Tim's journal

Bunny experts agree that you're a terrible bunny owner if you don't feed your bunnies timothy hay. Problem is, the usual way to buy it is in tiny bags at the pet store, at a factor-of-100 markup. Also, there has been some sort of timothy hay price explosion in the past few years, so even if you want to drive 20 miles to a feed store (and have a car to do it in), it's harder to find places that sell it at all.

Mostly for my reference (but if it's helpful to you, cool), here's a list of places near me that sell it in more economical quantities than a 1-pound bag for $5:

• Alamo Hay and Grain is where I bought my last bale of hay, back in March. I'm guessing the bale was about 100 pounds. My two bunnies finished it in ten months. (I was also using hay as bedding for most of this time, so it's not like they ate all of that.) It was around $25 if I recall correctly. They are apparently still stocking it as of now.
  
• For Other Living Things in Sunnyvale is probably the best place around here to get timothy hay without leaving the urbanized/suburbanized metropolitan area. They sell a 50-pound box of Oxbow timothy hay for $56, which is quite a bit more per pound than if you're buying a bale at a feed store, but still much better than the 2-pound bags you get at Petco and similar places. Also, they're a really nice independent store.
  
• The time before last, I bought a bale at Dave's Hay Barn, not too far from downtown San José. However, when I called them later on, they told me they weren't stocking it and didn't have plans to.
  
• Felton Feed has a 9-pound bag for $25, which is a much worse deal than For Other Living Things, but might be convenient for you.
  
• The House Rabbit Society in Richmond sells small amounts of hay for reasonable prices, but for me they're a bit far.
  

That's what I know of in the Bay Area. There are farms that sell bales for cheaper in Chatsworth and El Centro (at least), so I should have bought some on my road trip to SoCal!

Feel free to add your suggestions.

Like with my previous surgery posts, some disclaimers apply (these are modified from the ones in the last post):

1. I like to be open even about things many people consider private, and that means I'm okay with writing about intimate details about my body and my sexuality in public. I'm okay with sharing these details with anyone who might stumble upon them. But you may not be comfortable with reading about them. I'm expecting this will mainly apply to people who know me in particular contexts.
   
   
2. There's actually both less gore and less sexy stuff in this post than in the previous ones. But if you're really squeamish or don't want to know anything intimate about me, still don't read it.
   
   
3. Just because I'm sharing these details doesn't mean it's okay to ask any other trans person about surgery they've had, surgery you think they may have had, surgery you think they should have, anything else about surgery, or any intimate details about their bodies that you wouldn't ask someone who wasn't trans who you knew only casually. So don't do that! We're not all alike, and I am not going to be the one who gives any cis people an excuse to ask other trans people invasive questions. In fact, there are a lot of situation in which I don't want to discuss the contents of this post, even with people who I'm comfortable having read it: in the office, in church, on VTA Light Rail, and so on. So use the same judgment you'd use when bringing up any other sensitive topic.
   

( Keeping those disclaimers in mind, read on... )

Content warning: violence against animals. (And people, but I suspect you've already been hearing about that.)
( Read more... )

I promised I was going to post something related every day until I reached 20 donors for the Ada Initiative for my 32nd birthday. So far: 3 down, 17 to go!

---

I'm going to start with Valerie Aurora's absolutely brilliant post, 'Connecting the dots: "Everyday sexism" and the École Polytechnique massacre'. Valerie Aurora is a co-founder of and executive director of the Ada Initiative.

Really, I could just link to this post, tell you emphatically to read it, and leave it at that. But there's a little more I want to add, since the topic of Aurora's post is an incident that directly affected me: not the École Polytechnique massacre, that is, but the most recent events involving the the Planet Mozilla controversy and the harassment of my colleague Christie Koehler that resulted from it.

Aurora writes:

This anniversary is important for women in technology in part because it connects obvious, overt crimes against women in technology with the ugly root system of "everyday" sexism that feeds and sustains it. Lépine left a long note explaining why he targeted women: feminists had ruined his life ("les féministes qui m'ont toujours gaché la vie"). In particular, he told people that women in technology caused him to be unable to get a job or complete a university degree in technology.

It's pretty obvious that there is a parallel -- in intention if not in effect -- between the massacre and the death threat that Christie received from a person who had an interest in what goes on in the open-source community. In my opinion, these two examples of hostility -- from men in the tech community, aimed at women in the tech community -- clearly show the source of a lot of the more everyday, more insidious hostility towards women in the software industry and especially open source. The hostility comes from men defending what they believe to be their property. Lépine believed that he was entitled to have an engineering job -- to the point where he should not have to face competition from women who were as qualified as he was, or more qualified than him. To defend his turf, he literally murdered women who were potential rivals with him for jobs. As with any hate crime, his action also served as a warning to all women who might consider studying or working in engineering: that if you encroach on a man's turf, he might defend it by killing you, and that engineering is a man's turf.

While less harsh in its consequences, a death threat from someone who believes that the open-source community should be a heterosexual men's club serves the same purpose: to terrorize, to instill fear in any women who participate or might think about participating that if they question anything about how they're being treated, someone might hurt or kill them. Hans Reiser, who was at least formerly an accepted and influential member of the open-source community, made this less hypothetical by murdering his wife, Nina Reiser. While Nina Reiser was not a programmer herself, this incident shows that committing extreme violence against women is not incompatible with being in the open-source community -- that you can't assume that just because someone is your colleague, or works on the same project, that they're not capable of hating women enough to kill one.

So far, I don't expect what's been said to be too controversial. But, as Aurora did, I also want to problematize the incident that set off the Planet Mozilla controversy and gave rise to the discussions that made at least one person (whose identity is not known at this date) feel so passionate about defending the right of some other people to use a work space to say certain things that they were willing to threaten somebody's life over it. That is: a paid Mozilla contributor made a statement on his blog, which was syndicated on Mozilla's blog aggregator, encouraging readers to sign a petition that says: "I support the legal definition of marriage which is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman."

Now let's talk about what this means. Opponents of universal marriage might say that they don't hate or fear gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, intersex, genderqueer, transgender, or transsexual people -- just that they want to make sure that "marriage" "means what it's always meant". But clearly, this "always" statement is based on universalizing a very particular white, heterosexual, monogamous, middle- to upper-class, Protestant, Western European definition of "marriage" (and it might be something even more specific than that) in a way that denies history. So the concept of "not wanting to change what it's always meant" is a red herring, since there is no single thing that marriage has "always meant".

I think what's really going on is about ownership as well. The aforementioned privileged group (a subset of individuals who are white, heterosexual, Protestant, and so on) believe that they own the concept of marriage and have the right to exclude people from it as they choose. They think marriage belongs to them. Let's make a table. By the way: when I say "fundamentalists" in the heading, I'm not meaning to imply that all opponents of universal marriage are religious. I also don't mean to blame the abstraction of "religion" for the misguided beliefs of real, concrete human beings. They are responsible for their beliefs, which can't be blamed on an abstract concept. I'm religious myself, so I know that many religious people hold open and accepting views, and many non-religious people hold bigoted, narrow views. Rather, the group I mean to name is that group that uses obsessive, almost fetishistic attention to the literal meanings of words (always according to dictionaries they wrote) as a weapon. Many of these people identify as religious, but not all.

Violent, misogynist men in the tech industry	Fundamentalists
Believe themselves to be superior to women	Believe their relationships to be more sacred than, more moral than, better for society than, better for children than, just all-around better than queer people's relationships with each other
Rely on their roles as hackers, programmers or engineers to reinforce their self-esteem	Rely on the concept of "traditional marriage" in order to feel good about themselves and their relationships
Feel that open-source belongs to them and they have the right to enforce who enters geek/nerd/hacker spaces	Feel that marriage belongs to them and they have the exclusive right to decide whose marriages the government recognizes
Are sometimes willing to use outright violence, or at least threats thereof, to protect their turf	Use legislative and rhetorical violence to protect their turf, diminishing the quality of queer people's lives in real and concrete ways

Some people might say that fundamentalists don't deserve to be compared to murderers. Honestly, I couldn't care less how fundamentalists feel about being compared to murderers. When fundamentalists start thinking about how it feels for me when they tell me their relationships are better than mine, maybe then I'll start thinking about how they feel about the comparison. My activism is not to "convince" or "persuade" fundamentalists that it's more rewarding and enriching to see oneself as equal in worth and dignity to others than to see oneself as others' master, anyway -- I don't think I'm clever enough to convince them of that. My activism is to convince people like me to not sit down and take it.

I'm not saying that fundamentalists' feelings don't matter. Everyone's feelings are real, everyone's feelings matter. But there's a difference between having a feeling, and compelling someone else to care about it. If a fundamentalist tells me it hurts their feelings to be grouped together with violent people, I'm sure that they really do feel that way. But I can't address their concern if, when I engage with the person, all that happens is that they:

• tell me that their intentions ought to govern me (i.e., that I'm not allowed to have any feelings about their words or actions that they didn't intend to make me have)
  
• tell me that I'm obligated to sacrifice my autonomy to protect their abstractions (e.g. "traditional marriage")
  
• refuse to acknowledge that it hurts to be told that you're inferior
  
• even, sometimes, refuse to acknowledge that their actions could make people feel inferior
  

I have seen this pattern from both fundamentalists and misogynists too many times. Were I to spend my compassion on such people, I'd be entering into an abusive relationship: one where I am asked to consider another person's feelings, but they don't consider mine. I can't afford to pay that price. And that's the long way of saying that yes, I've considered what it means to draw an analogy between people who advocate that the state should repress queer people and people who commit violent crimes, and no, I'm not going to censor myself for the sake of the feelings of people who already hold power and privilege.

And, of course, I am not saying that rhetoric and murder are literally the same. They are different. But we can all agree on that. Where I disagree with some is that I'm not satisfied being told "You should be grateful we're only suggesting to other people that you're disposable, rather than killing you directly." Saying that we're second-class -- by designating us as the one class of adults that isn't allowed the basic freedom of having our relationships recognized as serious and committed -- as adult -- does send the message that we're disposable.

So, I believe that when an open-source community like Mozilla tolerates anti-universal-marriage rhetoric in a form that lives under a Mozilla domain name, that is tacit endorsement of an entitlement, on the part of fundamentalists, to claim marriage as their own and to use rhetorical violence -- language that implicitly (through appeal to a host of cultural baggage about the relative value of heterosexuals' and queer people's relationships) proclaims people like me as less good and less deserving of fair treatment than heterosexuals are. The spirited defense, in terms of so-called "free speech", that quite a few members of the community mounted of their right to use the blog aggregator in this manner -- as well as the total failure of Mozilla leadership to condemn the anti-universal-marriage statements as contrary to Mozilla's philosophy of openness and inclusion -- connotes, to me, the way in which violence against women and subordination of queer people are intertwined. And if it wasn't clear, the fact that one of our colleagues, a person who works in the same office as I do, explicitly told Christie and me that we didn't belong at Mozilla and should go somewhere else, as well as the fact that this person faced no concrete consequences for what he did, drives that message home. And if that wasn't clear, the fact that somebody with a stake in it was so passionate about fundamentalists' right to use any platform to defend their turf that they were willing to make a death threat drives home -- tellingly, aimed only at Christie (not at me, though I've been equally vocal) and shot through with disgusting comments about her gender, sexuality, and body -- that it's all connected.

You might ask me at this point whether I'm engaging in mind-reading when I argue that fundamentalists are really defending their turf, rather than defending "traditional marriage". I don't have time for that question. I'm entitled to interpret what you say, just as you're entitled to interpret what I say. A basic measure of respect adults grant to each other is to recognize that other people won't automatically trust you, assume you're telling the truth, or believe you when you state your motivations. I'm happy to hear someone tell me that I'm wrong or that I'm right, but deflecting attention from the content of what I'm writing by questioning my right to have higher-order thoughts about my social superiors -- insinuating that I'm obligated to believe that cops never lie, teachers tell the truth, and authority figures are always open and honest -- is just a way of derailing the discussion from substance into vacuous meta-discussion.

So what does this all have to do with the Ada Initiative? Well, I think the problems we have in open source are not primarily due to the relatively small number of men who are willing to commit physical violence or threaten it in order to keep open source a boys' club. Rather, I think they're due to the large majority of men in the community who are sympathetic to women's issues, who want to change things but aren't sure how, or who stay silent at everyday sexism -- the remarks that, as Aurora showed quite well, create an environment where more serious acts of violence flourish. The work of the Ada Initiative is helping make it easier to do the right thing instead of staying silent. Their work on codes of conduct for tech conferences has already made it easier for a woman in the software industry to attend a professional conference without worrying she'll be sexually assaulted or harassed -- something that almost all men in the industry take for granted.

I support the Ada Initiative because I stand with cis women, with trans women, with trans men, with genderqueer people, with queer cis men, who don't want to own the world -- who don't want to control a community or an industry -- but who just want to govern their own lives. People who want to make a good living, do honest work, and collaborate with others to build tools that will make life easier and better for people. These are modest goals, but if enough of the industry remains complicit in misogyny, they won't be achieved. Likewise, as queer people, we don't want to define marriage for everybody else and exclude people who aren't like ourselves from deciding what it means. We just want to live our lives, too: paying our fair share in taxes, visiting our partners in the hospital, raising children if we choose to, transferring property when we die, and so on. And where these two threads come together is that I still work in an industry that doesn't recognize that opposition to universal marriage is both a mainstream political view and hate speech that makes people in a minority group feel unwelcome and unsafe.

If you agree with me that the Ada Initiative's work is important, please wish me a happy 32nd birthday and make a donation. And then let me know. By doing so, you can be as cool as juli, etb, and Henry!

I haven't written anything under this tag in a long while. For most of that time, I've been head-down working on the let/match refactoring in trans. I feel like I've learned a ton about trans in the meantime that I will be able to translate into comments that will help future trans hackers (pun possibly intended). But I also feel embarrassed about not having a lot of visible work to show for the past month or month-and-a-half.

The middle of this week, though, I decided to set that aside since we have the 0.5 release coming up soon, and I didn't think I was going to finish #3235 in time. Instead, I decided to just try to fix as many release blockers as possible. I'm particularly satisfied to have fixed #3121 just now (well, it's not committed yet, still waiting for tests to run). I spent a good chunk of time trying to isolate this bug when it was newer, and I gave up because I didn't understand trans::alt well enough. But thanks to that time I've spent trying to refactor, when I looked at it again today, I was able to find the buggy code in just a few minutes. The bug is even simple enough to explain in terms of code (I think):

fn enter_default(bcx: block, dm: DefMap, m: &[@Match/&r],
                 col: uint, val: ValueRef)
    -> ~[@Match/&r]
{
    do enter_match(bcx, dm, m, col, val) |p| {
        match p.node {
          ast::pat_wild | ast::pat_rec(_, _) | ast::pat_tup(_) |
          ast::pat_struct(*) => Some(~[]),
          ast::pat_ident(_, _, None) if pat_is_binding(dm, p) => Some(~[]),
          _ => None
        }
    }
}

This is the code that takes a list of Matchs (structures representing patterns that may match) and narrows down that list to patterns that are irrefutable: that match any value of the right type. Examples are _, the wildcard pattern that matches anything, and x if x is a free variable (which just binds any value to the name x. enter_match is a more general function -- the details aren't important -- but the point is that it takes a higher-order function that classifies patterns. Here, the match on p says that the following kinds of patterns are defaults: wildcards (_); record, struct, and tuple patterns (that is, matches on constructors for product types), and variable patterns. The higher-order function returns Some(~[]) (again, the reason why doesn't matter) for defaults, and None for non-defaults.

That's all fine and good, but in Rust we have pattern guards; to use the example from #3121:

match *m {
      to_go(_) => { }
      for_here(_) if cond => {}
      for_here(hamburger) => {}
      for_here(fries(s)) => {}
      for_here(shake) => {}
    }

Normally, for_here(_) would match any value of type order (see the bug report for the type definitions), since the _ nested pattern matches anything. But the pattern guard -- written if cond -- means this pattern only matches if cond is true. So the _ here isn't really a default, because a guard makes the entire pattern that it's attached to refutable.

Once I realized this, the fix was quite simple. And happily, I got to close several other issues that turned out to be instances of the very same bug: #2869, #3257, and #3895.

There's no greater moral here, no fancy theory; just another mundane, prosaic day in the life of a compiler writer. The real issue was that pattern guards were added on after the fact, and probably not tested all that thoroughly -- but I certainly can't place any blame for that, since I generally don't put as much effort as I should into test coverage either.

ETA: Well, the fix wasn't as simple as that after all, sadly. Don't want to have an "I am so smart" moment here. :P Still working on it.

ETA: Cat-sitter found. Roadtripping with the kitties!

I'm looking for a Bay Area person to take care of my two adorable one-year-old cats (this is how adorable they are, though they're bigger now) in their home from 12/15-12/25 while I'm out of town for surgery. Can reciprocate in pet-sitting for your pets in the future, booze, money, baked goods, we'll figure something out.

And by "their home" I mean yours, since (understandably) nobody wanted to stay in my place (yurt in Los Gatos, or at least, I'll be moved into it before December) for ten days to pet-sit/yurt-sit. It's not a location that's going to be easy for anyone to get to twice a day, either.

If someone could help me out on a bartering or below-professional-pet-sitter-rate basis, that would be awesome, as I'll be paying to board the bunnies and I have plenty of expenses with traveling to Arizona for surgery and so on, all at once. Thanks!

ETA: All books have been taken and/or distributed to an appropriate bookatorium. Thanks for playing!

If you have not checked out my free books posts:

http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1771247.html

http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1771692.html

http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1771814.html

I'm giving everything that hasn't been requested away (or selling it...) tomorrow.

If you already asked for some books, I've set them aside, but if you haven't already, you should either send me your address if you're not local, or tell me when you want to hang out if you *are* local. I have nothing to do this weekend except pack! Also, am in the East Bay and San Francisco tomorrow. (If you're local and want me to mail them, I will, but after grumbling about not getting to see you.)

I've got one more free CD post coming -- watch this space!

See part 1 for instructions, and part 2. All are paperback unless otherwise noted. This is the last and final part!

Comics and misc:

Envelope of random indie comics -- about 14 of them. Surprise grab bag! Tak eone, take all.
Original Plumbing (issues 2 and 3)
Here Comes Snoopy (Charles M. Schulz)
Queen of the Black Black (comics) (Megan Kelso) [I just read this and it was really good. Not keeping it, though.)
DVD: Jesus is Magic
Get Fuzzy: Groovitude (Darby Conley) [Recycle]
Ronald Reagan in Movie America (Jules Feiffer)
Pinhead's Progress (Bill Griffith) [Recycle]
King Pin (Bill Griffith) [Recycle]
( Read more... )

See part 1 for details.
( More books! )

A brief rant since I don't feel much like talking about the specifics of the progress I haven't been making lately. People I work with, don't take this personally; it's more about a general trend :-)

I'm not very good at reading code, or perhaps it's that I don't like reading code and so I don't do it, and don't get better at it. I'm not sure. In any case, I certainly prefer writing code to reading code. This probably makes me like most programmers. Still, you're supposed to get something out of reading code, and I often don't.

Part of the problem is that code often doesn't have very many comments in it. When I'm writing code, I'm not always the best at commenting it either, but often I find I have to write comments just to keep track of what I'm doing, because otherwise I lose my train of thought. When I read un-commented code, I think "this person must be a better programmer than me, because they can hold so much stuff in their head without writing it down". I get intimidated and my mind shuts down and I think maybe I should be a bus driver.

Maybe people who can keep all that state in their heads are better programmers, I don't know. But when it's just in someone's head, it's not available to someone else who might want to work on the project. A friend wrote recently about the ways in which lack of documentation excludes new contributors from open-source projects, particularly new contributors who have plenty of ability but aren't comfortable joining an often-frat-boyish IRC channel to get documentation. Some people need documentation more than others, depending on their social placement.

I'm already in a project, so I should be able to get information the informal way, but sometimes I feel like I ought to know already. Because I don't like reading code that isn't well-commented, I'll do almost anything else to figure out what's going on -- running it repeatedly with lots of print statements added, for example, which incurs a high cost when builds are slow. Or tweaking test cases fairly randomly and observing the change in behavior, or reading the code the compiler generates, which for whatever reason is cumbersome (just making it visible, not understanding it). That takes a lot of time when in some situations, it would probably just be faster to read the code and develop a mental model in it in my head than to -- as I more often do -- develop a model of what it does using the scientific method, treating it as a black box.

But reading the code often brings up an intolerable amount of performance anxiety for me. I can't understand it because my brain is going "you ought to be able to understand this better". Comments would help because it would remind me that the person who wrote this isn't omnipotent, and had to think hard about it in order to get it right. That they went through a process in order to create it, and the product didn't suddenly spring fully formed from their brain.