shadowspar

Celebrated Zuck getting TIME's "Person of the Year" award by deleting my almost-completely-disused Facebook account. Every person on there whom I'm at all close to, I interact with via some other medium. The only function it was serving was for freaky exes from my past to find me, and I've had quite enough of that, thank you very much.

Wanna hear the best part? When you go to deactivate your account (which is different to deleting it permanently) it shows you the profile pics of a few of your friends (probably the ones you interact with the most) and says "Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? $FRIENDNAME1 will miss you. $FRIENDNAME2 will miss you."...etc.

*delete*

So Julian Assange has turned himself into the police and been arrested.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, said Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom...

Uh, no it's not. It's an attempt to bring an individual to trial for criminal acts he's alleged to have committed -- rape and sexual assault, in this case. The charges predate Wikileaks' release of US diplomatic cables, FWIW.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing over this, like the media is trying to make out whether to drape Assange in a hero's cape or a villain's one. People do good things; those same people do bad things, and they should be praised for the former and held to account for the latter. The cells of Torquemada's prisons were apparently "large, airy, clean and with good windows admitting the sun....far superior to the civil prisons of that day", but you don't see anyone holding him up as a wholesome personage to emulate, and rightly so.

We can give Assange credit for his work with Wikileaks without letting him off the hook for his other behaviour. It's that simple.

Had a crummy day today, but this made me do a happy dance:

I found this picture on my hard drive, which I'd seen on a website but couldn't find again, and despaired of having lost forever. It reminds me of everything good about trains in Japan. *^_^*

How did people in remote Northern Ontario ever find out about random awesome K-Pop and Russian girlpop bands before the age of the Internet?

Oh, that's right, they didn't.

Saw Drums United last night.

The sight & sound of percussion from all over the world uniting into one rhythm was awesome, both musically and metaphorically. There was so much awesome it's hard to single anybody out, but still, the Senegalese drummers (Aly N'Diaye Rose on a set comprised of sabar, djembe, and bougarabou; Maracas Pape Thiam on tama) were spectacular to behold; Niti Ranjan Biswas made sounds emanate from the tabla that I've never heard from any instrument before. I was a bit disappointed that the timbales sat idle most of the night, but really it's hard to find any fault with the show, and I think they were missing their usual timbalero besides.

I've also come to the conclusion that to enjoy a concert as much as I'd really like to, I'm going to have to be on stage. We'll have to see about that. ^^;

This one's become so much of a ritual that I can pretty much recite it by now.

• ½ cup unbleached AP flour
• ¼ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ cup buckwheat flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt (omittable)
• 2 eggs (we use Kingsmill powdered egg replacer in lieu)
• 1½ cups buttermilk (or, using the standard "mock buttermilk" formula, 1½cups milk + 1½tbsp vinegar or lemon juice. soymilk works in this formulation too)
• 2 tbsp fancy molasses (or, if you never have it either, 2 tbsp of dark brown sugar makes a nice sub)

Standard pastry drill: mix dry, mix wet, wet into dry. These turn out a bit denser than garden variety pancakes, so I like to cook them a bit longer at a bit lower temp. They're a great platform for funky stuff like cranberry butter as well as the more traditional maple syrup.

meloukhia put up an anonymous adoration meme this morning. If you're inclined to heap some anonymous praise upon someone or squee about their awesomeness, here's a good chance. =)

While the world is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, in a sense we are all much more similar than we are different. People like good conversation over a nice meal, wish the best for their family and friends, and hope to live a full life. Some things transcend linguistic or cultural barriers -- music, a smile, and sometimes even humour.

Hanging onto the last little bit of summer cheer. Love this tune and this video.

This is the first time we've actually made homemade Pico de Gallo; we should have done much earlier. It's got a nice fresh flavour that's the perfect antidote when you feel like you've been eating nothing but frozen, canned, or packaged food for far too long.

(Originally from The Complete Vegan Kitchen).

• 1 small red onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 cups (500ml) seeded diced tomatoes
• 2 tbsp (30ml) lime juice
• ¼ tsp (~1ml) salt
• black pepper to taste (cracked or ground, as you will)
• 2 tbsp (30ml) olive oil
• 1 tbsp (15ml) minced cilantro

Mix in a bowl; let stand at least 15min for the flavours to commingle.

Side tip: if you're a tomato-processing noob (like me), one of the faster ways to seed tomatoes is to cut them in half around the equator (ie, not through the stem or base, but around the other way) and then squeeze each half out over a bowl. This gets rid of most of the seeds, and you can clean the stragglers out with a spoon or finger if you want. After this, you can optionally flatten each half against your cutting board with the heel of your palm to give a nice, two-dimensional, easy to dice tomato.

I have heaps of Dreamwidth invite codes if anyone should happen to want one.

Just sayin'.

While coming up with music recommendations for damned_colonial, I chanced to discover that one of my favourite songs by Shaye (of Happy Baby fame) is a cover of a tune originally done by Crash Vegas.

In my youth I always felt as though this kind of music trivia was exclusively the domain of 'cool kids' who hung out in record stores all day, so I love that the internetz has opened up an unlimited horizon of musical exploration for geek types like myself. =)

As I'm continuing to discover, there's a lot more to the world of musical instruments than you find in a typical rock band or symphony orchestra. Some of them are so far removed that they still amuse me every time I encounter them. The best part, though, is that they usually have more depth than it first appears.

A shekere looks like someone playing a lamp that they found at a garage sale, though thankfully without the bulb and lampshade.

I'm sure most people look at cajón players like they're playing the box their drum came in instead of the drum itself. Who cares when you can make a sound like this come out of it, though?

Even the much-pilloried cowbell, made infamous by a certain SNL skit, can really rock out -- here as part of a timbales setup:

Dudes are always wringing their hands and saying stuff like

I AM COMPLETELY BEWILDERED BY THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SO FEW WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY

or

I CANNOT FATHOM WHY MORE WOMEN DO NOT GET INVOLVED IN STARTUPS
CLEARLY, AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY!

and then they post or retweet stuff like this:

<startupnorth> RT @hnshah: 5 ways engineers are like hot chicks http://kiss.ly/cfVvO8

Gee there, dudebros, I wonder whatever could be the problem?

Ah, the mojito; possibly the most perfect summer beverage known to humankind. Turning them out one at a time isn't too bad, and they're always nicer made fresh, but there's a lot of mint muddling involved if you're serving a crowd, so it can be nice to have some premix made up instead. Conveniently, it's still plenty refreshing without the rum; a lot of folks take a dim view of getting plastered in the middle of the day, even if that is when it's hottest out.

The method:

1. Procure a two-litre bottle of club soda.
2. Pour off about a cup (250ml) and set aside.
3. Break out your trusty funnel and dump into the bottle the following:
• ⅔ cup (160ml) lime juice
• ½ cup (125ml) white sugar (add it slowly; it foams like a fiend)
• 24 mint leaves
4. Cap the bottle and invert gently a few times to mix.
5. Carefully re-open and top off with the reserved club soda.
6. Stash in the fridge to let the flavours mingle.
7. To serve: pour over ice, add white rum to taste. Garnish with fresh mint and a wedge of lime.

Things start out with the taste of the lime predominating, but since the mint leaves are steeping in solution, as it were, the mint starts to take over before too long. Best to use this in two days or less. If you leave it for too much longer that that, the leaves start to go funky and you have to pitch the whole thing out.

I prefer to add rum after the fact so that you can adjust to everyone's tastes, but if you want to make the alcoholic ready-to-go version, 1 cup (250ml) white rum will do the trick. Enjoy!

Just moved my "professional" blog here from Posterous.

I know I'm not Posterous' target audience, but it drove me nuts how their formatter mangled my text, littering <br>s all over the place, then mashing up all the line breaks. More than once, I've found out that their post editor is flat busted for me -- usually when the formatter has made a mess of something I've already posted, conveniently making it impossible for me to clean it up.

Even better: back in December, they decided to bring Viglink on board, a service which adds a Posterous affiliate code to links in your blog that don't have an affiliate code already. Of course, they didn't see fit to inform their users of this change; one of the Posterous founders replied on HackerNews, but they haven't mentioned it on their official blog or twitter stream.

I know the folks here at DW will never pull that kind of stupid shit. To boot, Dreamwidth has always been rock-solid for me in terms of reliability, which is funny when you think about how often the lights seem to go out on the services with dozens of full-time staff and sacks full of money. In short: thanks, denise and mark. =)

I admit it. One of the best moments of my undergrad degree came when our small group of thesis students was bandying about topics. When I mentioned I was set on doing decompilation, there was a long, awkward silence. One of the other students, apparently speaking for the entire group, said "We wouldn't touch your research subject with a 10-foot pole."

As smugly optimistic as I was, though, my thesis on automated decompilation would never have seen the light of day without the work of Dr Cristina Cifuentes -- particularly her PhD thesis on Reverse Compilation Techniques.

Dr Cifuentes' research runs head-on into some of the most thorny theoretical problems of computer science -- problems like the Halting Problem, which define the limits of what computers can actually do. Amongst other things, she's also worked on binary translation, static analysis, and parallelization, topics that people sometimes shy away from because of their reputation for both practical and theoretical difficulty. But this work yields awesome real-life applications, like programs that find bugs for you by reading your source code, and holds out the promise of many more, like tools that can scan compiled binaries for security bugs, or general-purpose decompilers that can read in a binary originally written in C and 'decompile' it to Ruby source code instead.

I think we forget how many women were involved in pioneering work in the early days of computing (eg the ENIAC programmers) and how many are in the thick of pioneering work today. The hardcore research isn't just done by bearded guys in white lab coats -- women are pushing the boundaries and making the future of computing possible, too.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in science and technology. You can find more information at the Finding Ada website.

While watching Sesame Street vids on Youtube with the kids the other morning, I realized something: even though I can remember the People in Your Neighbourhood skit from the time when I was a little kid watching Sesame Street on an 11" black-and-white TV, I've never seen any kind of computer-related job on it. I got to thinking how it'd play out if it included some of the folks in my virtual neighbourhood.

In their job application form, a company asked me "What's your motivation?". In reply, I pulled together the following mini-screed.

It's only a fragment of why I'm involved in technology, but I liked it enough to post it here. (Besides, their form has a bug which stopped me from being able to submit it, and I wanted to put this somewhere. Curse of the tester, I guess.)

As terrible as it sounds, I think that much of my motivation comes from frustration.

It's galling when I see a UI that's actively unhelpful. Encountering yet another easily preventable security problem makes me shake my head. Code that's a nightmare to test or debug makes us all want to scream. It's so frustrating, because I've seen all of these things done right, yet so frequently they're done wrong! So much so that most people have gotten used to them and think of them as ordinary.

I like code that's clear. Design that conforms to the user instead of forcing the user to conform to it. Features that are solid and robust. Applications that people rave about...or that just let them get their work done so unobtrusively that they're hardly noticed at all.

Things like that make me proud. That's the kind of project I want to contribute to.

Have I ever mentioned how much I like Japanese Beer Commercials? Actually, I shouldn't go so far as to say that. I don't actively dislike them like the ones we have here in North America. Why? Because almost without exception, they don't follow the Western Beer Commercial Standard: Guy in a Bar with Hot Women Draped All Over Him, or some other formulation that clearly shouts "Drink our swill and you'll get laid, stud."

Yeah, taste isn't the only reason I don't buy North American macrobrewed beer.

Denise explains here.

If you dislike this idea as much as I do (or if you dislike the barrage of gross diet ads you get on Facebook when you set your gender to "female") then perhaps you'd be interested in offering LJ some feedback.

ETA: as it turns out, this code made it to beta and isn't going live, for (what sounds like) this and other reasons.

I've been meaning to start a blog about technical topics for some time, leaving this one free for more personal stuff. Chris's creation of the writing-about-testing mailing list & conference plus the subsequent encouragement to write about tech stuff were the final impetus I needed to actually go and do it. There's naught but a "Hello world" post yet, but if you're interested, feel free to follow things at http://rickscott.posterous.com/.

Mark Shuttleworth (the CEO of Canonical/Ubuntu) has been in the news recently because of comments he made during a conference presentation. I was present at a Ubuntu Open Week session where he was questioned about diversity, and wrote a brief guest post on the Geek Feminism blog about it.

First off: since Skud's OSCON keynote, I've been following the Geek Feminism blog. I think you should too.

Every now and again, something happens in our community that's problematic -- something racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful. It can be something high profile, or something as seemly innocuous as a comment on a mailing list or irc channel. In fact, I shouldn't say "every now and again" -- it happens a lot. More than you might think.

This post really spoke to me -- this comment in particular. Part of the issue surrounding being a minority in FOSS is that your time and energy get diverted from the productive bits (coding, testing, writing, etc) whenever you're forced into dealing with incidents like the above.

We have a lot of amazing people from a lot of diverse backgrounds in FOSS, and we all benefit from their contributions and expertise. So when someone says or does something (intentionally or not) that makes people in the community -- our community -- feel unwelcome, or excluded, or threatened -- we all need to step up and address it.

Nobody wants to have their project saddled with behaviour that drives people away. We all benefit from an environment that's welcoming the broadest possible range of contributors. So when it comes time to deal with sexist behaviour, women shouldn't be the only ones paying the troll tax. Geek guys need to step up and take part of the load. I'm trying to start with me.

Guys, if your experience mirrors mine, you've been in the situation where someone else has done something that crossed the line. You've gotten that sinking feeling that what's just happened is wrong, but maybe you weren't quite sure what to do about it, or how to do something about it, or if you were even the right person to do something about it. I'm going to urge you to step outside of your comfort zone a little, and say or do something to let people know that this kind of behaviour isn't ok. A stern glance or a terse "not cool" can be enough. It doesn't have to be elaborate or involved, but it does have to happen, because silence is tacit approval. If nobody objects, it looks to all concerned as though it's ok.

This isn't a sermon from on high. Nobody is perfect, least of all me. There are going to be times when we screw up, or let something slide that we shouldn't have. We're human; it happens. What's important is that we make the effort -- a serious and genuine effort -- to work together, respect and support each other as fellow hackers and human beings.

(Some random links that inspired this post. I found them useful; I hope you will, too.)

• Jay Smooth: How to Tell People They Sound Racist
• Shakesville: Crank it up to 11
• mdz: Do not stand by
• Chris Clarke: How Not to be an Asshole: A Guide for Men (frank but important read, especially if you think a woman is overreacting to an incident of online harassment.)