Accidentally in Code

Author: Cate

  • Democamp 12

    Monday was Democamp 12, I heard about it in the morning and managed to get a ticket (someone dropped out). It was really a great evening; I met some really cool people and won a model plane.

    Events: Betidings and Twegather

    First up presenting was Betidings. The concept is that you have a calendar of events that you’re interested in, and you can follow other people and events they add to their calendar will show up for you as well. So with very little effort I now have a schedule of events in Ottawa and I can see what days I’m free and what interest me. The downside – I was living in contented ignorance about the Girl Geek Dinner on Monday, and now I’m gutted that I’m missing it! I think it’s worth checking out, you can see what I’m interested in here.

    This is still in the very early stages and is more of a proof of concept than a fully fledged application but I think it’s worth a go – the more data there the more useful it will be. And it’s a nice way to share stuff you’re interested in without forcing it on people. I guess it could potentially be for events what Twitter is for ideas and content. Not sure everyone got this though – one jerk said the user interface sucked. Not quite in the spirit of democamp! The UI isn’t fully there yet and I’m not a big fan of the colorscheme but they’re actively looking for feedback and welcome any comments to @betidings.

    Twegather (not yet public) was created through TeamCamp – read about it here. It’s an event system using Twitter, you’ll be able to create an event using @WhoWantsToGo.

    Crazy Planes

    The planes were what I was talking about in this tweet. A full article on it is this one, by the lovely @loudandskittish. I thought these were awesome because to me they illustrate the programmer mindset applied to something not-programming. I’m definitely going to be taking mine (and hopefully a few more) to my Holiday Science Lecture in December!

    Twitter Procrastination Tool: BattleTwip

    This is kinda cute! Battleship on Twitter, played against everyone. Created by 76Design, you can follow @battletwip and play via Twitter when the next game starts. They also have a really awesome looking web interface which we saw a preview of, but as far as I can find it’s not up yet.

    Advertising: Shiny Ads

    Shiny ads is an alternative to Google Adsense. It allows you to attract your own advertisers, gives them the tools to make their ad or upload it and then you can approve it (or not) and earn a much better rate for click-through. Wasn’t so relevant to democamp – although most people had websites, they seem to use them to either promote their (non ad-based-web-) business or personal brand.

    Overall

    Great experience, great people, great opportunity to interact with the Ottawa tech community and it’s nice to see what’s up and coming. I love the vibrant tech scene here! Can’t wait for democamp 13 – wonder if I could present my graphs…?

  • Inspiration

    I’m having a slightly crazy week. On Monday, I went to democamp (this was really great and I met some really cool people – I’ll write more about it later). Tuesday, uOttawa WISE had a talk from Dr Rekha Mehta (really good – great turnout).

    Yesterday was not so great. I had my best TA session yet (last week I wasn’t feeling well and got a little flustered and confused by pseudo code in French – my answer sheet was in English). We’ve moved onto Visual Basic so apart from a bizarre VB error (it was appending the numbers rather than adding them for some reason – breaking the code up into small instructions fixed it) it went well. I worry about how good a TA I am in French, but I had a queue at the end of class and my office hour lasted two and a half hours, so I hope if they’re talking to me I’m doing OK! But yesterday I also had something occur (well, actually it occurred on Monday but I did not realize until yesterday morning) which had me hopping mad. I wish I could write about it here, but that would be inadvisable. Suffice to say, I’ve been fairly down on the level of unionization at the university – I’m not a fan of unions. I’m starting to realize why there are so many, though, as one begets another. I doubt that the problem of excessive unionization is one that will be solved by more unionization but worry that it may be the only way.

    Anyway, this morning I read this post by Penelope Trunk. It gave me some needed perspective. Yes this event was disrespectful and wasteful of my time but it’s not a catastrophe. It’s frustrating, but expending my energy on getting frustrated just wastes it. I realize the irony of linking to that post – about why the hell not share – in relation to something that I’m not revealing the details of, but I’ve evaluated the worst case scenario  and decided against it.

    I doubt I’m alone in having these days where I wake up and feel overwhelmed at what’s built up over the course of the week. Of resenting the fact that there’s things I did not get done, mostly as a result of other people’s disorganization. Fed up of feeling like my primary function is compensating for other people’s stupidity/disorganization/mistakes/apathy/arrogance. Wondering if “work with people who are competent and respectful” is an impossible dream – I do work with people who are more than competent and very lovely, but the bad experience cloud things and makes me temporarily irrational. So – here’s a few inspirational things I’ve come accross and saved for just such occasions.

    This series – Find Your Strongest Life – in the Huffington Post is awesome. I wrote more about it in this post.

    Penelope Trunk again, this time on having more self-discipline. Apparently, it snowballs, so get one area of your life in order and others will follow.

    A long, but brilliant and fascinating article about a longitudinal study of some Harvard students who were followed throughout their lives. The different stories of these people and what happened to them are fascinating.

    If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s last lecture on Achieving your Childhood Dreams – find an hour to watch it. This is honestly one of the best, most inspiring and profoundly moving presentations I’ve ever seen.

    What inspires you?

  • Spammers etc.

    I got another irrelevant @ message. The content of this one was a link to … you knew where I was going with that. I don’t need to say it! Check out the graph for the originator – @BaileyWolfeaem:

    @BaileyWolfeaem's Twitter Conversation Network
    @BaileyWolfeaem's Twitter Conversation Network

    Again, lots of one way links to “normal” Twitter uses (who have reciprocal conversations). the graph is huge (goes way off the screen) and quite sparsely connected.

    Another spammer, this one better disguised, brought to my attention by @smiffy:

    How amusing. I have just been followed by what looks like a ‘bot. The funny bit is that half of the ‘bot’s followers are ‘bots themselves.

    So here is @tina_revers:

    @tina_revers's Twitter Conversation Graph
    @tina_revers's Twitter Conversation Graph

    Again, the one way links and a fairly small graph. Obviously for this spammer what I really want to graph are who’s following who – I have a theory that there is a clique of bots all following one another and spewing out spam – but this is difficult because of the way the API works and the limitations on calls. I’m working on it, though!

    Finally, below is the graph for @connectcreators – I don’t think they’re a spammer, in fact what they’re doing looks like a good initiative but I do think they need to “connect” more!

    @connectcreators Twitter Conversation Network
    @connectcreators Twitter Conversation Network

  • @ Message Spam

    I used Twitter’s new “Report as Spam” feature today for the first time, after I got a bizarre @ message from @billy_Napper_ (Following 0, 0 Followers) about the top 10 hosting sites. I don’t pretend to know all the different kinds of spam on Twitter, but there are those spammers that follow you in order to get you to follow back and click on their links (I talked about them in this post) and then there are the kind that send you unwanted @ messages.

    So – I graphed him! See below:

    @billy_Napper_'s Twitter Conversation Network (spammer)
    @billy_Napper_'s Twitter Conversation Network (spammer)

    Notice the one way links (purple) and the disjointed network (although I’m surprised it’s not more disjointed). The graph is also large relative to the number of people he’s following/being followed by.

  • Week in Brief

    Goals for this week were:

    • Next Twitter Visualization (super excited about this)
    • CA Project outline
    • Read 5 papers
    • Marking :’(
    • Move ToDo Lists over to Remember The Milk
    • Write more on thesis, get to the point where papers can be integrated
    • Write survey for other project (more soon!)
    • 3 blog posts

    I also:

    • Worked on next week’s WISE event
    • Got a page of my website mostly done
    • Annoyed prof by coding my assignment in Haskell
    • Had to redo part of my assignment, not in Haskell (really annoyed about this)
    • Played with Adobe’s Flex Builder 3
    • Moved onto Adobe Flash builder 4
    • Hated both of them, hence lack of new Viz (they are buggy with next to no error reporting. I’ve already crashed Flash builder twice).
    • Applied for Curriculum Development again
    • Submitted the abstract for a presentation I’m giving October 30th.

    It’s really been a frustrating week with things coming up and needing to be done (like redoing the question in my assignment) and taking longer than expected (Flex/Flash Builder, marking – tried it on both Macs before I discovered that I had to use a Windows PC for the macros in the marking sheet to work – which meant Sunday at school). I’m loving Remember the Milk, though!

    For this week:

    • Write more on thesis
    • Create slides for presentation
    • CA Project plan (need to find out what this entails)
    • WISE event
    • Write survey for other project
    • Keep working on Twitter Viz, maybe look for a new viz toolkit.

  • Awesome Quote from Clay Shirky

    Clay Shirky - Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans
    Clay Shirky – Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans

    Gives you something to think about, huh? This stuff that’s so natural to us is new and game changing. Who knows what will be different in 5 years time? I can’t wait.

  • Effectiveness, not Efficiency

    Someone once described me as “scarily efficient”. I have to say, I took it as a huge compliment. However after reading The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss – Amazon) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R Covey – Amazon) I’ve been focusing more on Effectiveness. There’s an important distinction. You can be efficient at doing trivial things, effectiveness is focusing your energy on things that will allow you to achieve the most important things.

    One of my friends was talking to me this evening about how she’s not achieving what she wants to, and about how she feels like having a personal life eats into her “work time”. I hope I gave her some reasonable advice, so I’m going to reproduce it here.

    1. Get Some Perspective

    Read The 4-Hour Work Week and 7 Habits (Amazon) and learn the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Think about the things that you do that are efficient, rather than effective, and whether it’s possible to eliminate them.

    2. Don’t be Overwhelmed

    My friend has big problems keeping up with her RSS feeds. But if you’re overwhelmed to the point where you’re not reading anything, you’re not keeping up with what’s important. Incidentally, if you’re getting more articles than you can read a day and you stop trying to keep up, you’re still getting more articles than you can read a day and ultimately it won’t take long before you’ve got more than you’ll ever catch up with. Don’t just declare “RSS bankruptcy” – eliminate ruthlessly and keep just the important feeds. Learn to skim – if you start reading something and it’s not interesting, or relevant enough,  don’t waste your time reading to the end – move onto the next thing.

    3. Set Manageable Goals

    If you have a full time job and work 50-60 hours a week are you really going to spend your weekend reading an entire text book? I really hope not! Get a proper todo-list manager (I’m liking Remember The Milk) and make some lists. Set repeating tasks that are manageable. Manageable is key, because once you get behind you probably won’t be able to catch up. I feel that a backlog of a week’s daily repeating tasks should be able to be cleared in one day focused on them – but that’s not a scientific measurement.  Also, as a grad student my schedule is somewhat different.

    A really useful aspect of a todo list, is if you get home feeling drained knowing you should do something productive but incapable of deciding what – the todo list will decide for you. Do it, and you’ve achieved something more than just watching TV. Consider the warm glow this gives you a gift. I do this when I’m feeling overwhelmed, just pick the top-priority task of the list. Or pick an easy “repeating” task to warm up and gear me up to being productive.

    4. Put Those Goals in Public

    I’m finding my Week in Brief really helpful. I put my goals in public and that makes me accountable. I also evaluate what my high level goals for the week are. As a graduate student, I only answer to my supervisor but he’s just concerned that I’m making progress – he doesn’t prescribe what that progress should be. Once I’ve written the list for the coming week I can evaluate how the tasks I’ve set myself fall into my “roles” (grad student, TA, blogger, President of WISE). At the end of the week when I evaluate what I’ve checked off and what I haven’t managed, I can see whether I’ve devoted too much time to one “role” at the expense of another, and when I look at what I have managed I can take a moment to be proud of what I have achieved this week. A Masters Thesis is this big, long-off goal, but I know that if I chip away at it week in week out, I’ll get there.

    If you don’t want to announce your todo list on your blog, you can always share it with a friend and get them to motivate you!

    5. Focus on What’s Important

    Now you’ve got your life in order, you need to stop it getting out of hand again! New opportunities, people, and activities are great but do they help you achieve your longer-term goals or distract you from them? For instance, I get really drained by people who enjoy an argument. Not, as in, a good debate, but deliberately taking a (relatively unimportant) point of contention and making it into a time consuming argument which just leaves me frustrated and bored. One of my friends really enjoys these, but after I finished one the other day with “I’m going to go and have a more productive conversation with a brick wall” we’ve agreed that he’ll stop having them with me.

    6. It’s not All or Nothing

    Finding a degree of balance in your life is hard, and there’s debate on whether or not it’s a good idea (I wrote more about my personal findings on happiness in this post). But I really don’t believe that having a boyfriend or girlfriend need negatively impact your professional life. My boyfriend is incredibly supportive with everything I do for WISE, and honestly I wouldn’t have achieved as much there without his advice and support. He’s President of IGADI (CS Grad Association), and I encouraged him to go for that. He wasn’t wild about me going to China, but he supported me in it (and never said “I told you so” when I got frustrated). I’ve dated more than my share of idiots and possessives, but my experience in a stable and balanced relationship is that we build each other up and achieve more.

    7. It’s OK not to be Super-Human

    I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness lately and it’s really insightful. Losing control did make me miserable, and I’ve realized that when I imagine the future it’s one where I sleep a maximum of 4 hours a night (I think I’m fairly productive, but in my imagined future I achieve new, unimagined levels of productivity and there are never unforseen setbacks). I’m starting to try to imagine the future in a more rational, balanced way. I probably won’t become an uber-productive cyborg, but that’s OK. I expect uber-productive cyborgs don’t have that many friends, anyway.

  • Seminar Presentation Abstract

    I’m giving a presentation at Carleton for my Seminar course on October 30th. Title and abstract is below – slides coming soon!

    Title: Conversation 2.0: Twitter

    Abstract: The advent of Web 2.0 changed the internet. It went from an information medium to a communication medium. Recent developments have made that communication increasingly real-time. Services like Facebook and Twitter have made it possible to passively monitor real-time updates on your friends, whilst Google’s recently released Wave service aims to reinvent email – and make it more real-time. These changes have had a very real effect on the way we interact – with each other, with brands, our political system, and with the press. The presentation will discuss what Twitter is and its effects. There will also be a demonstration of how we can graph users “conversation networks” and the conclusions we can draw from them.

  • Mycrocosm

    Last month, I read a paper on Mycrocosm – briefly a site that facilitates “microblogging through stats”. So for the last month I’ve tracked everything I drank, see the graph linked below.

    Drinks

    So – big who cares? Well, I found it interesting! For instance, there was a big jump in liquid consumption when our heating broke, and I could see that I tend to drink more when I work from home, etc. However tracking what I drank did not require much thought or effort on my part. A couple of times a day I just go to mycrocosm and add whatever I’ve drank lately – so it was a good (easy) thing to start with.

    If you have a hankering to track things (I do, hence Wakoopa, last.fm, and 43places) or a need to track something it could be useful. For instance, if you were on a diet you could track everything you ate and your motivator could check up on you. You could even track everything you ate as part of a group data set, so if you were trying to lose weight with friends that might be cute. Or, if you’re training for something you could track that. Triathlon training, for example, you want to balance your training between swimming/running/biking and mycrocosm would easily allow you to track that.

    And then people are using it to track more abstract things like “mood”. For the next month, I’ll be tracking “My Day in One Word”. You can see it here: Day in One Word.