HACkers blog

No, it's not censorship.

Nor is it an attempt at silencing the debate.

So where has the Blue Rinse post gone to, and why?

Well, the where is quite easy to answer - it's gone to that cyber-bucket of deleted posts and lost links and 404-cobweb pages. And why? That's perhaps worth a fuller explanation.

The original post was intended by the blogger to record the frustrations of a clash of Campus Cultures arising from the introduction of a group of people who don't all subscribe to our Values, particularly when it comes to respect and tolerance for difference and the valuing of diversity. I find racist behaviour abhorrent, and do not feel it is something that should be tolerated simply because of the perpetrators' age and social class.

The duty to oppose racial and other forms of harassment, and unfair discrimination, is something I take very seriously. We have policies and procedures in place to govern the way we as staff and students behave towards each other. There is a code of conduct which extends the framework towards the contractors who work among us. But what recourse does, say, a cleaner have when her dignity is assaulted by a visitor implying that her colour predisposes her to theft? What structures and systems protect other frontline staff subjected to racist epithets by visitors? Are we creating a welcoming environment for disadvantaged black students by exposing them to racist and classist comment being uttered about them with impunity, by visitors to this Campus who don't necessarily share a view that values diversity?

Should we not be requiring of all people on Campus - even those contributing their presence in the most fleeting way to transient Campus Communities - to uphold the behaviours enshrined in our Values, even if in their heart of hearts they don't necessarily subscribe to the values themselves?

Today's Observer reports that Barclays Bank is one of three British financial institutions propping up the Mugabe regime by underwriting his "vilified land reforms". Some people reading this blog might be old enough to remember when Barclays Bank - the predecessor of FNB in South Africa - was accused of financially supporting the ANC back in the days of Apartheid. (Some people reading this blog might even be old - or honest - enough to remember that South Africa once had a system called Apartheid, and that sufficient numbers of white people voted to keep it in place, while others of us considered the whole notion of "whites only" elections so illegitimate we boycotted them - which no doubt helped perpetuate the Apartheid majority at the ballot box too.)

Anyway, it seems that Barclays is once again tweaking up mainstream (white) blood pressure by allegedly supporting a cause which allegedly hinges on taking stuff from white people and giving it to black people. Lots of allegedlies - just as Apartheid South Africa was largely in the dark about what the ANC actually was and wasn't, I find myself very much in the dark about what actually is and isn't happening in Zim - a country I last visited 20-odd years ago when it was new and shiny and a great place to source "No easy walk to freedom" T-shirts and enough banned literature for some serious Liberation Before Education study groups.

It was our neighbour to the north that taught me, as a child, that economics was not the career for me. As Whenwes streamed across our border and into our schools and neighbourhoods, the conversation between the adults inevitably turned to matters economic. My one attempt at understanding proved futile:

"Why does Mr B have so many leather jackets?"

"He brought them back from Rhodesia because he can't get his money out of the country."

"But why?"

"Because if they let everyone take their money out of the country, the economy would collapse."

"Then why does he want to take his money out of the country?"

"Because the economy is going to collapse."

Rather like my attempt at studying Science at Stellenbosch "university", I found that answer rather unsatisfying. So instead I flipped politely through the copper coasters claiming "Rhodesia is Super", gazed sadly at the bumper stickers calling for "Rhodesia - no sell out!" and waited for the economy to collapse. And, some thirty years later, perhaps it has, as a fresh generation of Zimbabweans streams across the borders into our schools and our neighbourhoods, bearing Zimbabwean artefacts for resale in SA in their turn.

And, as my mind is boggled by talk of hyper-inflation at more than 1000%, I realise anew that I was right about that career in Economics not being for me.

Over on this little damp island - and the top bit of the slightly littler one next door - there's some thinking going on about Britishness. Consensus seems to be there's not enough of it, though opinions differ widely about whether that's a bad thing or not.

Not since Zola Budd have I heard anyone declare themselves to be British. But essentially, the subtext appears to be to discourage young Muslim boys from trotting off to Pakistan and coming back with explosives in their shoes. I'd have thought it would be simpler just to leave George Bush to fight his war on Islam "terror" by himself, and not alienate them in the first place - but then, I'm not a politician.

Artificially constructed political identities have been attempted before - Manuel Castells was famously involved in a project aimed at constructing a supra-national European identity. Not since apartheid times have I heard anyone defining themselves as European, either.

Of course, the other subversive identity that all this "Britishness" is trying to suppress finds its expression this evening - with the addressing of the haggis, on Robbie Burns Night. Anything to silence those bagpipes, I suppose...

Recently there was some discussion on Comment is Free regarding blogging and censorship - specifically, whether or not the removal of comments by the blog owner was tantamount to censorship, and whether or not such actions were "legitimate".

As my SpamKill finger hammered the "delete" key earlier on my own blogs' comments, it occured to me belatedly that not every comment posted by an innocuous-sounding first name with a hyperlink - indicating a URL or email address supplied by the poster - necessarily indicated that the comment was spam. There may well have been legitimate, bona fide comments among those wiped out en masse in my spam clean up, but I'd not had the energy to click each one to find out.

Deleting comments unread on the assumption that they're spam is more a crime of omission than commission, but to the commentor whose contribution simply vanishes, the end result is the same.

And, had they posted something contentious, they may believe that the action was targeted, rather than random.

If someone posts a comment with which a blogger disagrees, should the blogger remove the comment, or engage with it? The issue raises for me shades of the Frank Ellis debate. Surely refuting an argument is better than silencing it? But what if the comment itself is deeply offensive - racist, or sexist, say - given the Values we embrace as a University, and the identity of this blogspot as UCT's blogspot, do we not have an obligation to promote those actively?

How does one balance rights - the right to dignity vs the right to freedom of speech - in the context of a medium that, while University-identified, reaches beyond the confines of an institution, of a State, of any notion of shared values (even Netiquette) - while still trying to protect the integrity of the debate, in some way?

Yesterday it rained. Being Cape Town, that meant faulty traffic lights, slippery roads and road accidents - backing up traffic for miles. One of those days...

And then, about an hour after I arrived on Campus yesterday, the power went off with a great BANG! as Eskom / the council decided to switch us off. "Rolling blackouts" - apparently scheduled, but with no warning - had arrived.

Unstressed, I decided to run across for coffee before the hot water cooled - though Marilyn had wisely decanted the coffee into a flask, obviating the need to rush - and a newspaper, given that the Guardian Unlimited, News24 and IOL would no longer be at my fingertips, and no constructive work would be possible for the next while.

I figured that the power would return, sooner or later, and that would allow my repowered PC to connect with the systems which would have been sustained and protected by the barrage of UPS and Generator and redundant cabling, zooty switches, etc that the R78M bought us.

Right. Power returned after a while. The services did not. A polite message dump informed us that the system had "failed".

Eventually, when it became apparent that nothing would happen the rest of the day, I joined the exodus leaving Campus, and found a huge flatbed truck with crane trying to maneouvre into the tiny confines of the Beattie parking lot. With a view to removing the generator, to bail out the ICTS data centre.

By this morning, one could again log in to some of the systems.
By lunchtime, mail started arriving.

It just hasn't been the most productive week:

Two days (and two and a half years of data) lost to Groupwise frying my harddrive.

One day lost to a communication crisis.

One day lost to severed network cabling.

One day lost to power outages and no systems.

Five days. An entire working week. Please can I have a refund?

My traffic fine has yet to arrive in the Infernal Mail. But what did arrive today outraged me far more.

A copy of a memo addressed to the Dean, informing her of staff in the Faculty who qualified this year for Long Service Awards. First on the list, was.... me.

Aside from the implication that I've been treading water as a pit zombie these last 15 years (or 14 and some bit years - the anniversary bell tolls in October) the principle and form of the Long Service Awards themselves depressed me terminally.

For those who've not encountered them:

Upon labouring 15 years (and each ten years subsequent: 25, 35, etc) for the University, staff on conditions other than academic qualify for a Long Service Award. This is in recognition for good and faithful labour over time - after all, these are not people whose quality service is acknowledged through Ad Hom, or whose length of service qualifies them every seven years for sabbatical.

This involves being awarded a certificate and vouchers to the value of R1 250 for 15 years, and incremental amounts for subsequent Awards, and a letter personally signed by the Vice-Chancellor in the month of the anniversary of employment.

And despite the wonderfully ironic inversion of a Black VC bestowing largesse on loyal and diligent white workers, it still smacks of its historic roots in a system of paternalism, of "baasskap" and classism, permeated with the historic racism that interweaves our history so strongly.

It's really hard to feel pleased on receipt of a letter whose subtext suggests that Madam HR wishes to reward your dutiful service with a shiny new microwave, which the Baas will personally hand over with a handshake and a smile.

At the same time, it's hard to launch an all-out campaign against this assault on the dignity of the subordinate classes of staff who qualify, without in the process removing from some who really appreciate the material benefit (a new fridge, after 35 years!) given the relative paucity of their wages.

Perhaps if all classes of staff were valued, and acknowledged, equally, one wouldn't feel so cynical. Perhaps if all systems of reward and acknowledgment were equitable - appropriate to the nature of one's work, rather than one's conditions of employment - one would feel more enthusiastic. Why a Librarian, say, should get a microwave rather than a sabbatical (or two sabbaticals; a fridge would equate with five) when their research contribution could be as enhanced as a rank-and-file academic's through sabbatical; why the AA who secretly runs the Department while the HOD gets the allowance should feel blessed with a LaZy-Boy rather than an Ad Hom promotion, or why the Departmental Assistant who, 35 years later, is far more expert in his field than the newly appointed lecturer who relies on him to make it all happen but gets all the credit... Well, these celestial mysteries are not for the likes of us to ponder. Ours not to reason why - ours but to do and - after 15 years - smile gratefully when your letter arrives telling you you've won a microwave.

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Early last week a colleague had problems changing his password, and I pointed him to the Password Self-Service URL, for him to try that. It reminded me that my own password was due to expire while I'm overseas, and so I thought I'd change my own password while I was at it.

Invalid User ID or Password, it shrugged calmly back. I tried everything I could think of - my staff number - with and without leading zero; my FQN; my old and new style email addresses - with and without capitalisation... All in vain. It simply did not recognise me.

Seeking to preempt further problems down the line, I mailed the Helpdesk. The prospect of being stranded over the sea, unable to access email because my password had expired and my grace logins used up didn't particularly appeal.

Two days later a Helpdesk consultant responded, to say he couldn't find my details on the Heat database. Which surprised me on two counts - firstly, that it took two days for someone to attempt to log my call and notice that I didn't exist; and secondly, that - despite having logged probably thousands of calls in the years I've been at UCT - the system failed to recognise my existence.

That was the last I heard on the matter. No call number, no progress report, no further information sought. Nothing.

Until the file servers were virtualised, I myself had access to HEAT, and could log calls directly into the system, monitor them and bounce them back when someone mistakenly sent them to the wrong team... but this being no longer the case, I relied on Heat Self-Service to look up the progress of my call. Again, nothing I typed in as "Email ID" was recognised - despite my previous email address having been happily accepted these past many years.

Something, somewhere, is amiss.

But unless someone, somewhere, does something to address this, a whole lot more will shortly be amiss as my password expires and my grace logins run out; my mailbox fills up, topples over and bounces incoming mail; and someone bursts a bloodvessel somewhere from uncontrolled bloodpressure.

Happy New Year, everyone...

And so, my broken iBook spent a rather chilly weekend in the fridge: with the result that it now acknowledges that there is a hard drive in there, and that it's a Macintosh hard drive, but the hard drive and the OS are still not on speaking terms. I suspect even couples counselling won't help.

Meantime, I keep remembering data that isn't anywhere else - some of it less critical (my iTunes library...) and others, well... All my teaching information - both retrospective (mark schedules, spreadsheets with complex formulae to weight peer assessment of assignments, detailed assignment feedback for each student...) as well as prospective - course outlines, seminar plans and reading material for the semester about to unfurl. And - critically - my bookmarks file! My email archives! Documents and spreadsheets of all kinds... Seared across my forehead now, like a tattoo: Thou shalt back-up regularly!

Prayers to St Anthony have now been diverted to St Jude.

Meanwhile, the divorce from Groupwise continues to bring relief and light into my life. It's so nice to have working spam control! Messages that arrive in my inbox are messages that actually belong there - well, aside from some stray ones from Isengard that I've yet to work out how to filter out, given that server-based email addresses have now been abandoned and subnets reconfigured...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!

As those who are not Microsoft slaves will know, the "cross platform" client for GroupWise gives you the functionality of a cleft stick without the messenger - kind of like the beta release of the first version of Pmail for DOS, with a cludgey GUI. All that you were used to in the old IMAP Webmail - like the ability to sort messages on message size, and some indicator of your usage of mailbox space, for example - are no longer at your disposal. You can read mail, send mail, and move stuff between folders, and that's pretty much it.

And so, when I logged into uctgwacc at home and found I had used 89% of my mailspace, I was a bit alarmed. Particularly as it threatened me with all kinds of dire consequences. I ought, I decided, to do something, and so this morning I thought I'd move some of it to my C: drive.

Now, on all the mail clients I've used (PMail on PCs, and the native Email programme on the Mac) you can have folders all over the place, access several email accounts and identities simultaneously with all the folders in a single drop down list, etc, so I was completely unprepared for the the notion that moving mail to your hard drive might be A Big Deal. Well, it is. Welcome to Groupwise!

So you need to archive mail. Right - created the directory, highlighted the mail I wanted moved, found the menu item and chose "archive this" and Voila!

Everything froze. For five minutes I sat staring at that little kaleidoscopic wheel that Apple has instead of an egg timer. And then, pop! Suddenly Groupwise just wasn't there anymore. The window had shut, the icon had vanished from the open applications in the taskbar, and it was as if it had just never been. Trouble was, everything else was still frozen, too.

Now Groupwise crashing is nothing new. It happens several times a day, and the OS gives you polite messages to tell you this has happened, but being an Apple, the rest of the system remains stable and you have only to reopen the naughty app and resume work. But not this time. It was all frozen.

Even Force Quit achieved nothing. Eventually I used the only bit that still responded - the power button.

With a sinking feeling I waited, and then slowly switched it on again. The normal hard drive waking up noises started, the chime.... and then, nothing. Like a search for intelligent life in space, staring into the darkness yielded nothing discernable.

Eventually a small, flashing questionmark in the centre of the screen convinced me that the operating system really had been corrupted. Groupwise really had gotten it right. Even my robust iBook had been broken. It was wrist slitting!

So now I sit and wait, hoping Disk Warrior can do the magic Moeneeb promises.

If I ever get it working again, I solemnly swear to remove every trace of Groupwise from it. I'll set my email to autoforward elsewhere, and read it from a reliable mail client or a web-based mail account like GMail. I simply can't take the risk again.

While trying to track a paper on gender and blogging, I came across this interesting site, which claims to predict with 80% accuracy whether the author of a block of text is female or male. You copy and paste in a block of text from your blog, select the genre as blog entry, and click submit... and it gives back your result.

I fed it several samples from both Carnivorous Cow and HACkers blog, and the results were interesting - if unexpected.

HACkers blog was consistently androgynous, scoring ever so slightly ahead on the female score on occasion, so on balance, possibly female (just!).

But the Gender Genie decided that the Cow must be male! All the samples from the Cow's blog came out as overwhelmingly male.

Identity crisis, anyone?

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Dave started it, with his post about social networking, but soon other minds - or what passes for them - were getting captivated too. And then, once some more interesting data got thrown into the mix, there was no preventing it.

Having finally gotten a nascent MySpace page to look like someone lived there, I started poking around. A rather handy browse facility allows you to perv the talent, filtering out those that don't meet your particular preferences. Which was when I remembered the survey results.

Intrigued, I set out to find what proportion of married people registered as UK resident were explicitly looking for dating and/or relationships (i.e. not just friends or networking - something potentially sexual) on MySpace.

Men declaring themselves married, stating that they were looking for dating and / or relationships clocked in at 35.5% - not far off the third of men reportedly "bored" in their marriages, or the 36% not getting enough marital sex. However - those were the men happy enough to have their photo (or at least a photo purporting to be them - some were avatars) online, generally those not concerned with being found out. Remove the requirement for a picture, and the proportion rose to 43.9%.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I refined the search to married men (with no requirement for photos) looking for dating / relationships who declared themselves straight (excluding gay, bi and "not sure") and the percentage dropped to 28.2%... a change of some 15.7% [of total].

Women declaring themselves married, while looking explicitly for dating and / or relationships were by contrast 26.4%. Again, these were those less concerned with discovery - with the requirement for a photograph removed, the percentage rose to 30.1%.

Declaredly straight married women (no requirement for photo) looking for dating / relationships dropped to 15.2% - a percentage drop of a similar order to the men, of 14.9% [of total].

I'm tempted to read into this that UK-based netizens of MySpace are more fluid about their sexual identity - particularly the women, of whom a greater proportion were uneasily labelling themselves "straight" - and not terribly concerned at the prospect of discovery. But of course such a reading filters out a myriad possible confounders, including laziness and ignorance in setting up one's profile, so interesting as such conclusions might be, they remain speculative.

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News24 recently reported on a blog scam where ads masquerade as real blogs, the idea being that some reader gets duped into thinking the blog content is independent comment.

It's a bit like having to warn, on packets of peanuts, that the contents might contain traces of nuts and thus be unsuitable for nut allergy sufferers. Honestly, if someone's dumb enough to take the word of some random blogger as "expert advice", they probably deserve it.

But it does raise the question - if people are now faking blogging, does that means it ranks as pleasurable as that other phenomenon allegedly so widely faked... orgasm?