Older blog entries for ladypine (starting at number 20)

Kneset

There is going to be another meeting of the committee in the Kneset (Israeli Parliament) regarding open source. A couple of Linux people are going to be there, though we probably won't get much of a chance to speak. mulix, gby, tzafrir, doron, katriel and me. We should get together to coordinate prior to that. I hope the government indeed decides to pay less for licenses to M$, and promote Hebrew in Linux, instead. After all the developments in Hebrew Linux in the past year, Linux is almost fit for an Israeli desk top. Just a little push.

Women and Linux

I dared to express myself on a personal matter in the linux-il mailing list: the reaction of males to a woman in the crowd of Linuxers. No, I do not need to be flattered about my looks the first thing when I come to a LUG meeting. Yes, I want to get to know people, but I want then to first take me as a Linux person (or as mulix said, a female-hacker), and not as a potential date.

Of course, I got flamed in a very personal manner, (which I anticipated). What I did not expect is the people it came from. Another thing I did not expect is for those people to re-invent the truth. Well, it was an important subject to raise, if only to let guy say things in a most clear tone. Maybe, due to the fact that I shared personal experiences, I was very careful about my choice of words.

Some people will never change, I guess. But public awareness is important, and I try to do my share.

Wishing for a happy new Hebrew year, I wrote a short story about a programmer who finds a kitten.

Wishing for a happy new Hebrew year, I wrote a short story about a programmer who finds a kitten.

Queue Managers

Taking an interest in queue managers, such as jobd and condor. They are better when they are combined with schedulers, of course. Both of them, as well as mosix, do not make it worth while for the user to submit his/her job via the complicated mechanism, unless he/she does not really care when the job ends. The only reason for a user to submit the job via one of those systems, is when direct access to the machines in question is denied.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Finally we got to see a movie from beginning to end, though it did take beginning it, falling asleep and trying again the next morning. This movie can certainly make one furious with the stupidity and futility of the army.

Operation "Army"

Spent yesterday helping mulix get ready to his reserve army duty. It seems like we thought of everything a person should take, preparing for the heat of the desert as well as the cold of the night. "Everything a person should take" filled quite a large bag. Eventually, we were so tired we both (almost) fell asleep in front of Fight club. I wonder if I ever get to see the end of it, since i saw the first half twice, already.

The morning was sleepless, since we both woke up at 5 a.m., though we did not have to get till 6 a.m. I guess mulix was excited, but why do I find myself excited over his army duty? It is not like I have not been there...

I am not very sad that he did not have to go, in the end.

Anti Certs

Bram, Be careful about the division you have in the end: If I get it all correctly, then after a distance of several people, you may reach a low value both for confidence-in-cert and for confidence-in-anti-cert. Then you divide two numbers which are very close to zero, and your certainty of both of them is very low. you come up with a number with a lot of noise, which may be very high.

Hackers, by Steven Levy

I just finished the second part of Hackers, about the hardware hackers. As I was reading along, and getting to my year of birth, things were getting familiar. Though I never thought of him this way, my father was actually a hardware hacker. In the late seventies, he assembled the pong kit, which was a miracle in my eyes, back then: a device which controls the picture on TV! and more than that- an interactive device!

In 1981, when he brought home the Atari, the first computer I ever saw, one of the first things I remember him do was to insert Hebrew fonts, which I helped design. We used 8*8 bit maps, and at the age of seven I became thus aware of binary representation: Each of the eight lines of the letter had to be inserted as number in the range of 0-255. Then he spent hours trying to make the cursor move from right to left. He changed the binding of the Atari logo key, to flip the direction of writing. Before, it had a really strange operation: it would toggle the display from black-on-white to white-on-black.

Then we had at home a huge machine, on which you could punch letters, like a typewriter. depending on the way it was hooked, it would either print to paper or to the screen, through the computer. I never understood why he brought it home, but now I begin to think it may have been a sort of dumb terminal.

Then, my father made a cool hack for independence day: he had a chain of eight light bulb in various colors flicker in various patters. They were all connected to the parallel port, of course. For this program, my father used up all the machine's memory: 32K+32K extended memory!

Welcome to Linux

Welcome to Linux is beginning to take shape. Very few people are taking responsibilities, though. Again I find myself doing more than I intended or can afford, and mulix is somehow responsible for half the lectures himself, in addition to organizing all of them. I came out with a part of the Public Relations, the first lecture, and the feedback.

Smoking

For the second time in two weeks, mulix and I went to a restaurant, and left after a couple of minutes, because people were smoking. The waitors tend to claim "but nobody is smoking right now", and I fall for that again and again. I try not to test mulix's patience, and I try again not to run away the moment sombody smokes next to me, but then I am haunted again, driven away from the nice place I was about to hang out at.
Although the law in Israel says that in public places smoking is not allowed except for designated areas, non smokers are still the ones who need to search for a plausible place to eat. I remeber the air port in Salt Lake City, where the speakers constantly ask you to keep your air clean. I hope some day soon it will be possible to breathe in Israel as well.

Birthday

Threw a birthday party at mulix's house. The company was a mixture of physicists and haifux members. At some point, Ranny (a physicist) began explaining to his girlfriend about the cult of linux people, who actually form an underground movement, with shrines to the Penguin, strong beliefs, branches, pamfletts, secret "get-together"s and a mission to take over the world.
When I consider the way our door loos like, and the way my table is always covered by posters for the next or previous Linux event, I can certainly see where all of this is coming from...

Haifux
Haifux is three years old. We had a birthday party yesterday, and "somehow" I got to arrange it. Orrd had his PR lecture, about how to promote linux, in which he gave feedback to several people who got themselves on video a-priori. There was Elad, who got all he knows about linux inthe two minutes before the camera was on, Alon, Orr himself, mulix and me. since I was brave enough to go and let him film me, and then have everybody watch as he analized us, I added myself to evangelism.

Orr said that Muli occupied thrice his volume, when he entered the room, due to his self confidence. I wish I could do half of what he does.

August Penguins

Last Friday, August 2nd, was the day of the event called August Penguin. We hardly expected to cover the costs of the event, which included renting the cinemateque hall and public screening rights for the documantary movie Revolution OS, which is about the FSF and open source in general. It was a huge operation, in my eyes, regarding coordinating, and making sure the idea of selling tickets to cover the costs was legal. Now we are left with some left over money, which we would like to donate to an NPO of linux-il, which we need to form. If we fail to form such an NPO, we would donate the money to something like the FSF.

Currently, I am finishing a website for the event, including pictures, slides and after - words by various people. I even corresponded a bit with J.T.S. Moore, the director of the film.

Welcome to Linux

The usual welcome to linux debate has already started, this year before the lectures even. I prefer arguing prehand: maybe we would really implement something good this time. The main question is, should we focus on showing that Linux can do wonders, or that it is not so hard to work with it?