Jacob T. Levy on his introduction of photos at his eponymous blog:

I hear that the interwebs are now capable of handling things that aren’t even text. (In my day, we browsed the interwebs on lynx in UNIX and read e-mail on Pine and we liked it!)

Heh; while my first exposure to true Internet access (in the summer of 1992, before the invention of the img tag and widespread use of the web) was rather more slick due to the wonders of NeXTSTEP, the ancient ancestor of Mac OS X, even that was an incredibly texty experience by today’s standards. Over the intervening years, I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time with lynx and Pine and their more modern siblings (elinks and mutt).

My parents found it strange that I spend considerable time in the night doing "some Linux thing", so the other day I explained to them what Free software is and we talked about copyright and licensing. I was very happy that they were able to appreciate it. I also gave a Debian Installer demo. While there are a bunch of Indian languages supported in the Debian Installer, (Telugu) isn't one of them. They noticed it and motivated me to work on te_IN translation for d-i and promised to help me. So the three of us have been discussing translation strings. I have been committing changes slowly and intend to complete this activity in a few months. Lack of interest in translation meant that I never gave much thought to it but I see that translating software is rather difficult and it is an activity that would benefit a lot from two or three people doing it together. I found a glossary at swecha.org but there are a bunch of problems

• Computing terminology is context sensitive and one word doesn't fit all uses.
• A lot of words in the glossary are rather contrived.
• Most words can be understood only by the elite of the Telugu speaking world.

I am using these simple guidelines for translation:

• Use language that is used in the newspapers today. Most people who can read would be used to this and understand it best. e.g password would be rather than .
• Do not invent words. If a certain computing term or a word doesn't have an equivalent colloquial Telugu word, use the English word written in Telugu script. Include the English word in paranthesis next to it. e.g. Registering modules... would be (modules) ...
• If a translated Telugu word sounds complex or ambiguous in the translation context, include the corresponding English word in Telugu as well as English in parentheses next to it. e.g Partitioning scheme: would be ( [partitioning]) :

A few resources that I have been using:

• lekhini - a browser based tool for transliteration based on RTS.
• en2te and uchicago.edu's Charles Philip Brown Telugu to English dictionaries.
• J. P. L. Gwynn's Telugu to English dictionary hosted by uchicago.edu

I will have to find a good quality comprehensive Telugu general knowledge book or an official A.P. govt. document to translate ISO 3166 codes etc. The Manorama yearbook would've been great, unfortunately Telugu is not one of the few languages it is published in. I will also bring my copy of Sankaranarayan's dictionary from my next month Hyderabad visit. If you have suggestions on any of these (pointers to guidelines, resources that are DFSG free and I could copy from etc.) that would make doing this easy for me, please do let me know. Naidu does good one-off Telugu string translations in Launchpad (so does praveenkumarg, btw), and Naidu has promised to do some of the work as well as review. If all goes well, I will try and create a debian-10n-telugu sometime in the future.

Today, as I was riding my bicycle home from work, I noticed that the road maintainer had been by on the dirt and sand roads near our house. Unfortunately for me, he left a few sections of road with deep sand, and I almost wiped out several times. I ride a bike with narrow road tires that doesn't deal well with that.

But I'm not the first one to have a problem with roads.

A hundred years ago, the "brethren to the south" were having trouble getting to the community's main church, Alexanderwohl. Back in the days before paved roads, or heavy road-maintaining machinery, it took time and endurance to travel the distance even on good roads. A group of them started holding weekly Sunday Schools in local schoolhouses. Eventually, after much discussion, they decided to build a church, and it was completed in 1908 -- Tabor Mennonite, more than 4 miles from Alexanderwohl!

Tabor thrived over the years, though not without difficulty. Everything from how to shelter members' horses during services to what do to about the weighty social and political issues of the day were discussed and documented in church minutes. The church sent people out as missionaries, planted new churches, and supported several young pastors just starting out. In 1938, they expanded their building, and in 1965, replaced it entirely.

Tonight our weekend of centennial festivities began. It started with a prelude played on the church's first organ -- now about 90 years old if memory serves. Its current owner was tracked down, it was brought to the church, and still sounds wonderful. Tomorrow we will have music and activities outdoors under a tent, and all our living former pastors will be around, with a drama and meal in the evening. Then on Sunday, the big day with singing choirs (and a work commissioned for this occasion), each former pastor giving a short (we hope) message, a potluck (of course!), and the opening of the cornerstone.

It's been 6 years in the planning. I've spent the last couple of years collecting photos and other material for the archives and for the coffee table-style book we published for the centennial, and others have put in lots of hours too.

Sunday's worship service will conclude with singing the "Mennonite Anthem", also known as "606" from its number in an old hymnal. It will be a capella as is tradition for this piece. (Click for MP3 of a small choir singing it) It will be loud and beautiful, hundreds of voices joining in, a fitting way to mark this occasion.

What a wonderful thing we have been left by those that came before. And still, a responsibility for us as we look to the future. Rural churches are disappearing, and while Tabor is the rare rural church that is growing, still we hope that its location at the corner of two mostly dirt roads 4 miles from the nearest town (population 600) will not get in the way in years to come.

At the end of the events tonight, we were reminded of the favorite Bible verse of Rev. P. H. Richert, first pastor of Tabor, who served as pastor for almost 40 years:

the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

(Isaiah 2:2)

Somehow it seems improbable that dirt roads led to all this.

I was sure it will be possible. With current awesome git version it's possible to run a space invaders game. With only 380 lines of Lua. Is there any window manager capable of doing this ? And don't say it's useless! Thanks to Gregor "farhaven" Best for wasting his time with that.

I was forced to try Ubuntu Hardy in the new university pool. The setup includes one Linux server dedicated for the pool, one Windows AD for Kerberos authentication, one Windows fileserver with user data and 20 clients. The clients are new HP machines with a Radeon Xpress 200 card. First problem was nasty, the X server turned the display black and then crashed, leaving an unusable console behind. Even a blacklist of the radeon module does not work. Somehow the Xorg radeon driver loads the module on its own, ignoring the modprobe blacklist. Only a hard blacklist using install radoen /bin/false in the modprobe config was able to prevent this. Lets hope that the endeavors to remove much priviledges from the X server goes good. For the homes two setups was tested:

• Homes on the Windows server via cifs, mounted via pam_mount using NTLM password.
• Homes on the Linux server via nfs version 3.

The first one just produced an error that some Gnome component was unable to lock ~/.ICEauthority. This could be worked around in the Xsession. Otherwise it was usable to slow, which may be a problem with the Windows server. The later, plus a reinstallation with fglrx, produced first unresponsive OpenOffice.org windows and then a complete unusable Gnome desktop. I would not completely vote against a problem with fglrx or even a broken installation, but the amount of problems exceeded the threshold. Now we will try Lenny and see if this also happens there. Especially home via nfs is not that uncommon that we can let it broken in a release.

Bjorn mentions that he doesn't want the nokia internet tablet, because it doesn't have a phone and he doesn't want to carry two devices with him. Bottom left, my portable media player. 4G solid-state storage, plays movies (the display shows a scene from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I converted from DVD), audio, FM radio, and after a firmware update can do games and some random applications. Does bluetooth. Does not do phone calls. Upper right, my cell phone. A simple Nokia 6021. Does bluetooth, makes phone calls, and (as the display somewhat shows) can do calendaring, too. With SyncML, I can synchronize it with my laptop. Together, they perform anything I'd possibly want from a smartphone (and don't anyone tell me 'SSH', because doing ssh on any screen smaller than, 7" and without decent keyboard is laughable). Together, they're smaller and weigh less than a smartphone. Together, they're less expensive than a smartphone ( 125 for the phone, 85 for the portable media player). Why does anyone buy a smartphone?

I won’t repeat my frequent anti-Plesk rant, but suffice to say: it’s a pain. For some reason, we wanted one file back out of a backup. It took me a few minutes to realise it, but Plesk’s backups are essentially MIMEd and gzipped. So, rather than fighting with their mysterious semi-documented backup-unpack tool, just say:- zcat backupfile sed -n -e '/name="filename.whatever/,/^--_--/p' >filename.whatever If you don’t know the filename, zless’ing the head of the file should find it from the XML description blocks pretty quickly. Slight editing of the output file will be necessary, to strip MIME and so on, but it’s easier than installing too much else on a webserver. Does anyone know why this gzipped-MIME is better than tar.gz or something else common and easy-to-use?

I just watched an interesting TED.com talk about video games [1]. The talk focussed to a large degree on emotional involvement in games, so it seems likely that there will be many more virtual girlfriend services [2] (I’m not sure that “game” is the correct term for such things) in the future. The only reference I could find to a virtual boyfriend was a deleted Wikipedia page for V-Boy, but I expect that they will be developed soon enough. I wonder if such a service could be used by astronauts on long missions. An advantage of a virtual SO would be that there is no need to have a partner who is qualified, and if a human couple got divorced on the way to Mars then it could be a really long journey for everyone on the mission. VR training has been used for a long time in the airline industry (if you have never visited an airline company and sat in a VR trainer for a heavy passenger jet then I strongly recommend that you do it). It seems that there are many other possible uses for this. The current prison system is widely regarded as a training ground for criminals, people who are sent to prison for minor crimes come out as hardened criminals. I wonder if a virtual environment for prisoners could do some good. Instead of prisoners having to deal with other prisoners they could deal with virtual characters who encourage normal social relationships, prisoners who didn’t want to meet other prisoners could be given the option of spending their entire sentence in “solitary confinement” with virtual characters, multi-player games, and Internet access if they behave well. Game systems such as the Nintendo Wii [3] would result in prisoners getting adequate exercise, so after being released from a VR prison it seems likely that the ex-con would be fitter, healthier, and better able to fit into normal society than most parolees. Finally it seems likely that someone who gets used to spending most all their spare time playing computer games will be less likely to commit crimes. It seems to me that the potential for the use of virtual environments in schools is very similar to that of prisons, for similar reasons. Update: Currently Google Adsense is showing picture adverts on this page for the “Shaiya” game, the pictures are of a female character wearing a bikini with the caption “your goddess awaits”. This might be evidence to support my point about virtual girlfriends.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/will_video_game.php


• [2] http://wirelesswatch.jp/2005/11/09/virtual-girlfriend-for-your-mobile/


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii

Share This

Yesterday, a small commi tin D-I SVN marked the beginning of the work on the translation of Debian Installer to Breton. First French regional language to be worked on (if we except Basque where the effort mostly comes from South Basque country, namely the spanish part of "Pays Basque". There have been discussion about support for Occitan. Some translations are rotting in Launchpad even though the translators have been notified that nothing can happen in Ubuntu when the language isn't first supproted in Debian Installer. Among the 'major' regional languages in France, we'd need people to catch up with Alsacian and Corsican as well.... Maybe some day....

Marking up email on the Web is not a pretty picture in 2008.

• Weaver daemon used by Gmane (seems complicated to setup)
• Hypermail (51k SLOC) used at suckless
• Hypermess (56k SLOC C) used by the W3C
• Mailman’s Pipermail used for Python mail archives (not a drop in replacement for hypermail or maintained according to upstream)
• MHonArc (280k SLOC of perl) used by Debian lists
• lurker (10k+ CPP) used by the free network group
• zest 1k of Python (looks like an interesting research project which I have not managed to get working yet…)

Notable mail archiving services:

• Google Groups for Usenet archives and much more, with a killer search feature
• The Mail Archive which uses MHonArc

Random thoughts:

• I think the thread view is the most important feature. Google’s approach to threading mail as a bunched up conversation works quite well, though I still prefer the tree threaded structure that mutt does so well.
• Mailman implements RFC2369, though the W3C doesn’t seem to support this, though it does use Archived-At: which is quite useful. Google doesn’t seem to employ archive links to HTML sadly.
• I am not fond of framed views that I’ve seen some mail archiving services provide.
• Has anyone really studied how a RFC2822 mail message should be marked up in HTML? 3.1. Formats of Archived Message does not address the problem.

Any other relevant RFCs, tools or tips I might have missed?

Data ordered by entry data is not a data file, and thus not protected by the law regarding personal data files, because it’s hard to do searches in them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the argument that the highest court in Spain (Tribunal Supremo) has used to prevent the Catholic Church from losing believers. Many children are automatically baptisted by their parents when they’re just babies, without having any decision in that, and thus they names are written down in the Church files^Wlists of baptisted people. That’s the numbers they will use later when asking for privileges for the Catholic Church, and that’s why it’s so important for them that all of us are counted as catholics, whether we are or not believers. Fewer than half of Spanish youth consider themselves Catholic, so it’s important for them to keep appearances to keep their power intact. In Spain thousands of non believers are demanding that the Church cancel their baptism records, in order to annul any official connection with Catholicism. And church leaders in turn have gone to the courts to try to stop parishioners deserting. The Tribunal Supremo seems to be taking a political side with their decision trying to vulnerate non-believers rights to artificially promote the Catholic Church. Apostasy is the formal religious disaffiliation or abandonment or renunciation of one’s religion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, considers the recanting of a person’s religion a human right legally protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “The Committee observes that the freedom to ‘have or to adopt’ a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace ones current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views […] Article 18.2 bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to their religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.”. Anyway, many religious groups and even some states punish apostates. For Catholics, the word “apostasy” signifies the desertion of faith, which had been one of the three unpardonable sins in the early years of the Church. AEPD, the national agency for data protection, is pondering now whether to appeal against the sentence. I hope they do. There are other legitimate subjects that could appeal against it, too. No one should be forced to belong to a Church they don’t believe in.

One ongoing problem with TCP networking is the combination of RPC services and port based services on the same host. If you have an RPC service that uses a port less than 1024 then typically it will start at 1023 and try lower ports until it finds one that works. A problem that I have had in the past is that an RPC service used port 631 and I then couldn’t start CUPS (which uses that port). A similar problem can arise in a more insidious manner if you have strange networking devices such as a BMC [1] which uses the same IP address as the host and just snarfs connections for itself (as documented by pantz.org [2]), this means that according to the OS the port in question is not in use, but connections to that port will go to the hardware BMC and the OS won’t see them. Another solution is to give a SE Linux security context to the port which prevents the RPC service from binding to it. RPC applications seem to be happy to make as many bind attempts as necessary to get an available port (thousands of attempts if necessary) so reserving a few ports is not going to cause any problems. As far as I recall my problems with CUPS and RPC services was a motivating factor in some of my early work on writing SE Linux policy to restrict port access. Of course the best thing to do is to assign IP addresses for IPMI that are different from the OS IP addresses. This is easy to do and merely requires an extra IP address for each port. As a typical server will have two Ethernet ports on the baseboard (one for the front-end network and one for the private network) that means an extra two IP addresses (you want to use both interfaces for redundancy in case the problem which cripples a server is related to one of the Ethernet ports). But for people who don’t have spare IP addresses, SE Linux port labeling could really help.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseboard_management_controller


• [2] http://www.pantz.org/hardware/ipmi/ipmiconflictwithrpc.html

Share This

Today an discussion rised up in #debian-devel on the OFTC IRC Network. It started because someone noted the bug report #501318 which is, to summarize it, just a user mistake, because someone obviously read the man page (time(1)) for the /usr/bin/time command, while time is also a shell builtin (which does not accept the same arguments as the time command. Certainly this bug reports appears to be funny at the first sight, but on the other hand, there is a suboptimal situation that leads to this.

1. There are some builtin commands that also have binary equivalents (like time, printf, echo). Its quiet easy to tell weither the one or the other is used, by using the which command, but thats not really a realistic workflow, so its better to know this. The difference between these commands is often causing problems, which we have to cope with. For example bashs builtin echo behaves different as /bin/echo and people who use the bash as their default shell tend to use what bash provides, which in turn causes problems if other people who use a different default shell try to work with these scripts. But this is another problem, because...
   
2. ... every program, utility and function in Debian has to provide a manpage, as said by our policy: "Each program, utility, and function should have an associated manual page included in the same package." I guess that the rationale behind that is that 'man' is a very common tool in the Un*x world, which is wide-spread and which usage is much recommended to find out how specific tools behave. It is always referred to in Documentation, weither it is Debian specific or not, e.g. in books.
   
   The time package, which is of priority Standard and which includes /usr/bin/time, does conform to that policy by providing a manpage for the time command. The various shells don't do that, because they usually don't have a man page for each and every command (usually they have a more generic manpage which includes the builtins or in some seldom cases a special manpage for such and similar things (as for zsh, which has zshmisc(1)) and because its not that easy, because the man command cannot (AFAIK) distinguish between the user joey_average calling 'man time' in a bash, while the user schoenfeld calls the command 'man time' in a zsh, or if joey_foobar calls 'man read' in a shell which does not have a builtin time command and uses /usr/bin/time instead.
   

So whats wrong about this situation? Would you say that users that expect 'man time' (or similar examples) to do the right thing are making wrong assumptions? I disagree. Its what they've always been told to do. And if it does not show anything eventually run info, or look at HTML documentation or what else. But they haven't been prepared for the case where the manpages does show something, something wrong. The good thing is that the manpage for time includes a sentence:

"Users of the bash shell need to use an explicit path in order to run the external time command and not the shell builtin variant."

The bad thing about it is, that it is at approx. 70-80% of the manpage.

Clint, the maintainer of zsh, mentioned run-help which seems to be a part of the zsh, but not of any other shell, and does more or less the right thing (at least for the builtins) but not for external commands and not even for itself (it opens the code of the function instead of something user-readable like a manpage). I guess "one tool for a specific need" is a good maxime, but is it really a good maxime for finding documentation?

But how could the situation be bettered? I could think of a wrapper for man, similar to run-help but as a more generic solution. Any ideas for it? Is it the right way at all to better the users experience? Any other ideas? Other opinions?

Following my last blog post, Moritz Muehlenhoff sent me another statistical list in a desperate attempt to prove that there is no german cabal. As usual, when counting antyhing per inhabitant in IT, Finland wins:

   241890 Finland
   361500 Switzerland
   398766 Norway
   401033 Sweden
   426800 New Zealand
   489205 Austria
   492322 Germany
   612857 Australia
   713415 Netherlands
   795965 France
   814194 Belgium
   834800 Canada
   871071 United Kingdom
   912631 Denmark
  1102457 Spain
  1196289 Ireland
  1255125 Hungary
  1369233 United States
  1456400 Israel
  1484500 Croatia
  1737487 Czech Republic
  1738889 Uruguay
  1806645 Italy
  1910059 Bulgaria
  2270700 Latvia
  3369600 Lithuania
  3539191 Portugal
  3640956 Japan
  3811600 Poland
  4133884 Costa Rica
  5379455 Slovakia
  5608354 Greece
  6779558 Argentina
 10410773 Brazil
 11975000 South Africa
 14695666 Colombia
 12261197 Korea, Republic of
 16598074 Chile
 20042551 Madagascar
 20286976 Russian Federation
 22246862 Romania
 28199822 Venezuela
 28220764 Peru
 35293128 Turkey
 53341250 Mexico
 75360000 Egypt
226489200 India
330462972 China

Indeed, the best proof that there is no german cabal is that, IIRC, "they" never succeeded in having one of "theirs" elected a DPL. This is probably the best proof that there isn't ONE german cabal, but probably more... Beware of "them", "they" are everywhere.

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website. I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function. The user-interface situation gets worse later, when I am taken through five successive screens to upload and classify some new media. It seems that in order to bore people who are foolishly trying to upload their home movies over "poorband" they attempt to display a progress bar. A better approach would be to ask me all of the questions about the media I am uploading on one single page and let me get on with something useful. This might be news, but it seems that such an interface could be done in plain HTML, and wouldn't actually require me to enable javascript for a site which is riddled with cross-site scripting flaws. Since it's the school holidays at the moment we took advantage of Te Papa's excellent institution of "Late Night Thursday" last week and visited the other end of the website in person. My disappointment in the website was then entirely eclipsed by my disappointment in the real-life part of the exhibit. The "walk on the map and see photos of the area" component was decidedly clunky, with no clear feedback between stepping on a tile and media appearing on the wall In fact it seems most tiles don't actually do anything, and there are only a few small screens in the walls to display the images. The "postcards blowing in the wind" gimmick amused the kids for about 20 seconds, tops. The 'wall' was quite a lot more successful, amusing me and the kids for nearly half an hour, though we're unlikely to go back next time we're there. There were plenty of annoyances also, in particular that it doesn't appear to use the full resolution of uploaded photos, the interface is slow and it is difficult to see what you are doing at times. It's good that they've started practising their apologies, firstly targeting the small (but geeky :-) segment of New Zealanders who are Linux users trying to help them out by providing them with free content. Now I am looking forward to their further apologies to larger groups of justifiably annoyed people, culminating with the ultimate one, where they apologise to all of the taxpayers of New Zealand who funded this incredible waste of money. I can imagine that something interesting could be done with a lot of media of New Zealand and now that Te Papa has started to amass a collection in this way, perhaps they will.

It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website. I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function. The user-interface situation gets worse later, when I am taken through five successive screens to upload and classify some new media. It seems that in order to bore people who are foolishly trying to upload their home movies over "poorband" they attempt to display a progress bar. A better approach would be to ask me all of the questions about the media I am uploading on one single page and let me get on with something useful. This might be news, but it seems that such an interface could be done in plain HTML, and wouldn't actually require me to enable javascript for a site which is riddled with cross-site scripting flaws. Since it's the school holidays at the moment we took advantage of Te Papa's excellent institution of "Late Night Thursday" last week and visited the other end of the website in person. My disappointment in the website was then entirely eclipsed by my disappointment in the real-life part of the exhibit. The "walk on the map and see photos of the area" component was decidedly clunky, with no clear feedback between stepping on a tile and media appearing on the wall In fact it seems most tiles don't actually do anything, and there are only a few small screens in the walls to display the images. The "postcards blowing in the wind" gimmick amused the kids for about 20 seconds, tops. The 'wall' was quite a lot more successful, amusing me and the kids for nearly half an hour, though we're unlikely to go back next time we're there. There were plenty of annoyances also, in particular that it doesn't appear to use the full resolution of uploaded photos, the interface is slow and it is difficult to see what you are doing at times. It's good that they've started practising their apologies, firstly targeting the small (but geeky :-) segment of New Zealanders who are Linux users trying to help them out by providing them with free content. Now I am looking forward to their further apologies to larger groups of justifiably annoyed people, culminating with the ultimate one, where they apologise to all of the taxpayers of New Zealand who funded this incredible waste of money. I can imagine that something interesting could be done with a lot of media of New Zealand and now that Te Papa has started to amass a collection in this way, perhaps they will.

I just got back from the OpEd project/workshop. In short, it was worth every penny and if you are interested in writing an OpEp and riding the public debate bandwagon, this is the perfect place to start. Why? Well, first because the world of punditry and debate needs more diversity and women and this project is fundamentally geared toward getting more women into the system and in a no nonsense, accessible, inspiring, and yet utterly pragmatic fashion. First, if you don’t know the stats concerning women, they are depressingly dismal. For example, 9 out of 10 submissions are from male writers and 88% of published pieces are from male authors (and this is matched by all sorts of other disturbing figures about the lack of women non-fiction writers, TV producers etc). In the OpEd field, the main problem, in short, is that women are not even trying. Today’s full-day workshop was enlivening and engaging. Catherine Orenstein, the founder and dynamic leader of the project, dusts away a lot of the mystery of this writing genre and equips participants with some basic skills and tactics to get you started (then, in my opinion, it takes a fair bit of work and persistence to master, just like any type of writing but it is not rocket science either). What I like most about the project is its utter pragmatism. Cathy knows that once there are enough women in the system, the project can close shop, for it will be other women who will take over the reigns and inspire other women to write them (and informally mentor them as well). It is well known, for example, that once there is a critical mass of women, let’s say in the work place, then these women are the point people for recruitment so that the company does not need to actively recruit women. I have heard this argument before and have had a number of personal experiences that confirmed this fact. Last year, for example, a student from my department was organizing a conference and he could not, for the life of him, find any female speakers or discussants, despite asking a number of them who declined because of other commitments. He had ran out of options, that is, until he talked to me. In less than a minute, I rattled off like 5-7 other possible choices and within a day, we had 2 on board. It is clear that women know other women (and many are friends) so the best person to go to to tap into are other women. In terms of the actual writing of an OpEd, I am not sure I will be writing one anytime soon in so far as I need to really pump out a few more academic articles as the future of my jobs depends on them. But I may write a draft version of one that I will hammer into finer shape if a timely news event arises. Otherwise, I look forward to spending more time on this genre, especially once my book is done and know that if I am going to stay in academia, I will for sure make space for this type of thinking and writing. Finally if you are interested in attending one of the public, women-only seminars and you know me, let them know you learned about the project through me, and you will get discount.

One thing I am known to do is complain how the public/academic discourse surrounding/around technology/computers is overwhelmingly male (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Shirky and I can go on and on). But one day I realized that if I am bothered by it, I should do more than talk the (often) empty talk of complaint. So I decided to enroll in a day long training for writing OpEds, which kicks off tomorrow. I am not sure if engaging in public debate is what I want to do, mostly because of piling more work and time commitments on a very full plate but I am starting to explore what it means and what it may take to leave the Ivory Tower. Here is a little more info about the OpEd Project:

The OpEd Project - featured by The New York Times, Feministing.com and Katie Couric on CBS News - is an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate focus on targeting and training women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, online sites and other key forums of public discourse. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages - which are a source for all other media - deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space which is intended to showcase divergent opinions. It also means we are only hearing from a tiny sliver of the nation’s best thinkers. Imagine a baseball team of only pitchers - how well would it do?

A small discussion on IRC triggerred this (from Debian LDAP): Number of DDs per country:

United States : 348
Germany : 197
United Kingdom : 97
France : 96
Canada : 56
Australia : 56
Spain : 49
Japan : 41
Italy : 40
Netherlands : 38
Sweden : 34
Finland : 27
Austria : 22
Switzerland : 21
Brazil : 19
New Zealand : 14
Poland : 13
Norway : 13
Belgium : 13
Hungary : 12
South Africa : 8
Denmark : 8
China : 8
Russian Federation : 7
Ireland : 7
Argentina : 7
Korea, Republic of : 6
Israel : 6
Czech Republic : 6
India : 5
Portugal : 4
Bulgaria : 4
Croatia : 3
Greece : 3
Colombia : 3
Uruguay : 2
Turkey : 2
Romania : 2
Mexico : 2
Egypt : 2
Venezuela : 1
Thailand : 1
Slovakia : 1
Peru : 1
Madagascar : 1
Latvia : 1
Lithuania : 1
Costa Rica : 1
Chile : 1

Number of active DDs per country:

United States : 223
Germany : 167
France : 81
United Kingdom : 70
Spain : 41
Canada : 40
Japan : 35
Australia : 35
Italy : 33
Sweden : 23
Netherlands : 23
Finland : 22
Switzerland : 21
Brazil : 18
Austria : 17
Belgium : 13
Norway : 12
Poland : 10
New Zealand : 10
Hungary : 8
Russian Federation : 7
Denmark : 6
Czech Republic : 6
Argentina : 6
India : 5
Israel : 5
Ireland : 5
South Africa : 4
Korea, Republic of : 4
China : 4
Bulgaria : 4
Portugal : 3
Croatia : 3
Colombia : 3
Uruguay : 2
Turkey : 2
Mexico : 2
Greece : 2
Venezuela : 1
Slovakia : 1
Romania : 1
Peru : 1
Madagascar : 1
Latvia : 1
Lithuania : 1
Egypt : 1
Costa Rica : 1
Chile : 1

One thing I am known to do is complain how the public/academic discourse surrounding/around technology/computers is overwhelmingly male (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Shirky and I can go on and on). But one day I realized that if I am bothered by it, I should do more than talk the (often) empty talk of complaint. So I decided to enroll in a day long training for writing OpEds, which kicks off tomorrow. I am not sure if engaging in public debate is what I want to do, mostly because of piling more work and time commitments on a very full plate but I am starting to explore what it means and what it may take to leave the Ivory Tower. Here is a little more info about the OpEd Project:

he OpEd Project - featured by The New York Times, Feministing.com and Katie Couric on CBS News - is an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate focus on targeting and training women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, online sites and other key forums of public discourse. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages - which are a source for all other media - deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space which is intended to showcase divergent opinions. It also means we are only hearing from a tiny sliver of the nation’s best thinkers. Imagine a baseball team of only pitchers - how well would it do?