Dyepot, Teapot

The food cart map has resulted in a few emails now and then from people who saw it somewhere or got an email from a friend, and wanted to say “hey, neato”. This past week I decided to find out just how much traffic the map is actually getting, and where that traffic is coming from.

It’s a bit more popular than I realized.

Since Thursday night, the map has been viewed 52 times. It’s mentioned on Chowhound, Metroblogging Portland, alt.portland, and the Portland Mercury blog. I am really proud to have created something that random strangers find useful.

So I think it may be time for an upgrade. I’d like to expand it outside the downtown area, and I’m open to creating more maps for other cities, if people want to tell me where their favorite carts are. I just need enough location details to find it on Google Maps (”on the north side of SW Taylor, between 2nd and 3rd, about halfway down the block” is usually enough info, but I like to take a quick snapshot to work from later, and if you happen to have a GPS device handy for exact coordinates, that’s even better).

I also think it might be helpful to provide short descriptions or reviews for the different carts, and maybe some additional details like the phone number to call ahead with your order, or the hours they’re open. All of this requires going around to the carts on weekdays, though, and just getting food and walking back consumes most of my lunch hour. I wonder how “I want to take a really long lunch so I can talk to people who run food carts” would go over at work.

If you have suggestions for carts to add, or cool things I could do with the map, please leave a comment.

Tags: food carts, mapping, cartography, portland, lunch

I’d like to encourage everyone who’s reading this through some kind of aggregator (like Bloglines) to switch to the Feedburner source at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DyepotTeapot. There are a couple of reasons for this: it will give me better feedback on whether anyone is reading even when they don’t click through to the post, and there’s a good chance I’ll be moving away from Blogspot at some point, so this will make it easier for everyone to follow the blog even if the actual site address changes. If you’re not sure how to make the switch, leave a comment and I’ll try to help.

Also, I think there’s a Livejournal subscription to redirect. Erin, do you still manage that?

Tags: feeds, syndication, blogging

I was reading through the job board on 37Signals earlier, when I spotted this:

Chief Geeky Dude at AKQA

Location: Washington DC
URL: www.akqa.com

Description
Join AKQA Washington DC’s senior staff. The Technical Director is responsible and accountable for the overall leadership, and direction of AKQA’’s flash and web development teams. Or as stated so eloquently by our Creative Director: CHIEF GEEKY DUDE THAT CAN ACTUALLY MAKE THE GREAT IDEAS AROUND HERE A REALITY DIRECTOR. We are looking for a highly talented, web focused flash/technology “’mad scientist’” who wants to be part of delivering amazing online experiences for some incredible brands.

Aside from the fact that it reads like the writer was drunk at the time, there’s one huge glaring problem with this. I can’t think of any way that one might reasonably read the job title and think that this company was equally interested in hiring a man or a woman, which means there’s a good chance that they’re violating the equal employment laws on non-discriminatory job ads. Dude means men, in every context I’ve encountered.

I can’t decide whether I should email 37Signals about it or not. Do they look at the job posts before they go up? At $250 a month, I’d expect actual human involvement, but who knows.

Anyhow, in Ruby programming news–I had the dumb realization that if I couldn’t get the Blogger API to work, I could always write a script to email the posts instead. So I did. Slightly more interesting automated content coming soon.

Tags: discrimination, gender, jobs, tech industry

HTTP GET requests with basic authentication: working.
HTTP POST requests with basic authentication: not working. But I can’t tell if this is because I’m doing it wrong, or because Blogger appears to be somewhere in the middle of switching to a generic Google data API, so I gave up and decided to write an Atom feed generator instead.

Which leads me to the next problem: the Time library documentation says there’s an xmlschema function, to generate iso8601 formatted date/time strings. But I can’t find it. Time.xmlschema gives me “undefined method `xmlschema’ for Time:Class”. Time.now.xmlschema returns “undefined method `xmlschema’ for Sun Sep 24 10:25:30 -0700 2006:Time”.

As a sidenote, irb is really handy for poking around in classes and testing ideas before writing several lines of code that may or may not work as expected. So I tried Time.methods, and sure enough I can’t find xmlschema at all.

What’s going on here? Am I using this wrong, or is the documentation out of sync with the library? Do I have to construct the date string I need by hand?

UPDATE:
Ruby Cookbook to the rescue. I found a way to get the date string I need:

require 'date'
puts DateTime.now.to_s

Tags: ruby, programming, questions

One of the bad things about Ruby [1] is that sometimes when you Google for information on a warning or error message, the only references that turn up are in Japanese.

I’ve been trying to work on a couple of things that need to open https connections with a username and password, and invariably I can’t get it to work. After much mucking around with net/http(s), I feel like I have a fairly good idea of how to work with this library, but even the most successful looking results I’m getting are re-directs because the server on the other end can’t see the username and password I’m sending. This is getting really frustrating, I have no idea if I’m doing something wrong or if there’s a problem with the openssl library, but I can’t even get code samples from a couple of online tutorials to do this correctly.

I’m about ready to rewrite my project in perl. But maybe I’ll find a useful hint in my copy of the Ruby Cookbook, which should be arriving later today.

[1] Okay, this isn’t a problem if you actually speak Japanese. But for me… I’m wishing they were at least writing in German, so I’d have some chance of working out what’s being said.

Tags: programming, ruby

My thumbs hurt. And the first boss level on Sonic Rush seems harder than it ought to be. But otherwise the game works nicely on the DS. There’s something very relaxing about sending a spiky blue guy spinning through a maze of ramps and gold rings.

The best part of babysitting for my cousins when I was in middle school is that after they went to bed, I could play Sonic the Hedgehog on their Sega Genesis until my aunt and uncle came home. We still only had an Atari at my house, so this was a big improvement over my normal video game options. I’m pretty happy to be able to play Sonic again.

Now I just need a home version of Area 51. I kick ass at that game.

Tags: games, nintendo, sonic

This article from the NYT on the results of a study of women in science and engineering was one of the brighter spots in my day. Not because the news is good (far from it), but because the conclusions are so important and it feels good to see this relayed in a major newspaper. I am furious when I hear the assertion that women are less successful in certain fields because they are innately less capable, less motivated and interested, or just not qualified to do the work. It’s ridiculous and dehumanizing, and yet there’s been a rash of this line of thought on some of the tech blogs lately.

A couple of quotes that caught my eye:

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are any cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant.

…

The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes, and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

Tags: feminism, women, science, engineering

I’m limping along. I did not anticipate just how depressing it would be to not be able to walk properly for so long (it’s been over a month now). My foot is almost back to normal, but I still can’t walk as far or comfortably as I want, and it’s really hard to cope with some days. It’s one of those things I just take for granted, that there’s no reason not to spend half an hour walking somewhere to get a bite to eat or go shopping, but right now that’s really exhausting.

I’m also feeling disheartened by this discussion on women, tech, and the O’Reilly publishing empire. It’s the other half of why I skipped all my programming meetings this month. Not that they aren’t mostly welcoming groups, but sometimes I feel really overwhelmed, like I barely have the technical knowledge to even participate and no one cares what else I can do so I may as well stay home.

I read way too many blog posts about the world o’ tech, so maybe this is on my mind more than it needs to be, but I feel like women are expected to either be just like the guys and blend in without ever mentioning clothing, cooking, or a desire to take a break from writing the next fabulous AJAX library once in a while, or they have to be creative/communicative and design graphics or do marketing or study community collaboration. No major hacking for the girls.

It doesn’t help that I’m really frustrated with my job right now. I feel like the managers I deal with are very critical of the actions of some employees, to the point of micromanaging them, and at the same time allow gross incompetence and very unprofessional behavior from other people. And the people (including myself) who find they have to double check everything and cc like crazy to cover their ass are women, while the person who gets away with the worst job behavior (to the point of being handed easier tasks when he gets confused or frustrated with the work his coworkers are expected to do–despite having the same job title and presumably receiving similar pay) is male.

And I don’t know if what I’m seeing is happening because of gender or not, but I think it’s a factor, just based on watching how the managers deal with other men and women in general. I’m really unhappy about feeling like I have to justify every single thing I do at my job, even though I’ve been there over a year and was had a positive review in July. Especially when I see other people doing very bad work and not seeming to receive any kind of significant reprimand. When I started here, there was a guy who barely did any work or follow up with the customers and instead spent a lot of time on the phone talking to various cousins about arranged marriages… and when he finally left to go work elsewhere, the VP of our department actually came around to thank the guy for his good service. What?

***

Anyhow, I’ve been feeling the need for some stress relief, so I bought myself a Nintendo DS. It’s almost as sexy as my iPod. The display quality is great, it has a shiny black case, and I have a copy of Age of Empires waiting for me right now.

Tags: gender, tech, work