Dyepot, Teapot

There are some things going on in my family right now that I’m feeling angry and frustrated and sad about. I’ve been helping my brother take care of the paperwork required to drop all of his classes this quarter, due to a currently undiagnosed neurological disorder. My grandmother, who will be celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary on Saturday, has severe temporal-frontal lobe dementia that reduces her impulse control to that of a toddler. It can be scary to be around. One of my cousins is in the army, and he recently found out that he’ll be deployed to Iraq for 15 months starting in August. Some of my other relatives have poorly managed health and lifestyle issues that are very hard on the people around them.

I’ve been hesitant to write about any of this, because I want to respect other people’s privacy, but I’m finding that it’s really having an effect on my mood and concentration right now. I want to help, but there’s so little I can do in most cases, other than look up phone numbers for various services and offer my brother a place to hang out when it’s too crazy at home. We’ll all be in one place (thankfully, outdoors) for the anniversary party this weekend. I love them, but I feel overwhelmed. Right now I’d really like to stay home.

1. With their head inside a plastic bag, no matter how interesting the contents.
2. The kitchen cupboard.
3. The bathroom cupboard.
4. On top of a shelf that used to hold photos and other knick-knacks.
5. In the bedroom (cats on pillows == wheezy Lucas).
6. Whining pitifully outside the bedroom door at 5AM.

He’s really lucky he’s so cute.

I’ve been wanting to try stenciling (or even screenprinting, but I don’t have the setup) onto knit fabrics, so I made a small bag on the knitting machine, crocheted a handle, and h4×0r3d it.

I also crocheted a Nintendo DS cozy on the plane to Vegas last fall. I thought I’d already taken pictures of it, but I couldn’t find anything on my Flickr account.

I just upgraded one of my Rails projects to Rspec 1.0.2, ran all my old specs to see what would happen, and … crunch. It turns out there are a few gotchas if you were using an older version (instead of starting from scratch–I think they’ll be picking up some new users with this release).

First thing to change in your specs:
context "a model or controller or whatever" do
specify “behavior” do
…
end
end

is now

describe "a model or controller or whatever" do
it “has behavior” do
…
end
end

The description for model blocks should look like:
describe Apple, "with fixtures loaded" do
…
end
The string after the model name is optional.

For controller blocks it’s:
describe ApplesController do
…
end

You can also use a string in place of the controller name, in which case you’ll need to declare the controller name explicitly.
describe "Submitting new apple description"
controller_name :apples
…
end

The setup block is now before(:each).
before(:each) do
[setup actions of some sort]
end

The syntax for ’should’ functions has changed.
I had several examples of:
User.should_respond_to(:authenticate)

This is now:
User.should respond_to(:authenticate)
Note the lack of an underscore after ’should’.

The exception to that is the should_not function.
This is correct:
@feed.posts.should_not be(nil)

With these changes, all of my specs are passing again. Did I miss anything that broke for you? Leave a comment.

Links to further documentation:
Writing specs for Rails
General Rspec instructions

I’ve been actively listing things on Etsy for the last few weeks, and the main thing I’m noticing is that it’s hard to sell items directly through the site, because there’s just so much listed and the search tools don’t always do enough to narrow it down (or if the features exist, they’re not obvious). I think the most successful shops are the ones that have gained a certain amount of attention from outside, so people buy things from them because they heard about that specific shop elsewhere.

So with something of an ulterior motive, I’m going to point out a few examples of very cool sock yarn that the web at large might not know about.

Hlmiller has a green and pink (like a watermelon) yarn. Great summer colors.

I love the green and blue gradient on SeeJayneKnitYarns’s Austin Peacock sock yarn. She has a lovely dark moss green listed right now too.

Some great pinks and oranges and reds from Zen Yarn Garden.

Yarnchef’s colors definitely look food-inspired. The yarn shown below is on sale, too.

And last but not least, here’s one of my own yarn dyeing experiments. I like to toss some yarn and dye in the pot and see what comes out.

I hope this helps direct a little more traffic toward everyone’s work. There’s some really nice yarn on here, but with 95 pages of listings just for this type, so much of it only gets a few views apiece.

Yesterday the Financial Times reported an interview with Eric Schmidt where he says,

“We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

“We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”

This is a little creepy. I think most people don’t mind their friends and relatives having such insights into their life, but for a major corporation that most of us have no personal contact with to be attempting the same thing?

Bruce Schneier recently wrote,

1984’s Big Brother was run by the state; today’s Big Brother is market driven. Data brokers like ChoicePoint and credit bureaus like Experian aren’t trying to build a police state; they’re just trying to turn a profit. Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they’d be stupid not to. And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U.S. government buys commercial data from them.

I’ve noticed in talking to people about web services that there are two distinct camps on this subject. There are people who host their own email, blogs, photos, and all other data, because they don’t want other companies to have any control over its use or longevity. And there are people who happily outsource everything from email to calendars to every other kind of communication to services that will hold onto it indefinitely. There’s a real trade-off here. If I let Google have access to all of my electronic data, I can be fairly well assured that I’ll have long-term access to it as well. Also, the more places have pieces of my data, the better chance I have of reassembling things in the case of a failure in the primary repository (as many people with corrupted databases or deleted blog posts have discovered, Google Reader and Livejournal syndication can be a godsend).

At least in the US, we have very few laws that restrict how long much of this data can be stored, and how it can be used. Obviously, no commercial service wants access to all this potential information if they can’t make money doing so. And increasingly, that means analyzing everything you buy and do with the intent of targeting commercial services more accurately.

Yet it’s hard for me to get worked up about this issue. No, I don’t want the government or anyone else using this to restrict what I can or can’t do, look for illegal behavior before it starts (think of all the false positives), or in any other way invade my life. But Google telling me what I think or want? Surely I’m smart enough to ignore this and continue to have my own mind. I don’t buy books just because Amazon says I’ll like them. On the other hand, maybe it’s better if these data stores expire after a while. If I want to hold onto my own email for 20 years, that’s one thing. But it doesn’t seem appropriate to allow this sort of analytic targeting to use data so old we don’t remember it ourselves. People change.

Some final thoughts from Schneier:

Of course, Orwell’s Big Brother had a ruthless efficiency that’s hard to imagine in a government today. But that completely misses the point. A sloppy and inefficient police state is no reason to cheer; watch the movie Brazil and see how scary it can be. You can also see hints of what it might look like in our completely dysfunctional “no-fly” list and useless projects to secretly categorize people according to potential terrorist risk. Police states are inherently inefficient. There’s no reason to assume today’s will be any more effective.

The fear isn’t an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state, although with the U.S.’s programs of phone-record surveillance, illegal wiretapping, massive data mining, a national ID card no one wants and Patriot Act abuses, one can make that case. It’s that we’re doing it ourselves, as a natural byproduct of the information society.We’re building the computer infrastructure that makes it easy for governments, corporations, criminal organizations and even teenage hackers to record everything we do, and — yes — even change our votes. And we will continue to do so unless we pass laws regulating the creation, use, protection, resale and disposal of personal data. It’s precisely the attitude that trivializes the problem that creates it.

[Link to interview via Shelley Powers.]

I had a great time talking to people at the Portland Social Media Club tonight. Thanks Marshall, for setting this up and inviting me to participate.

To follow up for the attendees and anyone who managed to watch the streaming video feed, info on my science fiction publication is at Yogsnotebook.com. I received some helpful suggestions from the audience on how to make the site more engaging, so hopefully I’ll be posting more about that soon. And my main personal site is lifeofaudrey.com. I assemble the main page content by aggregating a number of personal feeds through Tumblr and then use Feedburner to create the summary for display on the webpage. This is really easy and doesn’t require any programming on my end, and as John pointed out, it’s a great way to keep blogs and other sites from going dead when we don’t know what to post.

One of the kinds of comments I keep running into goes like this: “The reason women aren’t in technology in large numbers is that they don’t have enough encouragement early on. If we help them get interested in grade school and high school, eventually we’ll have gender parity in the working world.” And on top of that, any other attempts to encourage diversity among existing adults get the blanket label of affirmative-action quota programs (even if all that’s been suggested is to find a way to acknowledge the presence of women in your field in a manner that does not make them feel like the subject of a scavenger hunt).

The problem with this is that it completely neglects the people who have the skills and the interest to be working in this field, but have chosen to do something else (even a support or management role rather than programming) because they don’t feel welcome. Encouraging young girls to play with computers is not going to fix the lack of an inclusive professional environment to move into. And I think the declining diversity that occurs as we go through the educational and career process is a strong indication that this particular problem exists. Do you really want to encourage more women to enroll in first-year CS classes just so even more of us can leave?

This doesn’t mean that I’m not in favor of technology initiatives for all children. I mostly talk about gender because I’m a white female and this is what I know, but I really am interested in more diversity in all directions. I actually think that everyone should know at least a little about how to program, create web pages, etc. This is an important kind of literacy in the modern world. Except that’s a different problem than what it’s like to work in the tech industry right now.

I also don’t think we should equate technological literacy with who graduates from CS programs, but I hope I covered that enough in the previous post.

From _why’s Hackety Manifesto:

Hello world should be one line.

In fact, downloading an MP3 should be one line!!

We just don’t care right now, do we? Programmers have a paid gig. So business is happily slurping them up. Look at our books. Look at the programming sites. Programming is tightly coupled to business. Often the first example is an e-commerce site! Our books are like FIFTY DOLLARS!! For crying out loud.

This diatribe isn’t about business being bad. Of course you need to feed your family and drive an Audi.

This diatribe is about adding some balance to the world of programming. Okay, so, let’s take things into our own hands and bring hacking to the young folks.

Go read the rest of it. The bylaws are wonderful.

I keep thinking that I’ve already spit out everything I can think of on this topic, but a comment I saw on Tim Bray’s blog reminded me of something else. There’s a lot of focus on a particular route to working with technology, running from early childhood computer use, to high school programming classes or college CS studies, then finally getting a real world job in the field. It’s the formal path for this, right? So then when we talk about how to get minorities actively contributing in the world o’ tech, we focus on smoothing that specific route. But in reality, a lot of us actually studied or worked in other fields at some point, and came to technology from elsewhere. In my case, I learned BASIC in grade school, played with computers tons all the way up, but didn’t take a single computer class in high school, and in college I majored in geography instead. The particular kind of technology work I do now mostly involves things I didn’t pursue until I was away from formal education systems.

I’ve heard similar stories from a lot of other people, too. Many real live computer programmers have a background in something other than CS. And that’s wonderful. I think it’s much easier to learn computer skills on the side than to get an in-depth look at many other fields that way, and a background in something else can give you so much material for what questions technology is needed to solve. So when we’re thinking about how to increase the diversity of who works in technology fields, it’s really important not to neglect the indirect routes. Many modern jobs involve computers in some way. We need to think about how to help people become not just passive consumers of technology, but active contributors. Even if all they do is write their own web page or a small script. Even customization of existing tools or just a good understanding of how they work is part of this.

Not everyone will want to get into the nitty gritty details with tech, and that’s okay too. I wrote a post after Recent Changes Camp about how organizations can recognize and support involvement at many different levels. But while there are many great reasons to reach out to as diverse a pool of kids and students as possible, to facilitate their future involvement, I don’t want to forget the adults who are already out there using these technologies on a daily basis, who may just need a nudge in the right direction to take a more active role.

And maybe we should also be talking about expanding our definition of who counts as a technology worker in the first place. Shouldn’t this include anyone who creates or modifies tech for their own needs, whether or not they’re working under the umbrella of IT or programming at the time? Not to make the numbers and diversity ratios look better, but to reach out to people who may not realize there’s any kind of community or resources connected to those activities.

More to think about.