Stubbleblog

Hire women. I didn’t really understand why until hearing Elizabeth Lawley’s talk, Breaking Into the Boys’ Club: How Diversifying Your Team Can Expand Your Market. That’s when the reason first clicked.

Hiring women will make you rich.

Successful tech products that performed well with women (MovableType, Blogger, The Sims) had women playing key roles in design and implementation. To the extent that that’s true, you’d be shifting from a market of products designed by/for men to a market that’s much less crowded, and just as big. It’s actually better than doubling your opportunity because you’re both doubling the size of your market and shrinking the number of competitors.

I’ve worked with some great women in tech (director of the internet group at mastercard, sysadmin manager at mastercard, director of O’Reily’s internet group, CIO at O’Reilly) but I have almost no idea where you find these women.

Today, Gaba (lead tech for Babes in Toyland) sent us a link to some resources for hiring women.

All of this reminds me of a quip from my college advisor as they hired their fourth CS professor, “Today we’ve increased diversity by hiring a thin white male.”

Updated: Marc says not to forget Flickr (duh, i once sat awestruck on a panel with Caterina) and to check out Ben Trott’s take on Mena’s involvement in MovableType.

I just uploaded a perl module for connecting to Safari Bookshelf’s API, Net::Safari. There’s still some work to do, but I’ve been getting use out of it so I thought other people might too.

The Safari API can be really useful if you want to search within books. For example, in my POD search app I wanted to display books related to the current module. The Safari API let me search inside code examples for mentions of the module. It’s not just search inside the book - it’s search inside the code.

You can read more about the Safari API on the Safari site.

I used f-spot for Linux to organize my Tibet photos and put together my photo gallery. f-spot uses tags to help you organize your pictures. That’s a great idea - totally pragmatic and flexible. It also produces gorgeous online galleries.

The software is alpha, and thus a little buggy. It doesn’t have the ability to edit EXIF data yet. The timestamps on the photos from me and my friends were all over the map, so I had to correct them with an outside program. However, f-spot didn’t recognize the new timestamps unless I removed and readded the pictures. Of course that meant readding my tags.

The other problem I had was that it wouldn’t generate my photo album. That’s a problem that mysteriously disappeared. Good thing too, the photo album that it did produce looks great.

“In a room full of expert software designers, if any two agree, that’s a majority.”

Greg Moreno’s gaboogle.com blog turned up in my Steve McConnell watchlist with this list of quotes from software development experts.

The rest of his blog is quite good and worth adding to your rss reader.

If you use shells and you use wireless or laptops (or the switches at your work keep getting rebooted, etc.) you’ll appreciate the benefit of having a shell session that’s persistent across multiple logins.

Here’s the quick tutorial:

screen
start screen for the first time

screen -d -r
reattach to an old session

C-a
issue a command from within screen, important ones below.

C-a c
new window, (like a tab).

C-a “
prompt and switch to a new window.

C-a #
switch to the window at that number.

C-a C-a
switch to the last window

C-a ESC
scroll mode

Nice little interview with Steve McConnell on IT Conversations.

He covers the genesis of his books and takes time to comment on Mythical Man-Month (turns out to be mostly about documentation) and Extreme Programming (just another tool in the toolbox).

I’m finding that people who reference Steve McConnell in their blog posts often have something interesting to say, so I’ve added them to my rss reader with a technorati watchlist:

http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=60721

I can recommend his Code Completee to nearly any programmer and Rapid Development to any programmer/manager who’s working on a project that’s behind schedule or suffering from irrational expectations (again, basically anyone). If you work in software and you laugh at Dilbert, read Rapid Development.

Updated to include inheritance tree, method signature, linking of methods to documentation anchors, HTML from pod2html, and css from kobesearch.

Pod Search

Next up: download link, use package name as bread crumb trail, reformat long method listings, related links (probably from del.icio.us although Perl.com articles would be nice).

Pod Search Demo

This is all the POD on my server, converted into approximate Docbook xml, and then inserted into the free version of MarkLogic.

The speed still amazes me even though this is only 11MB.

Here’s the xquery code that runs the search.

I finally got my first module on CPAN. This is a coming of age event for Perl programmers.

The module, Net::MarkLogic::XDBC is an interface for running XQuery on a MarkLogic XML repository.

I’m super excited, stoked even, for the possibilities created by working with MarkLogic. Their CIS product can hold terabytes of XML and query it instantaneously with XQuery.

O’Reilly luminary and former coworker, Schuyler Erle, seems busy.

So now that the book is done and Jo and I are back from India, we’ve decided to make robots.

Mapping Hacks is out in June. He, wife Jo and cohort Rich Gibson are maintaining a weblog devoted to the state of geolocative hackery. And now they’ve decided to build robots.