Grace Hopper was in Portland this year, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to attend their first-ever Open Source Day. I planned to spend my time doing some work for the Kids on Computers project, which takes in donated laptops, installs Edubuntu on them, and then deploys them in computer labs for disadvantaged kids.
Four of us set out to make some kind of quickie script that would make laptop ‘triage’ faster: answering questions like does it have the minimum memory required for Edubuntu, what size is the HD, etc. Currently, about half the laptops KOC gets are Windows machines; the other half are (surprise!) Linux. So the script would have to handle both OSes. Luckily, Sandra had done some VBScript a long time ago, and she & Jenna worked up a solution for Windows while Michelle & I worked up a bash script for Linux.
I’d like to say it was glorious & empowering & stuff being in a room full of women nerdy IT types, but really, it felt normal. [1]
The mayor came & gave the lunchtime address (complete with a shout-out to locals Code & Splode http://codeandsplode.org/). He visited our table for a photo-op. A couple days later, when I showed the photo to some friends, they weren’t as impressed by the mayor as by the fact that I was working on a friend’s Macintosh.[2]
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1 – Although it was nice not having to answer the usual “Hey! You’re the only girl here!” stuff.
2 – My trusty little HP died, and I had to borrow a machine. More about that next week.
the gabriellephant 