CleverBlogName

Today was the last (formal) day of linuxconf 2010, and since I was a “professional” delegate I went to the dinner, and took Maire and Ada along, too. It was a pretty decent night out, with a kapa haka group, a chance to catch up with gnat after way too many years, sitting with Tridge at our table (do coding skills, like celebrity, osmose through proximity? If so, I should be able to do the best work of my life after bathing in his aura), and having Liz give Ada a ride in her wheelchair (which was the coolest thing of the evening, I reckon).

Ada was magnificent. We left early, but still didn’t get home until 10, which is two and a half hours past Ada’s usual bedtime, and she was brilliant. She drew, she ran around Civic Square, she chatted to people, she sat in the lobby of the Town Hall with me and scrutinised the geometry of the tiles that made up the floor (“Un, deux, trois, quatre triangles in the square!”), and at quarter to ten she explained she wanted to go to bed, all with nary a grumpy moment for the evening. I feel so lucky with her.

Josh Berkus

A very excisting time for PostgreSQL, since the final commitfest for PG 9.0 development.

8.5 had gone by the by because the feature set is going to be SO DAMN HUGE. 64 bit windows, exclusion constraints, JSON/XML EXPLAIN output, host standby, sync replication.

What’s a commitfest? It’s a way of dealing with scarce committer and reviewers time; review patches faster, sooner, every patch, and train reviewers. People were getting patches knocked back or forgotten because of a lack of reviewer time, which was making people unhappy.

Every other month during the development period, we clear the queue of patches; this also makes it transparent as to what’s happening in the development world. It lets you help with failing patches if you care about them, too.

Four commitfests, followed by cleanup, beta testing, and then a final release. Version 9 should be released mid-way next year.

• Avoid Traditional system designs
• single server bottlenacks
• Avoid symmetric shared disk (cumbersome, hard to scale)

ceph is one of those things that fills one with the kind of “gimmegimmegimme” enthusiasm.

aka The Kernel Report LCA2010

Jonathan Corbet from LWN

Organised in terms of challenges, because this will help spell out where we’ll have to do.

Josh Berkus

First, a word: Josh is a neat speaker. He comes across as Good People. Nice, clear, concise, tell-it-like-it-is style, and great audience interaction, answers at his fingertips. Another on my list of “see this person if you get the chance.” Also, he’s really generous with chat time outside of presentations and very approachable.

On with Josh’s talk...

There’s been a lot of activity in the nonrelational world, with it being hard to keep track of; this talk is about how to choose relational vs nonrelational, understanding some of the things that matter, some that don’t.

Having mastered Teddy Bears’ Picnic, Petit Moulin, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the alphabet song, and that one about the turtle and the bubbles, Ada has moved on to broadening her range with classic rock and roll (Heartbreak Hotel, or the Loud Baby Song, and It Doesn’t Matter Any More), psychedlia (Uncle John’s Band), show tunes (Summertime), and punk rock (The Passenger).

Ada’s first big-girl lego - a tractor.

We had a milestone on Sunday: Ada’s first real Lego. What’s especially gratifying is that the set she chose is old-school Lego; rather than being what I tend to think pejoratively of as modern Lego, with large, irreducibly fully-formed pieces, it’s a collection of small pieces that form the whole, much like the Lego I had when I was a lad. Even more pleasing is that it was in a section of similarly old-style boxed sets, alongside some dedicated collections of block types—boxes of wheels, boxes of windows, boxes of roofing tiles.

For a while Lego was beginning to look more and more like Playmobile than Lego: a castle might be made, not from acres of grey blocks, but from half a dozen large segments that snapped together. The tractor is at the other end of the spectrum; the wheels could be repurposed to a moon rover, the cab the observation deck of a spaceship, the headlight to a sports car.

(If you’re wondering why the references to spaceships, it’s because Ada was trying to build rockets with her Duplo; this provoked me to bringing out my old Lego, which I’ve build many a fine spaceship from, and knocking up a small fast spaceship, a large spaceship with swing doors that can carry cargo, and Space Truck, a mighty assemblage that, under Ada’s guidance, has evolved to carry passengers, Siku metal cars, sport cranes, grapples, and a tree; the last of these is presumably fodder for the Space Koala that sits atop the back of the large spaceship.)

Here’s the thing: for me that’s the whole point of Lego. There are no shortage of toys that give you defined, channeled play: toy cars, dolls, houses, what have you. The magic of Lego is that you can enjoy your pristine, perfect creation of an object from instructions, or you can tear it down and rebuild your own thing, learning, along the way, a little about the nature of things, about how to build strong buildings and how to avoid weak buildings, about how much better things fit together if you think about it a little ahead of time, the problem-solving of making limited resources fit elaborate schemes. The play is not just the objects, the play is the creation of the objects; child as creator and producer, not child as consumer. And that, for some time, is what it looked to me like Lego had lost in pursuit of idiot-proof, instant-gratification licensed product sets and so many of their themed products.

I’m glad there’s real Lego still being made.

That said, I still have a few reservations: I’d like to see some slightly less hideous gendering with it. I’d like to see fewer grim-and-gritty angry little Lego people, too, for that matter.

Went to see Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years at the City Gallery, and came away appreciating it as the most child-thrilling art I’ve been to in the last nearly 3 years. Starting from the gallery being covered in guant multi-coloured spots (which led to quoting of Put Me In The Zoo) through to the Narcissus Garden full of mirror spheres, the firefly exhibit of mirrors, water, and handing lights, and the favourite of the trip, the mini-maze of convex mirrors which lead to a yellow room with black polka dots and inflatable sculpture at one end, and a black room with yellow polka dots at the other end, it was a smash hit.

The only bummer was that photography was, as typical for exhibits, verboten, which means I wasn’t able to get photos of Ada’s near-unrestrained joy as she trotted from inflatable sculpture to inflatable sculpture in the polka dot rooms.

So, Ada loves Bob the Builder. She loves trucks and screwdrivers and the like. So you’d think that the Bob merchandise would be a slam-dunk for our household.

Nuh-uh.

The problem is that most everything I’ve seen of it is poorly-made shit. Not only does this violate my general thoughts about acceptable toys (they should be tolerably well-made), but it seems to me to be a deep and fundamental betrayal of the series itself, which is, after all, about doing a job properly and minimising waste.

Ada with axe and dragon

Ada’s cousin had his third birthday party and wanted a knights theme; being somewhat concerned about the prospect of a gaggle of three year olds with swords I did what any responsible parent would: I bought Ada a sword, a shield, and the biggest axe I thought she could handle.

As it happened, it all went smoothly, not least because the knights had a dragon pinata to slay.

It has, however, given me a mighty new peeve: the tomboy; when I was telling a temporary creche worker about Ada’s weekend with axe and shield, while she was playing with trucks in the sandpit, said worker described her as a tomboy, which got a fairly visceral negative reaction from me.

Firstly, it’s not terribly accurate. Ada has begged, pleaded, and wheedled on the topic of nail polish until she has some bright yellow stuff of her own. This is not, as I understand it, the sort of behaviour one associates with the word; like her mother, who enjoys long evening gowns and fencing, Ada has tastes I would refer to as “well-rounded”.

But more fundamentally it’s that the very idea is a kind of third state of gender; it’s a peculiar construct, because on one level it lacks the wholly negative connotations of the closest equivalents I can think of for men (all of which, like, say, ‘effeminate’, leave the listener in no doubt as to the second-class status of the object). On the contrary it can be viewed quite positively by some. The problem, for me, anyway, is that it’s also got a big chunk of essentialism and denial of feminity about it. Because, it says, you are interested in cars and trucks and building castles, you are not a Real Girl. If you were a Real Girl you’d be uninterested in those things and interested only in Proper Girly Things.

I reject this—I see no reason to assign “interest in building things in a sandpit” as being an inherently masculine activity, and I see no reason my little girl should be assigned a kind of not-girl status for liking them.