I will be running a tutorial Writing a PHP extension in C and speaking about Web Sevices for Consumer Devices. I look forward to seeing you there.

I will be bringing a long several Arduino-a-likes together with a variety of components and CDs of the IDE so that we can get together in groups, code and play.

I am intending to take along items which are a mix of traditional crafts such as knitting and jewellery making combined with tech. For example programmable earrings, a temperature sensing hat and a bag that has a proximity detector and RFID tag so it can detect its owner.

I am also going to show off a couple of my other projects like an ethernet adapter for a BBC microcomputer and a “Mood Wall” (It analyses twitter tweets for the mood of the content displaying patterns and colours which reflect the prevailing mood).

Hopefully I will see you there!

LinuxChix is a global community of women (and their supporters) who are fans of, users, or just interested in Linux and Open Source Software. LinuxChix has various chapters around the world. Currently there is only one in the UK, based in London, but I am proud to announce the LinuxChix northern chapter, LinuxChixNorth.

LinuxChixNorth is a chapter for LinuxChix members, or potential members, based in and around the M62 corridor in the north of England. This covers the cities of Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and York. It is intend the first meetings will be held in Leeds and Manchester but there is no reason why members shouldn’t organise meetings in other cities. The first meeting will be in Leeds at the beginning of December. I am finalising arrangements for a venue and will announce the date as soon as I know it.

Apart from the website we are on twitter as @linuxchixnorth if you want to follow us. You can also e-mail the current organisers at uberchix at linuxchixnorth dot org dot uk.

PHP NW 2009 was a one day formal conference with a social on the night before the conference and more informal talks session on the Sunday morning, the day after.

Personally I feel uncomfortable entering a room mostly full of men. It’s not that I feel unsafe its just that I feel that many many eyes will suddenly be looking at me, appraising my appearance, my age, my potential skills, all in that single moment. I want to see a friendly face so I tend to gravitate to other women in the room. As I am a member of PHP Women prior to PHP NW I tweeted suggesting we met at the social and had a dinner together. I got a few replies and on the Friday night a few of us had a great curry in a near by restaurant. At least one at the table was a woman who didn’t know about PHP Women but seemed pleased that we were there and she had a group that she could hook up with.

The following day was the main conference. There were both men and women assisting with registration and a fair few of the conference assistants were women. This, to me, made the event less threatening and allayed my nerves. Also one of the main organisers is LornaJane adding to the strong female presence. PHP Women had a visible table in the main conference area which gave us a place to congregate between talks and somewhere for other women to come and find out about the group.

There were a respectable number of women among the speakers. LornaJane gave one of the two talks that followed the keynote; Sara, one of the core PHP developers, had travelled from the US and talked on the Sunday about the new features PHP 5.3; and there was a talk about UTF-8. The women weren’t chosen as speakers because they were women but because they were good speakers with interesting talks. But it all helps. It gives a feeling, to me anyway, that we’re not a curiosity, we’re just developers like everyone else attending a conference which is how it should be.

So you want to encourage women to attend your conference review this check list and ask yourself whether you’re doing enough.

Women Organisers

Try an ensure your main organising committee has both men and women. For one thing you’ll get a more rounded set of ideas due to different experiences and social history but also it should give the conference a more women friendly feel, especially when other women see there are women organisers.

Women speakers

Women are the minority in the IT industry. That I can’t deny. However there is no excuse for having a completely male set of speakers. You don’t have to have positive discrimination or affect the calibre of your speakers by choosing a female speaker as there are plenty of good women speakers knowledgeable in a variety of topics. Have a look at GeekSpeakr for example.

Women staff

Registration is the first time delegates get a chance to decide the tone of a conference. Ensure you have a mixed staff at registration. Also ensure there are some women available at all time during the conference because there may be issues that women are uncomfortable bringing up with a male member of staff.

Personally I don’t really have a problem with the ‘Booth Babe’ but if that’s the only women that women delegates see then that does far more damage than if they weren’t there at all. Try and keep some balance. PHP NW’s ‘uniform’ was generally unisex t-shirts carrying the sponsors logos, jeans and sneakers. Perfect.

Women friendly talks

Strongly encourage your speakers to be aware of women delegates and to pitch their talks appropriately. Unfortunately at one conference I attended this year two of the talks had slides with questionable content for example scantily clad women. Infamously both Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth have been blatantly misogynist recently in their talks. One bad speaker can ruin a whole conference.

Support the women’s groups

The are various groups such as PHP Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, Systers, etc. who would more than be happy to have a presence at your conference. Help them out by having a table or booth in a prominent position and donating a couple of tickets. Such booths give women a focal point to congregate.

Post conference feedback

Finally in your post conference feed back try and get the opinion of women delegates and take note of any ideas they have as to improving the conference for women next time. Please try not to be defensive and if something unfortunate has happened just apologise, don’t try and qualify that apology you’ll just make it worse.

The opinions above are purely my own and I may get some flak from them. Also I know the list is in no way comprehensive or complete. If you have any further ideas I would be interested to hear from you. May be we can produce a definitive guide.

This is totally unacceptable and rather disappointing. The IT industry is one of the remaining industries where women are under represented. “Entertainment” like this does nothing to encourage women or make them feel comfortable at events like this.

However in the past this may have gone unnoticed but this time people tweeted about it, there were e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts and so on. Social networking ensured that Yahoo! heard about the disgust and they have apologised. The text of the apology is below:

All,

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of
female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack
events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about
our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the
“Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that
spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send
about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone
feel welcome, including women coders and technologists. 

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have
offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Best,

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

twitter: @ydn
email: cyeh at yahoo-inc dot com

This is a good thing. However what about the Go-Go dancers at last years event? I was going to link to video on Youtube at this point but as I was doing it they went private! May be they’re ashamed?

Another “Win” for social networking was the outcry against Jan Moir’s homophobic article on Stephen Gately’s death. It ran with all the clichés i.e. that gay people are sexually promiscuous, that a civil partnership is less than a marriage, and so on. However so many people complained (over 21,000, the highest ever) both on the Daily Mail’s site and the Press Complaints Commission’s site (which actually buckled under the strain) that the PCC is to examine the article and the Daily Mail.

Social networking now means that intolerance and injustice can not go unnoticed anymore. This is a good thing!

I love my iPhone. I started a second contract to have an iPhone 3G when they came out. This meant I had my old contract still. Rather than ending it I decided to use it as a work phone, change to T-Mobile (UK) and got myself a Google G1 to find out what Android is like and to learn how to code for it. My conclusion. Its okay! I would be perfectly happy with it if the iPhone didn’t exist.

I bet you can hear the silent ‘but’. The battery life is not good on the G1. I run my iPhone with everything enabled but I turn off WiFi and GPS on the G1 to extend the battery life. And there’s at least one reason why the battery life is bad which I will describe later. However T-Mobile does have better 3G coverage than O2 and unlike O2 I can use the ‘free’ WiFi I get via T-Mobile hotspots with my MacBook as well as my phone. The BTOpenZone accessibility I get through O2 on the iPhone is locked to the iPhone. T-Mobile just seems to do it better.

So when I came to look for 3G support for my Mac I looked at tethering through the iPhone but I’m sorry O2 another £15 a month for something I already have is a joke. I talked to T-Mobile about tethering through the G1 and was told (a) it was possible; (b) that it had been removed at T-Mobile’s request; and (c) if I had a 3G modem I could use the G1 SIM in it since my account had broadband over 3G enabled. So I decided to go for a T-Mobile PAYG 3G modem. I already had the WiFi and the few times I didn’t have access to WiFi I could use via the modem.

Now comes the first bit of fun and games. I use the online web shop and order one. Everything seems fine but then I get an e-mail saying they were out of stock (not indicated in the shop though). Coincidentally I get a marketing phone call from T-Mobile saying since I was a customer was I interested in mobile broadband. I told them that I had ordered a 3G modem but they were out of stock and was told that “stock had just arrived” and that “we’ll cancel that order and put one through on your phone bill and get it in the post today”. Sure enough one turned up the following day. Then another one turned up the day after that! I ended up selling the second one to my housemate.

The USB modem comes with the software in it. You plug it in and it installs the support software if necessary. No CD-ROM required. However on the Mac why do I need special software. It’s just a USB modem that uses AT commands. Surely a suitable script for the standard OS X software would be sufficient? I will have to look in to this.

However there is a really big problem on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard WHICH BREAKS YOUR OS X INSTALL!. It seems that the T-Mobile connection software ships with a 32 bit only version of the libcurl dynamic library that over writes the one in /usr/lib. Before connecting the T-Mobile USB modem on Snow Leopard ensure that you have backed up all the copies of the libcurl dylib in that location and be expected that you will have to boot in single user modem to replace the over written libraries with the original again. Luckily I installed mine before upgrading to Snow Leopard and so avoided this problem. Sara alas, did not and it is she who debugged the issue.

Next I found that T-Mobile has a disproportionate parental control system. Any web site that could potentially have anything on it that may be construed to be not safe for children. So this was basically most of the internet. When you come up against a blocked site you get the following screen.

T-Mobile Content Lock

Unfortunately clicking on the registration link takes you through to this screen which is a bit fail. How do you phone them from your mobile phone when it isn’t a mobile phone.

No Number

I tried using the SIM in my G1 but it hasn’t got voice calls enabled. You can’t enable it via the My T-Mobile web site because if you’re on PAYG it doesn’t have that option so the alternatives are phoning from a mobile or going in to a T-Mobile store which totally negates why you bought it over the internet in the first place i.e. avoiding having to go in to a store. O2 wont let you phone T-Mobile customer support via their system so I used the G1, and after getting bounced around via various departments, and having to use my credit card to have £2 deducted and then added back, I got the blocks removed. It wasn’t easy though.

Now comes the other issue. As suggested when using the dongle a lot I swap SIMs with my G1. But I discovered that if my G1 is left on my credit is used on my PAYG SIM anyway. Sara also found that her credit would disappear on the PAYG SIM she used in her G1 due to data usage. It turns out that the G1 has a heart beat ‘ping’ that it sends to Google over the GSM network regardless of whether you are connected to WiFi or not. This means that it is running down your credit just by being on. This is not optimal and to be honest damned annoying. You have been warned! Turning it off requires hacking your phone.

So in theory they should both be good products. But a combination of nanny controls, poor systems, and assumptions about use, makes them less than ideal.

The whole of my working life, accountancy, academia (Computer Science and the Physics), and then industry I’ve been one of the few women amongst many men. I’ve gotten used to it. I can’t remember all the injustices but a few come to mind though; Such as the male students I was supposed to be supervising during their masters (since their work was based on my work) who went to my professor rather than me; Or being an acting team leader for a couple of years but whenever I tried to get the promotion I was told “I didn’t have the right attributes” even though I was going the job (I eventually decided the right attributes were a set of male genitalia); Or listening to colleagues discussing the possible appearance of a prospective employee once they discovered she was female. I just learnt to live with incidents like these as did most other women I knew. Yes I could complain but then I would just be seen as a moaning woman but it would have never gotten me anywhere so I kept my head down and got on with work.

Online it was worse! The anonymity that the net gives people allows them to be blatantly bigotted or misogynistic with no recourse. I know women who only post anonymously on Slashdot for example since if they didn’t they would basically get attacked. Some would argue that in most cases it is just words on a screen but eventually enough words have an effect. More often than not I hid behind my nick which is not obviously female. So in the last few years I just haven’t been publicly active on-line.

There is a real issue with gender prejudice and some of the incidents have become really quite nasty. Emma McGrattan of Ingres caused a stir when she commented on gender and coding styles. Discussion sites such as Slashdot had many rather vitriolic posts by people who hated her over it. Kathy Sierra , however, got hate mail and death threats and ended up shutting down her blog because of what she had written. Other female bloggers and speakers worry about having content in which they have opinion because of the backlash and bullying that seems to occur from a section of the IT community. My issues have been light in comparison.

Then recently there have been a few speakers at various conferences who have had inappropriate content. I have written before about the inappropriate slide content of a scantily clad woman parading across the screen at PHP Conference UK 2009. Richard Stallman did not endear himself to women when he gave the keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in 2009. And finally, (since I don’t want to make this a long list), there’s Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at LinuxCon where he used ‘guys’ almost entirely, made an ejaculation pun, and talked about “explaining to girls what we actually do”. All of this is discouraging to women in the industry and I frequently have conversations with women who talk about changing career at some point due to this kind of atmosphere.

But in all this negativity there is a ray of sunshine. Unlike when I first started in IT there are now women’s groups both virtually and actually for example PHP Women, Linuxchix, Systers, Girl Geek Dinners and so on. These groups are supportive to women, provide encouragement to young women interested in a career in technology, and also give us a place to talk to one another about issues we are facing. Some of this conversation obviously turns towards incidents like those I’ve written about above and we are at least annoyed at most angry about it. However rather than just merely griping we’re doing something about it. All of the speaker incidents have been blogged about quite extensively. There are sites such as the Geek Feminism Blog and the Geek Feminism Wiki to name a couple. We’re being positive; we’re doing something about it; and it makes me optimistic for the future.

I didn’t have a VGA adapter for my MacBook and had to borrow one to connect it to the project. I think I need to buy one. I bought a DVI adapter when I bought the machine but not the VGA one as I thought who needs them with modern monitors. But of course most projectors have VGA only connections so such adapters are a necessary component of the presenter’s toolkit.

The talk seemed to go well and was appreciated by the audience and plugins seemed to be my topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. There was some interest in my WordPress Coppermine Widget plugin and techniques I had used in the Javascript for it. I think this will become the subject of another blog post.

I went a little awry with my mental arithmetic and ran over by about a minute. When Lornajane gave her talk she had the slides change automatically after 20 seconds so you know when the talking time for a slide is up. I will steal this idea!

My slides are available as a PDF download.