Kevin Schofield shares some of his knowledge about Margolis and Fisher's study on women in CS at CMU. Apparently there were (at least) two big issues that we causing women to leave the CMU CS program. I'm going to restate them here in my own words, and in a positive way, because they resonate with me as well (you should read Kevin's post in full anyway).

1. Women want to use computing to change the world.
2. Women want to work collaboratively to accomplish 1.

Last week Tim Bray chronicled the development of Sun's blogging policy, and prior to that, Planet Sun blasted off.

So today, I was encouraged to see that IBM had finally decided to get into the blogging act as well. At least until I visited some of the blogs and tried to get RSS feeds for them. It seems that the RSS feeds are generated by date on a monthly basis -- the feed is truncated at the beginning of the month. To see this in action, try to get the feed for Doug Tidwell's blog (the only one with enough entries to demonstrate this problem). Notice that you only get the entries for May, even though Doug has a stack for April. I tried trimming off the query parameters for the date, with no perceivable effect. Call me underwhelmed.

If you are interested in object systems, you really ought to be exposed to CLOS.

Richard P. Gabriel made his CLOS papers available. (via Pascal Costanza in comp.lang.lisp)

[via lispmeister]

I've been waiting anxiously for the latest version of shtoom to come out, since it's the version that will have fixed codec's for Mac OS X. Then I read Ben's post that he'd gotten the X-Ten VOIP phone to work on the Mac and used it to create an account on FreeWorld Dialup, which Anthony also recommended for use with shtoom. Since saving a bucket of money for OSAF on phone calls would be a good thing, I decided to try and get the X-Ten phone running. My experience was a little bit less ideal than Ben's -- I had a few snags related to phone number formats and iptables firewalls, but I did manage to get it going. I even called Ben and had a nice chat with him. The sound quality is okay, but surprising. When no one is speaking, you hear dead silence. When Ben was talking I heard him and some ambient background noise. That part is a little disconcerting. Of course, I could have just iChat audio chatted him, too, but that would have been cheating.