Older blog entries for cinamod (starting at number 119)

An informal WSOP sociology survey

A big hello to all the ladies in the crowd, especially to those of you who have applied to GNOME's Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP).

For Google's Summer of Code program (GSoC), about 180 candidates applied to have their proposals sponsored. All of the candidates were men. Chris Ball has informed me that the same order of magnitude of women have applied thus far for WSOP, and there's still another week left to accept applications. A lot of the applicants are quite qualified (a large number of CS PhDs applied, for instance) and the general quality of the applications and applicants has been astoundingly good.

So, I have a question for you: why? Why did you apply to WSOP? Why didn't you apply to GSoC?

There seem to be a lot of really qualified women in this group, and it stands to reason that some women candidates would have been accepted in the GSoC pool (perhaps even 50:50, just going by the total number of applicants). The WSOP seems to me to have some major strikes going against it:

• WSOP's payoff is less ($3000 vs. $4500)
• WSOP's number of advertized positions is less (3) than the general SoC allotment (20)
• WSOP was advertized when a lot of North American schools have their summer recess, where SoC was advertized while students were still in class
• On top of that, I have to imagine that GSoC was advertized more broadly than WSOP
• GSoC was open to both men and women, and WSOP is open only to women (AbiWord got some decent female candidates, for instance)

The projects don't differ substantially in terms of size, scope, complexity, or requisite skills.

From these talking points, it stands to reason that there should be fewer applicants (and perhaps even fewer qualified applicants) in WSOP than GSoC. But the evidence hasn't borne out that way. There's probably some "eureka" thing going on here, and I'd like to find out what that is. It's something to understand and act on, unlike Murray's "we're doing so badly, we should try anything just so we don't look like we're doing nothing"[1] proposal. I'm interested in ensuring that GNOME offers equality of opportunity to all, and your answers will help me understand what the community is doing right and what we're doing wrong.

So, if you are a WSOP applicant, would you be so kind as to email domlachowicz <at> gmail dot com with your experience or opinions? I'd love to hear them, and will pass them on to the appropriate people. Better still, if the WSOP program would like to survey their applicants in a more formal way, that would be much more productive.

And for the record, I don't want to hear conjecture from non-applicants. I want this "straight from the horse's mouth", so to speak. Consider this to be a sociological survey.

[1] Citation needed. GNOME's mailing list archives recently got nuked, and part of the May foundation-list "Code of Conduct" thread is missing.

It's not ultimate frisbee until:

• You have a welt on your left forearm that's obscuring 1/2 of it
• You've broken a finger on your left hand
• You've just barely not sprained your left ankle doing so

And your team still loses. Today's lesson learned: leave the left half of your body home before playing a "non-contact" sport. Oh well, I'll be on an I.V. of Gatorade and Ibuprofen on my couch for a little while if anyone needs me...

Google SoC stats:

• AbiWord: 5 projects accepted
• OpenOffice.org: 6 projects accepted

Take that, beotch!

Oh wait, OOo has how many full-time employees working at how many companies?

/me hides his head back in the sand... world domination will have to wait another year, I suppose

New Hobby

I went hiking with Shashank today. We climbed Mount Monadnock at a breakneck pace. I was impressed with our pace, since I hadn't ever really been hiking and it was his first time of the season. The weather was nice and cool for our ascent, but started pouring during our descent, making it really hard to get good footing on the rock faces.

I can't wait to try out some more difficult trails in another few weeks. I've posted pictures on my gallery.

Dobey, that's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.

I was tempted to respond to Paul Bogdanor's Top 100 Chomsky Lies collection (especially to the "10 Lies About the War on Terror" section), but then thought better of it. Never argue with an idiot; He'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

I hooked up support for XInclude in librsvg today (without support for the XPointer attribute). I've also been talking with Peter Moulder from Inkscape team. It seems that they forked the libcroco CSS2 engine a while ago in order to improve its selection engine. Libcroco's selector is sub-optimal now, in that it needs to operate on a libxml2 DOM tree rather than the DOM-like trees that Inkscape and Librsvg use internally. Inkscape's version corrects this, and we're working on getting the trees merged, thus eliminating the fork. Hopefully we'll get this straightened out soon, so that librsvg 2.16 will have really good CSS2 support.

librsvg progress

Recently, some people have been bugging me to get external linking working. It seems that they want to use librsvg + SVG templates in the pre-press business (which would have never been possible without the hotness that is Cairo, I might add).

To help these folks out (and make a few quick $$ while I'm at it), I've cooked up basic support for the xml-stylesheet standard, external entities and the CSS @import statement. Next on my list is to support a subset of the XInclude standard, and things should be peachy. I'm sure that I screwed up somewhere, so I'd appreciate if people would try this out and let me know what breaks.

For the icon theme authors in the audience, this means that the next version of GNOME will support the same sort of templating features that those pre-press guys wanted. You'll be able to share stylesheets between icons and be able to share SVG snippets between icons (eg. include the same SVG code that draws the "document" in all of your mime-type icons). This should hopefully make it easier to create, modify and parameterize your icon themes. Enjoy!

Just as a friendly reminder, there's a belated Gnome 2.14 release party in the Boston area tomorrow night @ 7ish. Relevant info in Luis' email to boston-social-list. If you get there early, try to reserve a few pool tables near the back.

Phillip,

You do know that the "P" is "Pthreads" expands out to "POSIX" which then expands to "portable", right? That Cygnus/RedHat has had a port of Pthreads to Win32 for 7 years (almost to the day) now, and it's just as complete and correct as any *NIX implementation? That Tor wants to deprecate GThread-win32 in favor of Pthread, because Pthread's implementation is more robust and correct than GThread will ever be? And that using an AsyncWorker package that requires a main loop to be running is not all that different from requiring threading inside of your library (you're just letting the equivalent of "select()" do context swapping for you instead of the kernel's scheduler, without all of the benefits of proper thread conditionals and whatnot)?

That's not to say that Tor isn't a hero, which he is. But calling the portable threads standard not-portable is dangerously incorrect. Pthread is what GThread aspires to be, and why (IMO) GThread is redundant. Pthread is the portable thread library wrapper/implementation around proprietary threading APIs. And it works properly on Win32.