The Coding Girls Manifesto (1.0)

I do not want to copy the whole girls@geecon diary entry – if you are interested, check the conference blog.

Still, I think the Coding Girls Manifesto we came up with during the girls get-together matches this weblog very well. Here it goes:

1. Parities are nonsense, but there are more girls fit (and happy in favourable circumstances) to do IT than what we see now.
2. We are not saying there are not differences between men and women, but members of both sexes can become great programmers or visionaries in computer science.
3. It is very important to monitor early education stages and eliminate concious and subconcious hints sent by parents and teachers, assigning girls to ‘softer’ crafts or praising them only for looking good (and boys for being intelligent and creative).
4. We (girls) have to become just a little more self-confident, including starting our sentences with ‘I know that’ instead of ‘I think that’.

One more thing just now. This is what my friend Ania showed me a few days ago:

A screenshot from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science main page

This is/was supposed to attract students of both sexes to study computer science at my old faculty. Wrong on so many levels!!! But I hear it is going to be replaced with something more adecquate (a SKIRT maybe? + the half-open door symbolism)… I’ll keep you posted.

My Unofficial GeeCON Review

(ten wpis po polsku: Moja nieoficjalna recenzja z GeeCON-u)

Some of you might have noticed that I joined the GeeCON team (scroll down to see team members info in the page). GeeCON is an annual Java (and other JVM languages) conference held in Poznań or Kraków, depending on the year.

GeeCON 2012

This was my 3rd time at GeeCON. Two years ago I saw a GeeCON advertisement in Software Developer’s Journal (this year it turned out that the team had thought nobody ever found out about GeeCON this way). At that time I was at the last year of my PhD studies and did not plan on staying at university, so I decided to remind myself some of what used to be my favourite programming language. I mean, Prolog is nice, but how much of a career can you build out of it? Last year, as a proud Java programmer, I was sent to Kraków by my employer as one of the chosen few (do they know how many job offers you find in the gift bag?). This year I did not count on any favours of this kind, so I bought the ticket early myself. And then Adam P. from the GeeCON team, who I am happy to call a follower of this humble blog, asked me if I could join them, mostly helping with their new weblog. As a) I was broke and he offered me a complete ticket refund and b) I think this conference is really cool, I said yes!

So, now I am about to give a review of a conference I reportedly organized…

GeeCON is not the first conference I have been on the organizing team of. My university research unit has orgninized the Language and Technology Conference in Poznań, so I should have known better… Somehow I had the feeling that a research conference and technology conference (a lot of comtempt between those two, btw) are two different things, and forgot all lessons learned. Including the most practical one: ‘forget about sleep!’

The most important thing is that GeeCON was great. There was a huge number of rock-star speakers (there exist a photograph of me with Bruce Eckel, I just have to tear it out from the photographer’s throat), and all speakers were passionate (some too much, maybe, as one of the tweets said Dear [...]. There is a place for swearing, but a stage in front of 500 odd people at #GeeCon really isn’t it) and had interesting knowledge to share.

Update. Bruce Eckel & me. Not the most flattering photo of me, but I am still very grateful to Andrzej Grzesik for taking it

In the middle of the GeeCON frenzy I held a little girls@geecon get-together. I contacted all the ticket-winners (girls had the chance to win Google travel grants, and we also added two tickets without travel refund). I was not able to get to other girls directly (all I knew was that out of the 500+ GeeCON guests, 30 requested female T-shirt sizes), so I just tweeted like crazy. I was a bit self-aware in this, and here is why. On the GeeCON blog you can find short interviews with high profile speakers. One of the questions was about girls in IT. All the guys provided long essays on this subject (look for them, they are very insteresting to read), and the only female speaker featured answered no comment to this one.

Some of the GeeCON girls in Kuchnia dla Dragona, after the conference

We had a mix of stories and opinions during the get-together – I think it deserves a separate post, and I will probably post on the GeeCON blog too… And probably after I come back from Bucharest, I am leaving early morning tomorrow for 3 days of Europeana Libraries meetings. Two interesting notes: a) the girl who takes advantage of Google grants the most often was the (only?) one who feels that women are not discriminated against at all, and b) I learned about a ‘geek dinners’ initiative in Dublin, maybe it could be planted on Polish soil too.

Oh, and we met in one of Multikino’s (this was the conference venue) birthday rooms, how cool is that? Another one of those rooms was taken by the speakers.

Girls@GeeCON meeting atendees list

So, the things I liked the most:

+ The speakers and their speeches
+ Large screens
+ City center location
+ Contests
+ General atmosphere
+ Possibility to meet so many inspiring people from my domain

I met a lot of people who make me want to become a better programmer and better person too. I also had weird encounters… So I met this guy I used to know, and he asked me two questions. Those questions should probably have been:

• Have you completed your PhD?
• What do you do these days?

but they were:

• I heard you had problems with your PhD. I do not know if I should even be asking about it…
• So, you are a photograper now, and quit IT? (I was taking photos for the GeeCON website all the time).

Oh, the frustration…

Then the things I did not like quite that much:

- Too many parallel paths
- Communication issues – e.g. Open Spaces should have been announced much sooner

This is my biggest complaint: 5 parallel sessions is too much. For many reasons: one is that every time I chose something, I already felt I was missing something else. Sure, the presentations will appear on the Internet finally (say, in a year? ) but I do not go to a conference to watch talks on video. The second one is that when I left the venue in the afternoon, it was very hard for me to talk to people about what they thought about the conference, when EVERYBODY HAD SEEN DIFFERENT TALKS. And, finally, not all presentations were of equal quality, so maybe a more restrictive review process would do the conference good. But I am very interested to hear what other people have to say about that.

I saw three classes of presentations this year:

• technical
• methodology
• I created this cool tool/language/framework and I want to boast about it

Especially the last category saw some statements that were not entirely supported by facts.

As for the technical category, I heard people complaining about how some of those talks, even during the University Day (with longer tutorial-like talks) barely scratched the surface instead of diving into the very essence of the subject. By the way, the 2 hour talks during University Day seemed to be really exhausting for some speakers – maybe we could introduce a short break in the middle?

I also heard people say they were disappointed by the absence of Spring Framework talks, but, well, I do not care about it too much. I am not sure how much I care about the abundance of new JVM languages either: I hope evolution takes care of most of them and only leaves the fittest

There was also a lot of geek humour on GeeCON. Kevlin Henney had a closing keynote on ‘Cool Code’ and here is one of the things he showed us:

This C code computes the number e.

This is the Obfuscated C Code Contest winner in the ‘layout’ category. It computes e!

PS. If you ever hear me say that I want to do a presentation at a JUG meeting, remind me this: Dawid Weiss may appear there and crush me like a straw. Man, I felt sorry for some speakers who had him in the audience!
PS2. My favourite talk: It Is Possible to Do Object-Oriented Programming in Java by Kevlin Henney.
PS3. I was not able to go the Unconference/Open Spaces thing on Saturday due to some family stuff. I am not missing this occassion if it presents itself next year.
PS4. Definitely going to Confitura!

May Long Weekend in Polish Cities: Diary and Review

The original version of this post (Weekend majowy – pamiętnik i recenzja) was written on May 6, but I needed a few days to translate it into English. It is about a very long weekend we had in Poland: May 1 (Tuesday, International Workers’ Day) and May 3 (Thursday, Constitution Day) are free from work, so almost everybody I know decided to take those 3 annoying days off and have a 9-day-long weekend.

Last night (and when I say night I mean the night and not the evening) I came back from Wrocław, with plans of spending the last Sunday as actively as the other days. Unfortunately, the standard throat-sinuses combo kept me at home. As movies, a dinner out or a bike trip are out of the question, I have decided to take a trip down the memory lane

I took the long weekend in two doses, with one working day in the middle to bring me back down to Earth for a while. Weekend A I spent in and around Bydgoszcz, weekend B in Wrocław, and the working Wednesday with its adjacents – obviously here, in Poznań.

It so happened that during this time I participated in a lot of cultural events. In this blog’s editorial I promised to include some cultural stuff here, so here is my holiday diary.

Bydgoszcz – at the River

The photograph below shows the view from the Zatoka restaurant where I had a dinner with my family at the beginning of the May weekend. A short review of the restaurant itself: the interior decor is pleasant and stylish, but asks to be spruced up a bit; the surroudings (in the very centre of the city) are beautiful; the service is great; the food is average, and when I say average I mean exactly this: not very good, but not very bad either, only the dessert menu rocks; no wine card. Please blame the poor quality of the photo on my mobile and the Sun – I did not see anything in the display (at least I straightened the photo for you in Adobe Lightroom). I know I am drifting away from my main subject, but I really want to say it when my mobile got in the spotlight for a while. In Lapland my Taiwanese phone offered me the following piece of information: “it is too cold to use the flash”. Of course, a Nokia phone (all my previous phones were Nokias, sob) would never pull a stunt like this, so I am keeping my fingers crossed for Lumia.

Bydgoszcz-style BBQ

In the photo above you can see a boat with a small grill and a tablecloth-covered table. A moment after I took it, the boat sailed away to the river (Brda). I am mentioning this partly to emphasize the fact that although in general I think Poznań is a place much more interesting than my hometown, I am unable to understand why it turned its back (to say the least) at the river (Warta). The most beautiful places in Bydgoszcz are those at the river, and you can come across attractions such as water trams (including one running on solar power) which you can use on with normal public communication ticket.

Bydgoszcz – the Opera

Another thing at the river bank in Bydgoszcz is Opera Nova. The building has been in construction ever since I remember (and I remember far, including when my 2 years younger sister was born). According to Wikipedia, the first stilts where placed there between 1973 and 1976. The opening ceremony was held in 2006, but first performances were given, in austere, sand-covered interiors, as soon as in 1994, during the First Bydgoszcz Opera Festival. And I was there… Just as I was for every other installment of the thing. My parents decided to educate me musically, forcing me to go to the performances, beguiling me with the nasty promise that I would thank them when I am grown up. NO I HAVEN’T AND NO I WON’T! Of all classical theatre forms I think opera is the least valuable one (artificial style, two hit arias per piece and a lot of fillers), and the 4-hour-long performances are suited for children as perfectly as the Tridentine mass.

Still, decades after, I must admit that I can appreciate opera from time to time, so I went with my family to the first performance of this year’s festival. They opening show was Rusalka by Antonín Dvořák. To me: a Slavonic treat among the Mediterranean evergreens. The performance, just like the seats (3rd row) was excellent. My husband went through hard times, unfortunately… He was afraid to go there from the very beginning, as years before he had the bad luck to see an opera performance (in Warsaw) which ended with a swarm of dancing and singing (everyone its own line) cockchafers (BTW, do you have any idea what that might have been?). I promised him that something like that would not happen again, and then, in the middle of the second act, a man with a shark head appeared on stage, out of nowhere. From the neighbouring seat I heard a terrified whisper: “cockchafers, cockchafers”.

What I did not like during the ceremony, and in fact I disliked it strongly, was the speech by Sławomir Pietras. It was long, that is the first thing – a German guy sitting behind us kept repeating a phrase which Dawid translated as “get down to work!”. The second thing was that he talked about finances a lot. It is justified to some extent, as the Bydgoszcz opera is drastically underfinanced compared to other institutions, but I felt it did not really match the mood of the evening. Last but definitely not least, he started to stir up very unelegant antagonisms, pouring a lot of contempt while mentioning the “big beat” (this is actually a very old term to describe rock music in Poland) bands that are supposed to play during UEFA Euro 2012 held in Poland and Ukraine, while there is no money for the opera… I guess it did not occur to him, even for a second, that he might be talking to people who can enjoy both those types of entertainment.

Also, I just learned that in one of the “Euro spectator zones” in Poznań we will have a Die Antwoord concert. Cool.

I Cannot Believe It Myself – Solec Kujawski

As the title suggests: against all odds and expectations, during the May weekend I went to Solec Kujawski. My parents-in-law (this post is the first time I use this word for real) decided to take a trip around Northern Poland, and the trip included Jurapark – a (static) Jurrasic park with real-size dinosaur figures. Solec Kujawski is a town 20 km from Bydgoszcz, but it was the first time I actually went there!

The dinosaurs (and the single mammoth) turned out to be fun. I recommend this place to everybody looking for a fun trip with children: it has both educational and entertainment qualitites. If you crave more, the Zaurolandia place on the route from Bydgoszcz to Poznań is not so far.

Poznań – KontenerArt Opening

Having said goodbye to the dinos, I set off to Poznań, trying to make it for the KontenerArt opening. I had heard an evening storm forecasts, but when I saw that streets in Poznań were wet, I concluded it must have already happened, and left the umbrella at home. Of course, we had to run for our lives from Kontener to Meskalina, when the storm came back in the evening. Kontener itself: sand, fresh air, good music, nice design. And the people – they keep getting younger for some reason

Haters gonna hate – that there are teenagers pissing in the bushes, that there are butt-ends in the sand… Well, one thing I would like to complain about is the inadequate number of bike racks (see the bike forest photo below). The saddest part is that apparently the Municipal Office meetings did not go too well, and the music was turned off at 10 pm. This sucks… And I do not understand… The closest house is a good few hunder meters away, and the city centre is the place where things should happen! If you do not like it, move to the suburbs, or the quite blocks of flats districts – that is what I think.

Bicycle forest around KontenerArt

Poznań – a Day of Work, a Day of Vegging Out

I had to work on Wednesday, but then there was a great ladies night out. Thursday I spent at home (doing the Stanford Machine Learning course and replanting things on my balcony). On Friday I woke up with a sore throat. Conclusion: never spend the whole day at home!

Wrocław – at the Attic and at the River

We went to Wrocław to visit Ł. He is changing jobs and moving to Warsaw soon (to take on his dream job, i.e. games programming), so this was the last moment to go there on this pretext. We stayed in the attic of a building in the very city center. The photo below shows the smoking/conversation corner in the staircase available to the whole community – I whish my neighbours would organise space this way… I know, I know, I am one of them. You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic

We wandered around Wrocław; I locked myself and got stuck in the toilet of the Małgośka bar; we went to the river and to the Witches’ Bridge at the Mary Magdalene Church tower. We even went to the cinema to use up the free tickets Ł. had. As the last three people in the country who had not seen The Intouchables (Nakache/Toledano) at that point, we enjoyed it a lot. I especially appreciated the opera scene

Wrocław – Asymmetry Festival

This was the last thing on the menu. There were two music festivals in Wrocław happening that weekend: the ‘alternative music’ Assymetry and a more general rock thing at Słodowa Island. Asymmetry Festival lasted 3 days, but we only went to the last one. Short impressions: the music was perfect! Apart from the ‘celebrities’ of Bohren & der Club of Gore i Killing Joke, the concert I enjoyed the most was a Czech group called Drom. The venue, Browar Mieszczański, was interesting and had the expected vibe, but it is, in my opinion, completely unprepared to host this kind of concerts. The reason for this is the sheer construction of the building which hosted the two main stages. The halls were long and narrow, and as a result only a small group of people could actually stand close to the stage, while others had to stay in the ‘tunnel’ behind them. To add insult to injury, next to the main, crowded Forum stage there was an identical hall, almost empty, from which you were able to listen to the concert (slightly distorted by the thick walls), but not see it.

Summing up, I might go to the festival again, because musically it was great (very rock-based for an alternative music festival, but then on the other hand we only went there for one of the three days), provided they move it to a different venue, or at least put the stages outside (I am not sure if the latter would be possible with residential buildings around).

Have you really managed to reach this point? I owe you a beer…

Shove That Apostrophe…

If you read my blog from time to time, you know that all posts (eventually) come in two language versions.

Yesterday I wrote the first post (Wsadźcie sobie w **** ten apostrof) that I thought about leaving untranslated. I know that some suspense can be a good thing, but I finally decided to offer you a short explanation, so here it is.

You see, Polish is a higly inflectional language. We decline nouns, conjugate verbs… Actually, more parts of speech than not have a number of forms. This may seem like a pain in the ass, and I guess for learners of Polish as a foreign languge it really is (with Polish being dubbed one of the most difficult languages to learn), but it also allows for forms of expression that you will not encounter elsewhere.

One of the consequences of inflection is a less restrictive word order. For instance, in English you can say:

•  Anna met Jim…, or
•   Jim met Anna…

In Polish, there is:

•   Anna spotkała Jima…
•   Jima Anna spotkała…
•   Anna Jima spotkała…

…and it is just the Anna met Jim part.

Some of those forms may seem more natural than others, but they put stress on different parts of the sentence, while still carrying the original meaning.

Inflection itself is not that surprising, but what shocked some of my foreign friends a lot is that we in fact (as you might have already deduced from the examples above) do inflect proper names. With my name, you can get Justyna,  Justyny,   Justynę, Justynie,  Justyno, Justyną… I guess those are all the singular forms.

Coming back to the original post: I had reservations about translating it, because it discussed a problem with the inflection of foreign name in Polish. You see, there is (almost) no problem with traditional Polish names and surnames. However, some of the foreing ones become tricky, as they sometimes end with letters you do not pronounce, and the way you inflect them while you speak is impossible to spell with normal Polish spelling rules. An example of a name like this would be Jerry Wallace. To write down the inflection (an it is really unnatural not to inflect this in Polish, even if you do not want your surname desacrated like this)… you need an apostrophe. So, here is a Polish inflection of the name:

• Nie widziałem Jerry’ego Wallace’a (I have not seen Jerry Wallace).

However, plenty of names can be spelled normally, like this one, just as if they were regular Polish words:

• Nie widziałem Iana Smitha (I have not seen Ian Smith)

Believe it or not, my whole post was about explaining to my fellow Poles that they should only use the apostrophe when it is really needed. A lot of people somehow miss the idea that it is used only when there is simply no other way to spell the inflected name in Polish, and put it everywhere, just in case.

In their version, when Adam Nowak is a Pole, you write:

• Nie widziałem Adama Nowaka.

but if he is a foreigner, it suddenly becomes:

• Nie widziałem Adam’a Nowak’a.

So, the purist that I sometimes am, but mostly the optimizer, I tried to explain, hence the almost untranslatable post.

Talking to Girls in IT

(po polsku: Przy czerwonym winie, o kobietach w informatyce, z kobietami w informatyce)

I had the idea of a series of posts based on conversations with other women who do computer-related stuff from the very beginning of this blog’s existence, but it turned out I needed a little extra push to put the thought into practice. The push finally came in the form of the GeeCON blog (the post will also appear there). Yesterday I met up with 3 programmer girls (women, actually, we are all close to 30) to discuss women participation in computer science.

My first question was about the decision to study computer science, and the reactions of people around. Here is what the girls said:

• Eliza (works with Delphi, C# and JS): Well, honestly, first I wanted to study psychology, but it turned out (and quite late!) that I suck at biology. I have always liked maths, so here I am. I would not say that my family had any particular kind of reaction to this field of studies. And I have always liked computer games, my first favourite was Boulder Dash.
• Ewa (currently works with Rails and JS, but as a small company owner she also has professional experience in ASP, C#, PHP and Java): I felt attracted to computers since I was a kid. It was great pleasure for me to just sit at my mother’s computer and copy folders (Eliza says: and you’re sure there was no porn involved?) or play Prince of Persia. Both my parents have technical professions (telecommunications and programming), so they were very supportive, only fought a little about which of those two directions was better suited for me. I had not done any programming before going to university, though, unless you count AC Logo.
• Magda (server-side Java, Android apps, Java web apps): I come from a family with maths traditions; both my parents are maths teachers, so in many ways it was a natural choice. I have always been good with computers. Besides, I like to solve abstract riddles. Programming to me is like playing with building blocks. My family was happy about this choice, mostly because it is a solid education.

(Am I the only one who actually did Basic programming on C64 I got as a First Communion gift?)

When asked about other studies possibilities they had considered, Ewa said she had thought about Polish studies for a while, but since you were only allowed to apply for 3 places, she left this idea behind. Magda graduated from both maths and computer science. At first she was interested in applied mathematics, but is now happy with the programmer job.

Eliza says she would not like her own child to study computer science, “because it is boring”. We disagree (completely!), but then admit that it is a job that is hard to talk about with people who do something else.

Then we discussed the females to males ratio at school and at work. The funny thing here is that in Polish ratio and attitude are the same word (stosunek), so the first thing Eliza answered was “we like them”.

Here are the numbers the girls gave me:

• Eliza: 20-10 at secondary school (extended English class), 14-48 at university (my year, so you may recognize the number from a previous GeeCON post), 4-22 at work.
• Ewa: 11-20 at school (science class), 14-48, 3-3 at current work (the project manager wants to hire girls, partly because it is a fashion-oriented project, and the boys have problems identifying with the product; the sweet Easter bunny that the girls put on th project website was heavily mocked).
• Magda: 1/3 of girls at school (“but the girls did better”), she doesn’t remember the numbers for uni because every class you had was with different people, 3-10 at work.

Then I asked the girls about whether they felt they were treated on the same terms as the boys while at university. I heard no hardcore stories, here is what they mentioned:

• Magda: the ladies in the faculty office were always nicer for boys, especially those good-looking ones.
• Ewa: there was this one professor who only talked to guys, even though I was the one who did most of the project, and he addressed us as “gentlemen”.

Ewa mentioned another thing here: the professors -> students line was ok, but the same thing could not always be said about male students -> female professors. We had guys enrolling for a class lead by an attractive girl just because of the way she looked, completely dismissing her intellect.

Then I asked the same question, but this time about professional life.

• Ewa mentioned business meetings in which the prospective partners only talked to guys, but she says it might be more of a personal presentation matter.
• Eliza told us a recent story in which her colleague was having huge difficulties with a task, so she decided to help him and managed to find the solution in Google. When her boss heard about it, he told her “oh, so you just got lucky”.
• Magda says she sometimes hears that she does certain (programming) things differently because she is a woman. “I am really angry about, what does it matter that I am a girl?”

My next question was about the number of girls in computer science. Is it natural? Is it that girls just do not want to do it, or are not skilled to do it, or is it something else? The general conclusion we came to is this: it makes no sense to force girls to do programming, but there is a lot of space left for encouragement. There is nothing wrong with the sheer fact that there are more men in computer science than women, but the current proportion does not reflect the real skills. It is a cultural thing: from early on we are told that “boys do better in sciences, and girls do better in arts”, or even that “boys are intelligent, but lazy, while girls are hardworking and mediocre”.

Stereotypes work both ways. We hear that “only ugly girls go to technical universities”, “girls in academic IT classes are there to find a husband easily”, but also that “if you choose technical studies, guys will pinch your bottom all the time”.

Ewa said she was at an official party some time ago, when the ACTA protests were at their peak. She was introduced to a Polish minister together with her brother-in-law, both as computer specialists, with stress on the fact that she is a programmer. The minister asked the guy about his opinion about ACTA, and when the guy said “I don’t know, I haven’t read it”, he dropped the subject, leaving Ewa with her plenty opinions unexpressed.

Back to the subject of the female-male ratio. We agreed that parities are nonsense here. Also, none of us would like to actually switch the proportions But more good girls in IT would be awesome! We all support girl-inclusion initiatives as long as they are healthy and do not exclude guys (but, let us face it, we are quite far away from that).

Finally we tried to find aspects of IT work when we (or “most women”) actually perform different then men.

It seems that most girls do have better communication skills than most men, so having a few girls on the team usually has a positive effect on it. We have more patience in explaining stuff, also to non-IT people. We do not hate writing documentation so much! But sometimes this kind of task is not appreciated enough (in our opinion). It might be easier for us to admit we do not (yet!) know something. I am afraid this is not a good thing, with women starting sentences with “I think that” and men with “I am sure that”… We are not aware of any serious coding differences.

An anecdote (?) to finish with is as follows. A guy we know says he will not hire women, because he does not know how to talk to them. He says: “If I tell a guy he should do something differently, he says OK. If I say the same thing to a girl, she locks herself in the bathroom and cries all day”. Even when you ignore the fact that he would have to hire a girl to actually notice something like that – first, none of us cries for reasons like this (I cried in the bathroom at work twice in my life, both times after serious sexist remarks unrelated to my work). Second – my experience is this: a lot of people will say “OK”, but remember it and wait for an occasion to fight back just a little bit.

I will end this cheerful post with a quote from Magda:

I have chosen this profession because I like it. There are moments, though, when my frustration level reaches unknown heights! I do not understand girls who want to prove they are better then boys. Life is not about proving things to other people.

Computer Science Literature. A Few Remarks on IT Books Translation

(po polsku: Literatura informatyczna. Parę chaotycznych uwag na temat tłumaczeń)

From time to time I translate books… IT books, that is. The photograph shows my achievements in this field so far. For most works there are two copies: the original version and the author’s copy the publishing house is kind enough to send me.

I have just finished work on a new book about Google App Engine (http://www.essentialappengine.com/). Translation has always been a side job for me. Usually, during the process I curse it dearly (you see, last Saturday, instead of going drinking and/or dancing with my friends, I stayed at home to finish a chapter, and as a result I spent the evening talking to firemen extinguishing a fire in my building; obviously it was the book’s fault that I was at home, not the fire per se, but I wish somebody else had taken care of that). I translated the first book while doing my PhD, very soon after graduating from the Poznań School of Translation, Interpreting and Foreign Languages (I recommend the postgraduate studies to every wannabe translator/interpreter willing to sacrifice a 2-years-worth of weekends). I remember thinking it was the perfect combination: stay in touch with the language, learn new things from my professional domain, and make decent money. It turned out to be more or less true.

Many evenings spent at home. The translations and the originals.

I should not really be doing this anymore – I have a good, stable and inspiring job (though at this very moment I am just a little bit bitter, seems the ‘honeymoon’ is over after a year and a half). But… I get tempted easily The luring mechanism is quite simple indeed. My Helion editor, Mr. B., every now and then sends me a personalized list of books, asking if one of them is not interesting enough for me to consider translating it. After a few rounds of this game it turns out that I forget all about the toil translating a book after the hours of my daytime job took at me. Once again I start thinking that if I have to translate the book, it means I have to really understand it, and then I will really rock in this cool new technology. Then there is weeping and gnashing of teeth… And the one glorious moment (ok, one of the two glorious moment, the 80% paycheck after sending in the last chapter is quite nice too) when I unwrap a freshly printed book… I have learned not to open them too often, though. The first time I did it, I immediately saw a typo, possibly the only one the proofreaders missed.

Why did I suddenly decide to write a post about translating? The reasons are twofold: one is that the publishing house has changed its ‘policy’ recently. Now I can actually address the personally (using the 2nd person) – originally I was supposed to use the polite Polish 3rd person form (update: the editor tells me it was left for my decision from the very beginning, I wish I had remembered that). For years I had thought it was a nightmare trying to change those direct, informal American phrases to polite Polish forms. Then the situation changed, and I discovered a whole new category of problems. I will come back to it in a moment.

The other reason is a rant on Larsson’s Millenium translation that one of my friends posted on Facebook. You see, on the back cover of the allegedly translated book you can find words such as ousiderka or researcherka. The friend was considering filing for a compensation, but some people tried to defend the translator, arguing that the acquisition of foreign-language terms is a natural process. Well, here is what I think about it: sure the acquitions is a normal, or at least justified thing… PROVIDED THE WORD DOES NOT ALREADY EXIST IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE! Otherwise it is just the easy way out, unacceptable especially when done by a translator, i.e. a person profesionally working with language. One argument for the defense: it is true that popular books often have to be translated really, really fast.

A funny point came up in the Millenium discussion – not every foreign-sounding word is a calque or loan from another language. Somebody mentioned the Polish word prysznic, claiming it was German – when in fact it a Polish word inspired by Vincent Priessnitz, the founder of modern hydrotherapy (and apparently something else, if you read deep into the post-Hysteria publications).

In computer science, English language is omnipresent and overwhelming. I fully agree that it is pure nonsense to force people to invent local equivalents of newly created technical words. I do happen, though does not make me proud, to use (in speech only!) words like zakomitować (commit to a repository), dump or timeout. There are words that translators have challenged to many a duel, and usually lost terribly – framework is one I personally gave up on. The problem I see here is that many of foreign words introduced this way already have correct and understandable Polish versions. I refuse to tolerate plugins (there is a Polish equivalent wtyczka), use cases (przypadki użycia), forks… I break down on the sight of diagram kolaboracji (in Polish you sure can collaborate… with the occupants). To calm down the group of people that after reading this post has decided never to buy a book I translated: when using a Polish equivalent, I always give the original too, mostly to help people who had dealt with the English language documentation before.

Coming back to the researcherka story – there is a whole separate domain of quarreling about the female versions of profession names in Polish. It is a big thing, because in Polish every word has a grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and the rarest neutral), that further influences adjectives (linguistic agreement) and even verbs (in past tense and conditionals). I HATE FEMALE ENDINGS IN PROFESSION NAMES WITH ALL MY HEART! I am unable to understand women who fight to have them introduced (the ministerka story with Polish female minister Mucha happened a day after I published the original post). A doctor is a doctor, what does it matter what sex the person is? All of this is made worse (in my opinion at least) by the fact that in Polish those female endings often suggest something smaller, a diminutive; a slightly less serious version of a job that would be done by a man. I do not want it, I do not need it. And as for those ‘lowbrow’ jobs that are usually performed by women and thus the formal name is feminine (in Polish it is for instance a nurse, a cleaning lady, a nanny) – I do not think it is so bad. The men who do this job will have to be called something. For some reason a kept man (utrzymanek) and a kept woman (utrzymanka) are equally popular forms.

So, why are those direct phrases used by American authors such a problem? As I said, in some past and also conditional cases Polish verbs reveal the gender of the subject. Translating phrases like if you removed line 3 is a disaster. If I do not use the direct 2nd person style, I can you auxiliary words like czytelnik (e.g. if the cautious reader…) – then the word (male, a female form exists but is strongly marked) enforces the gender of the verb and everything is fine. Sure, you can try to work around a bit, but if the author uses this style a lot, the situation becomes tiring for both the translator and the reader (the author shall be left in peace this time). In some English-language books the programmer reader is a she, but, as I said, in Polish it would not work; female forms of common words are heavily marked and would confuse readers of both sexes. A technical book should have a mostly invisible style. Still, facing a lack of other ideas, I might just try it next time… Though I have just made a promise to myself that the current book (actually, I have just sent the very last thing – the source code – to editor B.) is the last one.

At the end of this post I would like to tell an anecdote about a ghastly piece of cliche I was served by one of the book authors. It happens, and not so seldom, that American computer science books contain some minor factual errors: a piece of code that is supposed to compile but does not, an interface that is called a ‘class’, swapped explanations of two opposite options. As the translator, it is my right (and duty) to fix this kind of things. So, one day I found the following listing in a JavaScript book:

var jack = {
  read: function(what) {
    console.log('I just read that ' + what)
  }
};
var jill = {
  read: function(what) {
    console.log('You didn\'t hear it from me, but ' + what)
  }
};

So, what do we learn from this nicely laid out example? Well, what men do in life is reading, and what women do is gossiping. What, you did not know? A part of the so-called policy I should adhere to is that I Polonize the names of people in different examples, changing Johns to Jans. That time I was so angry I actually asked the editor (Mr. B., pleasure to work with) if I could use two names of the same sex. He said that if I cared so much I could even switch them Finally, I think, I stuck to the same-sex version. Boring, I know. This translation is my least favorite for many other reasons, by the way (and I mean the translation, not the book really).

If you are intrigued by the translation subject, here is a new lead for you: try to check the name of the @ character in different languages! To set you off: in Polish it is ‘the monkey’.

Recent News – Quickly

(po polsku: Najnowsze wiadomości – krótko o tym, co się u mnie dzieje)

Pipe removed from my cellar

I get asked about it a lot, so here is the most important piece of information:

My neighbour removed the pipe (see the full pipe story here).

I told him that when it is gone, we can sit down and talk about his request as if the situation had never happened. His first reaction was to suggest we talk without removing the pipe, but I explained it is an educational thing, and he complied.

Post translations to come soon

There are two posts on this blog that are missing a translation.

• SISU!!! (the Lappish Adventure) needs a Polish version.
• Literatura informatyczna. Parę chaotycznych uwag na temat tłumaczeń (about IT books translation) needs an English one.

Both are coming next week.

Cool Java conference to be held in Poznań again

I was invited to join the GeeCON  team to help with organising the conference. I will post on their blog from time to time, also copying my posts here. Among other things, it means more technical posts on this blog (good thing).

GirlLostInIT joins Twitter

I have (finally?) created a Twitter account. I am not sure how to use it though… I am connecting it to this blog. You can follow me (though there is nothing there yet) as girllostinit.

See you soon!

SISU!!! (the Lappish Adventure)

(po polsku: SISU!!! (lapońska przygoda))

I know I owe the the “masses” of my English language readers a translation of the previous post. It is coming, and it is a good one, because it is about… translation.

In the meantime, I came back from a well-earned holiday in Lapland. After serious (internal) deliberation, I hereby present to you the first post in the travel category. Not too many posts from this one coming soon, as I have already blown most of my leave due to the PhD exams and defense drama.

We had been invited to Lapland as part of our wedding gift by one of my best friends from university Michał and his (lovely, cool, beautiful and patient) girlfriend Saija. It took us some time to get there: we had to take a train to Warsaw, fly to Helsinki, wait there for a couple hours (which let Dawid taste reindeer meat, in the form of a really big hamburger; later he tried reindeer in the form of: pasta, pizza, poronkäristys, tongue, and a tinned dish), and then fly to Oulu. There we stayed overnight, did some sightseeing (with Dawid discovering the depth of Finnish city center snow when he decided to take a shortcut).

Picturesque, just outside M&S's place in Oulu.

The next day we finally set off to Lapland, and only when we finally reached Muonio did I realize that Saija actually comes from there! We saw Nortnern Lights from the very beginning. When we got off the car to have a nice dinner with the parents I started to set up my photo equipment (I even took the tripod to capture Auroras in their full grace), but then I thought it was not too polite to be doing this while somebody was waiting for me with a supper. I assumed that if we saw them on the first night, they would be there all along, especially since the Sun is supposed to be so active this year. So I dropped the camera and went looking for the cherry vodka and Ptasie Mleczko we also brought in Poland, expecting occasions like that. It turned out to be the last time we saw the lights, because the rest of the nights were really cloudy. You can catch a glimpse of one of them in the one photo I actually took that night.

Fairy tale house and a trace of Northern Lights.

The real adventure began slightly before the mentioned supper, just after we crossed the Arctic Circle. I did it in the best style I know: I tried to jump with my feet at two different sides of the parallel, did not see that there was ice, and finally slid through it on my bottom. I crossed the Arctic Circle for the first time in my life, sliding on my bottom.

Then we finally reached the cottage that would be our home for the next few days. Small as it was, obviously it had a (slightly stinky) sauna. I was surprised how hot it was inside the cottage, but then realized that the windows were made of four separate wings for good isolation. We had a draw which left Michał and Saija with the master bedroom (shame I do not have a photo of that) and Dawid and me with the mezzanine, but we did not mind at all.

The cottage.

The following day we spent climbing up a hill in Pallas IN SNOW SHOES!!! I had never seen snow shoes with my bare eyes before! They do not really look like tennis rackets (anymore), but still I felt a little bit like a cartoon character (Hewey, Dewey, and Louie, perhaps). This is what they rackets like nowadays:

Modern day snow shoes.

We decided to climb to the top of one of the hills, but every time we reached the supposed top, a new one would appear from behind it. At some point (when we ate all the chocolate and drank all the Minttu cocoa) we decided to bo back.

The next day we went to a traditional smoke sauna and learned the true meaning of the Finnish word Sisu (inner strength, force, endurance, being rigid and insistent, translation according to a blog I am linking at the end of this post). When I read in the travel programme (yes, M&S prepared a travel programme) that we were supposed to do “Savusauna and ice hole swimming in Jerisjärvi”, I was not sure whether or not it was a joke. As it turned out, it was not so much of a joke, but more of a dare… All of us did it for the first time, including Saija! (Well, not swimming really, but I even let go of the ladder). I have a photo to prove it, but it is not of the most flattering type, so let’s skip it, shall we. Actually, the worst part of the whole experience was a group of young male tourists who heated the smoke sauna to a truly unbearable degree, and then wanted to jump into the lake applying a technique that here in Poland we call bomb jumping. When somebody calmly pointed out that this may not be the wisest of ideas, they called it a “gay advice”. I figured that if one of them dies of thermal shock, the others will not come back to the sauna, so I decided not to interfere with their plan.

Then we spent a day cross country skiing. I had never attempted it in my life, so I fell 10 times, making the bruises on my knees (a souvenir I got after rolling down a whole flight of stairs in a celebration of a friend’s farewell party before her departure for Scotland – hell, I had 4 X-ray photos taken!) even more colorful. But that was fun! While skiing on a frozen river we crossed a super-secret audi winter testing route, but none of the cars appeared.

By the way, did you know that Nokia made winter tires? Those used in Northern Finland have metal spikes studded. They are unbelievably effective. Driving on snow, ice, and mountain roads looking like ski routes – we only had one more serious skid when we hit a snow rut while overtaking another car. What I liked very much, and what is very different from Poland, is that they do not really put salt on the roads, only cover them with a bit of sand. It looks much better and does not destroy plants (or shoes). Also, this way they cannot serve road salt to people to eat (see recent Polish news if you do not know what this one is about).

One day Dawid and I spent shopping in Levi (apparently the Finnish capital of after ski sex), while out friends went snowboarding.

Then we moved to Sweden for a little bit to take a 3-hour-long snow mobile ride which was excellent, excluding the fact that I managed to fall off the machine after the starting 100 meters, when we had to take a 90 degree turn from a road up a snowbank. I learned to trust the machine after some 2 hours It was really cool. We went through a forest, saw a sled dog farm, and went 70 km/h on a river, with the “outmost layer” of the ice (or so I was assured) breaking underneath the heavy vehicles. Actually, it was the only excercise during the trip that made my muscles sore.

My husband the Black Stig of snow mobiles.

When we came back to the starting point after the 3 hours ride, I realized that almost all alcohol they had in the Rajamaa establishment (see the link below, it is place worth recommending, even though in Sweden not Finland ) was Czech. When we asked about it, it turned out that the “secret Audi testing center” has a Skoda equivalent on the Swedish side.

Let us bring down the curtain on the Santa Claus village in Rovaniemi.

Then we went back to Oulu, and our friends picked their lovely dog Vivi from the dog hotel she was left in. We had a nice walk in the city in the morning, then had lunch with my friend Mikko whom I had not seen for a few years now (last time it was the Open’er festival, I am definitely going there this year too, because one of the early announcements is Bat for Lashes), and set off to Helsinki. I wanted to write a letter to a friend on the plane (everything is better than thinking “we are not going to fall” all the time), but I lost all the paper sheets I took with myself, so finally I wrote it on a few pages torn off the British Vogue (I guess nobody had ever made Vogue look so scruffy).

In Helsinki we had dinner with another Finland-destined friend of mine Wąglik, who took us to a Nepalese restaurant which perfectly fitted those 2 kilos I gained on that trip.

Then we went home, happy and completely broke, even though M&S did not let us pay for the cottage or the fuel we used.

This we did not try. A nice photo I took at Pallas.

Culture Appendix
This trip had the perfect balance of adventure and chill out. It had a salutary effect on me also because for the first time in a few weeks (if not months) I had a chance to read an actual novel (and reading novels is one of the 5 reasons to live according to Justyna)! It was the latest work by the newly Nobel Prize awarded Mario Vargas Llosa El sueno del celta/The Dream of the Celt (Polish version; I am supposed to know Spanish quite well and am able to read Spanish novels, but those Latin American language masters are too much for me). It is excellent. It is complelling, dark, exciting, weirdly erotic… and based on a real person’s life, which, I am embarassed to say, I realised almost at the end of the book. You live, you learn. It also made me want to read, finally, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, because the author is one of the secondary characters in the book. So Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls a little lower in the queue.

In my defense I want to say that I had actually read a cool Finnish book soon before going on this trip: Hurmaava joukkoitsemurha/A Charming Mass Suicide by Arto Paasilinna (I am not sure about the quality of the Polish translation though, but it is only my intuition – possibly the book is written this way too), recommended by a Norwegian. Another literary feature was the Pajala signpost we passed during our snow mobile ride (Populärmusik fran Vittula/Pop Music from Vittula – this one I highly reccomend).

We also saw a true diamond of Finnish cinematography called Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Definitely the thing to see in Lapland, but on Monday I am organizing a screening for my colleagues. They do not know yet that the snacks I promised will be Super Salmiakki.

Further Reading

1. I found this very nice blog about SISU products and Finnish design: http://sisu-made.blogspot.com/
2. This is the place where we had the snow mobile ride : http://www.rajamaa.com/

My Neighbours, or Why Suddenly I Am Dreaming about a (Barbed Wire Surrounded) House in the Suburbs

(po polsku: Moi sąsiedzi, czyli dlaczego marzę o domku na obrzeżach miasta (otoczonym drutem kolczastym))

My dear English-speaking “followers”, you might already have seen this very long post in a language you do not understand. Well, here comes the English version. It is long too… But has some cool pictures in it!

I have not written anything in quite a long time. Many things have happened meanwhile. First of all, there was this rather round birthday. I had planned to look it straight in the eyes and have a huge, fabulous party, preferably convince my friends to go to Berlin (it’s only a 2h drive with the new highway!), find a great concert (this time though in a club where I would not be afraid of losing a kidney)…Then it turned out that my PhD defense date was set for two days after the birthday, so all plans went to hell.

I did defend the thesis! This is good at least. You can oficially call me Dr, and you will be able to call me that even more oficially when the decision passes through the science council. My new business cards are on the way nonetheless I am planning on writing a post especially dedicated to this subject… Maybe not on the defense per se, but the 4 years I spent trying to get a PhD in a Polish university. There’s plenty stories to tell, and advice and warnings to give. Slow down, though, I almost forgot what made my turn Parenthood off. This is not a good moment by any means.

As some of you may know, I live in an old part of town, very close to the city centre. The housing cooperative has only 10 owners, most of whom actually live here, so you would imagine people would want to cooperate nicely and have good relations with their neighbours.

The view from my balcony on one of the worse days (H. Cegielski trade union protest)

Only briefly will I mention my neighbours Z., who are very nice and cool people and always invite us to share whatever they are having, but who display this rare and extreme type of carelessness that makes them, for instance, light a fire in a tile stove that has not been used for 20 years, without checking out with the chimney sweep (we woke up in a cloud of black smoke and called the fire department).

I will skip the neihgbour N., who has not paid his liabilites to the cooperative for months, even though he has a few cars, and most Sundays he spends with his family in high brow Poznań restaurants, explaining to the other neighbours he meets in the street that “a man of a certain age is allowed to certain his habits.”

Today I am going to focus on amore camouflaged case.

I will start by telling an old story. It should have warned me in time, but somehow I stopped paying attention to it at point. Some two years after I moved to this flat my now-husband and I decided to stop living in a 5 people commune and transform the flat to meet just our needs. We started (and pretty much ended) the refurbishing with the bedroom. It is the only room located at the backyard side of the building, which means no trams and no night road works (especially painful when the sledgehammer guy misses my car only by a few inches while taking his backswing).

During the refurbishment process, and anomaly has been detected. One day the contractor asked us to come into the room and knock at one of the walls. The bedroom is not in the main building, but in an annexe (so there is an attic over it and not the next floor). We had not paid to much attention to the fact that it was the only room in the flat in which we were able to actually head the neighbours. In any other room we could play foosball or Guitar Hero till 4 a.m. and nobody ever complained. One day I asked (attention!) my neighbour C. (the one behind the anomaly wall) about the sound permeability. He said they were not able to hear anything from our flat. Imagine my shock when the wall we knocked on emitted a dull sound, and when we removed the plaster, we saw… a DOOR. A door like those installed in blocks of flats from the 70s: you kick it hard, it’s gone. This time though there was no need to kick it, as the only thing that kept it closed was (the relief!) a STAPLE at our side. When we removed the staple and opened the door (which my neighbour Z was brave enough to do), the door hit a wardrobe in neighbour C’s flat.

Just like that.

Up to this day I am unable to grasp what made neighbour C. claim that he had no idea how the sounds from his daugters’ piano playing reached our ears. Those poor girls – I have no idea how long in their adult lives will they have to pay for having only a cardboard door separate them from a newly-wed couple. The best bet I can make is that C did now want to participate in the (considerable, truly) costs of bricking up the door. We finally did it by ourselves and I still wish I had let that eczematous hamster into his flat before adding the last brick.

Unfortunately, this event had sunk into oblivion (in my more and more Alzheimer-like memory), and that proved to be a very disadvantageous fact.

Then, a few days ago, one Thursday afternoon, after a short meeting concerning the current matters of the cooperative, neighbour C. told me that he had a private matter to discuss with me. He said he was setting up a new bathroom in his flat and wanted to plug the outlet (one big WC pipe and 4 smaller ones) to a master pipe in my cellar. One more thing to explain here: my cellar is a big one, with 80m2 and an interesting layout which you can admire in the enclosed drawing. At this point it is in a less-then-raw state (dirt floor) but in future I want to use it, e.g. transforming it into an office – a fact the above mentioned neighbour is well aware of (“But you’re not going to turn it into a pub, are you?”). Unfortunately, the cellar is not exactly below my flat, so I cannot connect to it easily from here. Over rooms 1 and 2 there is a grocery store, over 3, 4 and 5 neighbour C. has his annexe.

My cellar. Full of potential, but I would have to invest a lot, and get rid of the pipe first. No proportions have been kept.

I answered that in general I do not want to block the new bathroom possibility for him, but he would have to break through the ceiling in the last room (5 in the drawing) and the closest possible to the wall, I would also like for him to join the 5 pipes into one at the level of his flat. I said I would think about it and answer in a few days. On Friday Mr. C. (who actually calls himself MISTER C in many notes) stopped my husband with the same question, but he said he would not give him any permits without talking to me first.

Saturday morning I wrote a long email to my neighbour C., carefully setting up my proposals for futher negotiation:

• digging the pipe into the ground (there is no real floor in the cellar),
• hiding it in the wall, if it sticks out from the ceiling somewhere else than the very end of room 5,
• buying the last part of the cellar by neigbour C. (this seems to be impossible in Polish law, though).

A little bit later, still on Saturday morning, I learnt that C. has already installed the pipe in my cellar.

So, where do we put your desk? The foreing body in my cellar. Do not miss the artwork in the background.

Sure – I am the only one to blame for not having fixed the padlock that a burglar (hoping to steal a cherry compote I assume) broke during one of the attempts. The padlock does close, but you can open it without using a proper key. Neighbour C. entered the cellar, drilled through the ceiling in room 3, and then run the pipe through rooms 3, 4, and 5, plugging it into the master pipe in room 5. Wanting to save on the materials, he made shortcuts in all the corners (pay attention to the backgroun on the beatiful photograph).

To understand the situation well, here are the facts:

• My neighbour C. could as well have had the pipe run through his own flat and break through to the cellar at the very end, but this way he would have had to drill through a number of walls in his own flat and somehow mask the pipe and the sounds it emits.
• Neighbour C. has at least one functional bathroom in his flat already.
• Neighbour C. was well aware that he was not given any permit to enter the cellar or install anything in it, not to mention drilling holes in the internal walls.
• There is not doubt whatsoever that the cellar belongs to my flat.
• Neighbour C. had been to the cellar and knows that the height of the rooms excludes the possibility to install a suspended ceiling or anything like it.
• Neighbour C. is not a dosser who had been denied the right to education and interaction with culture. He is an intellectual worker, a husband, and father of two daugthers.

When asked what the hell did he think, he called the situation an “unfortunate turn of events” (=his construction workers happened to have time on their hands). He proclaimed that he was “not at all proud of himself and in no way did he consider himself a winner”. He said he had waited for an SMS with our decision, but did not get it (well, I see no unanswered calls in my phone, something you would expect from a person who is desperately trying to get to know your decision). He also expressed the will to “work out a compromise” during a BBQ he invited us over. Just to set things straight, I am not accustomed to have BBQs with him not only because I do not eat meat, but mostly because never ever had he invited me or my husband to hang out. I am also truly puzzled by his understanding of the word compromise. So, when we finally meet (a moment after my lawyer sends him the documents with a recorded delivery letter), I am going to propose him a deal. I will put a huge garbage bin in his living room and then, working out a compromise, I will change it to a smaller one, that is going to stay there forever – just like Mr. C likes compromises to be done.

There is a number of daunting features this moralless story haunts me with. First: he broke into my property, and the property law is one of the few areas of law there are still treated seriously here. Second: he has pulled a really awful stunt on a kind, well-mannered neighbour (me) in a very small housing cooperative. Third, and most enraging: this is not the first time in my life when I see people confusing politeness with weakness. He really assumed that he would get away with this, that I would not have the strength (or time, maybe?) to react. I learned a long time ago that there exists a group of people who require a loutish attitude, who need to be yelled at, because otherwise they are unable to receive the message. This is not my weapon of choice, but more and more I am thinking it should be. Also, I would have agreed for him to put the pipe there, just in a way that did not deteriorate the value of the place… At this point there is nothing to discuss anymore.

If you think this story sound crazy and improbable, here is the opinion of my editor B. after I explained why I am late with this week’s bundle:

The situtation is so absurd that is must be true.

Ubuntu (en)

(po polsku: Ubuntu (pl))

I decided to write this post when my programmer friend (of course programmer seems to be a simplification, but I suppose this is what happens when you try to define a person by their walk of life) found a can of Ubuntu Cola in Tesco (see the photograph below) and posted it on Facebook as a good geek joke. Dear all, Ubuntu Cola (and I do acknowlege the fact that it sounds freaking hilarious) is not an Ubuntu Linux trademark rip-off. The name is a reference to the same beautiful idea that the Linux distribution name originates from.

Ubuntu Cola (original photo from http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com)

Ubuntu is an African philosophy whose supporters include Nelson Mandela. The Ubuntu term itself is often translated as I am, because you are, because we are. The humanistic philosophy rejects individualism, recognizes the value of human life, values community and togetherness, dialogue, tolerance, and understanding rather than punishment Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize laureate, writes (quote taken from The African Philosophy Reader):

It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world. It embraces hospitality, caring about others, being able to go the extra mile for the sake of others. We believe that a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with with yours. When I dehumanise you, I inexorably dehumanise myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in belonging.

It goes really well together with the open source movement, doesn’t it?

I first heard the word in a non-Linux context during the Intercultural Navigators workshop organised/funded by the British Council. I learned a lot there… I remember a long block of workshops and meetings on this subject, sparsely illustrated with film material in which members of African tribes described putting the Ubuntu idea into life. If somebody has nothing to eat or drink, you help them. If he ir she is not fit for work, you help them, and so on. All the time my Central European brain kept pondering: “how do they eliminate con men”? How long can you be “unfit for work”? What happens if a person decides to take a lifetime of relaxing while the rest of the tribe works their butts off, and never repays any of the favours? There seemed to be one, constant answer: “it’s not the point”. Having the favour returned is not the ultimate goal.

Since we are already on the subject (please see the Ubuntu Cola photo again), I learned a few days ago that the first Fair-Trade-only shop (is it in Poland even?) has just opened in Poznań (some shops, like Alma or Folwark Wąsowo already offer some products with the logo/certification). While writing this post I finally checked the adress – turns out I pass it every time I go to work by car and park in my sister’s garage. Expect a review quite soon

Coming back to the Navigators. I do not really remember what made me apply for this programme. For a few months I had one weekend a month taken from me, filled with meetings with some of the most determined, higher-goal-oriented and aware people I met in my life. I deeply believe that most of us learned a lot about ourselves and other people during that time. At the end of the workshop period we were given a chance to apply for a funding for a self-designed project, and somehow my Online Grandmas! idea was one of the winners. So together with my friends, including my dear Husband (who is very anxious about being mentioned here), we had this truly wonderful experience. Side effects include the release of a group of elderly spammers. See the pink email background and the bon-mot slideshows and you know what I mean, I might just look for them for your entertainment. They are really sweet. Here is one of the photos from the lecture/pratice series. You can find more in the project website, but that is in Polish only, sorry.

The Online Grandmas lecture series (Adam Mickiewicz University's Physics Department)

How about a rerun?

Have a great New Year!