Brenda Wallace: who are you people?
i'm curious who is reading my blog.
How did you find me? What are you looking for? How many gadgets do you have on your person?
Brenda Wallace: convoluted paths.
I do this alot with my palm:
1. take photos with DSLR
2. put camera card into palm
3. send photo by email
This is the only method i've found for getting photos from my camera into my ipodtouch so i can email them..
1. take photo with DSLR
2. photos saves to Eye.fi
3. Eye.fi connect to wifi, uploads to https://eye.fi
4. the eye.fi server pushes to flickr
5. I go to my flickr account with my ipod
6. Save photo from safari
7. Send photo my email
alas this requires being online with wifi (the final email step queues for later sending on both palm and ipod)
Brenda Wallace: Wellington event hosts free software advocate Richard Stallman
Some shameless self promotion by me:
Free software advocate Richard Stallman is in New Zealand for a limited time to speak about copyright and share his experiences establishing the world’s first free user operating system.
A pioneer in ICT circles, US-based Stallman controversially started a movement based around sharing source code back in the 1970s when programming was still in its infancy and launched the development of the GNU operating system (www.gnu.org) in 1984.
Coined ‘Free Software’, Stallman’s aim was to allow the freedom to copy GNU and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small – unlike single-user commercial operating systems. The GNU/Linux system is now used on tens of millions of computers around the world.
For his efforts, Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.
Presenting alongside Richard Stallman at Gadgets, Games and Geeks is Brenda Wallace (Catalyst). Exhibitors include Snapper, Bookhabit, Mukuna, Magnum Mac, Altspace, 920, Vision, Tentacle Media, Filibuster Films, Xero, Epic Beer, and Tone Magazine.
The Gadgets, Games and Geeks Expo is happening Wednesday 13 August, 2008 at the Wellington Town Hall Councl Chamber. The Richard Stallman seminar runs from 2.30pm - 5.00pm and the main event starts from 4:30pm.
Also - i'm rather excited that Epic Beer is gonna be there... mmmm... I like Epic
Brenda Wallace: Girl Geek Dinner #2 in Wellington, New Zealand.
On Tuesday 5th August, 70 geeks gathered in the Emperor Suite at Chow from 6pm till late.
Each guest received a bag of goodies including a bottle of Epic Lager, laser cut decorated USB keys from Shift, Cafenet tokens and discount vouchers from Wanda Harland, amongst other things.
Sandy Mamoli spoke about the basics of Ruby on Rails; what to use it for, when to not use it. Jo Hall introduced us to Tech Angels, and described being a female Computer Science Student. Stacey Walker described "impostor syndrome". Sarah Wiig & Band played music, including a song about a Robot.
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This is largely thanks to our wonderful sponsors:
More photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/taniwha/sets/72157606574704827/
Brenda Wallace: OLPC testing session
This morning a group of us (Martin, Tim, Leonie, Callum, Tabitha, Stephen and I) gathered at the Southern cross for an OLPC testing session. It involved following a test script to check what works, and what doesn't.
Tesult: 2 confirmed bugs, 11 new bugs filed, lotsa apps tested , lotsa existing bugs gone.
Penny Leach: [lazyweb] icons, irssi and unicode
The moodle development chat has finally moved to Jabber from Skype, which means that I can mash it into irssi using bitlbee. However there's one last thing that stands out as a FIXME!
The developers are all used to Skype's icon set (h) and (ninja) and (y) and so on and those who have graphical clients (most of them) have managed to find Skype icon packs. Which means that a lot of the time, I'm left seeing these series of strings.
So, I was wondering, is there a way (an irssi plugin, perhaps) to do matching on other people's input (preferably restricted to a defined set of channels) that converts from a set of supported characters into their unicode equivalents. Or even just to a few plain characters. Obviously (mooning) and (ninja) and others are not going to be supported, but (h) definitely would be. I can't find one that matches (y) either, yet.
An exhaustive list of all the silly icons can be found here
Brenda Wallace: Barcamps on twitter
New barcamps are created on barcamp.org.nz from time to time - and it's hard to get the word out without resorting to evil spamming techniques and cross posting to a multitude of mailing lists.
Do I turned on the Twitter module within barcamp.org.nz (it runs drupal).
Now you can follow edits on that site, on http://twitter.com/barcampnz
Brenda Wallace: I LOVE EPIC BEER
AND!! I've discovered Mojo Invincible has a shipment of Epic Pale Ale arriving today. They also have a guy from Nelson named Dan playing music tonight.
Brenda Wallace: Auckland Girl Geek Dinner #5
When: Thursday 28th August 2008 - 6pm to 10pm.
Where: The Grand Harbour, Viaduct. Pending final confirmation.
Cost: $30 per ticket. Ticket price includes dinner and until the 31st July we are offering an earlybird price of $20 per ticket.
Speakers: Amanda Jackson, a senior developer with Fronde Systems Group, presents "Managing Complexity in a Software plus Services World". This talk will discuss how to understand complexity, how to better organize the complex systems we are so familiar with, and how to untie existing complexity knots so you can benefit from modern software trends. Amanda is also presenting this talk at TechEd NZ and TechEd Australia in the Architecture track.
There is room for another speaker, if you are interested, please email amanda.jackson@fronde.com with a topic and bio.
6.00pm - doors open, sign-in, drinks, meet & mingle
6.20pm - starters are served
6.40pm - main course, speaker 1
7.40pm - Q & A, Desert
7.40pm - Quick Geeky Quiz (with prizes)
8.00pm - Second speaker or something else fun (TBC)
9.00pm - drinks, mingling
Head over to the website to buy a ticket using your credit card. You can also pay by direct credit to our bank account - info here...
Brenda Wallace: Internet NZ response to ACTA
Internet Society of NZ has made a submission on the proposed Anti-Counterfeit Treaty: ACTA:
http://www.internetnz.net.nz/issues/submissions/2008/acta
ACTA is DMCA style legislation wrapped up into a Treaty. It orginates in the USA, and New Zealand government is asking for comment on it.. However the treaty itself is not officially available so it's really difficult to comment. There is however a leaked version, and though the treaty mostly deals with stopping counterfiet goods (like fake Nike shoes) the USA's own RIAA was asked for their wishlist which was included. This section makes ISPs liable for any copyright infringement that passes through their network.
Think about that... If you ISP lets copyrighted material through to your computer, without knowing for sure you're allowed to get that content, then your ISP is the one who will face prosecution.
How are ISPs to respond to that? By only letting you talk to sony.com etc? By blocking all encrypted communication where they can't see what you're sending? It's either shows a huge misunderstanding of how the internet works, or intentional malice to line the pockets of copyright collecting companies.
Brenda Wallace: check out this stamp
The delivery of OLPCs is well underway, and see this crazy stamp from Uruguay
Penny Leach: I've become disillusioned with geek -women/-chix communities
Thinking back over the years that I've been involved in IT and geek communities, I've only been involved in the female support groups for maybe 3 of them. My first introduction to these was Debian Women, and while I'm not active in any way in the Debian community, I can remember being terrified of asking questions on mailing lists because I had seen how prickly that community could be, and Debian Women provided a helpful (and prickle-free) place to ask questions.
For some reason it was much later that I joined Linuxchix, and other than lurking on mailing lists, the occasional post and setting up their Moodle installation, I've never become particularly active there, either.
So perhaps I'm not the target audience. Or rather, a more accurate way to put that is: Perhaps I'm not the target audience anymore. I suspect that the time that these groups are the most helpful is for women who are trying to break into a geeky career (or hobby) and finding it a bit daunting. I used to get all torn up going to conferences and being mistaken for someone's girlfriend, but these days I have enough confidence in myself and in my standing as a giant nerdy-nerd, that it wouldn't affect me more than the passing annoyance of having to set someone in their place again. It doesn't affect my self esteem anymore.
This undoubtedly means that my place in these sorts of communities should now be of a more senior support role, helping younger women who are just starting to go through this, and I feel bad that I don't take that role on. I do mentoring in more official capacities (like GSOC), but not so much in the female oriented communities.
So why am I writing that I am disillusioned with it, rather than just saying, 'not for me' and moving on? The answer is that there are a few things about these communities that I find frustrating.
The first is the picking of battles thing. I watched recently a thread about the gender of the main character in a game, and what could be done about it. And to be honest, it kind of baffled me. Surely, there are bigger, more important battles to fight? I'm not a gamer, never have been. The closest I ever got was playing games like Kings Quest when I was little - and no, the fact that I was playing a male character trying to rescue a princess never deterred me in the slightest. I guess a predictable response to that is that the gender stereotypes had been so deeply ingrained into me, even at such an early age, that I didn't question it. But really - I just can't see how this is important in the grand scheme of things. Surely, surely there are worse problems to solve?
And the second reason is one that, more than just bewilders me, actively pisses me off: The most interpersonal difficulty I've had in recent years with peers in the geek community has been with women. I don't understand this (although I can make amateur psych-101 type guesses) and I find it really irritating. Maybe this is because I have a base expectation that we would be by-default supportive of eachother, being minority players together, rather than in competition, an assumption that is perhaps naïve of me, but I find it just flattens me everytime when I encounter it.
So this is not a linuxchix-ragequit or anything like that, I still read the mailing lists with interest and occasionally un-lurk and post something myself. It's more a reaching out to other geek women to remind me of the value these communities offer.
Brenda Wallace: Refactoring..
So, i wrote some unit tests for an ancient php4 library i wrote, that someone else did the final conversion to php5.
It's called the "Mobile Display Library", and it's grown up through my work mostly with Telecom Mobile, and a bit of Vodafone (PML). I'd love to get permission opensource it one day! (unreleased handsets removed of course)
anyhoo, as I wrote more unit tests, I found more bugs!! This is awesome because I found them - less awesome because I'm now fixing them and it's blown out the time I had to spend on it (I'm working hard on Telecom's UMTS network stuff, and i'm also sneaking off work for Girl Geek Dinner stuff and struggling for time).
The bugs are all from php4 to 5 conversion ... e.g. 5 now take variables by reference instead of a copy -- it also calls the parent class constructor. These things results in interesting bugs.
What i'd love to find is a commandline xhtml/wml/xml validator -- somethign that'll read the DTD and tell me where the output isn't okay. I've seen validator.w3.org but, correct me if i'm wrong, it doesn't have run commandline - it's a whole webservice.. guess I could set that up, but perhaps there's something better.
Brenda Wallace: Is this a good idea?
A thread on wellingtonista, a blog from my own city - skims the surface of "Are single gender events a good idea?" -- amongst the comments is a brilliant comment from Natalie Fergusson
I completely disagree with the idea that exclusive gender events are stupid, people who say that have never felt like a minority. But I don't think they are the only part of the solution, and all over the world, there are more and more female initiatives around building up the female way of doing things - we are involved in a few ourselves that ARE having an impact.
Basically (after my rant) I have come to believe that the reason why girls still shy away from tech is because when they go for it, they are expected to act like a guy - for many subtle reasons. If we can build our own culture and way of doing things, the prospect will be far more appealing!
Natalie totally gets it.
I want to add that, conversely, women who act geeky get accused of "Acting like a man".. and they're not. There's nothing inherently masculine about wiggling a mouse through warcraft, watching Transformers 10 times too many, or configuring your door lock to unlatch apon trusted bluetooth signals.
I don't think that's the behaviour she's talking about.
Likewise it doesn't require female bits to put on some nail polish, care about your hair, or order the diet coke. Why do we let activities get labelled that way? New Zealand, snap out of it.
Brenda Wallace: Girl Geek Dinners is tomorrow
!!!!!!!!
Unfortunately a couple of our speakers have cancelled due to illness - the hazard of an event in August.
We've filled that gap with a couple lightning talks - will be awesome.
Update: WOW!!! There are so many awesome geek women in Wellington. And they're mostly all coming to dinner tomorrow - from amongst them we had no trouble finding a GIANT LONG LIST of speakers to fill the gap.
Brenda Wallace: Sun Mysql becomes more closed source
Mysql to become more closed source - some new features, and improvements to existing, to be only available on within the Enterprise edition of Sun's MySql product.
Penny Leach: I miss Catalyst
- red liquorice! proper red liquorice! I don't think I've had any since I left New Zealand. Long term (or even short term, probably) readers of my blog know I run on red liquorice and black coffee.
- A cat badge, which I have put on my cellphone sock
- A beautiful scarf which looks like someone knitted it, although I cannot be sure
- Spaceman cigarette and Goodnight Kiwi badges. Glee! They are going right next to my I ♥ MT VIC badge I have on my laptop bag from Bec at Beckon Design Store
Anyway, this all filled me with warm fuzzy glee and reminded me what an amazing place Catalyst is.
Brenda Wallace: summer of code wellytown
Tonight i was at Victora University to do an intro to PHP for a group of summerofcode students.
I also mentioned Drupal, Joomla, Symfony, Cake, and ZendFramework amongst hello worlds
Brenda Wallace: Why are super heroes neutered before they get into tights?
Check out these 2 images -- the before and after. The first is the original of Citizen Steel cover, the second is the newer updated comic book cover.
What's the difference? The orginal has a average male "package". The new cover has some serious genital shrinkage overnight. What's with that? Modern day comic style male super heroes are rendered with their boy bits strangely missing, hidden, or down played. Something about a anatomically correct male groin is too scarey for superman's tights. Check out the careful camera angles in last years superman. Compare to the comics.
Super Women's bits are drawn in lavish broad brush strokes. Super Men's bits just kinda missing.
Some of the outrage at the Citzen steel neutering can be found @ http://comics212.net/2007/04/19/afraid-of-cock/
and, some real live humans for comparison (SFW)
linuxchix.org.nz
Planet Linuxchix
- Brenda Wallace: who are you people?
- Brenda Wallace: convoluted paths.
- Brenda Wallace: Wellington event hosts free software advocate Richard Stallman
- Brenda Wallace: Girl Geek Dinner #2 in Wellington, New Zealand.
- Brenda Wallace: OLPC testing session
- Penny Leach: [lazyweb] icons, irssi and unicode
- Brenda Wallace: Barcamps on twitter
- Brenda Wallace: I LOVE EPIC BEER
- Brenda Wallace: Product comparison
- Brenda Wallace: Auckland Girl Geek Dinner #5
- Brenda Wallace: Internet NZ response to ACTA
- Brenda Wallace: check out this stamp
- Penny Leach: I've become disillusioned with geek -women/-chix communities
- Brenda Wallace: Refactoring..
- Brenda Wallace: Is this a good idea?
Linuxchix International
- Portrait: Michelle Murrain lives the open source lifestyle
- LinuxChix-India aims at free software access for women
- Tina Gasperson - Jewelry Artist
- Aussie(Linux)Chix and AussieDevChix will have their regular joint meeting in Sydney
- Linuxchix Member Gets Cool New job!
- O'Reilly Media at OSCON
- Linux.conf.au - Hobart Conference 2009 Opens Call for Papers
- The Definitive Guide to VoIP for Linux Users
- "Women in OpenSource" blog posting
- Linux Networking Cookbook