NoWomenJustMen: The Roster at Most Tech Conferences

I heard from one of the organizers of the Spring Experience, an enterprise Java conference organized by NoFluffJustStuff that I criticized for assembling a 38-speaker roster than doesn't include a single female.

He never responded to my request to run his e-mail in full, but this quote sums it up:

We sought out a qualified speaker who was female. She is on your list. Unfortunately, she is in very high demand (as one would probably expect!) and in the end could not commit due to a scheduling conflict. Even with the conflict, we went the extra mile to accomodate her because she brought something different and refreshing to our target audience. Unfortunately, she just couldn't commit.

We're actively pushing bright girls out of professions like programming by reinforcing the idea that technological fields only appeal to one gender. The brain drain this causes has to be incredibly detrimental to this country's competitiveness, discouraging 51 percent of the population from pursuing these fields even as we rely more heavily on them in our economy.

Politics · Java · 2006/10/07 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Handle 'Scumbag' with Care

The original meaning of the slang term scumbag was a bit more specific than "despicable person" -- it meant "used condom." The New York Times once put a scumbag in its famous crossword puzzle and angered readers.

Former Rep. Dan Burton called President Clinton a scumbag in 1998, sparking press attention in the word's unsavory origins.

Now that I've told you this, please enjoy the following metaphor from Dennis Byrne's commentary about the Foley scandal in the conservative weekly Human Events Online:

... for Rush [Limbaugh], it appears to be just one more case of defending the castle against another onslaught from the left. In this, he's not doing Republicans and conservatives any favors. It just gives gleeful Democrats an example of Republican "hypocrisy." Of how Republicans keep talking about America losing its moral compass, while they've lost it themselves.

Democrats are making gains with it, because it is becoming increasingly true. Otherwise it wouldn't have taken Republicans so long to admit that they messed up by not smelling the scumbag in their midst.

Jargon · Politics · 2006/10/05 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Proposal: Revise the RSS 2.0 Specification

In the 2.5 years I've been a member of the RSS Advisory Board, three questions have been asked most often by programmers having difficulty interpreting the RSS 2.0 specification:

1. Can an item contain more than one enclosure?
2. What elements are allowed to contain HTML?
3. How do I deal with relative URLs?

I think it's time that the board answered them.

In February, work began on a new, written-from-scratch draft of the specification, with each revision announced and vetted on the RSS-Public mailing list. The main contributors to the draft are four members of the board and one of the lead developers of the Feed Validator: James Holderness, Randy Charles Morin, Sam Ruby, Greg Smith and myself.

The new draft documents the same elements and attributes described in RSS 2.0 (version 2.0.8), the current spec, making no changes to the requirements upon which RSS creators Dan Libby and Dave Winer sparked the incredibly successful RSS boom. No elements have been added or removed.

It does clarify the RSS specification in the three areas mentioned above, based on our interpretation of the current spec and its predecessors:

1. An item cannot contain more than one enclosure. The only RSS element that can be present more than once in an item is category.
2. The only RSS element that can contain HTML is an item's description.
3. Relative URLs are not allowed. When they're encountered in an item's description -- which is not recommended -- the feed's link element should be used as the base URL.

Though we could answer these three questions by editing the current spec, this draft should be easier to interpret because it follows the rules of RFC 2119, a standard for spec writers that dictates exactly what words like "must", "may" and "should" mean when they appear in a technical document.

It also has been through a thorough and open review process that included 11 revisions to the draft and 13 revisions to a companion document still under development, the RSS Profile.

I proposed today that the RSS Advisory Board adopt the draft as version 2.0.9 of the RSS 2.0 specification.

If this proposal is seconded, the seven-day discussion period will be used to fix mistakes, address concerns and make other minor edits to this draft. When the vote begins, I'll report to the board on the changes that were made and publish the final draft at the above URL for consideration.

Comments from the public are encouraged on the RSS-Public mailing list.

Rss · 2006/10/04 · 1 COMMENT · Link

James Holderness and Paul Querna Join RSS Advisory Board

James Holderness and Paul Querna have joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Holderness is a software developer working on the Snarfer RSS reader for Windows whose past projects include the WebFerret search utility and Delrina CyberJack Internet application suite.

He's also an active participant on the board's RSS-Public mailing list who contributed to the RSS Profile, a set of best practice recommendations for RSS in ongoing development.

Querna is a software engineer at Ask working on Bloglines, one of the most popular web-based RSS readers.

He's also a member of the project management committee for the Apache web server and formerly a developer of voice over IP communications systems at BitStruct.

Welcome to the board!

Rss · 2006/10/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Foley's Abuse of Teens Should Draw Bipartisan Disgust

I'm glad that some right-wing partisans such as Michelle Malkin are outraged about Mark Foley's sexual exploitation of Congressional pages and the inaction of House GOP leaders who knew he was behaving suspiciously and did nothing to investigate:

There is a time and place for attacking the Dems and the MSM. Now is not that time. Parents need assurance that their kids are safe on Capitol Hill. If Beltway GOP elites can't understand this, they are beyond hope.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, on the other hand, claims that Republican leaders didn't stop Foley because they were too tolerant of gays:

... in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters?

It's hard to believe that a newspaper with such a great news department allows itself to be associated with such vile sentiments. The Journal has to be the only major paper in America that would use Foley's abuse -- which has yet to be criminally investigated and might include more than online chat -- to make the implication that gays are predisposed to prey on children. Has there ever been a heterosexual politician in a sex scandal whose actions were viewed as a statement against all heterosexuals?

The Journal devoted thousands of words to President Clinton sexing up Monica Lewinsky, who was a college-age White House intern when their relationship began. Did it ever use that as a springboard to leap to conclusions about straight men and young girls?

There are times in politics when decency compels you to throw a member of your own side under the bus. This is one of those times. Anyone in Congress who protected Foley should resign from his leadership position and perhaps even his seat.

The instant message conversations Foley had with teens -- one interrupted by a boy's mother, prompting Foley's hope that she "didn't see any thing" -- may be the most disgusting conduct by a member of Congress since Ted Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne in the water in 1969.

The worst thing about this scandal is that it's the second time our politicians have been caught using the page program as a jailbait dating service. Members of Congress should register with the local sheriff's department when they move and be prohibited from living within 500 yards of a school or day care center.

Politics · Florida · 2006/10/03 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Want Out of Wikipedia? Fight to Stay In

If you dive into the Wikipedia talk page on Seth Finkelstein, you'll find his interesting and utterly futile effort to be deleted from the encyclopedia. Getting a piece in The Guardian isn't helping his claim to be insufficiently famous at all.

On the mailing list WikiEN-L, Steve Summit identifies a law of Wikipedia that should become known as the Finkelstein Paradox -- a subject who argues he doesn't belong in Wikipedia is more likely to remain in Wikipedia:

I was struck by Seth's account of how he "strongly argued the case against myself" at AFD. I suspect that a biographical article's subject tends to carry significant but paradoxical undue weight at AFD, in two contradictory directions. Subjects who argue that they are notable and that their articles should be kept are obviously vain self-promoters, so their articles should obviously be deleted. But subjects who argue that their articles should be deleted are obviously trying to hide something (or, at least, to unjustly influence the free flow of information), so their articles should obviously be kept.

It's too late for Finkelstein, but others can learn from his predicament. If you're added to Wikipedia and don't want to be there, show up for the ArticlesForDeletion (AFD) debate and argue the merits of your fame as passionately as your mother would. Edit your own entry and add a few accomplishments and personal qualities that other editors wrongly overlooked. Deride your critics in as supercilious a tone as you can muster.

The Wikipedia editors who show up for deletion votes will respond to these acts like a shark that smells blood in the water.

Wikipedia · 2006/10/01 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

A tragic story in today's Houston Chronicle has an unfortunate ad juxtoposition:

The ad's animated, showing an SUV stopping safely and avoiding a child's ball bouncing into the road. "You always stop," it begins. "You always drive safely. You deserve a reward."

Journalism · 2006/09/30 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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