Planet Systers GSoC

I had a not so great experience with a customer service rep on one of those live-chat things today, so I sent in a complaint after suffering through statements like "when u log in with yr used id and password what does it comes?"

I got a response back, which was nice, but it included a variant on "she's a great rep but English isn't her first language"

And while they don't really try to claim it's an excuse, it got me thinking... is our collective distaste for outsourced customer service and non-native speakers part of some internalized racism?

It's got a some of the hallmarks, but I don't really think it's the core issue. The core issue is communication and failure thereof. If I'd gotten that sentence above from a native speaker (and believe me, I've seen worse chatting with folk in games) I'd still have made my complaint that she didn't seem very professional with her tendency to abbreviate words that were already three or four letters long. It still would have been a problem that despite me telling her explicitly 3 times that I was not a student, she was still telling me to click on a "student" tab that doesn't appear in my interface and thus couldn't help me with that part of the question.

So then the question is, why tell me that she's a non-native speaker? Are you just trying to make me feel guilty about complaining about her? She still did a poor job today; it doesn't really matter to me if she's normally better at it or if it's harder for her than it would be for me. I just wanted to report that so that she could be helped with her listening and writing skills, as well as her knowledge about the differing interfaces to the system.

I'm used to making allowances for poor language skills (native and non-native speakers alike) within the university system, but when communication is the job she's being paid to do, I think it's fair for me to complain when her language skills are not at the level I expect.

In conclusion, it's always good to examine internal racism, but making a complaint about poor customer service seems fair regardless.

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I saw this giraffe pattern on Ravelry and knew I had to try it for the next person with a baby on the way... and a few weeks later one of my colleagues announced that his wife was pregnant with their first kid!




I'm absurdly early -- the kid's not due for another 5 months or so -- but this worked up really quickly. Now I need to decide if I should give it to him right away and then have an excuse to make something else if the lab decides to do a shower, or if I should wait so I don't look a little obsessed.

... Oh wait, everyone in the lab watches me crochet/knit constantly during meetings. I guess he gets the giraffe on Monday. ;)

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Just in case anyone was curious, it's now been 4 weeks, and this is pretty much where my recovery is at:



(Found somewhere on the the internet)

Jokes aside, the point is that I can do most things, but stairs are still not my friend, at least not without the aid of a cane. Nor is rough ground. And I work best as a human hillclimber algorithm: maximal fitness achieved when going up or down a slope, but sideways doesn't work so well.

I wish I could say I was thrilled with the progress, but I could do most of this (except the up stairs) two weeks after the sprain, so it actually feels like I've slowed down on recovery. Still, things are progressing, and I think I can ramp up my ankle exercises to push myself a bit more!

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Ken sent me a text message this weekend that said something like, "Thanks again for the scarf. I've found it meets a niche in my life not unlike the towel in the hitchhiker's guide."

I think this may be the greatest endorsement ever. :)

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As many of you know, I've been working on a pattern for making pones based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

I finally sat down and stuck the pattern and the pictures together, so now you can all make ponies! And best of all, the pattern is free! (This is mostly 'cause I'm that kind of person, but it is complex for me to sell anything due to the conditions of my work visa here in the US. Which is to say please don't ask me if I can sell you a finished pony; I can't.)

The pattern as a pretty printable PDF
The pattern in HTML
The pattern on Ravelry
The pattern on DeviantArt (No good reason for this except that there's lots of bronies there and I might as well share where the community is!)

And to remind you, here's what you'd be making:







More photos here.

I'm really nervous about this because it's the most complex pattern I've ever posted online and because I know other people really want it. I hope people enjoy it!

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I'm not sure I've *ever* laughed so hard while reading a comic book. These stories would probably be funny satire of the romance genre on their own, but paired with vintage romance comic art they're downright hilarious. Highly recommended to anyone who's ever made snarky comments during a romantic comedy!

For the MBL crowd: this is the romance version of that Ghost Stories anime Jamie had, just as hilarious in juxtaposition but a little less reliant on the random gags.

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I don't normally review craft books, but since I've started getting them from the library and need some way to keep track of the ones I've seen and might want to get out again for projects, I figured book reviews was a good solution.



Knit Your Own Royal Wedding
by Fiona Goble

Instructions for very cute and slightly kitschy William & Kate royal wedding dolls. Lots of pictures and details in the clothing, so it's fun even if you haven't got time to knit and just want to look at the little doll dioramas. I think my favourite are the little corgis.



Last-Minute Knitted Gifts
by Joelle Hoverson, Anna Williams

As a newbie knitter, I definitely appreciate patterns for things that are small and have estimated times attached. Unfortunately, the books are starting to all blur together since most contain variations on the same hats, socks, scarves, small bags, etc. The thing that makes this particular volume stand out is actually the photography and the careful use of colour (there's even a whole section about it!)



Positively Crochet!: 50 Fashionable Projects and Inspirational Tips
by Mary Jane Hall

I loved many of the patterns, many of which are nicely modern (surprisingly hard to find in a crochet book!) though I found the "positive" sidebars totally insipid. If, like me, you find that's not your thing, at least it's easy enough to ignore. I liked the mix of small and large projects, and the couple of patterns I've tried from this book have been clear and well-written. Looking forwards to trying a few more in the future!



Simply Crochet: 22 Stylish Designs for Everyday
by Robyn Chachula

A beautifully photographed collection of nicely modern crochet designs. I haven't tried any of the patterns yet, but it looks like the instructions are very clear, and many projects are photographed from a variety of angles so that you can see the detail of the pattern and the places where joining might be tricky by instruction alone. I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to buy my own copy rather than constantly renewing the library one before I start any patterns, which is the reason I haven't done any yet.

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The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
by Clay A. Johnson

I expected the diet metaphor to get strained, but it actually worked better than I expected: consume less-processed information just like you consume less-processed food, and don't consume mindlessly and continuously. The author's approach to dealing with information "obesity" isn't the standard reactionary "Get off the internet! Go play outside!" but a more nuanced look at how to consume better information rather than just less. I particularly liked the looks into why headlines are terrible (overdone and outright false headlines get clicks, clicks = money), and how using your friends to filter information can result in a dangerously narrow point of view. I was less thrilled about how much of the examples were very American politics oriented, but obviously the author has to write from what he knows. And politics in America does provide some interesting examples of over-information warfare, as it were.

What's most striking about this book to me aren't the ideas, though (as a research scientist, going to the source and avoiding "junk" information is already part of my daily routine), but the fact that it's a life-hacking book that doesn't suffer from extreme bloat where the author repeats himself endlessly for 300+ pages. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the topic, that the author would be able to write succinctly, but after my experience trying to read volumes like The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done, this brevity and ability to get the point across in a nice slim volume were much appreciated.




XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture
by Phyllis Richardson

This is pretty much a tiny coffee table book filled with beautiful pictures of unusual architecture fitting the small structures, green architecture theme. Fun to flip through and see some unusual projects from around the world. If you're the sort of person who clicks on "look at this cool house!" links on the internet or just loves photography of strange objects d'art, this is a little treasure trove of neat things.

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Remember me mentioning this appalling-sounding novel about Vampire Shakespeare? well curiousity got the better of me, and I did click "Request it!" and they actually chose to send me a review copy. Here's the review I provided:

This book is like a B-movie inspired by the anachronistic touches of Moulin Rouge, only the sex scenes are outright un-sexy. It's a cheesy mish-mash of modern pop culture and Shakespearean English. It's both totally appallingly bad and yet sometimes brilliant, often funny and probably the strangest adaptation of The Tempest ever.

If you wanted anything remotely serious or delicate, this is not the book for you. (And what were you doing buying a book about Vampire Shakespeare fighting zombies with his Dark Lady anyhow?) I think it has the worst romance I've read in years (and I have a project with friends where we read terrible romance novels out loud) but if you read it all with the pacing and imagine the wooden acting of a low-budget film, it's worth a laugh. Recommended only if you like bad movies, silliness, and dubious mashups of pop culture and literature, since this rests on the knife edge of "bad" and "so bad it's good." I enjoyed it, but your mileage may vary.

I'll be keeping my copy for The Project, but I'm quite happy to lend it out to anyone else who foolishly thinks that Vampire Shakespeare and his Dark Lady battling zombies during The Tempest sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure if this is warning or endorsement, but it's only a few velociraptors or beagles shy of sounding like it could have been written by beable. Now you know.

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A while ago, I saw a mention in a UNM newsletter about Google Scholar profiles and decided to give it a try. Like many people in my field, I already keep a list of publications on my website, but this had graphs! Citation counts! I wasn't too sure about this whole social-media-for-researchers aspects, but I like graphs.

I had totally forgotten about it 'till a few days ago when I got a reminder email, and upon looking at my profile I was pleased to see that my very first paper now has 60 citations. Sixty!

For context, the average citation rate in computer science was 3.75 from the period 2000-2010 (Source: Times Higher Education), and even the average citation rate for science in general was 10.81. So 60 seems awesome, even if average may be a weird number for something that I know is a power law distribution. Still, go me! I've got a few above-average papers, mostly the spam work (I was the first to apply artificial immunology to the spam problem, so subsequent people working in that space generally cite me) but I notice that SOMA's almost made it up to 30 citations, and that's the first of my papers in the web space.

It's still a pretty modest accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. Check out Paul's list or Steph's list if you want to feel small, but those are both totally amazing, exceptional people who run whole labs. For my weight class as a newly minted PhD, I'm happy enough, but I need to do more...

So now to take that pride and turn it into a totally awesome, citation-worthy paper summing up my remaining thesis work!

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This post about kettles is strangely fascinating:

To raise the tem­per­ature of one litre of water from 15°C to boiling at 100°C requires a little bit over 355 kilo­joules of energy. An “average” kettle in the UK runs at about 2800 W and in the US at about 1500 W; if we assume that both kettles are 100% effi­cient† then a UK kettle sup­plying 2800 joules per second will take 127 seconds to boil and a US kettle sup­plying 1500 J/s will take 237 seconds, more than a minute and a half longer. This is such a problem that many house­holds in the US still use an old-fashioned stove-top kettle.

I actually did have people ask why I have a stove-top kettle back when I was in Ottawa. I usually said it was just habit (true) and I just didn't have space for another appliance (true) and then later when I wound up with a free electric kettle, I'd tell them that my electric kettle was terrifying (also true), but now I realize I could have said it was all about voltage and seemed *way* more into the science of my tea.

I'm doubting that all of us who use stove-top kettles actually thought about it that way, though. It's just what I was used to. I only switched a few months ago when an electric kettle was all I had while my stuff was in transit. And even if I'd cared, I might not have noticed a difference since water boils around 85°C here instead of 100°C (woo! Altitude helps protect me from burnt tongue!)

... all that said, I almost always boil water in the microwave now. 55s to hot chocolate!

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People have started to ask me what my plans are after I finish this postdoc, or rather the frequency with with I get asked has reached an arbitrary threshold, so I guess it's time to write about it. The short answer is that I'm not planning to start my job hunt 'till October at the earliest, but here's some more detailed information about my plans in case you, like many others, are curious:

1. I'm currently expecting to be at UNM 'till around Nov 2013, which would be the originally expected 2 years. The date's a bit flexible: the grant I'm on goes a little past that I think, and I can leave earlier if I have another offer that needs to start right away.

2. I'm focused on getting some publications out before I start the job hunt at all. I'm hoping to have results from the router work as early as next week, and I've got a plan for publishing my remaining thesis work, so at minimum I want papers for both of those to be out for review before I start looking.

3. My job hunting mode will probably kick off around the time of the Grace Hopper Celebration in October. That's not the greatest timing, but it's a good enjoy goal date for the papers to be out and the job fair and related resources available at GHC12 is an excellent opportunity that I don't want to miss. I'm happy to consider things that come up before then, but October/November is when I'll polish up my resume and start being active in my search.

4. I'd like to go back to Canada, but I do have a US visiting scholar visa that can be extended and transferred to another qualifying job. (It can be used for up to a total of 5 years, of which 2 are going to be used here at UNM.) There's some fascinating legalese around my current visa that makes Canada the easiest choice for my next job, but I'm not adverse to other countries.

5. I'm not committed to either academia or industry at this point, and I wasn't planning to make a more concrete decision on that 'till I have actual offers. You can expect me to be looking at a combination of academia and industry labs. I have one lab already on my shortlist after the last round of interviews. I turned down their offer of an on-site interview because I had decided on UNM, but if they're still taking on new hires when I'm done here I'd like to continue the process with them.

So I'm not looking yet, but do feel free to pass job leads my way if something comes up that you think would be up my alley.

Speaking of jobs... I *do* have a couple of friends looking for jobs more urgently than I am: One is a very talented programmer who's currently located in Halifax but willing to relocate, and one is an efficient mostly-windows systems administrator who's looking for a job in the Ottawa area. They're both around intermediate level, but given the job market they're willing to work more junior positions if that's what it takes. I'm happy to pass leads along or obtain their latest resumes if I can help make a connection!

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The scarf is finished and gifted! As I said in the first post, I wanted to make the scarf for Ken because he's the one who's really carried me through the new seasons of Doctor Who with his enthusiasm, even when my faith in the writers often flagged.

I hope Ken enjoys it. I'm sad I didn't manage a better photo of him -- he's usually quite photogenic when I don't mess up the focus on my camera! It's soft and warm, so at least it'll do its job as a scarf. He agreed with my choice to prioritize softness over perfect colour matching, of course. Turns out Ken hasn't watched much of the old Doctor Who, though, so now he feels like maybe he should.

Quite a few other people have recognized and liked it, at least, including my mother. Tom Baker is the doctor that I remember watching sometimes as a kid 'cause he was the one my parents liked, so no surprise that she thought this was fun (if a little crazy). And of course John wants one too, but I think he should learn to knit one himself! He's good at this sort of thing and I like the idea of him messing with people's heads when they ask, "Oh, did Terri make that for you?" and he can say, "No, I did it myself!"

The best story I heard was from my friend Andrew, whose sister-in-law asked if she could knit him anything for Christmas and he said "a doctor who scarf" and she said ok without knowing what that was. When she found out, she had to retract the offer and told him he was getting gloves or something else manageable!


I say the scarf is finished because I've given it away, but if you look at the picture you can tell I only got this far in the scarf pattern:



Just over 70%, or I think around 8 feet long? I forgot to measure it. Obviously long enough for usual scarfy purposes. It's also slightly less wide than the pattern calls for because I thought it was hilarious if it was 42 stitches wide. If I were doing one for myself I think I might make it even less wide, although I *did* appreciate being able to use it as a blanket while I was knitting on the plane. ;)

I keep saying it took me around 3 weeks, but looking through my journal it turns out I started on Mar 22, so it's actually been closer to 2 weeks. 2 weeks + 2 days in fact. This was helped by the fact that I can knit at work during seminars, colloquia and other meetings (an extra 5-8 hours of knitting at work per week), but I also spent a lot more time than usual listening to audiobooks, the radio, podcasts, and even watching TV. It was fun -- often I get so bored/fidgety when i try to watch TV that I'll wind up doing things like getting up and cleaning just to avoid staying still (which is why I usually prefer audio-only media and am so hooked on the radio) but the knitting kept me busy enough that I could actually enjoy TV on my own while John was off at collab summit. I'm pretty impressed with myself regardless.

I'm most definitely not taking orders for any more dr who scarves anytime soon, but I might consider doing it again sometime just so I can say that I made a complete one. Right now, I'm trying to lay off the knitting for a bit I work on wrangling mentors and student applications for Google Summer of Code, but I'm finding that I've gotten so used to having my hands busy all the time that I'm craving a new project. Perhaps a smaller one this time, though!

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I said on twitter:

It appears someone may have stolen our broken dryer from the backyard. The gas-powered one that was going to burn down the house. Not sad.

But someone asked on fb what's up with that, so here's the longer story:

It's a slightly longer story than fits in a tweet: The broken dryer was in the backyard since they replaced it yesterday, and we'd been told someone was coming to pick it up, so when someone rang the doorbell John showed them the dryer in the backyard and they carted it off.

But then the friend/cousin of the landlord's who'd been helping with this showed up and was all "someone's coming to pick up the dryer" whereupon John said "he's already been and gone" and Cousin was all "uhh... I hope not" and it turns out that apparently they'd arranged on fb for this guy to show up and give the cousin $20 for the dryer. But he didn't give us any money, and we didn't know to ask for it (also, I'm not sure I'd ask anyone for money for Deathtrap Dryer anyhow, but that's another story about how I think gas-powered appliances with broken shutoffs shouldn't be in use).

So then Cousin was all upset and phoning the dude because we don't even know if it's the *right* guy who came to get the dryer or whether they had this whole conversation on someone's public facebook wall and some stranger was all "huh, free dryer in the backyard!" or what. John helpfully pointed out that it could, technically, be reported as theft.

Meanwhile, I am thrilled that Deathtrap Dryer is gone, and if it burns down a thief's house, so be it. ;)

In short: We didn't have to pay someone to haul away the dangerous old dryer! No matter what the landlords call it, I figure that's a win.

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I was running with my grandmother's dog yesterday and managed to sprain my ankle. I actually fell off the road in what would have been a hilarious accident if it hadn't hurt so much -- I was running along the edge of the road and managed to step half on half off the pavement, rolling my ankle badly and landing in the grass which was probably 5cm/2in below the pavement level. Aside from landing badly on the ankle, I'm fine, not so much as a scratch on my hands or a bruise on the rest of me. Buster the dog was spectacularly unsympathetic and continued on without me. So much for doggy heroism! My grandmother lent me her cane and my mother lent her her arm and we all got home safely.

I was *hoping* that it'd be a matter of hours to recover, but after icing it it was clear that I was getting a noticeable goose-egg of swelling around the ankle bone, so I'm declaring it a sprain and treating it accordingly. I didn't feel like trying to find a clinic that was open and dealing with my potentially dubious trans-national health insurance issues just to be told rest, ice, compression and elevation.

It's noticeably better today, but going through airports tomorrow will be distinctly non-fun. I should be able to struggle through security, but I'll be prepared to ask for help as I need it.

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Spotted this on Fandom secrets while taking a break:


The text reads: "My family moved to Canada and are in the process of getting a citizenship. Secret: I cried the day we left not because I'm going to miss the US but because I knew how much more expensive shipping is to Canada which means buying fandmo stuff would be even more expensive for me. Bye bye free shipping :( I also hate the coldness but that doesn't really matter."

I find this strangely amusing. I think the next time someone asks me what I like about the US, I'm just going to say "free shipping" ;)

(I have spent so much money on Amazon, it's not even funny... Mind, that's only half about the free shipping and half about the fact that shopping here isn't great. But in case it's not clear, my favourite thing about the US is still my research group!)

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Cross-posted from Web Insecurity

I often get into discussions about whether people really do care about privacy, given that they give away personal information regularly when they share with friends via Facebook or other services. A recent report suggests that people do care, at least when it comes to banking and shopping:

The Edelman study released in February 2012 shows that consumer concerns about data privacy and security are actively diminishing their trust in organizations. For instance, 92% listed data security and privacy as important considerations for financial institutions, but only 69% actually trusted financial institutions to adequately protect their personal information. An even sharper disconnect can be seen with online retailers, with 84% naming security of personal information as a priority but only 33% trusting online retailers to protect it.

The blog of the Office of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner (from which I drew this quote) sums it up in the title: Privacy: Not just good business, but good for business.

But I have to wonder, do these numbers indicate that privacy-preserving businesses will be winning customers, or will we simply see claims of privacy that aren't backed up by carefully constructed systems? Do consumers really care about privacy or do they just say they care? How will consumers evaluate potentially spurious privacy claims? In Canada we at least have the privacy commissioner who brings issues to light, and worldwide we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but while both organizations are astute and do their best, privacy claims are something that will need to be evaluated by organizations like Consumer Reports that are used by consumers when making decisions about where they spend and keep their money. Right now, by and large, we only hear about the relative privacy of an organization when a breach occurs.

I attended a talk on Internet voting yesterday and the speaker quoted an official in DC who claimed that, "voters like internet voting, so it must be secure," which is really quite a terrifying quote if you think about it. The speaker joked, "does this mean that because my kid likes cake, it must be healthy?" It really clearly demonstrates first that users of the system have very little understanding of its safety (despite strides in the area, internet voting as currently implemented is rarely secure) but also that officials who roll out such systems have little understanding of the flaws of the system and are much too willing to overlook them for convenience sake. If this is the case with voting, it's hard to believe that business would avoid such cognitive mistakes.

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For PAX East last year, some friends and I made a bunch of Angry Birds, which resulted in a great many games with strangers and a lot of fun. I've taken a smaller set of birds out to a few other conferences since, and when I was hanging out with some open source folk, I developed a penguin ball to toss around with the Angry Birds. At my last conference, Pycon, I crocheted up a couple of little ones to give away to my fellow GNU Mailman developers:

Small Penguin Ball

Crochet Instructions:

I use Red Heart Super Saver yarn with a K hook, but anything would do.

Start with white yarn
0: Make a magic ring (6)
1: incr in each stitch (12)
2: {incr, sc} x 6 (18)
3-4: sc around (18)
Switch to black yarn
5-7: sc around (18)
8: {decr, sc} x 6 (12)
Stuff (I use pillow stuffing 'cause pillows were on sale and fiberfill was not)
9: decr around (6) and finish off. Tuck ends in.

Wings (make 2):
Make a magic ring using 7 dc (start with one sc to get you up there), but pull it into a half-circle instead of a full circle

Eyes (make 2):
In White: 0: magic ring (5)
In Black: tie a big knot, thread it through the center of the magic ring. (I chain 3 and then tie that in a knot to make it big enough)

Beak:
0: magic ring (7) fold in half and sew together a little bit when you sew it on the penguin.

Basically, take all those things and sew them on the ball. I hide the join for the black and white body under one of the wings.

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I decided I wanted to upgrade my flash drive and there was no reason it shouldn't be pretty, so I bought this 16G USB Flash Drive off Amazon.

It's so very shiny that when I opened it up, I decided that rather than just stuffing it into my purse, I should use it as a pendant. A few minutes, some jewelry wire, pliers, and a necklace wire I had on hand, and here it is:




I'm inordinately pleased with myself. :)

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I'm still loving my Kindle Fire, but what I am not loving is that cases are still in the $40 range, and many were too bulky or otherwise not appealing to me. So I made my own little slipcover:




It's so simple that it barely needs a pattern, but in case someone wants one, I wrote it out:

Knitted Kindle Fire Case

Size 9 needles, I used Loops & Threads Impeccable worsted in colour "Seaside Ombre" and a 7" zipper (longer might be better)

Cast on 32 stitches.
This will look noticeably shorter than the 7" height of the Kindle Fire, but I preferred my case to have a snug fit. If you prefer it looser, you can add some stitches here.

Row 1: Knit across
Row 2: Purl across
Repeat 1 and 2 until you've got something slightly more than double the width of your Kindle Fire.
This was around 70 rows for me.
Cast off.

Fold in half and sew up the sides. Put in the zipper on "top" and you're done!

You can see in the photo below that my 7" zipper was actually a bit too small, so I had to leave a bit of extra space at the end so it was easy to get the Kindle in and out of the pouch. If you have a longer zipper, you won't need to do this.




And that's it! Here's one last photo of it on and closed:




I learned to knit about a week before making this, so it's totally a suitable project for a beginner!

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My boss got a huge beautiful new monitor, so I got her old apple display to use as a second monitor today. However, it wasn't entirely intuitive to set up dual monitors on my Ubuntu machine at work: The Apple monitor would turn on for a second and then turn off, which apparently is what they do if they have no signal, but I didn't know that at first. All the instructions said to go to the ubuntu display settings and tell it to autodetect, but that didn't work because it didn't notice the other monitor. So then I went to xorg.conf, which apparently by default is disturbingly short, but I wasn't too sure what to put in. Thankfully, this post came to the rescue. In short, here's what I did:

1. Run nvidia-settings.
   
2. Under "X Server Display Configuration" I could see that my second monitor was there but unused, so I clicked on it to enable it and modified the settings to suit.
   
3. I had already backed up my xorg.conf so I clicked on "Save to X Configuration file." It tossed an error about not being able to parse xorg.confg, but clicking through gave me a "Save X Configuration dialog" where I could click "Show preview" and copy those settings to my xorg.conf
   
4. Restarted X11 (actually, I rebooted 'cause I was lazy and wanted to knit a row of my latest project) and poof, it works!
   

So now that it works, I've also customized it to match the rest of my office with the help of some window cling stickers I had on hand:



I am either terrible at being an adult or awesome at it.

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The Pycon sprints were amazing, and the GNU Mailman team got a lot of work done on Mailman 3, the web UI, and the archives. I've never done a 4-day hackfest format, and usually for the short hackfests I'm one of the volunteers helping people set up their environments so I barely do any coding myself. But this? This may have been GNU Mailman's largest gathering of Mailman core devs ever, plus other experienced hackers to boot. It was 4 days of glorious code, architecture discussions, bugs and features. It was energizing, productive, excellent and exhausting.

I'm eager to talk about the UI work I got done and what is coming next, but I think it should wait 'till after I've slept!

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Using (or talking) about R makes me want to rant sometimes and if you've ever written a line of Fortran code, you would have certainly wanted to experiment with a new language stack for scientific programming. Yup, I am aware of scipy, numpy, sympy, sage, et al.. and despite their existence, when I came across this language for scientific programming in January this year, sheer curiosity** made me give it a spin.

Starting the year with a scientific language that has clean syntax and some nicer documentation made me feel warm and fuzzy, until, it refused to build due to a BLAS dependency. That problem didnt last for long though, as I was able to pull a fresh commit which had fixed this issue. Its nice to see an active team having interesting (read, sane) development discussions. A Matlab coder has opined thus about Julia while an R programmer has done a comparison between Julia and R.

After some trial-and-error, I managed to grok its syntax, enough to rewrite an old fortran code in JuliaLang [Julia is still pre-release and I ran Version 0.0.0+1331430882.r69af from Commit 69afb7032d (2012-03-11 07:39:42)]:

#!/usr/bin/env julia
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#*****************************************************************************
# COPYRIGHT (C) 2012 VidAyer <vid@svaksha.com>
# LICENSE: GNU AGPLv3, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
#*****************************************************************************
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation#Geometric_interpretation
# Example, suppose 5 countries have gross national products
# of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 billion dollars, resp. Suppose these 5 countries
# (in the same order) are found to have 11%, 12%, 13%, 15%, and
# 18% poverty. Then let x and y be ordered 5-element vectors containing
# the above data: x = (1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and y = (0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18).
#*****************************************************************************

gnp = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8]
poverty = [0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18]
vectorgnpgnp = 0.0
vectorpovertypoverty = 0.0
vectorgnppoverty = 0.0
costheta = 0.0
n = 1.0

vectorgnpgnp = vectorgnpgnp + gnp[n]*gnp[n]
vectorpovertypoverty = vectorpovertypoverty + poverty[n]*poverty[n]
vectorgnppoverty = vectorgnppoverty + gnp[n]*poverty[n]
costheta = vectorgnppoverty / (sqrt(vectorgnpgnp)*sqrt(vectorpovertypoverty))

# Terminal Out
println("The Vector product value of Cos Theta is: ",costheta)   # correct value should be 0.9208   
println("The Vector product of GNP and Poverty coordinates:  ",vectorgnppoverty) # correct value should be 2.930   
println("The Vector product of GNP is:  ",vectorgnpgnp) # correct value should be 103.0   
println("The Vector product of Poverty coordinates is:  ",vectorpovertypoverty) # correct value should be 0.9830E-01

I was avoiding blogging this here as I think code belongs in a DVCS, not in a blog but I've intentionally not uploaded this program because its not fully functional yet -- see my comments within the code. When I cross-check the results from the fortran code (or as mentioned in the WP page --Geometric_interpretation.) I find "sqrt" isnt working as it should -- I need to figure out the syntax a wee bit more, so I'll push this only if it works perfectly.


** PS: That it was named after a woman (or atleast I like to think so) isnt what prompted my interest! No kidding!

I had my very first visitor from Canada this week, which was absolutely lovely. It's great to have an excuse to do touristy things, and we actually haven't done many ourselves yet so it was new to us too!

I haven't really processed my photos, but it turns out my new phone takes panoramas relatively easily, so here's a few of the phone pictures for those who haven't seen them via other social media.

Sunday: M arrives! Late due to flight rescheduling!

Monday: Visit to Old Town. J gets home from Iowa/Boston.

Tuesday: M comes to my seminar and argues about biology with the computer scientists. As she is a Real Biochemist, her perspective is rather different from the rest of the group's, and I think it helps a lot. In the afternoon, we go to the zoo.

Wednesday: The Very Large Array. It was stupidly windy in a gale-force + sandstorm sort of way, which made the walking tour more exciting and resulted in us having teased 80's hair by the time we were done. You can't really tell from the photos, though.



The photo's much bigger, btw, and I think it looks nicest on black.

The dish on the far left is the one they used for the most photogenic parts of Contact. Now you know! Here it is, closer (I was still playing with the panorama function, which only works if you hold move the phone towards the small edge, so I had to take a slice of dish here):



And here's my traveling companions (and me playing with the HDR function):



Thursday: Hiking at the Petroglyph National Monument:



The petroglyphs themselves are pretty cool, although it's sometimes hard to tell which ones are ancient and which are modern. There's a lot of more recent graffiti at the site, though the gentleman at the visitor's center said there were around 600 petroglyphs on the trail, so quite a lot were original I guess!



After that, we went to a local quilt shop which has quite a lot of southwest and native designs, making it a perfect way for M to get souvenirs *and* quilting materials at once. The lovely lady there noticed my crocheted hat and scarf and wisely gave us a tip about the yarn shop around the corner:



You can just tell from the tagline that this is going to be a store of fun people! I've just recently (as in, Wednesday) started to learn to knit and wanted to get myself some pretty yarn as motivation to practice enough to make a scarf I'll actually wear, and this was a great store to stop in to. Not so good for my usual needs of cheap brightly-coloured hard-wearing stuff for amigurumi angry birds and the like, but the point of learning to knit is to do some very different stuff than I do with crochet. And to try a pile of ravelry patterns I couldn't do before. ;)

From there, we went out to Santa Fe for a bit more tourism and dinner, which was awfully picturesque due to the lightly falling snow, but not so convenient for photography given that it was dark by the time we got there (too much time shopping!)

Friday: A short morning jaunt to Old Town for a last shot at souvenirs, then we saw M off at the airport. I spent the afternoon dealing with GSoC, taxes, and some work.

All in all, a rather lovely visit! I hope some other people will come to stay while I'm living down here!

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I'm re-reading Richard Hamming's talk on You and Your Research because I felt like I needed the kick in the pants to do great work this month after some very busy months of doing necessary but not necessarily great things.

In this reading, I was struck by this anecdote:

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.

On a surface level, I've long believed this is true. I've been long primed in the art of social hacking, first by my father and more recently as a security researcher/hacker. Anyone can watch the subtle variations on how I dress on teaching days or days when I'm going to the bank and you'll note that I pay attention to fitting in to the environment and manipulating the way in which I'm perceived. But as a child of the Internet, more or less, my experimentation hasn't limited to physical presentation. Especially as a teenager, I spent a lot of time grossly mis-representing my age and gender as well and watching how that changed my interactions with folk.

But what gets me this time is the end of that quote: "[If you don't appear to conform,] you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble." Sometimes it's important to change the system, but sometimes you just want to get stuff done.

I can dress the part, but I don't generally change my gender presentation in real life. Is my female-ness adding up to an enormous amount of needless trouble over my lifetime given that I work in a field where that's going to make me non-conforming? I suspect it is, although I'm fortunate enough that my gender presentation is often canceled out by my racial makeup (Asian girls are totally good at math, don'tcha know?) so I can console myself by saying maybe it's not as enormous as it might have been. But not every person who doesn't fit the norm for their field has that consolation prize. Are we all paying the price of being different?

It's easy to get a little saddened by this. All that time explaining that no, I really am a techie, has added up to a lot of time I'm not having amazing conversations and doing great work. But before you get too saddened about how your hard-to-hide features like race/age/gender are affecting your ability to Do Great Things, you should stop and listen to Duy Loan Le's excellent 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration Keynote. In it, she talks about what she does to fit in to environments where she felt that letting go of her ego made it possible for her to get more good work done. I think it's really worth a listen, especially if fitting in isn't just a choice of what suit to wear for you.



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This is the first in my series of short notes on the academic papers I'm reading. This is a paper we read for seminar last week, and I chose to review it here not only because the results are interesting but also because it's a highly readable paper in case any of you get curious and want to read along with me.



Detecting malware domains at the upper DNS hierarchy
Antonakakis, M. et al, 2011

This paper is all about detection of malware using DNS. It turns out that while "normal" domains are accessed by machines that have patterns of geographical and network locations, malware domains are accessed by a bunch of zombie machines that could pop up anywhere on any network so the dns requests are a lot more random. So if you look at DNS, you can figure out what domains are being used by malware, and you can do it on the fly as domains change without needing a manually created blacklist.

It's a pretty neat trick. Malware authors could potentially get around it by adding in more clever requests -- doing something more like facebook or google which route you to "close" servers to provide good quality of service -- but until they do, this could be a handy supplement to existing malware detection. Reminds me a lot of greylisting that way.


@INPROCEEDINGS{antonakakis2011dnsmalware,
author = {Antonakakis, M. and Perdisci, R. and Lee, W. and Vasiloglou II, N. and Dagon, D.},
title = {Detecting malware domains at the upper DNS hierarchy},
booktitle = {Proc. of the 20th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security},
year = {2011},
volume = {11},
pages = {27--27}
}


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One of the big problems of academia is that though we produce some amazing things, they're often not available, accessible, or even noticeable for the general public. That is, articles may cost money to read (unless you have access to academic journal subscriptions), interesting results get buried in dense scientific language, and often few people are talking about the results outside of academia (or sometimes even inside academia).

Last year, I committed myself to writing more book reviews to share what I read with others, and it occurs to me that this year, maybe I should make more of an effort to do the same with the scientific papers I read as well. The usual caveats apply: I've got my own set of biases in research just like I have taste in books, and it's entirely possible that I'll interpret results in ways other than they were intended.

This is something I did occasionally with my web security blog (and hoped to do more), but I'm currently reading papers about complex adaptive systems, biology, security, and more. So for now, these public paper reviews are going here right alongside my book reviews, and they'll be drawn not only from my own research interests but from the overlapping ones of my colleagues. I have a lead on a paper about railway design using slime molds, for example. You've been warned!

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One of the spambots that hit gf this week apparently was broken and has given us All The Spam Comments at once:

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I want it to be a rap song, or at least poetry. But really, "Thank you, this is the worst thing I’ve read" is my new favourite spam phrase.

There is something interesting here, though. It used to be that spambots were more complimentary, but this one sometimes turns outright rude, abusive, and mean. I'd always assumed that the complimentary nature of spambots was to appeal to human moderators so that they'd be more likely to post the spammy link. But what about the psychology of the mean spambot?

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Quelab had a chocolate-themed hack night tonight, which included a double boiler made from dog dishes, delicious chocolate pearls (I almost typed perl... such a geek), several variations on chocolate mousse, several failed attempts at a chocolate rocket (although the test fuel burned well, the fuse fizzled on the rocket itself). But my favourite part was sitting down with a bunch of fellow geeks and altering conversation hearts to be a little more geeky. We had waaaaaay too much goofing off and geeking out while coming up with things to put on the candy. The best set is probably these themed ones:




I came home craving Doctor Who and devoured a couple of episodes while putting together my crochet Fluttershy. More pictures of the hacklab and the new pony tomorrow, though; I am sleepy now.

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My smart phone has decided that it needs to spontaneously reboot itself 5-10 times a day, so I have decided I probably need a new smart phone. I've been very lucky to receive contract-free dev phones for free the last couple of times, but that seems unlikely to happen again.

I don't currently have a data plan, but it turns out my boyfriend has a spare t-mobile sim for which he's paying for a plan just 'cause he wants to keep the unlimited deal he's got on it. (There's a longish story about why this makes sense in his very specific context of phone plans; I'm not sure I'd do the same, but it's his money.) I'm welcome to use said sim until such a time as he needs it, (which is possibly never). It would be a pretty huge upgrade as I'm currently on a pay-as-you-go and just pay for data when I'm travelling. I don't care about changing my phone number as the one I give out is my google voice number anyhow.

So... I'm looking for an unlocked cell phone that will work with t-mobile in the US.

HOWEVER, it turns out that phones are getting bigger and bigger, but my pockets are not. I've had my N1 fall out of my pocket when I crouch down twice this week as is. Sadly, online shopping rarely tells me how huge these things are. Can anyone suggest reasonable smartphones that are not much bigger than the Nexus One? Or point me to a reviews site that includes the phone dimensions? I wouldn't mind having a physical keyboard again and I'd probably prefer something that can be flashed with cyanogenmod, but I'm hoping to not pay $500+.

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Yesterday, we published our 12th Android app: TimerRN. This app has been a long time coming, primarily due to my getting distracted by other projects.  Hokan worked on the first version; Matt did some major re-work after I tested it and figured out what worked and didn’t in the original design.

The original idea for this product actually came from a conversation I had with Mark Burke of Voalte in July, 2010.  Voalte describes itself as providing “compelling software solutions for healthcare institutions that solve communication problems at the point-of-care.”  They concentrate on iPhone- and iPad-based solutions but Mark was kind enough to spend a bunch of time on the phone with me, talking about Android apps for nurses, and, among other nuggets, threw out a suggestion that we implement a ‘drip timer’ app.  TimerRN is a bit more general than that first idea. Nurses can set multiple timers and alarms for IV drips, medicines that have to be dispensed outside the standard schedule, getting patients ready for transport, or even to when to take their next break.

It’s been a busy month but Matt helped me make the effort to get TimerRN published.  We’ve made it as good as we can internally; it needs users working with it to get better.  And it’s great fun to have an even dozen Android apps in the Android Marketplace.

Some months ago, the service I was using to archive my tweets stopped working. Again. I noticed shortly thereafter, but no obvious alternative service seemed to be around, so I figured I'd have to do it myself. Then, you know, life happened.

I was stuck home today due to the aftermath of a particularly nasty headache, so while I was trying to see if I was coherent enough to do some work (which I did do later), I wrote a twitter script. It's not terribly clean or nice yet, but I started a cronjob running sending the formatted output to http://tko.dreamwidth.org. It may be terribly unwise given that I've been largely incoherent all day, but the code seems to work. It's strange how I can write code even when my brain isn't good for much else. I took 8 tries on an email, couldn't concentrate enough to read a book, but I wrote code I felt safe leaving in a cronjob posting to the internet? Perhaps my head's still not working right.

It needs a few pretty touches to make sure it's not losing tweets between days, deal with the timezone, usernames, urls, and retweets more nicely before I share it around. Still, though it's simple it seems worth sharing since I didn't find what I wanted when I looked. Where does one put such small open source scripts nowadays? Github?

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There's an interesting article up on NYT regarding Facebook's definition of "active users" for the purpose of its IPO. Here's the boing-boing link to the story for those who are sick of NYT's paywall nonsense interacting badly with privacy settings. But really, the interesting part is this:

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.

“Think of what this means in terms of monetizing their ‘daily users,’ ” Barry Ritholtz, the chief executive and director for equity research for Fusion IQ, wrote on his blog. “If they click a ‘like’ button but do not go to Facebook that day, they cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services. All they did was take advantage of FB’s extensive infrastructure to tell their FB friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they liked something online. Period.”

The article goes on to point out that at least Facebook tries to count engaged users, unlike the way Twitter or Google have been criticized for counting users. So don't be too hard on them for that.

But here's the real kicker, and the first thing I thought of when I saw the paragraphs above:

The big question is how Facebook can put all of its “active,” er, engaged users in front of advertising?

So... will we see small ads with every like button? Am I going to get ads stuck on the end of the text messages I get with my friends' status updates? Having had this "flaw" in their numbers pointed out, it may behoove Facebook to demonstrate how this is an untapped resource on the advertising front... It's actually tempting to brainstorm about this as a creativity exercise, no matter how obnoxious excessive monetizing seems to me as a user.

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One of the things I occasionally talk about at work is that my experience in the standards process completely destroyed any illusions I had about standards being made for the good of all[1]. Which is why this quote about the process of deciding on IPv6 amuses me so:

"However, many people felt that this would have been an admission that something in the OSI world was actually done right, a statement considered Politically Incorrect in Internet circles."

- Andrew S. Tanenbaum regarding the IPv6 development process in Computer Networks (4th ed.)

And since I imagine few of you follow my long-quiet web security blog (I didn't really feel like writing more on web security while doing my thesis or shortly thereafter), here's another quote that amused me from the same book:

... "some modicum of security was required to prevent fun-loving students from spoofing routers by sending them false routing information."

- Andrew S. Tanenbaum regarding OSPF in Computer Networks (4th ed.)

In case you're wondering what's up, I'm reading this textbook to brush up on my basic routing terminology with the plan to do some crazy things with routers in the future. It's quite useful for this purpose, but I keep getting distracted by how awesome Tanenbaum's writing is; you can see from his humour and deeper insights why his texts are considered standards in the field of computer science. I think the last time I was this struck by a textbook author was while reading Viega's Building Secure Software.

This sort of carefully crafted understatement is a huge contrast to the other book I'm reading currently, The 4-hour Workweek, which I'll probably review in a later post if I don't give up in disgust. (It's full of useful ideas, but the writing style is driving me nuts.)

[1] Standards are made for the goals of the companies involved in the committee. Sometimes those happen to be good for all, sometimes not, and the political games that happen were very surprising to me as a young idealist.

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I'm not even sure what to say about this, so I'm just going to put it out there:

From USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of Shakespeare Undead, comes the gripping follow-up story about vampire William Shakespeare and his Dark Lady who are stranded on a mystical island.

Fresh from a triumphant battle over the zombie horde that invaded London, Will concocts a plot to rid the love of his life from the encumbrance of her husband. Will plans to give his “dark lady,” Katherine Dymond, a potion that will make her sleep the sleep of the dead. Once she is entombed, Will can sneak in, wait for her to awaken, then spirit her away. After her husband returns to his plantation in America, Kate can return to London under a different name and assume a new identity. No one will believe that the dead Katherine and the live Kate are the same woman. Of course, as is often the case with true love, all does not go as smoothly as planned. When the two of them are shipwrecked on an island ruled by a wizard and a nymph, as well as infested by zombies, Will and Kate must stop an even larger plot afoot—one that leads all the way to the royal palaces of Queen Elizabeth.

That's the blurb for Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel.

There's review copies up for requests at librarything, and I can't decide if I should click that "request it!" button or stay far, far away.

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It's been a really long time since I did a photo for this Active Assignment group I'm in on Flickr, but one of my fellow members challenged me to come back so I managed a photo this week. The assignment was "figures of speech" so this is "things are looking up"



I amuse myself, anyhow. We'll see if it amuses anyone else in the group!

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My friend Mark Thoney of Wyolution added a smile to my workweek when he emailed me a link to a USA Today story on how fleeting glory is for most phone apps.   The main point of the piece was no surprise to me.  I’ve long heard that many apps, especially games, get used only for a few hours or a few days after they are downloaded.  Frankly, as a developer, I’ve always found that one of the most discouraging of factoids.  Think of all the passion and labor that goes into even a simple app.

But one quote caught my eye.  Anindya Datta, founder of Mobilewalla, an ‘app analytics firm’ says that while “80% to 90% of apps are eventually deleted,” he considers any app that’s retained by 30% of downloaders to be “sticky.”

Guess what? By that measure, almost all of our apps are sticky!  I’d been feeling a bit down about the fact that ‘only’ half of the DOT Placards downloaders still have the app on their phone.  Guess I’m going to have to revise that emotion upward, eh?

I tossed our current download and install numbers into a spreadsheet:

Isn’t that cool?  With the exception of SnapTo Scott Hininger, which is a very, very niche app, ALL of the apps so far are sticky.

Generally, you’d expect retention numbers to go down as apps age; a user’s needs change after all.  But DOT Placards, our oldest app, is still above 50%. And check out PasswordRN.  The total install numbers may be miserable — I clearly have not yet found the right key to marketing it — but the retention rate is 100%!

 

When I was an undergraduate, I found that university really wasn't living up to my expectations of stimulating, interesting people and ideas.

But today, I was totally living the academic dream.

We had a visit from a leading expert on ant behaviour. This wasn't about computer ant algorithms; she studies real live ants. We started off the day with her talk on the Turtle Ants she's been studying in Mexico, a talk filled with pictures of ants and paths and grad students on ladders pointing at the trees. A talk filled with speculation about behaviour and patterns and analogies to search in computer networks and bifurcation of biological trees. Over the course of the day, the group talked ants, bees, simulations on the computer and using robots, immunology, flu and t-cells in the lung, patterns and theories. It was the kind of conjunction of ideas from multiple disciplines where things were just clicking and questions and potential experiments started getting debated.

Biochemistry from my scientist parents, ecology and field work from Macoun Club, immunology from the above plus my own master's research, algorithms from math and CS... I was pretty proud of myself for knowing the jargon pretty much across the board and being able to keep up. I love that I'm with a group where seemingly disjoint backgrounds are consistently recognized as a huge advantage, and my own particular background fits right in.

I learned a bunch about ants and flu today. My notebook is filled with doodles of ants and cells doing stuff. Apparently turtle ants, since they have paths in the trees, sometimes get the paths broken when the wind blows, and the ants just back up and wait for the wind to blow the branches back so they can keep going. I learned that swine flu's replication rates in cells are a hundred times higher than avian flu (and ~20 times more than regular flu) but avian flu does other things to suppress immune response. I learned some about how T-cells get into the lungs and find infection despite the fact that they don't seem to move fast enough to explain how well we handle infection. And I got to watch people putting ideas together in ways that might result in using experiments in ants to try to explain things that would be much harder to test in the lungs, and so many ideas that probably just couldn't happen anywhere else.

So if you've been wondering why the heck I moved here despite the many downsides about the US/desert/altitude/regional poverty/city, etc.... this is why: Cutting edge research at the conjunction of biology, computing, and maybe a few fields besides. Even if I decide to do something else once my contract is played out, this has already been amazingly worthwhile, and with my own project starting to take shape, I'm pretty sure it's just going to get better!

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- Took an impromptu trip to the Bay Area this weekend. Bit expensive since we decided to do this on Tuesday, but otherwise quite feasible, which is good to know for future trips! Mostly hung out with the new parents and thus got to meet the new babies, which was fun.

- My first visitor to Albuquerque has scheduled her flight. Which means I now have a time limit on unpacking and prepping the house! To be fair, it's perfectly feasible for visitors to show up anytime now (the spare bedroom has bed, lamp, sheets, etc. and I'm using it as a quiet place to chill or have a nap where John won't disturb me) but I'm hoping this will provide the push to make the place nicer.

- I hated moving, but at least I culled my stuff before I did. Not only does it suck to have finally gotten the unpacking under control only to wind up with another household worth of crap in the house, but there's a lot of "why the hell did you bring all these useless old computer books, and why did you unpack them onto my one remaining bookshelf?" -- John is taking it in good humour; I want to burn all the things. Have not thrown him and his junk out of the house yet, shockingly! But he may be buying a shed to temporarily manage our stuff problem. Not kidding.

- I'm still settling back into a new routine with two of us in the house instead of just me. I like having milk mysteriously appear in the fridge!

- Work is still settling in. I am irked by the fact that I miss paperwork deadlines because I don't know about them until after they've passed, but I think I'll be able to predict some of them for next time, so I have hope I'll be able to be responsible and not on academic-time always! I've got a project on the go and will be giving a prelim talk on the subject on Thursday. I'm debating if I can find some clever way to do an off-the-wall presentation here, just for variety, but think this will be more of a led discussion.

- After much fuss, I have most of a dev environment set up again for Mailman hacking on my laptop. Looks like I probably can't justify Pycon, but am still hoping I can make the sprints. (Work may have a visitor then, though, which would mean I'm stuck here.) Either way, have a bunch of summer of code stuff that I really want to have integrated. Maybe this weekend I will actually sit down and do that. I have been a very absent dev for the past few years due to thesis, and I'm a little nervous about getting back to it, but there's lots I want to do!

- Also, I have started keeping a list of all my "I should really do this..." projects, which I find strangely motivating because so many of them seem within my grasp. I'm trying not to over-extend myself, but little personal private ideas don't feel like they're in the way. It's more like now, when I'm bored, I know I can grab something off the list.

- I totally managed a step class at altitude before I left for California for the weekend. But I also managed to make myself very sore between that and playing too many kinect games the night before. Am slightly afraid for my next class (weds unless I wimp out), but at least this time I wasn't gone long enough to lose my entire altitude adaptation. I have to say, it's a neat and unexpected perk that the university provides me with a free fitness class pass! If it turns out step doesn't work for me, i can switch to a variety of other classes, but I figured step was the most familiar class for me to start at: I know how my body should react to doing step at sea level, which gives me a handy baseline.

- That said... I managed to get a migraine for the first time since, uh, I had a root canal done many years ago which apparently fixed the freaked-out nerve. This was the day *of* said fitness class, so trigger could have been over-exertion, dehydration, altitude, or possibly plain old lack of sleep. Hopefully this will not be a thing in the future, but as far as migraines go it was kinda fun: I still have prescription drugs left over from before the migraines were cured, so it didn't hurt, and I got some seriously fascinating aura stuff happening with half of my vision flashing white shiny-ness. It made the trip to home depot especially trippy.

- I bought some "water crystal gel balls" that are absurdly fascinating given that they look like tiny plastic ball-bearings and then swell up to be marble-sized bouncy gels. Soon, I'll have some bamboo stuck in them and will have continued on my plan to green up the house (currently only at 3 plants, but I'll have a jungle yet!)

- I also bought a little nail buffer/shiner thing, which is just a bunch of different very fine grades grit used to make nails shiny without polish. This is much more fun than it has any right to be, but it encourages me to keep my nails longer than usual, which feels odd because I tend to use the tips of my fingers and thus I'm knocking them on stuff a lot. Strangely, this reminds me that I need to get back to practicing clarinet so that I'm in shape to join one of the local concert bands.

- As you can tell, I'm not actually that good at anti-materialism despite my constant complaints about the amount of stuff around here. le sigh.

So... overall, things are settling again. I'm happy to give myself a little longer of settling given that house stuff is still taking up a lot of my weekend time, but I'm hoping that I'll move past settling and into doing new stuff soon!

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Note:  This is the somewhat techie version of this story.  If you don’t maintain your own website, you’re probably interested in the more business-oriented version here.

Having checked out our various web sites using both our own mobile devices and the nice HowToGoMo tool that I wrote about previously, it was pretty easy to decide that we needed to invest some time in trying to increase our sites’ mobile friendliness.  And it was easy to decide where to start.

We have four web sites that are ‘just’ WordPress installations.  WordPress is a set of free tools which started out being just for bloggers but has become the dominant easy-to-use website-building tool for thousands of sites, large and small.  Two of our sites, this Sherprog blog you are reading and our PlacardApp site,  use simple, standard WordPress themes.   Two of our sites, ChecklistRN and ElizabethGunn, use heavily customized themes that we developed in-house, although the graphic design for the ChecklistRN theme was done for us by the talented Julie Cornia.

So, it seemed reasonable to think that the right place to explore just how easy it could be to implement mobile-friendliness would be with our two simplest WordPress sites.  WordPress has a great community of users who develop and share tools, called plug-ins, that can add all sorts of different functionality to your site.  (Yep, like apps “there’s a plug-in for that.”)  Many  plug-ins are free; many have Pro or Plus versions that are available for a fee.

A quick search (‘wordpress mobile’) yields two types of results.  A bunch of apps that can be used to manage a site FROM a mobile device.  And, what we were looking for:  lists of plug-ins that can be used to make the website work better for mobile viewers.  A few minutes of exploring the plug-ins (I’ve never been a picky shopper), led us quickly to choose WPTouch:  free, ‘popular’ (for WordPress plug-ins that means much-used and proven to work) and easy-to-use, just my kind of tool.

If you use some other content management system for publishing your website, you’re likely to find a similar list of plug-ins available.  Most commercial vendors or developer communities should have them by now.

Still, since twiddling with my live websites is NOT my idea of a good time, Kim and I got together on a quiet Friday afternoon when we could concentrate and made sure we had a good back-up of Sherprog.com we could revert to if things went south on us.  But, remarkably, the process was pretty painless.  We went through it the first time very carefully, double checking our progress each step along the way, looking at the website with our desktop browsers and our mobiles, and making sure we were, at least, doing no harm.

You can see the results, which are dramatic, above.

We did actually have some confusion that day and for the next week or so due to interference from another plugin (SuperCache, if you’re curious, which is intended to make the web pages load faster).  But the problem showed up primarily when we tried to switch from the mobile to the regular version of the site and back again, which we didn’t expect a lot of users to try.  We eventually decided to disable SuperCache since we also use another performance optimization layer and decided that mobile-friendly was a lot more important for our simple pages.

As Kim summarized it after she’d gone through it again by herself for Placardapp.com, the steps are just:

1. Login to WordPress on your site as an Administrative user
2. Temporarily turn off any features that are caching your pages so you don’t get old versions as you test.
3. From the Dashboard list on the left, select the Plugins page,
   1. On the page, press the Add New button
   2. Search for ‘term’ WPtouch
   3. When found, press Install Now
4. When the installation is finished, go to the  Installed Plugins  page and find WPtouch
   1. Activate (if not already activated)
   2. Settings – change settings as needed, there are lots of them.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that this free and easy process did not make my two sites completely mobile-friendly.  The free version of WPTouch does not change how the sites look on iPads.  The author of the tool has chosen to market that feature as a very reasonably priced add-on.  ($49 for one site, $99 for up to five sites, as of this writing.)  And I may go back and buy it, but I’m going to give the free version some shake-out time first AND see how WPTouch does on at least one of my more complicated sites before I commit.

If you have questions about our experiment, or you have conversion tales of your own to relate, please leave them as comments!

 

 

 

 

I started writing a post about how easy it was for us to convert our two simplest websites to be mobile friendly.  It was pretty easy and you can see the big difference it makes.  But the details are probably only of interest to folks who have something of a DIYer relationship with their website(s).  If that’s you, check out my How easy was it? write-up.

However, if, like most business people, you had someone else build your website, you’re almost certainly going to have someone else make your mobile-friendly modifications, too.  So for you, the questions are more:  What should I expect, in terms of time and money?  How do I know if the person I’m talking is honest, competent, and going to do a good job?

Yikes, I can’t help you much with that last question.  If you don’t have a good working relationship with a website maintainer, now might be the time to cultivate one.  For me it’s like having a good working relationship with my car mechanic.  I need someone I can trust, someone who won’t talk down to or around me, who will do the work he or she CAN do, on time and right the first time, and who will refer me off to another competent professional when I need, say, body work that they are not equipped to do in-house.

On the other hand, how easy can it be to make your website mobile friendly?  Well, it CAN be very, very easy — taking only an hour or less.  Or, frankly, it can be hard and expensive — maybe involving an almost complete re-implementation.  And it all depends on how your current site was built in the first place.

But let me take some of the mystery out of this by pointing out a few things you might not know:

• Whenever someone accesses your website, your site can and does know an awful lot about that user and, in particular, the browser and device from which she is viewing it.  And the site can tell YOU what it knows.  If you use the free Google Analytics tool, check out the Technology / Browser&OS and Mobile / Overview pages.  (In the last month, of the 246 visits to this Sherprog.com site, 51, that is about 20%, were from mobile devices.  They were about evenly split between iOs and Android devices.  Only 5 visits were from iPads. If you aren’t using some sort of analytics tool, if you aren’t a couple of clicks away from knowing these numbers for your site, solve that problem first and worry about mobile-friendly afterwards.)
• Your website can change its behavior and appearance based on the device and browser.  In fact, all websites do this, all the time.  Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Internet Explorer versus other, more standards-based browsers, has long been all in a day’s work for websites.
• When the site detects a mobile user, it has three options:
1. Do nothing special.  This usually amounts to being mobile-unfriendly although the site may be perfectly acceptable when viewed from a tablet versus a phone.
2. Apply a special ‘theme’ to your site’s content that works better for the mobile user than the standard theme. (Think of a theme as a sort of font, but for your website as a whole, not just the text.)
3. Redirect the whole session to another, slightly different web address, where part or all of your website has been re-implemented to be mobile-friendly.

As you might guess, if you can use option 2, making your website mobile friendly is going to cost a lot less than if you have to use option 3.  For our two simple sites, which are implemented using a very popular content management system, WordPress, and simple themes, it took us a couple of hours to convert the first site and half an hour to do the second, once we knew what we were doing.

We haven’t tried our two more heavily-customized WordPress sites yet.  I’ll report back on that when we get to it.  But I’m hoping that even they can be done in something like 4-8 hours each.

On the other hand, if you have a site that depends a lot on Flash animation, you are probably stuck with a partial or complete website re-write.  Flash doesn’t run on Apple iOs devices such as the iPad and iPhone.  This is probably one reason the number of Flash implementations is declining.  But, as of this writing, Flash is still used on about 25% of all sites.  How much you have to re-implement will be a function of how much Flash you have now.

There can also be other reasons to redirect mobile users and provide them some sort of parallel implementation:

• Make your pages ‘lighter’ so they load faster and eat less of the user’s data plan.
• Provide mobile users more (or less) functionality based on the capabilities of the device or your sense of what the mobile user will / will not want to do when compared with the desktop user.  But be wary of this approach — there is going to be less and less difference between the mobile user and the desktop user over time.
• Direct mobile users to a native app version of your functionality.  This is what the YouTube site does if I access it from my iPad.

If you have a mobile-friendly conversion experience of your own that you are willing to share or you have follow-up questions, please post them as comments.  I’m giving a talk on this topic at the Wyoming Gro-Biz and Idea Expo in a few weeks and could use some feedback on how useful this information is and/or what related questions folks have.

 

 

In the U.S., April is usually thought of as ‘tax time’ since that’s when personal returns are due.  But, for small businesses, January is tax time since we have to get a ton of filings done by the end of the month.  Our own Federal returns aren’t due till March but all the paperwork we produce for others: the W2s for employees, the 1099s for contractors, and many other quarterly or annual reports are due by the end of this month.

I grew up in a family business and remember the bad old days of computing payroll taxes ‘by hand’, looking them up from the tax tables one employee at a time, late into the night, every two-week pay period.   So for the most part, with QuickBooks to back us up, I consider most of our tax reports a little bit nervous-making (Do I have the right numbers?  Am I getting the reporting quarter checked off correctly?  Is that deadline date a post-marked date or a due-there date?) but laughingly easy to actually generate.

However, amazingly to me, there are still a few tax forms that can’t be just printed out on blank paper by QuickBooks.  All of the 109x series (Miscellaneous Income, Interest Income, and the like) come in multi-part forms that have to be TYPED.  So once a year, I drag out the old Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 on which I typed my very first college paper (Europe in Medieval and Early Modern Times team taught then by Charles Wood and David Lagomarsino and, remarkably, still team taught by Lagomarsino and someone), plug it in, and hope that I still have at least enough ribbon to get through one more tax year.

I hate everything about getting out the old beast — it lives behind the foot-rest bar of my desk at home and is so heavy that I have to ask my husband to drag it out of its hidey-hole.  When I hit the power button, though, and it roars to life, I find myself unaccountably fond of it.  Everything about the Smith-Corona is loud —  the idling of the motor, the strokes of the keys, and, especially, the zip-whack of the Power Return button as the carriage grinds back to line up to the starting margin and hits the stop.  But sitting in front of it, going back to the high-stakes key strokes of my typing youth, just feels so . . . familiar.  It’s a lot like driving an old, rutted road back to some place you loved as a kid; not pleasurable exactly but ‘right’ in a deep way.

My own true typewriter love will always be the IBM Selectric.  I actually owned one once but left it behind at Tally Systems when we moved from Vermont to Wyoming.  What was I thinking when I decided to drag along the S-C and leave behind the Selectric?  Probably that, heavy as it is, the S-C was built to be a portable and the Selectric simply demands to live, in state, on a desk of its own.  Even in 1999, I assumed my days of needing any typewriter at all were limited and I couldn’t imagine giving a suitable home to a Selectric.  I’d find a place for it now, though, if I had the chance.

I'm taking an online course on How to teach webcraft and programming to free-range students taught by Greg Wilson, who some of you may know. If you don't know him, you might want to listen to this talk he gave at CUSEC several years ago. Anyone who's ever thought about the world critically will probably get something out of that talk, though it was geared undergraduate software developers.

Our first assignment is to look at these recommendations about best practices to improve student learning and Greg's post about which of these he's managed to apply, then write about how we have or haven't managed to incorporate these ideas into our teaching.

( A story about pencils, 7 recommendations, and a lot of discussion... )

Conclusions?

So, lots of these things work and are common practice in my classroom experience, but not so many as far as mentoring goes. I think a few of them could apply more if I was looking for/creating opportunities for discussion and revision, but the past couple of years I haven't kept close enough tabs on my summer of code students' work to be effective at leading them down those paths. Definitely food for thought! But i feel like some of it, like quizzes, would feel incredibly forced outside of the classroom environment. Plus, repeating stuff just isn't that much fun... but maybe it could be?

Ages ago, a friend was telling me about a role-playing game she was in where she had to level up her Jedi (or maybe it was Sith?) by doing things like making web pages or doing photo editing and taking quizzes on the software she learned. I thought it was interesting that this group of people was clearly trying to help train their members outside of the game while they were training their characters in it, a gamification of life long before I'd ever heard that term (or, perhaps, before the term had been invented, though I do so love the assertion that Weight Watchers with its points is one of the most well-known examples of gamification of life). Anyhow, her game included little photoshop and story writing contests and such that seemed to keep her engaged and interested in her game "assignments" -- I wonder if there would be ways to bring some of that to free-range programmers? We have contests, but not at learner levels. We sort of have ranks as open source developers sometimes (bugs solved, commit access, invited to maintain $foo), but they're often not explicitly defined so it's hard to use them as motivation.

This might be interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that trying to force things like quizzes to work for free-range learners might be like clinging to the pencil as a way of learning.

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The scare quotes are because neither of these things should have been accomplishments at all, since they should have just worked. Since they didn't, though, I'm blogging for posterity with links to the things that helped me solve the problems.

( Short version: I now have 8gb of ram that works, a backup drive that doesn't, a Mailman dev environment that half works, and I kinda hate Apple. )

I'm tired and cranky, but I'm determined to win this... tomorrow.

Also, I made myself cookies, so that's something.

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Once upon a time, there was a blog aggregator for Women in Free Software. Then it broke. Repeatedly.

I found I sort of missed the FOSS Women Planet, so I made myself a new one: http://terri.zone12.com/wifs/

That's currently seeded with the feeds from the original list. I know lots and lots of women who aren't on the original list but who do have public blog feeds, so I may add some from my own reading lists. Meanwhile, if you'd like to be on there, feel free to let me know, and if you also missed the old one, feel free to use mine.

I'm thinking maybe I should get a better url for it and make this more obviously a public thing that others might read, but I don't currently own a suitable domain. Suggestions? It's tempting to make womeninfreesoftware.nowwemustfight.com but I'm pretty sure that's not the impression I want to give.

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Sometimes the city of Ottawa just looks like a painting...




(Albuquerque is looking pretty dull after being in Ottawa for the holidays. Processing photos is making me homesick.)

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Happy new year! Most people try to use the new post of the year to reflect or summarize or plan for the future. I'm going to show you pictures of my incomplete crocheted my little pony. I wanted to be packing, and my mother wants me to figure out how all my taxes are going to work despite not having all that information, but the dog has decided I should do nothing other than sit on the couch with him, so that's what I'm doing.

As I said previously, it's my intention to release this pattern free to the public for a variety of reasons. Taxes are included in these reasons, in fact, so I'm totally thinking about taxes, Mom!

( More in-progress pictures under the cut )

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Update:  22 Jan 2012

I’ve been using STM+ off and on over the holidays and it was always working well.  I took several big photos this morning and they appeared in my inbox very quickly.  And I never did get any support emails or negative comments in the Android Marketplace.

So whatever problem we were having for a while in December seems to have gone away.  Of course, the wise old tech support saying is:  Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves.  So we’ll be monitoring the STM products’ performance carefully.

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I use our two photo sending apps, SnapToMe and SnapToMe Plus, all the time in my own work.  I’m always scribbling something on a whiteboard and needing to save it or show it to someone.  Snap!  And just the other day, Matt and I put together a low-fidelity mockup of a new user interface with sticky notes and needed to send it to a customer for review.  Snap!

In the past week, I’ve had a couple of days where emails from SnapToMe Plus were delayed for up to 24 hours and emailing from SnapToMe simply failed outright.  We’ve narrowed this down to being pretty certainly an issue with our email hosting service and have begun researching alternatives.  But, frankly, it’s Christmas time and we’re also trying to take some dedicated time off to be with our families.

So, please, if you are experiencing problems with one of the SnapTo’s let us know at support@sherprog.com.  We’d like to take our time, understand the problem more thoroughly, and be deliberate in our choice of what service to try next.  But if the products are working badly for a lot of users, we’ll do what we can to accelerate a solution.  Meantime, keep your eye out for an update to your app and, when you see one, please accept it.

Thanks for your patience and support.

ag

For what may be the first time in my life, I have voluntarily purchased 1st gen tech hardware in the form of the Kindle Fire. Normally I enjoy contemplating all the things I'd like to have and then... not buying them. It's almost a zen thing.

Anyhow, point being that I bought the device even though that was pretty much not in character, and I want to talk about the things I like and dislike about it, because I saw some very weird reviews that make it sound like a disaster or a new holy grail, and it is of course neither.

Short version: I like it a lot, and the flaws that seem to bother many reviewers are non-issues for me, but I do have a few places I'd like to see improvement (and I well might over the next year or so!)

( Things I like, things that could be better, things I don't give a fig about, and other thoughts )

In the end, I now have a library book I can play games on, which pretty much meets most of my leisure needs. ;)

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This was originally posted on But Grace, but I don't want my regular blog to wind up devoid of technical content so I'll be crostposting all my posts from there in their entirety, I suspect.

One of the cool things going on at work is some software we have that automates the creation of small bug fixes. We're looking to try it on some more active projects with real bugs, but we need projects with reasonable test case coverage so that the automated system can also ensure that it isn't causing other things to break in making the fix. Basically, we're potentially offering up a bunch of free bugfixes if your open source project has decent test cases. Pretty good deal, I hope.

Open source projects with good test suites

But how do we find software with good test cases? Here's a few I know of off the top of my head:

Open source projects with good test suites

Name/URL	Test suite?	Notes
Firefox	A brief search turns up some automated tests	My fuzzy memory suggests there was more than these...
Gnumeric	Extensive regression tests for each function	The function tests are in .xls spreadsheets, so we could potentially apply them to other spreadsheet software.
SQLite	They claim extensive test coverage	Very promising!
Webkit (Chrome, Safari)	a brief web search turns up regression tests for javascript	I believe the Chromium project has even more tests

Can anyone suggest other software or more details (and better links) on the things I have mentioned already?

Open source routing software

For various reasons, I've been encouraged to try experiments on open source routing software. There's some existing academic literature on the types of bugs found in open source routers, and it seems like our automated patch creation system would be a good fit especially since router bugs often cause huge outages or security problems and having a temporary patch to solve the problem right away could be a huge boon.

My query on twitter generated a nice list of open source router software, but no one seems to know anything about test suites. Here's a table summarizing what I've found thus far:

Open source router software test suite information

Name/URL	Test suite?	Notes
Click	Unknown	Nothing obvious, and given that it's on a university website, I'll be shocked if it has testing. ;)
dd-WRT	Unknown	Nothing obvious in the wiki, but there were lots of hits I haven't investigated.
OpenWRT	Unknown	Clearly there was interest in automated test suites in Jan 2011 but it's unclear to me if these are now around somewhere. Need to look more.
pfSense	No evidence of a test suite	Searching the dev wiki for "test" yields nothing likely, so I'm guessing there isn't one.
Quagga	There is a tests/ directory, but it looks unsuitable	"make test" doesn't work and "make check" pokes a bunch of directories but doesn't seem to do what I need. There's a directory called tests/ in the repository, but I'm not sure what it does. I can run the tests manually, but the output is currently meaningless to me. No one answered my question on #quagga, although another open source friend on #kernel.org suggested that the test suite may have been abandoned.
Tomato	No evidence of a test suite	The web site contains nothing useful, so if there is a test suite, it's likely being provided by someone else.
XORP	There is a tests/ directory, unsure if suitable but look promising	These look promising, but I'm having some build errors and haven't been able to run them yet

You'd think, perhaps, that reasonable test suites for routers would already exist. A generic test suite would be totally sufficient for my needs at the moment. And in fact, I've found a set of routing tests from the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory, but while their tests are well-described, it doesn't look like something we can run locally and repeatedly as we'd need to in order to test the auto-generated patches. I haven't yet found others.

Let's be clear: I don't really care what the router supports in great detail. The important thing for these tests are that there be a good test suite, and preferably a good bug queue so we can grab candidate bugs and bug test cases to try to solve them. Generally speaking, the bugs have been easier to find than the regression tests.

In summary...

I am looking for:

1. More information about router test suites.
2. Updates to my current tables of information. This represents a morning's work, so I'd be shocked if they're perfectly correct.
3. Any open source/free software projects with good test suites (and preferably good bug queues).

Again, the key here is that I need good test suites. I'm most interested in routing software at the moment, but I'm building up a list of alternative ideas if that doesn't pan out, so anything with good automated tests I'll be able to run repeatedly is of potential interest. We've got access to a reasonable amount of computing power, so heavier weight tests are fine as long as they aren't going to take all month to run.

We would love to contribute any fixes we find back to the community, so if you think your project might qualify please get in touch! I think the end result is going to be awesome for all involved: free bug fixes for the project, more impressive real-world validation of our automated patch creation system, and maybe even an academic paper out of it for some of the folk around here.

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I was debating going to barcampabq today, but my head decided it had other ideas, so I've been trying to relax and not aggravate the headache today. So I went to fill in my LibraryThing list, and discovered that it's been so long since I looked at my "recently returned" list from the Ottawa Library that my old stuff has expired. Or maybe it's just that they changed the interface. At any rate, I think I've lost a bunch of books I should have recorded. On the bright side, though, that means I had a perfectly manageable list of books left so here's some reviews from the past month or so.

If you only read one of these, make it the first one. If you read a few more, I recommend The Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld (even though I wasn't as impressed with the 3rd book the 4th made up for it) and Level Up by Gene Luen Yang, which is something special.


Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Gatto

A scathing description of the problems of our current educational system. A good read for any parent, and also for many students, to better understand why some illogical educational decisions only make sense in the context of building compliant workers rather than free thinkers. My only complaint is that Gatto offers homeschooling as a panacea without much deeper discussion into how difficult it can be to produce a great homeschooling environment.

I spent a *lot* of time in school bored out of my tree, a fact which I relayed repeatedly to my poor parents. But I've also had some not-so-great experiences with other people's homeschooling, and lots of experience teaching now... all very interesting put into the perspective of this book. I immediately lent it to my mother and we had some great conversations about it, and what we thought a better solution might look like.


Animal Academy, Vol. 1-2

Cute but not too memorable story of a girl who accidentally winds up enrolled in a school... for animals.


White Cat (Curse Workers) by Holly Black

An interesting world, where some people possess the ability to curse others by touching them, an ability they have been banned from using by the government. Cassel isn't a curse worker, but the rest of his family is, and to fit in he's become an adept con-man. But slowly, he's realizing that the biggest con in his life isn't one he's running...


Red Glove (Curse Workers, Book 2)

Continuing on from where White Cat left off, this book actually focuses some on the politics of being a curse worker. Basically, it comes off as a metaphor for racism, much like mutant abilities are viewed within the x-men. Within the backdrop of political change, Cassel is finding that knowing he is a curse worker has opened a lot of doors for him... opportunities he's not sure he wants and doesn't know how to refuse.



Goblin War by Jim C. Hines

The third (and probably final?) instalment in Jim Hines' books about Jig the Goblin. If you enjoyed the others, you'll enjoy this one, so I won't risk spoiling anything by saying more!


Specials (The Uglies) by Scott Westerfeld

I've been really enjoying the series, but Specials felt at times a bit like it was repeating the other books: how many times is Tally going to have to recreate herself in nearly the same ways? It felt a little less creative than the previous books, but they set the bar high enough that it's still well worth reading!


Skim by Mariko Tamaki

A bittersweet story of a young girl trying to find out who she is, set with a backdrop of a school coping with suicide, the friends learning about wicca, and a budding romance... weightier issues than you see in many teen novels, but treated in a heartfelt way that lets the light shine through and doesn't let it get depressing even when sad.



Extras (The Uglies) by Scott Westerfeld

Extras starts off in a different city from those we saw in previous books, and correspondingly shows a very different societal structure (and totally avoids the problem of the last book, Specials, which felt a little too familiar). This foreign city is strangely familiar to anyone who's used Facebook or other modern social media: a city based on the economy of how many people are tuning in to your feeds. So why are a group of girls with low rankings so darned fascinating?


Level Up by Gene Luen Yang


An excellent story of parental expectations, medical school, and video games. Not to mention some pesky little angels... I highly recommend this one and don't want to say too much lest I spoil anything!



Someday's Dreamers Volume 1 by Norie Yamada

Cute and bittersweet stories of a witch whose job it is to help people with their dreams.


Princess in Love (The Princess Diaries, Vol. 3) by Meg Cabot

Fun and fluffy, and Anne Hathaway's reading does add something to the audiobook. Sure, it's horrifically stereotypical teen problems and longing set to the backdrop of being a princess in new york, but... if you didn't want that, why are you reading volume 3 of the princess diaries?



Rules of the Red Rubber Ball: Find and Sustain Your Life's Work by Kevin Carroll

I find after a while that all these "do what you love!" inspirational books blur into one meaningless message of "go get it! don't let anyone stop you!" but this one stands out because it manages to convey the same message concisely, and the graphic design and layout of the book make it match the playful message of the red rubber ball. If you want a cute little bit of inspiration that you can tuck into your pocket and will smile at over and over, this is exactly the book you need.


Ultimate X-Men Vol. 4: Hellfire & Brimstone

More of what I'd expect from the series. I didn't like the art as much in this one, though.


Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker by Debbie Stoller

Great, clear instructions for a variety of stitches, pattern reading, and techniques, combined with a set of fun patterns to use them. A good beginner guide or reference manual for the more advanced who want to try some new techniques.

I actually liked this enough that I'll consider buying a copy for my own reference (as usual, this was the library copy)... It's very easy to look up stitches on the internet, but I prefer diagrams to video a lot of the time, and knowing I have a book would be nice.


How to Wash a Cat

Perhaps because I read this while sick, I found it a little overly descriptive and sometimes hard to follow as things bounce from recollections of her uncle to present day. I felt early on that it was clearly meant for people who love cats a lot more than I do. That said, even in my illness I pressed on and enjoyed the sometimes ridiculous characters and gold rush mystery in spite of my confusion with the prose.


Ultimate X-Men Vol. 5: Ultimate War by Mark Millar

I read x-men primarily for the character-driven stories, which made this volume, heavy on the action, a bit of a disappointment.

Also... this marks the last of the volumes that my library has, aside from, inexplicably, vol 10. So now I'm torn: do I buy the other ones and either keep or donate them to my library, or do I find some other way to get my x-men fix? Still looking for a good digital buy/borrow mechanism for this.

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Obviously, I haven't really kept up with book reviews since my move/thesis/conference/breakin/unexpected internet fame/etc., but rest assured that I've still been reading! Anyhow, here's reviews of a couple of books I got via LibraryThing's early reviewers program:


Dragons of the Watch: A Novel by Donita K. Paul
As a fantasy, this succeeds brilliantly. Watching how Ellie (and her goat, Tak) react to the fantastical world in which they find themselves is incredibly fun. The story of adventure and compassion even in the face of those who seem at first to be enemies is surprising and adorable.

As an allegory, however, I'm less certain. There's a clever little "play within the play" moment where we are reminded that fantastical stories can serve as ways to teach lessons... but while some of the parts of the story that revolve around the God, Wulder, fit beautifully into the tale of self-discovery, I have to admit that by the end of the story I felt like some of the references were a bit bolted-on.

I still definitely recommend the book and fully enjoyed it despite this, but beware that you may feel like the religious aspect becomes a bit heavy-handed towards the end.


Skye Object 3270a by Linda Nagata
As one of the other reviewers said, this is reminiscent of great teen science fiction such as Monica Hughes' books. Think Devil on My Back or The Keeper of the Isis Light. I loved those books: a world that is both believable and alien, teenagers who are finding their place in the world, and an adventure as they stretch to learn more. I found myself caught up in the mysteries, and wanting more when it finished. I'm looking forwards to reading Linda Nagata's other books!

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Should you be investing in your website to make it more ‘mobile friendly’?

The simple answer is undoubtedly YES.  The market for smartphones and tablets is exploding.  A study on cell phone usage by the Pew Research Center, published in the spring of 2011, stated: “One third of American adults (35%) own a smartphone of some kind, and these users take advantage of a wide range of their phones’ capabilities. . . . eight in ten use their phone to go online.”  By October of the same year, a Nielson study claimed, while “only [italics mine] 43 percent of all US mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone . . . the vast majority of those under the age of 44 now have smartphones. In fact, 62 percent of mobile adults aged 25-34 report owning smartphones. And among those 18-24 and 35-44 years old the smartphone penetration rate is hovering near 54 percent.”

But how bad is your site right now?  What do you need to do to make it better?  And what’s it going to cost in time and money?

I’ve been arguing to friends and colleagues that needing to answer these questions was a GREAT excuse for buying one of the hot new tablet computers (iPad, Nook, or KindleFire just to name a few) as a legitimate business expense.  And I still think that’s a good idea — the only way to begin to understand the mobile user is to try out the world from his or her perspective.  If you don’t have a smartphone yourself then a tablet can be a great substitute — with no expensive data plan driving up the long term price.

But, in the meantime, here’s a great resource that popped into my inbox today.  It’s a website that can SHOW you, right now, for free, what your current site looks like on a smartphone and help you evaluate how much or little trouble you are in.  The site, HowToGoMo.com seems to be a Google offshoot.  It’s got a fair amount of easily digestible why’s and how’s but the coolest bit is the site tester page.  It takes a minute to process the URL you give it but then it shows you exactly what your site will look like on a smartphone!

If you are lucky, chances are your site looks ok, just very small, as mine does above — not pretty but at least zoomable.  If you are not lucky (read:  your site uses Flash animation), you may find the simulated phone screen just . . . sad and empty.  (Yes, that image is from a real test of a real, production website.  A silly, fun page on a business website that just happens to use Flash animation to provide an online, Mr.-Potato-Head-like game:  http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html.)

I’ll be writing more about this topic over the next several weeks as I prepare to give a talk at the next Wyoming Idea Expo.

 

 

 

I got a really interesting query today that boiled down to, "How much math do you need to write code?"

The short answer to this is, "Not that much" or perhaps "it depends on what you want the code to do." But here's part of what I actually wrote back:

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To be honest, the level of math required to write code is pretty small. A grade school understanding is often sufficient; there's a reason we can teach 7 year olds to program! Modern programming languages are much less math-oriented: I once spent an afternoon teaching my then 11 year old sister and her friends how to write dynamic database-driven websites, and the only math they used was to add up the scores on the "what animal are you most like?" quizzes they wanted to write.

The math in computer science comes a lot later: for deeper analysis of algorithms and running time, we use algebra and mathematical proofs in an academic setting. But... to tell the truth, relatively few programmers need or use this kind of deeper understanding in their day-to-day jobs. And in my experience teaching students, many people find this stuff easier to learn by doing, so they only really begin to grasp it *after* they have gotten comfortable writing programs.

In short: you probably have all the math skills you need to write code, and if you decide you want to do more hardcore CS later, it'll be easier to learn the math along the way anyhow!

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There's some nuance there that I didn't really tease out -- the deeper understanding of algorithms and program behaviour is what characterizes the real "science" out of computer science. And maybe the world would be a better place if more programmers did actually use deeper analysis in their day-to-day jobs. But you don't have to be an academic-style computer scientist to write code! Still, it's a very interesting question, given that historically programming actually did require a lot more math, and our perceptions and stereotypes haven't really kept up with the reality of the field.

Perhaps it's time for me to write another presentation? ;)

(For context: my old slideshow about women, computing and math got included in this TechCrunch post about Racism and Meritocracy, so I've been getting a lot of mail, including the one that spawned this post.)

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Lots of people have gotten in touch with me over the past few days, but for those of you who might want to know what's up but not want to overwhelm me with more questions, here's some answers:

1. John made it in on Sunday night (after more excitement with his flights than we'd hoped, but he made it in only an hour late), so I am not alone in the house. (And, in fact, the house is rarely empty as he's working from there.)

2. We have had some repairs done to the windows including the one used to gain entry to the house. The landlords have been really great about it all and have a long list of further upgrades that will be done once the immediate stuff is out of the way, including motion-sensor activated outdoor floodlights, padlocks for the exterior gates, etc.

3. We've got an appointment for an assessment with an alarm company next week so we'll see what additional measures they recommend.

4. John has updated his insurance to ensure that it covers all of my stuff in the case of a break-in where theft is the goal.

5. For those concerned, no, I'm not going to run out and buy a gun no matter what the police recommended. Given my complete lack of expertise with firearms, I fully understand that having one in the house would likely make me less safe at this stage. That said, knowledge is power, so I am going to learn to operate a firearm even if I ultimately decide not to go that route.

6. I still want a dog, though. ;) (And yes, this is a big, long-term decision, so John and I will have to figure that out together. But my vote's still for a dog.)

7. I am really, honestly, fine. As I've said elsewhere, this would have been a lot more scary if I had ever been seriously scared during the encounter, but the guy was really more odd than threatening. I reserve the right to change my mind about this (I've been told by several people that it's fairly normal to be much more disturbed after the fact) but for now everything's well in hand.

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Short version: A guy broke into my house while I was there. He wasn't very threatening, but he attempted to hug/grope me and only left my home once he could hear that I was on the line with 911 dispatch. I'm fine and am staying with friends for tonight now that the police are done at my house. John is flying in tomorrow anyhow, so he can help me deal with stuff then.

Long version below (and I can't figure out how to put in a cut on the beta create entries page which I'm using... ugh). It is rambly as, you know, it's been one heck of a weird night.

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On the bright side, my brother tells me his friend got mugged at gunpoint his first night after moving to NYC, so at least it took me longer to get to my harsh introduction to the severe sketchiness of the USA.

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Honestly, I think I make more resolutions after GHC than I do at new year's. I'm always so inspired!

Thing 1: Pushing the development of the GNU Mailman UI

Two things came together for me at the conference:

1. One thing I heard frequently while working the free and open source software booth is that there are plenty of folk interested in getting involved with open source, but they're not sure where to start.

2. I came home with a suitcase full of paper prototypes and pictures from the Mailman 3.0 part of the codeathon for humanity on Saturday. I was looking at spending my evenings digitizing them and turning them into functional prototypes.

So... I asked for help! Transcribing paper prototypes isn't the most glamorous of work, but it's a great place for a beginner to start, and given that we're hoping to have a Mailman 3.0 release as soon as possible, new contributors would have a chance to ramp up to doing real code commits very quickly. Plus they'd be able to see their code go out and be used in the real world sooner rather than later!

I posted to the Systers list knowing I wasn't the only one feeling the post GHC rush, and I posted to the Mailman list knowing we had a would-be contributor who wanted to help.

What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have talked to NINE volunteers in less than 24 hours. How awesome is that? And most of them are women as well!

Now I have the problem of making sure I have enough for everyone to do, but with a variety of skill levels I'm sure we won't have any trouble finding stuff for everyone. I'm so excited, and I hope they are too!

Associated goals:
- Allocating more of my time to serious Mailman development.
- Getting more women involved in open source.
- Improving the usability of Mailman 3.0
- Speeding up development of the Mailman 3.0 UI.
- Doing some teaching/mentoring since I love it but won't be doing it at work this year.

Thing 2: e-textiles

The first thing I did after I got home from GHC11 was sleep. But when I woke up in the middle of the night, the second thing I did was order stuff from SparkFun. :)

I've ordered a couple of simple e-textiles kits and the goal will be to play with them. I made an awesome monster at the GHC e-textiles workshop and I was eager to do more. The end goal is to build a set of lights into my new coat that respond to my movement in some way (See the tentative wishlist), but for now I'm going to make a lit cuff/armband for walking at night and experiment with the neat little aniomagic chip 'cause it looks like so much fun!

Associated goals:
- meeting more people in the local community
- actually becoming a member of a hacklab to support my projects
- making it safer for me to walk home in my beautiful-but-not-visible new black coat
- experimenting with e-textiles
- doing some more hardware-oriented projects
- making sure I had a project that would take me away from the computer

Not-quite-a-Thing 3: Not biting off more than I can chew

A common theme at GHC is reminding people that we have to really be careful about time management so that we don't get overloaded, so I'm choosing those two things that cover lots of my personal goals, and I'll aim to do them well and save the other things I want to try for later. Wish me luck!

I'd love to hear how other people are using what they learned at GHC11!

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People often comment on the number of ribbons on my badge, and I always tell them that I get a lot of them because I like volunteering at GHC. Volunteering every year keeps me with a nice balance of meeting new people and having an excuse to sit and chat with friends who I met volunteering in previous years. Plus, badge ribbons are just fun:




My day started with an orientation for Hoppers, and I was not nearly awake enough to take pictures of that.

From there, I headed to the Free and Open Source Software booth, which is kinda unusual among the booths at GHC11 in that we're a collection of people working on completely unrelated projects, and you'll get to hear about completely different things if you come back a few hours later. Plus, some of the coolest and most inspirational women I know are working at the booth. One of the things about open source is that it attracts a lot of people who are willing to just Get Things Done and who are able to not only get the technical details right, but also able to organize their own time and other people's to make sure things happen. If you went to Jo's session in the afternoon and realized you want to be known as the sort of person who really gets stuff done, you should be looking to these people for tips!




Then I moved on to the PhD Forum. Here's pictures of the lovely presenters, but I'm too tired to dig out my session notes so I'll just suggest you mosey on over to Valerie's blog about the session.




There's a blur of meeting people and chatting and getting caught up between every session. It's awesome!

I also got a chance to meet with the other community volunteers, yet another illustrious crew of smart awesome women who are passionate about using social media and all our other tech tools to share the experience of being at GHC11 online. Anyone who comes to GHC11 and takes a picture, writes a blog post, tweets, and participates in our online communities can be part of our team! If you want to know how to contribute your stuff to the online communities, just ask!




A few people were willing to humour me today by playing "real life angry birds" with me at the open source booth. I crocheted a bunch of birds to play with, and used it as an excuse to take pictures as a community volunteer. Lots of people have asked if they can have one, and I wish I had time to crochet them for everyone, but alas, I'd get a hand cramp long before I finished! However, please stop by the booth and play with them and take pictures over the next few days, just remember to leave them for the next visitors.




Next up, I went to Jo Miller's session on building your personal brand. Once again, I suggest you visit Valerie's blog to learn more about Jo's talk. I'm going to echo what someone I talked to today said and point out that the neat thing about Jo is how she really motivates this stuff. Brand-building sounds like marketing or startup culture speak to me, but she had a great story about a women she met who felt she was "the best-kept secret of the company" -- but you don't want to be a secret! I may write a post about this later, but for now, read Valerie's. :)

Towards the end of the session they did a speed-networking thing, and I totally made the rookie mistake of leaving my business cards in my purse when we got up to stand on this weird grid thing to facilitate moving and networking. The most amusing moment for me was when we got over and everyone was too busy networking to listen to the instructions on how we should network!





Then it was back to the open source booth for me, where I got to talk to more super cool people and play more angry birds:




I talked about how open source is awesome when you're in grad school. I talked about to get internships at open source companies or through google summer of code (we loooove students!) I talked about what drew me to GNU Mailman (short answer: technology that helps build communities and fun developers to work with!) And I got to hear about people's backgrounds and worries and projects and how their companies use open source software.

Then my final job of the evening was as a Hopper working the registration desk. I figured after the bustle of the open source booth, working a quiet registration desk would be boring... But I sat down next to Kate and had a blast talking about Margaret Atwood, working in technology while wearing a skirt or even a suit, our (relatively) new jobs, and everything else we could think of for a few hours. It was great!




And then back to the free and open source booth where I got to sit and chat with Mel who I admit I probably fangirled all over because I love the way she's been blogging about viewing academia from an open source perspective, and she is just totally one of those people who always seems to be doing cool things and thinking about them in insightful ways and I was so very exited to meet her. Hopefully i didn't talk her ear off too much, given how tired we all were by this point!

When the show floor closed up, it was time to head back to the hotel, and now I've stayed up too late processing photos and blogging. Oops! Tomorrow's 7:45am breakfast meeting with my security panel is going to feel very early!

But thankfully, you don't have to get up before 7:45 to talk about the panel; you can all just come see the finished product at 11:30am-12:30pm in B113-115 where I'm on a panel about online security for technical women. Hope to see you there!

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I arrived in Portland a few days early to play tourist. Here's two cool things I took pictures of that I wanted to share with other GHC11 attendees!



My friend Jen (@jenred) took me out before GHC11 for some hiking and beautiful views. It's amazing the sort of natural beauty you can find not far from the city! I looooved the waterfalls, since I just moved to the desert and damp Portland just seems extra lush and beautiful.




A cool thing to do at lunch or after the conference: Take the Tram up to the top of the ridge. Lots of great space for the view of the city and photo opportunities, and it only costs $4 for the tram + $2 for the trolley to get you there. (It's just past the edge of the free zone, sadly!) You can definitely walk the last stop, but it's a bit noisy with construction so I just paid the $2 and then used it as an excuse to ride the streetcar loop to see the area. So pretty with the fall leaves changing!

More about the tram here: www.portlandtram.org/

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My stuff arrived today! I'd claim that my house is full of boxes, but the house is so large that the only area I really need to unpack with any urgency is the kitchen (and even then, I had enough space to make lunch without any problem). There was some very minor damage to a couple of things in moving, but nothing unfixable or that I care about.

I'm really happy with Atlas Moving, actually. We wound up playing an inordinate amount of phone tag, which was stressful, and last minute confusion about my immigration paperwork, but they carefully helped walk me through the import paperwork (which would have taken me forever on my own) and they got my stuff here with little damage, and the guys even helped me move the futon I'd been sleeping on into the living room and offered to help do things like set up my air conditioner (sadly I had to decline, as the window it's going into is currently sealed shut for the winter). The final bill was under $3k, which is impressive given that my first few quotes from other companies were well over $5k for the cross-border move. They'll probably be the first people I call when my contract here is done and it's time to move on.

I'm now officially started at my new job. At least, as far as the contract is concerned. There's still a fair bit of paperwork and running around to be done to make sure I have keys and can be paid.

I have a US bank account. Which would be a lot more exciting if paycheques were going into it, but at least I can pay my bills online now. (Although getting to that point was a hilarious adventure of "wait, you used the wrong fake SSN -- we gave you a different one!")

Despite the fact that I've only unpacked 10 boxes thus far, I'm feeling like maybe, just maybe, I'm really settled here.

... just in time for me to fly to Portland for GHC11. ;)

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