Composite: Tech & Poetics – Page 4

SXSWi: Fighting online misogyny panel

March 15, 2009 Liz

Thank you!!! times a hundred to Nalo Hopkinson who just now took my rough live transcript and cleaned it up and emailed it back to me so I could post it. Thank you Nalo! You rock so hard.

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That’s Not My Name: Beating Down Misogyny Online

Panelists: Cecily Walker (Cecily.info), Ann Friedman (Feministing), Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon.net), Samhita Mukhopadhyay (Feministing)

Cecily Walker: How do you think that new media and Internet technology, new tools, feminists can use these new media tools? Boosting feminist activism?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: All of us have a tremendous amount of expertise using online tech. women’s community, grass root organizing community, new tools, support work happening on the ground. Strategic media campaigns, budding networks, social media to support our justice-minded goals. We use tools, though, that tend to represent the same stuff we’re fighting; tools produced in environments highly volatile for feminist voices. 50/50 good, problematic. Opportunity, brought up new issues.

Amanda Marcotte: Promise of blogging world many years ago, we could divorce ourselves from identity and just be pure voices, as the online and offline world merged into one. But you can’t communicate about your ideas without bringing your identity along. Pluses and minuses.

Ann Friedman: Divorcing identity is not a useful way to do activism. we don’t actually want to live out whatever early Internet ideal enables us to not have an identity, that hampers our activist goals.

Cecily: I wasn’t finding many black female queer voices online, it was important to me to blog under my own identity. given our circumstances today, how important is it to you to blog under you own identity.?

Amanda: I started blogging under my own id without really thinking of it, it didn’t seem to be a big deal. in retrospect it was good and it sets a good example if you can. a lot of women who are afraid to , the more of us who can do it, the less threatening it is for others.

Samhita: when i started we were excited if we got comments on a post. then 2 years into it we started getting threats. you then realize the threats mostly don’t translate to real live experiences. I also think for women online it’s an important statement to make. you’ll notice a lot of men have a blog under their own name. women tend to be in group blogs or under a different sort of brand name. So it’s important for your future to use your real name.

Friedman: women in the political blog world as pseudonymous and I’m thinking of Digby. But it’s not always a great idea to blog under your own name. It’s fraught. There’s a certain amount of privilege and risk you assume. Not all of us even thought about it. we didn’t consider the implications. Concrete advantages, consider Digby, they didn’t know she was a woman, so they didn’t pigeonhole her. ‘This is just a women’s issue’, etc. We can try to keep a voice but transcend some of those boxes.

Cecily: What are some of the key repercussions of online threats that moved into offline space? Paint us a picture of what that looks like.

Amanda: Not the John Edwards campaign. *laughter* I started off on a smaller blogspot blog. Was invited to join Pandagon by Jesse Taylor. there weren’t many high traffic liberal blogs that had any women at all. I honestly think my entrance on to the a list was a profound thing for many of the male commenter, mind you right wing male commenters who felt this was a boys’ club. It turned ugly really fast. Publishing my address, telling people to show up at my house and do violent sexual things to me. Calling my work and trying to get me fired. Nobody in the liberal blogosphere that i turned to had any experience whatsoever with this kind of thing and they didn’t believe it at first. he’d experienced viciousness and racism from commenters but he’d never seen anything cruel and violent as was directed at me. We had free comments, we had to turn that off and turn on registration for comments. I don’t know how serious the threats are but i have to assume they’re pretty serious if they’ve found out where i worked and called my boss.

Ann – Feministing has an appointed FBI agent where we send our threats. It’s that bad. Political blogging … I’d say that, we don’t control the space for (tapped?) as much as we do on Feministing. so it’s a more sexist space and a less feminist space. undoubtedly in terms of the private mail we get, via Feministing, that’s way worse. we can control the comments but not the private email.

Samhita: some of the worst misogyny I’ve experienced is on other blogs. this isn’t about how we feel threatened but about how it affects the community. we’ve been chastised a lot for not moderating every comment and not providing a safe enough space online for our readers. it’s not about protecting our own identity and feeling threatened but about how it makes our community feel. if you’re someone who’s experienced violent misogyny in your life there’s a moment of violence and violation that happens that makes you feel unsafe. we have to be clear about creating boundaries so our community can feel safe.

Ann: there’s a chilling effect when one woman, one person of color or queer person , is a target, then others are deterred from speaking in quite so open a manner. so the power structure online, that mirrors the real world…

Amanda: listening to auto admit case, on NPR, it’s a case law blog targeted very randomly two law students, two women. one man posted something about one of the women who had turned him down to go on a date. another woman got looped in. it got to the point of stds, slept with everyone, posted photos of them in their daily life with lurid rape fantasies, I’m sitting behind her in class, she’s at the gym right now, The defenders of the auto admit blog were going on about free speech. Can’t you understand that women also have the right to free speech and if you’re using yours to silence her then you’re not for free speech?

Cecily – at the library. heavily gendered space, 90% female environment. if we contribute to the web sites, we have to use our full names, our names on badges, one unsafe thing about a library you are in a female controlled space, you are in a culture that is heavily invested in keeping your individual name safe, but now that’s not true. i have to get people to feel more comfortable posting on the Internet, but it’s not going well, people don’t feel safe doing that, we get crank calls, complaints, we try to showcase all political viewpoints. spaces you might not define as feminist, we’re feeling some heavy pushback from the staff. how are we going to roll this process out?

Cecily: why is it important to look at gender and how it plays out online?

*laughter*

Samhita: we want to keep this panel to what it means to be feminist online. But because of these highly volatile experiences we’ve had it…. we’ve had different experiences online, male blogers don’t have that same thing. there’s never been a question, when i say something a little controversial, it’s not about the issues, it’s about whether i should have said something in the first place, you internalize that belief you constantly have to prove yourself.
A lot of our readers have experienced sexual violence and want to share those stories but don’t feel that they can. You have to make a lot of different negotiations to feel comfortable in it

Ann – women’s writing, the dynamics. One thing i do for myself is go through everything i write and strip out all the i thinks and i believes. because I’m writing it duh it’s what i think. writing more authoritatively. if y
ou’re going to pick me apart for this i might as well say it right out. Or, you can add 50 million caveats and end up not saying anything and not offending anyone. the Internet constantly needs to be fed. the evolution of women’s writing online, if i look at things i wrote in 2004, that’s largely in response to being hardened by this sort of stuff.

Amanda: i tend to say things very authoritatively and that’s always been a very hard things for me and many men who have multi year grudges against me. I’ve got into the habit of qualifying and adding the i think in.

Ann: but that doesn’t stop it. that’s not going to stop you from getting slammed on some blog full of dudes who hate you already!

Amanda: when i taught writing i would circle them in girls’ writing and tell them to take it out. it was always girls.

Cecily: lessons you’ve learned?

Samhita: Uh, that I’m a masochist

Cecily: I think you might have to unbox that one for us? lol

Samhita: yeah I’ll “unpack” that. ha. The content of what I’m writing and who i am writing it, it’s twofold . at least once a month i want to throw in the towel

Cecily: what keeps you from doing it?

Samhita: masochism? ha ha. It’s telling me that the level of importance of what we’re doing, for every piece of hate mail i get i get something else from Idaho saying they’ve never read something about sexism and racism and it’s changed their life in some . It’s not just for my own voice but it’s part of a movement of online feminism that we’re a movement and moving forward. Online solutions and best practices and you have to not care any more. you have to divorce yourself from caring about what people say about you, you have to go “well, you have 1/4 the readership lol” not the most humble way to think about it, but hey it helps me feel better. plus if I’m pissing off people who i wouldn’t like in real life,

Ann: 6 of us who write on Feministing and we can all each other up and go “i know people say mean shit all the time but this one really got to me!” and we all know how it feels. sometimes you have to decide what is a good public fight to have, vs. “you just want to call me ugly and tell me to make you a sandwich” i know it sounds ridiculous but it is hard to tell the difference sometimes! we need help in figuring that out, when to engage and when not to. you can engage with people who just don’t get it. But Feministing is on our terms. we don’t like it, we can delete your comment. we can respond to just part of what you’re saying and ignore the rest. or we can have a full blown back and forth, having a community to help decide and talk about how to engage has been crucial

Amanda: the purpose is to shut you up and if they don’t get what they want, they stop trying to shut you up, the more I don’t go away, and don’t shut up, the less harassment i get. just go out there and write every day and eventually they will give up. it’s not working, it’s straight up behavioral science.

Cecily: these tools that help us to get our voices out there, also hurt us. social networking tools.

Samhita: Twitter is a very useful tool. Communities, we have different community that comments on our youtube videos, twitter is another micro group environment and you get to know people a different way. That’s very powerful. I’ve had friends on my twitter feed who in the blogging worlds we have knock down “your mama” fights but on twitter I’m like “Oh you do yoga? i do yoga toooo!” lol. It’s less serious, less formal, commenting on Feministing can feel very formal.

Cecily: using these tools to get people to organize around a specific activist event?

Ann: When someone is getting attacked elsewhere, get into comments and post in support. Supportive conversation in public. Positive, or smackdown.

Cecily: Basic survival tips: solutions. if you’ve felt threatened, what do you do?

Samhita: Do not feel bad about banning people.

Amanda: Don’t feel guilty about it, some people are not there to engage. they shouldn’t be there.

Ann: You determine the levels of your own engagement, that’s self preservation. Free speech, free speech, my rights! whatever! go start your own blog! you do have free speech. Shockingly, no one has registered the url, getyourowneffingblog.com.

Cecily: libraries are public spaces, oh wait we can’t suppress these voices. what kinds of tools, for someone in that situation where the people in charge don’t understand it’s a safety issue an a respect my own house issue.

Amanda: Some men are allies. make alliances with men who will back you up can be very powerful. atrios alone has been useful in getting people to shut up being nasty about me. he’ll write a post saying they’re morons and he’s a man so people respect him and they shut up. that helps a lot. who has power in your community that you don’t have? exploit it a little. exploit other people’s privilege.

Ann: comments on huff po are useless, they’re a free for all. when you’re writing for bigger spaces it’s not that meaningful or helpful, it’s not my community responding to me it’s just like, crazytown. just ignore it. At feministing, people who read us regularly and have been for a long time, Samhita has a word for people who are super engaged

Samhita: minions

Ann: No! not that one! *laughter* Our regular readers are quicker than we are and say no that’s bull or email us and say please moderate this crazy comment. that is unbelievably helpful.

Samhita: creating a community people are bought into, invested into keeping a certain way. that is one of the best practices which has kept us afloat. it is crucial

Cecily: being a librarian i can’t do anything without reading about it in some academic journal. Germany researchers, algorithm to measure level of sexism in a comment. they had men tell jokes to a computer set up to “think” like a woman. the level of harassment the computer notices, correlated with the level of harassment real women experience online. women who identify as feminists get more harassment. if a woman mentioned herself or posted a photo her level of attractiveness had nothing to do with it. automated sexism detector!

Amanda: what we need a machine to back us up now!

Amanda: registration is the most useful way to control your space. disemvoweller is useful, button for it. Also, give some of your attack dogs moderation power. delete a comment and replace it with videos of bunnies hopping around. it makes people happy to see bunnies. *everyone laughs*

Cecily: what’s crazy bait?

Samhita: writing about any part of popular culture people feel invested in, fraternities, video games, if you want to get a lot of traffic then piss off the gamers, just kidding Latoya! *laughter* Race and gender, intersection. people feel very personally offended. Gentrification.

Amanda: Biggies are rape and domestic violence. if you write about rape or domestic violence in any form that’s crazy bait. Abortion, gotten better than it used to be. But if anyone tells a personal experience, that gets nutbars who will make personal threats directly against the person who got the abortion if anything has a racial aspect watch out it’s going to get really ugly.

Ann: if you’re writing about The Presidential Race or The Economy in the abstract without a personal level, people aren’t pissed off. Gentrification, when you get at where people live, it gets to them . Lipstick. what you wear. what people have personal experience with. they feel authoritative about it.

Cecily: Takeaway?

Samhita: Don’t feel threatened. it’s not about you. there’s some crazy people out there, it’s about them. keep going. young women reading, young women’s voices. the potential is very great right now. don’t give up.

Amanda: You’re not alone, you have friends. When under atta
ck you can feel very alone. Feels hard, you don’t want to “play the victim” but reach out and ask for support. Own what’s happening and ask for other people to care. they will often step up more than you would think initially.

Ann: Yeah. community. public, on blog, private space to process, that’s what it all comes down to for me. And, vast quantities of self esteem. A reservoir to draw on. Especially if you’re doing video blogging

Amanda: If you can learn to feed off the hate like … like trolls…

Ann: Youtube comments about how ugly, or how attractive. they have the same tone! stepping back and realizing they’re crazy!

Audience questions:

Kimberly: kimberlyblessing.com Feminist web dev : twitter is where i get problems. i speak to my community via twitter including feminist issues and that’s where i get attacked and it carries over to the real world because i work with the guys who followed m on twitter. i get angry and it affects me at work. i i start to internalize all of it. when there is something that important, what would be your other tips, i don’t have community, i work with almost all men. who do i go to? I don’t have any support or anyone more powerful to turn to. I just shut down and then go away for a while.

Ann: there must be other feminist web developers. Reach out to them.

Kimberly: Someone pulls you aside and says, hey that post you made this morning on twitter linking to that feminist thing online, you’re about to go into a big meeting with some vice president…

Amanda: what’s wrong with men who need to see women fail like this? pity them.

I’m Elisa from Blogher. (*applause, cheers*) There is disdain for business women and moms and women of color, dismissed, conservative women bloggers treated badly in other space, the misogyny itself is the problem, we need to see it everywhere, we can’t allow it, wherever we allow it to fester, it will continue to grow.

Q: Misogyny mommy bloggers, they have a more accepted space. women are more accepted in the blogosphere in “women’s blogs” networks, food, moms, travel. when we try to venture into economy, science, web dev, that’s where we are told to sit down and shut up. how can we continue to cross over?

Samhita: There is something different about “women” and “feminist” you are in a space you’re not supposed to be in , a political space. to be a woman in one of those fields, you have to fight with some best practices.

Amanda: any women who feel confident to feel about politics please do so more. write about the economy and politics. other women need to see that behavior modelled. know you’ll get a lot of blowback. eventually it helps.

Q: tendency to email privately? or privately and hateful? how do you draw the line?

Ann: sometimes our commenters have already talked back, engaged, other times it has a derailing effect.

Amanda: 90% of it is public, they are performing for other people

Monday night: Feministing party at Beerland on Red River & 7th- 8th!

Talking at ETech this Thursday: DIY for People with Disabilities

March 10, 2009 Liz

I’m going to be speaking at ETech in a couple of days about technology, culture, and disability/access invention. I’m all fizzy with enthusiasm and can’t wait to give the talk and see what people about afterwards!

If you’re curious, Here’s the talk description, and I’ll put slides up on Thursday or Friday.

Wheelchairs aren’t any more complicated than bicycles, but they cost a ridiculous amount of money. They shouldn’t. Neither should other simple accessibility and mobility equipment. In the U.S., people with disabilities who need adaptive devices depend on donations, charitable agencies, insurance, and a corrupt multi-billion dollar industry that profits from limiting access to information.

With a cultural shift to a hardware DIY movement and the spread of open source hardware designs, millions of people could have global access to equipment design, so that people with disabilities, their families, and their allies can build equipment themselves, and have the information they need to maintain and repair their own stuff.

Since we can’t all do it ourselves or weld our own chairs, we also should encourage a different mindset for the industry. You can’t stand up all day at your desk, but you don’t need a doctor to prescribe you a $6000 office chair. A consumer model rather than a medical and charity model for mobility aids would treat wheelchairs simply as things that we use to help us get around, like cars, bikes, or strollers.

Small assistive devices such as reacher/grabbers, page turners and book holders, grip extenders, can be made with bits of rubber tubing, PVC pipe, and tools as simple as box cutters and duct tape. Rather than obsess over impossible levels of healthiness and longevity, we need to change people’s expectations of how they will deal with changing physical limitations. Popularizing simple designs, and a DIY attitude for mobility and accessibility gear, will encourage a culture of invention that will be especially helpful to people as they age.

This will be my first O’Reilly conference. No, wait, it won’t, I went to a huge impersonal scary Perl conference in about 1998, as a somewhat lonely programmer and the founder of Orange County Perl Mongers. But that’s another story. What I want to say here is, I really liked the O’Reilly conference registration site. It let me make my own profile and control it, rather than emailing a bio and info 12 months ahead of time. It lets me see all the other speakers and attendees, which is hugely important for me so that I can picture where I’m going to, how comfortable or hostile an environment it will be, whether I know *anyone* else there, how my talk will fit in with other talks, and so on; it helps to emphasize that people are the map. There are even social network features so that I am coming into the conference “friended” with a bunch of people and able to message back and forth with them. It is all very slick and very useful to me.

A conference is a social event. It makes sense to build social media around it.

State of the Union speech, and a little rant from me

February 24, 2009 Liz

I watched President Obama’s speech tonight on CNN with Facebook comments and Twitter streaming by both at once, and several people talking with me on IM, as is now my usual practice watching anything interesting in politics. If I had to watch the speech without the backchannels, I wouldn’t be exactly bored. I’d be frustrated, like I was missing a sense I’m used to having. My reactions develop and merge with the stream of reactions online and I like it that way.

While I watched, talked, and listened, I noticed Tweet Congress, which encourages members of Congress to get on Twitter.

Now, even if we manage to keep a handle on the downward slide of the economy, I think this country needs more investment in something like the CCC and the WPA. We need better infrastructure especially in schools, health care, and housing. More investment in programs like Americorps.

I have been thinking about what will happen if more and more people become poor and homeless. Here’s my tinfoil hat speaking… We have widespread poverty already. But it is cordoned off from the middle class and wealthy. As I considered what would likely happen I thought back to the Astrodome or “Reliant Center” relief camp of 20,000 in Houston after Hurricane Katrina. You may not remember, but Barbara Bush and other powerful wealthy people actually believed that the people whose communities and homes were destroyed by Katrina would want to live on cots under the bright lights of a refugee camp, and would be better off there. Better off! It was amazing and outrageous. Yes I watched this woman who was the First Lady of the U.S. for 8 years walk through the sad shell shocked crowd of black folks who had been trapped in the Superdome, and then say on the radio that they were going to have a happier better life now that they were taken care of in this camp, and they weren’t going to want to leave, because they had been “underprivileged”. The disconnect and lack of empathy and imagination was, and still is, so vast for people like Bush.

Some factions of government were practically salivating at the thought of having an utterly disempowered population in a fenced off area they would make into a model refugee camp. They were planning, likely with some good intentions, “Reliant Village”. I saw the plans for it, with a mobile school and playground and town square and sort of a barracks set up. They planned for the long term, for years of thousands of people living there in the stadium and parking lot. And I believe that model is still in the minds of much of our government; disaster, as an opportunity for a kind of reform. But a kind of reform that any sane person would reject, because it means living in a jail wrapped up to look pretty, with electronic tracking bracelets and military guards everywhere 24/7 to guarantee that poor people are safe from themselves but most of all to sanitize the idea of poverty and unfreedom for the rest of the country who still have jobs and homes so that they won’t have to face up to it. Those middle class people were all too happy and charitable to send truck loads of their donated old tshirts to the camp not having the faintest clue that no one had anywhere to put a truckload of clothes and material possessions and that that kind of charity wasn’t helping a damn thing.

In short, I now trust, due to Obama being elected, this won’t happen.

Under Bush, that’s where we were heading, straight to crazy-ass dystopia. And it was beginning to happen post-Katrina. Surprise, most people got the heck out of the camp as soon as they could muster up a ride or a bus ticket out of town, if they knew anyone – anyone! who lived outside of the hurricane-hit areas. The ones too old, alone, or in too many difficulties to do that, got bussed off forcibly to smaller refurbished military bases and church camps in the middle of nowhere where they know no one, because of the panic over Hurricane Rita — camps where years later some are still stuck.

So what do I think will happen? Don’t know and it will depend how bad the job losses are, but I’m putting my hopes on massive public works programs and jobs for everyone. Housing is the piece of the puzzle I can’t see for the life of me; public housing sucks, institutional living sucks worse, maybe an expansion of Section 8, better funding of Habitat for Humanity type of projects, or better rent control laws will help. There is no safety net, welfare and even food stamps are incredibly broken, and people need that safety net, more transparency and less cold hearted state employees who do their jobs right.

My tiny adorable flowered computer!

February 4, 2009 Liz

I got an HP Mini Vivienne Tam edition to review a few days ago, and I’ve used it so far for blogging, surfing, email, IM-ing, and writing up my thoughts in Notepad. Here’s my preliminary review based on four days of casual but heavy use.

This is a good computer for a blogger or a student who doesn’t need a huge screen or massive computing power. Also it’s incredibly cute.

Here’s some praise!

I’m a demanding blogger. I type 100 words a minute and I like to have about 50 tabs open. This HP Mini was incredibly easy for me to slip into using. I blogged from it without noticing the slightly smaller keyboard; I could type just as fast as I usually do. The size, key placement, action, and feel of the keys are all just great. If you’ve tried a mini before, but had trouble getting used to the keyboard, you may be pleased with a Mini.

The screen is big and very readable! It’s tiny and very light.

I like the way the case opens and shuts. The shell is hard plastic – not fabric or gelskin covered.

It has two USB ports, which seems quite nice.

I’m happy with a 60GB hard drive in such a tiny, light computer.

The wireless mouse works well.

Everything I wanted out of my Asus EeePC, but sadly never quite got, has come true in this adorable netbook!

Here’s my wishlist.

I fervently wish for holes in the case where I could attach straps. Two holes near the hinge would be ideal, so that I could put a shoulder strap on this beastie. At She’s Geeky conference this weekend, how many women did I just watch, walking around the room holding a computer, a paper notepad, a pen, a purse, and a latte? Around the house, it would be all that plus a book and a baby and 6 things you’ve picked up from the living room to move to the office. Computers need handles. But beyond the OLPC or old clamshell iMac handles that require a hand. Shoulder strap power!

Backlit keys would make me *very* happy. I’m often typing in bed or in a darkened room, in work meetings or conferences. It’s lovely if I can see the keys, but keep the screen relatively dim.

Neutral thoughts

* Mostly, I use MacOS X or Linux. So this is the first time I’ve used Windows. While I’m not especially impressed with Windows XP, I’m also not especially annoyed. So for a week or two, I’m going to stick with XP to give it a fair shake.

* I haven’t tried doing any development on this machine yet, but I think that will go quite well.

* I haven’t tested battery life. So far, it hasn’t been a problem, but I haven’t approached it systematically.

* I haven’t tried the webcam yet. It has a built in camera! I will take it through some video chat paces.

* I haven’t tried installing any games or a Second Life client on it. I’ll let you all know how that goes. I figure, I don’t play a ton of games, but if Second Life behaves well, then I can stand by my recommendation the computer for the writer and student who’s also a casual gamer.

My criticisms of the HP Mini are minor.

* The computer goes to sleep a bit too quickly when I half-close the lid. I’m often blogging or emailing or IM-ing in social or work situations, or doing actual work with private information in a cafe, and if someone comes up to talk with me, I need to half-close the computer so they can’t shoulder-surf. While the Mini wakes up very quickly, I wish it didn’t go to sleep until I *actually shut the lid*.

* The bumps on the f and j keys are too subtle for me to feel them easily. I could type with more confidence with better subliminal feedback about the “home” keys.

* The hinge on the case could open a little more widely. It goes past 90 degrees, but not quite far enough. I type in my lap, not on a desk. This is partly habit I’m sure, but I wonder if it’s at all a gender related habit, as chairs, desks, and tables often don’t match up for me, because I’m shorter than the default person (male) they’re designed for? Because the computer’s in my lap, and the resulting viewing angle, I sometimes need to tilt the screen further back than 100 degrees. Now, this is also true when I have my HP Mini in bed. Which I often do.

AND NOW FOR THE ADORABLENESS

This computer is cute. It’s pretty. But it doesn’t make me hurl with the pinkitude. Really!

It’s a really nice color of deep red, with black around the screen. There’s nothing ugly and clunky about this computer. It’s totally elegant. I take it out of my bag, and everyone admires it, and whatever one might think about HP’s targeting of women or the cut of the marketing, women everywhere I go are exclaiming with delight at how cute this computer is. It is very much OMG I WANT THAT. Then, because I’m this sort of person, I hand them the computer and invite them to type something and take it through its internet browser paces. In fact, it’s been really fun to have people come up and talk to me and be so friendly, because they’re curious about my computer.

For quite some time I’ve been asking the world for an adorable computer that is small and light, yet still a useful computer. (Oh, how I miss my 12 inch MacBook, but how I wished it were *even smaller*.) While I have issues as a feminist with everything being pink especially like, pink tools and pink computers, (see girl geek bingo), I also have mixed feelings and like things that are pretty and cute. It’s better if they’re pretty, cute, and punk rock, and actually work.

This is my usual style (me and my sister, with 13-inch MacBooks covered in stickers)

And here I am with the Vivienne Tam,

This gets across how tiny and handy it is. See how it likes to sit on top of my MacBook?! It’s like a cute little ladybug!

The Internet is srs bzns and so am I, in black boys’ guayabera, SF State tshirt, cotton handkerchief with red stitching, and matching computer,

The Vivienne Tam and its matching mouse want to wear my Fluevog boots:

If it had a hat, it would have a beret. If it were a color of nail polish, it would be “I’m Not Really a Waitress” red. Yes. I have middle class brand awareness. I cannot help it. When I wasn’t playing video games, I grew up in a mall. It seeps into your blood.

Even the packaging was nice! It was like buying a computer at Sephora. Or Bloomingdale’s or something. I know it’s shallow, and obviously I care WAY more about the specs and usability of a computer than the box it
comes in, but I noticed the box anyway. Check this out:

At the She’s Geeky / Women 2.0 Dinner, I ended up passing the computer around almost as much as I got to use it myself. And when I whipped it out of my backpack to show to my friend Beth aka Techmama, she yelped and pulled out her own! We were like, “Oh no, same dress at the prom!” We managed to share the cuteness!

I can heartily recommend this computer if you’re a blogger, writer, or you just want your own laptop instead of using a shared family computer. The 60 GB hard drive is big and fast enough to deal with the *ton* of photos, Flip videos, and music that I tend to accumulate as a blogger. The wireless also works very well so the machine lives up to its promise of portability.

ALSO, IT IS REALLY CUTE. Did I mention that!?

I have three matching wireless mice to give away. Red mice with lavender flowers and silver sides. Who wants them?

* Buy it from HP: HP Mini Vivienne Tam (“Buy it” link gives all the specs)
* Buy it from Amazon:HP Mini 1140NR 10.2-Inch Netbook – Vivienne Tam Edition (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, XP Home, 3 Cell Battery)

Programming languages and science fiction!

February 3, 2009 Liz

Cat Valente, Tiptree-winning author of The Orphan’s Tales, wrote up a brilliant comparison of programming languages to literary genres. She covers a lot of ground here as a cultural and critic, and she’s witty as hell. If the bits I’m quoting make you laugh, go read the whole thing!

Smalltalk is mythpunk, Python is speculative fiction, Java is…

Divorce in the suburbs, cancer of the miscarriage, and how God will punish you for having sex. That’s right, it’s the big, predictable Literary Fiction Gorilla, coming to destroy a gated community near you. Java is the mainstream of the mainstream, it gets all the critical hand jobs, they teach it at universities, and the support base is vast…

PHP is journalism, Perl is poetry, Ruby is steampunk, ASP is given a snarky kick to the head that keeps making me laugh!

It mixes all the worst parts of the other genres/languages. Hey! Serial killers are awesome! What about a vampire serial killer? What about a vampire werewolf serial killer with a heart of gold? What about a vampire werewolf serial killer with a heart of gold who mixes row result processing, business logic, and layout code ALL ON ONE PAGE??!

Sold, to your corporate overlords. After all, if you put the strength of an entire company behind it, it’ll be a success, even if it leaks memory and ends with and then I woke up.

The feel and culture (and reputation) of each programming language are well described and it takes some complicated snark to link them all to equally well described literary genres and subgenres. Geek culture is AWESOME.

I can’t imagine a more perfect post for this blog to link to! Thanks, Catherynne!

She's Geeky – Tour of WordPress template code

February 1, 2009 Liz

There were 20 or so people at this talk, including non-programmers and programmers wondering if they should install WordPress, and bloggers and admins already familiar with WordPress. We did a round of introductions:

* Graphic designer interested in what degree of control she could have over a WordPress blog.
* Benay, running a blog connecting seniors with caregivers.
* Collie, looking for help with a WordPress upgrade on a complicated blog. Where is community to find help or pay someone to help? (Collie and others: you might try Heather L. Sanders. Anyone else have recommendations?)
* Person who installed WP to force herself to learn more code. Curious about plugins. Which are most useful?
* Terri – uses WP at her job for blogging, thinking about running her own for personal use.
* Nadine – Installed WP for other people many times. Does a lot of troubleshooting.
* Laura – Has installed and messed with WP many times. Wants to create a template from scratch.
* Stephanie – has an HTML site. Might want a blog.
* Olya – is a blogger. sometimes has language barrier while troubleshooting.
* Estella – artist, craisin.com.
* Crystal Marie – adding a blog to her existing web site. Looking at WP and Drupal.
* Beth C – Loves WP. Would like to do more customization.
* Michelle – Is a coder
* Vee – Blogs for her company. Knows HTML.
* Min – Uses MoveableType, is curious
* Karen M. – Thinks there might be entrepenurial opportunities with WP
* StephanieBamBam – Personal blog

I’ve been using WordPress for several years and administer a group blog. As part of my job, I do tech support for bloggers who run into template problems and quite a few of them use WordPress, so I look at a lot of different templates and help people troubleshoot. (The other part of my job, I munge data, write back end tools and infrastructure-y scripts in Perl, Python, and PHP in an aspiring codemonkey way.)

I started out by saying that WordPress was blogging software that you can either use on wordpress.com, or can download for free and install on your own server or web host. You will need an account somewhere and need to have it clear in your mind that you’ve got a username and password for that server account. In that account you’ll be making a folder where you install WP, and then you’ll have an administrative username and password for the WP admin and blogging interface. You may need to pay attention to this in order to change file permissions and make your theme files writeable if you want to edit them from the Theme Editor web interface. This tends to confuse people who aren’t used to web hosting. Also, some people use web hosts which have one-click installs or who install WP for you and then charge to upgrade or maintain it.

We looked at the files and folders in a WP installation. There was some discussion of how you move files around and edit them. (Either from the command line on your server, from the admin interface for theme files, or with FTP; you can download the WP files, and extra themes and modules, to your computer, then upload them to your web host.) It’s a good idea to just look through all the folders, so you know what’s there. You may want to read through the wp-config file. But most of what people deal with is in wp-content, in the themes and plugins folders.

We then looked at the WP administrative dashboard, a bit at Widgets, and then at the Appearance menu and the Theme Editor. I said that editing code in the Theme Editor window sucks. While it’s great for making quick changes, I recommend you edit the files in a text editor that will color code the code and indent it nicely, like vim or Textmate. You can pass code back and forth with other people by putting it into pastebin.com, which will also color code and indent it nicely. Also, it’s amazingly helpful to print out all the template code, and mark it up with pen, and see which bits you can understand; or at least understand more or less what it does.

I explained briefly that anything that looks like a command with parentheses after it, like get_header, is a function and you may need to look for it in functions.php to figure out what’s happening. We looked at index.php for a little bit. It is helpful to read through it. You should be able to mark what is header, what is the content (including “The Loop” which will cycle through your posts), and what’s the footer.

The WordPress codex is your friend. Here’s some great starting points:

* http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes
* http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates
* http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop

Take a look at your sidebar.php file, header.php, footer.php, and page.php for individual post pages.

At some point, I mentioned the site to look for and download WordPress Themes. You can specify whether you want fixed width or floating; one, two, or three columns; and other parameters such as the main color. It is often best to start with a fairly popular theme.

Keep track of customizations you make to the theme you pick, because at some point you will want to upgrade or change it. Make backups.

There was some discussion of plugins as well. All in One SEO Pack (which sounds a bit evil, but which is great since it makes your URLs a bit more human readable as well as search-engine-friendly) had good recommendations. Stats, Sitemaps, and various Flickr or photo plugins were mentioned by bloggers at the session. On the group blog I co-administer, we had written some code to pull in a list of all our plugins onto a static page called “What we use”, which has come in handy many times when we want to recommend useful plugins to other people. (Whoops; when I tried to show this off, I found that our recent upgrade to 2.7 had broken this code.)

The post template plugin was mentioned for its usefulness and for being able to pick a post or a page and “template-icize” it. This sounded intriguing!

Someone else mentioned that people should be aware that new plugins might break other ones and if you run into trouble, uninstall some plugins and see if that fixes the problem.

Someone else asked if there are good books for learning WordPress theme development or php. I don’t know about books, but php.net is fantastic, and the WP Codex is quite good. The Codex is also editable by its users, so if you use it a lot, make an account, log in, and fix any documentation that’s wrong when you figure out a solution. I also recommended blogging your template or code problems or posting on forums, and then posting the solutions to those problems when you figure them out. This is hard to do sometimes, but the more of us who do it, the better.

When I mention IRC at this conference my general impression is that people aren’t using it that actively and many people don’t know what it is. People who were techy or coding at all or playing on MUDs or smoething before the web, or before about 1995 or 96, know what IRC is. People who learned their stuff or got involved with online worlds after that, it’s much more hit & miss. In any case, I continue recommending people try IRC and hang out in channels on freenode that have to do with the tools or languages they’re using. Here’s some explanation & guidance on IRC and WordPress. Lurk for a while, pick up the culture of the channel, and you might be surprised you can actually answer other people’s questions: when I do this I tend to feel better about asking questions myself.

At some other point I mentioned MAMP again. It’s very handy and easy to install, if you want to run a local web server off your Mac in order to develop and test.
While I was doing this hour long talk, at least two people downloaded and installed MAMP and WordPress and got it running on their laptops.

I enjoyed this session! We didn’t go all that deep, but we covered a lot of ground and people seemed energized by the ideas and possibilities. If you were there, thanks for coming, and let me know how your project turns out!

She's Geeky – Install Drupal on your Mac

January 31, 2009 Liz

In this session we talked about Drupal in general, and a few people, including Margaret Rosas from Santa Cruz Geeks and CrystalMarie, got it installed and running. I have to apologize for being a bit incoherent; I was tired and unprepared. It was worth the session anyway to introduce the idea that you *can* run drupal on your laptop and use your laptop for development and testing! Margaret and others saved the day by having plenty to say about Drupal, Drupal 6 modules like Original Groups, what will be new in Drupal 7, and how interesting the process has been for re-organizing the Drupal web site.

If I had do-overs, here’s how I’d run this session:

– First of all, have already rewritten Installing Drupal on a local MAMP setup to improve its instructions.

– Quick description of what Drupal is. Show drupal.org site.
– Quick introductions around the room.
– Pass around a few USB drives with zipped MAMP and Drupal files, with versions 5 and 6, for people to install and copy over to their laptops.
– Pass out a printout of Installing Drupal on a local MAMP setup.
– Ask people to team up in pairs.
– Give an overview of the install process, but without doing it.
– Then everyone is free to do the install.
– People who get it installed should then go around the room and help other people get it done.
– Mention IRC, #drupal-support, drupalchix, and drupal.org documentation as good resources.

We ran into various difficulties. Some people had file permissions problems; it worked to make the entire drupal directory and all its files and directories readable and writeable, though that seems less than ideal. Also, we had some difficulty doing the first login, which I’m still going through with Laura from Indie Craft Gossip.

Thanks to everyone who participated! I didn’t take down your names, but if you want to comment and link back to your blog or Twitter or your company, I’d love it. Also, if you’re in the Bay Area and want to hang out messing around with Drupal, ping me and let’s have a Drupalchix meetup sometime in February.

She's Geeky – Show and Tell Your Dev Env session

January 30, 2009 Liz

We had a session to talk about what tools, languages, and platforms we use for software and web development.

I started off by trying to list all the tools I use for work for development. Then other people stood up one by one to add their tools to the list on the whiteboard. Lots of people had questions. Our group ranged from people who have been developers for decades to people who had been programmers, but left the field and come back again, to people who weren’t sure if they were developers at all because they do web stuff.

I felt like something came together at the end when someone said that she was leaving a huge company with the budget to buy development tools and was now going to work for a startup, so she came to She’s Geeky to figure out what free and open source tools were out there for her to use. I forgot to mention SCALE and OSCON, but I should have.

There was a core of people using unix/linux and (oddly?) Mac but unix-centric. There were some Windows folks but was unclear

Version control: People were interested in svn clients and in github. No one currently used CVS and almost no one had heard of mercurial.

Here is the giant, unorganized list of tools mentioned.

unix / linux
macos
terminal
quicksilver
xcode
ichat vnc screen
bash
vim
svn
git (github is nifty)
cvs
php
perl
python
drupal
sourceforge
github
durpal
mamp
firebug
command line…
textwrangler
textmate
clearcase
perforce version control
ruby
rails for web framework / merb
apache with passenger – for deploying rails apps locally
mongrel server to run web apps and it’s really easy. (use with rails) ruby gem
webbrick rails thing – use to be built in rails server now it’s mongrel
what is a ruby gem install?
rspec
selenium – browser based scripting
watir – testing tool – ruby
“Everything I know is ruby, I’ve tried to forget my Java life”
eclips intellij
bbedit / textmate
textmate has plugins
php, ruby, html/ css/javascript
Firebug. I love firebug. i am dead in the water without it.
firebug lite you can use on non firefox browsers.
We need a whole session on firefox plugins
Yslow, pixelperfect, firebug, web developer toolbar
enthusiastic recs for pixelperfect.
ADBLOCK!!
Melanie explains history of Yslow.
(Firefox accessibility checker, can’t remember its name)
subversion client: beanstalk
Versions – mac svn client!
Tortoise – windows svn client beautiful interface that makes sense.
frameworks: jquery uses css format for javascript and it is awesome
Django (python)
Apptana. IDE. mixed feelings. baby aspirin flavor of eclipse. painful horribly slow but love the real time syntax checker
vmware fusion. really cool for multiple dev for mac. it can be a little slow. My mac is 2GHz processor 2GB memory but it’s almost not enough any more to run the VM
Amazon ec2
Apache comes with your Mac, just turn it on in the preferences.
phpmyadmin
jslint. douglas crawford’s book Javascript: the good parts (unison from room)
he wrote jslint, javascript interpreter.
Wireshark – monitor your network
adobe cs3 design packages, fun! flash dev. get student discount. adobe 4 is out!
instant rails for windows.
hivelogic.com help installing mysql on a mac.
IRC: use irc for the tool/language. Colloquy – good irc client for Mac (no one used it on Windows)
basecamp, campfire. Propane.
Scrummy – open source good for task tracking, agile
pivotal tracker – a useful communication tool. tracking stories. move through dev cycle. it’s free.
Drupal firefox plugin!!! must have this! helps with debugging!
Kindle – good for tech manuals
The Public Library. good for tech manuals too.
westciv stylemaster css editor westciv.com
coda panic software Transmit ftp client. integrated web dev env called Coda which is really fascinating.
Apple trainers doing technical mac os books. they use subetha edit.
omnigraffle mindmeister
different open apis that are super useful.
cpan, darwinports, apt-get, easyinstall, etc etc

People:
* Desi Mcadam – ruby, ruby on rails, web based applications, spotus, hashracket , consultant. florida. Devchix!
* Karen Mcadams – Freelancer. Likes to work for non profits.
* Jenny Greenwood – jobs dev drupal software engineer C, C++, assembly. out of developtment for 8 or 9 years. teaching self CMSes and drupal and css and php
* Margaret rosas – quiddities , santa cruz – doing drupal. knight foundation. drupal radio. Radio Engage. local public radio station she built Santa Cruz Geeks site. met heathervescent and started doing santa cruz geek dinners.
* becca (berkeleybecca) peachpit press. what software tools we have energy around. ones we just love. she is lurking here to find out what we love. she is proud of coding her personal web site and taught herself css.
* Laura – – front end middle end web dev for 10 years. not working now, volunteering to do web sites. does bazarre bizarre. javascript, java, html css.
* nabil project manager. security. peeve of security. personal information in web sites! finds out horrible details! company is hiring, little consultancy, sf, biz process mgmt development, hiring microsoft engineer, a software developer. elegrity. elegant + integrity.
* Amie Forest – Quiddities
* Terri Train IT manager. web dev typing in html javascript by hand, dreamweaver, i like it by hand better elegant code. lotus domino. not free. good quick app development tool for doing all sorts of workflow , web forms, apps on the web. switching to a new company, come to this come to new company with fresh ideas, won’t have money to buy expensive tools, looking for free ware now.
* melanie archer – front end web developer javascript css freelancer.

I was taking notes very fast and might have left out people or crucial details – please correct me in comments (or email!)

A lot of us also agreed it would be nice to put up a board to match up people who use various of these tools or platforms or languages, so that we can have an IM buddy, where it might be easier to ask questions rather than go on IRC. I do try to nerve myself to ask stuff on IRC … and thank you to anyone on php-women and drupal-support who helped me out 😎 I found that pretty quickly I was able to be helpful to random other people in drupal-support, which made me feel easier in my mind about asking my own questions.

Thank you everybody! I got a lot of good tips from this session and also a nice sense of not being alone in trying to get a handle on the amorphous beast that is a development environment.

We agreed that we could pick any of these tools or concepts and do an entire sesson on it that is more in depth and hands on. general agreement that we need a Firefox plugins for developers session, asap.

She's Geeky – Session on gaming

January 30, 2009 Liz

There are some hard core gamers here, about 10 women, a lot of them gamers for many years. STories of AFT, All Female Tournament, Female Fragfest 99, women playing for years with male online identities to avoid harassment and then coming out. Funny story from Kim F. of the moment she realized a bunch of other teenage gamers she played with were female because they were the ones who got emotional at the death of Princess Di.

Someone said the words “Barbie Mortal Combat”…

I mention the Iris Network and Cerise, an online magazine for game geek women.

A divide in the industry between games for guys which are seen as monetizable in a certain way while “casual games” that 35 year old women play are treated as exploitable b/c they’re idiots like you can get a stay at home mom to give out the credit card number… it has attracted the seedy underbelly, the shady side of the industry. Annoying!

It’s still hard to find exciting games for young girls that aren’t sexist and condescending and stupid.

Games that aren’t totally dirty sexist first person shooters (though a lot of us here like them too) Katamari…

Board games, german games, this craze not realy picked up on yet by online industry.

We all want this: A sort of imdb for gaming. It would list all games, across all platforms and genres, mmorpgs, video games, flash games, board games, rpgs. Reviews, rating system, recommendation engine. tHis should cross platforms in the rec engine too and patterns might be detectable that if you like X flash game you might love Y MMORPG.

what makes a game addictive? is it different by gender?

Spore. Everyone hates ont he DRM. some are boycotting. Everyone likes the ideas in Spore!

Small companies can now build games very quickly because the game dev tools are better. Story about Artemis Software and their quake engine/ greek mythology game attempt. the tools weren’t there. Now, 3 or 4 people can get a game out in 4 months.

People customizing their wii avatars. body image and gaming discussion.

gamefaqs.com, defectiveyeti, metacritic, cerise, iris network, playrag, alltop gaming blogs, twop, scorehero (used to be good, then not enough moderation)
we want something like allrecipes.com but for games and strategy. Kongregate.

The best communities and information is built when there is strong moderation.

Rec of a game called Braid. (xbox.) it is back in the hands of the people.

Look on youtube for women gamers reviewing games.

Tomorrow: BSG, science fiction sessions!

There is more but i missed it while typing up my notes.

If you were at this session and are reading this (or weren’t but have something to say) please drop in more info and links to anything awesome and cool, in comments!!!

Cleaning up urls with awk

January 28, 2009 Liz

Here’s my stupid awk trick of the day: using the field separator option to mess with URLs. I spent something like an hour trying to write regular expressions and then reading other people’s solutions to cleaning up urls from log files and other sources.

For example, given a list of about a million urls like this:
http://bloggggggggy.com/path/to/the/post/2009/1/26/blahblahblah.html http://www.bloggggggggy.com/morejunk.html https://www.bloggggggggy.com http://yetanotherblogomigod.blogspot.com/ http://yetanotherblogomigod.blogspot.com/somejunk.php?stuff&morestuff
I want to end up with a list that’s just
bloggggggy.com yetanotherblogomigod.blogspot.com
You can do this in php with some regular expressions:
preg_match("/^(http:\/\/)?([^\/]+)/i", $URLstring, $result); $domain = $result[2];
(Though I saw a lot of other solutions that were much longer and more involved)
or, here’s one method in Perl:
$url =~ s!^https?://(?:www\.)?!!i; $url =~ s!/.*!!; $url =~ s/[\?\#\:].*//;
But for some reason I was trying to do it in one line in awk, because that’s how my brain is working these days, and I couldn’t get the regular expression right.

Suddenly I realized that if I split the lines on “/”, the domain name would always be the third field.

So,
awk -F"/" '{print $3}' hugelistofurls.txt > cleanlist.txt
gave me a nicer list of urls.

and
awk -F"/" '{print $1,"//",$3} hugelistofurls.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > counted-sorted-cleanlist.txt

gave me just about what I wanted.

After I did that and finished squeaking with happiness and wishing I could show someone who would care (which unfortunately I couldn’t which is why I’m blogging it now) I realized I wanted the www stuff taken out. So I backed up and did it in two steps,

awk -F"/" '{print $1,"//",$3}' hugelistofurls.txt > cleanlistofurls.txt awk -F"www." '{print $1 $2}' cleanlistofurls.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > reallyclean-sorted-listofurls.txt

which gave me something like this:

3 http://blogggggggy.com 2 http://yetanotherblogomigod.blogspot.com

Exactly what I wanted!

While I appreciate a nice regular expression and it can be a fun challenge to figure them out, getting the job done with awk felt a lot simpler, and I’m more likely to remember how to do it in an off-the-cuff way, next time I have a giant list of urls to wrestle with.

How would you approach this same problem, either in awk or using another tool or language? Do you think one way or another is superior, and why?