This year, Barbie has a chance to be a computer engineer.

You can vote for your favorite occupation on Barbie.com

What set Ms. Henry apart from other educators was her effective teaching methods. Her explanations were always clear and concise. I was turned on to computer programming because she made it seem easy.

She challenged the more astute students with programming competitions. For struggling students, she always had the patience to spend extra time with them, explain concepts again, perhaps differently until it would finally click. She was always very encouraging, never condescending and she would never give up until the material was properly understood. This was especially important because we had to cover the fundamentals.

Ms. Henry not only provided me with the nurture I needed to become a software developer, she also inspired me to become a teacher one day, so that I may show other girls that computer science is not scary or difficult.

Who is Carol Bartz?

I must admit that I have never heard of her until today. It turns out that she is the executive chairman of the board at Autodesk. She was previously the chairman, president and CEO of Autodesk.

Prior to Autodesk, she worked at Sun, DEC and 3M.

She sits on the board of directors for Intel, Cisco, NetApp, and the Foundation for the National Medals for Science and Technology.

She was also appointed to President Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Carol also has a Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin, and 3 honorary doctorates.

Pretty impressive resume.

Techcrunch describes her as a 60-year-old veteran of the tech industry. 60? Seriously? Amazingly enough, she doesn't look a day over 40 in that photograph. What did she look like when she was younger?

Is this amazing woman worthy of an Ada Lovelace Day write-up? Judging from Yahoo's plummeting share price today, maybe not... but I still have 2 more months to decide.

The only way I could get the div to center was to use auto left and right margins in conjunction with setting a width. However, I wanted the layout to scale gracefully if the font size was changed. The solution was to specify the width in em. This makes the div resize with the font. Quick and dirty, but it works well enough until I have time to come back to take a closer look at the problem again.

The first question that comes to mind is how they figured out how to get to my blog and leave a comment on it without figuring out how to save a web page or print it. Furthermore, what made them think I would honour their request to mail them a copy of my blog entry? (I'm not going to.)

Is this type of user representative of an average web user or a less-than-average web user? How many people like this are out there and do they matter?

Being a computer engineer, I really take computer literacy for granted. This type of encounter with lay people gives me an interesting perspective on the type of audience my products may attract when building the Internet.

Aside from the parking situation, who starts a developer event in the Bay Area at 9:00 AM on a Saturday?

This web site appeared within an iframe on a different domain than the frame parent, and we noticed that the Google Analytics cookies were not being set in the default Internet Explorer environment with a medium privacy setting. A privacy icon also appeared in Internet Explorer's status bar, indicating that site cookies have been blocked.

Why does this cross-domain cookie issue only manifest itself in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7?

It turns out that Firefox and Internet Explorer have different definitions for "third-party" cookies. In IE, a cookie is considered to be "third-party" if the cookie's domain differs from the domain shown in the address bar (even if the domain of the cookie is the same as the domain of the page that is setting the cookie.) In Firefox, a cookie is considered to be "third-party" if the domain of the cookie is different than the domain of the page that is setting the cookie, (regardless of the address that appears in the location bar.)

Here is a summary of what you need to do in order to allow third-party cookies to be set in IE:

1. Create a human-readable privacy policy for your web site (i.e. in HTML)


2. Translate the human-language privacy policy into an XML document using IBM's P3P Policy Editor (considered to be the best free tool available.)


3. IBM's P3P Policy Editor will also generate a P3P compact policy for you.


4. Emit a compact policy and a reference to the full privacy policy in the HTTP header of your web page


5. Place your policy reference XML file (p3p.xml) and policy XML file (policy.xml) in the well-known location set forth by the P3P standard (/w3c/p3p.xml and /w3c/policy.xml)


6. If your privacy policy is satisfactory, your web page will be permitted to set cookies. This MSDN article contains a table of things that will make your privacy policy unsatisfactory.

Although the P3P standard specifies that only the XML policy files in the well-known location and human-readable privacy policy are necessary and sufficient, IE6 doesn't work that way. IE6 only honours the compact policy (and ignores every other implementation method.) IE7 behaves as expected.

Now that we've discussed the solution, we can go on to explain why P3P was created. P3P Toolbox has a lengthy discussion about the need for P3P. The main idea behind P3P is that it is burdensome and unreasonable for the average web user to hunt down the privacy policy for every site that they directly interact with, let alone the sites that they unknowingly interact with (like those displayed in iframes.) Regular people just don't do this. P3P was created to standardize the discovery of privacy policies from site to site.

P3P does not enforce that site owners adhere to their own privacy policies, it merely automates the interpretation of the legalese in which most privacy policies are written. The enforcement of privacy laws is left to the judicial system.

He said it was because the product specifications required those links not to be underlined.

*headdesk*

This explains a lot.

This conversation I overheard at the conclusion of the discussion panel summed it up best:

Girl: Oh honey, this event was so empowering!

Girl's boyfriend: As long as it was empowering for you, dear...

I agreed with her boyfriend. The event wasn't particularly empowering.

Today, I received an invitation to participate in the second OpenSocial Hackathon.

One particular mandatory field on the registration form caught my attention (mostly because it wouldn't let me proceed without submitting an answer for it.)

My first reaction was, "I am a designer and developer who happens to be female, but I don't see what difference that makes, and why this question is mandatory. Are these people sexist?"

This question makes it sound like they're willing to lower the bar to accommodate women, which makes me feel insulted. I understand that they're trying to encourage more females to come out and participate, but the messaging isn't particularly empowering.

To quote Mike:

By trying to compensate for the historical mistreatment of a group you isolate it and reinforce the definition of the differences between that group and the rest of the world

I love Flickr and I use it to back up all of my photos. With today's announcement of Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, I can't help but wonder what the fate of my vast photo collection may be.

If the acquisition goes through, some of Yahoo's services will inevitably get shut down or merged into MSN's similar offerings. Microsoft doesn't have an existing product that is as cool or popular as Flickr yet, but I don't think Flickr is a particularly profitable operation.

I'm not the only one who is concerned about the future of Flickr:
Latest FlickrCentral discussion thread
Wired article about Flickr and Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo!
Flickr pool by concerned Flickr users

What are your favourite Yahoo! products and which ones are you most concerned about?

My XO laptop arrived yesterday and it's very cute.

However, I'm not sure what I would do with it after I'm finished playing with it. The screen looks really crisp in ebook mode, but I don't have any ebooks. The RSS reader is zippy, but so is Google Reader.

Although the built-in browser is based on Firefox, it doesn't support more than one window (even modal windows like dialog boxes), so Movable Type doesn't work. WordPress appears to work beautifully with the rich text editor turned off. The browse dialog is quite slow to appear and crashes the browser after spawning two of them on the same web page, so I can only upload one file at a time in the browser.

I've been using the mobile version of Flickr to upload photos taken on the XO laptop one at a time.

When I'm at my friend's house, I need to use a special tool to get onto his network because WPA isn't supported out of the box (yet.)

The XO is certainly more portable than my real laptop, but not by much since we're comparing with an ultra portable. However, it's just small enough to fit into my half-sized multi-purpose messenger bag, so it will undoubtedly travel with me far more often than any other computer that I own.

When I'm not doing any computationally intensive work on the computer, I'm usually checking email, catching up on blogs or chatting on IM. I need to install an IM client that will allow me to use AIM, YIM, MSN and GTalk.

I would also like to use the XO as a picture viewer. I've been meaning to get a portable media device so I can show photos that I've taken to other people. I haven't found a slide show program for the XO yet, perhaps I can create one.

Today I discovered why. After installing the service pack, I got the following error message when I attempted to open the solution I was working on:

The project file cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation.

I Googled for a solution and came across some forum posts with promising suggestions.

I tried all the easy fixes first.

1. running

   devenv /setup

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


2. running

   devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

   at the Visual Studio Command Prompt


3. running

   regsvr32.exe "%vs80comntools%\..\IDE\projectaggregator.dll"



4. installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - Update to Support Web Application Projects (KB915364)

But none of these tricks fixed my issue.

Finally I gave one last suggestion a try. I reinstalled Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer - ENU Service Pack 1 and it worked like a charm. I can open my solution without any error messages once again. I'm hoping that Visual Studio won't crash when I update my local copy of the code. (So far I haven't seen any crashes yet.)