@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

geraldew

@geraldew@fosstodon.org

Data analyst and programmer

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geraldew, to random
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

One of the curious things about my age point is that I do have memories of pre-decimal life. I have a little stock of pre-decimal coins that were mine to play with from before the currency change in 1966, Yes I was only four but I used to make rubbings of the coins, the shilling being a favourite. Then I had years of familiarity with most imperial measures prior to the 1970 to 1974 transitions.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia for details.

geraldew, to python
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

Not sure if I can write this without it sounding like a whinge, not merely an observation.
I've just read an article linked as "Docker is not the only game in town when it comes to app deployment".
Except, the word missing there was "web" - because indeed it is only about deploying web applications written in Python.
For reasons unknown I still have zero interest in making web applications.
But for many developers nowadays, that's the only type they seem to think exists.

geraldew, to random
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

A new blog post from me where for some reason I felt like explaining the obvious just in case anyone hadn't found it obvious.
It was meant to just be about programming languages and the idea of "Define Before, Execute After" but I felt I had to add some comments about Compiled versus Interpreted languages.
As usual it was supposed to be brief but I'm not good at achieving that.
https://geraldew.wordpress.com/2023/12/05/uncommented-beginner-programming-concepts/

geraldew, to random
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

Bearing in mind that even I consider it a tedious piece of writing, I did some time ago write up "My Coding History" as two blog posts.
Nonetheless, it was interesting to research the details versus my memories and is, perhaps, a bit of a time capsule.
https://dev.to/geraldew/my-coding-history-part-1-3onb
https://dev.to/geraldew/my-coding-history-part-2-4h1j

KathyReid, to generativeAI
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

Great article by the ABC's Jack Ryan talking about and its consequences - especially how the existing has failed to keep pace with

My take is that we need to start thinking about - where is kept in trust and released only for the purposes approved by data owners - and which could facilitate payment for that data ...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-29/artificial-intelligence-ai-training-datasets-copyright-books3/103157980

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@KathyReid Surely "data" is not synonymous with created content? The article is clearly about the latter.
That said, I'd be the first to admit I've not followed how copyright laws have been applying to data. I'm probably assuming little has changed since there was a court case over the Australian White Pages some decades ago.
IIRC that established that the collections of data could be copyrighted but not the data within them.

geraldew, to random
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

Years ago, in some coding at my workplace, which means it was in VBA, I added spoken voice clips to let me know when processes reached various stage points.

It just played canned spoken phrases that I'd made with a free program I found online.

At the time I had a very large cubicle with few neighbours who were mostly absent. It let me get things running and then go work on another computer, but hear exactly when I needed to attend to the process running one - i.e. without watching it.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

To be honest I don't clearly recall why I stopped using the technique.

It might have been because cubicles got smaller and denser, and a talking computer was a problem rather than a solution.

But it might equally have been that I found it too hard to get the balance right - between constant chatter and prudent status updates and requirement of reactions. And thus the whole method annoyed me more than I felt it worth resolving.

Or maybe my need for running long processes went away.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

As it happens, all these years later, I'm back to writing a new application - and I've once again created a custom logging method for it.

Wherein I have that same issue of needing to resolve just how much logging to do via what methods.

And until I read a recent post on here, I hadn't even considered using spoken voice as part of that.

I don't know if I will head down that path, either inherently or just to enable it, but it's been a curious joy to be reminded of paths I've trod before.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

As either a programmer or a data analyst I don't use my ears at all. But listening to classical music I can recognise instruments, composers, musical eras and individual singers.

Which then is more odd:

  • that I don't think to use that ability in my code or data work?
  • or that I don't have ready tooling too enable such approaches?
timrichards, to mastodon
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

I've just realised that today is my 1 year Mastodon anniversary. Has been fun. Who else has been here a year?

Community Freedom GIF

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@timrichards yep me too, and in general it's been a much better experience than the other site ever was. As a "tech" person that's probably not surprising, but I've got a nice general mix of people to follow.

And that's the thing, with very few institutional accounts present yet the whole feel is much like the old days. By which I mean the early web years when I'd read a personal web page and email the owner for a short chat.

geraldew, to python
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

One of the curious things about on Ubuntu is that Python is essentially pre-installed with the Linux distribution. That seems to be because Ubuntu itself uses Python quite a bit for various parts of its setup and routine processes.
Not a complaint as it works well for me, and in a way makes a good "fence" in which I can code and avoid non-stock dependencies.
For Foldatry, I only need to have "python3-tk" added via the admin account.
Wonder if anyone has mapped that out across distros.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@emattiza interestingly that resource does not list the package I actually use: "python3-tk" which is clearly correct for both Debian and Ubuntu
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=python3-tk
https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/python3-tk

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

head in hands I just filed a bug on the xkbcommon library on GitHub and I'm pretty certain that the bug I found is thirty-one years old

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@mcc interesting, and prompted me to wonder if I covered that in my char encoding article. To my delight it seems I did, by writing-

.. defer to Wikipedia for the details, but for this article, here is the key quote:

"BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise handle the text stream."

https://dev.to/geraldew/grrr-character-encoding-2lia

kzimmermann, (edited ) to random
@kzimmermann@fosstodon.org avatar

How "old" is the oldest file you have* in your backups?

*a file that you've created and kept, even if the current copy you have in your current computer is newer than the original. Ex: downloading today a file from the internet that was made in the 90s doesn't count, but a file you downloaded in the 90s and kept with you throughout does.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@kzimmermann I still have programs I wrote in Turbo Pascal for CP/M in the mid-1980s.

timrichards, to random
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

There's nothing more annoying on social media than when you share something lighthearted, positive and personal, and some arsehole decides to make themself feel good by criticising you over it. Instant block.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@timrichards ironically I don't think I ever used the other site in a "social" manner, instead of was largely a replacement for the RSS feeds I'd followed.
But here I'm using it for occasional interactions, half about tech and half about (for want of a better word) culture.
This time around I'm looking more for people who write posts rather than boosts and re-boosts.

KathyReid, to opensource
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

This is a fantastic retrospective on 40 years of from Rebecca Ackermann for MIT Technology Review that traces its origins, schisms, and current challenges. A beautiful study in exploring the richness and diversity of a landscape.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/17/1077498/future-open-source/

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@KathyReid Oh please, this piece hits bullshit quite quickly. e.g. the paragraph starting "Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer" implies that he, like Bill Gates opposes the freedom-for-users insistence of the GPL license.
Took me 5 seconds to find the requisite quote: “FSF [Free Software Foundation] and I don’t have a loving relationship, but I love GPL v2”
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3112778/linus-torvalds-credits-gpl-with-preventing-linux-fragmentation.html
Ignorance or intentionally misleading?

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@KathyReid It also, like many falsehood pedlars, implies that the Open Source movement was formed about less restrictive licenses - it just wasn't. As I keep saying, both the FSF and the OSI support both copyleft and non-copylieft licenses, they always have - and there very few licenses they differ about supporting (none of which are in significant use). Propagating the myth of eternal division is a ploy of those opposed to software freedom. So again, ignorance or intentionally misleading?

geraldew, to random
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

Thanks to a post by @liztai I've given my Wordpress Blog the ability to be followed via the Fediverse, and hence Mastodon.

Of course, with only one blog posting there so far, that doesn't mean much. However by following it myself I will be able to just post to the blog and then simply boost that item here - so that's handy.

Due credit to her blog post at https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/15/some-flaws-with-activitypub-and-wordpress-com-integration/

chestas, to Tasmania
@chestas@aus.social avatar

Great skies over Kanamaluka/Tamar River today.

Where I live is so beautiful, while the World news is so ugly.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@chestas ah, I was there for the first time eleven months ago.While the Tamar's river vs estuary vibe is distinct, the Eastern banks reminded me a lot of the Leschenault inlet in W.A. where I grew up. Hard to pin down why, something about the vegetation and the air perhaps.

I did wonder if anyone else has had that thought.

axbom, to random
@axbom@axbom.me avatar

When you run a survey you are getting responses from people

  • who are made aware of the survey
  • who are given access to the survey
  • who are willing to respond
  • who are able to respond

People who are disenfranchised, living with disabilities, struggling with time, money and/or language/literacy generally will not respond.

Surveys are rarely representative because the time and effort required to make surveys inclusive is not invested.

The effect of surveys is then that people who are made invisible by society are made even more invisible by organisations that often call themselves data-driven.

Because they run surveys.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@axbom while true, this is part of a bigger pattern that comes up in the work of data analysis.

My mental phrase this is: always respect the NULLs. That's a very relational-database way to say it - NULLs being part of the relational lingo.

So another way to put it is: always think about the data that might not be present.

The reality is that you can only work with the data you actually have. But the context should always account for what data you don't have.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@axbom Again, quite true - and there's not much I can add without getting into describing the internal politics of organisations where this happens.

I suspect that hopes of "can be" and "can do" are often water splashing over rocks of the interests of people in positions who make such choices.

So it becomes a question of: is there a way to make it in their interests to ensure all people matter?

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@axbom As you may gather from my position about this, I think there is a significant problem of real honesty in the data profession.

That's what caught my eye/mind in your post.

And that's all that I can claim to suggest ways of tackling. I don't have any solution for the people with decision powers.

timrichards, to random
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

Well, @NarrelleMHarris has "had a day", as she just said. She visited the eye hospital earlier, then went for a swim, and now has realised she's put her shirt on inside-out. Don’t worry, I said, you'll be setting a new hipster trend.

And yes I did ask permission to post this photo. :)

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@timrichards @NarrelleMHarris that has me pondering her taking a guerrilla trip to a hipster suburb to seed the trend and going back later to see if it took hold. Or maybe that's a uni psych faculty study to do. Or maybe that's already been done. Is there a hipster suburbs map for Melbourne? And if I go searching all those, there's my afternoon gone.

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

Over the next two weeks, I'll be publishing a series of four (well, 4.5) posts about Meta's role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Part I is up now, along with a little meta-post with notes on terminology and sources and ct.

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

https://erinkissane.com/meta-meta

These posts are aimed squarely at people like me and my tech-world peers—people who work on and care about social technologies.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@kissane thanks to the book Social Warming by @charlesarthur I have an idea of how this is going to go. All strength to you for writing this and I'll try to find a calm timespace to read through it.

twostraws, to random
@twostraws@mastodon.social avatar

After two years, yesterday I stepped down as PTA head at my kids’ school. Helping run events and meetings matters, but the thing I’m most proud of was raising $25,000 to help two Afghan girls move to the UK and access the free, high-quality education they were denied at home.

geraldew,
@geraldew@fosstodon.org avatar

@twostraws the only thing I would add to that, and sadly it is something I find myself frequently pointing out, is:

  • liars lie about lying
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