Please find me on LinkedIn and then.... hire me!!! :-)
With bits and pieces of time last week, and then a big chunk of my weekend, I managed to install the Wonderland server on my MacBook Pro laptop. I wrote these notes for myself as a way to reconstruct what the heck I'd done:
my.run.properties file and add two properties:" but there is no my.run.properties file in the server install directory, it is down two levels. Did not take me that long to find it (in Contents/Resources), but I did have to search for it.Now it is time to try to install the WonderlandWorldBuilder.
I spend a few hours every two weeks doing some internal communications work for a volunteer group of Sun employees working with Engineers Without Borders here in the SF Bay area. I make an agenda and take copious minutes for our bi-weekly call, edit our wiki, and I talk with people internally about potential EWB projects that might dovetail nicely with actual work projects at Sun, such as engaging students in projects using Sun technology.
So far, we have exactly one official EWB project, which means we successfully submitted their sixteen page project proposal form (daunting at first, but worthwhile in the end) and won their approval. The project, Wifi4CREA, aims to bring cheaper, faster, and more reliable internet access to the CREA - Panama reseach station in the Cocobolo Nature Reserve. CREA = Conservation through Research Education and Action. The improved connection will serve the researchers, the school visits to the center and lastly the local village. One of the other volunteers, Marco, has pictures and information about his trip to Panama here on his blog.
Through our local EWB San Francisco Professional chapter, the wifi4crea project was selected to represent EWB on a really cool site I did not know about before: Global Giving, a million little earth-changing ideas. We have until November 21st to raise $2k via this site, so please contribute! No amount is too small nor too large. We will use the funds to purchase the hardware we will install on the next trip to Panama, possibly as soon as January.
I visited Westmont High School today and helped the Intro Programming students set up a public_html/index.html file to use as a journal of their programming experiences. Their journals are "public" within the class, unlike the rest of their home directories which are set up to be private, visible only to the student and the teacher.
Some of them had already created applets, but they just loaded them into the browser directly from the file system. Now we will have them put applets into a subdir in public_html when they are ready to share them with the rest of the class.
Most important, to me, I showed them CodePoint 2008, the first annual Greenfoot Coding Contest, and urged them to enter. Some of them are under 16, some of them are over, so in theory, the class could win in TWO of the three categories for the contest! Hey, it is most certainly possible. They asked if I would enter myself, in the third category of everyone else who is not in school. I said yes of course! And I will, though since we sponsored the prizes I wont be able to win, and since I'm not a seriously experienced Greenfoot player yet I would not win in the general category anyway.
Here is my non-game scenario, in its current state.
In my copious spare time, I want to add some user controls to control the two booleans that I currently set manually in the code: bounce (makes the balls bounce off the edges of the world or else fly right through and come out on the same trajectory on the opposite side) and dirByColor (makes each of the seven colors start out with the same direction of movement, a direction that is unique to that color).
See if you can figure out how those variables are set in the above and below versions of the same scenario.
The giant dot is just dot #1 that I made large because I was experimenting with the img.scale method. Its size is meaningless and has no function at the moment. Scroll down to click on Run to see the dots go, click on Reset to restart them. Not very exciting but it is kinda pretty and it was fun to make it work.
Obviously this could be turned into a game - make a big dot eat the little ones; introduce a new creature that eats dots and let the user control it; give two players control of different dots or colors or etc.
Smadar and I worked together as programmers in the mid-80s at Daisy Systems, and now we only see each other once or twice a year. Going to her house feels very time-warpish!
She gave me this advice: take every single opportunity you get to talk to teachers.
So when Bruce Anderson, the AP/CS teacher at the local high school called me on Saturday (!) morning before school started on Monday, I talked to him. He'd just gotten back in town, he apologized for not responding to my email sooner and asked if I wanted to come over to talk? Heeding Smadar's advice, I popped over to the high school right after lunch.
I gave Bruce a little demo of greenfoot.org and showed him the greenfootgallery.org also. He had looked at the website but had not gotten around to the summer task of playing with it for real. He commented that it looks a lot like GridWorld, which he showed to me.
I said, "Oh! that is the thing that Cay Hosrtmann created, right? Do you use that in your AP CS class?"
Bruce replied yes, and they have to use it because it is the case study for the exam. He went on to lavish praise on the books that Cay Horstmann has written, saying they are so much easier for him to read than any of the other text books or programming books! Cay is also a fan of Greenfoot (see here) and Alice. Later, searching for more info on Gridworld, I found GridWorld in Greenfoot.
Bottom line, Bruce invited me to come spend one or two class sessions with his Intro Programming class (not the AP/CS class) to teach them Greenfoot. I'm going to send him my lesson plan to review, just as soon as I write it, or he may send me some suggestions, whichever one of us gets to it sooner!
Depending on how that goes, Bruce and I would like to come up with some dramatic creative compelling plan to increase the number of girls who take his classes. He says they always do very well, and they always expect to do poorly. He told me one year he had more girls than usual because a single girl persuaded all her friends to sign up! They all did great.
In fact, I've been playing with Greenfoot myself, in hopes of learning to use it well enough to be able to teach middle schoolers how to use it, mostly for fun, with learning being a happy side effect, at an after school club I have proposed to the school that is closest to my house. (My son is horrified. I told him he does not have to admit to anyone that I'm his mom. He does not even have to come, but I bet he will.) The after school club is by no means certain yet -- the district loves the idea but has warned me: "Sometimes things in education move at a slower pace." So we'll see.
I have also played with Alice, another fun game-tool featured on the new page, but since I can only learn one thing a time....here is a picture of my Greenfoot scenario.
I may eventually turn this into a game, or others might, but for now, I just want to add controls so the user can set parameters that I'm setting right now in the code: bounce off the wall or go through and wrap around to the opposite side, continuing in the same direction; start with random orientation or start with color-coded orientation, so all the blue dots have exactly the same direction of motion at first anyway. Another visually fun thing was to make all the dots jump to the location of the mouse, if you mouse over the field of dots. I'm working on making things happen when the dots meet in space, like delete a dot or merge them (a bigger dot) or merge the colors or start playing follow-the-leader.
When I am happy enough with this to share it, I will post it to the Greenfoot Gallery along with the sources. If I had the experience or time right now to figure it out, I would replace the image above with a playable applet, but that will have to wait for a later post, and a better version of my consequences scenario, more worthy of posting live.
Update.......OK so now I've done the export, a month or something later, and duh, it is so drop dead easy! I should have made it live way back when I did this post.
After the bbq, four of us stayed for a meeting. We were two women and two men, none related, and we chose to talk about stories in the Bible or Methodist tradition that give us some sort of problem.
The most interesting exchange for me was in discussing the crucifixion and the idea that Jesus died for our sins. We all agree that it happened, but N. sees it as an example of man's inhumanity to man and rejects the notion that Jesus died for our sins (she calls herself a heretic). M. explained his view on the matter, and while I don't recall him addressing the question of dying for our sins, one thing he said did catch my attention. He described a scene in that Passion movie by Mel Gibson in which Mary is almost unable to go to Jesus as he struggles to carry his cross. I never saw that movie, and never will, but M. was very impressed with this scene. He said that Christ stumbles, and Mary sees her child in him briefly and is thus able to go to him in spite of her revulsion at the horror of his broken body. M. says that Jesus put his hand on her cheek and comforted her by saying, "I make all things new."
That gives me something to think about, because it seems an extreme example of the idea that we can find God in the response to bad things happening. I usually think of that in terms of natural disasters, but maybe it is equally applicable to examples of man's inhumanity to man.
I believe that how I practice my faith is more important than the details of what I choose to believe or not believe, but I very much appreciated talking with the three people who stayed to share their questions and thoughts about faith with me and each other. I hope to host a DAFT meeting after each Thursday night bbq for the rest of this summer.
From something I wrote in the spring:
What Does D.A.F.T. Mean? DAFT is merely an amusing acronym that captured my fancy as follows:
Doubting Agnostics
Doubt tends to get a bum rap, as if it is a negative thing that should never cross the mind of a True Believer. Doubt deserves more respect! Doubt is not the antithesis of faith. Choosing faith while setting aside related doubts may be a better foundation for life in this world than blind faith that acknowledges zero doubts.
The term Agnostic is often confused with Atheist, but the two are not equivalent. An Agnostic is somebody who believes that it is impossible to know whether or not God exists, or that it is impossible to prove. The problem with the English word “know” is that it is so overloaded: knowledge of the heart? knowledge of the mind? some other sort of knowledge we cannot name? But the Agnostic believes you cannot know about the existence of God in exactly the same way you can know that 1+1=2.
So the term Doubting Agnostic is sort of self-referential, since agnostics certainly doubt lots of things; or maybe it is self-contradictory, making a double-negative leading to the positive alternative to choose faith, since scientific divine knowledge seems quite out of reach.
Faithful Thinkers
This one is easier, people of faith who enjoy trying to figure out how to apply faith to every day life, how to practice one's faith. In discussing this with my sister, she suggested I should call it “Faith Thinkers,” to indicate people who think about faith, who believe thoughtfully. I agree that works, but I wanted to imply Faith-FULL Thinkers, too: people who are full of faith and thinking about how to put it into practice.
Near the end of the school year, I asked my son what he was reading.
"Nothing!" he replied with glee. "We're done for the year! no more book reports." Clearly his plan was to not read all summer, which was not my plan for him at all. I put the problem off. Just before the end of the school year, after a grandparents visit, I noticed my son reading.
"Where did you get that book?"
"Grammy gave it to me. It is really good, you should read it, too." I was too busy silently thanking my mother-in-law to pay attention to the book. But my son persisted and after he finished the book, he said: "Mom, really, you have to read this book! It is awesome."
So of course I did. I've made him read enough books, fair is fair, and I never regretted reading all the Artimis Fowl books, and he was right, Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down is a great book.
The author, Colin Woodard, writes this non-fiction book like a novel, and you certainly catch the romance around the pirates, and yet at the same time, the brutality and ugliness. He does such a good job of making the pirates very human. And very different. They are not cookie cutter equivalents. Some are smarter, some are braver, some are opportunists, some are idealists, freedom fighter types in the same century as the American Revolution, a few generations before it. The scope of the book is limited to the Golden Age of Piracy, 1715-1725, with a little bit of history from before that decade to set the stage for the main characters.
Lastly, the plight and escapades of Africans as slaves or pirates are fascinating, though the amount of actual information the author could scrape together is tantalizingly scant.
This year at JavaOne, Clark Richey met me in the java.net Community Corner to tell me about MarkMail, a free service for searching mailing list archives powered by MarkLogic Server, a product that they sell. I said sure, go for it, sounds interesting and the price is right. Clark handed the task off to Jason Hunter, and the first week in July, Jason wrote:
We just finished loading the java.net archives into MarkMail. You can now search (and analyze!) in a unified way the roughly one million emails gathered across the thousands of java.net lists over the years.
The traffic growth chart is really quite beautiful, trending up and to the right. You can see it here:
http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Anet.java
Just about half the java.net mails are auto-generated as a result of checkins or bugs. If we remove those, it's still beautiful as you can see below. People are writing more than 15,000 human-to-human emails every month on java.net!
Wow - that is cool, and you quickly get the feeling it is just the tip of the iceberg. He also included a link to show all the messages from sun.com, and various other cool things. We will create a page on java.net with a bunch of sample queries and instructions on how new active mailing lists on java.net can get added to the MarkMail archive.
Just as the java.net FishEye instance (for CVS and SVN separately) is provided for free by Atlassian and Contegix, now MarkMail for java.net is provided free by MarkLogic. If you figure out cool searches that a project or community on java.net might want to include on a home page, please let me know. (If you use del.icio.us, you can bookmark it for:marlacparker or for:java.net.)
Whatever happens, I still believe that women in positions of leadership are important. Whether you support Hillary or not, isn't it great to see a WOman competing - and STICKING to it - for President of the United States.
Then on Thursday, the very next day, I received a link to Sexism, women and IT (Information Technology), a blog by a highly respected Java developer, Yakov Fain. This is his blog on the JDJ site, Java Developer's Journal[tm], the World's Leading Java Resource.
If the first blog, tiredofvotingformen, makes any sense to you, then the second probably will not. The second blog is not a spoof, by the way. He is completely serious, and in case you jump to the conclusion that he lives in some backwards country where women are still legally treated as property, if you google him you'll see that he works in New York. More importantly, he is completely sincere and, in a weird way, almost innocent.
If the second blog, sexism, makes sense to you, then the first one will seem quite silly. But to you I say: get educated. Because I assure you, the tiredofvotingformen blog represents the future, and dear Yakov's blog represents the past. Clearly not a past that is as dead as some of us would like it to be. Some of us. Don't kid yourself by wishing it were "most of us." (Where is that Feminism Consciousness Raising 101 Reading List reference when you need it, anyway? I think I misplaced it a few decades ago, oops.)
Langston Hughes certainly said it best, and beautifully, in 1938:
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!OK, so not even Hughes makes reference to women but I still think the above quote is the best I've heard to crystallize the idea that we have a great idea for a democracy, and we may be doing a better job of it than anyone else in the world, maybe, but the world we live in is really still a lot more like a feudal system of patronage and privilege than it is any sort of egalitarian democracy. Hughes asks: Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
Although I'm fortunate enough to be one of the privileged in this wannabe America, I'd still like to send this answer to heaven for Langston Hughes: I am the woman.
I'd used NetBeans before, but not recently. I knew that the new and wonderful NetBeans 6.0 came with Ruby support so that seemed like the perfect excuse for me to get started and work my way through some tutorials at least.
I have an old PowerBook G4. So I hit the big Download NetBeans IDE 6.0 button on the front page, picked the Ruby column and got netbeans-6.0-ruby-macosx.dmg, which installed perfectly as far as I could tell. It ran just fine. It even had a Ruby link in the Start page, so I must have done something right.
Or close to it. I cannot remember if the Hello World example in the Getting Started With Ruby and Rails tutorial is what refused to work for me or the Depot Application project that tries to get going if you click on that inviting Ruby link on the Start page, but anyway, I retreated to the Installing and Configuring Ruby Support page pointed to by the Getting Started page.
It says to download and install the version of NetBeans IDE 6.0 that contains Ruby. Ok already, I did that. Then it says if you don't have that, do all this other stuff. I thought I should be able to skip all that other stuff. So I went on to Using Database Servers With JRuby. I got MySQL all set up properly. Then the directions wandered off into the weeds as far as solving my basic problem of getting any Ruby to run in the IDE. Hmmm.
I went back and read that first section that I skipped because it was for IDE 6.0 installations that do not have Ruby support (but I've got it, don't I?). The key bit seems to be Step 5 on that page:
(Optional) Select the JRuby and Rails Distribution checkbox to download and install the JRuby software and the Ruby on Rails framework.
Note: You must have either Ruby or JRuby software installed on your system in order to use the Ruby and Rails distribution. If you do not have this software, you must either install this plugin, or download and install JRuby or Ruby software before working with Ruby projects in the IDE.
In the Plugin Manager, under the Installed tab, it says I have JRuby and Rails Distribution installed. But it is greyed out. Hmmm. Looks like that means I cannot uninstall it, which would be ok, but I'm not sure. And do I really have it installed? and if I do, would that mean that Ruby should run on my machine, at least within the IDE? (My questions to the users@ruby.netbeans.org list have not been answered, so I have no clue.) Is there some other step I need to take to get Ruby and Rails installed on my machine, independent of the IDE?
I figure there must be, since it is not working. So I go on a quest (which took maybe a year) to do that and finally succeed here: http://rubyosx.rubyforge.org/. Bless them.
At last I was able to run the little Depot sample application and it worked, and the Hello World worked also. I went on to other things feeling only slightly discouraged that after all that work, all I'd accomplished was to run the sample application!
Wow, was Mom ever right! It is a wonderful book. Exquisite writing, exciting action, and yet another tale of growing up different, but what a tale! I never would have expected to enjoy a book so much that is largely about .....boxing!!?
I love books with characters that are complex and believable, especially when the author picks characters that represent people we are unable or unlikely to personally get to know in our day to day lives. This is such a book. I look forward to reading the sequel someday, even though it is something like 900 pages long and probably not as good. Courtenay has written a dozen or more books, and from the reviews on Amazon, some are not so great, but high praise seems to be: this one is as good as The Power of One.
I see there is a movie, but I'm not sure I want to see it. Would be difficult to make a good move out of such a rich book. Just too much to put in a movie. Plus, the apartheid violence is evil enough in the pages of a book - I really don't think I need to see any interpretation in video, thanks anyway.
I am especially interested in participating in the Eco/Green part of this sprouting community, or maybe now they are calling it Eco/Green Science, even better! I hope I'll be able to contribute some activities that would be useful or accepted or whatever the word is for however the site will work. For example:
The fun with kml files that I blogged about. It was really easy to manually create a kml file that works with google maps or google earth and shows placemarks with pictures from family vacations, with links to more pictures. For the activity, it might make sense to do a really tiny example by hand, not necessarily to create it but just to look at it, and then say you can do this by hand or you can use this tool to do it faster.
Another direction to take is to try the kml file you create with the other tools: NASA WorldWind, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Adobe PhotoShop, etc.
My high-school freshman daughter went on a bike ride and then came home and used google map, I think, to make a map of where she went with annotations. It was not a kml file, though. I did not look at it closely enough to understand how it could be published, as that was an option.
A student posted a reference to the Cyber School Bus in the Fresh Brain forums, and wow, what a cool site that is! I wonder if some activities could be created around doing something on or with that site. Maybe not in eco/green, but whatever.
Those are the FreshBrain activity ideas that I wanted to list so I don't forget them.
The biggest piece of serendipity to grace the event for me was via the Ride Board, through which I met Deborah Grove. She alone was brave enough to accept my offer of a ride at oh-dark-thirty when I drove from Los Gatos to Sonoma in time for the pre-conference Online Communities for Social Good meeting Thursday morning at 8:30. (We stopped in Millbrae to pick up coffee and my former java.net colleague, Helen Chen, now with MATLAB Central.)
I say it was serendipity for me because Deborah started blogging about Green IT and consulting in that exciting field this year. She had so much interesting stuff to share, I of course cannot remember it all now, over a week later, but I have my homework cut out for me, starting with reading her blog.
I followed their Check it out! link and quickly got sucked in to the world of kml and created this map:
It works better if you view the larger map,and some of the placemarks are practically on top of each other if you are zoomed out to the whole world. Click on the placemark to see the info and picture - be sure to look at the ones in Norway. I created this quickly only because I had already spent an inordinate amount of time creating a more detailed one for my family pointing at more places and with links to the complete photo albums. This stuff is so easy my kids could do it (HINT HINT!!).
Update: What weirdness is this? I came back to this blog and found that the placemarks defined in this file were not showing. In fact, they don't show if I load the file manually in the location box on maps.google.com, either. So I copied the file from blogs.sun.com to my home server, and voila, it works again. The images referenced in the placemarks are still in blogs.sun.com/marla/resource, and they show fine. But if you load up http://blogs.sun.com/marla/resource/trips3a.kml in maps.google.com, it says "File not found at http://blogs.com/marla/reso...." I don't know where it is getting blogs.com from.
If anyone has a clue, I'd love to be enlightened. While you are at it, feel free to load the kml file into Google Earth and see if you can figure out why the double picture at Otter Point (in Maine) only shows one picture in Earth, though it reliably shows both in Maps.
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