anarres

As part of getting ready for GSoC I've been reading about perl's DBI (database interface) module, which lets you interact with an SQL database through a perl script, rather than typing SQL into a terminal. There's a good little intro to it in Chapter 14 of the freely available Perl Cookbook from O'Reilly. (Free ebooks are one of my favourite things ever).

This script shows the simplest possible example of using DBI:

( Read more... )

Wow, my Google Summer of Code proposal got accepted, this is amazing and exciting. I feel really lucky, I know the (Dreamwidth admins? Dreamwidthers?) had a hard time choosing between all the proposals.

So this is the part where I write a bit about myself. I'm a 3rd year mature student at the University of Manchester, UK, studying Physics with Theoretical Physics. However I'm starting to realise that the sorts of careers my degree leads to (mainly engineering or finance) don't interest me so much, and I've never much enjoyed lab work. However I've really enjoyed learning C++ and doing computing projects, and I'm beginning to think that a career in programming would be right for me, which is why I'm applying to Google Summer of Code.

As a hobby I'm working on a project called genderBender, which gender-reverses text by swapping gendered words, so for instance 'she' becomes 'he' and 'man' becomes 'woman', etc. It's pretty dinky-looking at the moment but I'd like to eventually work like Google's translate function, where you can translate either a piece of text or a website. My initial reason for doing this was to gender-reverse scifi ebooks in order to get some strong female characters, but I also think it would be a really interesting way to investigate how we tend to write and think about men and women differently.

For the past several years I've been involved in the Climate Camp, a group that takes action on climate change. For me one of the most exciting things about Climate Camp is that there is an anti-discriminatory Safer Spaces policy. Decisions are made through consensus decision making and I have gained some experience in facilitating these meetings. Up until 2008 I was also part of a small team responsible for building and maintaining the website. This lead to me learning a lot about HTML and CSS, and even more about the frustrations of attempting to non-hierarchically run a website which only two people know how to edit, but several dozen people want to frequently update (and all the updates need to go at the top of the main page, of course!) I'm happy to say that the Climate Camp website has since moved over to Drupal.

I also like making digital music using Ubuntu Linux, although I haven't had so much time for that lately. There are some songs I wrote here, which will probably only appeal to those who like their music slow, ambient, and weird.