terriko

I'm happy to say that...




Mailman 3.0 suite is now in beta!

As many of you know, Mailman's been my open source project of choice for a good many years. It's the most popular open source mailing list manager with millions of users worldwide, and it's been quietly undergoing a complete re-write and re-working for version 3.0 over the past few years. I'm super excited to have it at the point where more people can really start trying it out. We've divided it into several pieces: the core, which sends the mails, the web interface that handles web-based subscriptions and settings, and the new web archiver, plus there's a set of scripts to bundle them all together. (Announcement post with all the links.)

While I've done more work on the web interface and a little on the core, I'm most excited for the world to see the archiver, which is a really huge and beautiful change from the older pipermail. The new archiver is called Hyperkitty, and it's a huge change for Mailman.

You can take a look at hyperkitty live on the fedora mailing list archives if you're curious! I'll bet it'll make you want your other open source lists to convert to Mailman 3 sooner rather than later. Plus, on top of being already cool, it's much easier to work with and extend than the old pipermail, so if you've always wanted to view your lists in some new and cool way, you can dust off your django skills and join the team!



Do remember that the suite is in beta, so there's still some bugs to fix and probably a few features to add, but we do know that people are running Mailman 3 live on some lists, so it's reasonably safe to use if you want to try it out on some smaller lists. In theory, it can co-exist with Mailman 2, but I admit I haven't tried that out yet. I will be trying it, though: I'm hoping to switch some of my own lists over soon, but probably not for a couple of weeks due to other life commitments.

So yeah, that's what I did at the PyCon sprints this year. Pretty cool, eh?

Today is a good day: I get to be famous for being snarky!

There's a short interview with me up on FastCoLabs today, regarding my (in)famous slideshare presentation about women, biology, and computer science.

She did a nice job of trimming down my original answers, but I am sad that she missed the part where I said I didn't answer the question about what does cause the disparity in my slideshare presentation because half the point of the presentation was to get people to think rather than mindlessly accept shortened arguments with good face validity. (The corollary being that there's a meta-joke in the presentation because it is a shortened argument with good face validity.)

I edited out some of the other snarky things I said before I sent 'em. It's probably just as well. ;)

Anyhow, in case anyone reading this hasn't seen the original presentation before, I'll just embed it here:



In case the embed doesn't show up for you, here's a link: How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn't.

Enjoy!

This is more a note to self than anything else, but who knows, maybe someone reading is having exactly the same problem as me?

The "new" laptop has an overly sensitive touchpad, in that it seemed to be clicking at times when I didn't want it to click. While quite a few people handle this by disabling the touchpad or disabling tap-to-click, I knew from experience with my last linux laptop that this is a solvable problem under linux at least.

There's a *lot* of ways to control mouse settings, but here's the one that worked for me. In short:


xinput list
to find my touchpad device, which turned out to be id=12

xinput list-props 12 |grep -i finger
to give me a list of relevant entries

xinput set-prop 12 "Synaptics Finger" 25, 32, 256

to set it to something that seems better behaved.
According to the link above: "By increasing the second parameter, you require more finger pressure for the trackpad to respond. The first parameter controls release pressure, the third is to detect a button press (I think)."

and that seemed to match up. In my case, I needed to up the second number. While I was in there, I tweaked the two-finger settings so it'd be easier to "right click" with two fingers.

Lest it's useful to me later, here's my current settings:
terri@djpwn3:~$ xinput list-props 12 |grep -i finger
Synaptics Finger (261): 25, 32, 256
Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure (268): 256
Synaptics Two-Finger Width (269): 1
Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (272): 1, 1