Posted
on January 26, 2012, 5:33 pm,
by admin,
under Geekiness.
A couple of years ago I did a blog post on making a video from a load of labeled jpg images (http://www.hannahdee.eu/blog/?p=136) and this post is by way of an update to that. The technique there works fine if your images are numbered & padded with leading zeroes, and in the right order, don’t have any gaps, etc. But it won’t work if there are gaps, and it won’t work if the images are numbered consecutively without leading zeroes (e.g. image1.jpg image2.jpg [...] image10.jpg [...] image100.jpg).
It turns out that you can feed mencoder the list of images to encode in a file, which gets around all of these problems – just get the list of images into a file …
ls -1 *.jpg > list.txt
… Then sort the file…
And here some magic occurs
… And then use mencoder to actually encode the video.
The magic bit depends upon which type of numbering or sort order your jpg files have to start with, but the unix command “sort” can probably handle it.
Then you can do nice time-lapse videos, like this one.
Posted
on January 13, 2012, 9:13 pm,
by admin,
under Women in Computing.
The gender imbalance in computing is awful. I think this should be better, and here’s why – 9 reasons for women to study computer science
1. Computer science is a very interesting subject.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to
combine logical thinking and creativity, computing is great. It’s full of puzzle solving,
systematic thinking, lateral thinking… If you sometimes look at a
design or a puzzle and think “ooh, that’s elegant” you’ll find
that, too. In school, my favourite subjects were Maths, Art and
Psychology; the work I’m doing now involves something of all three.
Yes, it’s got its dull bits; every subject has dull bits. I’d hazard
that every compsci lecturer finds some part of their subject boring (I
find a the business focussed stuff doesn’t interest me – however, some
people love that). But I’d imagine that every philosopher, or English
lecturer finds some part of their subject dull (“Plato? BORING” … “I
can’t stand that Pinter bloke, he really goes on”).
2. There’s loads of support for women and girls in computing
Because we’re a minority there’s actually quite a lot going on
targetted at us. This might seem a bit counter-intuitive to begin
with, but it’s true. I run the BCSWomen
Lovelace Colloquium for women undergrads, a one-day conference.
There are
various women “hackspace” groups, girl geek dinners, and a very supportive online community including BCSWomen. Lots of unis have their own women in tech or women in science groups, too.
3. There are jobs in computing.
The market for people with good technical skills is growing. The government is currently changing the ICT curriculum to improve the technical skills of future generations just this week – it’s a hot topic, and there’s a projected skills shortage.
4. These jobs want women to apply
Research shows that diverse teams work better – it’s not just a question of people being happier when they work with a mix of people, they actually are more efficient at what they do (whether that’s making money, discovering scientific breakthroughs, or building stuff). It seems that having a range of learning styles, opinions, working practices and so on is a good thing in a team for many many reasons. So employers are really keen to employ women for their technical teams.
5. Women have an advantage at the recruitment stage
This is a direct result of the previous point – it makes good business sense for technical teams to be balanced. This doesn’t mean that women in tech are going to get all the jobs, but it does mean that women are being targetted now by recruiters. Check out www.womenintechnology.co.uk.
6. ROBOTS
Do I need to say more?
7. It’d be a better place for me to work
I’d like to work in a department with more women in it please.
8. Hot Nerds
(OK this one isn’t true.)
9. Computing is too important to be left to men.
That’s what Karen Spärck Jones said. And it’s true – computing is everywhere; in your phone, in your car, in your washing machine… We don’t want to leave the creative job of using these computers to one half of the population; its something we should all be getting involved in.
Posted
on January 6, 2012, 10:23 pm,
by admin,
under Women in Computing.
BCSWomen are holding a “Blog Carnival” in January. To enter, all you have to do is write a blog post on women in tech, and submit it to us. The best posts will be featured in a carnival roundup on Sarah Burnett’s blog over at http://sarahburnett.blogspot.com/. The idea is to get people blogging about women in tech, and to build a collection of people and links that are interesting to read on the topic.
Here’s how to take part and to help out…
Publish a blog post which has something to do with women in IT on your own blog during January.
Send an e-mail to bcswomen_blog_carnival@yahoo.com, including:
A link to the blog post
A short description of your blog (not the specific post, but your blog in general)
A brief description you, the author, and the URL of your profile on LinkedIn and/or Twitter (if you have one)
Visit the host blog http://sarahburnett.blogspot.com/ in the month after the carnival, to see the posts that have been selected and find out what people are writing about
If this is a successful event (and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be, apparently we’ve already had our first submission and it’s only Jan 6th:-) we will repeat the carnival, with different host blogs and different topics. So do get involved, and tell your friends & family.
Posted
on January 5, 2012, 12:40 pm,
by admin,
under Geekiness.
Each time I reinstall linux or change machines, I find myself having to add a bunch of latex packages and style files. I quite often forget exactly how to do this, so here’s a quick guide to installing latex packages for anyone else struggling with the details and also for my future self, next time I upgrade.
Posted
on January 4, 2012, 12:48 pm,
by admin,
under Geekiness.
I got a new phone with my xmas bounty (Thanks Mum & Dad!) and it’s great. A Samsung Google Nexus S it’s an android dream with a curved screen and buckets of charisma (yes OK it’s a phone). The device itself is thus far a complete success – I love it. And it was half price in carphone whorehouse so a real bargain to boot.
But … (yes, of course there’s a but) …
The first thing you do with an Android device is to link it to your Google account. About half a day later I received an email inviting me to register my new phone with Samsung, including a handy link to the registration page. Following this link took me to a page which did nothing (header, massive link-heavy footer, nothing inbetween). Hidden away (in the extensive footer full of links), I found a Register your product link which asked for my email and my zip code. Nothing else. They’ve got a nice bit of JavaScript validating their form, and perhaps unsurprisingly, an Aberystwyth postcode wasn’t accepted as a ZIP code.
Then I thought “Maybe I’m on the US site?” so I navigated to Samsung UK, found the Product Registration link (note different wording – and on the UK site, at the top right rather than the bottom left). I started to fill it in, but fall at the first hurdle. They’ve got a nice bit of JavaScript validating their form, and it doesn’t like my email hmd@hannahdee.eu. So I tried a different email, and it likes .co.uk so I filled in the other 13 compulsory form fields on the page. Only to find that on submission, it craps out due to a server error.
Looks like the phone’s going unregistered then…
The web design tips I take from this are:
If you’re sending out a link, send out the right link.
If you’ve got a location-based service, estimate the user’s location, and provide a “change location” link in case it’s wrong.
Don’t use JavaScript form validation for emails unless you really know what you’re doing.
Don’t make form elements compulsory unless they really have to be compulsory.
Posted
on December 22, 2011, 8:55 pm,
by admin,
under Wales.
Our solar panels were fitted at the end of the summer, and commissioned on August 30th, so we’ve had them for about four months now. We’re lucky – we got in when FIT payments were guaranteed at around 40p/KWH – so we’re expecting our 4KW system to pay for itself, when subsidies are taken into account, in about 9 years. So sometime in early 2021, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be raking in free electricity and free money (in the form of FIT payments), which is nice.
What’s interesting to me is the way my behaviour’s changed. I’ve always been a bit of a tree-hugger, turning off lights, making compost, recycling everything, and putting on jumpers… but I’ve become a bit more strategic since we’ve had the photovoltaics on the roof. We’ll wait until daytime to put on the washing machine or the dishwasher; we won’t use the dishwasher if there’s hot water; we’ll turn more things off at the plug, and we’re generally aware of our background usage (everything nonessential off = 2.5kwh/day, which is about 100w, which isn’t that bad when you think about it).
And we’re monitoring in a way we never did before. Or rather, Roger’s monitoring, and I’m watching with interest and stealing his graph for my blog:
The red line is what we buy off the electric company, the blue line is what we’ve generated. So you can see that here in wild wet and windy west Wales, we’re still making quite a bit of electricity well into Autumn (the graph starts on 30 Aug, and finishes on 19 Dec – x-axis is day, y-axis is KWH). In August there were a few days when we bought virtually nothing – our usage was pretty much entirely covered by the PVs. There’s some smoothing on the graph but the sunny days still stand out. I can’t wait till next summer to see what it does when there are really long days.
We got solar water done at the same time (it saved money as we only needed to get the scaffolders in once); the benefit of that’s much harder to quantify as there’s no meter and no FIT payments, just free washing up and baths. But I like that too. There’s nothing nicer than getting in after a long bike ride on a sunny day and soaking in a hot tub that’s come from the roof.
I think that the change in FIT payments is a huge mistake for various reasons – there were about 12 people involved in our installation for a start, only two of whom were directly employed by Llani Solar. Scaffolders, electricians, plumbers, general builders… The knock on effect on the local economy is going to be massive. I also think that the behaviour change that comes from having the panels is likely to amplify any ecological benefit from the electricity itself. I heard that Leeds city council recently cancelled installation on 1,000 council homes, which has to be seen as a real loss of opportunity.
Earlier this month Gillian Arnold (BCSWomen chair) and I went to the EU Gender Summit in Brussels. This was the first ever gender summit, concentrating on gender issues in Science, Engineering and Technology, and it was absolutely fascinating.
The real take home message to me was the power of diverse teams. I’ve heard this before in a business context, but the message coming loud and clear from the Gender Summit was that monocultures are simply not as efficient as mixed groups in any sphere. So your all-male science teams and your all-female nursing teams? Huge mistake, in the same way that all-male boards are in business. It actually pays to be diverse.
Obviously, it was a two day conference so there was a lot more to it, and we have put together a full conference report which you can find at http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/bcswomen_gender_conf_report.pdf. As there were two of us there, we split the parallel sessions and managed to cover twice as much (yes we are brilliant and organised, thank you for noticing:-).
Many thanks to the BCS and also to Aberystwyth university (particularly the staff development unit and the Gooding conference fund) for funding the trip.
Top tip – if you’re going to Brussels, there are some rather nice small apartments in the Ixelles region here: boomhostel.com. We stayed in one that had a bedroom and a large sofabed in the main room (which was fine – I lost the coin toss but didn’t lose any sleep!) and it was €75/ night; a proper bargain for 2 people!
On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on
a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech
by having a women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff – this is the second blog post about the evening and you can read all about the Android dev stuff here.
In the evening of 7 October, the Ada Lovelace Day events really started to
warm up. We sold out so there were 90 people there, and there was an amazing buzz right from the start. Lots of the daytime attendees had chosen to stay on which was great, whilst it made for a long day it was a really fun one.
There were 8 fantastic speakers on the night – that’s 7 doing short talks,
and a truly hilarious compere in Kate Smurthwaite.
I tried to video some of Kate’s compering but it was too hard for me to pull
it off with a borrowed hand-held video camera – when I got home & watched
the few attempts I’d made, I realised I’d been laughing too much so all you
could hear is my goofy guffaw, and all you can see is a shaky blurry image.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that she’s really very very funny
indeed, and go to see her live if you get the chance.
Then we had Maggie Philbin, yes, you read that right, MAGGIE PHILBIN OFF
THE TELLY. I was so very very impressed with the work she’s doing,
encouraging kids to think of technology and engineering, but to be 100% honest
I was more impressed with the fact that I GOT TO MEET MAGGIE PHILBIN. I was a
massive tomorrow’s world fan as a kid. I videoed her entire talk and
she’s kindly let me put it up for you all to see.
Next up, Helen Keen talked about astronauts, space, and women. The Mercury 13 is a cul-de-sac of space history that involved women getting the same training and tests as male astronauts, back in the 1950s. You can find out more on the mercury 13 wikipedia page. Apparently there have been more dogs in space than women in space, although the women do tend to fare better than the dogs upon return.
Sue Black then spoke about Twitter, BCSWomen, Bletchley Park and the power
of social media. I don’t actually need convincing of this, but if there was
anyone in the audience who wasn’t on twitter they probably are now. Nice work,
Sue. As an aside, I started this blog with a post about Sue back on ALD 2009 – she’s totally one of my tech heroines:-)
Sarah Pascoe followed with some stand up fun, less geeky than the speakers
surrounding her but very funny indeed. I hadn’t realised the stuff about Essex
and boob-jobs. Maybe you had to be there…
Gia Milinovich showed us some cool geeky crafty tech based around the lilypad
Arduino; I’ve heard about this and seen Leah Beuchey talk on wearable tech
and smart clothing but I’d never got that close to it all before. It’s a
fascinating topic and one I’d really like to get more into; I’ve never really
played with hardware other than cameras. Apparently you need to be able sew
and to program in C to do cool stuff, so I am part way there and all I need to do is learn to sew:-)
Helen Arney sung some funny geeky songs, accompanied by her Ukelele. My
video of Animals suffered from same issue as I’d had with Kate; the little flip
cam doesn’t take good video if I’m convulsing with laughter whilst filming.
Helen was one of the performers, but she was also one of the organisers. And
it’s thanks to Helen that we had such an amazing lineup. Here’s Helen singing a song about cryogenics on the night:
And the final speaker was Maggie Aderin-Pocock who talked about space,
Hubble, and how big things are, with slides of galaxies and the world outside.
It was a bit like the total perspective vortex from Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy – finishing on a tour of the universe like that was pretty much designed
to blow our minds!
To round off the evening there was booze & food & chatting (Networking, dahlings) in the Atrium at the BCS London offices. Many many thanks to Suw Charman-Anderson and Helen Arney for putting together such a fab lineup, and to Maggie Berry from womenintechnology.co.uk for helping organise.
On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on
a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech
by having women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff. This is the first of a pair of blog posts talking about what we got up to.
During the day, Karen Petrie (of Dundee University) and I ran an Android
workshop – this was a mixture of talk & play, with the attendees building
apps using AppInventor and learning about the basics of Android development. I
was in charge of the talky bits (five short talks on various aspects of mobile
dev, scattered throughout the day) and Karen was in charge of the hands-on
Appinventor bits, but it was very much a double act; I helped out in the
practical bits, Karen chipped in in the talky bits.
I found it great fun presenting with Karen – we know each other fairly well,
but have never worked together on anything like this. We were somewhat
under-coordinated (we only saw each other’s slides about 20 minutes before we
started the workshop!) but through a mixture of extreme sarcasm and Agile
presentation methodologies we managed to pull it off. The day worked
brilliantly, and going on the attendees’ feedback questionnaires, I’m not the
only one who enjoyed myself. Here’s a photo of one of the groups contemplating app development:
The first app attendees built was
an extension of the “standard” Google example app, or “HelloPurr”. In this app
you learn how to add a button, include a photo, include a sound, listen for the
accellerometer, and then you link the playing of the sound to either pressing
the button or shaking the phone. Or in layperson’s terms, you make something
that meows when you touch or shake it. The very short video below shows what
happens when everyone gets their devices meowing at the same time…
After lunch, we got into small groups and each group tried to make an app
from scratch. I think it’s fair to say that there weren’t many completed apps,
but there were some excellent tech demonstrators, including …
a compass for the
blind which read out directions (“south … south … south … south-east
…”),
an app which you could use to send an automated text message (for
example, “I’m in the cinema, I’ll call you back in an hour”),
a launcher for video webinars, that could link direct to specific youtube clips,
a game for kids, teaching the alphabet through animals and sounds,
a “guess the year” quiz app with images and music,
If any attendees want to see the slides, you can find them on my website here. We’ll copy them to somewhere on the BCS site at some point but that might take a little while.
Ada Lovelace day is a worldwide day of blogging and celebration of women in tech, and I’m sat in the BCS London offices, having co-presented an all-day android workshop for ALD and waiting for the evening ALD celebration to start, so I guess I ought to write my ALD blog post!
My choice for this year is Sarah Winmill. Sarah’s just started as director of IT at UCL, having worked as CTO at the V&A museum, at the Royal Academy of Arts, and in the Royal Palaces. She seems to specialise in doing hard IT stuff in beautiful and interesting settings. She’s chair of the charities consortium IT Directors group. (She’s really active in BCSWomen, which is great for us).
She’s also absolutely lovely, and gives a fantastic talk.
So there you go – my inspiring woman in tech for this year is Sarah Winmill!
