One more reason to be paranoid...

As if I wasn't paranoid enough, researchers at University of California in San Diego have given me one more reason: they've developed software that can duplicate physical keys from photographs. Taken at a distance. Or with a cell phone camera. From any angle. This is really scary stuff. I mean, those 80s made for television movies scared me enough - whenever I leave one of my cars for service, or send it through a car wash, I always remove my house keys. Now doing that may not be enough.  Yes, it seems unlikely that everyone will be at risk for this type of attack, but certainly if you are targeted it will be worth someone's effort to observe you and your keys.

Bridge School Benefit fantastic again!

My hubby and I walked to the Shoreline Amphitheater on Saturday afternoon to check out this year's Bridge School Benefit concert. Other than being irked by being required to pay for parking, even though we walked, we had a great time.  The lawn was packed when we arrived, and just got more so after the opening acts started. An odd character in front of me kept insisting on spreading out her blanket over my feet. This was strange, because we were there long before she was and she was actually looking at my feet as she did this (repeatedly, as I pushed it off each time).  After about 20 minutes of this, she seemed to realize that I was not going to move further back (which was actually not possible) and we could then enjoy the show.

Neil Young actually kicked the concert off with a couple of his classic tunes, which was a pleasant start of the evening. The opening bands were pretty good, though I did find Wilco a bit... boring. Death Cab for Cutie really got things going, bringing back sweet memories of watching The O.C. I could not possibly say enough good things about Sarah McLachlan's set, switching back and forth between the guitar and the piano, testing out some new material and playing all of my favorites as well. Nora Jones surprised me with her three woman band and the distinct country tone of her set, which ended up being quite enjoyable! She actually did a Hank Williams song that he wrote the lyrics to, but had never written music for - so she had composed a delightful melody to back it up. It's really amazing how those old lyrics still hold up.

We missed the last two sets, as the smoke from the cigarettes, cigars, pipes and ... pipes was getting to me, so we walked home. Still, had a great time and will be sure to make it again next year!

[I wrote most of this on Sunday but forgot to post! oops!]

Women more likely to give up passwords for chocolate

As always, the user is the weakest link in the security of the system. It is generally much easier to get a password and user name directly from someone with secure or privileged access than it is to hack/crack the system. This is pretty basic social engineering, and something we all need to constantly be on the lookout for. I have been recently cleaning up my email inbox, when I came across this article from April in The Register where their research showed that women are four times as likely to give out a password if chocolate is offered in exchange than men. Four times.  I could never have imagined how something so delicious could so easily be put to such a sinister purpose. *sigh*

Women more likely to give up passwords for chocolate

As always, the user is the weakest link in the security of the system. It is generally much easier to get a password and user name directly from someone with secure or privileged access than it is to hack/crack the system. This is pretty basic social engineering, and something we all need to constantly be on the lookout for. I have been recently cleaning up my email inbox, when I came across this article from April in The Register where their research showed that women are four times as likely to give out a password if chocolate is offered in exchange than men. Four times.  I could never have imagined how something so delicious could so easily be put to such a sinister purpose. *sigh*

Welcome to Avany Llyse

I now have an third niece, bringing my total nieces and nephews to 11.  I've now seen a bunch of pictures of her, and all 8 pounds 3 ounces are as cute as can be! I can't wait to meet her in person. :-)

Look for me in Babes of Hollywood!

So, I got an email (well, several, actually) from my friend Doug this week about a fund raising show he is producing at his daughter's high school, Presentation High School. They are doing Babes in Hollywood: The Music of Garland and Rooney.  I was taking a break from performing, but, as always, after a couple months off, I start reading the audition announcements again... I saw a lot of great shows, but they either conflicted too much with ski season, or my grandmother's birthday, or upcoming friend's wedding, etc. Then I looked at this show - we get a break from rehearsal for Thanksgiving and Winter break, and perform in early January. So, I decided on Tuesday that I'd audition on Wednesday.

That didn't give me much time to prepare, but I quickly updated my resume, grabbed a head shot, listened to the few Garland tracks I have on my iPod a few times, and ran through my traditional audition song, "Turn Back O' Man" (Godspell), a few times. The ending was rusty, I haven't been making it to the Sun Singers rehearsals or my voice lessons, so I just sang it on the way down in the car and hoped the notes would be there...

It was quite a comfortable audition environment, with the director & producer on stage with me and the piano player, making it a bit easier to focus and not think about all the other auditioners sitting in the house. I was nervous, but I have sung "Turn Back O' Man" hundreds of times (it was my "go-to" audition piece long before I ever played the role of Sonia in Godspell, even though I didn't use it as an audition piece for Godspell, so it was just luck I got that part).  It all came back and I hit the high ending note - all in my chest/belt voice!

Then the director asked me, just like he'd asked everyone else, to sing Garland's "Over the Rainbow", that's when I got really nervous! What key would it be in? Where will my break be in this song? Will this stupid cold I just can't seem to get rid of screw this up?  Do I sing it hopefully like in Wizard of OZ or despondently like the tracks of Garland on my iPod? I did have to bounce between my head & chest voice, but I think it went okay. I went for the despondent ending.

The dance audition was all simple things, like pivot-turns and grapevines, so I actually did well.  As I was leaving, I asked the director when we would hear about casting decisions, and he simply told me I was cast and he'd see me at the first rehearsal. I can't wait!

Fall harvest

This has been my first year trying my hand at gardening, and I've learned quite a lot! First, dwarf basil is a pain to harvest - it takes forever to pull off enough leaves for pasta!  I also discovered that I love fresh tomatoes and green beans, and fresh herbs are delightful.  For my first year I planted Better Boy tomatoes, carrots, beats, okra, broccoli, grean beans, red and yellow bell peppers, Serrano  chilies, jalapeño chillies, Anaheim peppers, "spring" onions, sage, basil, cilantro, rosemary, and thyme. Oh, and mint, but that is growing itself from the neighbors yard. :-)  The beans did fantastically well on the side of the house, and the carrots and beets thrived in a semi-shaded corner of the back yard (I'm thinking about doing a second planting this fall).  The tomatoes did well in the back, as did the Serrano chillies, but the other chillies and peppers suffered a bit - for two reasons I think, not enough afternoon sun and I didn't realize that I was supposed to fertilize them until after they were in the ground a couple of months.  I have *one* okra pod. One. Too much shade and planted a bit too late, I suspect. I'll try that again next year up front.

The broccoli... dear broccoli. One of my favorite vegetables, alas I've been disappointed by my home grown. After combating  a pesky caterpillar/moth with organic pesticide, I finally have florets, but they are flimsy and not firm at all. And they don't taste like what I'm used to getting from the store. They took so long to grow, planted in May in a semi-shaded spot, it's really disappointing.  I got the seed packet for free as a give-a-way at a conference, though, so maybe next year I should do some actual research into what seeds I choose. I didn't realize last spring that there were actual websites with seed reviews on them, but of course, though, there is a website for everything now.

Next year the peppers and chillies will get a sunnier spot. The tomatoes will probably go in the same place, I seem to recall it's not good to plant other things where tomatoes were, except maybe beets. Perhaps that's where I'll do my winter planting of beets (well, after the tomatoes have stopped producing). It is very nice living in a relatively mild climate, though I am hoping we will get a lot more rain this year.

Additionally, I grew my marigolds from seed this year. They are like giant marigold bushes now, getting a bit rangy so I'm not sure how much longer they'll get to stay. Oh, yeah, grew poppies, too. Now I think we'll always have poppies, as they had self seeded before I pulled them up.

My "spring" onions are well on their way to becoming full onions, I think. I was not expecting them to do that well! The chives I planted at the same time never even sprouted, but I have spring onions coming out my ears! 

There is something very rewarding about eating our own vegetables, fresh picked/pulled moments before cooking. Now, have I saved any money with all these home grown things? Once I take into account water, fertilizer and time, certainly not. I'll do it again next year all the same. :-)

GHC08: Final Night

What a fantastic conference this has been. Unlike many other conferences I've attended, I seem to have no downtime. I'm constantly networking, attending sessions, blogging... and this year, fighting an uncooperative dying laptop. The energy here is fantastic, the balance of technical talks with "soft skills" is perfect. I only wish we all had more time together, that the sessions were longer, and the breaks were longer (for more networking). Of course, that would only be possible if the conference itself were longer... but a woman can dream, can't she?

I staffed the Sun booth yesterday morning, fielding all sorts of questions on OpenSolaris, Solaris Security, types of jobs we do at Sun, opportunities for students and just general questions about what Sun does. I enjoy what I do here, so getting an opportunity to talk about it was a true pleasure. If I missed any of you at the booth, please send me an email or drop me a comment here.

While here, I got to meet so many students, I think I even met all of the students and faculty from Purdue as well. I really enjoy hearing about the new research and areas of focus.  The conference is only 50% students, though, so I also met so many inspiring career women.

Tonight Sun hosted a small private reception for the Sun employees and some outstanding women we all met throughout the conference. It was great to talk more in depth with these women, but again it seemed we just did not have enough time as we all rushed off for dinner provided by Google and Microsoft. Yum!

In addition to healthy, delicious food and cute t-shirts (Microsoft's t-shirts being made from bamboo and organic cotton - yay, Microsoft!) we again had DANCING! Imagine hundreds of women (and about 5 men) line dancing. Truly a site to behold. Unfortunately, I didn't bring the cable for my camera, but hopefully photos will be uploaded soon. It was quite a site to see!

Now I'm tired and need to start sorting through my stuff to see what I can fit in my suitcase. All the giveaways in the bag this year were really good, and anything folks didn't want someone has been collecting to give to charity.

Until next year :-)

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Keynote: Mary Lou Jepsen: unofficial blog

Sleeping has been difficult here, I think it's the altitude (and staying up too late trying to get this laptop to cooperate....), but I was very glad I drug myself out of bed this morning to make the Keynote.

I wasn't the official blogger for this session, but got so much out of it I wanted to add more to Kate's entry.  Ms. Jepsen was such an inspiring speaker - describing how she started a completely different adventure (it's hard to describe One Laptop Per Child as just a career) based on her strong desire to make a difference.  She leveraged her expertise in optics to come up with an amazing new monitor for the OLPCs - one that uses low power, is normally just black & white (with a higher power consumption mode that uses a backlight and color as an option), and has the CPU behind it (so your lap doesn't get hot!).

I just love seeing when someone just follows their dream and finds success. It's inspiration for all of us!

GHC08: Unofficial blog: The Imposter Panel

I'm sitting in the Imposter Panel, though not an official blogger for this particular session, I am just overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in here. It's great to know thta I'm clearly not the only one that often feels like an imposter in various technical situations. These women on the panel, in addition to all being very funny, are all very insightful.  They are all so very accomplished, yet they al feel like (or have felt like) imposters at one time or another.

Dr. Williams made a great comment: "I am the creator of my own experience."

Essentially, nobody ever told her she was an imposter, she was telling herself she was. So, she decided to stop telling herself that, and her confidence gets better & better every day.

The entire panel was wonderful - I just wish there were more hours in the day to attend sessions at Grace Hopper. They all seem to end too soon.

My computer woes have gotten worse and worse - now my networking driver is failing to attach, the wired connection is working, so I assume this is an additional hardware issue. Oh, and the CPU is throwing errors now, too. So, that brand new laptop has become a very expensive, slow to boot, word processor (does "vi" count as word processing  software?).  One of the fanstastic Sun recruiters lent me her laptop, and I ran off to the imposter session, desperate to upload my last blog from my thumb drive.  Alas, this session was so crowded, I couldn't obtain an IP address! But, small wonders keep happening at this converence - a wonderful woman sitting next to me offered me her laptop, where I'm blogging from right now.

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Women in the Brave New World of Open Source

This was my first time speaking at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and it was so exciting! I had just met most of the other panelists yesterday (didn't meet Stormy Peters until lunch today), and found it was so cool to find all the things we had in common and just as interestingly, all the differences we had in experiences, opinions and careers. The panel went really well - the more we talked, the more ideas we all had that we wanted to share. It was great sharing my eperiences with working on OpenSolaris with others, particularly the students. I hope between the OpenSolaris bite-sized bugs, the Linux "janitorial" work and the Google Summer of Code that we will gain many new women in the world of open source after this conference.  I wish we'd had more time, and do hope to hear more from the students that were there as well as the other women in industry. Together we can learn and discover more in the world of computing. More later...

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Women in the Brave New World of Open Source

This was my first time speaking at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and it was so exciting! I had just met most of the other panelists yesterday (didn't meet Stormy Peters until lunch today), and found it was so cool to find all the things we had in common and just as interestingly, all the differences we had in experiences, opinions and careers. The panel went really well - the more we talked, the more ideas we all had that we wanted to share. It was great sharing my eperiences with working on OpenSolaris with others, particularly the students. I hope between the OpenSolaris bite-sized bugs, the Linux "janitorial" work and the Google Summer of Code that we will gain many new women in the world of open source after this conference.  I wish we'd had more time, and do hope to hear more from the students that were there as well as the other women in industry. Together we can learn and discover more in the world of computing. More later...

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Technical Women

Caroline Simard (Anita Borg Institute of Technology) and Andrea Henderson (CalState Northridge) presented a new study done by ABI and the Clayman Institute at Stanford University on men and women in the high tech industry in the Silicon Valley at 7 hight tech companies.

Ms. Simard started off the presentation with the broad statement that diversity is good for business and social tasks, which has been backed up by research study after research study.  And while it has been shown that women control 80% of the consumer spending, men are still designing 90% of technical products.  More frighteningly, women only make up 13% of the board of directors of Fortune 500 companies and less than 5% of the executives.

The research study they did found that men are more likely to be in a senior postion than women (24% vs 10%), even though men and women surveyed had nearly the same distribution of higher level degrees.

Ms. Henderson then continued the talk to let us know that women are more likely to make decisions like delaying having children (30% of women vs 18% of men) in order to advance their careers, or forgo having children all together (9% of women vs 3.5% of men).  Another odd statistic out of this study was that the majority of women in high tech careers also have a partner in high tech (68.5%).

The presentation then went on to perceptions of success, covering what men and women considered to be the top attributes of success and then self assessment of how many of those attributes they think they have. One big noted attribute is that women believe you must work long hours in order to be successful (a belief that the men in the survey did not agree with), but don't believe they can meet those needs. Such self discrepencies can actually be a big barrier to success all on its own.

Women in high tech companies really want to see more investment by the company in corporate development on the job (as opposed to relying on the employee to do it in their "spare time"), make mentoring a part of the corporate culture and fix the wage gap.  Ms. Simard notes that it is just not true that women don't care about financial rewards and being paid fairly for their work. Their survey showed that women care just as much about health benefits, financial rewards and salary as their male counterparts.

The survey showed that some of the most important things to high tech women was for the company to invest in professional development on the job, mentoring to be a part of the corporate culture and to see the wage gap corrected.

Discussion came around one of my favorite books, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Apparently the authors did a follow up study and discovered that women who negotiated were more likely to be seen in a negative light by both men and women. Ms. Henderson & Ms. Simard noted that there was a lot of research finding that gender bias is very ingraned in both men and women, so as women we actually need to work at this ourselves and make sure we are aware when we are making such judgements.  Ms. Simard noted that women who are most successful are able to "tune" their assertiveness depending on the situation and whom they are talking to.

Valerie Fenwick
 

GHC08: Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Technical Women

Caroline Simard (Anita Borg Institute of Technology) and Andrea Henderson (CalState Northridge) presented a new study done by ABI and the Clayman Institute at Stanford University on men and women in the high tech industry in the Silicon Valley at 7 hight tech companies.

Ms. Simard started off the presentation with the broad statement that diversity is good for business and social tasks, which has been backed up by research study after research study.  And while it has been shown that women control 80% of the consumer spending, men are still designing 90% of technical products.  More frighteningly, women only make up 13% of the board of directors of Fortune 500 companies and less than 5% of the executives.

The research study they did found that men are more likely to be in a senior postion than women (24% vs 10%), even though men and women surveyed had nearly the same distribution of higher level degrees.

Ms. Henderson then continued the talk to let us know that women are more likely to make decisions like delaying having children (30% of women vs 18% of men) in order to advance their careers, or forgo having children all together (9% of women vs 3.5% of men).  Another odd statistic out of this study was that the majority of women in high tech careers also have a partner in high tech (68.5%).

The presentation then went on to perceptions of success, covering what men and women considered to be the top attributes of success and then self assessment of how many of those attributes they think they have. One big noted attribute is that women believe you must work long hours in order to be successful (a belief that the men in the survey did not agree with), but don't believe they can meet those needs. Such self discrepencies can actually be a big barrier to success all on its own.

Women in high tech companies really want to see more investment by the company in corporate development on the job (as opposed to relying on the employee to do it in their "spare time"), make mentoring a part of the corporate culture and fix the wage gap.  Ms. Simard notes that it is just not true that women don't care about financial rewards and being paid fairly for their work. Their survey showed that women care just as much about health benefits, financial rewards and salary as their male counterparts.

The survey showed that some of the most important things to high tech women was for the company to invest in professional development on the job, mentoring to be a part of the corporate culture and to see the wage gap corrected.

Discussion came around one of my favorite books, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Apparently the authors did a follow up study and discovered that women who negotiated were more likely to be seen in a negative light by both men and women. Ms. Henderson & Ms. Simard noted that there was a lot of research finding that gender bias is very ingraned in both men and women, so as women we actually need to work at this ourselves and make sure we are aware when we are making such judgements.  Ms. Simard noted that women who are most successful are able to "tune" their assertiveness depending on the situation and whom they are talking to.

Valerie Fenwick
 

GHC08: Experiences with OLPC Technology in Ghana, West Africa

Suzanne Buchele, from Southwestern University, spoke to us about her experience in Ghana, West Africa with the One Laptop Per Child program.

She started with the background of the pros  for having OLPC in countries where many children don't have electricity or even anything better than a dirt floor in their house.  One of the big pros for this program is to help provide education for young girls, as families can't often afford to educate all of their children - so they tend to only educate boy children.  She also believes this helps bridge the digital divide for incredibly impoverished children.

Ms Buchele then asks, is it really the best use of money for these incredibly poor people, when the laptops, while cheap compared to standard laptops, are far from free - especially when you consider what it takes to deploy them and secure them.  She seems to think that it is, because it's just not possible to train the teachers appropriately in a country where the median age is 25 - and not all of the existing teachers even want to go into those very rural areas. These laptops help to put education directly in the hands of the students, giving them a unique perspective of ownership and pride of taking care of the laptop themselves.

She talked extensively about the current educational realities in Ghana. For example, that students there learn by rote, which means they may know that 9 by 9 is 81, but would have no idea what that means. Same as they may know how to copy a sentence, but they won't be able to tell you what the words mean.  Also, the teachers are grossly under educated or just not available, or there are just not enough classrooms or no classrooms at all.

So, there seem to be real benefits to providing these laptops directly to the children at no cost to their family, which gives the children more direct learning opportunities on their own timeline.

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Awards ceremony and DANCING!

There was no awards banquet this year, as the Grace Hopper conference took a more casual approach to the awards reception. Dinner was served buffet style in advance, which nice as we all got a chance to actually pay attention as awards were given out, instead of attempting to balance between eating & listening to the presenters. I really enjoyed the switch!

I have never seen an awards ceremony with so many heart fealt hugs and ear to ear grins. The wonderful stories told about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg were fascinating to listen to.  It was cool to see a fellow Gaslighter Alum, Elisa Camahort Page, and her colleagues win the Anita Borg Social Impact Award for their work with BlogHer.  I especially liked the acceptance speech from Elaine Weyuker for the Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award.

I was lucky enough to be entertained again by David Garibaldi, who dazzled us as he did 6 foot portraits of both Grace Hopper and Anita Borg in less than 10 minutes each (perfectly coordinated to music).  I saw him last time at the Professinal Business Women of California conference in April.

The evening then turned to dessert and dancing - what a fantastic combination! Though, I will admit, dancing is challenging at altitude! :-)

Valerie Fenwick

GHC08: Getting it Together: Empowering People through Information (Integration)

Laura Haas, from IBM, talked about how we have lots of information - but the problem is it is in lots of places.  There is a big challenge of integrating data so the right data is available to the correct people at the right time - and most importantly in a format they can understand.

This research has been going on for decades, but advances in technology are making easier to find the right information that needs to be collated together. 

She went on to describe how to use search, as well as "was this what you were looking for" type queries to better aggregate the data, and noted the problems with dirty data sets.

There are still a lot of problems to tackle - it still needs human input, and too much expertise to run.

Ms. Haas is very passionate about this subject and has a list as long as her arm of followon work. Definitely seems like there are a lot of opportunities in this area!

Valerie Fenwick

neat workaround for broken harddrive

So, I'm anofficial blogger for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing ... and my laptop hard drive dies. Read errors. Sense errors. Oh, joy. It is a brand new laptop - this being my first real use of it (other than installing Solaris on it, configuring VPN and verifying the system worked).  Jim Hughes, a chief technologist at Sun, had the brilliant suggestion of using the OpenSolaris Live CD we included in all of the bags for everyone here at the Grace Hopper conference. Lo and behold, after an extended boot time, it worked! I'm online again. I can't access my Sun account, since my VPN keys are on the dead hard drive, but I can blog... it's something.  The extended boot time is caused by the Live CD attempting to mount all devices, which includes a dodgey hard drive...

I guess I can facebook too... ;-)

Laptop died!!!!!!

OH NOOOOOO! My harddrive in my brand new laptop just died... disk read error. Awesome. This entry is coming from the cyber cafe - I'll have to see if I can find a laptop to borrow for the other sessions I'm blogging, but I won't be logging into work anymore!

GH08: Future Mobile Technology Empowering Users: Understands, Guides, Decides

This session from Mary Smiley, from Intel's Emerging Technology group, was presenting on new micro technologies that enable all of us to "live large".

Some of the technology she covered were sensors, like the one in the iPhone or iPod Touch that can tell when you tip or shake the device. Some more advanced sensors that seem to be in the pipeline would be able to judge your mood from your body temperature, recognize your voice to determine more quickly if your phone might be stolen, and just check how healthy you are.

Some of their research leverage the Polar heart rate monitor straps and the mobile devices that measure activity to get an overall picture of their health. Clearly their are privacy implications for this, where you would not necessarily want to share all of this information with just anyone, and apparently those are being addressed.

Valerie Fenwick 

GHC08: Fighting Crime using Gunshot Location Systems

This is a very interesting talk on the ShotSpotter technology by Elecia White and Sarah Newman. This technology has been installed in several major cities, helping to solve crimes when the shooter can be pinpointed quickly.  In one example, a sniper shot someone from a roof, and actually stayed on the roof, relaxing and smoking a cigarette - thinking he was out of the expected shooting area.  But, the ShotSpotter technology had pinpointed him and the police were able to make an arrest.

Of course, this technology needs to attempt to differentiate between firecrackers, hammers, backfiring cars and gunshots. The technology takes a first pass at guessing what it was hearing (and gives a level of confidence), but then asks the police dispatcher to make a judgment call on whether police action is required or not.

They find this gets faster and better reporting than actually relying on people calling 911 (as there is a longer delay before they call and only about 50% of gun crimes are called in).  The system isn't perfect, but seems that it can definitely help!

Valerie Fenwick

A great start!

What an adventure getting here to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, with busy shuttles and lots of hustling around.  I'm glad I'm here and have been able to reconnect with women I met last year at the conference, mostly from Sun and from Purdue.

The  poster session was outstanding, as usual, though they seemed closer together or something, so it was sometimes difficult to move down the aisle.  I saw a lot of interesting research on learning techniques and new ways to get students inspired to explore computer science as a career.  I was happy to see a few posters from Purdue's CERIAS lab as well.

Travel is exhausting, though, so I'm off to bed now! Busy day ahead tomorrow!

Valerie Fenwick