Learning Python by writing a screen scraper

Just for fun I decided to write a tool for work in Python instead of Perl, and I thought I'd describe the process. Partly because other people can be very opaque about how they learn things, and especially how they learn technical things or approach something unfamiliar.

At work, I had a big list of URLs to look through, to check a particular detail of sidebar widget code on each blog.

Originally, I got kind of excited as I browsed this page of twill commands. I installed twill on my laptop and tried out the examples. Wooo! That was so easy! It was like screen scraping with pseudocode. So, without really looking into it any further I figured it would be easy to churn through the few thousand URLs I needed to check. It looked like maybe a day of work, or two if I was floundering around, which is often likely when learning something new.

When I actually sat down to do it, I realized that twill didn't have any control flow commands. So there wasn't a way within twill, fabulous as it seemed, to tell it to go through a list of variables. So I started to try to write it in Python. I went to a few of Seth's informal Python lessons months ago and then paired with Danny a little bit. We wrote a thingie with Django to let people create random Culture names. (Result: I am the Human Sol-Terran Elizabeth Badgerina Karen da'Champions-West. I am currently travelling on a Ship, the ROU Knock Knock, Psychopath Class.) In other words, as of Monday, I could write Hello World in Python, but only if I look at the manual first.

So I wrote pseudocode first, like this:

read in  biglist.txt

for each line in biglist.txt
   split the line into $blogurl, $blogemail

  get that url's http dump
  if it has "OLDCODE" in it
     Write $blogurl, $blogemail to  hasoldcode.logfile
  
  if not
     if it has "NEWCODE" in it
       write $blogurl, $blogemail to hasnewcode.logfile

Pseudocode rocks.

The Python docs made me want to chew my laptop in half. I read them anyway, mostly the string functions but that barely helped. Instead I just brute force googled things like "how do i find a substring in a string with python" which was often helpful if only so that I felt less lonely. It took me a while just to figure out how to concatenate two strings. I kept trying to use a dot, which didn't work!

The most helpful thing was turning up bits of other people's code, the simpler the better, with brief explanations.

The next most helpful thing was cheating by asking Danny, who kindly just said "Oh, do this, import urllib and do f=urllib2.urlopen(blog) and then h= ''.join(f.readlines()) and print h." Testing things out in the interpreter was useful too. The point isn't whether you lift it out of a class, a book, someone else's code, or another person. Just start out with a few lines of something that works. Then, fiddle with it and master it.

But there was no way I could figure out from scratch what to do with the first giant horrible alpha-vomit error that popped up. Danny kindly IM-ed me "try: THINGIE except ValueError:" which I then googled and figured out how to use. Some googling of bits of the error message would have gotten me some useful examples. Here, I may have chickened out and asked for help too soon.

I put my pseudocode into a file as comments. I wrote a file of a few test urls and emails. Then I wrote the program kind of half-assedly a couple of times, piece by piece, only trying to do one thing at a time. It mostly worked. That was the end of Day 1.

In the morning life was much better. Then I rewrote my pseudocode to include all the things I'd forgotten. I threw everything out and started over. Suddenly I felt like I knew what I was doing. A couple of hours later it all worked great.

While I was in that state of knowing-what-I-was-doing and being able to see it all clearly, it was exactly like the point in writing a poem where I know the map ahead. It is knowing the map and how to navigate and having not just the destination but having built a mental image of the entire trip. So, as with going down a road where I've never been before, but have imagined out the map, I feel a sense of the entire poem, all at once. It's a holographic feeling. In that state of mind, I am very happy, and want to work without stopping.

It's funny to talk about such a simple bit of programming that way but that's how it felt. I also knew where I was doing something in an inelegant way, but that it was okay and I'd fix it later.

When it was all working I paused for a bit, then went back and fixed the inelegant bit.

After that, I put in some status messages so I could watch them scroll past with every URL. (A good idea since the error checking is not very thorough.)

Here is the code. I can see more ways to improve it and make it more general. It would be nicer to just use the filename as the scrolling status message, perhaps giving the files names that would look better as they scroll past. There are also stylistic questions like, I know many people would combine

outfile = open("gotsitedown.txt",'a')
outfile.writelines(msg)

into one line, but I couldn't read that again and understand what it meant a month from now, so I tend not to write code that way. Maybe once I'm better at it.

  1 #! /usr/bin/python
  2 import urllib2
  3 
  4 # This reads in a list of urls & emails, comma separated.
  5 # It checks each url for a specific phrase in its HTML 
  6 # and writes the url and email to a log file.
  7 # The status print lines are for fun, to watch it scroll.
  8 
  9 lines = open("biglist.txt",'r').readlines()
 10 for l in lines:
 11  line = l.strip()
 12  try:
 13    (blog,email) = line.split(",")
 14  except ValueError:
 15    continue
 16  try:
 17    f = urllib2.urlopen(blog)
 18    h= ''.join(f.readlines())
 19    if 'NEW BIT OF CODE' in h:
 20       filename = "gotnewcode.txt"
 21       status = "New! "
 22       if 'OLD BIT OF CODE' in h:
 23         filename = "gotbothcodes.txt" # replaces filename!
 24         status = "Mixed up codes: "
 25    elif 'OLD BIT OF CODE' in h:
 26       filename= "gotoldcode.txt"
 27       status = "Old code: "
 28    else:
 29       filename = "gotnocode.txt"
 30       status = "No code here: "
 31    msg = blog + "," + email + "\n"
 32    outfile = open(filename,'a')
 33    outfile.writelines(msg)
 34    print  status + msg
 35 # check for 404 or other not found error
 36  except (urllib2.HTTPError, urllib2.URLError) :
 37    msg = blog + "," + email + "\n"
 38    outfile = open("gotsitedown.txt",'a')
 39    outfile.writelines(msg)
 40    status = "Site down: "
 41    print status + msg

My co-worker Julie was sitting across the table from me doing something maddeningly intricate with Drupal and at the end of the day she agreed with me that it is best to code something the wrong way at least twice in order to understand what you're doing. "If I haven't done it wrong three times, something is wrong."

I wish now that I had written down all the wrong ways, or saved the wrong code, to compare how it improved. One wrong way went like this: instead of writing the 5 different logfiles of blogs with new code, old code, no code, site down, and mixed old and new code, I thought of making directories and writing all the url names to the directory. That was before I thought of putting the emails in a csv file with the urls. Why did it make sense at first? Who knows! It might be a good rule, though. The first think you think of is probably wrong. You can't see a more optimal way until you have walked around in the labyrinth down some possible yet wrong ways.

This WordPress Code Highlighter Plugin might be the inspiration that pushes me finally off of Blogspot and onto WordPress for this blog, so that I can do this super nicely in text and not in an image.

Excite@Home bankruptcy trainwreck continues in slow motion

I cannot believe that I'm still getting legal notices about the Excite@Home bankruptcy and the pay they still owe me from October 2001. For real? Seven years of an utter waste of time and resources. How many lawyers are frittering away their lives and raking in the dough on this bullshit? They gave me most of my money long ago, from when they bounced all our last paychecks.

It stirs up my ire to get these snail mails, sometimes big fat packets of totally pointless legal documents. Some freaking genius should have made a webpage about a million years ago, for creditors (like me) to keep an email contact updated and they'd be able to pay us all that much more in saved postage costs.

Mostly though, I remember surviving the rounds of layoffs, reading Fucked Company every day along with all my co-workers, while then enduring the incredibly wankery company-wide pizza and beer meetings in the "garage" with endless power point slide shows about how great we were doing, that were obvious lies.

And the way they'd do some weird NASCAR event and whoop it up as if that was going to solve all our problems because it was cool.

The one satisfying thing was when they axed a couple of buildings after one brutal layoff, I took a whole lot of the office stuff and furniture they were throwing away and hauled it in my truck to donate it to the nearest elementary school, where second grade teachers fought like tigers over staplers and pairs of scissors. Where is the justice. They were desperate for petty office supplies while five blocks away a bunch of us basically wasted oxygen reading Fucked Company, downloading shit from Napster, and sighing bitterly as we waited for the axe to fall. ^*

There were some nice people at Excite (aka WebCrawler) that I worked with, but man, that company was so clearly going down. It was sad.

Anyway, everyone keep in mind if you need to get riled up, that there's a bunch of really rich bankruptcy lawyers sailing their yachts around and enjoying their home movie theaters, still reaping the rich rewards of the dot-com crash.

^* Note to future employers, actually I am a super hard worker until everyone around me has been laid off and doom is in the air.

Joy of unit testing

(From about 2 weeks ago, late at night)

I was just vaguely napping and realized I was still thinking in my sleep about the php code I had just been writing. Though I barely even know php at all, it wasn't that hard to just guess at it because it was mostly like Perl. My thinking in Perl is a bit stuck. Today with Oblomovka I wrote out what I wanted my program to do, then he started writing tests. At first I didn't get it that the tests didn't run actually in the program. My thinking was inside out. I thought I'd run a bit of code, then run something that tested if it did it right, or that error/die statements would be sprinkled around. But as I saw what Oblomovka was doing it was like a light went on and I felt like everything I've written has been incredibly sloppy! Works fine, tells you if it doesn't work, but was like wearing shoes instead of making a road. Or the other way around.

It was really fun to write the very simple tests and then figure out how to send it the simplest possible thing to fake it out so that the tests would pass. So for example if you were writing a simulated ball game, you would not start by simulating a baseball game. Instead, you might vaguely sketch out what happens in a game. Then, you'd write a test that goes like, "Does a ball exist? If not, FAIL." You would watch it fail. It's supposed to. Then think of the smallest thing it needs to do to pass. Your program would then merely need to go, "Oh hai. I'm a baseball" and the test would pass. You'd write another test that goes, "Is there a bat?" and "Is a baseball coming at my bat?" As you write fake bats, balls, and ball-coming-at-you actions, the baseball game starts to take shape. All the tests have to keep passing. The structure of how to build it becomes more clear, in a weird way. This isn't quite the right analogy. I can't quite get into the way of thinking and end up just hacking quickly on ahead. But for a little while, I felt the rightness of this way of doing things.

Technorati Tags: php, puppy, testing, work

Geek culture changes

I have gone from working in places where I have about 4 computers on my desk plus root everywhere to working for Silicon Valley startups where people bring their own laptop to the job and no one has ever seen a terminal window before. Most of the bloggers I know (and support at work) deal with their blogs and web hosts entirely from ftp desktop clients. And at someone else's fairly technically oriented workplace that shall remain nameless, just the other day, I over heard two people talking:

Q: So why do you people use those window things? And why are they always those black screens? Is it like, to look like The Matrix or something?
A: Um, well, I think it's just a culture thing. It's old school. Or something.

As I was reading through scads of comments on php.net and the forums on phpWomen.org I thought about how some people post stuff like "and here's how I like to indent my code", with examples. Actually I like reading that stuff and when it's super simple, all the better. Yet I never post my own notes and habits and cheap unix tricks, because I'm embarrassed they aren't super whizz bang hackery but are just my thoughts on vim vs. vi, or notes on how to change my csh prompt to be different colors. Why don't I post on that stuff? I might start. How many times over the years have I gone to look something up and ended up on shallowsky.com? A ZILLION TIMES! (Thanks Akkana!) I'm not posting for programmers - actually I might be posting for the bloggers who are only just trying out their new shell account and want to know what it can do.

So about geek culture changes. Aside from people who don't scream when they see a command line, what about the deeper culture? I was reading Rebecca MacKinnon's post Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorships and thinking back on all the pocket-watch-toting, vest-wearing, oddball sys admins I've known. MacKinnon (heavily quoting Danny O'Brien) describes how U.S. geeks put a lot of trust in technology and the internet:

we have come to depend way too heavily on a small number of Internet and telecoms companies to conduct the most private and intimate details of our professional and personal lives. As long as those companies have values aligned with our own and are run by people we think have integrity, we don't see a huge problem. But what if the values cease to be aligned or political circumstances change?

While I agree with MacKinnon that a company's leaders are important, I suspect that a lot of power right now is in the hands of sys admins, quite often the actual benevolent association or intersection of hippies and hacker-anarchists who inhabit university basements and run the backbone of the net. They're also powerful in determining what happens. I think about what is happening and how it's partly about a cultural shift in what people think the Internet is - rather than it being something you get your hands dirty in, that you play around with, where you bother to go read the RFCs even if you're not writing them... something that people like you are *making*... you shift it and its policies - you are its state and government - to something you consume or use that is run by far-distant giant corporations (whether they are trustable or not is not the point.) I wonder about younger generations of sys admins. Are they DIY in spirit - and have they been activists? That matters too - along with privacy policies which in theory are set by legal departments and corporate heads - because the people who will implement that stuff often care and have influence.

Bloggers haul in tons of free stuff

I forgot to post about how I got a free camera! Whoever does the marketing for Flip is a genius, because forever more I will go around explaining to people how awesome my FREE CAMERA is. Plus, it has the satisfaction of a well-designed toy.

Whenever I mess around with it this is what happens:









People end up grabbing it from me. It's so toylike that people aren't scared of it. When was the last time you grabbed someone else's video camera out of their hands and started filming? NOT... you'd be scared to touch most of them and you'd want the manual.

For years I have refused to deal with videocameras because they're huge and expensive and have a million parts and I break them and lose the tapes, etc. But for months I've been playing with this Flip Video gadget and loving it. It only has a few buttons and doesn't do anything fancy. It doesn't have a million different "modes". There is no annoying charger to lose so that the gadget becomes useless. It runs on a couple of AA batteries.

You turn it on, hit the record button, and have got 30 minutes of video. I tried it out without reading any instructions, and everything worked as I expected. When I hit the red button again, it stopped recording. Then when I started recording again, the camera was clearly making a new short video clip.

That's it.

Only time in my life you'll hear me say that I'm happy not to have a lot of options. No! I don't want options! A little bit of zoom is just fine!

The lack of cables is also amazingly great. The USB connector flips out from inside the camera like a freaking switchblade. When I plugged it into my Mac, it installed its own software on my hard drive. The software is nothing too special or fast. Though it did the job, it was somewhat horrible. It downloaded all my short video clips into the flip software, and showed me -- much like in iPhoto - an array of the clips, with a simple play and edit interface, and options to name and save each clip. I can upload them straight to YouTube. All of that is super handy.

But it was WAY handier to ignore the Flip software completely.

Just plug it in and treat it like a flash drive, drag the files off it, edit them (or not) and upload clips to Google Video, YouTube, or (for super short clips) to Flickr.

After I finish messing around with this video camera, I'm going to give it to Moomin. This is really a perfect videocamera for little kids -- and for me.

You can zoom in an out a little bit. The video quality is not all perfect. But I sure don't care. It's funny but the video "quality" or resolution is the last thing I care about. I just want something cheap and convenient and easy.

Though... I recommend you get a cheap tripod for it to avoid embarrassing shakycam. The camera has a little screw-holder thingie on the bottom for a tripod. I'm thinking of keeping a small GorillaPod in my backpack for times when I'm planning to film more than 20 seconds.



Because when you give this camera to little kids (or me) you might get this, or this:



My other free stuff lately was all BlogHer conference swag:



Free Bluetooth headset from Zivio! It's called a Zivio Boom and came with a jillion different little earpieces. I like the changing colors on it and how the antenna-microphone retracts - it telescopes back into the body of the headset. It's tiny for now, but I'm sure in 5 years we'll laugh.

This was the other Best swag from BlogHer:



Clockwise from upper left: KY lube, manicure set in sunglasses case, nail polish, 1GB flash drive bracelets from PBS Kids, Topix power outlet splitter (nice!!!), 1GB flash drive (from KY), snapfish gift card, stickers, Merci chocolate (LOTS), blogher heroes book excerpt, Word Girl comic book again from PBS, Zivio bluetooth headset (!!!!!), more KY, pens, Tmobile gift card (7 days, 20 bucks, super great, putting it right in my backpack... along with the lube).

Oddly I got a vial of "Zen oil" or some aromatherapy thing from Zivio as well. It smells nice and has the effect of Tiger Balm. I used it all this week on my forearms in the spot up near your elbow that hurts when you type too much. Why aromatherapy-tiger-balm with the headset? NO IDEA!

My 10 year old friend who cruised the sponsor rooms got a free Didj, which is sort of the next generation Leapster gadget for older kids.



"Stick with me, kid," I whispered. "Cute kid plus wheelchair, poster child city, they can't resist, we're going to own the world." She laughed in outrage... but took the free stuff.

The whole conference I was sending people off to the secretly good tables to get the best free stuff. "Flash drive bracelets at the PBS table" I'd mutter. All the mom bloggers would be off like a shot. I was left holding my coffee talking to thin air. Oh man. We love the free geeky stuff.

Now, the down side of this whole bloggers-get-free-stuff shtick is the utter crap. Mostly that is books. I don't know why! I love books! I love really good books. Why are there so many bad ones? Bad ones in my mailbox? It's a mystery... Come on now. Keep nasty booksss, send awesome gadgets. I will put stickers and EL wire all over these free gadgets ONLY IF THEY DON'T SUCK and pose for photos licking all the free cameras and computers you care to fling in my direction.

Who are we women bloggers?

We know where we are. But who are we? What are we as a group? Are we a thing? Are we a group?

This might sound weird from a feminist anarchist geek. But I had an epiphany at work during a marketing meeting.

Gina, our head of sales, was trying to describe to the rest of us what it's like to explain blogging to Fortune 500 company ad executives. They're used to putting people in demographics, and defining types of people who they recognize as categories. There are understandable archetypes like "soccer mom". There are "communities". The companies know that things can be viral and that online advertising is the way to go and that blogs are cool. But how to explain what we are? Who we are? Why we're powerful? Why we're not a fad?

Digression: At the first couple of BlogHer conferences I was not convinced that the conference sponsorships were a good idea. They didn't sway me. I felt marketed-to in a way that wasn't quite comfortable, or that felt slightly off. I wondered why it wasn't like other tech conferences, other blogging conferences. Why because we were women, didn't more big tech advertisers or companies come to us and sponsor us? Where were Apple and Microsoft trying to sell us laptops or giving us cool schwag - after all, we were hard core bloggers and geeks enough to go to a blogging conference.

And yet, the conference was fabulous, and I felt that even the companies who didn't get it, I had some respect for them just for showing up and putting up some cash. Maybe we were an experiment. They were trying to get in on this rumored wave of online stuff even if they didn't know how. This year, things were different. There were insane levels of corporate sponsorship, but the way it was done mostly didn't feel odd or wrong or presumptive that all women were a certain way. It felt like they were *getting it*. I didn't feel alienated. I was charmed. While it was strange to be having a KY sponsored party in Macy's lingerie department while drinking chocolate vodka and eating cookies, there was no way not to be charmed by the strangeness and by the free 1GB flash drives. Rather than showering us with glossy, expensive brochures we would just throw away, they put their product ads on flash drives that we'd find useful. That gave me a warmer feeling than the cayenne in the hot chocolate vodka. (Despite the perturbing heteronormativity of the lube's his and her packaging, which gossip I will repeat that hippietastically we had asked them to offset with equal amounts of her and her packaging but the ball got dropped somewhere.) It was smart marketing to women who love their computers - whose computers are important parts of their lives. Same with the clever presence of PBS Kids. They gave out stuff that you'd actually want to give to your kid - again with the flash drives, this time as bracelets. Mood rings. Stickers. Comic books. And even if you didn't have a kid, you were a kid once, and might like to see Grover and Grover's puppeteer in person in the studio that PBS set up inside our conference. iRobot had demos and a raffle for Roombas, and also sponsored a latte cart. How civilized is that -- don't just market to me: make me *like you*. Free lattes at a place that I was fairly desperate for nicer-than-hotel-coffee was smart.

That's very different from the old wave of internet advertising and marketing, the clumsy approaches that feel like this: We guess who you are, without listening. Then we tell you why you're interested in this thing. Then we beg you to blog about it. Then we measure our success by click-throughs.

Think of radio advertisements. A sponsor takes a ball game, something that people want to have. And says, "Hey. We're cool like this. We love baseball. We make Blahdeblah Product. We're helping it be so that you get to hear this baseball game on the radio." Internet ads need to be more like that. Radio advertisers didn't have little implants in our brains that gave them precise metrics of whether we *that second* turned our eyeballs to look at a Blahdeblah Product. Instead, they banked on our experential happiness, our participation and investment in the ball game. We'd have a good feeling about the game and our enjoyment, and associate them with it, like a friend. Instead, bad net marketing grabs your head, forces it into a vise clamp and makes you look away from the game and at them while you fill out their survey. It's intrusive and untrusting, essentially unfriendly.

What I realized during our meeting: we aren't a consumer demographic. We aren't the metrics. We aren't defined by what we consume in the mental model of 20th century markets. We're cultural producers. Through our blogs, we have open, mass access to the means of production. We're unmediated and unfiltered, if we want to be. We're also banding together to control how we're mediating and filtering. A big medical company might try to hire writers to tell their "true stories" of being moms with cancer. But they would never hit the grass roots authenticity of Motherswithcancer.wordpress.com. I can read that site and completely trust that it's not the zombie brainchild of Big Pharma. I read BlogHer and trust that, while it's got ads on it and (now) big corporate sponsors, it's not a department store mannequin's version of "what women want". It's what women actually got together and said they wanted to do. It's not a marketing category.

We are something new, a category not quite defined but still coalescing, something like Bluestockings or the French revolutionary feminists who ran their own newspapers in the 1830s. But unlike those tightly knit salons of intellectuals, we are a mass movement, a populist movement, with plenty of muscle and -- collectively -- economic power. We are not quite like what some people are trying to define us as:

* "the Association of University Women, who also shop"
* "the white 30-something soccer moms who write cutesily about only diapers"
* "men with boobs and social skills, who influence their network of friends"
* "sort of like journalists, but with no self esteem and you don't have to pay them"
* "computer geeks lite, who want a pink iPhone" (okay, maybe that one)

Or whateverall they seemed to think we were.

What we are: a mass social movement of women who are moving into the public sphere. We are not depending on authority to tell us what or who we are. If we don't fit into a demographic or a marketing category, that doesn't mean we don't get a public voice. We are redefining "what women are" in our society and the shifting marketing and ad markets are evidence that our redefinition is being heard. Publishers can say "Your story is too harsh. It'll alienate readers. Change it. Your main character can't be a black woman. Write about something else. That story about your special needs child is too depressing. " Sure, they can say it - and they do. We tell those stories anyway and find they are deeply wanted and needed by other women.

We're more like the women of the 1800s who started to be able to make a living from their writing. (Though men generated an enormous backlash against them and trivialized their work as being from a pack of scribbling women... babblers and amateurs who appeal to the crude taste of the masses and are not Literary Enough (for... what exactly?).) Have we hit critical mass, finally, with blogging? Can we end run capitalist patriarchy? Are we successfully changing it as it co-opts us?

Older feminists are standing back in a mildly skeptical way. Oh yes, we've heard this before, now is really the moment when we can all tell our stories, across class and race and gender and all barriers, and our histories won't be lost. Right. We've never heard *that* one before. I really believe it's true this time. We have to fight to keep it true, and to keep control and power in the hands of regular people, accessible to everyone. Keep that access to the means of production, cultural production, out there, and keep spreading it.

And by that I mean things as simple as: fight your local library not to block MySpace from their public access computers.

I also felt this deeply at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest. The technology is to the point where mobile phone are ubiquitous in developing countries. A protest happens a country's mainstream media can't cover it because of censorship or a threatening political environment, and yet videos go up on YouTube. Fighting for universal access to a decentralized Internet is crucial to our future, and all areas of this fight need to tie together and be allies.

So who are we and what are we? Women who are speaking, who are consumers who talk, sort of like journalists, sort of like authors; we are conscious, individually and, more and more, collectively, of our power to speak and be seen in the world of public discourse. We have jobs and we're in public, we're out of the domestic sphere, but our thoughts, the way we're framed in public conversations, in the media, isn't yet all the way out of the domestic sphere. My point is that we are no longer containable by old style media. We aren't an elite of "influencers" to be courted and co-opted. We're journalists who write about who we are, not what we're told to write, like a million mommy-blogging Hunter S. Thompsons writing The Curse of Lono instead of their assigned sports article.

Butch as hell sys admin hacker women who will kick your ass

From a few completely different sources I have heard of nascent conferences to train women how to talk at tech conferences. From everything I have seen, women know perfectly well how to talk at technical and computing and web 2.0 conferences. But I still see posts like Stowe Boyd's in puzzlement asking "Where are the women speakers?"

I would like to offer myself as a resource for tech conference organizers who can't figure out how to find "the most qualified" women speakers on particular topics. Ask, and I will help to hook you up. If you find a speaker you are happy with based on my recommendations, then pay me per successful connection. I propose as well that if you usually lean on the few geeky women you know to diversify your conferences, pay them in the same way.

So, back to that issue of speaker training. Great idea, valuable service. I'd like to question the idea that women don't know how to speak at conferences. Wait, I thought we were the communicators, the ones with the social skills, the teachers and professors, used to being heard by an audience. It's not just about women who don't know how to present themselves - it's also about people who are so complacent in their own circles that they don't know how to listen to the qualifications and capabilities of amazing women.

BlogHer in Second Life

The BlogHer Conference is coming up next week! We'll have tons of people in BlogHer in Second Life where there will be an entire conference track. Take a look at Erin's outline of the BlogHer Second Life Conference schedule.

Would you like to transcribe one or more of the voice sessions in 2nd Life for the IRC relay? If so, please contact Erin Kotecki Vest aka Queen of Spain, queenofspainblog@yahoo.com.

I am especially happy that the schedule includes Jen and Aleja from GimpGirl, an online community for women with disabilities. I go to their 2nd life meetings (though I attend only in IRC and not in Second Life itself) and there's been some great presentations and conversations.


Here's the schedule!

BlogHer in Second Life '08

DAY ONE, Friday July 18th


9:00-9:15 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
Welcome to BlogHer '08 from the Westin St. Francis Ballroom in San Francisco

9:15-10:15 AM
"Speed Dating" for BlogHers in Second Life

10:30-11:45 AM
Second Life Break-Out Session #1: The Intersection of Blogging and Second Life
Led by Cybergrrl Oh (aka Aliza Sherman), and featuring:
Ana Herzog (aka Nancy Hill)
Gidge (aka Bridgette McNeal)


12:45-2:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #2: Second Life and Security
Featuring Padlurowncanoe Dibou, formerly in charge of Hillary Clinton's in-world HQ

2:30PM-4:30PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

4:30PM-8:30PM
SecondLife Open Mic and Party
More details on how to be part of the Second Life Open Mic


DAY TWO, Saturday, July 19th

9:30-10:30 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer '08 Morning Keynote: Hybrid Media


10:45-12:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #3: SecondLife as Educational/Training Tool
Featuring:
Padlurowncanoe Dibou
In Kenzo (aka Evonne Heyning, Creative Director and Interactive Producer for Amoration)
Fleep Tuque (aka Chris Collins from the University of Cincinnati)
Dannette Veale (from Cisco)


1:45-3:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #4: Using Second Life for Good
Led by Susan Tenby and featuring:
Connie Reece
Jennifer Cole and Aleja Ospina, the women behind GimpGirl.com


3:30PM-5:00PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

5:15-6:15 PM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer '08 Closing Keynote: Living the Truman Show

http://www.blogher.com/blogher_conference/conf/2/agenda/1

For Global Voices: About wheelchairs and mobility

For everyone I met and spoke with at Global Voices Citizen Media Summit I would like to pass on some information about mobility, disability, and wheelchairs. I got a lot of questions about my wheelchair and a lot of compliments on how well I get around. In a lot of countries, people don't have access to wheelchairs, or only know about the most common kind of hospital chair. Here are some answers to the questions that people have been asking me at the conference.

My wheelchair is a type called an ultralight rigid frame. It weighs 17 pounds (8 kilos) and though I am not particularly strong, I can pick it up with one hand. The wheels come off just like a quick-release bike wheel. I can take off the wheels in about 10 seconds, fold the chair, and put it into a car or into the trunk of a taxi.

Standard hospital wheelchairs can weight 40 - 60 pounds (18 - 28 kilos). They are often designed to be pushed by an able-bodied walking person. With a lighter weight wheelchair, more people can gain independence.

These chairs are used by wheelchair athletes, but you don't need to be an athlete to benefit from an lightweight chair.


The major manufacturers of ultralights are :

Quickie (Mine is a Quickie Ti)
http://www.quickie-wheelchairs.com/

Ti-Lite
http://www.tilite.com/store/

Colours
http://www.colourswheelchair.com/

These wheelchairs can be extremely expensive.

Here are two international projects to spread the availability of light weight, durable, low cost wheelchairs:

Whirlwind Wheelchair International is an open source project meant to help people across the world to set up entire factories or shops to produce low cost, very durable & rugged chairs.

http://www.whirlwindwheelchair.org/

Free Wheelchair Mission is a project to ship very, very cheap and maintainable wheelchair kits to every possible country. (Their project is controversial for many reasons; read this article for background.)

http://www.freewheelchairmission.org/thewheelchair.html

Getting the right size of wheelchair is important. But, given a choice between the wrong size in a light weight, and the right size that's very heavy, I would take the lightweight chair.

Two good sources of information are Wheelchair Junkie forums, and Gimp Girl, a community for women with disabilities.



One more thing, to answer the other question that you all are asking me:

My hair is dyed with Special Effects Blue Velvet and Punky Color Plum. It's been that color for about 10 years. About once a month I put a little bit more purple to keep it bright!

Installing Eeebuntu on an Asus Eeepc 900

Last night I installed eeebuntu on my Eeepc 900. You see how I love this little beast!



The instructions and forums on eeebuntu.org were helpful. I realized while I was doing the install that there's Ubuntu Eee as well and that eeebuntu is basically just this one guy, Steve or "bezdomny". Since he is super responsive on the forums and people report good experiences with the install, I figured it is a good bet as an OS. Ubuntu Eee also looks good!

I didn't take good notes but here is my memory of what I had to do. I first tried to create a bootable USB stick from my Mac, but was missing syslinux so I used Oblomovka's MacBook running Ubuntu to reformat it with parted (set 1 boot on). Then put the eeebuntu iso file on the USB stick with bezdomny's isostick.sh script.

Then my eeepc booted from the USB stick. I hit "escape" during bootup and got a screen with 4 choices; the 4GB and 16GB drives on the eee, and two partitions on the USB stick. I chose a USB partition at random (wrong one) and then the other, which worked beautifully! It took a few minutes to boot. Wireless didn't work, but when I plugged an ethernet cable into my Eee, I was on the net within about 15 seconds without having to configure anything.

So, I tried to follow this advice to get wireless working,

http://eeebuntu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175&highlight=wireless

But then got a little bit confused because I wasn't sure where I should install madwifi and if it would work if I rebooted from the USB. At that point I decided I'd just take a chance and install over the totally working, but annoying and ugly and Windows-like, Xandros linux install that came with my eee. (Seriously, look at this, even their web site gives me hives.) It occurred to me that I might keep Xandros on the 4GB drive and install eeebuntu on the 16GB drive, and be able to boot either one. Which, if I couldn't get wireless working on eeebuntu, would spare me scrambling around trying to re-install Xandros. I went on IRC at irc.freenode.net and asked on #ubuntu-eeepc if anyone knew if that would work. No one answered. I got on #ubuntu-women just to feel braver but didn't ask anything. After some more poking around forums I decided to hell with it, blow away Xandros and if I have to reinstall it, comprendo bastante este video guía para instalearlo.

So I installed on the 4GB drive. It went completely smoothly, quickly, I rebooted, hey presto magic huzzah, I had working ubuntu on my eeepc. Plugging into ethernet worked smoothly again. I got the madwifi fix with wget and installed it. It didn't work... I re-read the thread on the forums for the millionth time. They kept saying "turn on the wireless" and finally Oblomovka and I got it that we had to turn on wireless in the BIOS. So, reboot, hit F2, looked at "Advanced" and "Devices" or something like that, it was pretty intuitive, and got a list of stuff enabled and disabled. I enabled wireless and the webcam. Rebooted, and wireless worked SO beautifully. (Not like Xandros which was incredibly clunky and failed to get me onto my own home network half the time.)

More wireless links: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

Next problem to fix. The mousing was crazy. Or, really, the touchpad. I don't have a mouse, but I still think of it as "mousing". There was a system preferences panel for mouse and display, but nothing for the touchpad. A bit more reading and I was lost... but then a bit MORE reading and google-fu and I found that going to Applications, then Add/Remove, then searching All Available applications for "touchpad" or "synaptic" would get me the control panel that I needed. That worked but during install I got a warning to change a setting in xorg.conf which I will tell you is in /etc/X11. It's helpful to look at some examples of xorg.conf options. Then, while in vi putting in the setting, I realized my keyboard is messed up and thinks that the " key is actually an @ sign. So I'll have to go figure that out and fix it -- I know I chose US keyboard layout -- what could it be?

What I need to be able to work off this machine on my trip:

Firefox, Greasemonkey
A good chat client
vim, perl (python would be nice)
the touchpad not to be freaking crazy. Tap-to-click OFF. Who uses that! Omg! Sucks!
Not sure if I will just suck it up with email and go back to Pine, or install Thunderbird and migrate my mailboxes, or use webmail of some stripe (ugh) Currently am favoring Pine because I'm lazy; Thunderbird only if I have time to install it.

Oh also, I'm resolving to document this more formally and contribute docs-writing to eeebuntu.



** further updates later today **

How to create a web form to talk with Google Docs

My friend and co-worker Jenny from Three Kid Circus pointed out a cool feature of Google Docs to me today. I use Google Docs spreadsheets mostly as wiki-like documents for a group of people to edit a web page in table form. In other words I use them for layout of a web page, and maybe for sorting columns, and sharing fairly simple information.

In another conversation I had recently, Elisa Camahort was talking about wanting a simple widget sort of thing for party RSVPs, but that would be more than a link to her email address - it would be a form for people invited to fill out. So, it occurred to me that the form-constructing capability in Google Docs would do all the things she wanted.

As I thought further, I realized it also might be helpful to my friend Squid Rosenberg, who has a son whose educational plan is managed by a fairly large group of people, using Google Docs, tracking his progress and patterns with a daily record. Similar documents could be very useful for anyone tracking health care issues, for a team of caregivers for an elderly person, for example.

Since this is a fairly new and obscure feature, and somewhat of a convoluted process to click around to where you even understand what the feature does, I thought I'd describe how to set it up.


1) Go to Google Docs.

2) Create a spreadsheet and call it "My potluck dinner" or whatever.

3) Make columns for whatever you like -- name, email, # of people you're bringing, what kind of food you will bring to the potluck.

4) Click "share".

5) Click "invite people to fill out a form".

6) Click "Start editing your form".

7) Click the Save button.

8) Click "Choose recipients". (You don't have to put in any actual recipients.)

9) Click "Embed", in the upper left corner.

10) Copy the code and stick it in your blog

Each column in the spreadsheet shows up as a title and text input field in the form! You can also add new fields.

It looks like this:



From there you might have to twiddle the formatting to make it look halfway decent. It is not set up to look nice in a blog sidebar, but it looks just fine in posts or pages in TypePad, and Blogger. It doesn't work in LiveJournal or WordPress because it uses iframes, though in WordPress you can install a widget to get iframes to work.

The resulting input into the spreadsheet looks like this:


(click image to see it bigger)

Note the timestamp, automatically added!

So, this could be useful for many purposes. My potluck dinner example is frivolous, but anyone who's suffered through the annoying interface of the spreadsheets on Google Docs, or who uses them for individual or group data entry, could set up extremely easy web forms with this hidden-away feature.

I would like to send a polite nudge to the Docs development team to uncover the forms feature! It would be very nice if it were an option to click directly from the spreadsheet or other document.

Sonnet, twittered

Drum roll... a moment in Twitter history...






Twittered by allaboutgeorge aka George Kelly, for Sarah Dopp.

The poem is better for having been twittered. I like it backwards, and getting the punchline first and then cycling back through it. The poetics of Twitter force circularity and rereading, disorder and reversal. Which goes perfectly with this poem's theme!

Free Idea: Use ChaCha's structure for disaster relief

On the drive up to Seattle a few weeks ago, Cindy and Sarah Dopp and I were playing with ChaCha and wondering how they make money. Around here we all go "What's your business model" right away... and then snicker.

So I think I might just have figured it out. Do it for free for a bit with your VC money and show how it works. Then, sell "Enterprise ChaCha" or something like it, to a big institution. (I was looking at Indiana University's page about it.) You'd sell the structure and the setup, and the institution creates its own number (and password or validation system) and pools its own experts. So, sell it to Exxon or something for its corporate librarians and geologists. Or to the military, obviously. Here is the military's answer to its perpetual search for AI. "Human assisted search".

Anyway, this could also work for disaster relief, because it's ideal for situations that change very rapidly. I was looking at Jon's empty wiki and thinking, well aside from all the problems with the whole idea of that, which I won't go into, might a Twitter feed be better? I thought of myself on the 2nd floor of the Astrodome after Katrina, gathering and putting out information that was extremely up to date, and how quickly things changed on the ground. Would I want a wiki for it? (I tried. It is hopeless without a core of people already trained to use one and to work together with one.) Maybe I wouldn't want one. Maybe a feed would be better. Page back through the "2nd floor astrodome" Twitter feed and see what's up. Combine many different channels of all the people at various stations in the Astrodome and you'd know who says what is true, right in the moment.

But even better -- a private setup for a ChaCha-like thing. You get 100 people together to monitor and answer questions and you would have an instant backup, fit for the general of an army. Or fit for a reporter on the ground in a rough situation. I think of how I combed google news all day long for the Back to Iraq guy back in like 2003 and emailed him updates on whatever was going on or being bombed in the area near him. How much better, if he could have called a phone number like ChaCha's, and tapped into a network of people like me. Someone would have texted him back the information he wanted within minutes. And if there were sort of a combination of Ning and ChaCha, you'd be able to set up your own information broker network and invite people to join it.

The Red Cross should be using this (okay, maybe in 20 years if they can get it together that fast). But, I offer the idea up to whatever nonprofits or disaster relief workers can use it.

WordPress plugin idea - blikify

So I was at Recent Changes Camp this weekend talking smack about blikis with some people. And I told anyone who would listen about the plugins for WordPress that help you integrate your blog with Mediawiki or other wikis.

What about a plugin that would just let you designate any page or post as world-editable?

Add Markdown and your WordPress blog could be easily wikified. I could use this for my nascent Hack Ability blog, and it would make me (and readers, and other editors) a lot happier than setting up and maintaining a whole parallel wiki structure to go with the blog.

On #wordpress I was just talking with _ck_ who wrote a Wiki Post plugin for bbPress.

_ck_ also pointed me to this cool and hilarious video of andiacts and Selena discussing when to use Drupal and when to use WordPress:


"It's so cool! It's like a new solar system!" That made me laugh so hard.



I have never written a WP Plugin but this seems possibly within the scope of my coding ability. So maybe this summer I'll give it a shot.

But, if anyone out there wants to write it, go ahead, take the idea and run. Just hat tip me when you do. And, I would be motivated to help and contribute, because it would be handy as hell.

Ubuntu "Girlfriend Experiment" PHAIL

Ugh... I really get pissed at the basic idea of "we can see how usable Ubuntu is by testing it on our girlfriends." Assumption: "We" are male; "our" girlfriends are ignorant of technical matters. And are stupid. Femininity here is equated with non-technical status. This is not only untrue, it is a really poisonous idea to spread.

http://contentconsumer.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/

First task: Tell me what the capital of Bosnia is. Second task: watch a video on YouTube Third task: Download a Spice Girls album.

Uhhh WTF with the Spice Girls? Care to infantalize women's use on the internet any more?

How about finding some RECIPES too?

All of this just yanks my chain big time, like when people say in talks and demos, "It's so easy, my MOM can do it." (And then everyone in the audience laughs knowingly.) Like moms are the dumbest people ever. My pet peeve at technical conferences. I am a mom!

I am also a girlfriend!

I am also technically competent and don't enjoy condescension!

Test Linux on your ignorant dad, next time, or your poker buddy. Be sure to have him download crap about the Backstreet Boys and other overly gendered BS.

Hundreds of women on the linuxchix mailing list are rolling their eyes in unison.

WAIT I'm so confused, maybe if they made the Ubuntu background pink?!?

DIY: Access Hacks project

For the second year in a row, I thought of the wheelchair modification and disability access projects that could and should be at Maker Faire. I'd like to make that happen next year.

At Maker Faire this year, I talked with Miguel Valenzuela, who was showing Lift Assist, a toilet lift device that can be built for $150 out of bits of PVC and junk from a hardware store, powered hydraulically from your own water system. That kind of thing costs thousands of dollars if you buy it as a medical device. If it were a DIY kit, and if it had open source plans and instructions up on the web, it could be useful to thousands of people all over the world.

So I got to thinking. Who would I even hook Miguel up with, to get his plans used? What other projects are spreading disability access devices, open source? Could things like this just be given over to an organization like Engineers Without Borders? How can they be open sourced or copylefted? Who's collecting that information? Certainly not the U.N. committees on disability - ha!

There are specific projects like Whirlwind Wheelchair International and its design for the Rough Rider chair, developed by Ralf Hotchkiss and students over many years and meant to be distributed to shops or factories or organizations in developing nations. In other words, partnership with actual manufacturers. There's the Free Wheelchair Mission which has a kit to build wheelchairs for under $50. They seem to take donations and then ship a giant crate of wheelchair kits to somewhere in the world. Those both look great. But neither of them were for a disabled person who might want to build their own stuff.

Then I found some nifty sites like Marty's Gearability blog, which has a DIY category for "Life with limitations and the gear that makes things work". She has made dozens of posts on modifications she's made for her dad, who uses a wheelchair. I especially enjoyed the how-to for a wheelchair cup holder and the elegant, blindingly useful offset hinges to widen doorways.

I'm also somewhat familiar with Adafruit Industries and its projects like SpokePOV. What if assistive devices used something closer to this model? Rather than people patenting, and trying to sell their designs to a medical supply company, which marks it up a million times until disabled people in the U.S. can't afford them unless they have insurance or can wait 5 years and fight a legal battle with Medicare.

I found organizations like Remap in the UK, that takes applications from individual disabled people, and hooks them up with an engineer who will build them a custom device. This I think exemplifies the well meaning but ill advised attempts to help disabled people through a "charity" model rather than through widespread empowerment. If an engineer is donating time and an invention, why not have them write up and donate the plans for whatever they are building, and post the DIY instructions for free? Then, thousands of people all over the world could build that invention for themselves.

Here's another data-sucking black hole of information that should be out there on the beautiful, wild, free internet: academia. This paper on bamboo wheelchair designs is probably super great, but who knows? Only the libraries who have the bound copy of the conference proceedings of the 5th international bamboo conference back in 2002. This makes me very, very sad. OneSwitch, on the other hand, has the right idea. It's a compendium of DIY electronics projects to build assistive devices. Perfect!

Meanwhile, I went looking for the latest news in open source hardware. What's up with the Open Source Hardware License?

My own inventions for assistive devices have tended towards the creative yet slapdash use of duct tape. For example, my Duct Tape Crutch Pockets, an idea easily adaptable to small pouches for forearm crutches and canes, or to get more storage space onto your wheelchair.

My own canes and crutches that fold (with internal bungee cords) could use simple velcro closure straps to keep them folded up while they're in my backpack or in the car. There are some ingenious ways, also, to attach canes or crutches to a wheelchair.

I have thought of, but not made, ways to extend storage space further. For example, I think that the lack of pockets in women's clothing is a political issue. Women's clothes are mostly designed without pockets, because of cultural pressure to look skinny, so women end up encumbered by bags and purses. If you think about how wheelchairs are made, it is interesting that they are assumed not to need storage space, cup holders, things like that. People hang little backpacks off their chairs. And there are a few custom made pouches for walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs, like this thin armrest pouch. You won't find them in an actual wheelchair store - and rarely in a drugstore or medical supply house. Why not?

As wheelchair designs continue to evolve, I hope that manufacturers will create customizable backs and sides and seats. Nylon webbing with d-rings, sewn into the backs and under the seats of wheelchairs, would mean that custom pouches and packs could clip onto a chair. Then it would be easy to set up your chair with interchangeable bits. My laptop could go in a pouch under the seat, for example, so that it wouldn't affect my center of gravity so drastically as it hangs off the seat back in a backpack.

I'd like to see more and more mods for chairs and canes and crutches that are just for fun. The little holes in adjustable-height, hollow metal walking canes -- don't they seem like the perfect size to stick an LED light in there?

Also, meanwhile, I had posted briefly the other day for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008 with a list of ideas for Practical actions that will help, like smoothing out steps into a small business (ie just freaking pour some asphalt in there or build a wooden wedge even if it is not exactly to code; people do nothing, for fear of being sued, rather than spend thousands to do a to-code ramp, and I'd rather they just stuff in a slope and bolt a rail to the wall than do nothing!). After I made the list, I went looking for online instructions on how to do the things I was suggesting. What did I come up with ? Jack shit! Nothing! Nada!

So, here's what I propose we do:

- Compile free and open source how-tos, plans, designs, etc. on Disapedia. I have made a page for DIY equipment.

- I will go and interview Hotchkiss and his class, and write up more detail on how their open source project works.

- A meeting to share access hacks and start to add to that wiki page on Disapedia.

- I'll head up an effort to organize a really good disability/accessibility hacking booth for Maker Faire next year.

For the Access Hacks booth, I'd like to pull in:
- craft/sewing people for stuff like mobility device storage and mods with velcro and fabric
- metal working people
- electronics people (like the OneSwitch folks)
- Maybe invite Tech Shop and the Bay Area wheelchair stores to participate
- obviously, disabled crafty/makery people. I thought I could try to pull in GimpGirl and put the word out in other communities
- Flyers on how to open source your hack and make it free - license info, where to post, hook up with places like WikiHow.

This could make a super fantastic real life application for hardware/craft hacks. I would love to just hang out all weekend with a bunch of other people with disabilities and share whatever hacks we've already come up with. That in itself would be productive without even doing it at Maker Faire. I'd like an Access Hacks meeting around here and I wonder if people would host them elsewhere and then post tips on Disapedia. (I would like to use them rather than host a new wiki, but I'm willing to make an access hacks wiki if that's what people would like.)

Please, leave feedback in the comments.

Reading in Seattle this Friday, Apr 25

Liz Reading at Queer Open Mic
Originally uploaded by Liz.

I am road tripping up to Seattle this week! If you are there please come see me at this event ! I would love to see you all and would love the support. April 25, 8pm, Annex Theatre, 1100 East Pike Street.

You will hear me say the word "Lezzie" in a Texas accent. Also, I promise to wear leather pants. There will be bubbling, and silliness, and insane talk of poems and roadside geology and the roots of the Klamath Mountains. I will pop a wheelie for you and you may pat me on the head and tell me I am brave (JUST KIDDING about the patting).

I will not have my child with me, but you can bring yours, as long as you keep them out of the bar area and don't mind them hearing some intense stories of playground bullies and maybe some cussing, plus you realize my story is about being queer, queer, queer. All the stories are AMAZING and are written about elementary school and early middle school experiences & with that audience in mind!

Get info & buy tickets here: Can I Sit W/You reading

Tickets are priced at $5 and $12, which means you can choose how much to donate. Money all goes to my hometown Special Ed PTA.

Code that isn't at all poetry, but that is structure & patterns

Happy Poetry Month! Rather than poeting, for the past few days I've been twiddling with code. It is much the same state of mind as translating, or basic composition, but for me at least, not quite poetry. It does require moving a bunch of words around, arranging them, and imagining their interpretation, organizing words in order to have an effect. For poetry or composition, an effect on a listener/reader, so you are imagining a logical and emotional state and the interpretation and effect of a person. For code obviously you are writing so that a machine will follow your orders perfectly; but less obviously you are writing for yourself in the future and for other future, human readers of your procedural pattern of thought. You are writing for your future (self or other) human, so they can modify and extend that code and put it to other uses. In other words, it has a bit in common with an oral or folk tradition. Repetition and patterns are good in poetry if you want to create structure for extension and improvisation.

So, just now I was doing some of my baby-Perl for some contract work. And the deal is, there are a bunch of users, and their accounts go through various bureaucratic steps, and through various work people and departments, some steps requiring others to happen first, for the account to become fully active. This is a fairly common situation for any institution. So, I had a Perl script that would take some command line options and then would do various things with the user and account data. As more people started realizing I could manipulate account stuff, and could generate reports, etc, they started asking me for new tasks. So, the hacky little script grew very quickly to a giant horrible tangly mess full of regular expressions that I did not understand anymore, 30 minutes after I wrote and tested them. A reg exp is a thing of beauty but it is not a joy forever. Instead, it makes my head hurt.

So I started about 4 times over this last month to rewrite that mess to make it easily understandable and extensible. I scribbled and thought on post-it notes so I could try to break down what needed to happen into chunks that I could move around & visualize, easier than in a 200 line text file.

It went kind of like this: use GetOpt::Long to tell from the command line what kind of report or change is required. Log in to several systems. Iterate over a range of account IDs in a big loop. Then do some http page getting and parsing. Then a lot of if else statements to see what command line option is turned on. Mixed in with some more tests and if elsing. Then again depending on command line option, do some other junk, write to some other web pages and outfiles. At the end of all that looping, write some more outfiles.

Ugh! You can see that any new capability meant that I had to do more page parsing and more reg exping, as well as thinking through all the logic of the whole if-else mess.

Today I suddenly realized several things. Speed doesn't matter for this. I can set it going and let it chug away.

So, number one, for each user ID, just read in all the possible pages that have info on that account. It is only 5 web pages on 3 different systems. Read them in and parse out all their fields.

Number two, think of each account as having a state. There are 8 different bits of information that change account state, out of the 50+ possible bits of info. So, after parsing all the pages, look at the 8 pieces of information I care about, to determine the account's state.

For things I then want to do, they fall into two categories. Reporting and state change. Reporting is easy. For changing account state, I can define for each case of one state to another; what actions it takes to change the account state. There are objects, and states, and transactions.

I have never really understood object-orientedness no matter how many times I think about it, and use and write code that is in theory, sort of object-oriented. It's not like I get it now, but I get it more than I did.

Suddenly everything clicked into place and I understood how to write the code in a way that would be useful and elegant. I understood the root of the problem. It all fell together in a system. It looked like a pattern, like information that was beautiful. I know, it is a bunch of account data in a bureaucratic procedure. After years of being "programmer analyst" doing back end tools for university departments, I had to find beauty where I could. The "click" feeling means I look back on my month of sporadic attempts to write this program, and it looks like I was brain-deadishly trying to make something out of legos by gluing their corners together, when all the while I could have been snapping them together how they are supposed to go. But, before, I could not see the intersections.

So, just now I had the exhilarating (yet slightly shame-faced) feeling that I had just reinvented the wheel, or some basic principle of computer science that if I had any sense, I would have known from taking some classes. On the other hand, taking computer science classes doesn't guarantee you know what you are doing or can build something that other people find useful & usable.

Carmen Berenguer wins Ibero-American Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize

Happy Poetry Month! Congratulations to Carmen Berenguer who has won the 2008 Premio Iberoamericana de Poesía Pablo Neruda.

I am very happy for her!

And for everyone who will now read her marvelous poems!

It makes me extremely happy that work so radical, experimental, feminist, and wild, has been recognized and honored.

"Es una sorpresa por la poesía que yo hago, que de pronto puede ponerle trabas al entendimiento y al sentimiento. Mi poesía es sonora, interna, musical, digo cosas increíbles", comenta. "Soy una mujer combativa, vengo de los conventillos, de la pensión y esos argumentos hicieron que me fijara en las injusticias", agrega.

*
It's a surprise because of the poetry I write, that can suddenly put up blocks to understanding and feeling. My poetry is echoing, internal, musical, I say unbelievable things. I'm a fighting woman, I come from the projects, from poor neighborhoods, and that background fixed my thoughts on injustice.

Berenguer often breaks words and form, with poem titles at the bottom of pages or strangely broken across two pages, like this:




and she ranges into concrete poems in her early work such as Bobby Sand desfallece en el muro as well as in later work such as the poem typeset to look like the Chilean flag. You can see a glimpse of that poem above.

I have translated some of her work over the last few years.

So far, I have spent the most time reading A media asta and La gran hablada. While I love her short poems, I am most fond of her longer work which sprawls and rants and sobs and screams across the page, long poems that build me up to a peak of understanding. It is not "leaping poetry" in the way that Bly meant, with graceful elisions. It is broken, unclear, obstructive, difficult, obstreporous. And, that is suitable, that is what is right, when you write about political violence, about gendered violence, about bodies, oppression, about Chile under Pinochet, as Berenguer does.





That is what I love best in poetry. I love when it has physicality, when it fights with sense, when it has elbows that stick out, when it feels like wading through mud or struggling to make my own broken body act and endure. It is poetry that rewards effort just as bodies do. Really kick ass poetry, seriously ass-kicking, rejects easy understanding, the facile Hmmmm and nod of agreement. It is perturbing! Bothersome! Berenguer's work is all that. I think of her work as mixing up the neobaroque/neobarroso with écriture féminine.

I want to quote some of her poems and post my translations, but I am trying to get them published in journals at the moment. So here are a few excerpts. This is from "Bala humanitaria", "Humanitarian bullet".

.....Ese dardo
Penetra rompiendo la piel disparado a cien metros
Rompe la piel en sugundos el dedo gatillado
Rompe el silencio y lo dispara
Ondas sonoras irradian el campo comprometiendo el sonido
Interlocutor del suave murmullo El dardo penetrando
Los ojos abiertos y un ojo semicerrado afinando la puntería
El hombre acaricia el gatillo con deseos
.....
*
..... This shaft
Penetrates breaking the skin shot at a hundred meters
Breaks the skin in seconds the trigger finger
Breaks the silence and shatters it
Sonorous waves irradiate the compromised field of sound
Interlocutor of the smooth whisper The shaft penetrates
Open eyes and a half-closed eye sharpened the aim
The man caresses the trigger with desires
......

Here I thought for a long time about how to translate "dardo" and though "dart" or arrow would be more literal, I think "shaft" gets the phallic imagery properly into the poem. It is important because it is a poem that links rape and violence, that takes a gendered view of the sort of violence that can consider it right to make international law about the correct way to kill people with proper bullets. The lines on penetration and holes are not an accident... Further, I would say that it is good to note how Berenguer speaks about sound, about echoes and fracturing; this comes up elsewhere in her work and I think it is right to think of it as the Howl, as the song of the poet, the fundamental sound, poetry, art, creation -- broken deliberately in order to reveal multiple truths. So, this is a poem about international politics and humanitarian bullets, violence; but it is also about gender, violence, rape; there is an industrial note, recalling thoughts of metals and mining, global industry; and it is also about words, poetry, logic, speaking, art, creation. That is the kind of poem I can get behind, 100%.

I feel inspired to go work on my translation of "Mala piel" now... and will post some excerpts from it later this month.



It is maybe just a particular pleasure for me that poems like this have been honored in the name of Neruda. While I love Neruda's poetry very much and honor him, I have some difficulties as a feminist with the way he writes about women's bodies and how they become his male dominated metaphor of art and life and love, his landscape to traverse and discover and see. In fact, Neruda-worshiper Robert Bly is just the same for me sometimes with his graceful, easy "leaping". For me as a poet, having spent years thinking about this in the way that poets do: I say fuck the leap. It is like cheating. Get your feet on the ground, dudes! Stay in your body! Go fast, but stay dirty! Thus it is particularly sweet to me, for a fantastic strong political woman who writes from and of the body, who makes words really embody, to win a prize named after Neruda.




Links:

* YouTube: el ojo no es un territorio, a video-poema.

* Palabra Virtual: The text of selected poems including a small fragment of one of my favorites, "Mala piel", and a recording of "Desconocido".

* YouTube: Berenguer en Chile Poesía

* Chilean wins Neruda Prize for poetry

* Carmen Berenguer, Ibero American Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize - with brief intervew.

* Pablo Neruda Prize 2008 to Chilean poet

Poetry month, A little playful translation

I'd love to see more interpretations of this odd little poem by David Rosenmann-Taub. It's from Cortejo y Epinicio, 1949.



Jerarquía

Ganglios
- líneas -
y puños.
¿Qué más?
Los panoramas.
¿Éstos?





Hierarchy (two ways)

Ganglions
- lines -
and fists.
What else?
Panoramas.
These?



*



Neural nets
- powerlines -
and grabbing.
What else?
Seeing everything.
This, too?

Poetry Month: Day 3, Anthologies

I love, love, love anthologies. I love to read their prefaces and introductions and all the surrounding "matter" and to think about how they were put together. I love to have a whole lot of different poets conveniently in one place, just like I love a rapid-fire reading with 30 people in a row, rapid exposure to many styles.

Pretty soon the Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers will be out! Yeah! Anything with Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Cho, Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, and Bikini Kill in it all together is going to be fucking glorious!

A couple of weeks ago I got my copy of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv. A couple of years ago there was hot discussion on the Women Poets mailing list about doing a book. It was feminist collective hullabaloo combined with large-scale mailing-list-drama! And it came out beautifully, affirming my faith in the Magic Internets and in amazing people who do hard work.



Editorial tasks were divvied up - Everyone stuck with it - A policy was set to accept and publish one poem by anyone on the list who sent something in - People who feared the prospect of putting their precious Work into something that would label them as Amateur, or Vanity-Press, or that would Suck because of no hierarchical editorial control, were argued against passionately - Inclusivity and anti-snobbery won the day for many people. The result, a very beautiful, thick, amazing book from Red Hen Press. 259 contributors from 19 countries. It is incredibly beautiful. The poems are good. I'm not at ALL embarrassed to be in this book, and I can't say the same of some other more "legitimate" journals or books. The poems are good and they're not all the same-samey workshoppy voice that drives me crazy about so many poetry journals.

Later today I'll post some excerpts.

Poetry Month: Day 2, Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva

Happy Poetry Month! Today I have been thinking about Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, a Venezuelan poet from the 20th century (1886-1962). Her poems are small and odd, but huge internally, like a pocket universe captured and studied from all sides; a bit abstract and philosophical. This, at a time when it seems to me like the way to be a famous woman poet was to blaze passionately forth in a sort of meteoric scandal of words. Arvelo Larriva's positioning of herself is at the same time very personal and connected to the specific landscape of the Venezuelan llanos, the central plains -- a tropical prairie. But at the same time she positioned herself as a very abstract, analytical, point of human consciousness.

Arvelo Larriva began writing and publishing around 1920 that I can verify (but I have also read she was a poet beginning at age 17, much earlier). Most of her poems that I've translated were published in the 1920s, but I don't have all the research done to know exactly when they were written.

I'd like to point out a pattern I have found in looking at the work of women poets in Latin America. Their poetry was often being published little by little in journals, the same journals as more famous men who were their peers, who were in their same literary circles. But the men became famous more quickly, had books published earlier. I think this is one reason that books of literary history tend to describe the women as footnotes, afterthoughts, imitators, or as not quite catching the wave of a literary movement. It appears from short biographical notes on Arvelo Larriva that she began publishing in 1939. This is not true -- she was publishing as early as 1918, and certainly throughout the 1920s, and was part of the Generación de 1918; and was part of the Vanguard of the 1920s student movement as well.

Why do I care? Well, because histories talk about those movements - but leave her out, or only mention her 20 years after her vital, early work. The elision of 20 or more years of her publishing history means that she is also cut off from politics; her brother and others of her political circle were jailed in the 1920s. She remained in their hometown on the prairies. My feeling is that the story of her life might be quite interesting and complicated, but that complication is not represented in any descriptions I've seen -- which just marvel at how she could write clever poems even though she lives out in the sticks instead of in the exciting capital.

Her work persistently reminds me of the somewhat better-known poems by David Rosenmann-Taub from the 1950s. I'll talk about his poems later this month and connect back to this post on Arvelo Larriva. I also think of some of the short airy poems of García Lorca.

So, onward to a few poems. They might not be your cup of tea. But I get very excited over their depth and over how different they are from other poems of the time. They stand out to me. Also, since I have read a bunch of her work, I am able to see some things in a larger context. So if it seems that I am reading too much into a tiny poem, try to bear with me.

Destino



Un oscuro impulso incendió mis bosques
¿Quién me dejó sobre las cenizas?

Andaba el viento sin encuentros.
Emergían ecos mudos no sembrados.

Partieron el cielo pájaros sin nidos.
El último polvo nubló la frontera.

Inquieta y sumisa, me quedé en mi voz.

Destiny



A dark impulse burned up my forests.
Who is left for me from the ashes?

The wind roamed alone, meeting no one.
Echoes emerged, mute, unsown.

Birds without nests divided the skies.
The last dust clouded the frontier.

Anxious and meek, I dwell in my voice.

"Destino" can be read in light of the Venezuelan llanos and the prairie burn-off of the dry season. Yet, like many of her poems, it can be read as a political commentary. There is the “dry season” layer, specific to the geography of Barinas, where she lives; the tangled, thorny groves are burned with controlled fires in order to clear room for new growth for vast herds of cattle. The poem could also work as a personal one about philosophical and spiritual renewal. However, the “pájaros sin nidos” ‘birds without nests’ can also be read as the journalists, students, and poets who had to flee the country under the rule of Juan Vicente Gómez, after the 1927 student uprisings or other political clashes.



The creative act of the word, of poetry, is presented as a solution to the problems posed in “Destino” as in many of her other poems. I see her as writing with intense vitality about violence, revolution, politics. But as encoding those concepts within a sort of personal artistic framework, where the poet's voice breaks out of everyday life, a jailbreak from reason and order.

To be honest here on my translation, I am not happy with those birds without nests. Well, how long can one stare at the page muttering, "homeless birds... birds without nests... nestless..... no, dammit" before one just goes with whatEVER. Sometimes, I will be driving down the highway and a line of a poem I translated years ago will pop into my head -- one of this sort of line, where my English is clumsy and graceless -- and the perfect, beautiful phrase will come to me in a flash. From what people say, this happens to all translators and that is why we are always revising. I can work very hard on a translation, and feel in the groove for 90% of it, but that other 10% that just wasn't inspired, is a torment.

I am also fond of this poem:

Vive una guerra


Vive una guerra no advenida. Guerra
con santo y seña, con la orden del día,
con partes, con palomas mensajeras.

Guerra pujante dentro de las vidas.
No digo en las arterias; más adentro.

Ni un estampido ni un rojor de fuego
ni humo vago dan desnudo indicio.

Mas paz de tiza la refleja entera.

And I will give you the first bit, which I think is interesting to translate. Try it yourself as a challenge, if you like.

A war lives


A war lives, unheralded. War
with saint and sign, with the order of day,
with parts of things, with messenger doves.

War throbbing inside whole lives.
I don't say in the veins; deeper inside.

“Vive una guerra” continues the internalization of violent metaphors, with war metaphors to represent existential and philosophical struggles.

Someday I would like to really do her poetry justice, and translate her first two books. Just the little bit that I do know about her family (which included many poets) and her life and about Venezuelan politics, history, and geography, illuminates the poems for me. If I could do the original research, find the journals where her work first appeared, read her poems in that context, I imagine that I could translate them better, explain them, present them in a context that would help other people see where the poems lead.

There is more to say about the ways that Arvelo Larriva was framed as a woman, and about the gendering of literary history as it happens and in hindsight. I guess I'll go into that more in future posts as I talk about other poets and their lives.



What I truly wish for is the ability to get some good, lowdown, dirty gossip. I'd like to know the poets I translate, who have been dead since before I was born, in the same way that I know the poets who are alive now in my city; what do people think of them, really? What are they like? Would I have liked hanging around with Enriqueta? Was she rude, kind, radical, bitchy, boring, pedantic, vindictive, wise? Was she more interesting when she was young? What was the course of her life? With many poets, I do get a sense for the arc of their lives and careers. With Enriqueta, I barely know a thing. And am not likely to get it in this lifetime. Maybe I'll find an old journal or two, or a letter; her letters with Gabriela Mistral and Juana de Ibarbourou. Just knowing those letters exist, changes everything for me.

Maybe someone who knows more will write a longer Wikipedia entry. More likely, some boorish great-nephew will write to me and go "My god! You're talking about old Aunt Netty and her insane scribbling! I didn't think anyone cared about that! Blah blah blah, all those poetry readings, grande dame of Barinitas... She smelled like dusty lavender and dead mice... But, she made good cookies." I can't romanticize my dead poets too much, because I always imagine out those great-nephews who have become excellent dentists and who have healthy lives and perspectives lacking in poetry, who knew only the human being and not the metaphysical point in space and time that was the free-floating philosopher poet.

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