Month: March 2007

Categories
Burningbird

Headers, Comments, and editing

I have been enjoying the Hubble headers. Of course, I have Hubble wallpaper on my machines, Hubble pictures on my walls, and books on Hubble, so no surprise here.

I’m not the first to use Hubble in site design and won’t be the last. A site can only improve with Hubble pictures.

Of course, the MissouriGreen site, which I hope to have up next week, will feature photos of Missouri. Naturally. Though I may try to sneak in some Hubble, as a reminder to Missouri folk that science is beautiful. Not that I would think people in Missouri would need this reminder.

My favorite of the headers? All of them, really, but I do have a slight partiality to this one.

As you may have noticed, I’ve turned off the ability to edit comments.

The approach I had developed worked quite nicely, but it is somewhat vulnerable. I’m working on a replacement that should be more robust. I may even throw in a little Ajax to provide for in-page editing, as well as a separate page for those with scripting turned off.

Categories
Political

Blame Jay

We’ve had an extraordinary and rather unpleasant situation here in Missouri the last few years. Our governor, Matt Blunt, and our State Attorney General Jay Nixon have not seen eye to eye on many issues, and almost any event associated with our state ends up being about the two of them.

Leaving aside the fact that both will face each other for election to governor next year, there are fundamental differences between the two men, which has left Jay Nixon spending a great deal of his time countering the efforts of our governor. Not surprising: Matt Blunt is the new breed of Republican that is backing away from the fundamentalists, favoring a form of social Darwinism that has even the most hidebound Republican going: eh, now, wait a sec.

I’ve written about the Katy Trail bridge and the Taum Sauk Dam break, but the recent fooflah literally boggles the mind.

Several months back, a woman who worked in the Department of Agriculture, Heather Elder, complained to the Governor’s office about the sexual harassment and discrimination she had suffered from the head of the department, Fred Ferrell. She accused Ferrell of hugging her, touching her inappropriately, telling her she should participate in a wet t-shirt contest, telling others that women are ‘show dogs’, and the only reason to hire such is because of our looks, and so on.

However, Ferrell is a friend of Big Agriculture, working hand in hand with the ‘new’ head of DNR, Doyle Childers, to roll back many of the environmental protections in place in our state so that large agricultural interests don’t have to worry about the smell of their big hog farms, or how much crap they dump into our rivers and streams.

When the complaint was received, Blunt took the unprecedented and illegal act of having the State Patrol investigate the allegations. He then used the DNR’s legal staff to negotiate a settlement with Elder that included what amounted to a slap on the wrist for Ferrell (sensitivity training, 10,000 fine, which he hasn’t paid), and a payoff and ordered cover up with Elder. The amount of money of the pay off was 70,000 dollars, paid from the Department of Agriculture’s equipment fund.

This all blew up last week when Elder rejected the offer and took the issue to the Attorney General’s office after the Missouri Human Rights Commission issued her a right-to-sue letter. Jay Nixon has now filed a suit on her behalf. The reason Elder refused the offer? She refused to let this be swept under the table, itself an act that is also illegal based on the Sunshine Act.

Caught not only misusing the state Patrol, misusing Agricultural department funds, misusing DNR resources, and protecting a man who isn’t fit to slop the corporate pigs he tried to protect, Blunt did the only thing he could: he tried to blame Nixon. How? By saying that he, Blunt, had to manage on his own since Nixon wouldn’t get involved in the initial negotiations.

As the *opinion piece in the conservative publication News-Leader, based in that strongest of Republican holds, Springfield, demonstrated: no one is buying any of this crap:

Blunt faces a growing cacophony of criticism for his mishandling of the sexual harassment and demeaning behavior of Ferrell, his former director of the Department of Agriculture. His initial reaction? Deflect some of the blame to Nixon for not getting involved in the case earlier.

The problem with that is Nixon didn’t hire a lecherous old man to join his cabinet. Blunt did.

Nixon didn’t respond to a serious allegation of sexual harassment by a female state worker by ordering an illegal Missouri Highway Patrol investigation. Blunt did.

Nixon didn’t ignore a report that any reasonable thinking person would realize displayed the sort of behavior by Ferrell that would disqualify him from any position of management in today’s society, let alone a position atop a state agency. Blunt did.

The governor told the News-Leader he believes in second chances, but apparently that lofty idea only applies to cabinet members and not their victims.

This act will kill any of Blunt’s chances for re-election, though with his growing friendship with Mitt Romney, he may not mind. Expect him to head toward a shot at the nationals, and if he does, run, run to your polls and answer with a resounding, “No!”

I am serious when I write that Blunt has done an amazing amount of damage in this state in his zeal to provide a ‘comfortable’ support system for big business. Kicked 300,000 children, disabled, and elderly off of Medicare; helped change water laws until the EPA brought all of that to a screeching halt; turned the Taum Sauk event into a political opportunity; brought in incompetent Republican cronies to head important departments; trying to sell off the fund that enable poor folks to go to school; put absurd restrictions on the universities for what they can do with the money set aside for capital improvements with this money.

This voters of this state made a terrible mistake when they put Blunt in as governor. Like the Ferrell case, that’s another thing that can’t be blamed on Jay Nixon–we did it all by ourselves.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch interviewed the Republican women state representatives, and the majority of the answers are understandable, though a little disappointing. Most condemned Ferrel’s behavior (or pleaded the 5th), but were reserved on Blunt’s role. However, there was one….

One of the Republican legislators interviewed said she hadn’t reviewed the case; she said similar sexual harassment claims stem from misunderstandings.

Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, said she’s worked around men long enough to know that two women can often interpret the same behavior differently.

“I work in a man’s world and sometimes men show encouragement by hugging,” she said. “Is that sexual harassment or is that encouragement? In my mind, it’s encouragement.”

Un-be-liev-able.

* via Black River News.

Categories
Books Writing

With appreciation

his week is the last week for editing on the new book, and the editors are just now finishing up. I wanted to thank the folks who gifted me with their time and effort; providing reviews, technical and other editing, and suggestions. I had a good group of people and the book is going to be a superior product based on their effort:

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street was spot on with CSS, issues related to accessibility, as well as general markup and page design. He also managed to catch numerous typos.

Elaine Nelson of Emergency weblog provided not only tech editing, but also did an excellent job of content editing.

Roy Owens — not the singer. Roy also helped me on Learning JavaScript. Some people are gluttons for punishment.

Anne Zelenka of Anne 2.0 provided a higher level analyst view, as well as spotting gotchas, areas of confusion, and points of information that should have been included, but weren’t.

Jesse Skinner, from The Future of the Web who is an expert on unobtrusive Ajax, and is currently working on a Short Cut for O’Reilly on unobtrusive Ajax. Jesse specifically focused on the tech, and his extensive knowledge of the Ajax world was extremely valuable.

Anthony Holdener, who is writing O’Reilly’s Definitive Guide to Ajax, contributed edits for the first three chapters until he had to return to his book. I appreciate the extra effort.

Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users did a first chapter review and provided some excellent insight into refocusing the first chapter and making important points more discernible.

My main editor, Simon St. Laurent, of course. This is my third book with Simon. Did I mention, gluttons for punishment?

It is a lot of work to review a tech book. You’re not just reading the book, you’re:

  • looking for typos
  • looking for missed opportunities
  • watching out for uses of technology that could be improved
  • watching out for uses of technology that really need to be improved
  • helping to discover areas where the author has made a mistake (all authors make mistakes)
  • helping to sooth and tame wild, clumsy, and agitated phrases
  • doing all of this within the constraints of an awkward book template, under deadline, with an overly tired author

The editing team for a book is the author’s only support in what is a difficult task. They form the parachute when we’re free falling; the additional sets of eyes when our own are tired and strained. Of course, the editing team can also only do so much: in the end, whatever is missed is ultimately the responsibility of the author.

Thank you. Thank you all most sincerely, from the bottom of my book writing heart.

Categories
Diversity

What Women Want

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Any one of us only knows those in a small slice of this environment. How else? We can’t spend all day and all night reading weblogs. That way lies madness.

As an example of knowing only a small selection of the voices, I was only recently made aware of the strong community of women academics in computing, engineering, and other sciences. Among these are Rants of a Feminist Engineer, who introduced many of the webloggers; FemaleCSGradStudent, who writes about the bubble bursting when realizing what it means to be a woman in the field:

My own bubble burst at the age of 26. It was the year I came to graduate school. Until then, I knew that there weren’t that many women in engineering and computer science, but I chalked it up to, “Well, we’re just catching up after the feminist revolution. It’s only been…50 years.” Despite evidence from the other fields that had been male dominated were now more equal, like family medicine, pyschology, and biology, I held firmly to that idea. I had been the only girl in my electrical engineering class. The only woman in my product group. One of four women on the plane to San Jose for the Embedded Systems Conference. But everyone had always been nice and supportive. I had friends and mentors. I had the support structure I needed to be successful. I worked in fun programs for girls in science to do my part to boost the numbers, to give back. The gender disparity hadn’t really punched me in the face yet. Not like it has in graduate school. Again. and again.

My hope for now is that I can return to a place where those support structures exist. Where the diverse contributions of many are appreciated, and folks are generally just nice.

Am I a woman scientist? who writes on the higher bar for women’s paper submissions, and See Jane Compute, who was recently interviewed. Among the questions and answers was the following:

Q4. You blog a lot about women’s experiences in an academic computing environment. How do you think those experiences are similar or different from women in other science/engineering/medicine disclines? Or even non-science fields like law or business?

Great question! I imagine that there are universal threads that run through the experiences of strong women in any field, whether it’s a more gender-equitable field like law or medicine or a field like CS or engineering that’s still struggling to achieve anywhere near respectable gender numbers. Things like not being listened to, or stereotyped because of the way one dresses or speaks, or not given a chance because “you’ll just run off and have babies”–these are universal parts of the experience of being a woman in our society. I think what makes the computing fields different, and from what I understand some of the “less enlightened” engineering and science fields (electrical engineering, physics), is the whole “macho culture”. Women are still made to feel like they just don’t belong in these fields, whether it’s because of the media images (the antisocial hacker, the almost total absence of women and their contributions in discussions of technical innovations and innovators) or the things we emphasize in the CS classroom and lab (bogging our students down in details and syntax, rather than focusing on the benefits and applications of computing) or even what we focus on to praise (“my code is faster/bigger/better than yours”). And it’s not just women–men who don’t fit the mold experience feelings of not belonging, too, although to a lesser extent. And that’s unhealthy for everyone. What I try to do through my blog is expose this culture, in all its unhealthiness, as a way of adding to the dialogue (hopefully) of how we can start to change this. I want to highlight, through my own experiences, why we should all be invested in changing the computing culture to something way more inclusive than it is now.

The academic and the applied in any field don’t always share the same concerns, or even the same understandings. However, as I read through these women’s posts, I realized that there is something we all share that reaches across the ivy: we’re women in fields where being such adds an extra element of challenge.

I’ve read in the last week, in daunting frequency, that the only reason women aren’t in computing is that we don’t want to be; that we women aren’t interested in computing, or engineering, or any other field where men are overrepresented (as one woman wrote).

Bunk.

Categories
RDF

First looks at Joost

s I edited the book today, while the snow blew in an oddly unendearing blizzard–alas, we missed the copper moon–I watched Joost. Specifically I watched a nice show on sleeper sharks, several episodes of National Geographic, and explored a bit with the other channels.

A television network hosted entirely through the web (Internet Protocol TV or IPTV) is the way of the future, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the major networks go this route eventually. At issue is bandwidth, not to mention integrity of signal. With Joost I found that sometimes the picture would be remarkably clear; other times, barely viewable. Still, all in all, for a beta product it was quite good.

I liked being able to pick any show I wanted, stop it, re-start it, and re-watch it if I wanted. The commercials are short and sweet, and I don’t begrudge the few minutes per show for them. What didn’t work is that Joost interrupts the program literally mid-word–it makes no use of markers to insert commercials in natural lulls. In addition, the commercials ended up being a uniform loud volume while the shows wavered in their loudness–leading me to having to hastily turn down the volume.

There’s a ‘young person’ feel to the service that I think is a serious mistake. A host from the service cracks about the ‘old people’ and the music videos seemed to feature young women who all sounded alike and all equally bared their navels, complete with navel rings.

Then there are the stripper shows. Ha! That got your attention.

Seriously, making assumptions about an audience could end up acting as a natural filter, which will end up hurting overall client numbers.

I don’t have cable or satellite, so Joost seems like a good alternative. However, I especially wanted to try out Joost because RDF plays a strong role in its infrastructure. According to Leo Simons:

We make extensive use of RDF in different places. It all starts with a core RDFS/Owl schema that is used to capture various kinds of information (think FOAF +imdb+RSS+a lot more). I suspect some parts of the modelling work that was done here will make it into future standards for online video.

We have a custom distributed digital asset management system (or DAM), built around jena-with-postgres at the moment for storage and (CRUD-like) management off all that RDF-ized information over a REST protcol.

Not only will this research go into Joost–at least part of the effort is going into TripleSoup:

TripleSoup is the simplest thing that you can do to turn your apache web server into a SPARQL endpoint.

TripleSoup will be an RDF store, tooling to work with that database, and a REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL, implemented as an apache webserver module.

Joost signed a deal with Viacom, which should begin to add to the content offered (Daily Show!) It’s a P2P service, a term we don’t hear very often now with the world’s seeming focus on all things Web 2.0. If this is P2P, what should happen is that my using the service also means that my PC participates in the network, providing resources for said network. I can’t find anything on that part of the application, but I’m assuming this is so. Or perhaps the true P2P is on the part of the networks involved.

Joost has a widget interface, which includes chat, a clock, and various other items of that nature, but to me, this isn’t something that’s too interesting. Either I want to watch television or I want to chat. If I wanted to do both at the same time, I’d get married again.

The interface is clean and relatively intuitive, especially if you’re used to Windows Media Center. All in all, it’s a pretty decent beta offering–true beta rather than than the, “Hi, we’re alpha, but beta is so much more cool. And it’s all fun anyway! *giggle*”. It has a way to go, though, as the current show I’m watching demonstrates, being full of stops and starts. Time to put on a movie.

Screenshots and another review.