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

Not posting this on Planet Ubuntu — they already know about this.

Anyway, this wiki is about, well, women in the geek society, and the hardships they face. The articles there heavily echo my own observations — which is hardly a surprise, given that the wiki is primarily edited by female geeks in the first place.

It’s an interesting and insightful read for everyone concerned, and I hope it answers the questions like “Why are there so few women in open source?”, and “Why do they have to band together?”

“…be conservative in what you send.” A lot of software works by that principle, and I like it. It makes sense: while you have no control over what you receive, you have control over what you send. My ideal data converter would be one that takes all kinds of weird malformed inputs and produces (e.g.) valid standardized XML.

This is why I find myself writing constructs like:

public static SortedSet<TimeSpan> intersectWithDisjointSet(Collection<? extends TimeSpan> spans) { … }

I apply this principle to human relations as well. I give people a lot of leeway in what they are and how they act, as long as they stick to two basic principles: (a) assume good faith, and (b) don’t be a pillock. It isn’t easy to shock me. While on the other hand, I have a strict code of what I allow and disallow myself (even though sometimes I fail at following it). That’s how most people probably act, but hey.

And to raise the Mandatory Gender Topic™: this is how I treat gender identity. I see other people the way they want to be seen, as long as I don’t see any evidence that they act in bad faith, that it’s a prank or trolling attempt. However, I hold myself to higher standards. This is why I didn’t assume the Maia identity and bombarded it with doubt until I felt completely, absolutely confident that it’s not just roleplaying, and I won’t regret it later.

On an amusing note, elky thinks that transgender people and “veg*ns” [sic] are naturally predisposed towards open source by their tradition-challenging mindset, which explains the unusual concentration of both there. “Most of the women who really participate in open source are feminist leaning too; it’s the strong ones that stick through though, and their involvement has short lifespans since the burnout rate is phenomenal.”

Maia is walking through her FOSS participation — confident, triumphant. I’ve switched completely in Ubuntu, got a patch for AUTHORS merged into Arora, changed the name in two of my three Debian packages (the third is pending a cosmetic lintian-cleanliness upload), and I’m considering updating gtkpod as well.

Perhaps this is part of a psychological campaign to distance from my past self, and to give the new identity a semblance of reality. The more people know me as Maia, the more natural and right it feels.

Still, in the domain of abstract thoughts, I found myself musing over this line from my latest Debian upload for smplayer. When a sponsor pointed out that I used three different name-email pairs in the old package, new package, and RFS email (I since configured Maia to be my default sender name in Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface), I inserted this line into debian/changelog:

- Changed maintainer name (still the same person and GPG key).

That got me thinking: what am I to the Debian and Ubuntu developers, at large? What identity matters the most? Maia, sikon@ubuntu.com, launchpad.net/~sikon, or FB21C80A?

One of the points I’m going to make in That Twoform Story™ is how Internet patterns bleed into the real world there, and people start referring to each other by online nicknames, even in person. Some fellow Polymex users actually call me LucidFox in real life. But what if we went even further, and displaced conventional names by some kind of “hard” identity, like the aforementioned GPG keys?

…I need sleep.

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

It’s incredible. A single conversation with maco and the subsequent heartwarming invitations were enough not only to remove my obsession with WoW, but also to make the Maia mind-state my default one — full-time, as long as I don’t obsessively focus on my male body traits. Apparently all I needed was acceptance.

As such, Maia is for all online intents and purposes complete. I can slip out of this state at will — I just don’t want to. What remains of the old me is just a shell, a deprecated compatibility layer for my few real-life contacts. [insert something suitably poetic about a plant bursting out at lightning speed]

And to think that just a few months ago, I was a chubby, unkempt, unemployed, depressed, chronically insecure boy with a jerkass facade. From that to this. Mission accomplished — on the personality level, at least.

What’s next? That should be transition, although I still have over 9000 doubts about it — most importantly about my ability to ever look convincingly female even with all the hormones in the world, given my comparatively oversized upper body and my height, being tall even by male standards. But at least now I seriously consider it and have no aversion to it by itself — it’s interesting to compare with how I started, and how I was at first outright disgusted by Sephi’s thought that I might accidentally be TG. In winterwyn’s words that fit here quite accurately,

I couldn’t imagine being trans so I identified to others as genderless, until oops.

I’ll start with features that can be changed without affecting my ability to pass as male — growing hair, removing body hair, and training voice. And the #1 absolute top of all these would be permanent removal of facial hair, because I’m getting tired of shaving every morning and it occasionally goes wrong.

An email I received yesterday evening:

Hey Maia,
Just wanted to say, don’t be a stranger to #ubuntu-women channel :) Us girls gotta stick together.

Uh-oh. I was struck completely unprepared, and my first thought was “Oh crap”. I recognize this kind of cognitive dissonance: the same kind of “it’s wrong!” inner scream. “Not with this body! Not even on the Internet!”

The mail was sent using the Launchpad web interface, which means she saw my userpage, which doesn’t didn’t have the name Maia on it (it’s only in package changelogs) but prominently displays a link to this very site… Now the question is, does she know what I really am? If not, what will she do if she finds out? Should I tell the truth, or roll with it? Will I be branded a G.I.R.L. if exposed? A chaotic, counterproductive train of thought.

At least I know that transgender Debian contributors do exist — not sure about Ubuntu — although it seems the topic has not been raised publicly (duh). I chatted with one of them, Rhonda, whose blog is an interesting read in that it contains descriptions I can identify with:

I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands… I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn’t even properly shaved…

Her poem Mermaids is an interesting read as well, and insightful.

Edit: turns out she does know. This wave of online acceptance really creeps me out.

<…> and a decent chunk of the people in there are also in #linuxchix, which is like 5% trans

o_O