I’ve not been well this weekend. Its the remnants of a fluey cold exacerbated by getting too cold in the wind and rain when using public transportation on Thursday and Friday. However every cloud has a silver lining and sitting in bed, in between snoozes, has given me the chance to get on and develop a Wordpress plugin and widget that integrates with, and displays images from a Coppermine gallery.

This is the first plugin and widget for Wordpress I have developed and its been a bit of a learning exercise. Its no way completed but the basics are there and you can download the plug-in here. (Edit: The plug-in is now supported officially on the Wordpress site. You can get the latest one from here). Currently the only known bug is that you add the widget to a sidebar before you have configured the default Coppermine database settings.

Currently the widget just displays a fixed number of random images from the whole gallery. You can see it in action in the left side bar. Clicking an image takes you to that image’s album in the gallery. Imminent additions I will make are a configurable number of images and columns; selectable queries e.g. the latest additions to the gallery, random from an album or albums, and so on; and pop-ups on mouse-over showing a larger version of the image together with image title and description.

For those who are not aware, today, 24 March 2009, is the first Ada Lovelace Day. It is a day to celebrate women in technology and to inspire young girls who are interested in technology.

So who was Ada Lovelace? Ada Lovelace, né Ada Byron, was the result of Lord and Lady Byron’s short lived marriage. In order to prevent her daughter taking on her father’s dangerously poetic traits Lady Byron had her daughter taught mathematics and music. The young Ada was fascinated by mathematics and when she was 17 she met Charles Babbage, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a position currently held by Stephen Hawking). Their copious correspondence made them life long friends. Ada eventually married and by way of inheritance became Lady Ada of Lovelace but she continued her friendship with Babbage.

Even though the Difference Engine was not complete Charles Babbage wanted to move on to his next contraption, the Analytical Engine. In order to be easily configurable, i.e. programmable, the engine was to utilised the punched card idea from the Jacquard Loom. In 1842, while Babbage was trying to get sponsorship from abroad to be able to build his device, Italian Mathematician Louis Menebrea published a memo on the Analytical Engine in French. Babbage employed Lady Lovelace to translate it for him.

But Ada Lovelace did more than just translate the document but furthered the research and the notes she wrote to accompany the paper are larger than the paper itself. In the notes Ada Lovelace described how you could configure the Analytical Engine to produce a sequence of Bernoulli Numbers. This was the first ever computer program and she was the world’s first programmer so it seems fitting the day is named after her. She also has the ADA programming language named after her too. But Lady Lovelace was not completely unaffected by her father’s legacy and when her peers were seeing such devices as merely scientific and mathematical machines she saw how computers could be artistic, used to make music or be used in graphics.

But this post isn’t about Ada Lovelace. It is about Lynn Conway who is a heroine of mine and an inspiration. It think she quite rightly deserves to be blogged about on Ada Lovelace Day.

Lynn Conway is Professor Emerita of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. She retired from teaching and research in 1998. Professor Conway is responsible for many advances that are required for modern computing and much of her work was carried out during a time when women were virtual non-existent in computer sciences and misogyny was rife.

I was not sure whether I should talk about Lynn Conway’s earliest work as she is a trans-woman and her earliest work was prior to transition. I was reluctant because I wanted to write about Lynn Conway the woman technologist and not her biological past however Ms Conway is open about her past and it does not detract from her achievements. In fact it makes them even more inspiring. Lynn Conway entered MIT in 1955 where she excelled. She tried to transition whilst there but the medical and social climate was against her so she left despondent and worked as a technician for several years. She resumed her education at Columbia University obtaining her batchelor’s degree in 1962 and her master’s a year later. She was subsequently head hunted by IBM to work as a researcher on the Advance Computing Systems project. Whilst at IBM Lynn Conway invented dynamic instruction scheduling.

Micro-processors have many functional units which can operate in parallel. I do not mean multiple core processors but units that are part of a single core. As a simplist example we can consider a processor that has separate addition and multiplication units. I.e. the processor can add a pair of numbers and multiply a pair of numbers simultaneously. Conway’s idea was to utilise this parallelization by re-ordering instructions in a program dynamically to suit the processor’s architecture. For example supposing a set of instructions comprising two additions followed by two multiplications performs a mathematical calculation. And suppose you could do the same calculation as addition, multiplication, addition, multiplication. I.e. you swap the second and third operations. Then this would be more efficient since the processor can do those additions and multiplications simultaneously. The rearrangement would be dynamic, i.e. the tools or processor would do it and not the programmer. This is dynamic instruction scheduling and is core to modern computer science.

Whilst at IBM the depression caused Professor Conway to attempt transition again and it was during this transition she was fired by IBM for being a transsexual person. She completed her transition, changed her name, hid her past, and started her career again from scratch.

Lynn Conway worked firstly as a contract programmer and then for Memorex as a system designer and computer architect. Then in 1973 she moved to, the famous Xerox PARC, where she led the Large Scale Integration Systems team. Whilst there she collaborated with Professor Carver Mead of Caltech. Between them they wrote the classic text Introduction to VLSI Systems. This text spearheaded the Mead and Conway Revolution whereby the number of engineers capable of developing new chips significantly increased. The book filled a major gap in the literature and formed the basis of an educational revolution in computer science. Many universities started teaching VLSI courses based upon the book and some even used Conway’s notes from her own, now famous, course held at MIT in 1978.

The course on its own would not have been that useful if students were not able to realise their designs so, in addition to inventing design rules which simplified chip design and design tools, Professor Conway also worked on an internet based infrastructure that allowed for rapid prototyping and short run fabrication of a large number of VLSI designs. The Multi Project Chip was demonstrated at the MIT course and within weeks students had their fabricated prototypes for testing. The system evolved and is still used as a national infrastructure by universities and researchers. Lynn Conway’s work has had significant impact on chip design. In the early 80s Ms Conway moved to DARPA and in 1985 she became Professor of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan and associate dean of engineering there. She stayed there as a researcher and teacher until she retired in 1998.

Most people don’t invent anything during their lives. Lynn Conway not only had one major invention, or even two, but several which changed the face of computer science and gave birth to much of the modern technology we use today. However when she heard that story of her early work at IBM was going to be published she decided to come out as a trans-woman. Since then she has been a trans-activist in order to “illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition.” Lynn Conway suffered bigotry in the 50s and 60s, transitioned and restarted life as a woman forging an impressive career in a male oriented industry and becoming an inspiration to many. Then, later in life, she risked bigotry again by revealing her path and has fought for justice and equality since then. I had a chance to correspond with her a few years ago and she is a lovely lady.

Lynn Conway is my heroine on Ada Lovelace Day.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

This blog post is the first in a number of what I hope are useful coding related posts. I’ve been coding for many years in many languages on many platforms. I tend to solve issues using a combination of technologies so many of my posts will be based around combining technologies. Others will be basically describing gotchas that I have found during development and how I solved or worked around them. This post is about using PHP’s session handling from a Java client, i.e. not a browser.

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The day after the PHP UK Conference 2009 was Techadventure in Bristol. This was the second one held, the first being last year, and is the brain child of Shevek. It was held in The Trinity Centre.

The idea behind it is to have a celebration of technology. A chance for engineers, technologist, crafts people and artists to show off their latest technology projects or works based on technology. There were many classic computers from the eight bit era. All of which were modified or expanded to support modern technologies such as MMC. There was a 3D table carving balsa wood. The was a laser guided autosentry robot that fired plastic pellets and a hexapod robot.

It wasn’t just technology though. There was also art based around technology. There was a reading of technology inspired poems. There were two musical performances. One piece was composed and performed by a Professor of Music from Boston and the other by DJ Lee Chaos. A large number of puzzle games had been brought for people to play with.

We arrived around midday during a talk about performance in computer systems and the best architectures for high speed computing. I had hoped to be able to demonstrate my BBC ethernet board but due to my broken wrist could not build it before the event. I did prepare slides but didn’t get time to give a talk. The idea was to make a talk along the 20 slides in 20 seconds theme. The slides are available online. We all announced what we were doing to the rest of the attendees and I was surprised by the interest in the ethernet board. It was great to talk to other demonstrators about their projects and exchange ideas. I am definitely going to make myself one of those hexapod ‘bots.

After the event some of us were invited to Shevek’s place for a meal and a chat. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day and I can’t wait for the next one.

The first ever single, a 45 RPM piece of vinyl, I bought was "Since You Been Gone" by (Richie Blackmore’s) Rainbow. I became an instant fan of Blackmore’s guitar playing. I wanted to know more about what he’d done so researched his career. I discovered he was previously in Deep Purple. So I bought their albums too. I was never lucky enough to see Rainbow perform live but I did see Deep Purple twice. Once in 1985 at the one off revival of Knebworth Faire, and once in Birmingham.

Blackmore’s relationship with fellow Purple Ian Gillan was tumultuous to say the least and he left Deep Purple for good in 1993. He reformed Rainbow for one last album before quitting that too. He wanted a change in direction and to play smaller venues. He also had an interest in music from the middle ages, folk and classical music. This interest he shares with his, now, wife Candice Night. Together they formed Blackmore’s Night.

I also have an interest in classical music, traditional folk, and more recently the German folk which tends to be referred to as mittelalter which literally means middle ages. Modern gothic bands from Europe often have Mittelalter influences. Some rock bands do too. Nightwish’s Islander has more than a bit of a folk influence in it. Blackmore’s Night rings all the bells for me and occasionally they cover on of the old Rainbow or Deep Purple classics. But the song I can’t stop playing right now is "Locked Within A Crystal Ball". It is catchy, a tad gothicy, has mittelalter influences and Richie’s classic guitar playing.

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Lunch really wasn’t bad at all. There was some carefully rationing on the part of the servers but I suppose it would be better to have too much at the end than to run out.

Living with Frameworks

I had wanted to see this talk on frameworks because of my common code background and love of frameworks in any development environment. Alas it seems that nearly everyone else wanted to see it too and because it was in the smaller of the two rooms it was over subscribed. So I took time out and nattered with other conference attendees and visited some of the exhibitors. I had a long play with the interactive table the Microsoft guys brought and perused the books on the O’Reily stand. I’ll catch the talk online.

It was also around now that we discovered that someone had stolen the PHP Women’s ElePHPant from the stand. The little blue ‘pants are rare anyway but this one was wearing a hand crocheted PHP Women’s top. We are all supposedly like minded individuals. It upsets me that someone would even consider the theft. Despite all announcements and appeals over twitter she never turned up.

Flex and AIR for PHP programmers

This talk by Adobe’s Mihai Corlan should have been interesting. Instead it was both controversial and boring. The idea of writing platform agnostic clients that would run both in a browser and stand-a-lone appealed so I wanted to see this talk. At first it was interesting covering FLEX, AIR and the open source tools you can use to develop apps. But then he decided to show what the technologies were capable of with a demonstration of "Desktop Keeley" (Who ever she is), an application developed for the Sun Newspaper’s web site.

To say the Sun is not the most politically correct publication is an understatement. The application seemed to comprise of a scantily clad young woman in heels who comes on and presents a pop-up displaying some tit-bit of news from the Sun’s website. I feel this is entirely inappropriate for a professional conference. At best its immature and schoolboy-ish and at worst its misogynistic. I wasn’t the only one who felt this. A straw poll found that many, regardless of gender, were uncomfortable with it. Mihai Corlan’s comment in reply to this post by Jaime Hemmett suggests he just doesn’t get it. Surely he could have found an example which wasn’t degrading. It doesn’t matter why he used the application, he shouldn’t have used it.

So now I was annoyed. Then his talk finished with some ‘extreme programming’. Watching someone typing is not the most exciting content for a talk. If I wanted to do that I could watch the guy who sits opposite me in the office. Anyway I was tired now and just wanted the talk to finish so I snoozed.

Security-Centered Design – exploring the impact of human behavior

Chris Shiflett gave a great talk to finish off the conference. He spoke about how, in order to be more secure, we need to understand how people think. Informative and amusing it appealed very much to the amateur psychologist in me. He covered change blindness and ambient signifiers. I loved the Derren Brown videos. It made me think a lot and was useful not just for web developers but developers in general.

Then the conference was wrapped up and we all headed back to the Brook Green Hotel for more socialising, a buffet, and finally goodbyes. Kat and I returned to the Hilton Euston for another night as on the Saturday we were off to Bristol and Techadventure but that’s another post.

Conclusion

Would I go again? Yes! It was enjoyable and informative and great getting together with like minded people. Can’t wait for the next one.

Since breaking my wrist I’ve learnt something about prejudice. I’m already well aware of prejudice for various reasons that I’d rather not write about here. But I’ve learnt about a new one. That of the pro right handed individual prejudice.

There has always been a prejudice against left handed behavior. In the past there has been religious and social persecution. Left handed people were referred to as sinister or evil. Children who were left handed were punished for for using their left hand and aversion therapies used to teach them to use their right. In Christian mythology Jesus sits on the right hand of God. Some cultures still have defined rules regarding the left and right hands. In Islam the left hand is used for cleaning oneself after toilet and the right is used for eating. Again this associates dirt and sin with the left hand.

My wrist is in a cast and my thumb is in it too so I can’t actually touch the end of my thumb and forefinger. This makes using the right hand problematic. Luckily I’m fairly ambidextrous. I already use my left hand for tasks that right handers typically do with their rights, such as driving the mouse or trackpad, catching things, and so on. I can even write legibly, if not neatly, with it. So switching to using the left was not too onerous.

However I am now discovering how nearly everything is set up for right handed people. For example my microwave has the controls on the right and the door opens to the left. This assumes you will open it with you left hand whilst carrying what ever you will be cooking with the right before programming it, again with the right. Since I can’t take any weight with my right hand right now this is difficult since I have to cross my arms. After realizing this I looked around and my dishwasher, washing machine, hob and oven all have their controls on the right. My TV has controls on the right. Even computer keyboards have the action keys such as return, arrow keys, insert and delete on the right.

We write from left to right. That favours the right handed. Left handed people who used quill pens would smudge the ink with their hands as they write. We even drive on the left because of right handedness. It became convention for knights to pass left of each other so that their sword arm, i.e. their right arm, was nearest the person they were passing. That became true for horse drawn vehicles and so when cars finally were invented they followed the same convention.

Its possible that left handed people do not notice the issues like I have. Mainly because they’ve always suffered them. I have to admit I’ve never asked anyone. But because I am right handed and I’m now having to use my left I can see the problems. Its like institutionalized misogyny. Women are programmed to behave in certain ways because we’ve adjusted to the environment and social frameworks in which we live.

I should get my cast off next week but it has been a learning exercise.

Friday 27 February was PHP UK Conference 2009. I’m doing more and more PHP and other web oriented coding as a change from my day to day work which is debugging low level linux code. A conference seemed the best way to find out more about the language and technologies so, with some encouragement from friends, I decided to go. I used some Hilton Honors points to get a couple of nights at the Hilton Euston in London and drove down there on the Thursday.

Usually I catch the train to London but as I was heading to Bristol from London on the Saturday I drove. Also normally when I drive I leave the car in outer London and catch the tube but a combination of lack of time and Barnet Council making all street parking short term meters or residents only I found it was easier to drive all the way in and leave the car in some free over night parking by the hotel. This worked well the first night because I entered the area after the end of congestion charging.

The Social

Thursday night was the social at The Brook Green Hotel on Shepherd’s Bush Road near to Olympia, which is where the conference was held. After a quick check in I changed and caught the tube to the Hotel. At the hotel I met up with my roomie for the two days, Kat, Lornajane, Derick and Sara. I also met a load of new people and put faces to the PHP Women I knew from online. I also drank rather a lot of vodka!

The social was organised by PHP London as a special one of their usual nights held at the hotel. There were two talks made during the evening. Derick made the first one on using DBUS with PHP. It was interesting . By the time of Sara’s talk I was both tired and quite drunk so I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention. Although I did get an awesome photo of her.

A round midnight Kat and I started to wend our way back to the hotel. Once we got there Kat had a few transfers to apply to t-shirts for the “Booth Babes”. Then we set the alarm for 6.30 am and went to sleep.

The Conference

The morning started far too early with the alarm going off at 6.30 am but after waking up I was quite excited as this was my first ever conference of this kind. I’ve attended shows and expos before and even given talks in front of lots of people but never attended a ‘proper’ conference. Since I had to find parking for the car it seemed easiest to drive across town and leave it in the horendously expensive Olympia car park. Like Thursday night I was driving against the traffic and so it was a pain free trip.

Kat and I arrived at the Conference Centre around 8.30 am. We registered, grabbed tea and coffee and helped set up the PHP Women’s stand. The key note was due to start at 9.30 but due to registration issues it didn’t start until 9.45. This meant we could natter longer between ourselves.

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades

Aral Balkan gave the key note speech and what a speech to be introduced to conferences with. Aral is a flash developer. Quite trendy he is a sociable guy and we talked both at the social and at the after conference party. His talk was not just relevant to PHP developers or even Web 2.0 developers but all developers of any software that has an end user. And he’s absolutely right. What is the point of having the most perfectly architected piece of software which follows more computer science patterns that you can shake a stick at if you completely miss the boat, which in most cases is the market. Sometimes you do just have to code and refactor later. He talked about commodity hardware and commodity software, great new tools and technologies, and was totally inspiring. An excellent way to start the day.

What’s new in PHP 5.3

The talk on the new features of the PHP language by Scott MacVicar was, in some respects, the complete opposite of Aral’s talk. It was totally technically and just described each of the new features in PHP 5.3, just as it said on the tin. For someone still learning this was extremely useful.

Of lambda functions, closures and traits

The final talk of the morning I attended was another technical one which explained some of the upcoming facilities in PHP 5.4. It described how to define lambda functions and closured (quick throw away functions useful as callbacks and so on). And the upcoming traits mechanism that introduces a level of multiple inheritance to PHP classes whilst avoiding the diamond pattern issue and duplicating Java’s interface mechanism.

Then it was lunch.

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Better late than never, here’s the report of the rest of the canal trip. Select photos are now available on line at my gallery.

The morning of day two we awoke to a frozen canal. This branch of the Shropshire Union canal had little traffic as it was the route between the main part of the Shropshire Union and the Trent and Mersey canal. You only use it if you want to get from one to the other. But this cold morning we were not the first people moving and another boat kindly broke the ice for us. Called “The Original Fudge Boat” it also had “Sanity?” written on the back. I have to admit agreed with the question given the weather.

Eventually, after a hearty breakfast, we go going ourselves. Steering a boat through the ice isn’t easy. The ice wants to push the boat in all sorts of directions. This is especially true for the large sheets which hadn’t broken up as they would bounce back off of the river back and knock the boat. The cold winter scenery though was truly beautiful.

We continued on the branch of the Shropshire Union before passing through the final lock and small bridge that put us on to the Trent and Mersey at Middlewich. At Middlewich we stopped in to The Kings Locks pub and grabbed a great pub lunch and a couple of pints which set us up nicely for the rest of the day. From Middlewich we headed north towards Northwich stopping when it got dark.

The following day we continued up around Northwich to see the Anderton Boat Lift. This is a fantastic Victorian contrivance which was built to raise and lower canal boats between the Trent and Mersey canal and the Weaver Navigation, some 50 feet below. It has two huge troughs each of which can carry two boats. These troughs, complete with water, transfer the boats between the two water ways. Originally it used hydrolic pistons to raise and lower the troughs but it was converted to cable hoists a while after construction. We didn’t get to see it working unfortunately but it looked fantastic.

As I was leaving the boat the following lunch time we finished heading north at this point and turned around. We grabbed another pub lunch on route hitting Middlewich at dusk and as there was no where to stop we were a little naughty and got through the final locks and back on to the Shropshire Union in the dark.

The following morning, as I had done the day before, I got the boat going while the others stayed in bed. It was very relaxing to potter along the canals with no one else around. Over the few days my boat handling skills came back and I was quite happy, for example, to go reclaim the boat and collect the others from the canal side at by the pub. Finally around 2pm we got back to the boat yard where I left the others. They continued on and I drove home some what chilled out.