Year: 2005

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

And Ruby isn’t just a gemstone

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I hadn’t intended to write any more on BlogHer, the blogger conference focused on women. At least, I hadn’t planned on it until I read Chris Nolan’s post today, trying to encourage Kevin Drum to attend. If you don’t know who Kevin Drum is, he’s a political weblogger/journalist who is assumed to have some influence in this environment. If you don’t know who Chris Nolan is, she’s a political blogger/journalist who is assumed to have some influence in this environment.

When Kevin asks, with his usual boyish charm, whether he should attend BlogHer, Chris replied:

This gives me a wonderful chance to state the obvious about this conference:IT IS NOT FOR WOMEN ONLY. Not only are men welcome — a statement that it seems absurd to have to make – but some are planning to attend. So you will have company, Kevin.

This gives me the chance to make another observation: If you are a man who like code and software and things that plug in, and is perhaps having trouble finding a girl who likes Java (and knows it’s not just a coffee) and undersands your inner Geek, this might be the PERFECT place for you to spend a summer afternoon.

The ratio at most tech conferences is hugely biased toward men that will assuredly not be the case here.

Perhaps if they’re intimidated, Kevin and Scoble can hold hands at the conference. Marc Cantor is attending, too, but he’ll probably hold his wife’s hand.

As for women attending the conference who know that Java isn’t just coffee, I’ll have more to say on this in the next week, but I did want to repeat what I had written in an email I sent to Lauren (aka Feministe) a few weeks back. It seems particularly relevant at the moment:

I feel at times (this is only how I feel, and may not be born out by truth) that to the guys in my profession, I am a woman first, a feminist second, and then a geek. But to the women’s movement in weblogging, I am first, foremost, and almost exclusively, just a geek.

More on this subject, after I think about it for a time.

Categories
Just Shelley

Stuckness

Golden Girl has been slightly sluggish the last week, and I wondered if I had taken too long for the last oil change. It just turned 50,000, so I imagine that problems will happen but I’d hoped they wouldn’t happen just now. Tonight, however, when I was driving to the park to walk, the “Check Engine Light” came on. Well, a light in the dashboard came on, but since I had lost my owner manual over a year ago, I wasn’t sure what it meant.

I pulled over immediately and did like I’d seen countless men of my acquaintance do in the past: I opened the hood and stood there, hands on my hips, looking down at the engine and waiting for enlightenment. Sure enough, enlightenment came. I shut the hood, walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk, pulled back the trunk carpet, and there on top of the spare tire was the owner’s manual.

(Later when I was telling my roommate the story, he didn’t bat an eye when I told him the manual was under the carpet in the trunk, lying on top of the spare tire. When I asked him why, he replied, “Well, I was married to you for almost twenty years.”)

According to the manual, the “Check Engine Light” doesn’t necessarily mean a serious problem: it could be caused by water in the gas, poor gas quality, and even a gas cap not shut tightly enough. As long as the light isn’t blinking, there’s no harm in driving the car for a time and the manual recommended driving the car through three complete fuel cycles. If it’s still on, then take it into the mechanic.

When I got home, I searched for information related to a 2002 Ford Focus and the “Check Engine Light” and in most cases, poor quality fuel was the cause. A couple of people had problems with a “EGR valve”, which I guess is also called the “O2 sensor”. A couple of others had some problems with the fuel intake system, but I didn’t have any of the other symptoms to match the problems they experienced.

One person in a car forum suggested unplugging the battery and then plugging it back in. In response, another reader wrote:

Last year sometime I had the same thing happen with the engine light, except when I unplugged the battery and then hooked it back up it still stayed on. When I took it into the dealer they said that a vacuum hose had caught fire and melted.

I agreed with the third person who replied, well that’s not healthy.

I searched some more and found a paper that explained how the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system works. The paper is for a Chrysler, but the architecture is consistent with most late model cars. I then found another site that discusses how to use diagnostic tools to determine the problem. Did you know that when a light is signaled in your dash, a code is recorded in software indicating the origin of the problem? When the mechanics hook up the gadgets, what they’re basically doing is downloading this code. (And we thought that mechanics would just listen to your car and know, magically, what the problem is.)

During my search, I remembered that my last trip out I had to fill up my gas tank at a little no-name gas station in the back woods. And my car had been in for a tune-up not that long ago and other than two of my tires getting mighty worn, the car came through with flying colors. Ipso facto: bad gas.

Of course if after three fuel cycles the light doesn’t go away, I’ll take it in. Or park it until I can afford to take it in. Until then, there’s nothing I can do about the light so I’m not going to worry about it.

Problem. Enlightenment and the Search. Acceptance. I have become, in effect, a self-taught mechanic.

Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a “hollow-flexible” attitude of “beginner’s mind.” You’re right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
…
Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Categories
Technology

Frustrating

Leigh Dobb’s wrote:

RDF is essentially a relational model, although not in the classic RDBMS sense. This means its much easier, IMO, to clearly express a model in RDF.

Much of the functionality that the library community is seeking: the ability to move data between formats and identify authorities, is already present in RDF. It’s there in the ability to create local schemas and/or inferencing rules that massage data into the model required for a particular application; RDF allows late binding of your application schema to your data. The functionality is also present in the means to derive variations on existing vocabularies, and annotate existing metadata with new properties. Authorities like the Library of Congress can publish their own schemas.

But the message isn’t getting across. I think the failing is that there’s too much emphasis on the big vision of the semantic web, and the more immediate, more pragmatic, benefits of RDF (with a sprinkling of OWL) are being lost. There’s some tasty morsels at the bottom of that semantic web layer cake. The only way to demonstrate that is to come up with more convincing demonstrations, e.g. a recast of MODS as RDF, backed by some useful code.

From a post written November 8th, 2003:

Clay also mentions that the Semantic Web has two goals: to get people to use meta-data and the other is to build a global ontology that pulls all this data together. He applauds the first while stating that the second is …audacious but doomed.

Michelangelo was recorded as having said: My work is simple. I cut away layer after layer of marble until I uncover the figure encased within.

To the Semantic Web people there is no issue about building a global ontology — it already exists on the web today. Bit by bit of it is uncovered every time we implement yet another component of the model using a common, shared semantic model and language. There never was a suggestion that all metadata work cease and desist as we sit down on some mountaintop somewhere and fully derive the model before allowing the world to proceed.

FOAF, RSS, PostCon, Creative Commons — each of these is part of the global ontology. We just have many more bits yet to discover.

And later:

Tim, man, you got to get down, son. Scrabble in the hard pack with the rest of us plain folk. Yank off that tie, and put on some Bermudas and hang with the hometown gang for a bit. You been with the Big Bad Business Asses too much — you forgot your roots.

What I do agree with in Clay’s paper is that the semantic web is going to come from the bottom up. It is going to come from RSS, and from FOAF, and from all the other efforts currently on the web (I need to start putting a list of these together). It’s going to start when we take an extra one minute when we post to choose a category or add a few keywords to better identify the subject of our posts. It will flourish when more people start taking a little bit of extra time to add a little bit more information because someone has demonstrated that the time will be worth it.

It will come about when people see the benefits of smarter data. Small pieces, intelligently joined.
…
’ll let you in on a little secret: my semantic web is not The Semantic Web. They won’t give nobel prizes for it, and it won’t be a deafening flash or a blinding roar. It will just make my life a bit easier than what what it is now. Some folks who like the Semantic Web won’t necessarily like or agree with my simple, little small ’s’, semantic, small ‘w’ web. But I don’t care, and neither does it.

In this semantic web, people like Danny Ayers with his good humored patience persistence supporting RDF and the ’semantic web, will have just as much an impact as any Tim, Dave, or Clay.

To quote Tonto: Who is ‘we’, white man.

(Archive of this page, with comments, at Wayback Machine)

Categories
Internet

Charter continued

Last post this this morning and afternoon. I don’t know why I’m in such a chatty mood.

The Charter Communications issue updated: In preparation for filing a complaint with the BBB and the State Attorney General, I call Charter to get a copy of this contract I supposedly signed. The billing office refers me to another office where the person does not identify themselves, and is in the process of eating a late morning snack, if the sounds into the phone are anything to go by.

I put in my request for a copy of the contract and the person tells me that there wasn’t a ‘real’ contract–I had signed up for the internet service on the internet, and therefore that agreement was binding.

Now I did try to get the internet service through the internet last November because it would be 10.00 cheaper to ’sign up online’. However, there was nothing in the online form that said the agreement would be for a year, and that there would be a penalty if I quit early. More than that, though, Charter never followed through on the Internet order, and I had to go down to the local store and place the reconnect order.

According to the gentleman today, I was misinformed on Tuesday about not being able to disconnect the television portion of the service, and that I could continue with the internet for 29.95. He also tried to resell me the television service for 39.95, leaving me silenced with trying to understand how he got there from here.

I don’t want the television service. I’m calling about the internet service.

I returned to this so-called agreement I had. I said I wanted a copy, a digital imprint, of the page that I had supposedly signed with agreement. A page that contains the information about the year contract and the early leaving penalty. I said since he was telling me this information, they must have a copy of it. That’s when it gets interesting.

They don’t necessarily have the information about what I signed up for. They just assumed that since I signed up on the internet, this was something I had agreed to. Because, as he said all people who signed up on the internet sign up for a year.

So then I tell him about going online yesterday and how the site advertised internet service for 26.95 a month, no contract required. At that point in time he said, well, there really is a three month contract with this offer–but that was besides the point. I would have to maintain my internet service with them through December of 2005, or pay 150.00 just to not do business with the company.

The BBB person I talked to said that Charter Communications in the St. Louis area has had 768 complaints — serious complaints — in the last three years. Well, now they’ve had 769 complaints. And I’m also filing a complaint with the State Attorney General. As for Charter’s ‘offer’ to let me keep the internet connection for the 29.95 a month until December–mighty big of the company, but I’ll pass.

Categories
Technology

Google Maps API

I am in the process of converting my metadata extensions for photos into simple drop in pages. There is no interest in the larger application, but some in the smaller uses. Not a lot — folks really are not interested in the whole ‘metadata’ thing. But I’d like to salvage some of the work I did.

My biggest problem I’m having with the change is Google’s Map API requires a key that is really limited. It only works within a specific directory. Worse, it doesn’t allow you to add a URL as a parameter in a query. Right now I’m working around this by passing in the post ID for the post. However, for a one page drop in application, a person needs to pass in a full URL.

I’m trying to figure out how to get the URL to the application without passing it in through a GET parameter, but still have it accessible via one click from a web page.

I don’t want to take long on this as I am finishing up documentation for JournURL, a hosted community/weblog system. I’ve been enjoying the effort and working with Roger Benningfield, mad scientist and leading developer.

And I would love to take another road trip. Somewhere. Anywhere.