I recently acquired a Dell Mini 9 laptop and turned it into a Hackintosh using these instructions from Gizmodo.

The install was relatively smooth. Not 100% — I had to go through it twice in the end — but not bad. Here is the result: my hackintosh posing with my work laptop, a 15″ Macbook Pro.

I’m currently working on installing all the software I need to feel at home, and getting used to the damn apostrophe key being nowhere near where I expect it to be. The keyboard size, in and of itself, is fine, but the placement of some of the punctuation keys is driving me a little bit mad.

Here are my additional notes:

I used the USB stick install, no DVD drive. Where Gizmodo says Choose “80″ for the primary internal SSD I had to type “81″ instead.

When I upgraded using System Update, it took me to OSX 10.5.7, and then the DellEFI installer didn’t work properly, and I got into an unrecoverable (to me) state of wedgitude: the machine would boot to the grey apple logo, then it would get all these weird video artifacts, and hang. I had to start over on account of this. Second time through, I carefully downloaded the 10.5.6 combo update from Apple and installed that instead. Worked fine.

Wake from sleep wasn’t working. Googling around, stevenf’s hackintosh notes told me I had to disable “Legacy USB support” in the BIOS to make it wake from sleep correctly. I did this and it worked fine. However, I gather that “hibernate” doesn’t really work, so I’m going to have to be careful about not leaving things unsaved when I put the laptop to sleep for a long time.

I’m not very impressed with the battery life, but I hear 10.5.7 improves matters. I’m not going to try it right now — I’m off for a short trip tonight and don’t want to get the laptop wedged again — but I might try next week.

Another thing I’d like to figure out is whether I can manage dual boot with Ubuntu. I might find myself a bit tight on disk space, but I have the 32GB SSD and I’m sure it’ll fit, even if it does cut into my space for music and videos. If I start running out of room, I can always expand with an SD card.

Hackintoshing is, of course, in contravention of Apple’s Software License Agreement. All I have to say to that is: if Apple had a tiny, lightweight netbook available, I would be first in line to buy one. I say this as the owner of a Macbook (my third, counting work laptops), a Mac Mini, an iPhone, and a certain amount of fully licensed Apple software.

It’s at times like these, when I ponder my choice to give up life as a code grunt to be a community manager, that I’m tempted to kick myself. Sure, you feel bad if you miss a release deadline, but at least you don’t feel like a kid who invited everyone to her birthday party and then nobody showed up, you know?

We’re two weeks out from the second Freebase Hack Day, and I’m running round trying to get people to register. You know how it is: you contact everyone you know, nag them incessantly, tweet til everyone unfollows you, put it on your personal blog…

Our previous Hack Day. Photo credit: Greg Elin under CC-BY

But seriously, the last one was a blast, and I love the unconference format for how little organisation it actually takes to get heaps of intense, fascinating conversations going. Plus this year our hosted app development platform is ready for prime time, and I think that’s going to really spur a lot of rapid development. And the Semantic Web stuff has really picked up steam this year, so that’s a whole stream of stuff that didn’t really get much play last time round. And some of the Freebase Experts team are coming to town, and I’m just dying to meet them.

Photo credit: Greg Elin under CC-BY

There’s always a burst of registrations right at the end. I know this. I really do. But last night I had an anxiety dream that nobody showed up at all, and I was sitting in the empty office waiting for people who never arrived.

Don’t let it be real. Come to Hack Day. July 11th, San Francisco. It’ll be awesome.

The Organization for Transformative Works, who run Archive Of Our Own, a fan fiction archive and (so far) 100%-female open source project, are seeking experienced XHTML/CSS coders for frontend development work. They’ve posted a job ad on their blog.

We’re now much further forward with the Archive, and we’re badly in need of some front end skillz! The illustrious lim wrote the main style sheets for the Archive, but now that those are in place, we have many other front end jobs. The lovely Flamebyrd has been doing sterling work on some of these, and we’re jazzed about the fact that Hope recently joined us to work on skins for the Archive, but there’s a lot of work to do and we’ve yet to perfect our cloning technology. So, we’re looking for people to work on some of the following:

• Reviewing the design of the site for accessibility and making improvements as necessary. We already know we have some issues in this area, particularly when it comes to ease of enlarging text, and we really want to get it right.
• Reviewing our coding standards and making sure that we have fully standards compliant code.
• Implementing cross-browser compatibility for the site, which is currently only Firefox compatible.
• Finetuning the styling for different parts of the Archive, especially in areas which have been built since the main body of work was done on the CSS.
• Lots of other smaller jobs – you can see some of these in our list of current frontend issues.

It’s interesting that the OTW’s project style is more formal than most open source projects. They post job ads when they’re looking for talent, hold meetings and take minutes, and I’ve even seen org charts explaining the different groups within the project and how they interact. This is not really my scene, but many of the AO3 coders seem to be thriving on it, and they’ve managed to build an active project with dozens of contributors, many of whom have never contributed to open source projects before.

Although the job ad says they’re looking for experience people, the AO3 project has also been great at training people up from scratch. If you’ve been wanting to learn frontend web development stuff in a supportive environment, this might be a great opportunity for you.

I have a handful of invite codes for Dreamwidth, the open source project I blogged about here and here that has about 75% female developers.

Overview:

• It’s a journalling service, forked off Livejournal
• 210k lines of code, mostly in Perl, both OO and otherwise, on the backend with Javascript, CSS, and HTML on the frontend
• Wiki here, bug tracker here
• Hosted development environments are provided
• Other vital statistics
• Their diversity statement is awesome.

If you’re interested in participating, especially if you are a woman who would like to join an open source project with a great culture of mutual respect and support, please leave a comment here with your email address.

ETA: I should make it clear… you need an invite code or a paid account to use the journalling service at http://dreamwidth.org/. This invite code will allow you to try out the journalling service for free. In theory, you wouldn’t need to join the journalling service in order to contribute to the open source project, but in practice people generally do.

If you’ve been following news in the tech world over the last few months, you would have heard about Matt Aimonetti’s CouchDB presentation at Golden Gate Ruby Conference back in April:

… and last week’s Flashbelt keynote by Hoss Gifford:

(The links above go to the Geek Feminism Wiki, which has roundups of links to blog posts about both these incidents, as well as to official responses by conference organisers.)

This is far from the first time it’s happened; the wiki even has a nascent timeline of porny presentations, harrassment, and other incidents. I guess history just keeps on repeating. So, in preparation for next time round, here’s a handy bingo card.

Click through for a bigger version. Thanks to Liz Henry and the folks on #dw for help with filling in all the squares.

Remember last year, when I reported that session panellist Amy Muller was refused entry to Web 2.0 Expo because she was carrying a baby? At the time, it was claimed that Moscone’s insurance didn’t cover minors.

I just wanted to point out a few small things…

“Some kids checking out a fully functional R2-D2 remote controlled droid.” — patorama on Flickr, under CC-BY-NC-SA

“Wonderwoman, Supergirl, and some admirers” — ClockworkGrue on Flickr, under CC-BY-NC-SA

These pics were taken at WonderCon, which was held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center in February. I think the R2D2 pic is taken by the escalators where the security guard stopped Amy and prevented her from entering the conference space with her 4 month old daughter.

I think this shows that there is no fundamental reason (insurance or otherwise) why children can’t be allowed at Web 2.0 Expo or any other tech conference at the Moscone Center, if they behave appropriately.

To pre-empt the likely comments about badly-behaved whining kids and crying babies, I’ll just quote from my previous blog post on the subject:

If given a choice between a crying baby who can be taken outside and out of the way, let alone a well behaved kid, and that bearded guy in the second row who’s always interrupting speakers to ask tangential, rambling questions (which, in fact, are actually statements), I know who I’d rather have at my tech conference.

A while ago when I was in Vancouver for Northern Voice, I met Dale McGladdery and he made a video report of me and the other attendees at the Freebase meetup. We talked a little, afterwards, about equipment for making the sorts of videos he does, and then all the specifics promptly fell out of my head.

Now I’ve got a bit of a Cunning Plan about some video stuff I want to make (more on which later, depending how things shape up) and I’m looking for advice all over again. Sorry, Dale.

My needs:

I’m planning to make videos for publication online via vimeo or similar. I’d like to make something that’s reasonable quality in terms of picture, audio, etc. I’d like to be able to film myself easily, without it looking like a cheap webcam. I’d like to be able to film in noisy environments like conferences, pubs, and the like. I’ll probably be editing my video using iMovie on a Mac, and am moderately comfortable with other video tools for format conversion etc. on that platform.

My current shopping list

• Canon FS200 camcorder, ~$320. Features I like include the SDHC card for video storage, the small, portable size, the audio in and out for microphone and headphones, as well as an audio level monitor built in. 37X optical zoom and image stabilisation are also appealling to me.
• This condenser shotgun mike, at ~$50, seems to have good reviews for the price. It’s mono only, which means that I’d want a mono to stereo converter plug (which would give me identical sound on both channels). The only better looking microphones I can find seem to have an extra digit in the price, and I don’t think I want anything that expensive right now.
• Gorillapod flexible tripod, $20. I might want a “real” tripod too later on, but these are cheap and cheerful in the meantime. Also, I’m pretty sure I could borrow a real tripod if I needed one.

Anyone got any thoughts/advice based on that? Does it look sane?

Things have been busy lately.

I went to my first WisCon over the Memorial Day weekend, and had a blast. WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention, and I had some great conversations there with friends from online and off, and we’ve continued them since, mostly on Dreamwidth. What a great environment, and a great opportuniy. I’m so glad to be on the same continent, and able to get to things like this.

Of course, I caught the con crud that was going round, and am only just getting to the end of the coughing. This makes four for four, or 100%, when it comes to me, conferences, and illness this year.

The next long weekend is the 4th of July, and yesterday I booked an Amtrak ticket to Portland and back, in a “sleeperette”. I love train travel, staring out the window, knitting, reading, and being rocked to sleep on a bunk bed. (Only the rocking of a boat is better.) I’ll be in Portland for ONE! NIGHT! ONLY! and hopefully able to catch up with some of my geek friends before turning around and coming back again.

In late July, I’ll be presenting at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Jose. I’ll be joining Jason Douglas and Yoz Grahame to for our session, Forking Encouraged: Folk Programming, Open Source, and Social Software Development which is partly based on Yoz’s Folk Logic talk that I blogged a while back, and partly about Acre, Freebase’s app development platform.

I’ll also be keynoting on the subject of Women in Open Source. This was just lined up this week, and I’m both terrified and excited. 15 minutes is an odd length for a talk on that subject, but hopefully I’ll make it work. You can bet I’ll be posting more on this as the event nears.

I’m looking for a roommate for OSCON (tempted to put a blink tag around that; think yourself lucky I didn’t.) San Jose’s pretty close to San Francisco, and theoretically it’s commutable, so work quite understandably doesn’t want to shell out for a hotel room. That said, it’s 1.5 hours getting there during commuter hours in the morning, and about 2 hours getting home at night, which is not much fun. Would love to team up with another woman who’s going and share a hotel room. Anyone? Anyone?

Finally, I’m hoping to make it to Wikimania in Buenos Aires in August (thus fulfilling my “visit a new country” resolution for 2009). The community track looks like it’ll be both interesting and useful, as do some of the papers in the academic track. I’m a little sorry I didn’t get my act together earlier to propose a session on Freebase’s community and how it’s interestingly different/differently interesting, and how Freebase and Wikipedia’s communities could potentially cross-pollinate. Ah well, perhaps next year.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I blogged about two ground-breaking open source projects which both have a majority of female contributors. Since then I’ve been collecting more information about both of them. The first thing I did was gather some stats about the projects: number of contributors, lines of code, and so on. You can go look it over if you like, but in short, we have:

1. Dreamwidth, 210k lines of Perl forked from Livejournal; ~35 developers, 75% female.

2. Archive Of Our Own, 60k lines of Ruby on Rails; ~20 developers, 100% female.

Next up, I surveyed female developers on both projects. Their responses were amazing. Here are some quotes/extracts that really jumped out at me.

I started by asking people about their prior programming experience, and any other open source projects they’d been involved in. While a few had submitted patches or written docs for other projects, most hadn’t.

rho writes:

I’d certainly never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could do.

cesy writes:

[Other open source projects] all seemed too scary and unfriendly to new developers. There was no obvious “if you want to learn and get involved, go here”.

juliet writes:

I’ve considered getting involved in Debian, but I’ve never really had the time, and the barriers to entry have always seemed quite high.

piranha used to be involved with the GIMP project, and writes:

did a lot of testing and some docs for it early on. i never really connected with people. that’s my usual experience with open source, and why i’ve never stayed with a project; i think i am looking for more community than simply a technical one, and while i can geek out with the best of them, i want something more.

ysobel had previously been a support volunteer on LiveJournal. She writes:

Honestly, the LJ dev environment felt very closed — the code was available for people to use if they wanted to install it themselves, but that’s kind of like being handed a box full of random bicycle parts: it doesn’t help when you don’t know how they go together and just want to learn how to ride a bike. It never even occurred to me to contribute code, and I never got the impression that “outsiders”, people who weren’t real devs, would be tolerated all that well.

exor674, who wrote the Dreamwidth journal import tool, writes:

Tried to get into LiveJournal development back when LJ used Zilla, but no real success. Didn’t feel like I was really wanted, and at that point IIRC, most of the stuff was kinda scary (haha, stuff I do now is a little scary at times, but I’m more confident as a developer now) — and the stuff that wasn’t seemed to get ignored. Never really really worked on any projects, however have been doing personal projects since I was 6.

What shes likes about Dreamwidth?

I like it that I’m “allowed” to do the complex scary projects.

gchick writes:

One thing that seems to happen on a lot of projects is that people without a ton of tech chops get shunted off to side areas (doc, support, general cheerleading), and those areas end up as the ladies’ auxiliary. With DW, those boundaries are fluid: people who have been working in other areas can say, hey, I want to try some coding, and people who code do other jobs, and the result is that there is no sense that one area is the important one.

rho:

What I like most is that there isn’t any attitude of “stand aside and leave the code to the grown-ups”. If there’s something that I’m able to contribute, however small (and I have submitted a patch that changed precisely one character of code), then the contribution is welcome. And by being free to do what I’m able to do, I could also learn to be able to do more stuff.

cesy:

It is easy to get involved, easy to make a difference, and there are always people willing to help if you’re stuck. [...] The kindergarten channel on IRC helped, and the stuff on the website saying they welcomed babydevs, and the babydev-bait list of easy bugs.

A lot of Dreamwidth developers mentioned “Dreamhacks” — hosted development environments — available to anyone who wants one.

rho:

Having the dev environments provided and experienced people willing to spend time on reviews has helped a lot. Without them, I doubt I’d have been able to do anything at all.

gchick:

Could I set up a dev environment? Sure, with enough ibuprofen on hand. Do I want to load a bunch of extra stuff on one of my machines, or scrape together enough 64-bit parts for a spare box? Not reeeeeally. Having an environment available for the asking is a very pragmatic sign of DW’s commitment to nurturing the dev community rather than putting up hoops for new people to jump through.

ysobel:

It’s … very beginner-friendly for being a large project. The dreamhacks help — practice bicycle that’s already more or less built, that I can play around with without harming anyone else — and the encouragement of baby devs helps, the fact that someone trying is met with “yay \o/ if you could fix X, Y and Z, that would be awesome” rather than “… you got X, Y and Z wrong, ffs, why are you even trying, go off and play in the corner and leave us alone”.

It’s also — still — confusing and over my head, and there are a lot of things I don’t grok about the way stuff works, but I don’t necessarily *need* to. Even if I end up bailing on the current projects and just sticking to occasional minor tweaks, I really like the fact that I’m *welcome* to do that, that baby coders doing minor things are greeted with enthusiasm instead of dismissal. (And I like being able to turn around and help other baby devs, even if my ability to do so is minimal.)

Afuna got involved in Dreamwidth before the Dreamhack system was set up. She writes:

This was all before we had a formal mentoring system, and before we started offering hosted Dreamhacks, so I set one up on my own server (with lots of help from Sophie). But even back then, everyone was supportive when I asked lots of questions, Mark reviewed my patches most helpfully, and I kinda got pulled in. No one ever asked me what I could or could not do, but I saw the need for someone to do development so I stepped up to fill it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had the background to get started up fairly quickly, even if I didn’t have the experience everyone else had. And then the nurturing environment in DW helped me grow: it’s been an amazing experience.

And then there are the experiences people are having on these projects.

lian, a translation volunteer with AO3, writes:

But, more seriously — deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would and lol, not even worth considering, how ridiculous is that to even think about trying? (I would fail! and everyone would laugh at me!)

Well. I have my hands full with translation, but the thing is: I now believe I could try it. Why not? It’s confusing and probably cruel and I would suck at it, but it lost this forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind. (That sounds extremely lame and “DUH! ya think, stupid?” but it’s been a real epiphany to me!)

liv, who hasn’t programmed since BBC Basic in the 80s, writes:

The other thing that’s wonderful is how much work people are prepared to put into holding my hand when I am trying to deal with things like Mercurial and Dreamhack installations and such. And the way that whenever I’m working on a bug, all kinds of people show up with helpful suggestions for how to solve problems or improve my code.

Denise is one of Dreamwidth’s founders. Her response is worth reading in its entirety, but a few points stand out:

I actually never expected to be doing any code myself. When we started talking about DW, we figured Mark would be doing all the engineering-manager and ops-manager stuff and I’d be doing all the business-manager stuff. We hit a point where there were a lot of little-details stuff, though, and I looked at them and went “hmm” a lot — then, when Afuna said she had set up a hosted dev environment and was offering space, I finally said “why the hell not”. So I did one or two little changes, and the next thing I know …

I’ve done a bit of coding up until now — some minor scripting for system administration, etc, and a lot of coding on a MOO I used to hang out on — but not a whole lot. This is the first time I’ve ever worked with source control, first time I’ve worked with perl, first time I’ve dealt with anything of this complexity, etc.

I most love the fact that every single developer on this project, from Mark on down, is willing to take the time to help someone else out. When I get stuck on things (which is pretty often), I can grab someone and shout for help and get it. That alone makes me a lot more comfortable with wanting to try things that are just slightly outside of my comfort zone, since I know that if I get really lost or frustrated, I’ll have someone there to help.

I’m not even going to attempt any kind of synthesis at this point. I think these women’s words speak for themselves.

The full survey responses can be found here: AO3, Dreamwidth, and an additional survey for non-female or non-coding Dreamwidth contributors.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to post about two open source projects that, as far as I know, stand alone as large-scale efforts with majority female contributors.

Open source software, as a field, is about 95% male. There are various statistics out there, but I’m drawing on figures from a couple of different surveys of open source software contributors and users, and my own 15+ years’ experience on mailing lists, at user group meetings, conferences, and the like.

Some open source projects, like Ubuntu and Drupal, are known as more women-friendly environments. Ubuntu’s code of conduct, for instance, set expectations about appropriate behaviour and help foster an environment where women feel more welcome and less threatened. DrupalChix say that Drupal has 10% women on the project, thanks to the supportive environment that group helps create.

But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

OTW and An Archive Of Our Own

The Organization for Transformative Works is a non-profit group dedicated to supporting the fannish creative community: those who write fan fiction, create fan videos, art, and the like. They have several projects, including an academic journal and a wiki of the history of fandom’s transformative works, but one of their largest efforts is the Archive, a fan-focussed repository for fiction. This archive software is open source, and developed primarily, if not entirely, by women.

Francesca Coppa has posted about women, technology, and OTW here for Ada Lovelace Day:

The Archive of Our Own may be the largest woman run and staffed open source software project on the web. 1134 revisions have been deployed to the Beta Archive to date, and we have had five major releases and innumerable small ones. 150 volunteers have worked on AD&T/Code/Test, many of whom we have trained ourselves in Ruby and other languages; we aim to teach and mentor all, women especially, who want to learn. You can see our code here.

Speaking of Ruby, I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program.

The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas–in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.

There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves.

Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth is another open source project I became aware of through fandom, though it is not a purely fannish endeavour. Dreamwidth is a fork of the LiveJournal codebase, and an attempt to run a journalling community transparently and openly and in a way that supports creative communities.

Dreamwidth’s diversity statement gives you some idea of the project’s culture:

We welcome people of any gender, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, religion, culture, subculture, and political opinion. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. We welcome internet beginners who aren’t sure what any of those terms refer to.

Since Dreamwidth is in closed beta, and all who are using it are involved in the development project, the stats showing about 70% female participation (of those who specified their gender) are impressive. The Dreamwidth staff show a similar gender spread. Most of the women participating in the project have minimal programming experience, and are learning as they go.

Some thoughts

Though I’m loath to draw sweeping conclusions from these two projects, I do see commonalities that might help answer the eternal question of “How do we get more women into Open Source?”

• Start with women from day one, in leadership and other roles.
• Stand for something that women actually care about, and don’t be afraid to state it up front and loudly.
• Make efforts to recruit women regardless of technical experience.
• Recruit from existing, active, creative communities who know how to communicate and collaborate online.
• Offer training, peer support, and activities to teach coding from the ground up.

I’d be interested to hear of any other large, women-centric open source projects out there, or thoughts on any of the above.

And, to fulfil the requirements of the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, the two women I admire in technology are:

Naomi Novik, chair of the OTW’s Board of Directors and inaugural chair of its ADT committee (developers of the Archive). You might also know her as author of the Temeraire series.

Denise Paolucci, co-founder, project/product manager, and loudest advocate and enthusiast for Dreamwidth.

These two between them have been instrumental in bringing hundreds of other women into open source software, and I admire them immensely.