How You Define Yourself

Recently there was a thread on the Google Summer of Code students’ list discussing gender dynamics in open source, but more broadly, interactions between those of different genders (mainly the discussion was simplified to be a discussion of sexes, which I think demonstrates the lack of understanding of the difference between gender and sex. But I suppose that’s a blog post for another day).

It was noted that many of the women on the list have blog addresses and other details that quickly self-identify the authors as female. There was discussion about whether this is a good thing or not, and the possible reasons behind it.

Here is what I wrote:

I think what you mention about yourself shows the world what you think about yourself, and what you consider yourself.

If first and foremost you associate your identity with being female (or male) or straight (or not)… then I guess that’s your prerogative.

But I, for one, am not /just/ an Asian male. I’m not just a Computer Science student. I’m not just a coder. I’m not just an Engineering student. I’m not just 20-years old. I’m not just a blogger. I’m not just an Open Source contributor. I’m not just an advocate of strange and often unpopular ideas.

I am a human being, with many dimensions. And I don’t try to simplify it by putting myself in a box and categorizing myself as anything.

I think that the key is just to understand everyone for who they are, and part of that is being somewhat ambiguous. As Leslie [Hawthorne] somewhat alluded to, it’s about managing people’s preconceptions about you.

I do not actively try to hide that I am male, or that I am Asian (you might guess that from my last name). There are all sorts of preconceptions people might have about things, and there are lots of -isms we should seek to avoid. (I’m Asian – maybe that means I’m a bad driver, and that I can’t pronounce Rs. I’m male – maybe I’m violent. I’m in Computer Science, presumably that means I play Dungeons & Dragons with my classmates on the weekends. I’m in Engineering, maybe that means I’m sexist.)

The reality is: none of these things should matter, nor should they define you.

Just be yourself. You show to the world what you consider relevant about yourself.

And for what it’s worth, I found out the other day that someone I respect and admire in the open source community is a teenager. Somewhere around 15 years old. It’s impressive, really. I look up to him, because he’s a really smart guy. But that wasn’t something he brought up right away; his nickname wasn’t “smartdude15” or anything
like that. That’s the magic of open source, and the Internet — I judged him purely on his knowledge. And once I did find out, I thought to myself… Wow, would I have thought the same thing of him if I knew his age right away? Would I have even given him a chance, or would I just dismiss everything he said as something an immature teenager might say?

I think along with sexism there are tons of other issues to worry about, like racism (consider how difficult it is in some cultures, and even in Western culture, to be really accepted if you are gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, two-spirited, asexual, intersex…) In fact, being gay was considered a disease until relatively recently.

I’m glad for all the progress women have made in the past several decades. Not everyone has reached a point where they are accepted in mainstream society, and not everyone feels comfortable announcing certain details about themselves.

If *all* you are is a woman in a male-dominated world, then I feel sorry for you. I truly, truly do. Because none of the women I respect and admire are that. They are, first, talented Engineers, Scientists and Programmers, who are only incidentally female. Being female isn’t something that really identifies them any more than the colour of their skin, hair or eyes. No, no, they are talented, and that is, in the end, all I care about, and that is one reason I am grateful for Open Source — because you oftentimes don’t meet the people you are working with all the time in real life, so you cannot judge them on anything other than their ability.

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Dual Booting Debian and VMware

Okay, so allow me to explain my personal development platform. I use Windows XP Professional as my primary operating system for various reasons, but I develop software for Linux (mostly because I like Linux, but also because I intend for a lot of my software to be used on my own servers, all of which can be considered Unix-like).

Because I prefer Windows for daily use, I’ve built various tools around the operating system and have become quite attached to them. I really like TortoiseSVN and Notepad++, for example. I’ve just gotten used to running Windows.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could transition into using Linux for everything, and because I work in Debian and have servers running Debian, I installed Debian. I had some trouble at first, prompting me to change to Kubuntu, but later came back to Debian after realizing that the packages in unstable and testing that I’d come to love were under an entirely different process in Ubuntu, which is currently unknown to me.

So long Ubuntu, I’ve re-installed Debian and love it so far. One problem I’ve noticed is that Debian would not boot inside VMware Workstation under Windows, while Kubuntu was able to do so out-of-the-box. Instead, I got an error like this:

WARNING bootdevice may be renamed. Try root=/dev/hda2
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
 - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
   - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
 - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

Looking into it further, it turned out I could edit the command line options to use a different device name–the debug output was right, I had to use /dev/hda2 instead of /dev/sda2–and things would work. The system would boot up normally, and everything was good. I guess it had to do with my drives actually being SATA (which I suppose are treated like SCSI drives); whereas VMware Workstation (in my setup) presents them as simple IDE drives.

But then I got to wondering how Ubuntu totally got around this problem, and it turns out that Ubuntu uses UUID identifiers to point to a hard drive. After searching on Google, it turns out that using UUIDs is convenient because it can handle cases where drives are removed; especially with external drives, or even re-arranging the drives inside your computer for whatever reason.

Using the command “blkid” from Debian (do this as root), you can get the UUID of all the partitions. You can either reboot into Linux using your normal dual-boot method (selecting the option from GRUB, etc), or you can edit the boot options from GRUB explictly to use /dev/hda2 temporarily. Once you boot into your Debian installation, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to use drive UUIDs instead of /dev names.

Instead of:

# kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro

or similar, you can change this to:

# kopt=root=UUID=<info from blkid for /dev/hda1> ro

Then you can use ‘update grub’ to update grub’s automagic menu.lst information, so that the new root is recognized. This way, however your disk is installed, the UUID will be detected and the appropriate drive mounted/booted. I haven’t tried this, but I suppose this would help if you have an operating system on a bootable USB drive or something, to help you select those partitions (though I don’t know if GRUB will even detect them on a boot. I’m hoping so since most BIOSes these days support booting from USB Mass Storage Media).

Good luck, I hope this helps somebody out there :-)

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Experiences With Debian and Kubuntu

For my Google Summer of Code project, I have been working with PerlQt4 bindings, which requires that I have Qt4 installed. While this is technically possible under a Win32 environment. Lots of people in the free software community vehemently oppose Windows, but while it has its flaws, I think overall the hardware support is still much better than Linux. True, this is because of Microsoft’s shady business practices, and because many companies keep their driver source code closed. I’m still using Windows XP Professional and quite happy with it, stability-wise and feature-wise.

As an Engineer, many applications we use on a regular basis are simply not available on Linux. They’re simply not replaceable with the current state of open source software, though there is some great stuff out there. Nonetheless, we’re still far from a point where engineers in general can switch to Linux — the application support is as important to an operating system as the kernel. Linux would be nothing without GNU’s binutils, for example.

I tried to install Debian first, as this is an environment I’m very familiar with. I use Debian on my development server, and it has worked wonders there. But everything I do on that server is command-line stuff. When trying to install a desktop environment, I followed the KDE Configuration Wizard, which isn’t too bad, but it expects an Internet connection throughout the process. The problem was that I didn’t have enough Ethernet cables to have both the desktop computer and my laptop plugged in at the same time, even though I had a wireless router set up, which meant I had to unplug the computer while updating packages, etc. Some of the updates took quite a bit of time, which was inconvenient for everyone else.

I eventually got the system to install, and told tasksel to set up a desktop environment. It was installing stuff, I typed ‘apt-get install kde’ and assumed everything would Just Work. After installing a whole bunch of stuff (which included a local install of mysqld, on a desktop machine?! — turns out it was due to one of KDE’s recommended packages, it starts with an A, I forget which). Anyway, then the environment didn’t “just work” as I had expected. Upon booting up my system, it just dropped me to a command line prompt. Fine, I thought, I’ll just use startx. But that was broken too. So after another few hours of fiddling I just gave up altogether.

While trying Ubuntu (the last time I had done so was probably in version 7 or so), I downloaded a recent image of Kubuntu 9.04, the Ubuntu flavour using KDE as a default desktop environment. It’s surprising that there has been lots of progress in Ubuntu and Linux in general. I have found that driver support is much better than it used to be, as it now detects my network card – a Broadcom 43xx chip – and does everything it needs to do. For the most part, my operating system “Just Works.” Great. This looks like something I might be able to slowly transition toward, completely replacing Windows except inside WINE or a Virtual Machine container.

Has Debian and Ubuntu made lots of progress? Sure. I can definitely see that Ubuntu is geared a lot more to the average user, while Debian provides bleeding-edge features to the power user. Unfortunately, despite being involved in packaging Perl modules for Debian, I fall into the former category. I’d really just like my desktop system to just work. Oh, and dual monitor support out-of-the-box would be nice too — I hear the new KDE and Gnome support this.

One thing Windows handles rather well is changing hardware profiles – when my computer is connected to its docking station, a ton of peripherals are attached. When I undock, they’re gone. Windows handles this rather gracefully. In Kubuntu, I got lots of notification boxes repeatedly telling me that eth2 was disconnected, etc. This sort of thing is undecipherable for the average user, so I’d really just like for these operating systems to be more human-friendly before they are ready for prime time on the desktop.

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