FOB

I was wading through kernel code the other day when I found this comment in idr.c:

You can pass this id to a user for him to pass back at a later time.

My feminist side was a little irked by the use of "him". It implies that the only user of this function must be men. English speakers tend to use the word "he" or "him" when the gender is ambiguous. It's common because in the past only men were educated and our language is slow to change. I started wondering, how would the Linux community react to someone submitting patches to gender neutralize code?

It's not a big deal, on the surface. It's akin to removing extra whitespace or cleaning up spelling, which some kernel janitors do. Like those tasks, it's a lot of thankless work. So why would it be worth it?

Our preconceptions of what we can and cannot do start with language. When someone is told, over and over again, that they cannot be an engineer or a ballerina, they may start to be believe it. People also get discouraged when all the literature surrounding the field implicitly assumes they are of the opposite gender. We'd look twice at a statistics book that talks about the chances of getting an ineffective pill in a batch of birth control pills. However, most people wouldn't even pause when reading the source code above because we think that men are more likely to be programmers.

A while ago, I was talking with a Boeing engineering at OSCON about the lack of t-shirts for women at the conference booths. He said something along the lines of, "There's just not that many of you around." My response to that is if the community doesn't make room for women, they will continue to be the exception.

Of course, some people might argue that by the time a woman reads kernel code or participates in an open source convention, it's likely that she's already decided to be a programmer despite societal expectations. However, as someone who is just getting involved in kernel hacking, it's still a little intimidating that there is an implicit gender bias. Heck, it was even intimidating to go to my first "Kernel beering" because society implies beer is not a girl's drink.

There are many subtle ways that the engineering community in general, and the open source community specifically, can make women feel welcome. It starts with language. If we can't explicitly tell women that the open source community is not a boy's club, at the very least, we shouldn't implicitly exclude them from the community with the use of gendered terms.

I spent about five hours today setting up Thunderbird to get messages from my gmail account. Most of that time was spent creating filters. I don't mind Thunderbird so far, but I have some small issues with it:

• Viewing labeled messages is a pain. As far as I can tell, there's no way to see all the messages I've marked with a particular label if they're in different folders. I'd like to use marking for reminding myself what emails I need to reply to, but it doesn't help if I can't see them all at once. It seems dumb to set up a folder to store messages I need to reply to. At the very least, a colored marker next to a folder than contains a marked message would be helpful.
• Only five labels? Come on.
• If I have a subdirectory, the parent directory doesn't show how many unread messages there are in the subdirectories.
• When I delete one message, I don't want to open the next message.
• I keep getting duplicate messages from gmail. I think it's related to changing my POP settings in gmail. Hopefully it will only re-download messages once.
• At first I thought Thunderbird ate some messages in a folder. The view was set to All, but I tried resetting it again. Turns out the view was really on "unread" instead. No message loss, simply a rendering/updating bug.
• More rendering bugs with drop down menus. A couple times, a newly added folder wouldn't get displayed on a drop down menu. It would show up as a blank space instead, and wouldn't expand to show any subfolders.

I should probably look to see if anyone has reported these bugs yet, but I need to start my technical writing homework.

The reason I'm switching to Thunderbird is so I can send patches to the USB mailing list and Greg K-H. It's still a pain to use Thunderbird for creating messages with patches in them, but at least I can sign emails with my gpg key. Gmail still doesn't have that capability.

At the bridal show I went to last weekend, there was a group of photographers that caught my eye. They take pictures of couples and turn them into movie posters.

The credits can be used to thank friends and family and the poster can be turned into save-the-date cards or thank you cards. I think it's a really awesome idea, but I'm not sure there's a "perfect movie" for Jamey and I. Maybe The Princess Bride? Jamey wasn't too keen on that idea (probably because he's only read the book and hasn't seen the movie).

Ideas? It doesn't necessarily have to be a romantic movie. It could even be an anime.

This morning I talked to Cindy Brown, the head of the CS department, about getting a CS master's degree. She was very excited about my decision to go to grad school, which is flattering to me. (I have the bad habit of underestimating my worth, and finding out that people think I'm interesting and cool is always surprising.)

I've taken a lot of CS courses for my ECE degree, but I would still need to complete CS311, CS321, CS322, and CS350 before I could be admitted to the CS graduate program. Because of the way those classes are scheduled, I would be working on them until Winter 2008:

Spring 2007
* ECE486
* CS311

Fall 2007
* CS321

Winter 2008
* CS322
* CS350

I would be admitted and start my graduate classes in Spring 2008. I may be able to apply for fellowships Winter 2008, but I have to ask Marcia if I have to be admitted to the program by then.

There's also funding through TA and RA positions. The faculty controls the Research Assistant positions, and the CS council and the department control the Teacher Assistant positions. Cindy said if I make myself useful on a research project, it's more likely that I'll get a TA position.

However, there's not much funding for post-bac students, so I'd have to pay for the pre-graduate CS courses on my own. I'll find the money somewhere. Jamey will probably still be working for Andrew, and he can support us while I take a break from school. I supported him while he took a break from school, so it's only fair.

I'm looking forward to only taking a couple classes and having some free time. I'll have time to work on some cool projects and catch up on my bookshelf. I miss reading.

Of course, if the right job comes along (e.g. working as a Linux kernel hacker) I may abandon this plan. The two paths aren't mutually exclusive, but it would be hard to work and go to grad school.

My livejournal readers have long ignored my more technical posts, so I'm considering cross-posting some of them here. As far as I can tell, only Bart and Judy are active bloggers, so this first message is a test to see if anyone would read my posts. *ping*