Categories
Diversity

Change begins at home

The effects of my gender posts recently are starting to thread their way around, slowly but slow change is usually the most lasting change.

Julia Lerman posts on an article with the deplorable title “Why can’t women keep up with men in high tech”. Julia writes:

t’s more like this – most agree that in our programming world – at work, user groups, etc, there are about 10% women. Go to PDC or TechEd and that percentage of women drops to about 5-7%. Then look at the top layer of our own (conference speakers, authors, etc and that percentage drops to maybe 1-2%. Those are the numbers that are driving the question. Why aren’t there also 10% up there?

I checked the speakers list at ApacheCon being attended by so many faces we know and know and know. Of the 50+ speakers, two are women. Just two. There were a couple of photos of of guys with long hair that got my hopes up a bit, but it was a false alarm. However, I wasn’t surprised by this – women have traditionally steered clear of open source technology.

I also had a long and terrific email from a relatively new blogger, Ingrid Jones, who blogs at blogspot under the name, Me and Ophelia. Ingrid pointed out to me a London Times article about the use of rape as a weapon in the Bosnian war:

A week ago this newspaper carried a harrowing account of the children born to the tens of thousands of Bosnian women who were subject to what the United Nations later described as mass genocidal rape by their mainly Serbian captors. The report, in the Magazine, recounted how these women, perhaps numbering as many as 50,000, were held prisoner for months and raped repeatedly, often several times a day. Most, unsurprisingly, suffered permanent psychological scars. When children resulted from these brutal and unholy unions, most were abandoned at birth. They are the permanent legacy of a bloody and vicious civil war. Those guilty of these appalling war crimes, meanwhile, have gone unpunished. Today, some even hold public office.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paid subscription wall. Does anyone have access to the material for Christine Toomey’s article A Cradle of Humanity that isn’t behind a paywall?

Update: Ingrid sent me a copy of the article in an email, of which I pulled the following excerpt:

“This will do little, however, for women such as Sahela, 46, now so frail she looks more like a woman in her late sixties. In the picture that she treasures of her handsome teenage son slouched smiling beside her on a sofa, she is totally unrecognisable. A few months after the picture was taken in 1992, Sahela’s 15-year-old son was beheaded in front of her as he begged Serb soldiers not to drag his mother away. After ordering Sahela to bury his body on the spot, the soldiers then raped her in her own home and did so again repeatedly after that in a rape camp, where she and other women were kept tied to beds. Sahela recalls how one young woman she describes as a noted beauty managed to break free from her captors and, crying out for her mother, killed herself by hurling herself through a closed upper-floor window to end the continuing torture.”

Finally, Liz at misbehaving.net wrote a post clarifying the purpose of the blog in response to several people, including Anne of ‘purse lip square jaw’ who wrote:

Personally, I self-identify as feminist and was most marked by my riot-grrl phase (this also points to my age and girlhood inspirations). But I also like this Rebecca West quote: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” All of which is to say that I am interested in women’s experiences, and am happy to read more women’s voices on technology.

Given my firm conviction that there is no-such-thing as (the essential) WOMAN, I shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t recognise myself – and all sorts of other women – in this weblog. What I mean is that, despite the explicit claim to represent many voices, I don’t see much difference on this site. In other words, the site content strikes me as pretty straight, white and upper-middle class.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. I am going to treasure this quote for some time to come.

Among other things, Liz wrote:

At the moment, I think one of the best things we’ve done is collect the list of names “misbehaving elsewhere” in our sidebar. It’s a wonderful retort to the “where are the women?” question. It’s an affirmation of the number of articulate women in the tech sphere. And it’s an incredible jumping-off point for seeing a range of women’s voices.

I wrote in a couple of comments:

As for the blogroll: I would still rather discover women’s voices because people link to their writing, rather than them showing up on a blogroll. There’s no harm in the blogroll – it is a positive thing – but that won’t generate change. As you’ve said, though, that’s not what you’re trying to do with this weblog, and isn’t a task you’ve asked for. You want to highlight women’s contributions, and that’s cool. Perhaps all of us should focus on that.
…
I agree with both Elizabeth and weez about pointing to the women on the right more and less to major publications and stories. These _are_ the women in technology – most of the other stories are about things and places far too distanct for most of us.

Then, we who read these stories should follow suit. This becomes a spark, a flicker of flame that allows Women’s Writing to grow beyond the shadows cast by far too many men linking in and among themselves.

Doc Searls, in response to the article It’s a little too cozy in the Blogosphere wrote:

This isn’t high school here. We don’t have to suck up to the popular kids, or try to be like them. If we want our blogs valued, if we want Google juice, we only have to try to say something worthwhile – meaning worth a link. It’s not a lot more complicated than that. Just a lot harder to understand than a popularity contest.

It is more complicated than that in this weblogging environment where Women’s Writing is concerned. But I cannot do much about what other people do – I can only control what occurs in this space, and therefore gently point you to these fine folk and write “Listen: they have something to say”.

Categories
Weblogging

Stopped short

I started doing something today, started whining about something, started ranting and raving in comments and in email, but not here in the weblog, when I realized that I was acting and soundling like some people I know through weblogging who I don’t really care for. That’s the thing when your words are in print – at times you can see what other people see in you. And it’s not always good.

I don’t want to start up in a brand new and painfully won home (the conversion has not been without problems) by bringing along old hurts and what not. What’s done is done, and I’m both glad and sad that I recognized the enemy within myself before the metamorphoses was complete.

But it does make me think on those webloggers who I don’t care much for: at what point did they stop reading their own words?

This is my way of saying, “Hi, I’m in my new home. Kind of.”

Categories
Internet

Transferring domains

Netcraft started a bit of a panic with an ill-considered writing about a new ICANN ruling that if a registrar or domain owner doesn’t respond within five days to a request, the site can be transferred automatically. I noticed that Dorothea just wrote on it, as have others including Kottke. But as Kottke found out the ruling doesn’t make your domain as vulnerable as it would first seem.

How it would work: I’m right in the middle now of transferring four domains from Dotster to GoDaddy. I’ve initiated the appropriate requests and punched in the appropriate codes. The transfer hasn’t completed yet. Why? Because Dotster is known to be a problem when it comes to you moving your domains away from the company. They don’t seem to want to let them go.

In the past, any registrar could make it extremely difficult for you to transfer, until you finally give up and continue to pay them to maintain the domain registration–what amounts to legal and technical extortion.

However, now, registrars can’t drag their corporate feet. Unless a dispute occurs, the registrar must respond to a legitimate request from another registrar in five days, or the transfer automatically proceeds regardless. Not another person, a registrar. A registrar that is responsible for making sure that all the of the appropriate authorizations are in place to prevent someone from hijacking your site.

Now remember, a registrar has certain obligations they have to meet to continue being a registrar, including getting the appropriate authorizations in place to ensure that someone can’t steal your domains. Registrars that don’t quickly lose their registrar status, and whatever dubious transfer is initiated is terminated. If you want to move a domain, they have to contact the domain owner and inform them of the request, and ask the owner to respond either confirming or declining the move.

(I also had to provide a code to move a .info domain.)

Much of the hand waving on the part of registrars in this is let people know about this change, which is significant. It also highlights the reason the contact information for the domain has to be up to date (though you can use third-party companies now to hide your information from casual WHOIS users).

However, a great deal of the hand waving is marketing and registrar intimidation. By all means, lock your domains–extra precautions should help (but check out the policy for unlocking the domains, first, before you push that button). It’s more important, though, to ensure that your contact information for your domain contains an up to date email that will ultimately resolve to you, so you can dispute a domain request if one comes up unexpectedly. And to ensure that you’re given a timely reminder when your domain is about to expire.

Now, we’ll see if Dotster complies with this new ruling, because it’s fast approaching the time when it has to allow the transfer.

Categories
Burningbird

I’m here. Where are you?

If you see this, then you’re seeing Burningbird in the new home. Expect rough times this week, as I continue the move. For instance, I’ve had to drop my recent comments/trackback list, though I am working an alternative. I also have several trackback pings that I have to find a way to move from there to here.

Hopefully the move is a smooth experience for Si, Farrago and the ever popular and far too quiet Mr. Golby.

Moving on Monday (17th): Joe Duemer’s Reading & Writing (new digs in that direction)(Done), and the ever infamous Stavros the Wonder Chicken’s Empty Bottle – the site that proves yes, chickens can be scary.

I’m glad that I’m splitting For Poets sites from the Burningbird installation, and putting the photos into their own domain, mirrorself.com – but what a lot of work this has been. Work that’s continuing, but I can’t hold the rest of the gang up while I screw around.

Still, it will be very nice to be all clean and sparkly, and ready to do some front-end design.

Update:

Many thanks to Girlie Matters for a dirify function in PHP I was able to incorporate into my recent trackbacks/comments. This emulates the Movable Type dirify function that converts titles to file/directory naming compatibility.

Categories
Burningbird Technology

You might see this

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

You won’t see this. It doesn’t exist.

Or at least, it doesn’t exist – yet – in the new Burningbird home, but does in the old.

I had hoped to be farther along in the transfer, but limitations in the software in the shared environment are slowing things. Rather than being able to log into each system using SSH and FTP files directly, I’m having to download them to my PC and then upload them to the new site. The first of many limitations I’ll face moving from the dedicated server to the shared environment.

However, once moved, the limitations will be offset by not having to worry about constant software upgrades or installing patches. A good trade, all in all.

I did implement the new file system naming here in the old site to make sure it would work on the new. Worked beautifully. You have to love Movable Type templates.

Yes I am aware that my recent comment/trackback functionality is broken with the new naming system. I am looking at solutions, or the possibility of using something else on the new site. You’ll need to click through to the individual page for now to see these items.

I’ve also added a link to the PostCon RDF file for each individual page. Right now all the link does is pull up the RDF meta file. When I’m finished, it will provide either a raw RDF feed, or a prettified HTML feed. I still want to see what RDF vocabularies created elsewhere I can incorporate in. If you see anything, let me know. The files are created by a template – let me know if you want a copy.

I’m itching to get into the design on some of the pages, I’m in a re-design mood. First things first, get everyone safely moved and working, and then I can play. Since I have 9 webloggers, and 15 weblogs (10 of which are MT), with about 23 domains, I think I have enough to do.

I can’t believe what a difference cleaning out the old Burningbird made – from 3000+ entries down to about 1100 or so. Most of these were drafts never posted, or entries used for the photo blogs. And the new naming system is based on category and title – I don’t care much for the date-based directory.

The kicker is going to be doing a string substitution in the database to replace the old photograph URLs with the new one for mirrorself.com. Can’t do that, though, until the DNS change for the domain makes it through. I have a feeling this is going to be slow, and we’re going to be in for interesting times this week.

DNS. You can see start to see increasing problems with DNS. For those who asked about my prediction for a rough year next year, here’s what I wrote in an email (with some edits):

Why bad? It’s a contentious US election year, with a much more web enabled populace, not only in the US but throughout the rest of the world. More software is being built with holes in it, managed by more web holders who know little or nothing about web technology. ISPs, to stay competitive, are adding more people to individual servers so they can cut costs. And more sites like slashdot and other sites that serve up mass traffic attacks act as a DoS because we just can’t handle any variation in established access patterns. Nothing has room to give.

As more and more webloggers voice an opinion on political issues, or religion, or even spammers, more and more sites will become the targets of DoS attacks. But this doesn’t just burden the site – it burdens the entire system.

Other forms of ‘junk’ connectivity are being outlawed, including junk mail and phone solicitation. The only avenues left to the swarms determined to separate us from our money is door to door, and your computer.

Add to this an increasing privacy issue: with governments becoming more aware of how web enabled their populaces are. My site being scanned by the California tax organization is just one example. And other governments will block, but they’ll use our own paranoia to do so. For instance, some of the original comment spammers had a Chinese IP address, and people were blocking entire networks of Chinese readers because of it.

Which leads to blacklisting. Blacklisting is going to grow as a problem, which means huge blocks of IP addresses are going to get into SPEWs and others lists like this, tainting them so they can’t be used again. IP addressing is enough of a problem now without this.

(Do you know that once an IP is ‘dead’ to a spammer, its released back for some poor old soul to use for their legitimate site? Do you know how long it can take to clear an IP address from all the lists?)

To protect against the bad guys we’re loading our systems down with software that checks this list or that, lists of which are growing exponentially in size. Each of us doing so burdens already over-burdened CPUs on machines holding more and more people, each added to keep costs down in a Net, which is becoming increasingly cheaper to get into, but still being supported on the same architecture that existed years ago.

Used to be you needed to be a smart hacker to cause problems. No longer – not with today’s new user friendly destructiveness. There is DoS software you can download and run without any programming experience. There is software you can get from the W3C that will allow you to post comment spam. And people are hurting themselves – they still won’t stop opening attachments!

How about IM, chat rooms, IRC, moblogging, audio files, video files – do you think that bandwidth grows out of thin air?

We webloggers have to accept that our own actions are adding to the increased burden – very few sites update, check, or send bots out like webloggers. Tell me, how many times were your index.xml and index.rdf files accessed in this last hour? We’re putting significant burdens on the system in comparison to our numbers.

And all of this hits us at our most vulnerable spot – the DNS and the routers.

All in all what we have is a badly educated populace using the Net more and more, buggy software, smarter hackers, and a great deal of overreaction. And just to make things fun – lets put voting online.

I was glad to see I’m not the only one talking about the problems of blacklists by URL or IP – Mark Pilgrim has also covered it, and many of the same concerns I’ve had. (And I love Mark’s new header.)

I’ve already had two ‘poisen pill’ blacklist entries with URLs for weblogs.com and fda.gov. Mark talks about reactions to his writing that are similiar to what I’ve had – why am I saying this negative stuff? Where’s my solutions?

You want a solution? Drop your weblog, sell your computer, have the electrical company turn off electricity to your home, or better yet – move to a cabin on a mountaintop somewhere. Use paper and pen, and get yourself a carrier pigeon – the spammers haven’t gotten to them yet.

I’m not dooming and glooming to scare people away from the Net, but more to get people to realize that comment spammers happen, down times happen, s__t happens – but overreaction just makes it worse.

And knowledge. Knowledge is power in this environment. The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to ride the rough tides without getting wet. Speaking of which, I added a new For Poets site: MySql/SQL for Poets.

Back to work. Hoo-rha.