techiturn

Check out my shiny new Moo cards!

Front: pink background, RTFM in large white letters
Back: White background, pink text that says the wiki – geekfeminism.wikia.com – the blog – geekfeminism.org

I kinda love Moo cards. They’re just so darn cute. I hadn’t even finished up using my old set when I ordered a new set. Then in the spirit of creation I decided to make these ones up too.

The idea for them came to me after LCA had a Haecksen miniconf which included its second “Allies workshop” for men. I had quite a few conversations with men about topics related to “women in tech”. Then a couple of weeks ago Free Software Melbourne had a discussion on the topic encouraging women. I was kind of leery of it being horrible but I went for an hour early on (double-booked with my book club :)) and it wasn’t, I’m glad to say.

But the discussion at both LCA and FSM contrasts sharply with the discussion at AdaCamp, an unconference organised by the Ada Initiative shortly before LCA, or even the Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne planning session that I went to this evening. It’s not just that the conversation is different when I have it with women; it’s different when I have it with people that have bothered to do any reading about the topic at all.

It’s like if you went to a Python meetup and all people wanted to talk about was “whoa, significant whitespace!” “No truly private class variables!” “Isn’t developing in an interpreted language awesome?!” “How about that integer division, huh?”

At some point it’s nice to have a discussion where those things are a given. GF wiki page Feminism 101 discussions says they “can be exhausting and demoralising for feminists and allies”. I would add they can just be repetitive and boring and for that reason, frustrating.

Nobody knows everything about everything or even anything about everything. I’m not trying to say men should never talk to women in tech about issues regarding women in tech. But what I am saying is if you are interested enough to take part in such conversations, maybe you should be interested enough to subscribe to a blog or cruise around a wiki occasionally. Look, I’ll even start you off: Elementary mistakes in feminist discussion.

“RTFM” is pretty much the geek way of saying you have a responsibility to educate yourself which I have heard many times in relation to social justice topics. I like to think the bright pink takes the edge off the abruptness of the (implied) message.

I took my cards to the GGD tonight which was hosted at inspire9 (I totally see what all the fuss around these folks is about) and happened to meet Desi McAdam, who founded DevChix! How amaze! I was stoked to be able to give her some and since I’ve done that, I thought I should blog about it. And if you run into me sometime just ask me for some cards if you feel like you’d like to distribute some. :)

Last written in 104 days ago, huh? This blog isn’t dead, it’s just been… hibernating.

Well, since I last wrote about LCA, it’s well and truly finished. As I mentioned in that post, I gave 2 talks and a lightning talk on Monday, the first day of miniconfs, so now there are videos. Distributed wikis (40 min), An approach to natural language generation (28 min), and Neurosexism (10 min).

Shortly after LCA I moved house, and my new house was flooded, and one casualty was my desktop tower, which was sitting on the floor. (I assume the hard drive is probably OK, but since hooking my keyboard and monitor up to my netbook, I haven’t been so motivated to check.) So that was a big drama that was fairly disruptive (but my life has been back to normal for some months now).

Anyway at the moment there are twothree geeky activities that I am actively pursuing.

The first is attending Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne (see also Meetup, Facebook). They are being driven by Jes Lowry, who has done a great job at securing a suitable venue and being really dedicated about having events consistently, and even beyond that organising a really diverse set of events designed to interest as many different sets of girl geeks as possible. So if you are a geeky woman in Melbourne, I really recommend coming along sometime.

The second is an attempt to start doing some Zookeepr hacking. Zookeepr is the conference software used by LCA, written in Python, uses the Pylons framework. Open source, natch. There was a code sprint-style event in mid April which was very useful as I was able to lean over the shoulder of someone else learning, and get an overview of the system components and how they came about and so on. Previously I was only familiar with the public/registrant components of the website, and the papers reviewing section (having been on the papers ctte for a couple of years). Naturally there is heaps of admin stuff that I had never seen, or even thought about existing. Just before the code sprint, the codebase was moved to Github, so learning enough Git to get by is also, well, overdue.

Sidenote: Github is great, right, so why is their Issues system so rubbish? One thing I like to do when exploring a new project is poke around the bugtracker, try and make order from the chaos. Like assign tags/categories, fix tags, make new tags. Re-write a bug title/description to be more precise or explanatory. All that kind of stuff. Seems impossible if you are not a project admin in Github. One area Launchpad beats Github hands down, then, is in the issue tracking.

My first attempted task is going to be working on a script for automated deployment. I’m going to try it in Fabric, being familiar with that from my workplace. Using Fabric seems quite common in Django-land, but I haven’t found many (anyone?) talking about using it with a Pylons project. I’m not sure if I should try and figure out why that is, or not.
Apart from that I would like to look at the testing, roles/ACLs, papers reviewing workflow-ish stuff, setting up a plain default theme and online demo instance, docs… OK that’s enough. :)

Finally I am making some progress in the world of Arduino. After LCA2010 I was inspired to buy a starter Arduino kit, and a Rainbowduino. However what the Rainbowduino offers in shiny, it completely and utterly lacks in beginner-friendly documentation. So after I bought it I tried to figure out how to use the Seeedstudio library to program it, but mostly failed, and then was rather stuck. So it all sat in a box for a long time for Another Day.

Then a few months ago, Andy Gelme came and spoke at GGD Melbourne , and brought lots of toys. :) He encouraged us to come and get involved in the hackerspace. One of the other women who attended was interested in going along, and eventually we coordinated enough to go along to the weekly Tuesday workshops a couple of times. Our timing was not great as most attendees were busily working on their project for the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge. However I did some poking around and still made some small progress.

One of my initial problems has been being able to successfully send programs to the Rainbowduino board. The recommendations on the web are to do it via another Arduino board. However I would often get an ‘avrdude’ error, which Google shed little light on. Last week Andy spent some time to sit down with me and suggested that the chip on my Arduino board may be getting the way, and intercepting my program instead of faithfully passing it onto the surrogate Rainbowduino board. (That’s my impression of what’s going on. :)) So he suggested using a FTDI board instead of an Arduino board as the messenger… which unequivocally worked! Success!

So on the basis of ordering one of these from Little Bird Electronics, I picked up a couple of other useful bits as well:

(click image to view on Flickr for annotations)

The FTDI board is connected to the computer via miniUSB, which I already have a cable for, and to the Rainbowduino via jumper cables (there may be some soldering this week to make a connector thing suitable for my Rainbowduino… ooh-err!).

Anyway in cursing the poor Seeedstudio documentation for the hundredth time, I reflected that I had not picked the gentlest introduction to Arduino by choosing a Rainbowduino. I thought, maybe there is something else I could use that could help me get a grip on I2C and so on before I worry about the Rainbowduino specifically. With a short bit of poking around I found the BlinkM, which is a “smart” multi-colour LED that has enough brains to run Arduino programs as a stand-alone thing. I’m not about to do that but I think it’s reasonably analogous to the Rainbowduino.

And thankfully, the docs are EXCELLENT.

So – progress, it’s happening.

O HAI, LCA2011!

Monday. No less than 7 miniconfs: Open Programming (more programming/developer focused), Freedom in the cloud, Southern Plumbers (kernel/low-level), The Business of Open Source, Multimedia + Music, Haecksen (LinuxChix) and Arduino.

The weather is really lovely. The humidity is OK considering I spent the past five days in Emerald (acclimatising! just like a tennis player :)) and, uh, the fact that we spend nearly all day inside.

I missed the opening and the first sessions because I was stressing over the three talks I gave today. One of them was a lightning talk, sure, but it was a well-prepared one nonetheless! First was An approach to automatic text generation in the Open Programming Languages miniconf (my “work talk”), then Distributed wikis (slides) in Freedom in the Cloud, and finally a lightning talk called Neurosexism (a kind of book review of Delusions of Gender ; slides) in Haecksen. (I will publish links to video when it comes online, and slides for the work talk if I get permission. :)) I got positive feedback on all of them which was nice.

Whew! I was happy that by afternoon tea, they were all over and I could relax and enjoy the rest of the conference.

I had to brush off quite a few people today to say “I need to work on my next talk… catch up with me later, OK?” I hope they actually do. :) It’s great to catch up with people – this is my fourth LCA. There have also been some nice surprises seeing people I didn’t expect to attend.

Then it was off to Red Hat offices for a Girl Geek Dinner. Which was very nice but hunger and fatigue gave me trouble keeping up with socialising.

Finally some tidbits gleaned from the interwebs –

• http://test.followtheflow.org/m/ – a mobile-friendly schedule. Shiny! By Ryan Stuart.
• Andrew takes exceptionally pretty photographs (like the one at top). Very lovely portraits.

PS. There is a planet. Textpattern is deficient in providing tag-specific feeds, so if you happen to have a blog feeding into the planet, feel free to include a link to this post for me…!

I have spent the last couple of weeks immersed in a new operating system – Android OS. After years of reasoning to myself that “my phone works fine, it doesn’t need an upgrade”, I started reasoning to myself that “I work in IT and revealing this phone is bordering on laughable, Android is a significant development platform and it’s open source”. The Nokia 3315 and its sibling the 3310 are not so much last year’s model as last decade’s model – the Nokia 3310 was first released in 2000! (I don’t think my particular phone is that old, but I do think it is only the second mobile I’ve ever owned.)

So now I have a Samsung Galaxy S. I don’t know if there are official “generations” of mobile phones, but I’m going to guess this might be like jumping from the Middle Ages to modern day.

Comparing the functionality was very interesting. Would you believe there are some functions my Nokia 3315 had that my new phone does not have? First among them is the fact that if you set an alarm and turn it off, it doesn’t wake up again. Phones since, well, the Middle Ages, have managed to do that. It occurs to me now that there is probably an “enhanced alarm clock” app somewhere I should be using instead.

Another thing is that the 3315 has a physical light. But hey, there’s an app for that. And the new phone holds up OK:

As for the core functionality of making and receiving phone calls, I’m still getting used to new the phone, but the physical design of the old one is certainly better. I recently read The Design of Everyday Things and I guess those ideas about form have been in the back of my head as I get used to the new phone.

Worse:

• Battery life.
• The new phone’s sound seems worse (I also switched from Telstra to Optus, which might be a factor).
• The new phone gets uncomfortably warm after a short conversation (somewhat mitigated by a protective case, although the old phone needed no such thing).
• The new phone is more uncomfortable to press against one’s ear, due to the size of it.
• The numpad never disappeared in the middle of a call with the old phone. :)
• My old phone never had mute, and so there was no danger of me accidentally enabling it with my ear in the middle of a call.

Better:

• Speaker phone!!
• I have the option of calling people with Skype (haven’t actually tried this yet).
• Caller history, favourites, contacts automagically imported from le Googs and le ‘Book. (My “living in the future” moment was when I saw the calendar app had imported everyone’s birthdays from Facebook. Truly useful.)

The only other function my old phone really had was SMS messaging.
Worse:

• It annoys me a little that I only see the character count when I get near the limit, but it’s not the end of the world.

Better:

• Picture messaging. ><
• Faster to type, I think. Even though it’s an on-screen keyboard, Swype seems pretty impressive. I don’t see any entries on damnyouautocorrect.com from Swype-enabled phones.¹)
• The “conversation/history” view! Really a nice improvement.

Basically phone calls and battery life are worse, and everything else is significantly improved. It’s kinda interesting that what was nominally the core function of a mobile phone, to conduct phone calls, is so side-lined now. Of course, for people who still value that, there’s always John’s Phone.

¹ damnyouautocorrect.com is hilarious, but also a fascinating look at the variety of spellings and words that text prediction systems need to cope with. A lot of the mistakes come from attempts at onomatopoeic spellings, like “whoooooa”, or names or mis-spellings. Still, if you are designing such a system, it seems like it might worth putting in something to stop “a call” auto-correcting to “anal” and, well, anything auto-correcting to penis, vagina or dick. Because, AWKWARD.

I recently bought a WikiReader and as I am about to visit Shanghai I am keen to load up the Chinese Wikipedia. WikiReader also offers English Wiktionary and English Wikiquote, and no less than 13 other language editions of Wikipedia.

WikiReader takes microSDHC cards and they are freaking tiny. My WikiReader came with a 4Gb card and to fit multiple wikis on you would need more space than that, so at least 8Gb. I also needed a card reader to be able to put data on the card (my camera only takes regular SD cards and I don’t have a smartphone yet…). JB Hifi has a card reader for $25 (Soniq QMU62RB) and Officeworks has a 8Gb microSDHC card for $35. The 16Gb card is $75 which is pretty amazing when you remember the original price of this device is $100.

So plugging in my original 4Gb card, I find it looks like this:

The root directory.

The “enpedia” subdirectory.

The WikiReader runs on Forth. According to a page on the GitHub site, *.bmf files are fonts, *.elf are executables and *.4th *.4mu are “Forth related”.

OK, so now to creating my own update. I downloaded all the files I wanted from the update page and then went about unzipping them. This wasn’t as straight-forward as I would have liked, as I am not very familiar with 7-zip and it seems its Linux tools are not as good as tar.

To get 7z, on Ubuntu you need to install p7zip-full. Initially I was misled into installing just p7zip, which provides a utility called p7zip. However p7zip is, uh, low on utility:

brianna@brianna-desktop:~$ p7zip -h
Usage: /usr/bin/p7zip [-d] [-h|--help] [file]

    -h print this help
    -d decompress file

For one thing it just wilfully destroys any directory structure the zip might have had. It also freaks out about “multi-volume archives”, which is apparently what five files called enpedia-20100622.7z.001, enpedia-20100622.7z.002, enpedia-20100622.7z.003, enpedia-20100622.7z.004 and enpedia-20100622.7z.005 constitute. This seems to be a known bug.

brianna@brianna-desktop:~$ p7zip -d testzhpedia-20100612.7z.001 
/usr/bin/p7zip: testzhpedia-20100612.7z.001: unknown suffix -- ignored

I initially got around this by renaming my *.7z.001 to just be *.7z. This seemed to work, except for the enpedia ones.

Note, 7z doesn’t have a problem:

brianna@brianna-desktop:~$ 7z x testzhpedia-20100612.7z.001 

7-Zip 9.04 beta  Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Igor Pavlov  2009-05-30
p7zip Version 9.04 (locale=en_AU.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: testzhpedia-20100612.7z.001
[...]
Everything is Ok

Folders: 1
Files: 42
Size:       471599864
Compressed: 462147500

See? The moral of the story is, p7zip is a waste of time.

When I did get 7z, I still had a problem, in that I could unzip the .001 file, but it wouldn’t touch the others, complaining Error: Can not open file as archive even if I renamed them to just *.7z. Then I got the idea that I should cat them all together, and the resulting file would be a valid *.7z that I could unzip. I think this is what I did, and I think it worked. However afterwards I wrote to the WikiReader support address and briefly explained the process I’d taken, and they replied

There’s no need to pull out the big cat gun :) Just install 7-zip and extract the first (*.7z.001) file and 7-zip will handle the rest.

Seems kinda magic to me… I don’t know if this is some standard feature of compression programs I’ve never run into before, or just a special trick 7-zip has. Can anyone shed some light there?

Anyway whatever I seemed to work because I put my card back in my WikiReader and… voila!

Before you type anything in the search, you can touch a “globe” icon to come to this screen, and then pick what project you want to search in. The two Chinese lines refer to different input methods.

The WikiReader is probably even better for reading Chinese than for English, because Chinese is more compact. Note the arrow in the top right – when you touch it, it shows/hides links to this same article in other languages on your WikiReader. They have preserved interwiki links! Bless their cotton socks. <3