Search Results: "reg"

20 February 2006

David Welton: Hecl, Oregon, OFBiz

Hecl I released a new snapshot of Hecl this evening, with a few minor fixes. I'm pleased that the project has picked up a regular contributor, Wolfgang Kechel, who seems to be doing some interesting things with it. He's a bright guy, and it's good to have feedback and someone to talk things over with. I have been sidetracked with Ruby on Rails (more on that in the future) lately, so I haven't dedicated as much time to Hecl as I would have liked to. Oregon I found this brochure about open source in Oregon. It's "marketing materials" kind of stuff, but still... I'm proud to see all the interest in open source in my home state. Almost makes me want to go back, but then I talked with my parents on the phone, who told me about the 24 days of rain in a row, which brought me back to my senses. OFBiz I had been investigating OFBiz as something to use in the company where I'm working, but apparently that's not going to happen for now, which is a pity, because it's well done software, and more importantly, has attracted a bright, diverse group of people to work on it. Indeed, I liked it so much that I'm helping out (I hope!) by acting as a "mentor" for the project as it goes through the process known as incubation at the Apache Software Foundation, which means that it hasn't officially been accepted as part of the ASF, but has the potential to do so if we get all the i's dotted and t's crossed. It's been an interesting experience, as it's about as far away as you can get from my Tcl work at Apache!

18 February 2006

David Moreno Garza: For those who care about abrotman

Thanks to the fifty persons that signed the petition regarding abrotman coming to DebConf6! Unfortunately, the guys at Petiton Online temporarily disabled the petition due to anonymous postage, which I had already certified and didn’t get a reply (the bastards).In spite of abrotman’s undecision, here is, for everybody’s joy, a picture of him at a wedding party:

cakebutt

Yay!

Zak B. Elep: Looking Back on the Bicol Open Source Forum

Whew! Wow! Yay! :D It’s been just a couple of days since the Bicol Open Source Forum was held at the Aquinas University, but I can’t just seem to forget it. It’s been a rocking experience, and I wished it were a bit longer: Thanks a lot to Joseph Cadag and Josephina Abilay of DOST/RITECC for organizing the event and bringing FOSS to the attention of many Bicolanos :-) I look forward for another event like this soon: from what I hear there would be an even bigger one set for July. I guess I should be pinging Marilize of Ubuntu now to reserve some flyers and CDs… …but right now, on the the Dapper upgrade! Break my Breezy and lemme have my jigsaw puzzle :P

16 February 2006

Jonathan McDowell: 8 years old

Last Saturday was the annual Earthlings dinner. We get very funny looks from the restaurant staff when we explain that we're celebrating the birthday of a domain. It's a good opportunity to see lots of people I don't see often enough though; sometimes it's hard to keep in touch with people. Actually, on that subject, there are a whole bunch of people I don't keep in touch with at all well. Mostly those who don't really do email and I don't really do the phone. I probably need to ring people more often; I used to be very good at running up my parents' phone bill. It's a bit hard to know what to say to people I haven't had any contact in years with. "Er, hi, please condense your entire life since we were at school and spoke regularly into a few minutes of conversation". And no one is near Norwich, so it's not like I can easily go and have coffee/beer with them. Meh. I've started having a regular dinner with people back home at Christmas, which helps a bit. And Burly's pretty good at telling me what people are up to. So, if you know me, and feel we don't see/speak to each other enough, sorry. If you think you see too much of me then tough. :P

15 February 2006

Erich Schubert: When XSLT gets really messy...

XSLT is an outright ugly language. Thats why I often just hate it. In some (rare) cases it's very elegant, but most often incredibly clumsy. I've been redoing my homepage completely, and I'm using XSLT to render my data XML files to the XHTML output. That works quite well so far, but I hit more and more special cases. First I wanted to add a language chooser. This required finding out which lanuages my document supports (read: blocks with that language attribute exist) and check for uniqueness. Some things where rather easy to solve (with some experience in XSLT), so where extremely ugly. First of all, I want my template file to be a valid XHTML file, I don't want to have any layout parts in XSLT. Then I have a separate sitemap, needed for generating the menu. So I have to process three documents at the same time in XSLT. Ouch. But doable, using variables. Basically I have three modes - in one mode, the template is mostly copied over, unless I've specified some special rule, e.g. to insert the page title, meta information or content. A second mode uses the current chunk of the template document as template for the contents a couple of times to iterate over data chunks from the data source file (read: put text blocks from my source files into the output template format). The third mode does the same for the sitemap. Unfortunately, it started to get even messier... Big problem number one: Make a list of the available languages for the current page. Make this information reuseable throughout the page transformation. Part one: make a list of available languages by finding unique (!) @lang attributes. (usual approach: grab all nodes with @lang attributes, check if they have the same node id like the first occurence with this @lang value for uniquness, then output. Ugly as hell, but string magic sucks as much.) Big issue number two: Assume we now have a variable with en in there, access these nodes to transform them. Unfortunately, the generated nodes are "result nodes", and you cannot iterate over them with for-each. Luckily the exslt node-set extension to solve this. But now came the third big issue along... this is where I give up. I want my pages to have a nice modification date... my data pages are stored in subversion... Subversion has keywords expansion like CVS, which I can use nicely to automatically update the last modification date of the file. Unfortunately, the date will look like this: $Date: 2006-02-15 21:29:10 +0100 (Mi, 15 Feb 2006) $ Whereas in a web page meta information it's recommended to use ISO8601. Now if I only had regular expressions and proper date handling functions... I guess I'll stop writing ugly, hackish XSLT code and chose pretty Python code instead. Maybe use TAL or KID for XMLish templating...

Edd Dumbill: XTech schedule coming soon

The selections for XTech are now almost complete. Over the weekend I drafted the schedule, which is under review right now by the programme committee. Every year I say how hard a job this is because of the high standard of the submissions, and every year it seems to get harder. This year I found it almost heartbreaking to have to exclude some talks. Number crunching To illustrate, here are some statistics about the proposals and their selection. We received 177 submissions. Each of these abstracts were peer reviewed by at least 4 or 5 reviewers, from a panel of nearly 90 reviewers. From the graded results I shortlisted 105 proposals. From that 105 I have had to fill 68 schedule slots, which meant about a third of the shortlisted proposals had to be excluded. Almost every single one of these would have been a great talk. They were so good, in fact, that I'm working on some ideas for adding to the schedule. Notifications to accepted speakers will be sent at the beginning of next week. Rejection notices will follow a little while later. We don't want to send these out until we're sure we've done everything we can to accommodate as many quality presentations as possible. I am enormously grateful to everyone who submitted a proposal. I can't wait to get the acceptance notices sent out so we can publish the schedule. I can however reveal some early news about pre-conference tutorials. We'll have day-long tutorials on: Ruby on Rails; XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 & XQuery; and a Web 2.0 tech bootcamp. Also there'll be half-day tutorials on microformats, and XForms & XHTML 2.0. Finally, it's worth noting that registration is now open. Also, if you work for somebody who would be interested in sponsoring the conference, do get in touch.

Joey Hess: the slowly dying laptop

Yeah, my Fujitsu laptop has been dying for a year or so, it's had surgery for power, batteries, hard drive, sound, etc, it's lost every bit that could break off and still have a usable laptop (all the suede on the bottom, the lid fasteners, the pcmcia blcker, the case around the base of the lid.. the still working pcmcia eject button is my one remaining sacrificial breaky bit). It's got the marks to prove cats love it, along with all the results of throwing it in my book bag and taking off with no concern for carrying a laptop around. The screen has 4 or 5 dead pixels and recently one faint patial dead scan line. The lid is getting worryingly wobbly. The CD drive was once crushed in an airplane and then banged back into shape so it still fits in the machine and even ejects OK. I've rubbed the letters right off some of the keys on the keyboard. The speakers turned black and exuded some glue or something long ago during a hot summer, one of them is barely audible. The headphone jack broke. Oh and the laptop is also abused regularly by programs like firefox and openoffice that really didn't expect to run on a 900 mhz crusoe. All that, I can live with. The laptop bears its marks with pride, and amazingly, people still occasionally ooh and awe at it. Although more likely from a bit of a distance these days. The newest wrinkle is that I'm beginning to exceed the design specs for the keyboard. Apparently they just didn't design for it to be used so much. First some keys stopped working half the time on some days, yeilding the famous irc sessions where joeyh tlks without ny A's. Then the Function key's membrane stopped pushing it back up, so it always appears pressed, though still works. Now the Alt key is going the same route and the right side ofthespacebardoesn't work, leadingtoircsessions whereItalklike this. And it just feels like I can't touch type on it half the time anymore. A new keyboard is $100 or more. I think it's time to retire this to a d-i test machine and start looking for a new latop.
I looked at the IBM X-41 again, really like it, but still can't get past the low res display and fan. Especially with some reports that the fan runs constantly in linux. I looked at all the stuff on dynamism, but wasn't impressed enough to consider it. At the moment the Fujitsu P7120 is looking mighty appealing. Hey, it's even got the suede bottom again. And no fan.. Only problem is it has a touchpad.

14 February 2006

Mike Hommey: Font packages

I’m currently working on a way to display japanese characters on web pages, on a computer where japanese fonts are not installed. It involves a server-side image generator for glyphs, for which I needed the .ttf files for appropriate fonts, like kochi-mincho. So, i just apt-get installed ttf-kochi-mincho, and it told me it wanted to install a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. I ended getting the .ttf files directly from the sourceforge site… I don’t want to clutter my server with X packages. The question is: why do fonts need to depend on xutils (not all but quite some) and defoma (all of them, apparently). Couldn’t they just recommend defoma and run the font registration thingy only if it is present ? If not present, nothing would be lost, since defoma’s installation would trigger font registration. On the other hand, I don’t understand nor see why some need xutils at all…

Zak B. Elep: Speaking, Packaging, and Writing, All in One Week

Two days from now, I’ll be pushing for Legaspi to be a speaker for the Bicol Open Source Forum. I’m going to talk about general FOSS and Linux stuff. I’ll also meet up with fellow Ubuntero Irvin Piraman and give away some Ubuntu CDs together :D . If you’re anywhere near Aquinas University, drop me a line. On the Debian side, my updates for opendchub and dbacl have hit Sid, thanks to the great Florian Ragwitz :) I’ve still yet to see ecb, xshisen, and rccp sponsored though :( I’ve seen some hope for ecb, thanks to Bart Martens, who was very helpful and put the updated URL for the latest ecb source package on the ITA. As for the writing, I’m now doing some final school reports for the year-ender. Ooh, just a month more, and here comes summer!!! I just hope there’s something like a local Google Summer of Code…

Andrew Pollock: [tech] My Asterisk configuration for use with Engin

This is the relevant bits of my sip.conf: 
register => 073117xxxx:passwoid@byo.engin.com.au
[engin]
canreinvite=yes
dtmfmode=inband
fromdomain=voice.mibroadband.com.au
fromuser=073117xxxx
host=byo.engin.com.au
insecure=very
musiconhold=framed
nat=yes
port=5060
qualify=1000
realm=mobileinnovations.com.au
reinvite=yes
secret=passwoid
type=friend
username=073117xxxx
context=default
Obviously the number is the number provided by Engin, as is the password (as opposed to the password you provide when you create your website account). This sends inbound calls to the default context in extensions.conf, which for me looks like: 
[default]
exten => s,1,Wait,1                     ; Wait a second, just for fun
exten => s,n,Answer                     ; Answer the line
exten => s,n,Goto(menu,s,1)
exten => t,1,Goto(s,1)
For routing outbound calls via Engin I have: 
[internal]
; for standard Australian 8 digit numbers
exten => _01161XXXXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/engin/0$ EXTEN:5 ,60)
exten => _01161XXXXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
; for 1800/1300 style numbers (10 digits)
exten => _01161XXXXXXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/engin/$ EXTEN:5 ,60)
exten => _01161XXXXXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
; for 13 style numbers (6 digits)
exten => _01161XXXXXX,1,Dial(SIP/engin/$ EXTEN:5 ,60)
exten => _01161XXXXXX,n,Hangup()
And I make my internal SIP handsets use the internal context like this: 
[sipura]
type=friend
secret=passwoid
nat=yes
host=dynamic
reinvite=no     ; this
canreinvite=no  ; and this may be unnecessary
qualify=1000
dtmfmode=inband
regexten=1000
realm=andrew.net.au
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
allow=alaw
allow=gsm
context=internal
I'm fairly happy with everything now. When I get time, I'll implement QoS, for what it's worth, and tweak the dialplan to send telemarketers to hell. I also need to get a card to hook it up to the PSTN. So far an X100P via ebay seems the cheapest way to do it. I'm actually surprised at how difficult it seems to be to purchase a Wildcard TDM400P online (none of the resellers seem to offer online purchasing), and how expensive they are (at the Digium store).

13 February 2006

Ross Burton: Why I Don't Use GnomeFiles

My Top Five Reasons as to why I don't update the information for Sound Juicer in GnomeFiles often:
  1. No programmatic way of uploading new versions. Freshmeat has a XML-RPC interface and sample implementation, freshmeat-submit. This means I could integrate posting new versions into my make release script, which also uploads source tarballs to ftp.gnome.org and puts the latest DOAP file on burtonini.com. Ideally GnomeFiles will let me specify a DOAP URL and the server will fetch it regularly, updating the information when it changes.
  2. When adding a new version I need to fill in the download location field from scratch. For every Sound Juicer release this is going to look like http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/source/sound-juicer/2.[something]/sound-juicer-2.[something].tar.gz. It's a good assumption that if one version was at some URL, the next version will be at a very similar URL, so why not pre-fill that field with the previous version's URL? Freshmeat does this, and it turns typing in a long URL into changing a single number.
  3. I need to fill in the file size of the file at the URL. Why can't the server do that? If the download is over HTTP it could do a HEAD request and extract the Content-Length header.
  4. No support for branches. There are two branches of Sound Juicer development at any moment: stable and development. I have to pick one of these to publish, so am either publishing only the stable release, or the development releases. People who want to know about the other releases can't find this information out.
  5. This one is petty, but it bugged me. Description of the file to download eg. "Binary" or "gnomefiles.org Server". One of those is a description of the file, the other is a description of the site.
NP: Black Diamond, Angie Stone

11 February 2006

Andrew Pollock: [life/americania] The Social Security Administration strikes again

I'd been planning on waiting to blog about the issuing of my Social Security number until I actually received the card, but as it seems that it has been lost in the mail, I could be waiting a while... So I was doing my regular weekly "what the fuck is going on with my Social Security number application?" phone call to the San Jose Social Security Administration office on January 12, when for a change, they couldn't actually find my application by the reference number that they'd given me. Lo and behold, my number had been allocated two days earlier. They told me that my card would be mailed out in 10 working days from the date of allocation, or that I could come into the office and get a bit of paper that told me what the number was. Let's just say that I'm glad I didn't wait for the card, or I'd still not be getting paid... So ten working days passed, and then some, and no card. This made me somewhat concerned, since everyone's been telling me how the SSN is the Primary Key of All Things, and that if it gets stolen, you're screwed as your identity can be stolen, with all the bad things that accompany that. So I rang the San Jose office back, to see if they had anything useful to say for themselves, and of course, they didn't. They couldn't tell me anything. They couldn't even tell me what address they had on record to ship the card to. They couldn't offer any postal tracking information, and they said that if it bounced for some reason, it would go back to Baltimore, where it would be destroyed. Oh goody. So after the trip to the DMV today, I thought I'd drop into the Mountain View Social Security office to request a new card. Well, let me just say that I can see why they zip-tie the chairs together... After waiting for over an hour and a half to get to speak to someone, they said that they would need to request secondary verification of something or other before they could issue me a card, and that it could take up to four weeks (the same secondary verification that took nearly 2 months in the first place). Or I could go to the San Jose office, where they already had the verification on file, and they could request a new card for me immediately. I was so flabbergasted that I just walked out of there. In hindsight, I should have told them to just go ahead and request the secondary verification, as so far I haven't actually needed to present the card to anyone wanting my SSN, and it's a lot more convenient (I think) to have to deal with the Mountain View Social Security office than the San Jose one. What absolutely blows me away is that there is no trust, no communication between offices. The fact that one Social Security office has already requested (and received) secondary verification of my existence from Immigration isn't sufficient for another office. They can't even ship a copy of that from one office to another? The mind boggles at the inefficiencies. I want that hour and a half of my life back.

9 February 2006

Ian Murdock: Yahoo?

Lily Tomlin As regular readers of my blog should know by now, I’m a big fan of SaaS (software-as-a-service). I’d go so far as to say it’s the future of software. Like all things, though, SaaS has its drawbacks, the biggest of which are questions of reliability, as the recent outages of salesforce.com have made painfully clear to its customers. It’s great if your data lives on the network, but what happens when your data isn’t available, either because the network isn’t available or because the servers it lives on are down? (The rhetorical question brings to mind Leslie Lamport’s famous observation that “a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”.) Security and trust are important too. Prime example: saleforce.com’s less than forthright acknowledgment of the recent outages. Another: Just today, Google launched version 3.0 of its desktop search software, which gives users the incredibly useful ability to search their local documents from any computer in the world. Of course, it does this by storing the index (and, apparently, the documents themselves) on Google servers. Hmm. Do I really want my business plans stored somewhere on the web outside of my direct control? Then again, an increasing number of people keep their email on the web, so chances are, if I’m collaborating with someone, they’re already there. As much time as I’ve spent thinking about SaaS, though, this was a new one: A friend of mine managed to get himself locked out of his Yahoo account, and after hours on the phone with Yahoo support, he seems unable to convince the Yahoo bureaucracy he is who he says he is so they will let him back in. He even offered to fly to Sunnyvale to present his driver license. Apparently, the zip code Yahoo has on file is different than the zip code he’s had his entire life, and the support staff say they can’t unlock his account until he gives them the right answer, which he’s already doing. (Apparently, the best one particularly dim bulb in Yahoo customer service could come up with is that he call back each day with a different guess till he gets it right.) In short, there seems to be some sort of an immovable object/irresistible force thing going on, and he’s not sure how to break the deadlock so he can get back to his data. The most pressing problem is that he’s got some tax related information in his email account, and on the current path, there seems to be no way for him to get to it by April 15. So, I pose two questions here: First, if you work at Yahoo, how in the hell can my friend get his access back? As already stated, he’s spent hours on the phone to no avail. I’ve tried inquiries on the backchannel but have received no responses. Second, for the larger SaaS community, if our data lives on the network, what happens if Google, Yahoo and the like become the phone company?

8 February 2006

Matthew Palmer: Drama on Rails

In another form of "It Never Rains But It Pours", today's ride to work has seen: Most days commuting are straight-forward, no-nonsense, uninteresting days. But when the Universe decides to put on a show, it makes sure it's worth watching.

Joachim Breitner: Announcing the RiskRecorder

Last week, some friends and I played a very exciting and long (6 hours) game of Risk. At the end, I thought: Too bad we can’t rewind the game and play it fast forward, just see how the tides of colors are waging.Well, on Sunday, I though, why not, and started writing “RiskRecorder”. It is my first larger project with python and gtk+, and I am quite content with both of them. The map is stolen from JRisk, and with that the idea of a gif file that maps pixels to countries. The RiskRecorder is meant to be used during a game of regular risk, to - well - record the moves. As a side benefit, you don’t have to calcuate the number of units you get anymore, as the RiskRecorder can tell you that. You can then save the whole game for later review.It should be in a usable state by now, but I plan to add more features sometime, like better animations and graphs showing development of the game.To try it yourself, you need the program itself (one file so far), then get at least the board.map, board_map.gif and board_pic.jpg from the jrisk CVS repository (you can open any other JRisk map in RiskRecorder, too). You might need to download the python bindings for gtk and cairo, too. On debian, I assume that apt-get install python-gtk2 python-cairo will get you what you need.As always, comments, bugreports and patches are welcome. To follow development, have a look at my svn repository.

Aigars Mahinovs: Superball/bowl. So ... I tried to understand what ...

Superball/bowl.
So ... I tried to understand what this american football thing is all about. What got me interested in it was an anime from Japan called Eyeshield 21 where a boy that ran errants for bullies his whole school life goes into american football as a runner with his great speed and agility. That get me thinking about looking into that sport - it looked quite interesting in the anime.
Boy was I wrong.
So I watched the Superbowl XL - the biggest and most important event in the american football year. The first half was absolutely empty - nothing happened at all. The ads were much more interesting then the game. The halftime show was ok, not as good as ads.
And the second half just showed why this is the definitive american sport in the worst meaning of that - legalese. Steelers would have lost it the judges would have not interfered so much with the game. This sport has like hundreds of tiny rules that are very dependent on interpretation by the judges - that is what I call a sport for all the american lawyers to like. Cancelling several good Seahawks trows just because some guy was holding someone on the other part of the field, that must be givin an ecstasy for every law student. Not for me though.
And even without all that dilation with ridiculous rules (what's that stupidity with running clock and two minute warning ?!?) the game itself is kind of dumb - there are just too many people in the field for anything that a regular person can really understand. Strategies that almost never work out because of the other team interfering with their strategy. Too much chaos and still each person only does a one single thing. Even more - many of the players never will get any attention in the game just because they are on a supporting position, but the quarterback will always be the center of attention.
A very unbalanced game that is even more screwed by a ton of ads, a very heavy leaning on judging nitpicks and just 3-4 nice moments in the whole 1 hour game. I'll just stick back with hockey and anime :)

7 February 2006

Matthew Palmer: Microsoft Patent Indemnification Not Worth Squat

It seems that all of Microsoft's hoo-hah about patent indemnification and the associated attacks on Linux aren't even worth the electrons they're excited with. According to an article in The Register, a patent infringement suit brought by a Guatemalan inventor has resulted in all users of newer versions of Microsoft Office needing to install a new, presumably non-infringing, version of the software next time they reinstall. Users who fail to do so "will no longer be covered by Microsoft's guarantee against patent infringement liability." I don't see how this is any different to what you get with patent infringement in the FLOSS realm. Someone says "that code violates my patent rights", the developers reimplement to avoid infringing, users have to upgrade. I'm just not seeing the difference here.

Zak B. Elep: Whirlwind < 48h Manila Tour

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog ;) Here are the highlights of my trip: I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too :D Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

Joey Hess: unix tools followup

Following up on my earlier post: This has only whetted my interest. Maybe the problem isn't that no-one is writing them, or that the unix toolspace is covered except for specialised tools, but that the most basic tools fall through the cracks and are never noticed by people who could benefit from them. So, to provide some more incentive, I'd like to start a collection of new unix tools. I've worked on this kind of thing before with my collection of biff-type filters and Debian's devscripts. Sometimes just bundling up a set of programs consistently can add to their value. I think it can here too, once a critical mass of tools is assembled. So, write more unix tools, and tell me about them so I can collect them into a package.

5 February 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: On homosexuality Listening to some recordings of ...

On homosexuality

Listening to some recordings of the Howard Stern show got me thinking about homosexuality. I try not to have any prejudices, so I tried to view this phenomenon from a purely logical point of view with as little external data as possible, so help me if I'm wrong.

Close relationships between two persons are generally understood to contain four separate components: sex, legal matters, social matters and romantic matters.

First of all it is said that, while the percentage of homosexual people is low, many heterosexual people have had some kind of homosexual experience either as an experimentation or as an accidental exposure. It also is believed that if the person in question is not physiologically repulsed by the concept (i.e. homofobic) then they can experience sexual pleasure regardless of the gender of the partner, number of partners or even absence of such. In all we can basically conclude that while homofobia is a sexual disorder (it disorders sexual function), homosexuality is not about sex at all.

The legal perspective is very inconclusive - in some parts of the world even having homosexual relationships can be illegal, but in other parts of the world homosexual marriages are not uncommon. Also all the legal stuff is there to help people that can not help themselves, especially minorities. So the legal part should be all for the equalising homosexuality to heterosexuality unless that does direct and irreparable harm to the society (which it seemingly does not).

From social perspective homosexual couples look to be living the life very similar to the heterosexual couples - there are some that are going wild and there are some that honour strong and stable relationships for decades and love to go to theatre. It could even seem that homosexual people tend to have a higher percentage of creative people and intellectuals.

The only think left is love. Call it a quick romantic encounter or a the love of the lifetime, but that seems to be the major descriptive difference with homosexually oriented people - they just fall in love with types of people that tend to be of same gender as themselves. It could be related to behavioural predispositions or differences in hormonal perception, but ultimately we do not know enough about love to fully understand that difference.

So at this point I can only conclude that until we understand all the hormonal processes and that "love" thingy, we could just as well start counting homosexual males and homosexual females as two additional genders that can not be fully understood by other two genders, just like men can not fully understand women and the other way around. This difference is as real and as effective as the difference between male and female genders or (stretching the analogy a bit too far) like the difference between races and should be honoured just as much as these differences are honoured.

And now I coin the terms "omale" and "ofmale" as the new homosexual male and female gender descriptors and "oman", "omen", "owman" and "owmen" as terms for single homosexual male, multiple homosexual males, single homosexual female and multiple homosexual females respectively.

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