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Ada Lovelace Day 2009
March 24, 2009 – 10:37 pm
In the few minutes left before the first Ada Lovelace Day comes to a close, I want to tell you about my friend and coworker Strata Rose Chalup.
Strata is a world-class geek and polymath: she’s co-authored one of the go-to books on system administration, teaches project management at USENIX, gardens, dotes on her cats, dives, blogs, and operates HAM radio.
Last year, she joined us at Linden Lab. If you recall my employer’s recent announcement hosting IBM’s annual Technology Academy meetings in Second Life behind their firewall, Strata’s project management acumen made that possible.
I’m starting to do more project management in my job, and Strata’s been a great mentor to me as I learn those new skills.
Thanks Strata. Happy Ada Lovelace Day.
There’s a whole host of women geeks I’ve known in-person and virtually to recognize as well:
Dorothea Salo, whose journey from linguistics grad student to authority on Open Access digital archiving it has been a pleasure to read these past few years.
Dori Smith and Shelly Powers, both excellent explainers of technology.
Liz Henry, who I’ve known for ages. She picked up, took her laptop, and went to Houston to help Katrina refugees who were getting short shrift from FEMA. And that’s a small part of all the great things she’s done over the years.
Our cousin Vito Excaliber, with her wit and sketchpad.
K. Tempest Bradford, netbook maven, and unflinching vanguard for women of color in science fiction fandom.
Tess Chu, our team’s technical lead: unflappable, wise in the ways of C++, and mentors other women engineers and students.
Florence Chan, artist and wrangler of sculpted prims, whose landscaping makes Second Life a beautiful place to visit.
Meadhbh Hamrick, striving to get a pack of assorted vendors and technologists to march in the same direction on interoperability standards for virtual worlds.
And of course, Cynthia Gonsalves, beloved wielder of x-rays, focused ion beams, and knitting needles.
The GCU “He Hates It When You Call Him That”
March 23, 2009 – 6:40 pm
Having watched the finale of Battlestar Galactica, I’m going to assume the awful slog that the Colonials and Cylons were put through was the doings of a Culture Mind with a mean streak and a sense of humor.
From Font Design to Industrial Design
March 19, 2009 – 5:35 pm
Gary Hustwit’s (Helvetica) new film considers industrial design, and features interviews with Jonathan Ive and other rock stars of stuff.
Undesigning the Emergency
March 18, 2009 – 11:09 pm
Rough notes from Benjamin Bratton’s talk on design and terrorism at the 2009 ETech conference. In particular, he discusses the role of Twitter during the recent Mumbai terrorist attack. I wasn’t there to see the talk, but several folks were burbling about it on Twitter.
On the Facebook Redesign
March 18, 2009 – 11:00 pm
Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who knows about the difficulties involved in getting large-scale social services to play nice, wrote some of the first insightful things I’ve seen about the recent Facebook redesign.
[In contrast to Twitter, Facebook] specifically designed a page that was lossy. They said, “You don’t want to see everything, here is a subset of things your friends do we think you’ll be interested in.” And so you knew that you weren’t seeing everything, it wasn’t that they were failing their contract with you, but that they had decided not to show you something for editorial reasons. And you knew that if you wanted to see everything you had to dig, because that was the contract. And that digging was scoped to a user, your wall or your friends wall, data scoped by data owner — super cheap look up.
The punchline, and why we, and all our friends are complaining, is that the new Facebook page makes a promise it can’t keep.
I’ve reactivated my Facebook account, for the reason that I’ve been able to get back in touch with a lot of high school and college friends through it. Google-rank is not useful because you’re not going to find what’s-their-name-who-always-made-your-homeroom-crack-up, while Facebook’s set up to use your network of friends to set up that reintroduction.
Ditching the Stigma of Mortality
March 16, 2009 – 8:23 pm
Nicola Griffith’s response to the SciFi’s channel’s name change: I think I’m going to change my name to God: bigger market pull, and easier to fit on book covers.
On Tracking Cookies and Killing Puppies
March 11, 2009 – 9:46 pm
Following a post by Nelson Minar, I found the Network Advertising Initiative’s opt-out of tracking cookies page.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to set all the opt-out cookies from that interface, so I had to go to some of the individual advertising networks’ opt-out interface.
On BlueKai’s website, I was rewarded with this bit of passive agressiveness:
Yes, by opting out of tracking, I’m going to prevent a charitable contribution.
And if you’re from BlueKai, or their PR firm, don’t bother commenting to try to defend yourselves, because there really is no defense for that. Thank you for letting people opt out of your tracking, but your business isn’t saving babies, it’s ads and marketing data.
Magnatune Streams for Second Life
March 3, 2009 – 12:20 am
[ via AM Radio ] Magnatune provides several royalty-free streams you can use on your Second Life (and I would guess OpenSim) parcels.
Periodic Table of the Operators
February 24, 2009 – 11:14 pm
Mark Lentczner’s updated the Periodic Table of the Operators for Perl 6. At some point, Perl 6 might be done. That will be an apocalypse, alright.
Skewering “Thrift Chic”
February 24, 2009 – 11:08 pm
I enjoyed Judith Levine’s article in Salon where she excoriates the attitude that an economic collapse is good for moral hygiene. Several friends of Cynthia and mine were laid off from Spansion yesterday, and they aren’t singing the Diamond Sutra.
Programming Languages as Literary Genres
February 3, 2009 – 2:36 pm
Python is science fiction, Java is literary fiction, and Ruby on Rails is store-bought steampunk goggles*. Cynthia emailed me about Cat Valente’s funny post about programming languages as literary genres this morning. Liz Henry has a write-up too.
* for the record, my steampunk goggles were bought off of Etsy.
Data Visualization in Second Life
February 2, 2009 – 10:58 pm
The above is Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer constructing a ball and stick model of a lactose molecule in Second Life. It’s reading data from the HyperChem database converted into a notecard.
You can get one for free from the American Chemical Society’s sim*.
This is one of several examples of data visualization tools in Second Life mentioned in Rose and Tess Linden’s presentation at the She’s Geeky conference last weekend.
Daden Prime combines Google Maps with news feeds from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and CNN; earthquake data from the USGS; and 3D maps and panoramas of Birmingham.
* When you get Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer, select it to edit, then select “Recompile Scripts in Selection > Mono” from the Tools menu. The Rezzer will run much faster.
January 20th, 2009
January 20, 2009 – 12:40 am
Eight years ago, Cynthia and I observed the inauguration of George W. Bush by going to a protest in Oakland.
Today is also Cynthia and my fifth anniversary as a couple, so no, we don’t look back completely in anger at the last few years.
There’s a lot I can say, however, about the Bush Administration, but will leave it at this for the moment:
Consider it part of a movement.
‘The 21 Steps’
January 20, 2009 – 12:06 am
The 39 Steps, retold using Google Maps and KML to narrate a frantic chase across London and Edinburgh, and designed by Adrian Hon and associates.