Search Results: "erinn"

10 October 2007

Daniel Burrows: Science: who does it, why?

On the topic of "why so few scientists are women", I recently came across a rather thought-provoking article (thanks Erinn). It's worth a read, especially for anyone (man or woman) that's thinking about heading into academia.

Erinn Clark: Whatever

Here are some random links.

31 August 2007

Erinn Clark: My new furniture

Pink. Victorian. Vulvacious.

I have the most emasculating living room ever.

22 August 2007

Erinn Clark: Worriers, come out and pla-a-a-y

"It is so bourgeois to spend your days worrying about ducks and lattice work." -- seen on a mailing list

29 July 2007

Erinn Clark: web 2.0 is full of scary clowns

Because of the social networking and needing-to-be-registered of it all, I had to sign up for another website to keep track of one of my friends' goingses-onses. The sign-up process reminded me of a circus freakshow of the "Step on inside -- if you dare! And buy a bottle of our snake oil!" (insert knowing, taunting laugh) variety. Tell me how PUMPED you feel after reading the comments they added after I filled in the various fields:

Email address: Nicely put!
First name: So that's what they call you!
Last name: Classy last name, I have to admit!
Username: Creative!
I agree to the Terms of Service: ...I dare you to un-click that!
End of registration: To make sure you're as awesome as you claim, please visit your email's inbox for our verification email (I'm positive that more exclamation points were ejaculated all over my screen at this point but I closed the window too quickly to be sure.)
Activation confirmation emancipation proclamation: Wonderful, the hardest part is now over! Time to Enjoy! (With a capital E!!!!)
It might as well have been written by Dr. Bronner himself:

Email address: Godliness!
First name: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody!
Last name: Enlarge the positive!
Username: WE'RE ONE! ALL-ONE! EXCEPTIONS ETERNALLY? NONE! ABSOLUTE NONE!
I agree to the Terms of Service: Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute! or Wet Skin Well!
End of registration: Whatever unites mankind is better than whatever divides us!
Activation confirmation ALL-ONE! clean sensation: WELCOME TO SPACESHIP EARTH!!

14 July 2007

Erinn Clark: Proof that JWZ hates you

19 May 2007

Wouter Verhelst: Updating Debian/m68k patches for gcc 4.2

In a perfect world, software would work perfectly. Unfortunately... well, you know the drill. Since GCC 4.2 is upcoming, our resident GCC guy doko asked me to find someone to have a look at updating the Debian patches for GCC 4.1 so that they'd apply. Since I need to learn about GCC anyway for the Debian/ColdFire project (which nobody seems to be working on except for me), I started looking into it myself. The procedure is simple enough: uncomment lines in debian/rules.patch, and fix those m68k-specific patches that break. The first one was easy. debian/patches/m68k-gc.dpatch has been integrated upstream, so is no longer necessary. The second one was slightly more involved. But only slightly so; the patch tried to change libffi/src/m68k/sysv.S, which had received some three extra lines that conditionally add a .note.GNU-stack section. These three lines weren't there at first; but the .S file was otherwise entirely unchanged, so fixing this was rather easy. The next one is, uh, pretty hard. gcc/config/m68k/m68k.md is a file of 7k LOC in the GCC-specific "RTL" pseudo-assembly language, which I'm not at all familiar with. Yet, anyway. As a bonus, the first hunk in this file which fails to apply does so because that bit of this code has been changed rather significantly from GCC 4.1 to 4.2. Meaning:
  1. I need to figure out how this RTL code works
  2. I need to figure out what this particular RTL code block does
  3. I need to figure out what the point of this particular patch was
  4. I need to figure out how to write a patch (in RTL) which semantically does the same thing as what the original patch was doing. Without breaking the changes between 4.1 and 4.2
Wish me luck. At least the first two parts are almost finished; after skimming through chapters 12 and 14 of gccint.info, this hugging code almost makes sense to me. (oh, and if that last link doesn't make any sense to you, ask me for my fortune file at debconf) (which is in less than a month! whee! excitement!)

12 April 2007

Erinn Clark: Etch release party in San Francisco?

Anyone? Email me. I don't know when or where or who even lives here.

14 January 2007

Erich Schubert: Config files

Our top-10 female geek "helix" (congrats!) suggested (jokingly) we could do an Ajax interface for configuration files. Well, if you want, you can run a tomcat as root, and have it access your configuration files. If you're crazy enough. :-) No, there are actually secure ways of doing such things, if you want even with Ajax. Just have a secure web server for administration, which will then push the updated configuration file to the actual hosts e.g. via cfengine. Since people still tend do read "all configuration files should be XML", and "but I hate XML": please get down. We already have quite some XML-lookalike configuration files (e.g. apache). We have S-Expressions. We have some deeply nested INI files. We have true XML config files (e.g. /etc/fonts/fonts.conf). All I'm asking is that we should maybe use one single format for all applications that have similar requirements for their configuration. And no, not every application can be sanely configured with a linear, flat configuration file. Sometimes, a tree-based data model is much cleaner. You know, thats why we're using a tree directory structure, and not flat files. And face it, if you like it or not: XML is the most widely accepted choice for exchanging (tree structured) data. And if you manage systems, you want to be able to sanely exchange data between e.g. a configuration management tool and the service you're configuring.

13 January 2007

Amaya Rodrigo: I'm right here!

Stratus asks Where's Amaya?

I m right here! But I am so RC buggy that, of course, they must have found out ;)

I missed women like Carla Schroder in that list. She s been my inspiration since I started translating her articles for the Spanish version of Linux Magazine.

Anyway, in a list with 10 people, there are always many missing. And I warmly congratulate Erinn for making it into the list. She sure deserves it!

Visibility is what it is all about. And this makes all of us, even the ones not on the list, more visible.

12 January 2007

Gustavo Franco: Where's Amaya ?

...or why i hate top-whatever lists

Top 10 Girl Geeks looks interesting, but where's Amaya? Who's Erinn? lol :-P

Meike Reichle: Happy New Year! and some resolutions

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:
  1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
    • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
    • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
    • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
      So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
  2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
  3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
  4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
  5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...
So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

Erinn Clark: Sweet & Sour

According to this blog, I am one of the top 10 living girl geeks! How flattering. In other news, Robert Anton Wilson has died. He's one of my favorite authors, and I found this news to be rather tragic and upsetting, but it seems he remained in good spirits until the end. May he rest in peace.

13 December 2006

Steve Kemp: Do you know what it feels like in this world

Sexism Amaya was right to point out an example of sexism at a recent open source developers conference. She makes reference to the Debian Women group as an example of a good thing. I was talking to Erinn recently and told her that my impression was that the Women project had stalled/ceased. Mostly because there didn’t seem to be anything happening. I think that this is both a good thing, and a bad thing. Good in the sense that the idea of female developers isn’t a suprise (as it shouldn’t be) and that the previously overt sexist hostility is going away. But bad in the sense that there should be ongoing work so that we don’t start to take it for granted and ignore other newcomers and women. There are several reasons why projects like this stall; one of the most obvious is that writing documentation is hard. Really. You don’t know how hard it is until you try to do a little every day for week after week after week. (And there are times when I think of writing a book. Ha!) There are other reasons too; such as the difficulty in attracting volunteers who are matched to their jobs, and who in turn have the time to do useful things. So Planet Debian how are you going to help our women today? I’ll make sure I avoid sexist lyrics in my titles from here on out.. not a huge change since I tend to avoid it generally, much as I would love to fill entries with Depeche Mode lyrics I guess I have better places for emo-rants. One small step ..

29 November 2006

Erinn Clark: Geek the Wonder Cat


Val's cat Speak decided to pull a Garfield and get his geek on while hanging out on my nightstand tonight.

16 November 2006

Jordi Mallach: Debconf7 travel options

The Debconf team just announced that registration is now open for next year's Debconf7, to be held in Edinburgh next June. The preparations seem to go at good pace, and they already have a Travel wiki page with information so attendees can start looking for the best option for them. I am delighted to see they have been thinking about every case out there and it will be possible to swim all the way over to Leith, not even getting a bad cold. Thanks! This of course is yet another reason to plan ahead so I don't miss out, like last year in Mexico. Erinn, remind me about it in late May or so, mkay?

14 November 2006

Erinn Clark: I'm so country, y'all

If anyone knows where to buy grits and/or collard greens in the Bay Area, the home of godless, gritless liberals, please email me. I've tried TJ's, Safeway, and Whole Foods with no luck. Thanks!

8 November 2006

Erinn Clark: cd /mnt/view

The week before last, I packed up my car and drove across the country and am now in California. All I have to say about that is: WESSSIIIDE! I also have a few pictures.
This cow mooed at me until I went away. I love New Mexico.
Obligatory tourist shot at the Grand Canyon. As an aside, on my way there I got stuck on a highway overnight because of a police/gunman standoff.
Some pretty blown glass flowers inside the Bellagio in Las Vegas, NV.
The meteor crater, which I wish to pave and turn into a skatepark.

6 November 2006

Amaya Rodrigo: Everyday Sexism


Everyday Sexism
Originally uploaded by Amayita.


Things like this make us women feel VERY welcome in IT.

This time it's EagleSoft. But I am fearing SIMO in Madrid this week. It is just a CBIT-kind of computing fair, where there are more semi-naked women that semi-naked hardware to look at.

I did not want to attend this year, but I will. Just to take pictures of how male-targetted this market is. Naked women are used to sell anything, including computers.

I am nauseated and want to run really far away, where I can no longer take part in this consumerism-sexism whirlpool, and life a simple, materialism-free life, kind of Amish-like, but with access to my email :).

Excuse the rant.


Update: As requested by Madduck, I am happy to quote Erinn: The expression "nice rack" is used as a way to compliment a woman's breasts, as she was kind enough to explain on IRC for non-native speakers.
Please also note the expression on the guy's face.
Also, there are links to more sexism in IT adverts in this entry's comments. Feel free to add your own pointers. As consumers^Wcustomers we can make the educated choice.

13 July 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Pearls and Dents

In Germany's pharmacies (and all around the world), you can buy a tooth paste with "pearls". These are little, soft grains, and the combination of the seemingly suggested concept "sandpaper" (they even have to deny that on the front page of the product's home page) with the clean and beautiful image of "pearl" seem to lead people to believe that these particles will make your teeth twinkle in the dark. I am not in the capacity to judge whether those actually perform better deplaquification. The tooth paste goes by the name of "Pearls and Dents" (for non-German speakers). That's another German product carrying a name made of English words, which appears to be cool these days. I find it a sad development how English replaces German all over the German media and every day language use (second only to the germanification of English words, like "downgeloadet" -- the use of English words according to German grammar rules). But that's not the point, at least not this time. What I find even more disturbing is the stupidity of the masses that go with the flow, or even try to be creative at designing captive slogans, regardless of the widespread lack of command of the English language. "Dents" may be close to "dental", but it does not actually mean teeth. Thus I am left to wonder whether the manufacturer is trying to hint at what those little pearls actually do to your teeth, or whether it's just another instance of a crap marketing team (who'd probably be better off learning proper German first, before venturing into the domain of another language). Along similar lines, is it only me who thinks that Adidas' slogan "impossible is nothing" is just plain stupid. Are they trying to be extra clever by giving the all too common phrase "nothing is impossible" a witty twist (and failing at it)? Or are they instead hinting that "impossible" is for others -- wear Adidas and you'll encounter even less possible situations? PS: This post is dedicated to helix.

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