Planet Inkscape

Gail Carmichael: When Having a Lot of Facebook Friends is Good

2010-08-31T14:18:49+00:00

Some people scoff at those who have too many friends on Facebook. "They probably just friend a bunch of people they don't know to look popular," they say. While I'm not interested in having lots of 'friends' for that reason, I do find that Facebook can be incredibly valuable for networking. That's why I tend to have 400-500+ connections at any given time.

You know how when you used to go to a conference and you met someone you were interested in connecting with? The standard practice would have been to exchange business cards. I have no idea how often people would have corresponded before email, but before social media, email was the main choice. I remember emailing people after some conferences in my early undergrad years. We'd exchange one -- maximum two -- emails and then forget about each other.

One day in early 2007, someone I met at a conference finally convinced me to join Facebook. I had been avoiding it because the concept seemed dumb at the time (shows how much I knew), but finally relented so I could keep in touch with this person and a few other conference attendees.

This kind of networking is still probably one of my most valuable reasons to have Facebook to this day. Now if I want to keep in touch with someone, I find them on Facebook instead of thinking I'll actually email them more than the first time. I can have a passive connection with them where neither of us have to put any extra work into keeping in touch, but we don't forget about each other. Plus, if I see an update from one of these people that I think I can help out with, I jump on the opportunity. Most do the same for me. I've definitely seen many of them again thanks to this!

(Note: This goes for Twitter or any other social network that you and the other person you are connecting with use often. Take advantage of the places you hang out anyway!)

Inkscape: Interview with Inkscape team, progress of the project

2010-08-30T16:00:12+00:00

Libre Graphics World published an interview with Inkscape developers and contributors who worked on release of 0.48, Google Summer of Code 2010 projects and participated at Libre Graphics Meeting earlier this year. In the mean time some new features have already found their way to development tree for the next version. Thanks to Roland Meuband exchanging position of objects is now possible in Inkscape (via "Align and Distribute" dialog). Johan Engelen also started work on PowerStroke live path effect that will beyond all doubt attract type designers.

Gail Carmichael: Getting Ready for a Conference

2010-08-28T12:16:30+00:00

Grace Hopper is fast approaching so I find myself, once again, madly going through my usual routine list of tasks to do before heading to a conference. Here's my process:

Get funding. This comes from different sources depending on the conference, ranging for me from our CU-WISE budget to Carleton's Student Activity Fund to my supervisor.
Make a Google Map. I create a new map for each conference or event I travel to. I start by plotting the main conference hotel. If applicable, I then add other hotel options. Finally, I add potential sight-seeing opportunities and restaurants I want to visit.
Book flights and hotel. This one's pretty obvious. Best to get it sorted out early.
Plan schedule. This certainly won't be set in stone, but I like to look through the conference program and decide what sessions are "can't miss," and add these to my Google Calendar. I also try to plan out the sight-seeing portions of the trip (I always make sure to have some extra time for looking around!).
Gather documentation and currency. I print out all my flight and hotel info, my schedule, and make a packing list. I make sure I have my passport and enough money in the appropriate currency. I also bring my marriage certificate because I changed my name on a lot of my documentation, but not my passport. This time I'm also going to order custom business cards to hand out at the conference.
Prepare camera. Fresh batteries, clean memory cards, and in my case, clean lenses. I also have to decide what equipment I'll take (lenses? flash? carrying cases?).
Prepare laptop/phone. Again, want to make sure they are well charged for the plane, and that I have all the charging cables. I also try to make sure all the software I might want is installed on the computer I'm bringing.
Pack. It really is best not to leave this until the last minute. Use the packing list you made earlier and cross stuff off once it's ready in your "packing pile." Be sure to be strategic in what you put in your carry-on if you are checking your main bag. Just pretend your main bag will get lost and put your essentials in the carry-on.
Triple check flight times. I've been wrong before.
Check in online. Even though it doesn't take much less time to do it online, I feel more comfortable, since I think it means I have a little more leeway time to get to the airport (since the cut-off for boarding is later than the cut-off for checking in). I hope I'm not wrong on this!

I think that more or less covers it. Anything else you do to get ready?

Jos Hirth: OOCSS Module Blue-Printing – Using External Constrains to Assure Markup and CSS Quality

2010-08-26T01:56:58+00:00

: Keep them in check

There is no coupling whatsoever between your CSS and your markup. But don't get me wrong – this is a very good thing. However, this also means you can't use your markup to verify your CSS and of course it also means that you can't use your CSS to check your markup.

If you create a relatively complex website with more than 2000 lines of CSS this gets pretty annoying. With practice this just gets more annoying, since the impact on your productivity becomes more apparent with each project. During a site's lifetime you'll often notice how theoretically solid structures start to crumble. One mistake in the markup, another one in the CSS, and sooner or later everything will be in a somewhat inconsistent state.

If you come from a programming background this feels just plain wrong. It's almost like your selectors happen to coincidentally select some things here and there. There is no clear way to define a structure and to check if your markup and CSS adhere to your rules. There is currently only one way to check it: the dreaded, time-consuming, and error-prone manual one.

Also, if things are inconsistent – and chances are this happens right off the bat – it's very difficult to reason about it. You might look at two pieces of markup and their corresponding CSS and both might wrong in different places. Sure, you can just refer to your documentation… eh, yea, who am I kidding? No one knows how stuff like that is supposed to be documented. And if they do, it probably still won't happen.

Gail Carmichael: LaTeX in LyX

2010-08-25T09:48:51+00:00

If you ever need to write up a paper in LaTeX and you aren't terribly interested in doing it by hand, I'd like to recommend the open source software LyX. It's not a WYSIWYG editor, but when writing in LaTeX that's probably not what you want, anyway. Rather, it abstracts only just enough of the annoying bits of writing a document by hand by creating the codes for you, but still making it quick and easy to do things like write equations and label figures.

(Not sure what LaTeX is or why you'd bother learning to us it? Check out this crash course on the subject to find out. I avoided it for a while because it was just "one more thing to learn," but the investment I finally made was totally worth it.)

If you're a Windows user, I wanted to share a few tips on LyX. Even though I've been using it for a couple of years now, I recently ran into some headaches and had to look all this stuff up, so hopefully I can save you the trouble.

When installing LyX, I like to have LaTeX set up first. I recommend MiKTeX.

Once that's installed, go ahead and install LyX. Get the standard installer here. This version assumes you already have LaTeX installed, and will automatically find where you put MiXTeK. In the past, trying to get everything all at once (i.e. using the bundle install) did not work well at all. Here's more info about LyX for Windows.

Once you start using LyX, you may find that your spell checker doesn't work (the most common checker used is called Aspell). This happened to me recently. Because of some changes to more recent editions of LyX, I couldn't get Aspell to work after installing the newest version of LyX. There are various possible reasons for this, such as needing to install the Aspell dictionaries.

In my case, the registry keys left over from old installs of LyX never got updated, so LyX couldn't find the dictionaries. If you get error messages when you try to start spell checking, try searching your registry keys for "aspell" and double checking that the paths stored in the keys are actually correct. Your copy of aspell might have been installed right on the c:\, or potentially in Program Files. You can even move the installed stuff to your LyX folder if you want to keep things together, just as long as you update those paths in the registry.

Next, if you have a document class file (*.cls) for a conference or something, you need to make sure both LaTeX and LyX know about it. This is pretty easy once you know how. This post tells you exactly how to do it.

One of the greatest things about LaTeX is how easy it is to create a bibliography using BiBTeX. You technically don't need to install anything extra to use BibTeX, but the source file (*.bib) is not so fun to write by hand (and after all, we are using LyX to avoid this sort of hand-coding in the first place!).

Instead, try a reference management tool like JabRef. It makes it easy to format your references and creates a BiBTeX file for you. You can even make adjustments by hand when that's easier.

Once you have a *.bib file, you just tell LyX to "Insert > List / TOC > BiBTeX Bibliography" and point to it. Then when you "Insert > Citation" all the references in your *.bib file will show up there for you to choose from.

If you get errors when trying to compile your LyX file into a PDF (or whatever), check that the codepage for your BiBTeX database supports the characters in your file, but isn't UTF-8 (it's not supported by BiBTeX even if JabRef allows it). You will also need to double check that the font you are using in LyX actually supports the characters you are trying to use. For instance, I recently had to switch from Times to Times Roman to accommodate some of the accented characters that were appearing in authors' names.

That's it for now - I hope you enjoy LyX and don't run into too many problems!

Inkscape: The Inkscape Community Announces 0.48 Release

2010-08-24T05:00:11+00:00

After 9 months of development, Inkscape 0.48 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings a new Spray tool, multipath editing, superscripts and subscripts in text, as well as numeric control of text kerning, tracking, rotation and more, several new extensions for web developers and first take at adaptive user interface. Check out the full release notes for more information about new exciting features and improvements, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

Inkscape: First shot at Open Source Fashion extensions

2010-08-21T07:00:11+00:00

During Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 Susan Spencer gave an interesting talk called "Open Source project to enable fashion design using open data formats". Having spoken to various community members during the conference, Susan then dived into Python programming and finally came up with proof-of-concept extensions for Inkscape that allow creating clothes pattern blocks. If you are interested in this further development of this project or maybe wish to participate, keep an eye on the blog. The project now has a new name, TMTP (tau meta tau physica), and there is a dedicated website in works.

Gail Carmichael: Grace Hopper How-To's

2010-08-20T09:05:05+00:00

The Online Communities Committee for this year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has been working to bring you a series of how-to's that are intended to help you get the most out of the conference this year (before, during, and after).

I kicked things off with the basics of using Flickr:

With the advent of digital cameras, we can all consider ourselves photographers. But what happens to the hundreds of photos you'll inevitably take at this year's Grace Hopper? Instead of letting them sit unopened on your hard drive, why not share them with fellow attendees and those who couldn't make it? The best place to do this is on Flickr!

Valerie continued the series with some great tips for LinkedIn:

While Grace Hopper is a great technical conference, it is also a wonderful place to network and find jobs. When you're preparing for the conference, you should consider creating a LinkedIn profile or updating your existing one. LinkedIn is a great professional networking site, ripe with opportunities to reconnect to past colleagues and find new employment.

And most recently, Kate tells us the ins and outs of Facebook:

Those of you who have been to GHC know what a great opportunity it presents for networking - and those of you who haven't been before are soon to find out! Facebook is a great tool to help you make new connections and maintain them after the conference, so I wanted to share a few tips on using it to help you get the most out of this year's GHC.

Watch for posts on Twitter and YouTube later at the Grace Hopper blog.

Conference goers have rated the usefulness of participating in any online community very highly, and I can vouch for the fact that getting involved in any way really does enhance the experience. So don't delay! Go upload last year's photos or introduce yourself in a community today!

Jos Hirth: Off-Screen Rendering (Render to Texture) with HTML5's Canvas Element

2010-08-18T04:14:35+00:00

: Caching makes it feasible

Generally speaking: off-screen rendering allows you to cache expensive drawing operations in some sort of image, texture, or buffer. With the new Canvas API the vector drawing operations for example can be a bit taxing. Same goes for gradients or patterns (Firefox 3.x). Or well, anything that requires many drawing steps or per-pixel calculations.

If you have used any other 2D drawing API in the past, you'll probably picture this a bit more complicated than it actually needs to be. As it turns out, it's surprisingly easy with Canvas since the drawImage function can also take another Canvas as parameter. So, there is no need to construct an actual image – you already got one, kinda.

Gail Carmichael: Outreach Campaign: Smart Girls Rock!

2010-08-17T12:09:10+00:00

I've been leading an effort for our Women in Science and Engineering group, CU-WISE, to create a set of promotional items intended to be used during outreach events. We want giveaways that will be fun and that will leave the recipients with a positive image of studying science and engineering.

One of our Officers, Judy, offered to help design some buttons for our campaign. She came up with these images which are super cute!

As you can see the main theme is that "Smart Girls Rock!"

The next step is to produce a solo banner to put up at events. It should have some of these cartoons, possibly some photos taken at past outreach events, and a slightly longer slogan to go with the one on the buttons. I'd also take this design into a postcard which could have more information on what kinds of careers there are in science and engineering, or perhaps an explanation of the myths about these fields.

For the slogan, I'm thinking something like this, since there's often too much focus on the tools themselves (something males seem to prefer than females), rather than what you can do with them:

It's not about the lab coats, keyboards, or [something engineering related] - it's about making a difference in the world! Smart girls rock!

... but I'm not sure what to put for the engineering bit. I figure lab coats cover a lot of science and some engineering, and keyboards cover computing, but how to represent the rest?

If you have any ideas for the slogan or for the kind of material we should include in our postcard handouts, please do share your thoughts in the comments!

Inkscape: SVG Open 2010 in two weeks

2010-08-16T16:00:13+00:00

While release preparations are full-steam (at packaging stage), we'd like to remind you that annual SVG Open conference is taking place in Paris (France) in just two weeks: August 30 to September 1. The conference traditionally attracts software and web developers, graphic designers, GIS specialists and creators of visualization solutions. This year Inkscape project will be represented by Tavmjong Bah who will demonstrate both upcoming v0.48 and some of Google Summer of Code 2010 projects. For the full list of talks please have a look here.

Gail Carmichael: Carcassonne

2010-08-13T12:18:45+00:00

Some friends finally got me to download the iPhone version of the addicting game Carcassonne, and I've quite enjoyed it so far. But thanks to my recent desire to study games academically, I couldn't just enjoy it - I had to analyze it, too.

The first observation I made was about how my understanding of the game progressed. The first time I opened the app was when a friend requested that we play an Internet game. I tried to open the rules and read them, but didn't really understand them (this has a lot to do with the telling vs. discovery principle I discussed earlier). So I started placing tiles and Meeple (what they call the set of seven "followers" you place on the board to earn points) pretty much randomly.

After not having a clue what I was doing for a few moves, I switched to a local game against the built-in AI (in an Internet game you can end up waiting hours for the other person to move again). I noticed the AI opponent scored points any time it finished a city with its Meeple on it, and then even got the Meeple back, so I did that for a while, too. Same deal for scoring points for roads.

Eventually I needed to open the rules again to figure out how the fields and clusters worked. Just as one would expect, the explanations within suddenly made sense. I finally knew how all the scoring worked and could move on to coming up with strategies. I got a bit of a sense of good and bad moves with the AI games, but I learned the most playing with my friend in that first human-to-human game (which, by the way, he didn't win by all that much, considering I was clueless at the beginning).

After a day or two of playing, I started thinking about whether I thought this game would be better with real tiles or in its digital form (at that point, I didn't even realize there was a physical version - ha!). I figured that placing real tiles and the little followers would be much nicer than sliding digital tiles into place, but I also wondered how well I'd be able to count up the points. That part might be kind of annoying.

On the other hand, maybe being forced to analyze the field boundaries would have made me understand the rules more quickly. This is an interesting point. When I play board games during our bi-weekly meeting, we always have someone familiar with the game explain it to us and give us advice for the first few moves. Contrast this with my feeling of being in the dark in the digital version. It's pretty clear that I learn how to play physical games very differently from digital ones. Which way is more effective? Is one way better than the other at all?

It would be nice to try the physical version of Carcassonne and then play the digital version of a game I've already played in real life. I'd like to compare how I learned to play in each case and see if there is any advantage to one or the other.

Kees Cook: CryptProtect broken

2010-08-12T15:31:20+00:00

Dan Rosenberg pointed me to a paper from the 2010 WOOT conference that mentions my work to implement the CryptProtect function in Wine. Their research is awesome, and it was fun to compare my attempts at identifying the blob structure to what they discovered. Looks like I got the structure pretty well, but that was easy; they totally broke the encryption itself. Now those native blobs can be decrypted, opening the door to full NTFS interoperability, offline forensics of Windows encrypted files, etc. (For designers of future symmetric encryption methods: please don’t store the keys (in any form) on disk with the cipher text…)

What I found most alarming about this is a comparison to eCryptfs, and how it is implemented with the user’s login passphrase. In both cases, a hash of the passphrase is used to perform additional work that results in keying the final encryption. In eCryptfs, this hash is calculated to unlock the main key that is used for eCryptfs and is then thrown away (it can always be regenerated when the user logs in). If the user changes their passphrase, they must decrypt and re-encrypt the eCryptfs key (this is done automatically by PAM). Under Windows, to deal with potential user login passphrase changes, they instead decided to store all prior (SHA1) hashes of the user’s passphrases, even lacking a salt. So all the clear-text user login passphrases are recoverable with a standard rainbow table, in parallel. O_o

Gail Carmichael: A Different Perspective on P != NP

2010-08-10T13:18:34+00:00

Ok, obviously this potential proof for P != NP is causing quite a stir. I really wasn't planning on blogging about it, but today I had the opportunity to share the buzz with a group of grade 6-8 girls, so I thought I'd write about it from that perspective, since it's likely nobody else has.

I have a more or less preset workshop design that I use for most of my outreach with girls of this age. I start by introducing myself and explaining how university works before moving into what computer science actually is. I usually let them guess first, then give them a "big fancy definition" from Wikipedia. I break that down into a simple statement: Computer science is about figuring stuff out. This is followed by a list of questions like "What can be figured out automatically?" and "How hard is it to figure out?" I end with a selection of CS Unplugged activities.

I normally use the Travelling Salesman Problem as an example of a problem for the question "How hard is it to figure out?" that seems easy to solve, but that can take a really long time even with modern computers if you give it enough data. The idea that computers can't solve everything blows their minds.

Usually, I leave it at that, but today I threw in a little aside for them. I mentioned that the Travelling Salesman problem was part of a big group of similar problems that take a long time to solve, and that we aren't sure if there's some way to transform them into easier problems. I explained that if we can show how to do that, all these problems we couldn't really solve before suddenly become much easier. That also seemed to blow their mind.

The coolest part? When I mentioned "P vs. NP" some of them actually said "Oooh yeah!" or looked like they had heard the term before. I told them that someone put out a proof in the last couple of days that seems to show that P does not equal NP, and that the whole computer science community has been alight about this. They seemed to like being clued into what was making us all excited these last few days. ;)

Gail Carmichael: Why I Never Learned Scientific Experimentation in High School

2010-08-09T14:23:13+00:00

Every lab report was the same. We started off by copying down the hypothesis written in the text book or lab assignment, listed the equipment used, wrote out the steps, and then summarized the results. A conclusion confirming the hypothesis ended the report.

Why oh why did we write a hypothesis when we already knew that what we were writing was the correct answer? I never really understood this throughout high school, and as a result, I didn't know what true scientific experimentation was really like until I did my science electives in university (and perhaps even that's arguable). We should have been asked to partially construct the question ourselves, and then figure out how to get an answer. There should have been some actual discovery in the process.

I was reminded of these high school experiences while reading James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. I wrote about this book (specifically how identity relates to learning) before. The chapter that most recently caught my attention discussed the difference between overtly giving information to a student and letting her discover information completely on her own. Neither approach on its own is good; instead, a mixture of the two is needed. Unfortunately, my science experiences (and perhaps even most of my primary and secondary education) were pretty much all the first kind.

I'm trying to decide if computer science in university mixed the two concepts well enough. Lectures certainly almost always overtly gave information out of situated context. It's hard to understand programming from reading a book or hearing a lecture where we are given a bunch of technical information that we have to somehow remember when it comes time to do our assignments.

It would be a lot more effective to be given only the bare necessities needed to get us started (perhaps how to enter code into an editor, and how to compile and run it), and then letting us try it on our own. We'd muddle through it as best we could, and the professor would give us the key information we needed as we needed it. After all, that's how video games work, and we seem to be able to learn them smashingly well despite their complexity.

Sometime after I was done first year, our school introduced tutorials where students would do "labs" to practice what was taught in lectures. From what little I've seen from the outside looking in, typical tutorials are pretty step-by-step, just like my high school science labs. I'm not sure they had enough discovery amongst the overt information-telling.

A new stream for our degree is starting this year. It focuses on mobile and social computing. The first course will be offered in the fall and is going to have a very different setup than previous courses. There will be some minimal instruction at the beginning - just the bare bones. Then students will work on problems right there in the classroom on their own computers, figuring out how to do things mostly on their own, but with the professor's help as they need it.

Sound familiar?

This is exactly what we need in computer science. Let's hope the professor designing the course can pull it off and it can become a model of melding overt telling and discovery.

Inkscape: GSoC2010 and release news

2010-08-08T21:00:12+00:00

The midterm evaluation is long past. Unfortunately we lost two out of five students, and that leaves us two projects focusing on performance and one project focusing on rewriting internals. On the other hand the PowerStroke project was picked by Johan Engelen, mentor of the student we lost. Overall progress of projects is quite exciting, more on that soon. In the mean time we are tracking down the very last crashers to release a new version that won't disappoint you. By the way, we are still missing a person who could take care of a native Mac build (that involves Quartz based port of GTK+). If you are willing to help, please join developers mailing list and tell us you are ready to work on this.

Gail Carmichael: What Your Identity Has to Do With Learning

2010-07-30T14:46:29+00:00

What happens if one of your identities conflicts with what you're trying to learn in school? For instance, what if you are a creationist Christian learning science, or someone whose family is just not into school? Or what if you're a woman in a world where women aren't supposed to be good at coding?

It turns out that this can put you at a huge disadvantage when it comes to learning. Now that I've read the explanation in James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, it seems so obvious why this is the case, yet it doesn't appear to be something we pay much attention to when designing the education system.

There is a "tripartite play of identities" involved in learning, explained here in the context of a science classroom:

"In a good science classroom, a virtual identity is at stake. Learners need to be able to engage in words, interactions, and actions that allow them to take on the identity of 'scientist'."
"All learners in a science classroom bring to that room their real-world identities. ... [T]he multiple real-world identities of learners in a science classroom are filtered through their real-world identities as a learner, a school learner, and a school science learner learning science here and now."
"If learners are to take on projective identities in the science classroom, they must come to project their own values and desires onto the virtual identity of 'being a scientist of a certain sort' in the classroom. They must also see this virtual identity as a project in the making."

These three identities are easily seen in many video games (particularly role-playing games). As Gee says, "If schools worked in similar ways, learning in school would be more successful and powerful because it would become the active and critical learning discussed in the last chapter [on semiotic domains]."

It's the second type of identity that really got me thinking. The discussion on this one included the idea that students' real-world identities of being learners may be damaged, and they can't learn effectively until these identities are repaired.

But how can such repair work be done? It is no easy matter. In fact, often this is what good teaching, especially in socially and culturally diverse classrooms, amounts to. However, good repair work is just a more intense version of good teaching and learning for all types of students, including those who have no need of any particular repair work.

One of the identities I mentioned at the beginning was for women in technology. Our culture is one that imagines men being much better at these subjects, so many women, even if they enjoy programming and similar activities, often never see themselves as pursuing the subjects further. Those that do give it a shot tend to have at least some damaged identities, and of course, these are almost never addressed. In fact, many first year computer science classes assume you already have some experience in the domain (contrast this with the ridiculously basic level many computer science departments try to teach to arts and general science students in their 'intro to computers' classes).

The part of good teaching and repairing these identities is a great topic for another post, but I wanted to mention a story and/or game idea I wanted to pursue that I think could help with this before post-secondary.

I used to love books like The Babysitters Club when I was young, and have wondered if I could write a book about middle or high school life that has elements of learning computer science instead of babysitting. I even thought this could make an interesting game, where little puzzles scattered throughout the story were something you could actually try as you went through, rather than just read about.

The main goal (after having a good, solidly written story of course) would be to help readers repair their identities as people who are capable of learning about computers. It could potentially reach a lot of girls - many more than local outreach activities! And who knows... maybe it could even fit into my thesis topic of educational games...

Gail Carmichael: Work Where You Work Best

2010-07-28T13:05:44+00:00

Summers can be a bit lonely at universities. Without the hustle and bustle of thousands of undergrads to keep things looking and feeling busy, and with many faculty working from home or taking vacations, the halls can seem awfully empty.

That's one of the biggest reasons that I rarely came to campus during the first summer of my Masters. I tried to at first, and I can still remember a prof asking, "What are you doing here? It's summer!" Because I found I didn't enjoy the commute to campus anyway, I just worked from home.

But there was a downside to doing so. It wasn't that I got easily distracted by TV and other pleasantries; it was that everyone else assumed that if I was home, I must have time to do this, that, and the other thing. I also found that I just wasn't as effective doing certain things at home as I was at school.

This is the first summer of my PhD. I learned a lot from doing my Masters, and this is one lesson that has made me more productive than ever: I had to figure out where I work best for what task, and when that means I'm at home, I don't let anyone pull me away.

You see, there are certain activities I can do much more easily at home. Anything creativity-oriented, for example. Like game design: I just can't seem to do much of it at school. In the lab, I sit, stare at the screen, and feel tired and uncomfortable. Funnily enough, the same is true at home when I'm working on a more literature-oriented project and have to do lots of online searching. It also seems that I'm most comfortable sitting and coding for hours on end while at school.

Succeeding in working where I work best is easiest when I have multiple projects on the go. That way I can work on whatever my focus will allow me in my current setting. (Be careful, though - too many projects can lead to not getting very far on any of them!)

Give it a try. Figure out what types of activities are best for what settings, and don't fight it. Your productivity will thank you.

Gail Carmichael: New Portfolio

2010-07-26T11:57:49+00:00

I finally have a new portfolio!

When I made the original website, I was in fourth year and expecting to work for industry. But now that I'm in grad school and looking toward a career in academia, the content just didn't suit me anymore. Although I decided to keep a section for my creative pursuits (which I still need to finish up), it is mostly an academic/teaching portfolio.

The old site was also made statically using Dreamweaver. I decided to create my new site in Drupal to make it easier to maintain and change. Although Drupal has a bit of a learning curve, I'm glad that I took the time to understand it. I've now done two sites in Drupal (our photography club site being the other), and although I have only used ready-made templates so far, I feel confident about making more custom sites in the future.

I'll be adding more information to the Research and Creative sections over the next little while, but I hope you'll check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed if you'd like to know when I add new things or have short updates not appropriate for the blog. If you have any suggestions for what to add or change, leave a comment below. You'll also find a quick link to the portfolio at the top of this blog.

Gail Carmichael: Mental Models: What's In Our Heads?

2010-07-23T16:38:42+00:00

Yesterday I saw a video of Björk talking about her TV. In it she opens the back of the TV and talks about the little city inside, with a cable travelling up from little houses (really capacitors and such) imagined to be an elevator. She later explains that a poet's interpretation of what's happening inside the TV made her afraid of the appliance, but once she read a Danish "scientifical" book, she could feel comfortable watching again.

Also just recently, I was reading up on mental models in the context of human computer interaction (HCI). Informally, mental models are the pieces of information about the world that we store in our head. We can't store every last detail of the entire world's structure, so we simplify our knowledge down to the basics, and store it in a way that makes sense to us.

Sometimes these models are accurate if not complete, but it turns out that, just as happened to Björk, our mental models can be also be wrong. I believe it is much easier for this to happen with computers and electronics since, for many of us, the way they work is like magic at some point in the macro to micro scale.

For example, before I started university, I asked my then-boyfriend-now-husband Andrew how computers did addition. He started on the software level with his explanation, but my mental model already covered that. It even covered the machine code and a teeny bit about the fact there was some sort of circuitry inside the machine. What it didn't cover was how the circuitry could produce addition results given on/off signals that represented numbers as input.

He couldn't give me a satisfactory answer at the time, but fortunately I did get an answer when I took a second year course on computer organization (it covered programming in assembly and digital logic). There we learned about logic gates, and even had to draw diagrams of those gates strung together to create simple adders. Hurray! My mental model was complete! (Note that, even in this case, not all details are technically covered. I'd have to go much further into exactly how electrons travel through wires and so on to get a 100% full picture. But it was what I wanted.)

Software is an even more abstract beast than logic gates and adders are. Well, I suppose even compiled code gets down to gates eventually, but most people have a hard time even understanding the abstract logic happening under the hood in their programs. That's why they can get so frustrated when the program doesn't work the way they think it should, even if it does exactly what it was designed to do. It's our responsibility as software developers to match the actions and outcomes of our programs as best we can to the understanding that our users will have of them.

Kees Cook: Achievement Unlocked

2010-07-23T13:45:00+00:00

I think it would be fun to add an achievement system to the Ubuntu Desktop, like is done on Steam and XBox.

The tricky part is tracking various events and finding amusing correlations. For example, if your screen-saver kicks in 40 times in a single 24 hour period, you could earn the “Alternating Current” achievement, indicating that you’re being repeatedly interrupted all day long:

There are all kind of things to track and correlate. Miles moved with the mouse, clicks taken, keys pressed, files opened, applications installed, buddies added, IMs received, sent, etc. There are all kinds of achievements that could be designed that could be used to help people discover how to use Ubuntu, or for just plain humor. “Achievement Unlocked: Application Deficit Disorder” when you uninstall 100 applications you installed in the prior week.

I’ve been told this might all be very easy to implement with the Gnome Activity Journal (Zeitgeist), but I haven’t had a chance to investigate further.

UPDATE: I can easily imagine this being tracked in CouchDB, synced between systems via UbuntuOne, and could be linked to any other remote APIs that people could dream up, including Launchpad, Forums, REVU, Identi.ca, etc.

Gail Carmichael: What's This Educational Games Stuff All About, Anyway?

2010-07-20T13:25:48+00:00

As you may know, my research focus for my PhD is educational games and augmented reality. But what is this educational games stuff all about, anyway? Do video games really have the potential to support learning?

To give a general overview of the topic, I'd like to share some of the key points of a literature review on the topic. The review was published a few years ago (2007), but still points to some interesting research. It's called Educational Video Game Design: A Review of the Literature and is by Mary Jo Dondlinger. It focuses on the design aspects of educational games, rather than just what players learn from them.

The first order of business is to sort out the difference between edutainment and educational games. I often wondered why there were so many terms for what seemed to be the same thing. As it turns out, the research world sees these two as being different. Edutainment refers to something pretty linear, whereas "educational video games require strategizing, hypothesis testing, or problem-solving, usually with higher order thinking rather than rote memorization or simple comprehension."

Effective Game Design

The elements of effective video game design described in the review include motivation, narrative context, goals and rules, and interactivity. These are some of the key points from this section:

Some say that motivation comes from narrative context, and others think it's the goals and rewards that give it. Either way, it is agreed that successful educational games incorporate both intrinsic and extrinsic goals.
Adventure and strategy games tend to be the highest rated type of educational game as determined by student surveys.
“Strategies of design that lead to engagement may include role-playing, narrative arcs, challenges, and interactive choices within the game as well as interaction with other players.” [source]
Learning tasks should be tightly coupled with the main narrative context - don't make them secondary.

Learning Theories

In terms of learning theories applied to educational games, the literature seems to focus on contructivism, constructionism, and situated cognition.

Constructivism is a learning theory that suggests knowledge and meaning is constructed from the learner's experiences.

In an article describing the multi-user virtual world, SciCtr, Corbit (2005) underscored the merits of a constructivist approach for analyzing game-like environments. In SciCtr, students create virtual science worlds, such as rainforests or deserts, that other learners can visit and explore. According to Corbit, these worlds, the paths to navigate through them, and content embedded in them, are constructed by the developer/learner through meticulous research and thoughtful design.

Constructionism is inspired by constructivism, but not quite the same thing. It says that learning is most effective when the learner can build some sort of tangible object in the real world. While this seems at odds with video games, it is easy to imagine the many things that are constructed in them. My own first thought is The Incredible Machine, one of the few games I played (rather than watch someone else play) as a kid. Examples in the review include creating instead of playing video games as well as having architecture students model their designs in a game-ready engine.

Finally, situated cognition is a theory I'm more familiar with because of its close tie to augmented reality. As Wikipedia says, "knowing is inseparable from doing" since "all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts." One of my favourite examples of this is Environmental Detectives, a location-based (and, according to some definitions, augmented reality) training game situated in a real-life setting that is explicitly tied to the game content. "According to ... scholars, the authentic, situated context affords greater content mastery and transfer of knowledge than a traditional classroom learning."

Learning Outcomes

What can actually be learned from playing an educational video game? These are the key outcomes listed in the review:

21st century skills: video games apparently help develop attention, spatial concentration, problem-solving, decision-making, collaborative work, creativity, and information and communications technology (ICT) skills
Deduction and hypothesis testing
Complex concepts and abstract thinking
Visual and spatial processing

So there you have it - much of the literature supports the idea that video games can help us learn. I suppose the next step would be to see why do many so-called educational games are either boring or not deemed to be classroom-suitable.

Jon Phillips: Rejon (JonPhillips) Interview About Free Software Futures and Realidad

2010-07-15T23:23:57+00:00

[ Photo by Joi (of course!) ]

I took some time to do an interview with my new buddy, American cool guy, John Haltiwanger I met at LGM2010, about my involvements, mostly focusing on Inkscape, Open Clip Art Library, how to build successful projects, and Free Network Services. Please read the full thing. Here is a snippet:

> 5) do you have any idealistic dream
> statements/requests/admonitions/expectations you´d make about the
> future of free software, if given the opportunity?

Yes, Free Software powers the Internet. We did that, great! Right now,
there is literally one project and company working on freeing up the
network services, Status.Net (one of my primary projects). We need to
keep our slowfi lifestyle and keep our current apps working, but the
demand right now is to build free network services to replace and/or
innovate over Facebook, Twitter, Google and more. So, if the current
free software developers want to keep working on their desktop apps,
go for it! Keep those stable!

For the young, motivated and excited developers, join me and the
growing numbers of hackers who are working to free the network!
Without this, we are going to be stuck in a shareware app store hell,
locked into iPads we can install our desktop software on, and phones
we have to pay for on a monthly basis.

This is very serious! The good news is there is investment money to
work on these problems, and I’m actively recruiting on the community
and business sides! Lets free ourselves! and keep working hard to stay
free!

Head over to John’s blog to read the entire interview.

Gail Carmichael: Cooperative Board Games Take Some Getting Used To

2010-07-14T10:00:00+00:00

I'm sure getting together every two weeks to play board games and calling it research isn't anything new, but it's definitely something I need to do. I pride myself on work-life balance, but unfortunately this makes it really difficult to find time to sit and play games, particularly those requiring other people. (If that sounds weird, consider that I also just got my second degree black belt in Taekwondo, have a big garden, etc...) That's why I set up a biweekly games afternoon at school so I could do just that.

Last week, we played a game called Pandemic. As a game, it seems like one of those concepts that's somewhat obvious (stopping several diseases from spreading around the world), yet pulled off very well. Now that I've been trying to sort out a game of my own I can appreciate how difficult it can be to get these things right.

The thing that's really interesting about Pandemic is its cooperative nature:

The game is unlike most boardgames as the gameplay is cooperative, rather than competitive. Through the combined effort of all the players, the goal is to discover all four cures before any of several game-losing conditions are reached.

I've never played a cooperative board game before. I'm trying to remember if I've even played a cooperative video game before (other than being the second person in Super Mario Galaxy, where I really didn't have to do much). The experience was really... different.

In a cooperative board game, players work together in order to achieve a goal, either winning or losing as a group. As the name suggests, cooperative games stress cooperation over competition.^[1] Participants typically play against the game, and sometimes against one or two other players as well, who take the role of traitors. In many contemporary cooperative games, cards are drawn each turn from a deck of random events. These provide the conflict or challenge in the game, and make it progressively more difficult for the players.

I guess I have a more competitive nature than I realized because I just didn't get into the game as much as the others. They commented more than once that they were feeling stressed when the situation was dire. I didn't feel the same way, even though I was enjoying the experience for other reasons, such as liking the mechanics of moving around the board eradicating diseases.

Probably the most pleasurable part of this game was simply spending time with colleagues whose company I enjoyed. In other games we'd played in the past, I got quite excited about actually trying to win as well. This reminds me of why I wanted to make a hybrid iPhone/card game (which is currently in progress, by the way) - I wanted that face to face interaction, but with a game that could be complex without so many pieces.

Really, though, I think the honest truth is that I just have to get used to the cooperative game idea. I have to make the outcomes more important in my mind, even though I can't be an individual winner. Luckily, I'll have another chance during our next games session, when we'll apparently be playing another cooperative title. ;)

Ryan Lerch: Update on the fedora branding fonts

2010-07-13T22:46:49+00:00

Further to the previous post on the new fedora branding fonts trial, a new contender has emerged for the body text font. Cantarell is a contemporary Humanist sans serif that was designed with on-screen reading in mind.

Cantarell was designed by Dave Crossland using free and open source software (including fontforge). Dave also did a presentation on the development of the Cantarell fontface and the tools he used at the LGM 2010 conference.

Cantarell sample

Gail Carmichael: My Favourite Grace Hopper Memories

2010-07-12T14:32:46+00:00

My fellow Grace Hopper Communities Committee members wanted to share our favourite Grace Hopper memories over the next few days, and we hope you'll do the same! It's so much fun reflecting back on what has made Grace Hopper so special to me. I'll pick just a few aspects to share here.

One of the things that has made Grace Hopper so exciting is the opportunity to travel to new places. I never would have imagined visiting Keystone, CO in 2008 or Tucson, AZ in 2009. We arrived early both years so we could look around and enjoy the surroundings. Lazing in the lake 11,000 feet up in the mountains in Keystone was beyond relaxing.

And getting to meet the saguaro cactus in Tucson was surreal.

But even more important than the scenery was who I got to enjoy it with. Both years, members of the CU-WISE executive managed to scrounge together enough money to make it to Grace Hopper (getting scholarships last year certainly helped!). The group of us got a suite of rooms both years because, believe it or not, doing so is actually cheaper for that number of people. The bonding that took place was so wonderful, and we learned more than we ever knew we could at the conference talks. I can honestly attribute the smashing success of our WISE group to our ability to attend Grace Hopper together.

I can't wait until Atlanta!

Do you have a favourite memory? Check out the sister post on the Grace Hopper blog to see how you can join in the fun!

Ryan Lerch: Fedora Branding Fonts trial

2010-07-12T01:13:48+00:00

The fedora-design team is currently trialling new branding fonts.

Gail Carmichael: Negative Social Stereotypes and Deep Learning

2010-07-07T14:12:00+00:00

The next chapter to cover in my series of reflections on Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do (started here and here) is on what teachers expect of their students. The opening story for this chapter should resonate with many readers here: it's about how negative social stereotypes affect student performance.

One of the interesting things that Stanford social psychologist Claude Steele found was "that the negative stereotypes sometimes had the strongest influence on the students who had all the confidence in the world, had not internalized any sense of inferiority, often had excellent preparations, and really cared about doing well academically." This, of course, would apply to the whole 'women in computer science' issue we talk a lot about.

It seems that a big factor in helping tackle these stereotypes is simply expecting the right level of performance from students. Don't go too easy on them and forgo learning just to get good reviews, but also don't pile on the homework and leave students feeling overloaded and alienated for the sake of increased difficulty.

More specifically, there are some tendencies underlying the best teachers' practices:

"Look for and appreciate the individual value of each student."
Have "great faith in students' ability to achieve."
Focus on the outcome and represent authentic goals with "trust, rejection of power, and setting standards." Replace the notion of power with the creation of opportunities.

In other words (or at least in my understanding), whether or not any stereotypes have affected students in the past, you start from scratch, assuming that each is capable of the very best. Yet you don't give up on them if they can't achieve it right away; rather, you mentor them, and help them get there.

All of this is said to "rest on an even more fundamental bedrock of ideas about the nature and meaning of learning." They key point from this section was that learning is not filling your head with information but rather constructing models of reality.

How can computer science be taught in this way?

I suppose I've touched upon my answer before, particularly in my teaching reflection. There are so many opportunities for activities ranging from the interactive CS Unplugged style to a construction of reality through carefully planned participatory code creation in class. Rather than be given information about how something works, let students slowly piece it together until the light bulb (hopefully) lights up. (And if it doesn't, more mentoring and helping is key, as mentioned above.)

I wonder if a shift in classroom practices for computer science would help retain more minorities? The research presented in this chapter suggests that it would, and fits with many of the other things I've read on the topic.

Andy Fitzsimon: Sorry for the RSS hiccups

2010-07-06T15:50:43+00:00

My apologies to all the users of aggregation services which just copped a swarm of outdated posts from my blog.

I’m restoring this old blog and merging it with a couple of sites I have so stay tuned and thanks again for enduring the noise.

Inkscape: 0.48 release preparations

2010-07-05T21:00:13+00:00

We are quickly approaching release of final 0.48 version. The plan is to make sure everything unfinished we wanted disabled is already disabled and most nasty bugs are gone. Then we shall release tarballs with source code and start working on binary builds for Windows and Mac. In the mean time we are just a week away from midterm evaluations for our Google Summer of Code students. As a quick reminder, this year we have five students: two working on performance, one implementing PowerStroke live path effect, one reworking the way Inkscape makes difference between saving and exporting, and another student rewriting internals. We'll let you know how respective projects progress after the evaluations.

Inkscape: UniConvertor 1.1.5

2010-07-05T21:00:13+00:00

sK1 team released new version of UniConvertor — a universal vector graphics conversion tool that Inkscape uses to open documents like CDR (Corel DRAW), WMF (Windows Metafiles) and so on. The new version features file managers integration on Windows and Linux, a simple user interface, support for embroidery files formats (just importing). Other changes involve major internal refactoring, better fonts handling and better color management. The Windows version contains a script that can be used to patch an existing installation of Inkscape to use new external version of UniConvertor. You can download an MSI installer for Windows or binary packages for various Linux distributions, as well as source code, right here.

Kees Cook: gdb turns off ASLR

2010-07-03T18:05:41+00:00

Starting with GDB version 7, first appearing in Ubuntu with Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10), ASLR is turned off (via the ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE personality flag) for the debugged process. If you want a more realistic view of how a process will appear in memory, you must “set disable-randomization off” in gdb:

$ gdb /usr/bin/something
...
(gdb) show disable-randomization
Disabling randomization of debuggee's virtual address space is on.
(gdb) start
...
(gdb) ^Z
$ cat /proc/$(pidof /usr/bin/something)/personality
00040000
$ grep 0040000 /usr/include/linux/personality.h
    ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE =     0x0040000,  /* disable randomization of VA space */
$ fg
(gdb) set disable-randomization off
(gdb) show disable-randomization
Disabling randomization of debuggee's virtual address space is off.
(gdb) start
...
(gdb) ^Z
$ cat /proc/$(pidof /usr/bin/something)/personality
00000000

Kees Cook: reporting all execs

2010-07-01T22:24:41+00:00

I recently learned about the process event connector, and went looking for an example program that could report all the exec()s that happen on my system to help with debugging things like AC plug/unplug scripts, etc.

After cleaning it up and adding some features to do a simple best-effort cmdline reporting, I’ve now got a tool that will report every program run on a system:

$ sudo ./cn_proc
sending proc connector: PROC_CN_MCAST_LISTEN... sent
Reading process events from proc connector.
Hit Ctrl-C to exit
event: exec 17514 17514: ls -AF --color=auto (unconfined)
event: exec 17516 17516: date +%H:%M (unconfined)
event: exec 17518 17518: whoami (unconfined)

Change the values show_event, show_seq, show_cpu, show_security_context to set the reporting defaults. Or, if someone is feeling bored, it would rock to add getopt support instead.

It seems strange to me that only CAP_NET_ADMIN is needed to get access to this information.

Gail Carmichael: Getting the Hang of iPhone Development

2010-06-29T16:01:58+00:00

I needed to learn how to develop for the iPhone since the projects I want to work on next will be games for the device. This task was somewhat daunting, given that I hadn't really even used a Mac before, let alone Objective-C or Xcode. Luckily, there are some really great resources out there that you should check out if you are also just getting started.

So far, the most invaluable resource for me has been the Stanford iTunes U lectures on iPhone development. After watching the lectures via iTunes, you can download all the course materials, including slides and assignments.

Of course, it's one thing to passively watch someone talk, but actually doing the assignments is another thing altogether: it's the most important part. I've done the first few assignments, including the HelloPoly app that lets users increase and decrease the number of sides on a polygon and get the name of the result (my version is shown below). Just now I have started the multi-part Paparazzi assignment, which is teaching me how to do tabbed view controllers and navigation hierarchies.

Although most of what I've needed has been contained in the Stanford notes and code examples, a few times I did Google key terms to find out more. The Apple reference guide has always been the first hit for me, and has provided good, detailed information. It often even includes screenshots showing applications that use a particular construct (such as this page for the UITabBarController).

I've really only just begun learning how to program iPhone apps, but I'm glad that I found the Stanford course to learn by; I feel as though I'm learning the programming practices used by most developers. It's nice to know I'm starting out on the right foot!

Gail Carmichael: Connecting Computer Science: Results

2010-06-29T09:09:11+00:00

My course is now over, the feedback via my informal survey is rolling in, and students are working out all the kinks in their knowledge as they prepare for the exam. With things a little quieter now, I took the time to look through some of the papers handed in for the assignment described in the post Connecting Computer Science.

I picked five from among the best results and asked the students if they minded me posting their work on my website to share with all of you. I asked with the offer of allowing the students to remain anonymous, though some specifically requested their names appear in part or in full. These definitely aren't the only good ones; I just wanted to have a reasonably small number of papers that showed connections to a variety of topics.

Here are links to the papers:

I'm really proud of the students' results!

Jon Phillips: Federated Social Web Summit in Portland

2010-06-28T23:15:51+00:00

As announced at the StatusNet blog, on Sunday, July 18th, Status.Net, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others will be meeting in Portland Oregon for a Federated Social Web Summit, a one-day summit by those implementors working on building the federated social web. This means building upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate. We will be addressing current implementations, successes and incompatibilities between services, as well as the future and how to implement it.

This conference will be around the same time as the Community Leadership Summit in Portland as well as OSCON.

For more details see here.

Oh, and a big thanks to Robert Martinez for the ultra cool logo too btw.

Inkscape: First prerelease of 0.48 is out

2010-06-24T22:00:12+00:00

First prelease of upcoming Inkscape 0.48 is out. Please fetch source code or a build for your system, test and report all the issues you run into. There are just a few blocker issues left. After fixing those we will release last prerelease and, if all is well, it will be the time for 0.48 final to be out.

Ted Gould: No GUADEC this time

2010-06-22T14:30:00+00:00

A small announcement to mention that I won't be at GUADEC this year. So if you're expecting to see me there to chat about something, harass or just hang out we'll need to figure out a virtual method for all those. This isn't because I'm avoiding anyone, I've fallen in love with Qt and C++ or that there's a warrant for my arrest in The Hague for being too sexy (trying to cover all the rumors). In fact, my wife and I are expecting a new addition to our family around the same time. I hope to see everyone at the Boston GNOME Summit in the Fall!

Gail Carmichael: Teaching Reflection

2010-06-22T11:56:17+00:00

I'm just about finished the Graduate University Teaching Skills Certificate (GUTS) program I took this summer. I also just had the last class of my first time contract instructing. This reflection was an assignment for GUTS, where I had to write about my micro-teaching experience in the program and teaching in general. My micro-teaching was a ten minute version of the CS Unplugged Binary Numbers activity.

One of the things I told myself before I started GUTS and teaching my first course as a contract instructor (both of which started at the same time, coincidentally) was that I would never stand in front of the class and go through slides for an entire lecture. This was especially important for my course, this being a summer semester; lectures are three hours long and have huge potential to be very boring! And even though I traditionally learned fairly well from the old status quo of slide after slide, even I grew tired of this in my later years. Teaching computer science doesn’t have to be this way.

My micro-teaching lesson for GUTS was activity based with only a few slides to demonstrate a couple of key concepts. I taught binary numbers with little cards that the “class” used to get a feel for how to count in binary. This is actually an activity based on a CS Unplugged lesson I had used once before in a high school classroom and that worked very well. Trying it in GUTS was largely an experiment in whether this activity could be done in only ten minutes.

In the end, I think that ten minutes was almost enough, but didn’t quite cut it. I would have liked to spend more time getting the class to reason through what was happening with their cards and have more discussion where I could help them reach their own conclusions. However, ten minutes was really only enough time for the class to go through the motions, not to figure things out.

Nonetheless, I feel that this sort of approach to computer science is very effective. Even if I didn’t accomplish exactly what I wanted to with my activity, the class probably walked away with a better understanding and appreciation for the topic than they would have had I simply lectured. Or, at the very least, they probably had a bit more fun!

The previously mentioned status quo of teaching in computer science isn’t so great in my opinion. Students simply expect now that their classes will consist of professors with slides that they can then download afterwards. Professors read through these slides in class, often with little interaction with the students. This can get really boring, really fast, even when some professors are able to work more interesting examples into those slides. What use is dumping all that content onto the students if they can’t concentrate and pay attention to it? Even the best speakers can lose their audience if there is no break from the slides.

Some computer science professors pause from their slides to work on code with the class. This is a great idea – it allows students to think about how they would do it, and if the professor is really good, they even take these suggestions from the class to try out. It allows students to get feedback on their understanding and start correcting misconceptions right away.

While working on code is very helpful, I think that there are many opportunities to take the idea of classroom activities further. Algorithms can be shown with interactive activities, and students could work in small groups to answer a question designed to test their understanding of a concept right after is taught. In upper year classes there are fewer students, making it possible to get into some more interesting discussions – if only the right questions were asked of the class. You can even have students come up and show how to do something if you prepare a tutorial sheet for them and bring a printed copy to class (I did this when I covered Microsoft Word and PowerPoint in my course, and it was far more interesting than watching me go through 250 slides on the subject).

There is a danger with these classroom activities, of course. Some students may feel like you are treating them as children instead of adults and others may see them as time fillers. In fact, these were both comments I received in an informal survey I conducted recently about my own course. I can understand where these comments are coming from: I remember thinking that I wasn’t learning much from these sorts of activities during my student days. But looking back, I now realize that even though the activities didn’t disseminate as much information as traditional lectures, I actually did gain a better understanding of the topic. Funny how being at the front of the room can improve one’s hindsight.

I think the current challenge for computer science education is to break the mould that is the slide-based lecture and convince professors to spend a bit of extra time preparing more interesting activities for their classes. New and creative ways to teach difficult topics need to be invented as well, since it is certainly not entirely clear how to teach all subjects in this way. There are many opportunities to share this knowledge, such as through ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).

As for my own teaching, I will continue to promise myself to never spend an entire lecture with slides. I definitely accomplished this with my course, but it was an introduction course for arts and social science students – who knows how I would have fared in a core computer science class. But regardless of how successful I am in my future attempts, I will undoubtedly be better off having tried.

Kees Cook: kvm kernel console

2010-06-21T20:50:46+00:00

I know there are a lot of ways to do this, but I just wanted to note what works for me to catch early boot Oopses in the kernel. In virt-manager, I set up a serial device, as a “pty”. After the VM boots, I pause in Grub, and check the VM details for the serial port (it’ll show something like “/dev/pts/13″). In another terminal, “sudo cat /dev/pts/13″, and I boot the kernel with “console=ttyS0″. When the Oops happens, I get it in the terminal instead of having it scroll off the VM’s screen.

Jon Phillips: LOMO Jon Phillips by Joi

2010-06-17T16:51:14+00:00

LOMO – Jon Phillips, originally uploaded by Joi.

I’m almost back around the world from a bunch of bizness in EU and Singapore. Meanwhile, with CC Keffiyeh in hand, Status.Net on the mic, and Aiki Framework on the decks, showing signs of a smile these days. Hard work pays off they say. Keep on chugging friends

Gail Carmichael: My Grace Hopper Communities Introduction

2010-06-16T10:50:00+00:00

I'm on the Grace Hopper Online Communities Committee this year, and our first mini-campaign is all about introducing ourselves and trying to encourage others to the do same. I wrote an introduction post on the official Grace Hopper blog:

Hi everyone! My name is Gail, and I'm on this year's Grace Hopper Online Communities Committee. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and hope that you, too, will find a community you can introduce yourself in.

You can read the rest of this post and many others on the Grace Hopper blog. Be sure to check out some of the communities available to us. Now is a great time to start meeting other conference attendees with similar interests!

Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course 2010 Survey Results

2010-06-15T10:29:21+00:00

Last year, I did a pretty detailed post mortem of my mini-course Computer Science and Games: Just for Girls. I had my students this year fill in a similar survey and would like to share a few of the results.

Before the Course

At the beginning of the course, before I even introduced myself, I collected some first impressions. Some of the responses for what made the girls decide to take this course include:

"The subject seemed really interesting so I chose it. Plus the fact it was just for girls was so cool!"
"I'm really into electronics and tech so I figured that taking a course related to computers, tech etc would be suitable for me."
"Making a video game instead of going to school. How much better could it get?"
"I might want to be a computer engineer like my dad when I grow up but I'm not sure..."

All the responses were positive, and many essentially summarized the sentiment that seeing how a game is made would be cool.

These were the responses for the question "I am confident that I understand what the field of computer science is":

Disagree: 2
Neutral/Don't Know: 8
Agree: 10

This is interesting because it shows some confidence in the subject. However, after the lessons on what computer science really is, many admitted that they had the wrong idea. This is a byproduct of never truly teaching computer science before high school, if even then. Many students see using computers as computer science.

Responses for "I would consider computer science as a good career for women in general":

Neutral/Don't Know:4
Agree: 11
Strongly Agree: 5

Responses for "I would consider computer science as a good career for me":

Neutral/Don't Know:13
Agree: 5
Strongly Agree: 2

This shows that the girls had a decent impression of computer science as a career for other women, but were noticeably less interested in it as a career for themselves. The surveys at the end of the course were intended to see if these impressions changed for many of the girls.

After the Course

On the last day of class, I gave another survey. Some of the questions were repeated so the answers could be correlated. A summary of some of the responses follows.

"Was this course your first choice?"

Yes: 12
No: 7
Don't remember: 1

"If no, did you enjoy it more than you expected?"

Yes: 7
No: 0

A few people who said it was their first choice answered the previous question on enjoying it more than expected as well:

Yes: 5
No: 3

I find it interesting that the only ones who didn't think the course was better than expected were those that made it their first choice. Of course, saying you didn't enjoy it more than you expected might just mean you expected to really like it, and it delivered. In fact, most responses on how much they enjoyed the individual topics of the course were pretty positive among the "no" group, with only one "disagree" where the student did not like learning about what computer science is all about (but liked the other topics).

The question "Would you have signed for the course if it wasn't just for girls?" had two parts. Responses to the first:

Yes: 14
No: 6

Responses for "Are you glad it was just for girls?" among those who said yes to the previous question:

Yes: 4
No: 1
I'm happy as long as I'm not the only girl: 9

Responses among those who said no:

Yes: 5
No: 0
I'm happy as long as I'm not the only girl: 1

As expected, while many say they would have signed up for a mixed class, their appreciation that it ended up being all girls makes this all-girls course worthwhile. I also tend to wonder if they really would have signed up for a mixed version knowing that there was a good chance they really could be the only girl.

Here are the responses of the repeat of "I would consider computer science as a good career for me":

Neutral/Don't Know: 16
Agree: 1
Strongly Agree: 3

This is disheartening, and I don't remember seeing this kind of drop in the past (though it's good not to see any disagrees!). It's strange, too, because everyone rated learning about the computer science topics favourably. I wish I could get more insight into this answer. Perhaps it really is a case of "I don't know" - after all, they are probably too early in their lives to know what they want to do.

There's one last question I want to summarize for this post. "I am more likely to try computer science in high school after taking this course":

Neutral/Don't Know: 6
Agree: 9
Strongly Agree: 5

This looks a lot more promising. Hopefully our high school courses will be ready to continue the excitement of the topic and a few of these girls continue on to university. Based on the state of things when I was in high school, I don't have a lot of confidence, but if programs like the K-12 Computer Teacher's Workshop at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing continue, there is hope.

Jon Phillips: Open Clip Art Library Releases “Spring 2010″ Package

2010-06-11T19:16:55+00:00

The Fabricatorz Team recently helped complete and release the latest Open Clip Art Library Package. This new Release stands apart from previous versions because of a themed clip art package centered on “Spring 2010″. For more information about utilizing the new Spring release, check out the Fabricatorz post and the official press release.

Gail Carmichael: Augmented Reality on Bloomberg Innovators, and Current Gaps

2010-06-11T13:09:58+00:00

The weekly links post over at Games Alfresco - a blog about the latest and greatest industry and research advances in augmented reality - had a link to a documentary made by Bloomberg News. It's an episode of their Innovators program and focuses entirely on augmented reality.

If you are interested in the current state of AR and want to see some of the big names in research and industry, take the time to watch this video. I was excited to see many of the people I met at the last ISMAR conference as well. Some of the most well known projects are shown, though not all of the coolest stuff is in there.

One thing that sticks out is that I can't really say there was much discussion on why augmented reality was good. Why it will truly help us socially, cognitively, and so on. This is a gap I see in many research papers as well. Technologists are often able to say things like "it's good because you can look at it from all angles." But why is that good? What theories support that? This is a gap I'm trying to fill. Won't say too much more now, but hopefully it will be something I can publish that will be useful to prove that value of augmented reality in the future.

Jon Phillips: Team Sharism + Bassel + Herobum

2010-06-10T05:50:34+00:00

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good to us, originally uploaded by herobum.

All projects moving forward, problems being solved and then we get a great gift of Bassel Safadi arriving on the scene at CC Korea Conference!

Go team Sharism!

Gail Carmichael: GRAND Research Network

2010-06-08T15:34:04+00:00

Last week, I attended the first GRAND Annual Conference. I didn't really know what GRAND (Graphics, Animation, New Media) was, but I knew my supervisor was a network investigator on a few of its projects. I'm really glad I went; it turns out that this network is exactly up my alley, and I'm really excited to be a part of it!

As explained in the GRAND executive summary:

New Media, Animation, and Games -- these technologies are the building blocks of the Digital Age. The Science, Technology and Innovation Council report in 2008 recognized this as a priority research sub-area within Canada's Science and Technology Strategy. This application responds to the needs identified in that report. The GRAND NCE will undertake a comprehensive research program whose goal is to understand the underlying technologies and to make selective advances in a coordinated, multidisciplinary setting that lead to social, legal, economic, and cultural benefits for Canadians. ...

Benefits will be realized through creating new knowledge and technologies, training highly qualified personnel, creating wealth by exploiting the possibilities of New Media, Animation, and Games for economic growth, and improving the quality of life for Canadians. Technologies that improve healthcare, encourage sustainable lifestyles that honor and preserve the natural environment, and promote greater participation in public dialogue will be powerful benefits in the Digital Age.

GRAND is part of the Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada.

Because I am interested in education, educational games, and augmented reality, I feel I fit in very well with this community. Some of the projects that really interest me are (in alphabetical order):

BELIEVE: This is about creating believable characters and stories in games. One of the first things that comes to mind for me is how to incorporate learning objectives into game stories in a way that's not terribly obvious or lame.
DIGLT: I don't know a lot about the actual happenings of this group (missed their project meeting), but it's all about digital games for learning and training. Pretty clear connection to my interests here.
GAMFIT: This project on using games for physical fitness just seems interesting to me in general, even if it's not super related to my research.
HLTHSIM: Hey look! Augmented reality! This one's for health care training. I should look into this one more.

Another really cool thing about the network (which for all I know could be standard, but I'm new to this) is the ability to have peers review papers and theses before submission, and the collaboration they are trying to foster between grad students. To explain the value of the latter, the organizers emphasized that this is the group of researchers in Canada in our field that we will theoretically be working with for many years. We have an opportunity to become friends and allies now so that whenever we need a favour, we know who to call (and we know who to say yes to when favours come calling). We have this powerful common ground now; all we have to say is "I'm from GRAND". For whatever reason, this excites me.

One last point to mention in this post (though there will be hopefully more to come)... At the beginning of the conference, it was mentioned that GRAND wants to or is getting involved with The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. This got me thinking. If I could plan my future precisely, I would be working at Carleton after I'm done my PhD. I'd definitely be teaching courses. I initially thought I'd be happiest as an instructor, but then something clicked. Why couldn't I be a professor whose research is all about science education, and creating/using educational technology? I suppose I have several years to figure it all out.

Jon Phillips: Vision Forum’s The Invisible Generation in Beijing (06/08/10)

2010-06-07T17:31:36+00:00

If you are in Beijng be sure to check out Vision Forum‘s “The Invisible Generation” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Vision Forum has been a generous funder of the Laoban project – which will soon kick off a 3-part party series this summer (more details on this soon!).

I will be participating in this artist talk that is scheduled for today – June 8th at 4pm.

Here is some information about “The Invisible Generation”:

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”
~William S. Burroughs

“The Invisible Generation is an ongoing contemporary art project that appears in different guises in Beijing, Melbourne, Kiev and Shenzhen, inspired by a text by William S. Burroughs with the same title. The venues have been carefully selected due to their specific historical contexts and their perceived trajectories into the future. The project takes its starting point in performative traditions, but focuses on practices and events that cross over into other time-based activities, such as sound, film, video, literature, theatre and workshops. The project offers new situations for art and audience to meet outside of where one expects to meet an art piece or performance. The Invisible Generation allows the artists and audience to investigate how art can become a tool to shift our outlook at reality when it appears with an element of surprise.”

Inkscape: SVG Open 2010

2010-06-05T02:00:14+00:00

The annual SVG Open conference is taking place from August 30 to September 1 in Paris. If you live close to the venue and are willing to represent Inkscape as either developer or designer, please register and submit a short abstract of your talk till June 9.

Inkscape: Inkscape project at Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

2010-06-05T01:00:10+00:00

On May 27-30 annual Libre Graphics Meeting conference has taken place in Brussels. After several years of being underrepresented at the event Inkscape project finally featured many of its superheroes and rock stars: Johan Engelen, Jasper van de Gronde, Felipe Sanches, Tavmjong Bah, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Ivan Louette, Jon Philips, Jakub Steiner, Cedric Gemy and Andy Fitzsimon. Unfortunately, two other very important contributors, Jon Cruz and Donna Benjamin, couldn't make it. There were three talks covering Inkscape: "Diffusion curves" by Jasper van de Gronde, "Icon Workflows with Inkscape" by Jakub Steiner and "Inkscape for everybody" by Andy Fitzsimon. An exceptionally well organized workshop for Inkscape beginners by Elisa de Castro Guerra nicely complemented the talks. Videos of all the LGM talks are currently being uploaded to river-valley.tv who filmed them. You can also read Tavmjong's notes on the event here.

Inkscape: Alpha version of Inkscape 0.48 is out

2010-06-05T01:00:10+00:00

A while ago we released alpha verison of the coming Inkscape 0.48. You can download the files here. This alpha version features all things we told you about before plus recent work by Tavmjong Bah on the text tool options: numerical input for kerning, baseline shift, word spacing, character rotation and so on. There will be a number of last minute changes before we announce feature freeze and finally move to the next stage.

Jon Phillips: Sharism Presentation at CCKorea Open for Innovation

2010-06-04T08:00:12+00:00

Sharism: Banking on Sharing, The New Economy Pays

View more presentations from Jon Phillips.

Just gave a nice first presentation about the Sharism project here in Seoul at Creative Commons Korea’s Open for Innovation conference.

Here is the abstract, but the slides and rapidly evolving Aiki-Framework-based website, which says much more:

Banking on Sharing
by Isaac Mao, Christopher Adams and Jon Phillips

Money is the great wheel of circulation. However, there is another instrument of commerce between women and men, pupils and mentors, the artist and her audience. It is spinning at a much faster velocity. Its the sharing economy.

This New Economy has already taken off. At its center is not capital in search of profit, but creativity in search of an outlet. In both cases the return can be just as high. This presentation charts a new concept and protocol for the Sharing Economy that you can take to the bank. Korean companies who pioneered early virtual currencies as well as new trends in global are presented as well as threats to this new economy. They come in the form of broken net-neutrality reform, cracked patent systems, and a return to the re-locked read-only economy created by so-called magical devices such as the iPad.

We will write more about ways others can participate in this project as it develops over the summer towards CNBloggercon2010 in Shanghai.

Jon Phillips: Thanks All For 31st Birthday Wishes!

2010-06-04T07:34:48+00:00

Jon Phillips, originally uploaded by Joi.

I’m out here on the road doing some quick presentations and you know you get great pics when you are hanging with the @Joi.

I wanted to say thank you to everyone for coming out to StatusCheck Brussels and my REJON Version .31 Release Party!

LGM2010 went by way too fast, but thanks to the team at OSP, led by Femke, it definitely took the mantle as one of the best conferences I’ve every had the pleasure of participating in.

Now I’m at CCASIA conference led by Creative Commons Korea presenting Sharism for the first time! Slides coming now!

Gail Carmichael: CRV 2010, Teaching, and Good Presentations

2010-06-02T22:47:02+00:00

Yesterday afternoon, I gave my first academic conference paper presentation. I have given talks at conferences before (including Grace Hopper), but they weren't on highly technical topics. My main goal for this talk was to stay true to what I believe is a good presentation style, even though it's not really the norm.

I've had the opportunity to rant about talks and poster presentations a few times lately. The main summary of these rants is that I hate that people put so much information in their slides or on their posters! The thing is, there's only so much detail I can take in in a short period of time. And guess what? If your second slide (or your poster) is filled with all kinds of facts and numbers and equations you think are useful...my brain turns off. You've lost me for the entire rest of your talk. I don't this on purpose - I just can't process all that stuff, no matter how clearly and loudly and well paced you speak.

I knew avoiding the temptation to put lots of detail in my talk would be hard when I presented my CRV 2010 paper on global context for SURF and MSER features. After all, this is a technical conference with an audience that actually knows this stuff. But somehow, I think I managed to do it. My slides, embedded below, certainly don't stand alone, though they do seem to give a decent general idea of what I talked about. I made sure I rehearsed, and found a good way to explain some of the details of the method and results when I spoke. I'm quite happy with the results (one very kind attendee introduced herself and then told me the presentation was "perfect"). Even still, I would probably prefer to remove some of the text. ;)

Global Context Descriptors for SURF and MSER Feature Descriptors

View more presentations from Gail Carmichael.

I like to take this idea to teaching as well. Many of those willing to listen to my rants argue that lectures are different. You need to include lots of text so students have notes to refer to later. I say if you want to give them extra information, use the Notes section of your slides software. Keep the main slide content to a minimum, and supplement with activities, videos, and discussions. This is much easier in the intro to computers class I'm giving to arts students, but should translate to programming and algorithms classes as well (to an extent, anyway).

Anyway, I don't mean to sound as pretentious as I think I may be sounding, but I think it's worth ranting on this topic every once in a while so that, one day, the norm can become a style that many more of us can learn from.

Kees Cook: Linux Security Summit 2010

2010-05-30T01:22:24+00:00

The Call For Participation is open for the 2010 Linux Security Summit, being held just before this year’s LinuxCon.

If you’re interested in helping make Linux more secure, you’ve got ideas to present, want to have your opinion heard, or generally just want to hang out, please join us and/or suggest a topic for discussion (CFP ends June 4th, so please hurry).

I’m hoping to get a chance to discuss what I’m calling the “popular kernel hardening patches” which appear in a lot of distros yet remain missing from the upstream Linux kernel.

Gail Carmichael: CRV 2010

2010-05-28T13:22:16+00:00

The Seventh Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2010) is being held right here in Ottawa next week, and I'll be attending at least a couple of the days. A paper I wrote based on some of my Masters work was accepted to be presented there, and I was also invited to give a tutorial on feature detection for the free tutorial day happening on Sunday.

In the paper, I talked about using supplemental information to help make existing SURF and MSER feature descriptors a bit more unique. I found that adding this information didn't help SURF descriptors a whole lot in many cases, but always seemed to improve MSER performance. (If none of that makes any sense to you, basically I just did some stuff to make matching features in images a little bit easier.)

The tutorial is just an overview of some of the different feature detectors and doesn't get into much detail at all. It's only 15 minutes including questions, so there's no point in trying to get too deep into it. My slides are very visual and minimal, but I made a PDF copy of them that includes many notes to be posted on the web.

You can see the Tutorial Day schedule, or look at my slides from the main CRV website. My paper isn't online anywhere yet, but if you want to download and look at my 20 MB thesis file, you can.

Kees Cook: too lazy to recompile

2010-05-28T05:13:29+00:00

I have a camera that takes .MP4 files. MythTV’s Gallery plugin has a static list of extensions it recognizes. MP4 is not one of them. I can rename all my files (which is wrong — they’re MP4s not something else), or I can edit the source and recompile.

Or, since I want to watch them RIGHT NOW, I can binary-edit the shared library and replace something I’ll not have any of (WMV) with MP4.

# strings -a /usr/lib/mythtv/plugins/libmythgallery.so | grep WMV
*.WMV
# sed -i -e 's/\.WMV/.MP4/' /usr/lib/mythtv/plugins/libmythgallery.so

Ta-da. Just need to make sure I don’t change the size of the binary. :)

(Oddly, I’m not too lazy to open a bug and propose a patch.)

Gail Carmichael: Tech Mommies

2010-05-27T09:40:30+00:00

A friend of mine is expecting her first baby in the next couple of months. She asked me if I could do some maternity shots with her. The criteria? Nothing cliché! In fact, she was hoping to even bring some geekiness into it so she could be a role model for the CU-WISE community.

My idea was to make use of her cute little teeny laptop. Perhaps using her belly as a table? Well, she loved this idea, and luckily she remembered to bring the computer to our outdoor photo shoot. I'm really glad she did because some of the cutest photos are with the laptop and her glasses on.

This one doesn't do the table thing, but it shows her perfect round belly really well. Gorgeous!

Thanks, Natalia, for letting me put your photo online so you can be an inspiration to us all - we love you!

Gail Carmichael: GHC10 Talks

2010-05-27T09:34:21+00:00

It's that time of year again! My travel scholarship application is in, our committee on online communities is starting to make headway, and the results of our talk submissions are out. Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2010 to be held in October in Atlanta, Georgia is in season.

I was involved with a couple of submissions this year, but unfortunately only one got in (but I'm still excited to be a speaker in some capacity!). The panels I organized were on making the most of grad school. The concept was that there are lots of risks and rewards for going beyond the research, and not everyone is aware of them, nor does everyone know about the extra-curricular opportunities available. The topics and panelists I gathered together were really amazing, but our submission document probably needed some work. For instance, it looked like we had too many panelists and topics for a one hour slot. I learned a lot from the reviewers and will definitely try again next year.

The other panel I'm on came out of the blue, and I'm really excited to meet and work with the other ladies on that one. It's going to be on outreach using video games, but with a particular focus on attracting girls to the programs in the first place. I've had good luck with my mini-course, but other groups have had a harder time with recruitment, so what is it that makes them give it a chance?

This conference always reinvigorates me and makes me that much more motivated to be the best I can in my graduate program. This time I'll be more or less just starting my PhD research when I attend, and expect that I'll have many interesting conversations with chances to mentor and be mentored. I can't wait for October!

Jon Phillips: StatusCheck Brussels + Rejon Version 31 Birthday Release Party {in Brussels} !

2010-05-25T00:51:53+00:00

Join Rejon for his 31st birthday celebration and a special edition of StatusCheck Brussels at La Maison du Peuple immediately following the Libre Graphics Meeting on Friday May 28th!