A portion of the dialogue that is pervasive in these types of groups is dedicated to asking the question to ad nauseum “Why are there not enough women in technology?” The women that are in tech are quick to point out that most conferences are dominated by men, mostly white, and that few of these conferences feature any women speakers at all. Day in, and day out, the conversation and complaints flood my twitter stream and my RSS feed to so much annoyance that I’m almost tempted to start spending my free time speaking at conferences (which I’ve done), or organizing a survey to better understand why women in tech do not attend conferences or try to speak at them on their own volition. Just to make the noise go away. It’s not that I don’t believe there are valid concerns, it’s that I find the conversation is tired, and somewhat generational.
In the pop culture of the online world, it seems that women in technology fall into three roles which I can relate to Save by the Bell characters. The Kelly Kapowskis use their sex appeal to attract the tech geek guy to pay attention to them without knowing a lick of what they’re talking about. The Lisa Turtles are the peppy chicks that “overcompensate by pushing their ‘geekery’ on everyone” (quote), displaying a mastery of social media but not of the separation of the application and presentation layers (you dig?). And, the Jesse Spanos are quite qualified women of tech, who also sound like feminists ranting everyday that women are somehow being purposefully left out of the tech equation.
I don’t buy into it. And neither does my friend Amy Ziari.
Last August Amy approached me at a Girls in Tech event (we thank you for that GIT!), tired as well of the same old conversation, with an idea to create a video series featuring women in technology who talk about what they are interested in. Not to prove to anyone that we’re competent, or that we’re “geeky just like you!”, but to let our audience draw their own conclusions. We didn’t want to be Kelly, Lisa or Jesse, we wanted to be ourselves, comfortable with our role in the industry, with our peers (male, female, black, white, hispanic or asian), and what we find interesting.
In mid September we teamed up with Camille Ricketts of Venture Beat to put together the pilot episode of the WildWest show. We hoped to put together more episodes, but time passed, and now I’m leaving soon to take off on an excellent adventure (I’ve alluded to this trip, but have yet to post details). So enjoy this first episode, where we interview Joey Mucha from Sprout and talk about some of our biggest tech snafus! Also, visit the website – www.wildwestshow.tv - to learn more.
Katie came to visit me in August 2009. She helped herself to my city of 4 years so I helped myself to her images. Through her lens, the city refreshes in my eyes.
Like any person in your life, a city cannot be all things to you through thick and thin. As much as I love this city, after 4 years, I’m looking to shake things up. I set sail very soon, stay tuned.
Produced by: Lindsay Tabas
Photos by: Katie Delaney
Song: Signs by Bloc Party (buy on iTunes)
“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” -Abigail Adams
Our second First Lady was known for her prolific writing, and many beautiful quotes of hers have been pulled from her letters she use to write to her husband, President John Adams. Letter writing has become a lost art among my generation. We grew up writing letters to penpals and soldiers from the classroom, and letters to friends and family from summer camp. Even up until 2004, my friend Marla and I were trading letters while I was doing research at Texas A&M University and she was a counselor at a summer camp in New England. My grandmother use to write me beautiful letters, many of which I still have to this day. I remember the different note cards she would use, some with her name printed on them, and others with porcelain dolls. She loves letters so much that she made a copy of one I wrote her when I was 8 years old, and sent it to me; the letter, adorned with a caricature of Garfield eating a slice of pizza, is on my refrigerator. Her letters continued until she mastered e-mail five years ago.
When I reminded my grandmother that she use to write me, and how much I loved her letters, one day last year, to which she responded (by email) “I will retreat to my Abigail Adams mode.” A week later I received two letters from her. A few weeks later, I received an email that said “When I wrote on the computer I received notes from you and I’m missing some responses.” She pointed out the weakness of letter writing, to which email had the advantage. The latter was convenient and free, making a response easy and quick.
Over the years, I have been keeping a box of letters people have sent me, from Bar/Bat Mitzvah invitations 13 years ago, to wedding invitations and ridiculous post cards from Laura Lee’s travels this year. In that box I also keep note cards that I purchased 5 years ago, thinking I would be finished with them shortly thereafter. But then they invented the internet, email became ubiquitous, and we all began hyper-communicating with each other. Facebook came along and let us connect with all of our strong and loose connections culled over the years, enabling us to keep updated in one another’s lives. But, with all these tools, I find that the time between when I truly engage my friends, and when I speak to them again, grows larger and larger as the years pass. With all of these tools at our fingertips, we’ve somehow depersonalized our communication with each other to a few short messages, or a comment on eachother’s pictures.
Last night I opened my box of letters to figure out what I could do with these blank note cards. As I stared at them, I realized that with a fresh pack of stamps, and some free address labels, I could actually use them to write to some of my friends I hadn’t spoken to in a while. After all, snail mail has become such a novelty that it seems special, and an hour of my time to make several of my friends feel this way seemed well spent.
If you’ve forgotten how to write letters, I’ve outlined the steps below:
Step 1: Grab Some Notecards
Step 2: Find Those Free Address Labels the NPC Sent You
Step 3: Find or Buy Some Stamps
Step 4-6: Write Letters, Gather Friends' Addresses, Address Your Letters
Step 7: Find the Big Blue Box and Mail
The best part of this process has been the responses I’ve received after emailing my friends for their snail mail addresses. Being in my mid-twenties, the first question is “Tabas! Are you getting married?”
This is a tutorial designed to help you port your iTunes library from PC to Mac (or visa versa) without losing your Playcount and Rating information. I make several assumptions about the audience in writing this tutorial:
You have a basic understanding of XML.
You are not scared to read and update XML code.
You do not want to lose your Playcount and Rating information.
You are able to move your actual music files from 1 machine to the other without changing the general hierarchy of your file structure.
Now here is the warning for those of you that still are on the fence – this isn’t easy-peasy – we’re not selecting some checkboxes and radio buttons, we’re looking at the code where iTunes stores information about each song.
Background
In the Fall of 2005 I did a project called Playlist Generation & Download that involved creating iTunes playlists using the iTunes XML namespace. I’m hesitant to use the word ‘namespace’ because of iTunes XML’s poor structure. We enabled mobile and desktop applications in a service-oriented architecture to provide search, discovery and playlist generation using XML schemas. In implementation, a user could upload and share iTunes playlists, then download others based on genre and artist search. This tutorial was built based on the knowledge I gained doing this project 4 years ago.
1. Export a single playlist, view it’s XML format
iTunes stores all the data about each song into XML files; when you select Export Library or Export Playlist, the program will allow you to save the output as an XML file. Lets get started by looking at a sample XML file.
Select a playlist, preferably a small one (< 25 songs), and where the songs all reside in the same folder (a particular artist’s album would work really well for the “training wheel’s” version of this tutorial)
Navigate to File> Libary > Export Playlist
Save the XML file somewhere you can find it.
Open up the file in a text editor. The first section of the file is the usual introductions:
If you’ve worked with XML before and you have never seen the iTunes XML, then you’re probably a little startled to see its poor format. For those of you that don’t know right away what is wrong, it’s the fact that every variable is stored in some tag called <key></key> and its value stored in a tag such as <integer> or <string>. If I were to rewrite the first key, it should look like <Major Version>1</Major Version>. The iTunes people would have saved themselves a bunch of time if they paid attention in XML Bootcamp!
2. Locate the “Music Folder” path information
In this snippet of code, the most important piece of information is:
The <string> value is the location of your iTunes Music folder, and in this case, this is the Mac format.
Instructions:
Determine the location of your Music Folder in both your Mac and PC
Copy and paste these locations into a text editor so you can compare the differences between the two.
If you’re moving from a PC to a Mac (and try this first with your sample playlist):
Export your Playlist on your PC – lets call this Windows.XML
Change the Music Folder <string> to use the Mac location (path info), making sure the format is in a Mac format.
3. Locate the song “Location” path information.
Now lets look at the XML for each song. Each song in your library or playlist XML file has a few lines of XML to describe its properties; two of these lines contain the play count and the star ratings, exactly what we DONT want to lose. Here you go:
But, the only line we care about is the fourth line from the bottom: Location.
Instructions
Copy the folder in which your playlist’s music resides from 1 machine to the other. In my case I would take the Asher Roth album, and move it from my Music folder on my PC to my Music folder on my Mac
Find the new path information for this folder. On my PC, it’s something like “C://Documents and Settings/Music/…”, and on my Mac it’s file://localhost/Users/lindsay/Music”
Compare the two location/path information to see where they defer and where they don’t. For me, its the path information up until the Music folder.
For the first song in your XML file, locate the location information. Cut out “C://Documents and Settings/” and paste “file://localhost/Users/lindsay”. Verify that the path information for the song’s new location looks correct.
Do a Find/Replace on the entire file – Find: “C://Documents and Settings/” (the original path information), Replace with: “file://localhost/Users/Lindsay/” (the new path information)
You only want to do this Find/Replace because every song has a unique ending (the actual .mp3 name and file).
4. Save and Move the Playlist.xml file to your new machine and upload
If you’re playlist folder is on your new machine in the path that you directed the Playlist.xml file to, then all you need to do is the following:
Open iTunes – Navigate to File > Library > Import Playlist
Browse and Upload your Playlist.xml file
The Playlist should appear in your list of playlists, and the songs should now be in your iTunes
Verify that the play count and ratings are intact.
5. Don’t delete the playlists
The final note is that you should not delete these new playlists. If you delete them, you may lose some of your song’s information
Direction Reduction:
1. Export your iTunes Library on your Windows machine.
2. Open the file in a text editor; change the directory for your Music Folder and change the directories for the location of each song (a simple Find and Replace should work if you have correctly maintained your music folder hierarchy)
3. Import the XML file into your iTunes on your Mac machine.
Final notes to make your life simpler:
This is a really simple thing to do if your library is less than 1300 songs. If your library is like mine (9000+ songs) then you will need to separate your iTunes music into manageable sized playlists and export and edit each playlist. I did this by creating Smart Playlists for each letter of the alphabet related to Artists. It takes longer to do this on a playlist-by-playlist basis, but you’ll save your processor a lot of time and stalling (I had a 4GB processor that couldn’t handle the XML file for my entire library). I think total, this took me 2 hours to do. That’s 2 hours to save me the 30+ hours I would spend deleting duplicates and adding ratings if I had to start from scratch.
Your life will also be easier if your music happens to be on an external hard drive because you then don’t have to migrate the music too, just the data about the music. This was my situation, but probably is not the case for most of you.
Again if you can move the actual files from your Windows machine to your Mac machine without changing the hierarchy, then migrating your library will be much simpler in the long run.
If you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help out!
The basic idea of the product is to motivate children to move and dance by varying the speed at which the music is played. The speed changes based on how quickly and energetically the child is dancing.
A day does not go by when I don’t hear about an event from the numerous “we support women in technology” groups: Girls in Tech, Women 2.0, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner and Shes Geeky. All of these groups have merit, and all have a target audience, from software developers to marketing analysts. I’ve certainly benefited from these organizations, participating in Women 2.0′s Business Plan Competition back in 2008, attending a plethora of Girls in Tech events about journalism, business development, and so forth, and going to the Shes Geeky conference at the beginning of this year down in the Peninsula. I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing women which include intense athletes, creative and insightful product managers, and even friends that help me out with reservations to Chez Panisse!
In the pop culture of the online world, it seems that women in technology fall into three roles which I can relate to Save by the Bell characters. The Kelly Kapowskis use their sex appeal to attract the tech geek guy to pay attention to them without knowing a lick of what they’re talking about. The Lisa Turtles are the peppy chicks that “overcompensate by pushing their ‘geekery’ on everyone” (quote), displaying a mastery of social media but not of the separation of the application and presentation layers (you dig?). And, the Jesse Spanos are quite qualified women of tech, who also sound like feminists ranting everyday that women are somehow being purposefully left out of the tech equation.
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