Gunnar Wolf: Linux ranks high on stability One more time
Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.So John’s whole response paper is here and here is the pdf. In the paper, he makes a number of excellent points but what I loved most about it was his very geeky move at the end of the paper to prove Sarah (somewhat wrong) by listing all the girl geeks that do and have appeared in mainstream (and not-so mainstream) entertainment venues/shows, etc. They are as follows and in his own words:
Awesome as it is, you’ll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly
I will now showcase my own geekiness through my knowledge of geeky female characters. Why? Because I can. But also because I want to demonstrate that if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty. Moreover, if you pick the right ones, you can make them support your argument about gender relations, whatever that argument might be. Some of these charters and personalities are hardly gendered, some are hyper-sexual. Some are incredibly attractive but completely asexual. Some undergo a transformation into/out of geekiness, while others to not. Some are powerful, while some are powerless. Some (most?) celebrate their geekiness, others are tortured by it. They are all geeks take your pick: Aeon Flux, a sexy geek who’s technological gadgets give her super powers (Comic drawings then Charlize TheronAeon Flux) Wonder Woman, attractive pilot of an invisible plane Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones in short shorts, wielding guns and cracking computer codes (CGI and then Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider) She-Ra, who was way smarter than He-Man (Masters of the Universe cartoons) Gadget Hackwrench, beautiful chipmonk technician for Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers cartoon) Velma, featuring eyeglasses, awkwardness and brains (Scooby Doo), Hermonie Granger, a geek who is temporarily rejected because she is a geek, remains a geek, and finds love and happiness (Harry Potter) Barbarella, who, through comic strips and a 1968 film, helped introduce science fiction and sex to young women (Barbarella) La Femme Nikita, a skillful, savvy, and very feminine girl who doubles as a covert spy Kate Libby, aka ‘Acid Burn’, uber-sexualized hacker (played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers) Kathryn Janeway, smart and powerful captain of the USS Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), Dana Scully, FBI agent with encyclopedic media knowledge. The bizzare subtex of non-realized sexual tension was part of the magic The X-Files. Willow Rosenberg, geeky sidekick turned geeky supervillian (Alyson Hannigan in buffy the Vampire Slayer) Michelle Flaherty, hyper-sexual band geek (Alyson Hannigan in American Pie series) Dr Ellie Sattler, heroniene scientist (Jurrasic Park) Ellie, scientis hero (played by both Jenna Malone and Jodi Foster in Carl Sagan’s Contact) Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanson in Ghost World) just about every charater ever played by Jenna Malone (Donie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The United States of Leland, Saved!, etc) half of the charaters played within the last decade by Jodi Foster (Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Flightplan, The Addams Family half of the charaters played by Christina Ricci (Mermaids, The Addams Family, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ice Storm, Buffalo ‘66, Prozac Nation, Pumpkin, Speed Racer) half of the characters played by Natalie Portman (The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Star Wars, V for Vendette, The Darjeeling Limited, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Garden State) Molly Ringwald. characters played by Molly Ringwald. Rock musician Ani DiFranco and geeky Riot Grrls everywhere. Sarah Vowell, NPR commentator celebrating her geeky life. Voiceover for geeky cartoon characters. Rachel Maddow, for being Rachel Maddow.First, awesome list, though he forgot a few (like one of my favorites, Bionic Woman and a more recent one, Juno) and it is nice to have it in one compact place. But, I have to say, I still agree to some degree with Sarah Setlzer, though I also agree with John. On the one hand there are representations and it is as important just to strut this stuff publicly as it is to claim that there is not enough female geeky representations in mainstream media. This is what John has done quite nicely. One the other hand, as he himself says ” if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty.” I think those words, “if you look hard enough” also speaks volumes of the continued disparity that does exist. One should not have to look “hard,” and the only blockbusters, so to speak, which feature a female geek, is Tomb Raider, which for being so hyper-sexualized is not so geeky to me, no matter how good she is with the gadgets. That said, what I find so important, and have emphasized in different contexts, is the need for what I think of simultaneous positive and negative form of critique, the former being about pointing to already exisitng examples to get people jazzed and excited and to put things in perspective. The later form of critique, negative critique, identifies a lack, a void to fill, just the type of excellent commentary in the Seltzer piece… But now for the most important question, who has John overlooked?
I've just uploaded awesome 3.0-rc1 to experimental. For people who can't wait, the git repository is on Alioth.
awesome 3 should stay in experimental until it gets fully released. I plan to rename current awesome 2.x package to awesome2 and get awesome 3 as the new default awesome package. So Debian will still provide awesome 2 for people who don't want to upgrade.
I’ve finished the porting of rng from qt3 to qt4 and uploaded it to unstable. It has some minor regressions compared to the qt3 version, like the localization of the qt4 widgets which isn’t working yet and that the column which sorts the table isn’t saved and restored properly on startup, but it closes many other bugs and it doesn’t crash anymore.
The new version doesn’t bring so much new features so far, but since it’s using much of the stuff which came with QT4, like the QTableModel and the QWebView, it runs much faster in many cases, e.g. when sorting or filtering the table.
Ah, and last but but not least: thanks to WebKit rng even passes acid1 and acid2. Doesn’t yet pass acid3 but I guess someone is already working on it 
* Thanks to Albert (aacid) for committing first Gujarati (gu) translation file for KDE. Time for hard and quick work now! Also, feel free to join me!!
* I am at Ahemdabad for at least week from today. If LUG here is alive then, there is plan for a meet, but before that I need to fix bugs in my teeth 
There's no way around it: I'm a bit of a Rails fanboy. While it's got it's
glitches, it's certainly made the part of my life that involves writing
web applications a hell of a lot easier, and introduced me to the wonder
that is the Ruby programming
language.
However, there are plenty of times when Rails just isn't a good fit.
It's not particularly simple to deploy, it's quite heavy, and it does
have a definite learning curve. So, when I need to write something
simple, I've just used Ruby's built-in CGI support. But I will do so no
longer. For I have found Camping.
The name doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and until you come to grips
with Why The Lucky Stiff's weird sense of humour, the docs will probably
make you think that acid trip you took several years ago has just kicked
in again. However, the purpose of Camping is pretty easy to
understand: it allows you to make simple (CGI level) web "applications"
using Rails-like (or more properly, MVC) concepts,
which are fairly easy to write and deploy.
If you're familiar with Rails (or probably most of the other Rails-clones
that have sprung up in other languages) then Camping will probably
smell at least faintly familiar. You have routes, which map URLs to
controller actions, which retrieve models and feed them to a view which
sends results back as HTML. From that perspective, Camping is easy to
learn -- it's core concepts can piggyback on existing knowledge, and you
can get started very quickly.
Using your Rails-fu, however, will only get you so far. For one thing,
the API is similar-but-different enough that while your first couple of
simple experiments will probably Just Work, getting more complex things
done will either fall under the "different" or "difficult" headings.
That isn't meant to be a slight on Camping, though -- if you
want to do horribly complex things, then you're heading into
territory best served by Rails anyway. But there is a bit of a middle
ground where the utter simplicity of Camping is stretched a little, but
it's still more appropriate to write a Camping app than a Rails app, and
it's important to remember that you're not using full-blown framework
when you thump up against something that's beyond-trivial in Rails, but
is not quite so simple in Camping.
Camping is a microframework -- it says so right there on the front page. Why's
intention is that Camping will always be provided in less than 4kB of
code. So you're never going to get, for instance, the broad range of
HTML helpers that Rails' ActionView provides to make writing HTML
templates so easy, or the Prototype JavaScript framework shipped with the
main code. If you don't want to blow a steam pipe, then, when starting
out with Camping, you need to think "this is a lot easier than
hand-writing CGIs" instead of "this is a lot harder than writing a Rails
app".
There are a few things that are undeniably a pest in Camping, though. The
docs are a little incomplete and hard to follow (even when you account
for Why's "unique" style of writing), and some of the coding tricks that
are employed in making the framework can make debugging a bit tricky.
They're not showstoppers, but it's worth knowing about them in advance so
you don't go nuts when you're first using the framework.
If you're not the sort of person who needs small, self-contained web
scripts, then I'd say you'll probably never get much benefit out of
Camping. On the other hand, if you're still writing your CGIs against
the "bare(ish) metal", then I would strongly encourage you to
take a look at Camping, to make your life just that little bit more
delightful.
As of late, I've shifted quite dramatically my sysadmining/development activities. On the development front, although Perl is still my mother tongue and I maintain many systems I wrote with it (and my main involvement in Debian is through the pkg-perl group, of course), I've been largely switching over to Ruby - both under the Rails framework and doing standalone stuff.But somehthing that's new to me (well, relatively - it has been observed I have been playing with the idea in and out for some more time) is entering this maze of twisty little passages, all alike called Drupal. What can I say? I'm quite surprised by it. It is such a reach CMS, and so twistable for almost-anything, that it still defeats me.I've been asked (ordered? pushed?) to propose a complete plan to replace my Institute's current static-and-butt-ugly-HTML site with something dynamic and manageable, so, of course, this last week has been an intensive Drupal crash-course for me.Drupal itself is quite complex, yes, and I thought I had it mostly mastered for the trivial tasks. But then, I started looking for some I-thought-quite-simple extra thingies - And I started discovering its user-contributed modules. I've been having quite a bit of fun with them, and as I hate messing up my clean and nice installation, I've even set up a Drupal5 modules APT repository for Etch, where I'm putting the modules as I process them.As I'm really not into PHP, and I still lack enough of the Drupal framework understanding to really step forward and become responsable for them, I'm not yet even suggesting packaging them for Debian - but a time might come where I upload them as well ;-)BTW, in case somebody is wandering about this Jaws-to-Drupal scripty I mentioned that other time: It basically works for blog entries (as you can see in my test site - barring some trivial latin1-UTF discrepancies). I have not yet migrated because I'm also trying to migrate my Phoo photo galleries to Acidfree albums... And it's quite a more challenging task than just migrating blog+comments. But soon, I hope - I have a bit more time than in the last weeks to be able to play with it. Anyway, here it is as it is.
Now, this is what you get when the window is not so large, but still large enough for the whole thing to be displayed.
And what you get when you shrink the window more and more.
It goes further down when you shrink even more.
Sadly, the Gtk port is not as good.
It also does the “going down when shrinking” thing.
Update : Apparently, the “going down when shrinking” thing is a known “feature” of the Acid Test.
Next.
