Older blog entries for Liedra (starting at number 26)

hacker: As for the BearOps thing, please send the freshmeat editors a broken links notification using the url on the project page - we'll remove the project listing if the links are broken and the author doesn't respond to an email requesting new links. This counts even though there is a commercially available version you can purchase, because of the requirement of the GPL to have the source available (and their links are very much broken in that regard).

Well, it's time to do my annual Advogato entry.

What have I been up to?

  • Finished the main part of my undergraduate Science degree, majoring in Computer Science and History & Philosophy of Science
  • Started an Honours year in History & Philosophy of Science
  • Learned a lot about Trusted/Trustworthy Computing (NGSCB and the TCG specs) for my Honours thesis
  • Did some updates to my site liedra.net
  • Started a cutesy animal blog at zenkey.org (currently on holiday until I finish uni demands for the semester)
  • Made a bunch of new friends both at uni and outside
  • Racked up another year working for freshmeat (best job I've ever had)
  • dropped off the first hit on images.google for "sexy goth" (still no. 2 though!) which is pretty good considering I'm not actually a goth ;P
  • Doing some PHP programming for my aunt and an old workmate of mine as well as some random other bits and pieces
  • Doing some random contracty work putting together Linux boxen for my old work
  • Got a gym membership and have been doing "Body Balance" classes each week (mostly) and cardio too (which is good because since becoming a uni bum and living at home again on a good 3 square meals has made me lazy and put on weight :-)
  • Got my green P's (NSW drivers license) which I'll have for another 2 years
  • Had my 23rd birthday
  • Upgraded my tibook to Panther
  • Adopted a snake (a coastal carpet python)
  • Took a photography course
So there you go! See you next year! ;-)
work

Well, another thing that scoop and I have been working on for a while is finally done - osx.freshmeat.net is finally live and hap'ning for all your Mac OS X software needs. Huzzah!


stuff

In other news, am progressing in my quest to write a semi decent IRC client for OS X, the one I use at the moment, Snak, is competent but not quite how I like some things. :-) This is probably the biggest project I've ever set myself, and I'm learning Obj-C as I go, so it'll probably be quiiiite a while before I get anything use-able up and running. Coding isn't really my strong point, but I enjoy it and I like learning new languages. And isn't that what it's really all about? :-)

squrl:
I don't think that these women are doing such a thing *just* because women are underrepresented on the Internet, I think they are just letting interested women know that the stories aren't necessarily true, that you *can* be a female geek.

They're giving women a support network for when things do go wrong, when they are discriminated against or whatever. Even really really geeky geek females have probably been discriminated against or somewhat abused at least once in their lives by other (usually male) geeks. I'd classify myself as mostly a geek under your qualifications (I do have another life outside sitting at my computer, but I do the latter *quite* a lot), and I certainly have - several times. I don't think you can call it (LinuxChix in particular, of which I am not actually a member) a sisterhood as such, the LinuxChix welcome men to their meetings and on their mailing lists, so if my understanding of American culture's "sororities" is correct, this is somewhat different.
And you *are* being elitist if you say "90% of the engineers I've met are idiots" - and frankly, it's not very productive to be so openly judgemental about people, especially people you may be working with.

In Australian culture there is an idea that you should give people a go, whether or not you immediately think they're stupid - you may be pleasantly surprised. If a woman, or man, or anyone, thinks they have the mindset, give them a chance at that - if they fail, then they'll work it out and do something else. I think the most important thing is encouragement and education, and these groups provide it for women who may not be able to get it elsewhere for fear of ridicule or otherwise - and some just might end up finding that they really are good at coding or sysadminning or whatever, you never know.
5 Oct 2002 (updated 6 Oct 2002 at 11:13 UTC) »

Yay! After months of procrastination, I've finally finished my promised article on Linux DVD players, which is currently featured on the front page of freshmeat.net (URL updated as it moved off the front page :-). Hopefully I can get my act together and write more if this one goes down well :-)

OS X

Have been trying to get pygame + PyDDR to work under Mac OS X 10.2 with little success - the little dock icon opens, and then closes in a spectacular lack of fireworks or crash messages or anything really at all.
Hmm. Shall wait for a little more stability and/or ease of use in that arena I think :-)

10.2 seems to be a lot faster, and the initial crash-on-wake problems have been fixed up by the security update of early this week of all things... strange but true. And all the apps look more finished and nicer, except that Mail.app has somewhat broken the ability for me to see folders on my IMAP server that have mail fed to them by procmail on the server... anyway, suffice to say that I'm now using Entourage with its somewhat superior handling of subscribed folders. The only problem with most GUI clients is their inability to handle proper threading - if anyone has a suggestion of a good threading OS X GUI client I'm all ears!


Life

Have been feeling better this week than I have in the last three years. Huzzah for new routines and "prevention rather than cure" techniques. Getting a second (or in my case, third) doctor's opinion can be very useful. Other life is also good, with Uni group project working out very well so far (but it's been back to Java programming for me), fun parties, and generally all round good company. Yay :-)
pjf:

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches, although not as useful as chickens, are at least not as destructive as bunnies.

Unfortunately, my male, Siegfried, died last night due to what we think was dehydration caused by the excessively dry weather we've been having and the fact that he had a crack in his exoskeleton. Although I misted them with water frequently, the low humidity might have been enough to tip the scales, so to speak. Oh well, RIP, Siegfried. I'll have to go and find Brunhilde a friend so that she doesn't get lonely :~(
daniels:
Talk about pot calling kettle black! You FUD projects and people yourself, which does not lend you any credibility when whinging about hypothetical FUD spread about yourself.
Did you approach ElectricElf and ask him to clarify the situation? Did you even think that it was possible for whoever it was that blurted around second-hand information to be wrong, or out to cause trouble?
If you want people to respect you and take up your offers of help with projects, juvenile behaviour such as this is not going to win you hearts.
mwh: Well, from the documentation that came with the tibook (I had to hunt that one down :-), it says "If your battery runs low while you are working, you can put your PowerBook to sleep and replace the battery with a charged one. The internal backup battery provides enough power to maintain the contents of RAM for one minute while you change the battery."
So there you go ;-)

(Hi, rest of advogato! I've started fostering some open source OS X apps on freshmeat.net for people interested. So far there's Fire.app, and hopefully more to come.)
mwh, dobey: my tiBook gives me approximately three minutes (the documentation disagrees with itself as to whether it's one or three minutes, but I know it's more than one from experience!) to get my act together and find the power supply.

And fink is, indeed, cool.

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