It is well-known fact that the realm of computing and programming tend to be very male-dominated. There are lots of discussion as to why it is so, and some people are trying to actively change it. A few months back I received this little story per email that doesn’t explain it, but does use it [...]
For some time, I have been curious about the karma system in Launchpad – the massive infrastructure being erected not only for Ubuntu, but for the F/OSS community in general. The karma system gives “karma points” for actions which the system appreciates, like bug reporting, specification writing, bug fixing and so on. But so far, [...]
Since I came from Læsø [note the Wikipedia entry name in the address bar - not easy to recognize] late Tuesday evening, I have been catching up on my mail. And lots of it. Doing fieldwork in an on-line community means that you’re reading lots and lots and lots of mail. From the various Ubuntu [...]
This afternoon, I went to the launch of the Danish version of the Creative Commons. I’ve discussed the Creative Commons before, but to sum up: It’s a set of new copyright licenses for creative work intended to make it easy for the creator to give other people some rights not currently allowed by standard copyright. [...]
This morning I returned to the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital to do a presentation of our Interaction Design project at their morning meeting. This presentation has been underway for the longest time, mostly due to the fact that these people always seem to be busy, and you have to be patient in order to [...]
In a discussion of what it takes to be “computer literate” – ie. having sufficient computer skills to manage – one slashdot poster noted the following: Just for fun consider this: Computer support technicians and doctors are similar in many ways. They are both supposed to be highly paid, highly trained, highly skilled, and highly [...]
Since most hackers use PGP encryption keys to sign their mail to prove their identity, I decided that I probably should have an encryption key pair to sign my communications in hacker circles. So a few weeks back, while on Easter vacation, I found a nice guide describing the use of PGP (which stands for [...]
In a Slashdot discussion on Open Source Software in the developing countries, the following comment was made by the self-consciously monikered FlyingPig: At the moment software is frequently a tax that poor countries pay to rich countries to be allowed to participate. Poor countries often have weak currencies, but the local cost of goods and [...]
I’ve been reading several books on Interaction Design and how to design usable computing interfaces. I’ve read Alan Cooper’s About Face 2.0 and Klaus Kaasgaard’s Software Design & Usability. The former is a sort of entry-level book to the world of HCI, and it takes the reader through all the various stages of design â?? [...]
In all computer programs, all decision making can eventually be reduced to a question of true or false. And because of this, Boolean expressions – truth values – play a central role in programming. Boolean expressions use relational operators and take primitive types (integers, decimal numbers and single characters) as arguments. The result of boolean [...]