Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

The two women I thought of are Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and Barbara Liskov without whom computing would not be where it is today. They rock.

I use concepts they came up with every day. e.g. The Liskov Substitution Principle: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and needs batteries, it’s probably not a duck. Or for Grace Hopper, compilers and the idea that computing machines could be used for things other than arithmetic (read calculating bomb trajectories).

Some Quotes

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. … they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

– Grace Hopper [more]

It’s much better to go for the thing that’s exciting. But the question of how you know what’s worth working on and what’s not separates someone who’s going to be really good at research and someone who’s not. There’s no prescription. It comes from your own intuition and judgment.

– Barbara Liskov [src]

Check out some of the other posts for Ada Lovelace day at findingada.com

It was the third time I’ve gone to it. It was my first conference and still is my favorite. I got to meet Matz, I gave a lightning talk, I met all sorts of interesting people and I learned a bunch of new things. To quote Matz, MountainWest RubyConfはすばらしかった。

Things to revisit

• Archaeopteryx

• Rails 3

• Rack(1.1.0 in particular)

• Chef(looks better than the last time I poked at it)

• EventMachine

• Yard

New things(to me)

• RVM(rvm looks pretty handy, especially for cross vm library development)

• Ruby-Processing

• Hubris(this might be a neat way to get into Haskell development)

• Mucking about with the binary interfaces(because it is awesome.)

My lightning talk

So I dove into the Twitter API docs and found the pages on creating friendships and reading list members.

I then looked at rest_client’s documentation to see how best to manage the basic auth login, etc and decided to use RestClient::Resource, since it stores some of the config data for you., even though it makes things more complicatted due to needing two separate resources — one for api.twitter.com and one for twitter.com.

It took me ten minutes or so to put it together and test to make sure I didn’t make any stupid mistakes. Cool?

Chicago Deep Dish Pizza — Cooks Illustrated recipe(requires registration, but totally worth it.)

Apple Turnovers — Again a Cooks Illustrated recipe, this time from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

Broiled Salmon — I don’t remember, but I think this mostly came from the America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook, except the mushrooms.

Okonomiyaki(wiki), Hiroshima style(お好み焼き) — Hiroshima style means it has ramen and a fried egg.

I unboxed them and thought about what to do with them.

My chumby guts needs an enclosure, something I am going to wait until I have access to power tools perhaps.

But the arduino provided immediate gratification. Who knew embedded programming could be so easy.

My first arduino sketch (can you guess what it says?):

http://bizcomcult.blogspot.com/ — Musing about multicultural communication etc. I started this while in a class taught be Garr Reynolds, better known as the writer of Presentation Zen.

http://baroquebobcat.blogspot.com/ — my first blog ever, and definitely baroque in some of its sentence structures, stylings. It clearly didn’t last very long, unlike the baroque period, which lasted from the late 16th century through the early 18th(thank you wikipedia).

Some of what I’ve written is rather cringe-worthy, but it is interesting to look back at  it and remember those heady days, playing Starcraft with exchange students, surrounded by Japan. Or, reflecting on my kendo miscommunications.

Later, I packaged it as a gem, because a) I had never built a gem with an executable and b) gems are a great way to share things.

The end result?

http://github.com/baroquebobcat/usdo

It isn’t particularly smart, but I happen to find it funny. It also showed to me how far gem packaging has come. Gemcutter and Jeweler make building and distributing ruby gems freakishly easy. This is especially awesome in light of the recent announcement that gemcutter is going to be the default gems host(though at rubygems.org)

How I put it together

I ran jeweler to create the default directory structure and added a bin dir to it, for the files I wanted to end up in the path.

$ jeweler usdo
cd usdo
mkdir bin

I put my gist from before in the bin directory, and set up git.

Set up my gem info in my Rakefile

#...
Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gem|
  gem.name = "usdo"
  gem.summary = %Q{adds usdo command to ridicule mispellings of sudo}
  gem.description = %Q{...}
  gem.email = "ndh@baroquebobcat.com"
  gem.homepage = "http://github.com/baroquebobcat/usdo"
  gem.authors = ["Nick Howard"]
end

then did the jeweler gem initialization dance

rake version:write
rake gemspec
rake install

Testing it out:

$ usdo -l
----USDO----
    You mispelled sudo
    You can't do anything, you can't even spell sudo
    are you really sure you want to try running
    'sudo -l'????

Now that was working, to send it up for distribution.

Jeweler is awesome and now has gemcutter support. I followed the jeweler README‘s directions on uploading to gemcutter. Which makes pushing your gem as simple as

$ rake gemcutter:release

Awesome.

Check out my code if you want.

Problem: scrubyt
requires the firewatir gem

Hacky Solution: comment out the require

But where you ask?

/lib/scrubyt/core/navigation/agents/firewatir.rb line 1

This works on the current rubyforge version(0.4.1).
Recommended: Or, you could just use the version on github that is fixed(see commit)

grab the files via git or archive from github.com/scrubber/scrubyt

then

cd scrubyt-somehash
rake gem
gem install pkg/scrubyt-0.4.26.gem

Not as nice as using jeweler where you can just `rake install` it, but pretty nifty none the less.