Blah You, Blah Me, Blah We

I just tried pushing a bazaar branch, and got a scary message that said “WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED!”. Turns out my web host (dreamhost) moved my site to a new server. The error was because the RSA key had changed. I had to poke around to confirm that it was legit, and not a spoof.

But hot damn, that made my heart beat. I’m glad my everyday tools “just work”, with things that can confirm the box is the same.

This is a comment in reply to this open letter and this dent and the shenanigans that are claiming Mark Shuttleworth said “Explaining to girls what we actually do.” or something similar, which implies women don’t know technology. I hope Skud at http://geekfeminism.org approved my comment.

My Comment:

I’m not trying to start a flame fest. And really don’t feel like posting and tweeting to everyone that posts about this.

But the context you are assuming is not there. I watched the live stream. When Mark said try to explain to girls, he was not talking about women not understanding technology. He was talking about how hard the design work is to do, and that if things were designed poorly or had low usability, he would not know how to explain them to girls (my translation). The tone of his voice suggested sarcastic embarrassment, which implies he would prefer to impress girls. So he could have said the same thing about his father. Or better yet. If he was gay, he would have said “guys” not “girls”.

Also note that he was talking about design when he said it. So the argument that he thinks women are not hard core coders or programmers is moot. And yes he does say “guys” all the time. No one says “gals” by itself, because it sounds sexist. And saying “guys and gals” is as pain in the butt as saying gnu/linux. Everyone says “guys” when they mean “people”.

This incident  really is like wild fire erupting before my eyes. All the tweets, re-tweets, and blog posts are echoing the same sentence fragment, and disintegrating into primal noises. Primates can also re-articulate the same sounds they heard someone else make, or wave a flag. Humans on the other hand can think critically, about what they heard.

Wouldn’t it make sense to see the video before claiming it is sexist? Or perhaps even know the context of what he was talking about? Or even the minimalist thing, of getting the actual quote?

Please for the love of reason. When the video or transcript is released, form your opinion. Don’t just re-quote rumors as yours. I respect the work feminists are doing. But this was a knee jerk reaction. Hear the guy in is own words.

I really hope Mark does not let rumors re-create the context of what he said.

This code snippet will allow you to look for objects of a certain type in memory. This is very useful for plugins:

"""
    This looks through all the objects in memory, to find ones
    of the designated type.
"""
 
import gc
 
class Animal(object):
    def make_noise(self):
        print "snort"
 
animal = Animal()
 
for obj in gc.get_objects():
    if type(obj) == Animal:
        obj.make_noise()