Categories
Diversity Technology Web

The true secret behind the X

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dorothea linked to a power house web site tonight: Women in Linux. You all should print this out on pretty paper, put a bow on it and give it to the Alpha Man in your life.

Seriously, though, Dorothea, I’m finding that this straight forward, honest, and out in the open approach just isn’t effective. I mean, I dabbled a bit with the book, Unix Power Tools, and I still can’t convince people that I know how to turn a computer on, much less work with Unix.

In my experience, every time a woman gets involved in Linux User Groups, or tries to work with Unix in the office, some guy’s going to come along and throw some esoteric stuff at her, making her feel inadequate. And then the dude will walk away, triumphant in the knowledge that he’s prevented women from accessing the secrets of Unix yet again.

So I came up with a plan — a way for women to learn Unix without guys knowing. I told my plan to one of the industry’s leading technologists, and we called the plan Operation X, for the fact that women have two X chromosomes, while men only have one.

Except that when the plan was released, Steve released it as OS X.

And the story goes…

I called on Steve at his home one morning and I started talking to him about the problems women have with learning Unix. I described the put-downs, the deliberate and exclusionary geek talk, the difficulty entering a room full of men and being the only woman present. I could tell Steve was sympathetic, but also distracted. When I pointed this out to him, he apologized, and I asked him what was up.

“Well, Shelley, the point is that Apple isn’t doing that great at the moment. We keep losing business market share to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and the geeks think the Mac is a frivolous operating system that’s far too pretty and friendly and helpful to be taken seriously.”

“Wow, Steve. I didn’t know things were that rough.”

“Yeah. I’m down to my last few billion.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah. Bummer”

Then I had this epiphany! Excited, I turned to Steve and said, “Steve! I have a great idea!”

“Shelley, I’m sorry but I’ve told you before — I’m not going to incorporate RDF/XML into AppleScript.”

“No Steve, not that idea. A new one!”

“What is it?”

“Well, you say you want to attract geeks, right?”

“Right”

“But I imagine you don’t want to go with Linux or something like that cuz that’ll scare the corporate types, right?”

“You got that right. I can imagine going into Citicorp with Linux of all things.”

“Sure, sure. I know what you’re saying Steve. But what if you hid the Unix?”

Steve was puzzled. I could tell. Most people couldn’t, but I could tell.

“Come again?”

“Well, Steve, you use Unix for the base of a new operating system, but you put the old, familiar, less intimidating Mac stuff on top to hide it. With this, you can sell the OS to the corporate types — see no geeky Unix hacker shit — but still attract geeks because underneath all that puff lies a Real Operating System.”

As I was talking I could see Steve warming up to the idea. He said, “That’s a great idea! Shelley, that’s an incredible idea!”

He started pacing about, gesturing excitedly with his hands.

“We could develop new, flashier graphics — call it ‘clouds’, or ‘glitter’, or something with marketing clout like that. And we could incorporate bits of open source in with our commercial stuff and the uber-geeks would get off our butts about proprietary hardware.”

Steve rambled on for a while, fleshing the idea out. Finally, he started to wind down, and turned to me sheepishly.

“Shelley, you really saved my butt, but you came to me for help and I haven’t helped you at all.”

“But Steve you have”, I answered. “Once the new operating system hits the street women will be able to learn Unix, finally, without men knowing about it.”

“How come?”

“Here’s the scenario: a woman is working away in the Terminal, typing ‘nix command after ‘nix command, but then a guy comes up and asks what they’re doing. The woman quickly collapses the terminal, hiding what they’re doing, and shows the guy their drawing, or graphic, or letter, or whatever they’re working on. Non-threatening stuff.”

Steve’s quick, because he responded with, “Learning Unix with stealth technology. I like it!”

So we hashed it around, coming up with the name and all. Later, as he was seeing me out, I happened to notice a laptop computer by the door and asked Steve what it was.

“Oh, it’s a new computer case we’re working on. It hasn’t been painted yet because we’re trying different types of paint to see which works the best.”

“I don’t know, Steve. I kind of like the bare metal look myself.”

And there you have it. The truth behind OS X.

Really, really.

Categories
Technology Web

First, let’s fire the boy-racer HTML programmers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Webs in a Jonathon Delacour interview:

 

And of course we’ll also have to fire the boy racers’ clueless Dockers-wearing manager dweebs, who consider themselves old-timers because they got online in 1998 (!) and whose entire experience of the Internet is the commercial Web as rendered through Internet Explorer for Windows. These people cannot even *spell* “W3C” and still think banner ads have not been given a fair shake.

Boy racers and clueless Dockers-wearing managers, beware!

(And will Jonathon ask the question we’re dying to know: Does Joe use a Dishmatique?)

Categories
Web

Accessible web pages

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Jonathon Delacour is reviewing Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Web Sites. In addition, he interviewed Joe and will be posting results of the interview over the next few days. This promises to be excellent reading, and I do want to get the book when I can scrape the pennies together.

I used Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibility in the current re-design and re-organization of my web sites. Between the two — Mark’s online book and Joe’s hard copy book — I hope that I’ll be providing accessible and usable pages, in addition to meeting the CSS and XHTML 1.0 strict specification validation criteria.

Oh, and I’ll be using RDF as the primary data structure for the applications I’m integrating into the site. I am just as determined to make RDF as friendly and usable to all of you, as Mark, Joe, and Jonathon are determined to make web pages accessible to those who need this effort.

I will make even the most RDF-resistant among you into RDF appreciators, if not out-and-out RDF fans. It is my goal. I have a mission.

Categories
Web Writing

Slashdotted!

My “Parable of the Languages” has just been slashdotted. “Mean Dean” from Heal Your Church Web Site weblog was kind enough to submit me, and the floods just started.

I’m taking odds when my server goes down…

Update: The folks at Interland are keeping an eye on the server — luckily they know Slashdot. I am getting massively hammered, though.

A little side note about Parable:

If it weren’t for my friend, Jonathon’s encouragement and support about the direction I’ve been taking with my writing lately, I wouldn’t have written this little story — and more to follow. You meet the best class of people in weblogging. You really do.

(Damn! Did that sound like an acceptance speech to you? It did to me. Am I going to be reduced to “You like me! You really like me!” next?)

 

 

 

 

Categories
Technology Web

Name that space

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The fluff about namespaces in RSS 2.0 seems to have boiled down to: the major version number should have warned everyone that this version of the specification isn’t compatible with previous versions. The solution: generate both sets of Userland RSS (0.9x and RSS 2.0) until aggregators can properly work with the namespaces.

Tim Bray wrote in comments at Ben’s:

The best suggestion I’ve seen so far in the thread above is to leave RSS 2.0 with the all the elements in the RSS2.0 namespace, but for publishers to provide 2 different RSS feeds until people get used to it. And then turn off the non-2.0 feeds after a few months. -Tim

First, I agree with Dare Obasanjo — the breakage most likely did occur within aggregators that do support namespaces rather than the reverse; the namespace with RSS 2.0 ‘changed’ and this caused the breakage. However, I disagree with Dare that the solution is to just continue as is and have the RSS generators now create two separate Userland RSS feeds: one for 0.9x and one for 2.0.

How many feeds will we end up with by the time this is done — one for 0.9x, 2.0, and then the RDF/RSS, RSS 1.0 one?

Remember that old chestnut: Poor planning on your part does not make an emergency on mine?

Several things missed with all of this:

  1. Documentation of the namespace support in RSS 2.0 is non-existent, leaving a great deal of confusion about its implementation
  2. Most weblogging tools don’t have the capability of just adding yet another RSS feed, and most webloggers (or others who use software that provides RSS) don’t know how to program enough to generate their own RSS feeds (and those that do, don’t care)
  3. If RSS 2.0 is a major tool release, two weeks to hack it out, implement it, and then shove it into production is a farce — there was no time to allow for third party developers to adapt to the new specification
  4. Focusing on pure technical solutions to what is the result of poor business practices will only postpone these same problems until the next release of something like RSS

However, what I’m saying is not sexy and isn’t full of code. And since I don’t support RSS, it doesn’t impact on me anyway, so why am I talking about it?

One thing I will say, though, is that if RSS 2.0 had been based on RDF/XML, many of the questions arising now about RSS 2.0 would have been answered by the RDF specification, and there wouldn’t be this chaotic scrambling to understand what all of this means (namespace, default or otherwise). RDF/XML is an implementation architecture, and as such, provides a good understanding of what is, or is not, valid XML within the specification. That’s one thing RDF/XML would have provided.