*** Warning: This post is off-topic. This will happen very rarely! ***
I have a wonderful friend who lives on my street. She's one of the most giving people I have ever met. She also happens to be head of the Ottawa branch of the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, which helps improve the lives of seriously ill children and their families. Knowing this person so well, I can see how much of herself she puts into her work. She cares deeply about the people she works with, and always has a little something up her sleeve to bring delight to all.
Each August, one of the Foundation's most important fundraising events takes place: it's called the Dreamwalk. I took part last year and am going to do so again this year. I managed to raise several hundred dollars last year, but hope to do even better this time around. My husband and I are even planning to give a large donation ourselves, but are still discussing how big to make it. Suffice it to say that it should be over $100.
If you'd like to help me out in raising money for this event, you can do so securely with a credit card at my personal fundraising page.
Thanks for any help you can give, and wish me luck in raising as much money as I can for Starlight!
--- UPDATE: We donated $300. Woohoo! Hope you can help too!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Geospatial Day at OS Bootcamp
Last Monday I attended an interesting event for the first time: OS Bootcamp (where the OS in this case is for open source, not operating systems). I had heard of these events before, but never made it out until I had the excuse that the latest edition was going to be all about geospatial software (a topic related to my thesis - more on that in the next few days).
OS Bootcamp started as a free mini-conference to help students gain basic skills generally used in open source software development, from web programming to databases, C++ programming to Eclipse. There were five given before the geospatial day, but the latest was the longest, having talks for an entire day. Free food and drinks are always provided, including sandwiches for lunch in this case.
The first set of talks weren't of huge interest to me in that they focussed on business rather than technology. Andrew Ross, who founded OS Bootcamp, began with his thoughts on the business value of open source, focussing on the cost savings of reusing code that somebody else has designed, developed, and tested. Tony Bailetti of Carleton told us about the Talent First Network and the Technology Innovation Management Masters degree. Emma McGrattan explained how Ingres became the most mature open source database available for enterprise use, and how it integrated new open source geospatial libraries.
Things started to get interesting when Dave McIlagga outlined the significance of open source geospatial software in Ottawa. I had no idea how strong the culture of open source apparently is here. Dave asserted that there is a strong relationship between the community, industry, government, NGO's, and academia. He listed the following trends he thinks will be important, particularly in relation to location. I feel they are definitely relevant to my mapping idea.
Julien Lacroix and Paul Spencer demonstrated the many cool things that can be done with OpenLayers, "a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies." The website features a gallery of examples. I can definitely see some uses of OpenLayers and its vector capabilities for some innovative augmented reality web applications (perhaps even on mobile devices).
As a bit of a twist on the usual technical talks, Scott Mitchell discussed how open source software could be used in academia from the perspective of a non-technical geographer. A fresh perspective is always eye-opening, and it was motivating to hear about how professors in other departments are making use of the high quality software available free these days. Of equal importance are the disadvantages of OSS in this context. For instance, there is no institutional support for this non-standard software, so a professor that uses it must also administer and fix it himself.
Unfortunately, it was at this point that my attention span could not handle much more. I suppose that's why all the other OS Bootcamps are much shorter in terms of length and number of talks. There were several other talks that I should have been interested in, including one that had a great geometry focus, but my mind had wandered, waiting only for the draw for the GPS and Playstation III at the end of the day.
Despite this, I felt the event was really well put together, and am considering attending the next Bootcamp to see if I can't learn a few new tricks in Eclipse. Who knows; I might even be able to convince the husband to tag along.
OS Bootcamp started as a free mini-conference to help students gain basic skills generally used in open source software development, from web programming to databases, C++ programming to Eclipse. There were five given before the geospatial day, but the latest was the longest, having talks for an entire day. Free food and drinks are always provided, including sandwiches for lunch in this case.
The first set of talks weren't of huge interest to me in that they focussed on business rather than technology. Andrew Ross, who founded OS Bootcamp, began with his thoughts on the business value of open source, focussing on the cost savings of reusing code that somebody else has designed, developed, and tested. Tony Bailetti of Carleton told us about the Talent First Network and the Technology Innovation Management Masters degree. Emma McGrattan explained how Ingres became the most mature open source database available for enterprise use, and how it integrated new open source geospatial libraries.
Things started to get interesting when Dave McIlagga outlined the significance of open source geospatial software in Ottawa. I had no idea how strong the culture of open source apparently is here. Dave asserted that there is a strong relationship between the community, industry, government, NGO's, and academia. He listed the following trends he thinks will be important, particularly in relation to location. I feel they are definitely relevant to my mapping idea.
- Wireless is (or will be) everywhere. This will allow for a synchronization between reality and information technology.
- Consumers want real time information, like weather, traffic, and so on.
- There is also a desire for "real" reality (think augmented reality!).
- Technologies need to be geospatially aware to be able to make good real time decisions, requiring geospatial software to be well integrated with other technologies.
- There is an increasing importance placed on "where," and this context awareness is again important for effective decision making.
Julien Lacroix and Paul Spencer demonstrated the many cool things that can be done with OpenLayers, "a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies." The website features a gallery of examples. I can definitely see some uses of OpenLayers and its vector capabilities for some innovative augmented reality web applications (perhaps even on mobile devices).
As a bit of a twist on the usual technical talks, Scott Mitchell discussed how open source software could be used in academia from the perspective of a non-technical geographer. A fresh perspective is always eye-opening, and it was motivating to hear about how professors in other departments are making use of the high quality software available free these days. Of equal importance are the disadvantages of OSS in this context. For instance, there is no institutional support for this non-standard software, so a professor that uses it must also administer and fix it himself.
Unfortunately, it was at this point that my attention span could not handle much more. I suppose that's why all the other OS Bootcamps are much shorter in terms of length and number of talks. There were several other talks that I should have been interested in, including one that had a great geometry focus, but my mind had wandered, waiting only for the draw for the GPS and Playstation III at the end of the day.
Despite this, I felt the event was really well put together, and am considering attending the next Bootcamp to see if I can't learn a few new tricks in Eclipse. Who knows; I might even be able to convince the husband to tag along.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
What about Inkscape?
I wanted to work on Inkscape this summer, at least a bit here and there. I was trying to help out a Summer of Code student for a while, but my expertise didn't lie as much in his project domain as we were hoping. Other than that, I really haven't had the chance. Or maybe I just haven't forced myself to make the time. Either way, I'm hoping that publicly writing about it might guilt me into ensuring that I fix at least a bug or two before September comes around. Fingers crossed.
CS Unplugged
"Teach computer science... without a computer!"
CS Unplugged's home page tag line pretty much sums up the New Zealand-based project. I first encountered CS Unplugged on reddit, and got hooked from there. I had wondered if I'd be able to use any of the activities in my mini-course. In the end, I used no less than three of them!
The activities cover a fairly wide range of fundamental computer science concepts. The best part about them, though, is the head fake (if I may borrow Randy Pausch's term). You get kids to play these fun games or lead some zany discussions, so they're pretty much just having fun while learning (or at least being exposed to) some pretty tough concepts. True, some of the more keen students might ask, "So, what does this have to do with computers again?" But all is revealed in the end.
A great example is the activity on Finite State Automata, which I used during the artificial intelligence section of the mini-course. Several kids act as islands, and get printed cards that indicate where a ship may go. There are always two choices: choice A and choice B. The rest of the students start at the first island, and ask to travel along one of these choices. Their goal is to reach treasure island, while writing down the path(s) they used to get there. After everyone has had the opportunity to try it, the class can compare their maps and discuss what patterns of A's and B's can be used to get from start to finish. So while they think they're just going on a treasure hunt, they really just learned about how to find examples of accepted strings to finite state machines. Pretty cool eh?
I also tried the Human Computer Interaction and Turing Test activities during the mini-course. It was a bit harder to convince them of the relevance of the Chocolate Factory design discussion for HCI, but they seemed to enjoy these as well. If nothing else, they had some really good discussions about the topics, so perhaps they'll see the connection to computer science better later on and look back on their experience here.
You can see some of the events from around the world that used CS Unplugged material on this Google Map. My mini-course is on there - see if you can find it! I hope, in the near future, to be able to add more events to this map. In particular, our Women in Science and Engineering group hopes to work on some outreach programs for pre-university girls, so there's a huge opportunity to incorporate a few key CS Unplugged activities.
CS Unplugged's home page tag line pretty much sums up the New Zealand-based project. I first encountered CS Unplugged on reddit, and got hooked from there. I had wondered if I'd be able to use any of the activities in my mini-course. In the end, I used no less than three of them!
The activities cover a fairly wide range of fundamental computer science concepts. The best part about them, though, is the head fake (if I may borrow Randy Pausch's term). You get kids to play these fun games or lead some zany discussions, so they're pretty much just having fun while learning (or at least being exposed to) some pretty tough concepts. True, some of the more keen students might ask, "So, what does this have to do with computers again?" But all is revealed in the end.
A great example is the activity on Finite State Automata, which I used during the artificial intelligence section of the mini-course. Several kids act as islands, and get printed cards that indicate where a ship may go. There are always two choices: choice A and choice B. The rest of the students start at the first island, and ask to travel along one of these choices. Their goal is to reach treasure island, while writing down the path(s) they used to get there. After everyone has had the opportunity to try it, the class can compare their maps and discuss what patterns of A's and B's can be used to get from start to finish. So while they think they're just going on a treasure hunt, they really just learned about how to find examples of accepted strings to finite state machines. Pretty cool eh?
I also tried the Human Computer Interaction and Turing Test activities during the mini-course. It was a bit harder to convince them of the relevance of the Chocolate Factory design discussion for HCI, but they seemed to enjoy these as well. If nothing else, they had some really good discussions about the topics, so perhaps they'll see the connection to computer science better later on and look back on their experience here.
You can see some of the events from around the world that used CS Unplugged material on this Google Map. My mini-course is on there - see if you can find it! I hope, in the near future, to be able to add more events to this map. In particular, our Women in Science and Engineering group hopes to work on some outreach programs for pre-university girls, so there's a huge opportunity to incorporate a few key CS Unplugged activities.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
WISE Logo
I've been spending some time lately putting together a few options for the new Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering chapter. To make the final selection, we'll be asking the current members of the group for their top five choices. I'm very excited to see which one they'll pick, because I can't decide myself which I like the best.
Click this small and hard to read preview for a better look.
We know our color scheme is going to be green and purple, but the color choices in these previews are not necessarily final. There were also a few variations that I didn't include here. For some logos, I have a "short form" version that will be better suited to promo items like pens or shirts. These are the ones that say "CU-WISE." They will be partnered with one of the longer versions that will be used in letterheads and posters.
Click this small and hard to read preview for a better look.We know our color scheme is going to be green and purple, but the color choices in these previews are not necessarily final. There were also a few variations that I didn't include here. For some logos, I have a "short form" version that will be better suited to promo items like pens or shirts. These are the ones that say "CU-WISE." They will be partnered with one of the longer versions that will be used in letterheads and posters.
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