Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

• [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
• [2] http://www.theonion.com/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_chaser

The next 4th of September, the Portuguese Debian community will gather at the University of Aveiro for the third edition of the DebianDayPT

There will be several talks about about Debian/Free Software in Portuguese and as special guest, Martin Michlmayr will deliver a couple of talks titled “Contributing to Debian” and “Project Management in Free Software”. Like last year, there will be DVDs with Debian Live so people can discover, try and install upcoming Debian stable ‘Squeeze‘.

You can find more information of the event and information of how to arrive at: http://debiandaypt.debianpt.org/.

For those who don't know: The Motorola Ming was the A1200, a commercially very successful Linux-based phone in China and other parts of Asia, using the EZX software platform, i.e. the kind of hardware that we once built the OpenEZX software.

Motorola has recently announced that they will follow-up with some android based ming phones. It is my suspicion that apart from some mechanical design aspects, those phones will not resemble the ming in any way, neither on the baseband hardware side, nor on the application processor side, and particularly not on the software side.

So it's probably nothing than a marketing coup, trying to connect to successes of the past. Not interesting from the OpenEZX point of view, I guess.

Waseem Daher of Ksplice posted some interesting SSH trick on his blog recently. Most of them are old-hat, but one in particular was interesting to me – SSH’s escape key (tilde). This lets you send commands to the SSH session itself, like backgrounding the session.

chris@localhost ~ $
chris@localhost ~ $ ~?
Supported escape sequences:
~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~C - open a command line
~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Neat.

You will be missed so much. You were kind, you were fun to be around.
It is a privilege to have met  you. Debian is privileged for the effort and time you put in it.
Your contribution will remain with us and will inspire others for a long time.
You made a difference in this world, one that will last and outlive you. I can only thank you.

Rest in peace, my brother. See you at the other side of the Firewall, and thanks for all the FLOSS ;)

Continuing the series of blog postings that reference one another, a few comments on “updates and people”, following mizmo’s latest blog entry on the topic.

First, let me thank Mo again for doing an excellent job summarizing some of the problems, and describing the userbase with typically excellent graphics. There are plenty of Pamalas, Connies, and Nancys out there on the mailing lists, but not enough Carolines to speak up for overall cohesion, and product quality that we can be proud of. So, I am going to continue to stand up for the position of “Caroline Casual-User”, the kind of person that I personally feel is actively being driven away through the hostile actions of a few within the community toward update sanity (learning to say “no” to pushing updates) and overall distribution cohesion (ensuring packages actually do work well together). Caroline is the kind of person who is accurately described in the current User base documents on the Fedora Project wiki. She is also represented in a lot of the cosmetic GUIness we see in distributions like Fedora – graphical package updates and configuration, removal of advanced options, the general direction of the GNOME desktop, and so forth.

We have all of these nice “user friendly” features going into the distribution, and an effort at gating releases until they pass certain quality controls. And when you read the “User base” documentation, it becomes clear that the intent was to make the distribution accessible to a wider user base than just hard core package developers and rawhide consumers. Yet there are those who continue to push the notion that Fedora be some kind of rolling update, never really having strong releases (more like “snapshots” that happened to pass some quality control at the time), and that it continue to lose market share to other distributions. Apparently, that’s fine because we don’t care about user numbers so long as good things happen. But users like Caroline lose out in the process. Now, maybe they don’t matter one bit, maybe the mailing list threads are right. But if they are right then the documentation, the intended user base, all of that stuff needs a heavy re-think and update. Because you don’t get to say you are targeting something and then really not do that. You don’t get to pretend that all that shiny software has a purpose because it is going to empower users and then laugh in their face by breaking it randomly in an “update”.

And if those things are right, why does the Desktop gloss really matter anyway? Hard-core developers don’t need simplified UIs, they don’t need graphical configuration, they may not even need to be running a Desktop at all. They might aswell run emacs full screen on a large framebuffer and be done with it. Oh no! I hear the cries now! What a preposterous idea! Well, if it’s so preposterous not to care about a Desktop environment, then maybe it’s not quite so preposterous to ask ourselves who wants the kinds of things being churned out in Fedora these days. I’ll give you a hint, they’re the kinds of things Caroline Casual-User really wants to see. She loves consuming your end product. She loves the feel of Macs, and likes the trend to have more Mac-like features in Linux systems. She doesn’t know about systemd, but she digs the idea of things sorta just working where they’re needed. Heck, she even likes it when she plugs her phone in and the icon on the Desktop looks just like her phone. Why does a hardened developer even need any of that stuff? I mean really, who the heck hard core developer cares what icon even shows up, or even if stuff gets automounted? The real, not-on-Fedora-devel but interested userbase that used Red Hat Linux, that buy the magazines, that care, they are the ones who want that stuff. You know that because you make the software to target them, and now is the time to admit that.

What I want to see is a fundamental shift toward having a stable “Platform”. I’ll take credit for the term “Platform” in Mo’s post since I was the first to use it. Essentially, what I mean is that we split the distribution into a core platform needed to boot, and provide a basic environment for higher level stuff. This is what every other general purpose Operating System under the sun does. They don’t shove out random updates that might break the fundamentals, and it means users can rely on certain core stuff just working. Now, this doesn’t mean returning to the days of Core/Extras. It doesn’t have to be internal vs. external packagers, etc. It can just be about defining a basic set of features that must be stable (boot, init, libraries, etc.), turning those into use-case driven definitions (rather than plain old package lists like “critical path” is today) and then enforcing them. And gating updates, and saying “no” judiciously to people who want to break that. And asking others to go play elsewhere if they don’t like distribution cohesion, and all of these things. Not because they are sexy, but because they are responsible.

Jon.

Blog World and New Media Expo is a fantastic event for bloggers held every October in Las Vegas.

This year there will be a full day of ProBlogger training in a ‘ProBlogger Track’ on the Thursday. Yesterday the full details of that track’s sessions were released on the BWE site.

The four sessions through the day are based around 4 Pillars of ProBlogging that Chris Garret and I have been working on for a future resource here at ProBlogger. In our view these 4 pillars are all crucial foundations in building profitable blogs – it’s not just about one or two of them, all come together and make a blog a more powerful thing.

The day in vegas is also very similar in content to what we recently put on in the sold out ProBlogger Training day here in Melbourne.

Here are the four pillars and session times:

Creating Killer Content: 9.45-1045am (Presented by Chris Garrett)

Chris Garrett walks attendees through principles of creating compelling content that will draw readers into a blog and get them excited about passing it onto their network./b>

Finding Readers for Your Blog: 11am-12pm (Presented by Darren Rowse)

What’s the point of great content if nobody is reading it? Darren Rowse has jam packed his session full of teaching and tips on ensuring that your blog is read… by more than your Mom!

Building Community On Your Blog: 1.30-2.30pm (Presented by Darren Rowse)

A blog REALLY comes alive when it has community. In this session Darren Rowse teaches the secrets of moving ‘visitors’ into ‘readers’ and ‘readers’ into ‘members’ who feel a sense of belonging to your blog and who begin to take ownership of it to help you take it to the next level.

Making Money from Your Blog: 2.45-3.45pm (Presented by Darren, Chris and Yaro Starak)

In this final session of the ProBlogger stream Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak and Chris Garrett will present strategies for making blogs profitable through a variety of approaches. It will include time for Q&A from participants.

If you’re interested in these sessions – make sure you mark them on your schedule so you don’t forget they’re on. I’m sure Chris and I can come up with some prizes for people who come along and participate well so we’ll make it a fun day.

Keep in mind that this ProBlogger track is on the Thursday and is available to all BWE attendees with a ticket for that day. There will be other sessions going on in other rooms that you can also attend (although we’ve designed this track so that it’s best if you get the full lot).

Other Sessions

I’ll also be participating in a number of other panels and sessions including:

• A Keynote with Brian Clark and Sonia Simone (both of Copyblogger and ThirdTribe)
• A Monetization panel with Shoemoney, John Chow and Anita Campbell
• Possibly a couple of other sessions – TBC

Come along to BWE

I get excited about Blog World Expo every year. The sessions/teaching are great (I just looked over the schedule and there’s some great stuff going on) but better still is the opportunity to meet other bloggers (big and small). The opportunities for collaboration, networking and some fun times are certainly there.

This was taken at a ProBlogger dinner we held last year at BWE – one of the most fun nights I had all year. Photo by Lisa Morosky.

I’ve found people to be very approachable and while there are thousands of others there it’s not as overwhelming as some of the bigger conferences like SXSW.

Speakers are very accessible – here’s Tim Ferris (4 hour work week), Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and I after one of the sessions in 2008. Image by Shashi Bellamkonda.

I also love how BWE brings together such a diverse group of people from all kinds of interesting backgrounds.

One of my more surreal moments last year was sharing the stage with people like CNN’s Don Lemon, music producer/rapper Jermaine Dupri, journalist Hugh Hewitt, and Ford’s Scott Monty. Image by Ken Yeung.

Lastly – if you book your tickets before 16 September there are some good discounts on tickets still available. Get all the details on the Blog World and New Media Expo Site and I hope to see you in Vegas!

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

ProBlogger Track Details – Blog World Expo

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I have been wanting to post for several days already, at least since this last Sunday. I have repeatedly bragged about taking part in the Ciclotón: The last Sunday every month, the city's government closes to automotive transit a ~33Km circuit, for cyclists to enjoy. And by cyclists, I mean people from all expertise ranges — Well, the very elite bikers will not take part of such a massive thing, but there are people pedalling a couple of blocks, people taking their small kids to drive a bit, and I recognized an amazingly large proportion of people doing the whole route.

Well, this last Sunday one lap was not enough for me — I did two laps, ~65Km.

(oh, and just for keeping the complaint current: After all, SportsTracker did release a version of thier software for the N95... But it requires Flash for using the webpage at all. I have several pointers at other applications... but am time-starved right now to start reviewing :-/ )

Anyway, I decided to do this double ciclotón in order to train for next week. If you are anywhere near Mexico City, you are invited - this is meant to be a large group ride, and looks very fun!

Doble Maratón Ciclista Urbano del Bicentenario

We are two weeks away from the 200 year conmemoration of the beginning of the Independence War in Mexico. A group of cyclists came up with the idea to organize a Double Marathon to celebrate! 84Km of biking in Mexico City:

For some reason, the distance numbers in that map were made... in miles :-P Anyway, the planned route will be:

1. Jardin de los periodistas ilustres (Delegación Venustiano Carranza)
2. Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México
3. Circuito Bicentenario ( antes circuito interior )
4. Monumento a La Raza - Hospital La Raza
5. Río San Joaquin
6. Viaducto Bicentenario ( carril confinado sin interrumpir la circulacion )
7. Torres de Satélite 50 aniversario
8. Presidencia municipal de Tlalnepantla
9. Presidencia municipal de Naucalpan
10. Anillo Periferico Sur
11. Secretaría de la Defensa
12. Bosque de Chapultepec 1ª y 2ª sección
13. Segundo Piso del Distrito Federal
14. Ciudad Universitaria patrimonio cultural de la humanidad
15. Insurgentes Sur
16. Miguel Ángel de Quevedo
17. Calzada de Tlapan
18. Zócalo centro historico del distrito federal
19. Calle 16 de septiembre fin del recorrido

It looks very fun. Besides, although it is not that flat, it is one of the flattest long distance routes you will ever have. The toughest part will be IMO the Northern part of Circuito Bicentenario and possibly some bits of Periférico towards Naucalpan. Then, a long flat stretch, with one long but not steep way up in Segundo Piso (near Las Flores), and a little stretch towards Ciudad Universitaria. Other than that, it looks very doable if you are in a moderately decent condition. And taking part in such a thing is very very worthy!

As a final note... This same Sunday, it has been somewhat publicized the first Día Nacional de la Bicicleta (Bycicling National Day) will be held all over the country, kickstarting the National Cycling Crusade. Sounds nice, right? Even impressive? Yeah, but... If you look at the published information (in the page I just linked), you will see several cities are opening cyclist circuits. For one day only, which means, it does not build awareness among the population on how easy, how convenient and how fun it is to use the bicycle as means of transportation. And not only that — The cyclist routes clearly make a point that cycling is a good way, at most, to have fun... But not a general habit we should all embrace. Lets see, as an example, the distances offered (only for the cities quoting route length):

• Guerrero: Chilpancingo, 2Km; Chilapa de Álvarez, 4.5Km
• Sinaloa: Culiacán, 4.7Km
• Nuevo León:Monterrey, 1.9Km
• Querétaro: Querétaro, 3.2Km
• Sonora: Nacozari, 1.5Km; Naco, 1.5Km; Huasbas, 1Km; Granados, 1Km; Imuris, 1.5Km; Huatabampo, 1.5Km; Yecora, 1.5Km; Sahuaripa, 1Km; Caborca, 2Km; Navojoa, 3Km; Santa Ana: 2Km; San Luis Río Colorado: 2Km; Cd. Obregón: 3Km; Hermosillo: 3Km; Nogales: 4Km; Magdalena: 3Km; Guaymas: 4Km; Empalme: 2Km
• Morelos: Cuernavaca: 2Km

...And so it goes. As you can see, several very important cities (i.e. Monterrey, Chilpancingo, Cuernavaca) put only a 2km route. 2Km by bike is... Nothing. 2Km is done at a leisurely pace in less than 15 minutes (I often sustain 20Km/h, which would mean 2Km in 6 minutes). And, in this short sample (the linked page has the information for several other states, but the pattern holds), most states are only making this in the largest city or two, completely forgetting the bulk of their territories. In my opinion, this "effort" was done backwardsly, and ends up delivering the exact opposite message to what should be done.

Getting the git-pbuilder script included in git-buildpackage has significantly increased the usage, which means lots more people finding new features and facilities that they need. I love that part of free software work. Here's a new version with a few new facilities.

Since the previous release announcement (for 1.13), this adds:

• New support for an ARCH environment variable, which sets the architecture to use for the build chroot. This appends the architecture to the base directory name and passes the --architecture flag on to cowbuilder and pbuilder.

• When called with update, create, or login, pass any additional arguments to cowbuilder. Patch from Svend Sorensen.

• Say what distribution and architecture we're building for if DIST or ARCH is set. Error out if /usr/sbin/cowbuilder isn't available, telling the user to install the cowbuilder package. Based on patches from Guido Günther.

You can get the latest version from my scripts distribution page.

This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least. It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and drive around.

The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:

use Spykee;
Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
my $spykee = Spykee->new();
$spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
$spykee->left();
sleep 2;
$spykee->right();
sleep 2;
$spykee->forward();
sleep 2;
$spykee->back();
sleep 2;
$spykee->stop();

Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux, so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing going. :).

Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out where to make it available first. I will add a link to the NUUG wiki for those that want to check back later to find it.

As part of NIST's SHA-3 selection process, people have been implementing the candidate hash functions on a variety of hardware and software platforms. Our team has implemented Skein in Intel's 32 nm ASIC process, and got some impressive performance results (presentation and paper). Several other groups have implemented Skein in FPGA and ASIC, and have seen significantly poorer performance. We need help understanding why.

For example, a group led by Brian Baldwin at the Claude Shannon Institute for Discrete Mathematics, Coding and Cryptography implemented all the second-round candidates in FPGA (presentation and paper). Skein performance was terrible, but when they checked their code, they found an error. Their corrected performance comparison (presentation and paper) has Skein performing much better and in the top ten.

We suspect that the adders in all the designs may not be properly optimized, although there may be other performance issues. If we can at least identify (or possibly even fix) the slowdowns in the design, it would be very helpful, both for our understanding and for Skein's hardware profile. Even if we find that the designs are properly optimized, that would also be good to know.

A group at George Mason University led by Kris Gaj implemented all the second-round candidates in FPGA (presentation, paper, and much longer paper). Skein had the worst performance of any of the implementations. We're looking for someone who can help us understand the design, and determine if it can be improved.

Another group, led by Stefan Tillich at University of Bristol, implemented all the candidates in 180 nm custom ASIC (presentation and paper). Here, Skein is one of the worst performers. We're looking for someone who can help us understand what this group did.

Three other groups -- one led by Patrick Schaumont of Virginia Tech (presentation and paper), another led by Shin'ichiro Matsuo at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan (presentation and paper), and a third led by Luca Henzen at ETH Zurich (paper with appendix, and conference version) -- implemented the SHA-3 candidates. Again, we need help understanding how their Skein performance numbers are so different from ours.

We're looking for people with FPGA and ASIC skills to work with the Skein team. We don't have money to pay anyone; co-authorship on a paper (and a Skein polo shirt) is our primary reward. Please send me e-mail if you're interested.

Some careful readers of Planet OCamlCore should wonder why the OCaml packages in Debian has not yet been upgraded to 3.12.0. For the Planet Debian readers, this is the latest version of the Objective Caml programming language.

The answer is simple: Debian Squeeze froze on 6th August. This means that Debian folks focus on fixing release critical bugs and avoid doing big transitions in unstable (Sid). In particular, the Debian OCaml maintainers has decided to keep OCaml 3.11.2 for Squeeze, because the delay was really too short: OCaml 3.12 was out on 2nd August.

A great work has already been done by S. Glondu and the rest of the Debian OCaml maintainers to spot possible problems. The result was a series of bugs submitted to the Debian BTS. This effort has started quite early and have been updated with various OCaml release candidates.

S. Glondu has also built an unofficial Debian repository of OCaml 3.12.0 packages here.

Let's use it to experiment with OCaml 3.12.0.

schroot setup

Following my last post about schroot and CentOS, we will use a schroot to isolate our installation of unofficial OCaml 3.12.0 packages.

approx

approx is a debian caching proxy server for Debian archive files. It is very effective and simple to setup. It is already on my server (Debian Lenny, approx v3.3.0). I just have to add a single line to create a proxy for ocaml 3.12 packages:

 $ echo "ocaml-312   http://ocaml.debian.net/debian/ocaml-3.12.0" >> /etc/approx/approx.conf
 $ invoke-rc.d approx restart

approx is written in OCaml, if you want to know how I come to it.

debootstrap and schroot

We create a chroot environment with Debian Sid:

# PROXY = host where approx is installed, debian/ points to official Debian repository of 
# your choice. 
$ debootstrap sid sid-amd64-ocaml312 http://PROXY:9999/debian

We create a section for sid-amd64-ocaml312 in /etc/schroot/schroot.conf (Debian Lenny):

[sid-amd64-ocaml312]
description=Debian sid/amd64 with OCaml 3.12.0
type=directory
location=/srv/chroot/sid-amd64-ocaml312
priority=3
users=XXX
root-groups=root
run-setup-scripts=true
run-exec-scripts=true

Replace XXX by your login.

And we install additional softwares:

 $ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-get update
 $ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-get install vim-nox sudo

OCaml 3.12 packages

Now we can start the setup to access OCaml 3.12.0 packages.

The repository is signed by S. Glondu GPG key (see here). We need to get it and inject it into apt:

$ gpg --recv-key 49881AD3 
gpg: requête de la clé 49881AD3 du serveur hkp keys.gnupg.net
gpg: clé 49881AD3: « Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net> » n'a pas changé
gpg:        Quantité totale traitée: 1
gpg:                      inchangée: 1
$ gpg -a --export 49881AD3 > glondu.gpg
$ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-key add glondu.gpg

The following part is done in the schroot:

$ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312
# PROXY = host where approx is installed
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ echo "deb http://PROXY:9999/ocaml-312 sid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ cat <<EOF >> /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release l=ocaml
Pin-Priority: 1001
EOF
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-get update 
...
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-cache policy ocaml
  Installé : (aucun)
  Candidat : 3.12.0-1~38
 Table de version :
     3.12.0-1~38 0
       1001 http://atto/ocaml-312/ sid/main amd64 Packages
     3.11.2-1 0
        500 http://atto/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages

(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-get install ocaml-nox libtype-conv-camlp4-dev libounit-ocaml-dev...

That's it. The apt-policy command shows that OCaml 3.12 for the ocaml-312 repository has an higher priority for installation.

Good luck playing with OCaml 3.12.0.

Hurricane Earl is going to move up the east coast of the USA this week, reaching Canadian waters, still a hurricane, this weekend.

Evacuation orders have already been given for tourists on Ocracoke Island. Other communities are considering evacuation orders.

Please do keep an ear out for orders in your community; have a plan on where to go and what to take, and stay safe.

His Holiness the Karmapa talks about how he was discovered to be the reincarnation of a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism. In telling his story, he urges us to work on not just technology and design, but the technology and design of the heart. He is translated onstage by Tyler Dewar. (Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009 in Mysore, India. Duration: 25:24)

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Watch His Holiness the Karmapa’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

You don’t need to be a big-time blogger to need to outsource some aspect of your blog. A beginning blogger with a serious business plan might want to contract a designer to create a skin for their blog. A entrepreneurial blogger might want to outsource some writing, or have an agency provide social media strategy for the blog.

There are plenty of reasons why you might outsource some aspect of your blogging. But once you’ve identified the need, how should you proceed?

Don’t make your first step trying to find good candidates! Before you go hunting for help, you need to do your homework. Here’s the process I’d recommend.

1. Define what you want.

“I need help with my blog content” is not a clear directive. If you’re going to source help, you need to know what to look for, which means you need to have a clear idea of what, specifically, you want.

Don’t just think in terms of contractor skillsets. Think in terms of your audience. So you want to have a new interface designed for your blog. Great. But what do you want it to do? Do you have a visual identity you want the design to reflect or match? Are there interactive elements — like social media buttons or a subscription box — that, in accordance with your readership objectives, you want to prioritise in your design? Do you have user and usage stats that can help to drive the technical specifications you provide to a designer?

Work out what you think you want, and why, before you start thinking about who might do the work.

2. Make it measurable.

The word ‘measurable’ really gives the game away — if the first step in this process was to define specific objectives, the next one is to make them measurable.

Some tasks are difficult to measure — the “success” of a new homepage design might seem like one of them. But look a little closer and, whatever the task you’re setting, you’ll likely find ways to assess the results. Perhaps you’ll assess your current traffic metrics and set new goals that you expect the new site design to help meet. Perhaps you’ll require the designer to show you the results of usability testing.

Alternatively, your goals might be internal — related to your time or operations. Maybe you want to save time — say, two days a week — by outsourcing some of your blog post research and writing tasks. Fine. But make sure you’re prepared to track the time you spend managing your contractor, to make sure that you haven’t simply replaced two days’ writing with two days’ contractor management!

As part of setting measurable goals, don’t forget to apply a timeline to each! This is the most basic way for you to assess whether your outsourced work is on track.

3. Set a budget.

Now that you have an idea of what you want, and what benefits you need it to bring, you should be able to translate those benefits into a dollar value, and decide on the investment you’re willing to make to achieve that goal.

You might want the new design for your blog to increase average per-session pageviews by 1.5 within the first three months. Great! What will that do for your advertising revenues in that time? And how much can you afford to invest to generate this return?

Setting a budget is an essential step in the process. This will help you to qualify candidates early in the process, and save you from spending time talking to “prospective” contractors who really aren’t in your market at all.

4. Seek recommendations.

Unless you have experience in a given market space or discipline and believe you have the skills to select good talent off the bat, you might consider asking peers and colleagues for talent recommendations. Whether you’re outsourcing blog content production or your accounting tasks, personal recommendations are the best way to have some assurance that you’ll get what you expect.

Alternatively — or additionally — you might call for expressions of interest through your blog, your social networks, your professional networks, and other likely sources. To me, these approaches are still better options than advertising blindly on freelance networks, or scouring the web in an effort to find that needle in a haystack — good help that you can afford and trust. Recommendations are best.

5. Research the provider.

However you obtain recommendations, research the provider before you contact them. Conducting your own research is important — you never know what information a quick web search will turn up. Hopefully it’s the same information the contractor in question will provide to you, but if it’s not the kind of detail they’d likely share, you’ll be glad you looked into their work yourself.

If the contractor is local, your peers or colleagues may know them, so again: ask around. Encourage people to be candid and to give you their honest opinions, but also be sure to find out the bases for those assessments. Try to remain as open-minded and objective as possible at this point, so you can create a shortlist of at least two — but hopefully three or four — providers you believe might suit the job.

6. Make contact.

Make careful observation of each shortlisted candidate from the moment of your first contact. Everything they do and say will provide clues as to how well you may be able to work with them. If something makes you uncomfortable, try to work out what it is and why it’s a problem.

Again, it’s important to try to remain reasonable and objective at this point. The fact that your potential designer is wearing a suit and tie doesn’t mean he’s not as creative as the previous candidate, who rolled up to the meeting in ripped jeans and cool runners.

Try to get all the information from the candidate that you’ll need to make your outsourcing decision. The things I want to have in hand when it comes time to assess my options include:

• contact details
• competent past work examples
• a pitch, brief, or written document that explains what they’ll provide, for what value, and shows that they understand and agree to my expectations, goals, and time and budget constraints
• great references from current clients
• personal experience with the candidate (it doesn’t matter whether I’ve met them to discuss the job over coffee, or over Skype: I want to meet them one way or another!).

Now, the hiring decision is all yours. To make sure you’re protected, though, you might want to ensure:

• you both sign a legally binding written contract that explains the work and the work arrangements
• your contractor has any insurances you feel are necessary
• you’ve discussed and agreed upon any copyright and intellectual property considerations
• you’ve had the contractor sign a non-disclosure and/or anti-competition agreement if you feel that’s necessary.

These steps aren’t substitutes for good research and gut instinct, but they may help you if your research and instinct don’t pay off for some reason.

Have you outsourced any aspects of your blog? How did the process work for you?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years’ experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How to Outsource Your Blog… Or Part of It

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Great sound, great look, great price, and a remote control! Of course, it's also much better than some crappy dock your nana would get you for a prezzie! For starters it's got an alarm clock AND an FM radio - but don't hold that against it, you can always just sleep in or change the stations with your remote if you like! $34.75 + $6.95 shipping.

Since I published “How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr”, quite a few people joined the movement and I had less troubles finding projects to Flattr. That’s great!

Without further ado, here are my recommendations for september:

1. Smuxi is an IRC application that integrates from the start the need to be permanently connected. You can run the “engine” on a server and the graphical interface connects there. The engine has all the intelligence so it remembers what message you last saw in each channel (including highlights) and you won’t miss anything. I recently switched to it and I like it. It’s not perfect but it’s improving quickly. The next version even supports Ubuntu’s messaging indicator for better integration with the desktop.
2. Geshi is a PHP class used by many other software to provide enhanced views of code on web pages by coloring the various parts based on the syntax of the respective programming language. It’s used by Wikipedia, many blog plugins and lots of other web applications.
3. Git-buildpackage is a set of tools developed by Guido Günther to make it easier to maintain Debian packages in Git repositories. I use it for several packages that I maintain.
4. Mixare is an augmented reality browser. Take your Android phone and it will incrust information in the (camera) view of the environment. Impressive video on the website.
5. Lightspark is is a modern flash player implementation targetting ActionScript 3.0 support (while Gnash only supports older versions). It’s one of those few projects that are really needed to get rid of the non-free Adobe plugin that almost everybody installs because there’s nothing else that work well enough.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

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I previously wrote about my experience handing out How To Vote (HTV) cards at the federal election a couple of weeks ago [1].

One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some advantage in forcing cards on people, some people decide who to vote for once they are inside the polling booth based on information on the HTV cards (a couple of voters stated an intention to do so which disappointed the politically aware people who hand out the HTV cards). But for most voters there is no benefit in competing to hand them a HTV card.

Some of the comments expressed a dislike of being subjected to people handing out HTV cards. As a voter I don’t particularly like having a group of conflicting people wanting to hand me a HTV card either. Also it is obviously a waste of resources to hand out so much cardboard that goes to waste (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties that use glossy non-recycled paper).

I think that the ideal solution would be to have the officials at the polling booths hand out HTV cards on request. A voter would have to specifically request the card from a party and the poll officials would not be able to offer them a selection, “sorry I can’t tell you who is running for election, but if you express a desire to vote for a particular party I can give you a card instructing you how to do so“. The parties would be responsible for providing the HTV cards (according to strict specifications regarding the acceptable sizes), and if the supply runs out then the officials would decline requests.

This could even be made self-financing by making the parties who want their cards distributed pay for a fraction of the wages of the people who hand out the cards, if each polling place had one person handing out the HTV cards at a salary of $500 for the day and there were 5 parties cards to hand out then each party would have to pay $100. The reduced print runs for HTV cards would probably save each party more than $100.

Something like this should satisfy the real need of voters who want advice on how to support their preferred party while not annoying the voters who know how to vote without any assistance. I expect that most members of the parties would be in favor of this idea. The only reason we go to the significant amount of effort and expense to hand out the HTV cards is because everyone else is doing so.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/08/22/telling-people-how-to-vote/

"I was recently assigned to work on a team that maintains a fairly large product," writes Aaron, "at first, I was a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the architecture. There were countless layers of abstraction, thousands and thousands of classes, and design patterns galore. Since it was such a large project – and my first large project – I figured that the architectural complexity was simply par for the course."

“Then I started looking at the code a little more closely. If I had two words to describe it, they’d be ‘unnecessary complexity.’ And if I had one snippet to describe it, it would be this.”

private void SetAccount(RequisitionData.RequisitionItem requisitionItem, 
                        AccountData.Account account, bool automation)
{
    bool allowSetAccount = false;

    if(account != null)
    {
        // if the account entry is being set by automation, ensure that 
	// the user hasn't already set a value
        if (automation)
        {
            if (!requisitionItem.IsAccountCodeNull())
            {
                if (requisitionItem.AccountCode == string.Empty)
                    allowSetAccount = true;
                else
                    allowSetAccount = true;
            }
            else
                allowSetAccount = true;
        }
        else
            allowSetAccount = true;

        if (allowSetAccount)
        {
            requisitionItem.AccountID = account.ID;
            requisitionItem.AccountCode = account.Code;
        }
    }
}

Aaron continued, "the beauty of it is that the method is private within the class, and has an 'automation' boolean parameter. This parameter is always passed as true."

The Telegraph ran an article about a sizable -- and growing -- number of Catholic pilgrims arriving in a small village in the Pyrenean foothills. With 94 residents, the town has no hotels or shops -- a fact that has left some of the new arrivals a bit confused. The town does have a small statue of the Virgin Mary which some pilgrims have worshiped at. Most pilgrims have noted that the town seems curiously quiet for Catholicism's third largest pilgrimage site.

The village is Lourde. Without an "s". The pilgrims, of course, are looking for Lourdes. The statue some pilgrims have prostrated themselves in front of is not the famous Statue of Our Lady at the Grotto of Massabielle but a simple village statue of the virgin. Lourde is 92 kilometers (57 miles) to the east of the larger and more famous city with the very similar name.

Given the similar names, pilgrims have apparently been showing up at Lourdes for as long as the residents of the smaller village can remember. But villagers report a very large up-tick in confused pilgrims in recent years. To blame, apparently, is the growing popularity of GPS navigation systems.

Pilgrims have typed in "L-O-U-R-D-E" in their GPS navigation devices and forgotten the final "S". Indeed, using the clunky on-screen keyboards and automatic completion functionality, it's often much easier to type in the name of the tiny village than the name of the more likely destination. One letter and only 92 kilometers away in the same country, it's an easy mistake to make because the affordances of many GPS navigation systems make it slightly easier to ask to go to Lourde than to Lourdes. Apparently, twenty or so cars of pilgrims show up in Lourde each day. Sometimes carrying as many people as live in the town of Lourde itself!

The GPS navigation systems, of course, will happy route drivers to either city and do not know or care that Lourde is rarely the location a driver navigating from across Europe wants. The GPS is designed to show drivers their next turn so a driver won't know they're off course until they reach their destination. The systems assume that destinations were entered correctly. A human navigator asked for directions would never point a person to the smaller village. Indeed, they would probably not know it even exists.

A municipal councilor in Lourde suggested that, "the GPS is not at fault. People are." Of course, she's correct. Pilgrims typed in the name of their destination incorrectly. But the reason there's an increase in people making this particular mistake is because the technology people use to navigate in their cars has changed dramatically over the last decade in a way that makes this mistake more likely. A dwindling number of people pour over maps or ask a passer-by or a gas station attendant for directions. On the whole, navigation has become more effective and more convenient. But not without trade-offs and costs.

GPS technology frames our experience of navigation in ways that are profound, even as we are usually take it for granted. Unlike a human, the GPS will never suggest a short detour that leads us to a favorite restaurant or a beautiful vista we'll be driving by just before sunset. As in the case of Lourde, it will make mistakes no human would (the reverse is also true, of course). In this way, the twenty cars of confused pilgrims showing up in Lourde each day can remind us of the power that technologies have over some of the little tasks in our lives.

(For Those Who Care About An Introduction: Christine Spang gave a talk during DebConf10 about Simple Defects (SD), and blogged about it later on.)

Folks maintaining Debian packages are already able to partially-clone bugs.debian.org’s bug database thanks to the local-debbugs tool. But what about upstream’s bug tracker? Taking a (shamelessly self-centered) example: X.Org packages are hosted on FreeDesktop.org’s bugzilla. Thanks to SD, it’s possible to fetch bugs from there as well! Here’s the obligatory picture:

This means that you can browse/search them locally while being offline (or well-connected, but without having to use that !$\§%$^ bugzilla web interface). Many of the replica types support both reading and writing, meaning you can also queue some changes locally, and push them later. Currently, sd help sync says that read-write support is available for RT, Hiveminder, Trac, Google Code, and GitHub. There’s also read-only support for redmine. Debbugs is being worked on, see Christine’s blog post about her SD talk for more info.

Given there was no support for bugzilla, I had a quick look and reported my findings. The main point being: \o/ Bugzilla’s XMLRPC \o/

A little while later (I’m not exactly fluent in Perl…), I came up with a tentatively-mergeable branch adding preliminary read-only support for bugzilla. There’s still a lot of work, but I’m trying to work on it on a regular basis, adding support for more properties, and fixing bugs (tests should be written some day, too).

Skein is my new hash function. Well, "my" is an overstatement; I'm one of the eight designers. It was submitted to NIST for their SHA-3 competition, and one of the 14 algorithms selected to advance to the second round. Here's the Skein paper; source code is here. The Skein website is here.

Last week was the Second SHA-3 Candidate Conference. Lots of people presented papers on the candidates: cryptanalysis papers, implementation papers, performance comparisons, etc. There were two cryptanalysis papers on Skein. The first was by Kerry McKay and Poorvi L. Vora (presentation and paper). They tried to extend linear cryptanlysis to groups of bits to attack Threefish (the block cipher inside Skein). It was a nice analysis, but it didn't get very far at all.

The second was a fantastic piece of cryptanalysis by Dmitry Khovratovich, Ivica Nikolié, and Christian Rechberger. They used a rotational rebound attack (presentation and paper) to mount a "known-key distinguisher attack" on 57 out of 72 Threefish rounds faster than brute force. It's a new type of attack -- some go so far as to call it an "observation" -- and the community is still trying to figure out what it means. It only works if the attacker can manipulate both the plaintexts and the keys in a structured way. Against 57-round Threefish, it requires 2⁵⁰³ work -- barely better than brute force. And it only distinguishes reduced-round Threefish from a random permutation; it doesn't actually recover any key bits.

Even with the attack, Threefish has a good security margin. Also, the attack doesn't affect Skein. But changing one constant in the algorithm's key schedule makes the attack impossible. NIST has said they're allowing second-round tweaks, so we're going to make the change. It won't affect any performance numbers or obviate any other cryptanalytic results -- but the best attack would be 33 out of 72 rounds.

Our update on Skein, which we presented at the conference, is here. All the other papers and presentations are here. (My 2008 essay on SHA-3 is here, and my 2009 update is here.) The second-round algorithms are: BLAKE, Blue Midnight Wish, CubeHash, ECHO, Fugue, Grøstl, Hamsi, JH, Keccak, Luffa, Shabal, SHAvite-3, SIMD, and Skein. You can find details on all of them, as well as the current state of their cryptanalysis, here. NIST will select approximately five algorithms to go on to the third round by the end of the year.

In other news, we're once again making Skein polo shirts available to the public. Those of you who attended either of the two SHA-3 conferences might have noticed the stylish black Skein polo shirts worn by the Skein team. Anyone who wants one is welcome to buy it, at cost. Details (with photos) are here. All orders must be received before October 1, and we'll have all the shirts made in one batch.

My email lives on a virtual server and lately I've been accessing it with mutt on that machine via SSH. I really like mutt, but this makes things tricky when someone emails me a URL and it's either awkward to copy & paste (e.g. PuTTY) or I'd like to look at the web page on another machine--often I have my laptop to one side for email while doing other things on my desktop machine.

Mutt uses the rather nice urlview program to extract URLs out of email messages for easy selection. urlview's handler script can also be hijacked to do whatever you want. I've set mine up to generate an HTML file in the server's webspace. This HTML file has a meta refresh tag to immediately redirect the browser to the URL of interest.

Now when I get a URL in an email I hit ^b to invoke urlview, select the URL I want, load a web browser on the target machine and choose my bookmark for my own URL redirector.

To set this up yourself:

1. Install the urlview package

   aptitude install urlview

2. Modify /etc/urlview/url_handler.sh to call your own script. I put the following line under the user-configurable settings but before their own handler:

   /usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh $1
   

3. (Optional) Disable the http handler so that you don't end up loading elinks or something else on the computer running mutt:

   http_prgs=""

4. Create a world-writable file in the machine's webspace: (but not world-deletable! The parent directory should only be writable by www-data or root.)

   touch /var/www/link.htm
   chmod 0666 link.htm

5. Create a script to generate that link.htm. In my case I used this following in /usr/local/bin/sharelink.sh:

   #!/bin/bash
   
   LINKFILE=/var/www/link.htm
   url=$1
   
   cat > $LINKFILE <<EOF
   <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
   <html>
   <head><title>Email Link Redirector</title>
   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=$url"></head>
   <body><h1>Redirecting</h1><p><a href="$url">$url</a></body>
   </html>
   EOF

Coming up with a cool way of retrieving attached files is left as an exercise to the reader.

It’s not too long before we had a contest to win some BitDefender Total Security 2010 licenses here at Craving Tech. The team at BitDefender has launched a newer version of the Total Security software. Check out what ‘s new in BitDefender Total Security 2011 from the official press release.

BitDefender launches Total Security 2011, offering consumers a simple yet comprehensive solution to safeguard their online world

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – August 31, 2010 – BitDefender®, an award-winning provider of innovative internet security solutions, today announced the launch of BitDefender Total Security 2011 in Australia, offering comprehensive protection against the latest viruses, spyware, phishing and identity theft attacks.

Right out of the box, BitDefender 2011 offers users a simplified experience and more helpful information to answer questions about online security. All of BitDefender’s 2011 products include helpful user tips and a video library of tutorials that are designed to guide you through the product’s features and configuration in an easy, step-by-step format.

BitDefender’s adaptive design user interface allows you to customise the product to match your needs and technical knowledge: basic, intermediate and expert. You can also customise the product’s dashboard by adding shortcuts to your most frequently used actions, such as laptop and gamer mode.

To help you get the most out of your PC, Total Security 2011 has a host of new features to ensure that your computer is always running at its best. Performance Optimiser shows which applications are slowing down the PC, and suggests corrective actions to improve performance while BitDefender’s Tune Up feature can remove unnecessary files and registry entries to free up system resources. In addition, Smart Scanning & Scheduling detects the level of activity on your computer, and will suspend scanning or backups during busy periods to keep you safe without slowing down your gaming or media experience.

Vince Hwang, global director of product delivery, BitDefender, said: “Technologies such as social media, online gaming and collaborative tools have all taken personal computing into new realms. BitDefender’s 2011 range of products addresses this shift in the security landscape by providing comprehensive protection from online attacks that spread across new and emerging technologies, whilst offering major performance improvements in a highly-customisable user interface suited for families to enthusiasts.”

Other BitDefender Total Security 2011 enhancements include:

• Enhanced detection – every product in the BitDefender 2011 family provides multi-layered, proactive technologies to hunt down and eliminate the latest threats in seconds.
• QuickScan – detects malicious activity using through-the-cloud technology. QuickScan takes a snapshot of your computer’s running processes and checks it using BitDefender’s cloud-based scanning service in 60 seconds.
• Search Advisor – the BitDefender 2011 family of products automatically scans links and displays phishing warnings for search results, as well as safety ratings for all websites that may contain spyware or inappropriate content.
• Parental Control – manage children’s access to the Internet or individual programs from any computer or 3G mobile phone.
• Network Management – automatically detects other PCs with BitDefender 2011 installed and add them to the administrator network. Manage the security of all the PCs at home from a single place, and conduct tasks (such as scanning and back-up) across all terminals with ease.

Rounding out the BitDefender 2011 family of products are BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011.

BitDefender Internet Security 2011 provides Internet-connected families with the latest protection against Web-based attacks, faster performance for secure online gaming, and unrivaled parental controls. BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011 gives PCs fast, proactive protection against the latest viruses, spyware, and identity theft attacks—all managed through a user-friendly and customisable dashboard.

Pricing details:

• BitDefender Total Security 2011 – $105 (3 PCs/1 year)
• BitDefender Internet Security 2011 – $75 (3 PCs/1 year)
• BitDefender Antivirus Pro 2011 – $60 (3 PCs/1 year)

For a limited time, purchase BitDefender Total Security 2011 online and receive a free backup installation DVD. For details and a full list of BitDefender 2011 features and benefits by product, please visit bitdefender.com.au.

Frans Pop contributions to Debian has already been honoured: Frans Pop obituary by Steve McIntyre. One less known fact is that he hacked in upstream linux-2.6 too. Latest linux-2.6 git lists him with 80 commits. A bigger part of his work was testing latest linux-2.6 on different architectures. There are lots of patches with "Reported-by: Frans Pop <elendil>" and "Tested-by: Frans Pop <elendil>". Also in this field he was aiming for big coverage and a special responsive tester.

I am very sad to have missed the opportunity to meet you in person. You are missed. Rest in peace, my friend.

 Sigh, so close and yet so far.

This morning a message hit the Android Australia mailing list claiming that Australia had been added to the small list of countries that were allowed to sell Apps in the Android market.

Alas, it wasn't so. Instead it appears that Australias addition to the list was in error and we are still part of the great unwashed who are unable to take advantage of googles sales infrastructure.

Come on guys and gals at Google! You have an excellent product and people want to be able to take advantage of it, people are begging to be able to give you money via whatever cut you take via the marketplace, why are we being locked out? Why are you ensuring that those of us outside of the US/UK have to turn to iphone development to make our mark in the mobile world?

Sigh.

 Just a quick update on the iphone version of the openaustralia search app:

House of Reps Search:

Currently hardcoded to search by postcode. Need to include a Picker so that people can choose how they search for their members, however, the Picker widget on the iPhone is hucking fuge! Seriously, the thing looks like something out your local hotels Pokie room.

Senate Search:

Nothing done here yet

Hansard Search:

While the general search functionality hasn't been touched yet, I've started working on the Rep related Hansard search, tends to crash right now, but still going :)

My Rep:

Nothing done as yet.

If you want to have a look at the horror that is my objective c then have a gander over here

Here’s what I’m saying: I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I hope I’m not, you know, blowing your mind.

– Linda Holmes in her incredibly cool meta-film-review, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

When I went to church last Sunday, my Sunday school class suddenly grew from its summer attendance of three people to its school-year total of… well, a lot, but more than fifty-two.

I know there were more than fifty-two because, in an effort to integrate the crop of new freshmen just moved in to attend a nearby Christian university, the organizers handed out cards from a deck of playing cards, one to a person, and asked us all to find and get to know the people who had the same numbers as ourselves. (I am almost certain they found this in a book with a title like 101 Icebreakers for Any Occasion.) Of course, by the time I had figured all this out, all the playing cards had been given to people already, and there were more people than playing cards. People without cards were told to go and find anyone else who also didn’t have a card.

Okay, so review this with me: They just told me to make my way through a room where everyone’s talking, attempt to find people without playing cards, and, if I miraculously found them, somehow understand their introductions in the middle of the auditory confusion. It’s no wonder I ended up standing there, looking befuddled, until things quieted down and the class started. In the end, I never did find that elusive group of cardless people.

I mention this partly because I wasn’t the only disabled person in the classroom; there was at least one other, a law student who is blind and apparently had no trouble finding her group. Whoever gave her a card sensibly told her what number was on it.

Of course, the Sunday school leaders couldn’t have known I would’ve been better off if pointed in the direction of the group I was supposed to be finding. I didn’t know that I’d need it, and they didn’t know that I was confused. That’s the thing, though: They didn’t know, because my disability isn’t obvious, and even when people know I’m autistic, they don’t automatically connect it to auditory processing. But this is an example of an incident that illustrates an interesting thing: Whether or not they know you’re disabled changes the way people perceive you; and it changes the way they treat you.

Invisible Disability
So what’s an invisible disability? Well, remember first of all that a disability is a gap between your skills/abilities and the skills/abilities expected of the average person in your society. Simple, yes? Okay.

“Invisible” means that, when the average member of your society looks at you, you don’t fit his stereotype of “disabled”—that is, you’re disabled, but you’re not perceived as disabled. For many people, “disabled” conjures up images of physical disability of the sort which involves visible signs, especially wheelchairs, crutches, or white canes. The disabilities they seem to find easiest to understand are the ones that are most prevalent in the media, and thus the ones they’re most exposed to.

There’s a spectrum of visibility too, of course. Some disabilities are more obvious than others. While there aren’t any easily recognizable autistic facial features, some autistic people are obviously autistic, even to a non-professional, after thirty seconds of observation. Others are obviously odd or disabled after a similar length of time, though they don’t seem specifically autistic. And some don’t trip people’s “disability” stereotypes at all, and are thus assumed to be non-disabled until proven otherwise. (In case anyone is wondering, I tend toward the “invisible at first, but eventually obvious” type. I can “pass” as neurotypical for short periods, but it takes quite a lot of effort.)

Autism is often an invisible disability. Examples of other invisible disabilities include learning disabilities, chronic pain or illness, ADHD, most mental illnesses, deafness and blindness that don’t come with white canes and/or sign language, and versions of most physical disabilities that don’t require obvious technological or human aid.

Typical Until Proven Disabled
Just like people are presumed to be heterosexual until proven otherwise, people are also presumed not to be disabled. People without experience in the matter tend to assume that disability is always severe and always obvious. I even remember reading a children’s book designed to promote disability awareness which included, as literally the only examples of disability, a woman in a wheelchair and a man with a white cane. Kids were told, “This is what disability is. You are a kind person if you are nice to these people.” (I sincerely hope the book is out of print, but I probably have to admit that even if it is, there’ll be another taking its place. Since when were you a good person just for not mistreating other human beings?)

So when your disability isn’t obvious, things are different. People assume that you’re not disabled unless it’s made quite clear to them. That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. On the one hand, you might escape prejudice simply because people don’t know you’re a good target. On the other hand, you might be asking for help and not be able to get it because people assume that because your disability is not obvious, it cannot warrant the kind of assistance you’re requesting. People have been told that their assistance dogs are fake, that they don’t deserve handicapped parking, or that they don’t qualify for help at school, just because they don’t fit the stereotype.

Passing
People with invisible disabilities have one dubious advantage: We have the option of “passing.” That means, basically, putting on a mask, pretending you aren’t disabled, and trying to escape prejudice that way. It can work; it can let you do things that the world normally wouldn’t let you do, it can let you be treated as an equal by people who wouldn’t normally do so, and it can stop you from having to explain things every five minutes. But it’s not such an advantage in the long run, because “passing” takes a huge toll on your self-worth. To hide implies that disability is shameful; but to be open about a disability is to expose yourself to prejudice. For fear of being “outed” as disabled, people have hidden their disabilities for years and in many cases gone into burnout—just to be seen as equals. Nobody should have to do that.

Of course, it’s not that people with visible disabilities don’t feel this kind of pressure. It’s often expressed in the form of pressure to prove they’re “just like everyone else, deep down,” as though disability were a simple cosmetic difference rather than something that affected your entire life. It may seem controversial to say it, but disabled people really aren’t “just like everyone else.” We are just as human as anyone else, and most of our lives are made of things we share with every other human; but the differences are there, they are real, and eventually I think we’ll learn that acknowledging and accepting them, rather than politely and awkwardly ignoring them, is the better way to approach the fact of their existence.

The Reality of Invisible Disability
“Seeing is believing,” and that’s just as true when it comes to disability. If they can’t see your disability, some people will think that it simply isn’t there. They may not know enough to understand that dyslexia or fibromyalgia are real. They may assume that people want special treatment or want to “get out of” something. It may even be somewhat threatening to them that some people are disabled, but can’t be picked out of a crowd, safely identified, and mentally boxed up away from everyone else.

Wherever it comes from, being assumed not to be disabled can be a problem when you really are disabled. While being pitied and patronized is an experience I don’t wish on anyone, it can be just as annoying to have your disability presumed to result from a character defect. Before someone clued me in about my own disability, I was assumed to be lazy, strong-willed, dramatic, and overly sensitive. Because I learned to talk on time, I was assumed to be defiant when I couldn’t say what was expected. Because I didn’t zone out and rock for hours, I was assumed to be rebellious for zoning out and not hearing my name called when I was involved in my special interests. Because I seemed intelligent, three-hour-long meltdowns ending in exhausted collapse were put down to being “strong-willed.”
It doesn’t just work that way for autistic kids. Autistic adults, and people with any other invisible disability, have very similar problems—but if they mention their problems, they may easily be told to “stop whining”!

Common Problems, Different Perspectives
It seems to me that people with disabilities face many of the same problems, whether those disabilities are visible or invisible; those problems just seem to have a different spin on them.

We all face the problem of being distanced from society because we’re different. For some people, the distance comes from obvious signs of disability, and from people who are worried about doing or saying the wrong thing, or who even outright pity them. For other people, the distance comes from knowing they’re different, but still having it assumed by others that they are the same. They live knowing they have to work harder or do things differently; that they are different in sometimes small but always important ways—differences that are often ignored and sometimes misinterpreted.

We all face the problem of being prevented from living up to our potential. For those with visible disabilities, there’s the problem of being underestimated, patronized, or passed over because people assume that disability means total inability. For those with invisible disabilities, there’s the problem of being taken seriously as needing accommodations. In either case, the effect is to block the person from what they could do if they had the opportunity to do it.

We all have to deal with a world that assumes our number-one priority in life is to have as “normal” a life as possible. For those who are obviously disabled, that means being expected to “overcome” one’s disability and become “inspirational,” rather than just living whatever life one happens to want. For those who aren’t, it comes in the form of pressure to hide, to work harder, to do things exactly the same way that everyone else does them—even though it’s not the best way—just because it’s what would be expected of someone who isn’t disabled.

That people are treated differently depending on perceived disability says something about how we perceive disability: Namely, we still have two categories we put people into. One category is “People.” The other is “Disabled People.”

We think there’s some big, fundamental gap between people who are disabled and people who aren’t. Ideally, I think, we’d just remember that people are different from each other, and that the differences are something we can acknowledge and even treasure, and that people occasionally need help. Ideally, we’d set up our world in such a way that when people needed help, they could get it. It’s a sort of universal design, only much broader than the usual sense of the term, applied to the organization and social structure of the world. Perhaps in a world where people with disabilities were fully integrated, we wouldn’t need the term “disability” at all, because the gap between your abilities and your society’s expectations simply wouldn’t exist.

After wrestling with various Gmail extensions with similar aims, I was pleased to hear about the new Gmail Priority Inbox which I have now turned on for my Gmail. I don't think they have it quite right yet, but I expect it will evolve over the next few months and that it might just become so useful that I end up feeling that I did the right thing moving all my email to Gmail.

I’d be interested to see what other people think about this feature as they try it out.

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

It was June when Mark and Alicia kissed each other one last time before strapping in for the long sleep to Caltrani. “I love you”, Mark had said as the canopies had closed. “Elephant shoes”, she mouthed back, and giggled behind the glass that separated their two capsules.

Neither knew it would be their very last kiss, her capsule bleeding out in flight. When they came to wake her she was dried nearly to dust.

They would have no family. He was left alone.

Back home he knew his friends and family would have long passed on. Maybe there were nieces and nephews, or great to some incomprehensible exponent – great nieces and nephews, but they were as lost to him as his love.

Home would have to be where his heart was, where she was planted in the foreign ground.

He worked first as a labourer, helping build the colony up, then as a soldier defending it against those that would see it fail. He’d seen wars before, and was trained for them, but this was a profession he had looked to the stars to escape. Starting anew the cycle of getting close to people with a uniform in common only to see them die would prove too much to bear.

Mark became a nomad, losing himself in the rough jungle of this planet he’d been so keen to make peace with, a planet that had proved so vicious in return.

On a clear night, from the hilltops overlooking Panteran Gorge, he watched the landing lights at Keff, marveled as ships arced out into space, and others descended to take their place on the ground. The horizon was alight with evidence of prosperity. Brightly lit buildings, flying craft, the multicoloured aura of the cities and towns.

“Their prosperity,” he scolded the night, “not mine. Not Alicia’s.”

Slowly he made his way to the edge of the cliff, peeling off his clothing and equipment and leaving it in a trail behind him. Above him Gentle filled the sky, the low moon giant and grey, lighting the jungle and the water below. Beneath it Skittish streaked across the blackness in fast orbit. Less massive and straining against Caltrani’s gravity, it would pass many times before the sun breached the horizon again, desperately trying to break free of the planet’s grasp to fly away into space.

“It’s hopeless Skittish,” Mark spoke out-loud to the sky, “she’ll never let you go.”

Mark dropped from the cliff, barely feeling the water strike his feet, breaking the surface to sink like a stone into the icy depths. Above him the water rushed to fill in the space he left behind, on the surface barely a ripple to show where he’d been.

As he sank, he thought of Alicia, saw her through the water mouthing ‘Elephant shoes’, and giggling as she swam away. He thought of the children they’d never have, of how he’d been right there as she grew old and died, and how he’d been robbed of his chance to share that with her.

“Nothing left to live for”, he thought, as the moon faded out over his head. He kicked out violently at the water. “Nothing left to live for.” His heart pounding as he broke the surface and filled his lungs, “but I’ll be damned if I let that kill me.”

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