Monthly Archives: October 2012

women

five awesome women in science and technology

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In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, and inspired by a challenge to name five awesome women in science and technology in five different countries, I’ll give my answer.

  1. Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School (US).  She gave the keynote talk at UIST 2012 (which I just attended, and it was awesome, and I need to write it up) about art and vision, and gave me quite a lot to think about in terms of how we process visual information.  She is in the process of expanding her book Vision and Art, to be republished next year.
  2. Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel).  She won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for her work about ribosomes.  (The previous female Nobel laureate in chemistry was 1964, so she ended quite the dry spell.)
  3. Cheryl Praeger, University of Western Australia.  She’s done some amazing work on group theory and algorithm complexity.
  4. Tebello Nyokong, Rhodes University (South Africa).  She is the first woman from South Africa to have won the L’Oréal-UNESCO award for women in science, for her work on cancer treatments.
  5. Sophia Drossopoulou, Imperial College London (UK).  She might just be my favorite woman doing work in programming languages.
I’m overdue for a write-up of my experience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, too.  For now, suffice it to say that it was a freakin’ awesome experience to be in a room with 3600 other technical women, and I nearly fell out of my chair when my panel session about influencing without authority filled the room and had to turn people away.  
Mac

iTunes and half-star ratings

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Some time ago, I discovered that you could enable half-star ratings in iTunes with a simple Terminal command1:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Ever since I enabled that, I’ve been happily half-starring items.  When your music library runs to well over 40k songs, there is a difference between a five-star song, a four-and-a-half-star song, and a four-star song.

But then, sometime after I upgraded to Mountain Lion on my work computer, I noticed that all of my half-stars were gone.  My heart skipped a beat: I’d put a fair amount of work into rating those songs, and the idea of having to go back through and re-doing it made me quite cranky.  But I love my half-stars, so I quit iTunes, ran that Terminal command again, and re-launched it.

And then, I discovered that all of my half-star ratings were back.  Apparently those half-stars weren’t lost, they were just truncated when the correct bit wasn’t flipped.  Which means I can stop flipping out.

So, if you ever find yourself in my boat, try re-enabling half-stars with the Terminal command above, and see if iTunes does the right thing.  I hope it does.

  1. A tip of the hat to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the original tip. ↩
Nadyne, women

a-conferencing we will go – Grace Hopper and UIST

I got lucky, and get to attend back-to-back conferences this year.  I’m pretty excited about both.

The first is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which I just heard has sold out.  3600 of my fellow women in technology will be there.  I’ll be speaking on a panel about how to influence without authority.  I’ll also be working in the VMware booth for recruitment purposes, so if you’re interested in jobs at VMware, come by our booth and I’ll be happy to tell you more about what it’s like to work here.

Then I leave Baltimore and head to Cambridge for UIST 2012.  I’ve been wanting to go for years and years, but it always either conflicted with or was too close to OOPSLA for me to be able to attend.  So I’m totally geeked to be able to attend this year.  I’m just attending UIST, which is a nice change.

If you’re going to be at either of those, feel free to ping me via twitter so that we can meet up for coffee or cocktails.