The response to, “How do you keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” is not “Erect a giant, impassable wall between the farm and Paris,” it’s, “Make the farm more attractive.”

~ Sleutel, wow.com

Apparently, the time has come for me to invoke the Unicorn Law.

As a disclaimer, I think the Ubuntu community in particular has been doing a great job in raising gender awareness, and most Ubuntu members I talked to leave a very good impression in this regard. That being said, I only communicate online and don’t know how things go when Ubuntu members meet in person — perhaps things are different there, and ugly incidents may happen.

In general, these days, resources like the Geek Feminism Wiki can quickly name and shame major incidents regarding sexism — and make the problems harder to simply handwave away as systematic patterns are easily seen. At least in the English-speaking world, these issues are easily exposed.

Not so behind the barriers of communication known as “foreign languages”.

Within the Russian open source community, there is an atrocity. No, worse — an Atrocity with a capital A. When seeing the discissions (usually known by a less family-friendly word) on that site, a sane person would be disgusted or horrified, or at best, assume the detached attitude of an observer looking at monkeys throwing feces at each other in a zoo cage.

I’m not going to speak about their attitudes towards LGBT people (myself included) — that kind of tolerance would be, perhaps, too much to demand from this crowd of mostly imageboard-level users. That aside, the wild, untamed sexism in that place is too much to bear. This Russian Linux website linux.org.ru, or LOR for short, is almost completely male-dominated, with only two or so women remaining there who learned to stay detached; the rest are scared away by 1990s-era demands like “tits or gtfo”, talks about “chicks” and “females” (using the Russian biological term reserved for non-human species), and outright doubting their gender and accusing them of being bearded admins.

Even that aside, every news entry that somehow mentions women gathers metric tons of annoying, disgusting, repulsive sexist comments. For me, this one was the last straw. Starting now, I feel ashamed that I ever posted on that site, and withdraw from it. In fact, it almost makes me feel ashamed to be a Russian Linux user.

The thread is about the announcement of Amber Graner being elected. Elizabeth Krumbach had the misfortune of having her name attached to the original announcement, and that’s where the feces hit the rotating air cooler. For a few hours, the news entry (checked and approved by a moderator!) erroneously claimed that Elizabeth announced herself being elected, before eventually being corrected by another moderator. The comments are a whole other story. Ranging from accusations of a “transvestite conspiracy” to utterly off-topic discussions of art and photography, they fit the aforementioned monkeys metaphor to a T. Most of this (almost exclusively male) crowd started discussing and ridiculing Elizabeth’s appearance in a very derogatory way.

Let me cite some specific examples of the general mindset of those users — ones that do not insult a specific person just for appearing in the news.

• “To make it less scary for the fair sex to enter FOSS development, some men will have to pretend to be women to break stereotypes <…>”
• “Ooooooo how I miss a woman!!! I want to howl!!! <…> I’d screw them all, but nobody gives me sex…”
• “I’d do her.”
• “These ones can cook, and their brains are fine. And they give sex more often, which is important.”
• “This is what I’m talking about. These dames with negro homosexuals have eaten the baldness out of the normal man. Nobody left to screw.”
• “Do these chicks not have enough herdness? I don’t understand.”

I’ll stop here — there are much more, but the general mood is clear. This is far from a solitary case, too. The last such news comments, about Valerie Aurora, made one of the two remaining female users temporarily quit the site.

Usually I don’t pay attention to Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” style propaganda, but this one was so silly that I just couldn’t pass by when pointed to it.

Basically, there are two WMV screencasts “comparing” the easiness of installation of Perl and PHP on Windows and Linux. Notwithstanding the fact that the Linux screencast uses a three-year-old version of Ubuntu and the makers apparently didn’t hear of Synaptic and the Applications menu, what is it supposed to prove? If anything, that it’s easier to type a single command to “apt-get install” a package and get it working out of the box, than to run an installer (predownloaded from a third-party site and hopefully prescanned for viruses before the screencast begins) and making them work with IIS through a configuration window.

Or if it’s supposed to be aimed at Windows users to begin with (“I’d rather click Next into oblivion and then use the command line anyway to set up directories than just install everything with this unintuitive apt-get thing!”), who are they hoping to convince? If anything, it ends up looking like an advert for Linux instead.

Nice job breaking it, heroes.

Explained.

…could you please die?

In all seriousness, I don’t understand why in our age of cross-platform considerations, distribution packages, scripting languages and refactoring, so much Linux software still uses a stone-age build system.

I could list the advantages of CMake over GNU autohell… sorry, autotools for hours. I’ll just list the ones I submitted to the gtkpod developer who argued about its advantages, after I wrote a full CMake replacement for its autotools-based build system in one day.

• autotools only generate makefiles; cmake can generate makefiles, project files for various IDEs, and has (from my experience) better support for hooking into IDEs in the first place.
• There is only one command to learn to generate makefiles, regenerate the build system after making changes, etc. No need for autogen.sh.
• cmake is well-documented and easily extensible. For nearly every dependency, you can either find the way to hook it in the base bundle, or find an existing project that has a .cmake file for it. And it’s easy to write new ones.
• Strict checking of behavior between versions, compared to the constant problems with behavior mismatches depending on which versions of autotools were used to generate the configure script.
• All configuration is in one place (but easily splittable into included files), rather than all throughout the source tree in various .am and .in files.
• No difference in the steps to build from the VCS (which has no configure script) or tarball.
• Includes only the files with relevant configuration and nothing else. autotools installs lots of additional files used in configuration and building, and while it allows one to build without autotools installed, cmake is a single binary available as a package in all major distributions.
• Arguably more concise, intuitive and easy to learn. This is subjective, but compare the new CMakeLists.txt for gtkpod with its own configure.in and tell me which one you consider more concise and intuitive.
• Faster, since it, again, only checks for dependencies directly relevant to the build, and caches the results.
• Supports out-of-source builds. Cleaning up is as simple as deleting the build directory.

The only drawback is that cmake needs to be installed to build the software from the source tarball (autotools don’t even have this advantage for VCS builds). This may have mattered ten years ago, but not in modern desktop systems. Building from source (including installing all dependencies besides cmake) is not a task for the typical end user to begin with – they are expected to use distribution packages. And for package maintainers, cmake is a blessing – very customizable and patchable. I say that as an Ubuntu developer. :)

Did Gabrielle really have to go from this to this? I liked the former version much more.

…pay $5 for a single button.

That page is actually so overdone, an accumulation of every proprietary software website cliche ever, that I won’t be surprised if it’s an elaborate prank by Linux users.

It’s the twenty-first century. Never mind flying cars, where’s my sex-change-o-matic?

Recently, I went to package the JuffEd text editor for Ubuntu (it’s on REVU now), and I was surprised that it used bundled Tango icons by default. Then I looked at the code and saw that support for XDG icon themes was really hackish, and didn’t work with inherited themes such as gnome-colors flavors.

It’s strange that support for “stock icons” is not in Qt, unlike GTK, but still, I’d like non-KDE Qt applications to support them properly. So, yesterday, I wrote a small library to properly implement the icon theme specification.

If you’re writing a Qt application dealing with icons, there are two classes of note in that library:

• XdgIconManager keeps the list of themes installed in the system, and returns themes by human-readable names or directory names, or the user’s default theme.
• XdgIconTheme looks up icons by names such as document-new and returns the full path to the file. If used from GUI applications, it can also return a QPixmap, rescaled to the required size if there is no exact match.

Q-XDG library at Google Code

Holy cow, Google has already indexed a forum post I wrote ten minutes ago. Scary.

I won’t deny that the Ubuntu repository has plenty of software with badly designed UIs. Not much of it, however, makes it into main, and I’m even more puzzled to see something like this in the default installation — developed by Canonical, no less.

Look at it. Look at it.

UIs like this usually come from applications whose developers wrote them to scratch their own itches. Their purpose and the purpose of their controls are obvious to the developers, not much to Joe Average, Jr.

The description for this application, the Computer Janitor, suggests that its purpose is to “bring the system to a state close to being freshly installed”. Based on that, I assumed its purpose was to delete all packages except for the default install and revert system settings to the defaults as well. I was wrong — it does something different. In fact, I still have no idea what exactly it does.

The only hints at its function are the fact that the list entries in the Unused window are package names. Otherwise, it seems to be designed as cryptically as possible. You can probably guess that it’s designed to remove unneeded packages, but where is it stated? And what’s supposed to go into the other two list views? When there’s an empty list, a good UI usually gives me a hint what’s supposed to appear there. Here, I’m left without a clue.

Now, on to minor nitpicks:

• No window icon, even though there is a taskbar one.
• There is a “File” menu, even though there is nothing to suggest that this application works with files. The only menu item in it is, of course, “Exit”. In fact, the menu is so small that it could easily be moved into buttons in the window itself.
• The “Optimize” list view is for some reason narrower than the other two.
• It suggests me to remove (I guess) libsane-epson-perfection-1670, which is a package with binary firmware for my scanner that I installed manually. It’s not on apt-get autoremove — what is it doing here?
• The spacing between widgets doesn’t comply to the GNOME HIG — there is no spacing between the list views and the edge of the window at all.

In short, we have an application whose UI is designed “for hackers” rather than for the general user (which is itself puzzling — “hackers” will just use command-line apt instead of a GUI utility like this). It would be no harm done if it was just lying somewhere quietly in universe, but what is this doing in the default install?

I may be a minority regarding this choice, but I’ve always preferred xchat-gnome to plain xchat as my IRC client. Its minimalist interface fits well with my GNOME desktop, and the preferences dialogue is much cleaner than in regular xchat.

The only annoyance is the user list, which upstream insists on hiding behind a button despite all pleas to provide an option to show it in its own panel. Finally, I wrote a patch adding that option about a year ago, and today I fixed a bug with UI freeze in it.

I’ll try to get it into Lucid, but in case the core devs decide not to sponsor it, I’ve made a PPA for Karmic with the patched version.

In this dream, among other things, Yunaris invited me into an Ulduar 10 PUG.

Tiinalria had to say about this, “Behave well, and you’ll dream that he invited you into a TOTC 25 PUG!”

I was engaged in a scenario based on The Dark Knight, in which the Joker was immortal in the style of Jack Harkness and C.C. — making him much scarier to me than he was in the movie.

I was about to complain about this plot element within the dream. “Where’s your crusade for realism, Nolan?”

I went into a supermarket and noticed a board with four photos on a wall, some “employees of the month” thing. The third photo got my attention – it had a female name but a face I’d identify as male.

I barely resisted the temptation to point at it and ask a guard, “Is that really a woman? Doesn’t look much like one to me.”

I had a dream that I was discussing Mayakovsky with my former literature teacher.

As expected, it’s Stargate in name only.

Guess I should get back to watching the rest of Atlantis — I’m yet to see 3.5 seasons, after all. Problem is, Atlantis was at its best in the first season, which successfully replicated the spirit of the original SG-1 (as opposed to the atrocity of seasons 9-10) on a whole new level. Then the show forgot it was set in an Ancient city full of mysteries, and became Stargate: Daedalus — and I practically had to force myself to watch it.

“I’m bisexual. I just don’t sleep with men.”

~ Someone who believes everyone is bisexual

Yes, yes, this is a strawman argument given what else he said.

Heh, I never expected an Ubuntu release named Lucid something. More Lucid animals, good and varied, as Russians say.

Although given that I’ve used LucidFox for years now, I imagine making packages for that release will feel awkward.

Also, I want a version of Ubuntu named Alliterative Animal.