Marla Parker's Weblog

Classroom not School Club, maybe...
My plans for the Play 2 Learn Computer Club are on hold. I met recently with a dear friend, Smadar Agmon, who has built up a substantial math tutoring business in Los Altos in recent years. My after school club idea is just a volunteer effort, but I figured it would be wise to run the idea by her.

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.

Young Developers and Play 2 Learn
I was already a fan of the New to Java Programming Center, but now Dana Nourie has made it even better by creating a page for Young Developers which features one of my favorite tools, Greenfoot.

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.

DAFT Report
Before the LGUMC church bbq last Thursday evening, I announced there would be a DAFT meeting for anyone who cared to join in at 7:30, after dinner. No one remembered what DAFT was: Doubting Agnostics, Faithful Thinkers, D.A.F.T. which is just a silly name that I made up when thinking about the sort of conversations that I hoped to begin. Everyone, around a dozen people, who participated in the first three DAFT meetings in the spring seemed ok with this name, and we did indeed have some great conversations, exactly what I'd been hoping for.

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.

Republic of Pirates
I'm in an all day meeting where a colleague mentioned she has a pirate fetish, and her presentation was spiced up with plenty of pirate references and fun images. I'm inspired to blog about this book and my gratitude to my mother-in-law, who gave it to my 12 year old son.

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.

MarkMail for java.net!

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.)

Time Warp
On Wednesday, a dear friend of mine, from the 1970s, sent me a link to I'm Tired of Voting For Men and wrote:

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.

Beginner NetBeans and Ruby
I have not done any serious programming for, oh, about 15 years. I miss it. So I decided to play around with NetBeans and see if I could learn Ruby. I picked Ruby because it seems quite popular and I really like the approach of Rails. (See I know all sorts of things about programming, I just haven't done any myself in forever.)

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!

The Power of One
My mother, born in Kenya, enthusiastically recommended that I read The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay. (The book has multiple covers, here is the one that matches the copy I read, and I think the best cover. One cover with a small boy and plane on it makes no sense to me at all.)

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.

FreshBrain activity ideas
I've been reading the FreshBrain blog every week or so and participating in the forums on freshbrain.org. I used to work for the Headbrain (I'm not making this up, that is his username on the site) and I'm very excited about what this new non-profit is trying to accomplish.

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.

Online Community Summit 2007
October 4-5, I was fortunate to be able to attend the Online Community Summit 2007 in Sonoma, CA. I love this meeting because it is small, exciting, and full of interesting learning. This year, I especially enjoyed talking with or listening to presentations by:

• Holly Pendleton of Catholic Health Initiatives, a $7B nonprofit corporation I'd never heard of, about her work with the internal online community of staff working at CHI hospitals and other healthcare facilities around the country.
• Peter Cohen of Amazon, who is passionate about the possibilities unleashed by their Mechanical Turk.
• James Nauta of the American Academy of Pediatrics, about the difficulty of creating online communities where practitioners or patients can share best practices with one another without running the risk of illegally "practicing" medicine over the wire, e.g. by implying a diagnosis or suggesting medication that turns out to be ill-advised in some specific case. What a difficult problem!
• Paul Resnick of the University of Michigan School of Information, whose research into community participation reminded me of a workshop I attended once where we played variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• Neal Sundaresan of eBay, who explained to Roger and me why snipers are actually healthy for a micro-community on eBay, e.g. the group of collectors who buy and sell antique golf clubs made of wood.

...and many more. Thanks to Josh Ledgar for his copious notes on the days of the event, and Bill Johnston's report back and this picture he posted to flickr:

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.

fun with placemarks
I am really happy that the JUGs Community on java.net has made such great progress recently in creating their own worldwide JUGS Map using a kml file.

I followed their Check it out! link and quickly got sucked in to the world of kml and created this map:

View Larger 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.

Community Corner 2007
It is more than a month until JavaOne, so I'm happy that there are so many mini-talks proposed for the third java.net Community Corner on the wiki already. At the moment, there are ten or more talks from one very active project, but I've contacted that team and asked them to spread their talks out a bit across all three days, instead of having most of them on Wednesday, and maybe move a few talks into demos at the three pods in the Community Corner.

If you are a member of java.net, you can propose a mini-talk yourself, or volunteer to help staff the three demo pods in the Community Corner, all on the wiki. Just be sure to follow the directions, please!

Here is a picture from last year (courtesy of Aaron Houston, who send pictures out so conveniently that it is easier for me to borrow one of his than to find one elsewhere):

Come to JavaOne, and come meet other java.net members, project owners, community leaders, staff and volunteers, hang out and listen to the mini-talks.

What a change...
The big news today is of course a change but I'm personally more delighted with the internal change. Sun's senior management have been on the open source path for a long time, and lots of other staff throughout the company have been with them all the way. But a lot of other people, the majority at first, were too busy with their own jobs to pay attention to the early open source movement.

So when Danese Cooper, who often told me her goal at Sun was to get Java released as open source, would say something provocative, there really could be lively discussions that started with something like: what is she talking about? Open Source software is like Communism, isn't it? It was pretty entertaining.

Danese is long gone from Sun, but she is celebrating today with this timeline in her blog.

And wow, have times changed. Everyone, really everyone I know, within Sun gets it now. Schwartz and the rest of his team are effective communicators. No more fear and confusion, just a lot of positive energy and excitement.

Grabbing Opportunities
One of my interns, Sonya Barry, has started the assignment that I thought would be most interesting when I wrote the job description: to pick a java.net project of personal interest to her, try to join it and make a contribution, write about the experience, identify any obstacles along the way, and work with the infrastructure or community leaders teams, as appropriate, to remove the obstacles.

java.net is a site for collaboration, so we wanted to run an experiment to see just how easy or hard it is for a random developer to come and collaborate. The java.net Editors decided that Sonya's experience could best be shared through a new blog.

The project she is working on is Mifos and I am sooooo jealous. I've been a fan of MicroFinance since reading The Price of a Dream : The Story of the Grameen Bank, by David Bornstein many years ago. Mifos is in fact a project of the Grameen Technology Center. What could be more cool - microfinance plus open source?

extra intern candidates
I have filled both my intern reqs!

Thank You LinkedIn. This is the first time I've seriously used linkedin for anything other than keeping track of friends who switch companies and/or change their email addresses. I did not use my extended network on linkedin, though now that I think about it perhaps I should have... But what I did do produced 6-8 resumes, most of them good, and including the two interns that I have hired, both from Mills College. Did you know you can export your contacts list from linkedin? So that is what I did: exported my direct contacts and sent them all the same email via bcc. Ellen Spertus forwarded my mail to a grad student candidate, who has accepted the offer, and she in turn forwarded it to an undergrad student candidate, who accepted the offer for the undergrad intern job.

Two candidates that I did not get to interview in person, though I would have if things had spilled over into January, you might consider if you have a need for a part-time intern during school, full time during the summer.

They are Son Pham, a senior at SJSU graduating December 2006, with work experience at four different companies and a long list of language and technology skills; and Khanh Nguyen, a MS/CS student (May, 2007) also at SJSU, who has some open source experience.

My recruiter only sent me four resumes directly, but she was very helpful when it came to generating the offer and associated adminsitrivia. And she did indirectly generate a few resumes more from job boards where the req was posted at local universities. Overall I only got sixteen resumes, and screened maybe a dozen, but I'm very happy to have hired two.