Archive for September, 2009
Fortunately, I have a rental car right now, so I can follow my family to dinner… just… uh… an hour 15 minutes late.
It’s a dinner party anyway, and one formal enough that I have to dress up for it, and… well, you know how I feel about such things already. But the procrastination, it can haz productiveness! In the interim, I managed to (among many, many other things) unblock or partially-unblock a bunch of zikula package reviews… I seriously did not notice it had gotten this late. I thought I might be, I dunno, 15 minutes late. 30, at most.
…I should leave before they get unhappy (or run out of food). Sigh. Where’s that shirt Mom wants me to wear?
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
With every passing marketing meeting, I become more and more convinced that Fedora 12 is the cycle where Marketing will take off – we’ve been coiling to spring for quite a while now, and everything is falling into place for a series of takeoffs that will culminate in Marketing hackfestingness at FUDCon Toronto. Abe Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” We’re almost done making the axes, and it looks like they’ll start out preeeeetty decently sharp.
With zikula as a platform to work from and marketing research to help us figure out where to aim, we’re actually starting to gather and build an infrastructure and a set of tools for Doing Marketing, dramatically increasing our Capacity to Create Cool Content by making it far easier to do so. Recent news:
…and that’s just from this afternoon. Yep. We have momentum! I am psyched.
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | fedora | No Comments »
No, I don’t plan on applying for an MBA program.
- Because my cousins wanted to take it, but for various reasons weren’t getting a round tuitt.
- Because it seemed like fun.
- Because I’m curious how the evaluation is designed, from an education research standpoint.
Mostly #1, really. I think that being a catalyst is the only way I really know how to lead… if you want someone else to do something, do it yourself first. And you never know; it might be useful down the line; I’m not sure if I’ll need those scores in order to audit a marketing class (for more Fedora Marketing-fu) in the spring somewhere or what-have-you.
PS: I think I’m done with “publish publish publish!” mode for now – I need to go back and respond to all of the replies I’ve gotten in the past few days, and Do Some Stuff before I yammer on more.
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Emma Jane Hogbin had a great idea: do you want to see more $FOO in technology? Make a little scholarship for it.
Having recently transitioned from starving-intern to full-time-employee status without much of a corresponding rise in standard of living (…well, a little – I might buy my dad’s 16-year-old car so I can get to and from the office), I now have the ability to help the things I love financially as well as with my copious amounts of free time. And this seems like as good a place as any to start. I’m thinking something like $500, which seems both low and high to me; it’s “zomg a month of rent” high, but “pays for 30 minutes of college credit” low, just as a strawman for the time being; could go up, could go down, will probably multiply to cover several scholarships…
I don’t know how to go about thinking about this, so I’m hoping people here will be able to help me come up with a good design. I’m thinking mostly of my elementary, middle, and high schools here, but I might want to look at schools in the Philippines as well. This may take another year or two to figure out and put in place, or it could take a week. It all depends on the design parameters.
So… help me brainstorm! You’ll notice that I’m placing a high emphasis on follow-up and community support in addition to the $$$ (because I don’t have much $, am not used to thinking about $, and frankly, because I believe the real value of a scholarship/fellowship is the mentorship and not the money). Here is what I have so far. (Note that for each of these, I have a teacher or mentor in mind that I would want to name the scholarship after…)
- A middle school award for “creative use of open source tech” (for girls?) which gives the recipient a “high school fellowship” – in addition to the little scholarship, every summer between 8th grade graduation and when they start college (and they will start college if I have anything to say about it…*) I’ll work with them to figure out a cool (open source) project they want to do, and either mentor them through it or find someone who can. Thus, by the time they apply to college, they’ll have adult mentors who can vouch for their work, a kickass portfolio, and a bunch of folks (myself included) who can help them with their college essays. This one I know I can afford; I can always make time to mentor young people.
- A middle school or high school award for juniors, for “hacking your own school.” (Yes, better wording needed.) Who has worked to improve and modify their own learning experience in a way that works with (rather than against) their teachers and administrators? “Could I modify this assignment? Could we try X? Could I teach $name Y?” rather than “I’m not doing this assignment.” (How in the blazes do you measure this?) In addition to the little scholarship, these students (I’d either like to give multiple awards or make this a group award) will get funding and support for running a “teaching open source” unconference during the fall of their senior year of high school, because I think that Glenview, IL could use an adrenaline shot of hacker spirit, and because it will be a kickass thing to list for college apps. Seriously. Kickass. (One could easily see Sugar fitting into this, btw.)
- A high school award for “teaching open source” in the Philippines. For high school (or maybe first or second year college) students who demonstrate a dedication towards learning about open source and teaching it to others, a partial college scholarship and funding to organize a FAD sometime during their first 2 years of college. (Again, how do you measure this? And how much is this going to cost me? And how do I target Filipino students – do I go for one school, probably one from my family’s hometown? Do I look at OLPC deployments (which would be countries-that-aren’t-the-Philippines, unless eKindling changes that) and try to find a student from there? I don’t know!)
*unless they make a good case for why they want to do something cool that isn’t college – I’m all for that as well. I just want to make sure that it is an “I have something better to do!” decision, not an “I couldn’t possibly make it” decision.
I don’t want to overreach here; I recognize I’m far too eager at the moment (not just enthusiastic, but let-me-not-think-things-through-wheeee!-eager), which is why I’m stopping to ponder rather than jumping into immediate action. First, I need to make sure that there are communities that I can bring these students into, and that those communities want these students introduced in this way. And then… how do I make absolutely, absolutely sure that I can continue doing these for however long they are expected? Do it year-by-year? Place a sunset clause (“I’ll do this for 10 years”) and set aside that money now? (I know I definitely don’t have enough to make a trust and have these operate off the interest, so that’s out.) Is there a better way to spend this money?
Hit these ideas hard. Where are the holes? How could they be improved? What other ideas do you have? College students, what would you have wanted? High school students, what do you want? Professors, what would you like to see? Open source community members, what do you think would help the most? (Do you want to start a little scholarship? Read the HOWTO!)
(Yes, Nikki; excited Mel is excited.)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 8 Comments »
Look, if the title of this post makes *you* blink and cringe a bit, what do you imagine it’s doing to *me*?
Originally written in an email about a month ago; it’s taken that long for me to get up the guts to post this. In response to the last sentence of this post’s 4nd paragraph: Today is that day.
Matt and I were looking at the Python code swarm a bit over a year ago.
code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
He pointed out to me how long the video basically showed “Guido,” or “Guido And Maybe A Couple Other People.” And then the little trickles built up, and then… whoom. A quiet explosion… that ramps into a not-so-quiet one. If it took that long for Python, Matt explained, we shouldn’t be disappointed when the ecosystems of our own projects take time to nurture. It takes time to grow good, deep roots before a plant can go “weeeeeeeee!” and sprout up and have flowers.
It’s something that I think about every time the impulse to say “and people have been trying to do this for how long?” comes up, which it does automatically at a number of things. The one I’m thinking about today is gender. Specifically, gender and technology and engineering. Specifically, gender in open source.
I am young and impatient and would… honestly, I’d like nothing better to take the blue pill and wake up blissfully ignorant of the whole being-a-woman thing once again, because that’s how I’ve been for so long, and it’s just so much easier. But that wouldn’t be right. Being oblivious to something doesn’t make that something not exist. Besides, if I’m to call myself an engineer, I need to know how deep this rabbit hole goes, and how to hack it. If I want to be able to treat gender as a nonissue, it should be because it is a nonissue, not because I ignore the issues that exist. Someday, I’d like to be able to write about this publicly.
I’ve come to realize I’m very hesitant to be anything other than androgynous on the web now; there is a backpack of privilege I unconsciously put on over the years when I chose “Mel” as a nickname (when I was 7 and couldn’t pronounce “Mallory” – I didn’t realize it was a boy’s name) or “mchua” as a login (I was in high school, and all the other geeky kids were doing firstinitial-lastname) or somehow happened to adopt a speaking and writing style that didn’t use gender-specific pronouns to refer to myself. I never really thought much of it before, but as I come to recognize how much freedom it’s given me, I grow more and more reluctant to find out what happens when I take that backpack off online. Offline, I get to walk around as an obviously very young and nonwhite female. You never really know what sort of invisible effect that might be having.
The “holy crap, this matters” turning point for me was my senior year of college, where I went to a conference (really, a small hackathon) in drag as part of a (self-designed) class assignment (MetaOlin’s unit on Diversity), and suddenly saw a different sort of world for the first time. And realized in horror that some of the new freedoms I had as a “boy” in the real world felt a lot like the freedoms that I had online as an unintentionally nongendered entity.
I’m not comfortable being a woman. I’m not used to it. I don’t feel like I’ve grown into that word yet – I’m no longer a girl, but not quite really a woman. And I don’t know what it means. What does it mean? Who can I look to? I’m afraid of what I don’t know, and I’m afraid that I don’t know what would happen and what I would see that I don’t want to see and know.
Now that I realize I happened to fall into having a pseudobackpack, I habitually phrase sentences so as to actively avoid gender-specific pronouns, and my profile pics are similarly androgynous things like me dressed up as Robin (from Batman) for Halloween. I don’t try to pass as male, and I’ll say I’m female if asked, and most of my friends know anyway, but my gender is usually not something that newcomers realize right away. It’s similar to how I came to deal with my hearing when I was a kid; I felt like a hearing person, even if I physically wasn’t, so I simply went about my life and usually passed as one.
That’s why I haven’t written about this stuff as much. I don’t know how much shit it’d give me. And I don’t often think about it, because I have this compulsive transparency habit of publicly writing more or less everything I think. The fact that this post was an email for a month and sat there, making my “agh, it should be public!” twitch go crazy, is indicative. I’d rather spend my time as a hacker than a woman – not that the two are mutually exclusive, but that if they were, I’d pick the first… and just to make sure I’m safe, I pre-empt the issue and I do pick the first.
Not any more.
I’m clumsily and spasmodically (and uncharacteristically) piping up in these conversations mostly because I’m trying to get over my extreme discomfort at doing so. It’s pretty awkward and painful to watch, so thanks to whoever is reading for putting up with my craptacular beginnings of thinking this way, and this narcissistic self-referential apology therein – no, an apology “isn’t needed,” but it makes me feel a little more comfortable about hitting the “Publish” button, so I’ll allow myself the security blanket for this time.
It’s not a spur-of-the-moment decision. This will be slow, and quiet, and hard. I will spend far too much time at the beginning – and it will be a long beginning – agonizing over crafting long things with much awkwardness and little content because I don’t have the vocabulary or the thought-forms to consider and express this well yet. And I will backslide and fall down and frequently take the easy way out – but that’s why I’m marking this down now, so at least I’ll have said it at some point in time.
There. I’ve said it. Now I’ve started.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 16 Comments »
My brother and I landed in Chicago late Friday night. “I already ate dinner,” I told my mom and Ama (my dad’s mom – it’s our Chinese dialect’s word for “paternal grandmother”). They nodded in agreement and gave me a bowl of lugaw (rice porridge). Then I started in on a glass of homemade soy milk and some pandesal (bread).
Having finished his lugaw and pandesal, Jason looked up at me. “I’m hungry,” he said. I looked at the clock. It was midnight, and precious little in Glenview is open at that hour. “Steak and Shake?” I said. He nodded in agreement, grabbed dad’s car keys, and we headed out the door. A double bacon cheeseburger and fries, 5-way-chili, and dark chocolate fudge milkshake later, we were satisfied, and headed home to sleep with 3.5 dinners under our belts.
The next morning: wake up, pandesal, soy milk. My brother, myself, and two of our cousins (Mark, 22, the oldest son of my dad’s first brother, who’s staying with my parents and working for the same company as my dad – and Rachel, 24, the oldest daughter of my dad’s sister, who’s visiting from the Philippines with Ama) pile into mom’s minivan to pick up Megan (18, the oldest daughter of my mom’s 8th sister) from the University of Chicago, where she’s just started with plans to major in Econ. We talk about gourmet hot dogs on the way to meet the rest of the family + some family friends in Chinatown. Alligator and blue cheese; duck with foie gras topping. I have yet to find a satisfactory vegetarian hot dog.
A dim sum feast follows. My godparents are there, and they keep ordering food, food, food as it gets consumed by our end of the table until even the 3 biggest eaters (myself and the two guys) have to beg for mercy. After a brief interlude at church, though, we are refreshed. We proceed to stuff ourselves with yet more Chinese food in Evanston. After the older generation has reached their capacity and gone home, me, Mark, Rachel, Megan, and Jason are left sitting in the van. We look at each other. “Want dessert?” asks Jason. Two hours and a bakery stop later, we are home, and finished eating for… well, at least the next 8 hours.
Someday, this will pass. While it lasts, we shall enjoy it as we can. It’s not often that the ability to eat large quantities of food coincides with the availability of large quantities of excellent food, but when you bring together the appetites of young people with the “you’re home for a special visit!” food budgets of their parents, wonderful things happen.
Monday, September 28th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I just discovered xargs. With that, I think I’ve got enough queued up for another workflow hack weekend – haven’t had one of those in a while.
On my list of things to do:
- Install the irssi plugins various people have suggested.
- Trick out my vim; go through vimtutor, learn some shortcuts, put in a nice theme, get expansion of fixed text working.
- Set up my homedir to pull all its stuff from git checkout. I’ve been incrementally moving towards having my life in version control for perhaps a year now, and it’s been a good practice for me to continue – even if I never reach full VCS-age, it’s making me clean up my workflow considerably.
- See again about switching from Thunderbird to offlineimap + mutt – I suspect this isn’t actually going to happen (despite the awesomeness of vim text expansion) because, the more I think about it, the more I like being able to see my lists of subject lines in a pane alongside the message, and… well… ah, I should try it for a week and see.
- List (and centralize, where possible) my ticket queues.
- Mess around with xargs and whatever other cool command-line things I can find. I’d like to do GUI-Free-Week again someday, just to see how I fare this time around.
- See if I can switch from lettermelater back to a simple crontab with a bunch of mail commands; this is what I used in high school to send my parents letters home every once in a while – autogenerated from one of several default templates – so they wouldn’t bug me so much. I think I will have to use offlineimap to make this work. (I’m certainly not running a mail server on my laptop.)
That’s a pretty decent todo list; not sure what I’ll get through, but we shall see.
Monday, September 28th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
This post is about the Charlieplexing Wikipedia page.
4 summers ago, I was a student playing with microcontrollers. I needed a way to drive a large number of LEDs with a small number of I/O pins, and was stumped because even multiplexing wouldn’t give me enough. Puttering around, I discovered an obscure reference to a technique called Charlieplexing on a Maxim application sheet, but couldn’t understand it right away. After more puttering around, I decided there wasn’t a good human-readable explanation of charlieplexing on the internet – or at least not one that worked for me. So I buckled down and pounded my head against the topic, doodling circuit diagrams for an hour or two until I was enlightened enough to implement it, threw my notes into a Wikipedia page, and went off to do other things, like graduate from college.
Unbeknownst to me, a conversation had started. Was Charlieplexing a notable enough subject for a Wikipedia entry? There was support. “Charlieplexing is a well-established term in communities of microcontroller hackers and I’ve encountered it on numerous independent occasions in my research.” “This is an extremely important technique in electrical engineering that is taught in many universities these days, including my own, MIT.”
Eventually, the conversation turned to Charlieplexing itself. “Reverse-bias leakage currents are on the order of uA, so this really isn’t power-inefficient.” They fixed some of my mistakes. “It does NOT increase cost of production – the whole idea is to DECREASE the cost of production by using a microcontroller with fewer I/O lines.” They added diagrams. They put in real-world applications. “Added a picture of a clock I created which actually uses Charlieplexing (though I didn’t know it was called that, I thought I was inventing it myself when I created it) as an example in the top right.” They expanded into areas I hadn’t thought about, like tri-state logic.
Fast forward a couple years. I’ve completely forgotten about Charlieplexing by this point, having finished my project that summer and headed off into the software world. (Hardware, I haven’t forgotten you! I will come back when I have space for a stable hobbyist workbench!) I’m reading Matt’s blog and notice his del.icio.us feed has a link to something called… wait, what’s that? That sounds sort of familiar. I click – and now I get to learn about electronics from a page I started years ago.
I can’t help but compare this to the reams and reams of my undergraduate work which has either been recycled, deleted from various hard drives, or sits mouldering somewhere forgotten. I spent weeks and months on those projects; now they’re dead. These were quick notes I wrote up for myself to understand something so I could solve a problem that I had; making them available to others to remix was almost an afterthought. It turned out to be useful to other people. They found it, they gave back, and now it’s more useful to everybody, including future-me when I get back into electronics as a hobby. What goes around comes around; here’s the difference between my original page and the current page.
This is a tiny example of something that happens every day in open source. It’s not just code. In this world, you can learn a new programming language by reading your own book. This is completely normal.
Just a cool moment that I thought I’d share.
Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | teaching open source | 3 Comments »
Esther Schindler wrote a piece on mentoring in open source communities. There’s a lot of good stuff in it – Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier’s description of how openSUSE packagers progress from question-askers to independent maintainers (and presumably mentors of future packagers in turn), Jim Keenan’s story of his local CPAN testing group. Leslie Hawthorne, the woman behind Google’s Summer of Code program (and many others with similar models), puts forth some quick useful tactics:
Her advice is for participants to decide how much time should be spent trying to figure out the answer: an “n hour” or “n minute” rule. That is, “If you get stuck and can’t figure it out in an hour, e-mail me.” As Hawthorn explains, “You don’t want to train them to be so independent that they don’t ask for help when they need it.”
I’m also hearing a lot about how Dreamwidth is an awesome, friendly place for cultivating new contributors – and Denise Paolucci’s section makes me think I really should head over some weekend and check the project out.
“Create a project culture where trying new things — and failing at them on the first try — is not only culturally acceptable, but viewed as a good thing.” In many open source projects, she explains, imperfect or unfinished patches are viewed as a time-wasting liability, even if it’s only in the minds of the people who are doing code review. “Even if you never say something like that where anyone can see it, the attitude is still going to creep into the subtext of every interaction, and newcomers will be able to sense it,” says Paolucci. To attract new contributors, she says, it’s critical to “create a culture where a partway-there patch isn’t viewed as ‘Great, now we’re going to have to spend the time to clean that up’ but as ‘Great! Someone else did the first 70% of this, which is going to save me a lot of time and effort!’”
There’s also a bit (two, really) wherein I get Really Excited About Stuff, but I’d feel embarrassed about what the heck am I talking about? This blog is for my future self; I should not feel embarrassed about saying “look, it is a cool article, and I took the initiative to write to Esther and offer to help with a subject I’m intensely keen on, and my material was useful, and I’m proud of that!” (Why am I so uncomfortable calling any sort of positive attention to myself? I’d rather this way than the opposite, but… seriously, this is silly; there’s no good reason for it.)
Er. That is to say, I’m in the article as well. Whee! Most of the email I sent Esther (that the quotes were pulled from) was a litany of thanks to everyone who’s helped me find my footing in the open source world – and in life, in general. I have been blessed.
Friday, September 25th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
…here is Mackenzie on Software Freedom Day, which we celebrated early in DC. Yep, it’s marked (and swag-ified) as a LoCo table; we were all there for open source goodness in general – Ubuntu community members explaining to passers-by how the XO runs Fedora right next to the Fedora community member (me) teaching people how to boot their Ubuntu LiveCD. Good times. Any DC-area Fedora Ambassadors want to join them next year? ;-)
Edit: Mackenzie points out that “Ubuntu community member” is the appropriate term to use – thanks for the patch (and the awareness)!
Friday, September 25th, 2009 | fedora | 3 Comments »
