I called Vodafone customer service again. The first time, they’d robotically refused to listen. Some excuse about spoiling their bank holiday; not wanting to hear what I had to say. It nearly worked, I nearly didn’t call back. But I had to get it off my chest; had to say what I had to say.

So I tried again. This time, I wasn’t to be put off. I had to do it.

An Irish man answered. Friendly and welcoming. I felt awkward; he sounded happy; I didn’t want to spoil his day. I asked when my current contract ended.

“No problem, I’ll just check when your commitment ends.” He said it, not me: my commitment. He told me my commitment ended on the 23rd May 2011. There was a slight pause where neither of us knew quite what to say next. “Um…do you want to upgrade?” he ventured.

“I’m leaving. Can I have my PAC number please?” I gabbled. Just to get it out. There was another pause. A slightly taken aback pause. I felt bad. He’d been so sunny and warm until I’d phoned him like a rain cloud across his day.

“We’re…we’re sorry that you’re leaving.” He made an effort to smile again; to put on a brave face. “Okay, so you’d like a PAC number?”

“Yes please”

“I’ll have to check if the department is open. It’s, you know, bank holiday, so not all of the departments are…er…open today. Because of the bank holiday you know.” It was his turn to gabble.

“Yes” I said. “Of course.” Then, suddenly, to reassure him: “I’m sure I’ll be back. At some point.”

I paused, then added: “It’s not you; it’s me.”

As I listened to the ‘hold’ music, I relaxed a bit. I’d done it. it was nearly over. I was going to get a PAC number and then I would be free to move on. Free to discover a new network.

“Hello, Laura?” said another male voice. More efficient, slightly less friendly this time. Yet still polite.

“Yes” I said.

“You’d like a PAC number?”

“Yes, please,” This was it; I was nearly there.

“Can I ask who you’re leaving us for?”

My heart sank slightly. He was going to make this difficult. Why couldn’t he just accept it? I wasn’t trying to play hard-to-get. I just wanted a PAC number so I could move on from this old relationship to a new and vibrant network. He thought I was just trying to get a better deal.

“giffgaff” I mumbled.

“Which network?”

“giffgaff.”

He’d never heard of them. I felt a sudden sense of derision towards him. Granted, I’d never heard of giffgaff until last week but then I don’t work in the telecoms industry. I’d just asked on Twitter if anyone had any recommendations about Vodafone vs O2 coverage and SIM-only deals from each of them. I hadn’t even been aware of the quiet dark stranger standing in the corner, waiting to catch my eye.

@oldmanuk had been first to point him out. He’d not known him for long but what he’d seen, he’d liked. @oldmanuk had suggested talking to @maygg or @thomasj; both were with this newcomer, and they might be able to put in a good word for me. If I was interested.

Instantly, I had glimpsed the excitement I’d felt in the first couple of weeks of my current commitment, a long two years ago. Then, it had been less about the relationship and more about the gift of the new handset that had arrived to my home. About removing the box sleeve to reveal, inside, the shiny dark-blue touchscreen phone, its smooth surface unsullied by the bumps and scratches of my old phone. The novelty had faded over the two years but I wasn’t ready to give it up, despite the tempting offers from Android.

giffgaff wasn’t offering me gifts like that. He wasn’t offering them in return for a fixed-term commitment. All he asked is that I check in briefly every 3 months. If I wanted more, more was there. If I didn’t, there was no pressure. I liked that about him. I liked his easy-going nature.

“giffgaff?” asked the Vodafone customer service representative. “Are they a third-party website?” The slight derision I’d felt grew into coldness towards him.

“They’re another provider. Running on the O2 network.” I was annoyed with myself for feeling like I had to explain myself to him. I didn’t owe him anything. Yet I felt guilty, like I was being unreasonable, like I was playing around on a rival network.

“Oh” he said. “Can I ask what they’re offering?”

I held the impatience out of my voice as I replied: “Um…they do…um…kindof goodybags – they call them goodybags – that last a month. For £10 I get 250 minutes, and txts, …um…unlimited txts and data. And cheaper prices outside of that. And they…um…have…um…an interesting business model.”

I was gabbling again. In silent anguish I added: “why won’t you just let me go?”

He paused. I wished I were still talking to the first man. I’d felt bad for hurting him but at least I’d been able to talk to him. This man was colder, more experienced, more distant. I just wanted to get away. At the same time I understood that he was doing all he knew just to keep me. But I didn’t want him any more.

“I can give you 300 minutes for £9 a month,” he offered. My stomach tightened. I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me.

“No, it’s okay. I just want to go,” I said. Firmer this time. I had to make myself clear. I wasn’t just angling for a better deal. I wanted a complete break. I wanted to be able to to see giffgaff, without the ties, without the costs. Without the guilt.

“So you just like the look of this company?” He was trying to be calm and polite and rational. But, to me, he seemed to be suggesting that I was flighty, that I was falling for appearances, that I was being irrational.

“No, I like their business model. They’re community-focused.” I knew I probably wasn’t making a lot of sense to him. I was being defensive. I just wanted to get this over with. I wanted to move on.

“Okay, so you need a PAC number.” Relief slid down my tummy. Finally, he seemed to understand. My hand shook slightly as I wrote “PAC:” on the front of my giffgaff origami envelope and then waited for him to speak again.

He slowly read out the letters and numbers as I wrote them down.

“Thank you very much,” I said, as I hung up.

I looked down at the PAC number written before me, among the bright decoration of the giffgaff origami envelope that contained my SIM for the future. I was free.

My future was bright; my future was giffgaff.

I started a PhD last October. It’s part-time (I still have to pay the mortgage and cat food bills afterall!) so I aim to finish it sometime around 2015. I enrolled at the University of Surrey in the Psychology department where there is an Environmental Psychology research group, which struck me as just perfect because I wanted to research how people understand energy use and how to reduce it.

Like some of my IBM Hursley colleagues, I’ve been playing with a Current Cost electricity monitor for the past couple of years.

Like many of them, I’ve played with the technology, got my real-time electricity readings publishing to a server on the Internet, and looked at the data in graphs. I also learnt how to use my Arduino to take those readings and make Christmas lights flash.

I’m a User Experience Specialist in my day-job, it probably won’t be a surprise that I’m interested in understanding how people use the technology as much as the technology itself. My first degree was in Psychology and my Masters in Human-Computer Interaction, so while design itself is interesting to me, I’m more interested in how users understand what’s going on, what they want to do, what motivates them, and so on.

One of the reasons for my Christmas lights project (aside from learning to program) was to make build a kind of ambient, emotional connection between my house and my parents’, 250 miles away. My original intention (though it didn’t quite work out technologically) was to display my electricity readings on one colour of the lights and their electricity readings on another colour. So as well as having a kind of ambient indicator of our own current rate of electricity usage, I can see little things about their lives too: when their lights flash faster for a couple of minutes I can see they’re making a cup of tea.

Emotional connections to the technology around us (which uses energy of some kind) is hugely important to our global use of natural resources. For example, think about when you last bought a car. Usually there’s some kind of emotional factor involved, whether it’s the model of the car and the personal image or status you’d like to project, or the aesthetics of the car, or its comfort, or the way you feel it gives you your freedom.

One thing I’m interested in looking at is how ordinary people understand energy and their use of it (at home, at work, when travelling). Having a technology day-job, I’d also like to combine that with understanding how people perceive and think about technology in relation to energy-saving.

When I decided to do a PhD, I figured the Psychology of Energy Use would be pretty specific as an area of interest. And it kindof is, but it also kindof isn’t. Within that, there are just soooooo many approaches I could take; eg looking at people’s attitudes, their values and beliefs, their behaviours, their emotional experience of the technology and energy use, their perceptions of risk and control of technology, how other people’s attitudes and behaviours influence their own, how their local environment (eg where they live, where they work) influences or constrains their ability to manage their use of energy (electricity, gas, oil, petrol, etc).

So far, I’ve mostly done lots of reading and thinking but aware that there’s so much more I need to do before I can even decide on my exact research question. I decided doing some writing about it might help me organise my thoughts and ideas a bit. So here’s my first stab at that.

One Sunday morning in June, while I was lazing in bed, I received this tweet:

I spent the next hour absorbed in reading the Human Library website and the WOMAD website on my mobile phone. Then:

And:

So:

And that was that. I was committed. In public.

The Human Library is a fascinating idea that originated at Roskilde Festival 2000 in Denmark:

Borrow a person you normally would think you would not like. We have a wide selection of unpopular stereotypes. Everything from gays to hip hoppers to immigrants. Take a walk, have a talk or dont. Just remember to give back the person within two hours.

As a book, I had to have a blurb to be printed on my metaphorical back (in practice, it was to go into a printed catalogue of the available books for visitors to browse). The idea of the blurb is to be controversial and encompass some of the popular stereotypes about the subject. At which point, I started to struggle. So, I turned to Twitter again:

Initially I got self-consciously positive comments about women in IT such as:

actually the best IT Manager I ever worked for was female

Whilst a nice sentiment, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So I tried again:

I figured an example or two might be helpful to get the ball rolling:

That seemed to do the trick:

As you can see, there were quite a few responses, once unleashed. You can probably also see that some of them contradict others (eg ‘love pink’ and ‘not at all girlie’). I think that just goes to show that whatever you think about girl geeks, you’re probably wrong.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who helped crowd-source my blurb. You can read my published blurb on the Human Library at WOMAD website.

My next task was to un-earth my 15+-year-old tent, and put it up in the back garden:

And I bought some purple festival wellies on ebay.

On the weekend itself, I pootled up to Charlton Park, the venue for WOMAD 2010. After some difficulties with the lack of signage and not being able to find the right entrance, I was presented with not only a free weekend ticket but a CREW pass and backstage privileges:

Which, once I’d found Katy (@littlecough), I discovered meant that I could pitch my tent in the crew’s campsite. Basically it just meant I had to walk further but I could go pretty much anywhere and there seemed to be a higher ratio of toilets and showers to campers. I appreciated that a lot throughout the weekend.

So, the Human Library. Well, I had two 2hr sessions on the Saturday. The Human Library was based in a couple of pretty yurts on the edge of the festival.

It was a slightly odd experience being a book. It felt a wee bit like we were being pimped out – 8 of us books sitting out of sight on The Shelf (a row of chairs by the door with a label around our necks). The customers signed up at the desk outside the yurt and were then led inside to meet their book who would then take them to a free table and cushions somewhere in the yurt, or outside on a bench to chat for 30 minutes.

Some books were instantly popular, like the Tsunami Survivor and the Psychiatrist, who both seemed to be booked out in advance for every half-hour slot. On paper, it was less obvious what a Girl IT Geek was so I tended to be the pot-luck book; people who were interested in the Human Library and wanted to try it out would often just pick one of the books not currently out on loan.

I don’t think I got any advance bookings at all but I was borrowed for most of the slots. I found that I was every so slightly nervous at the start of each of my ‘readings’ because I don’t usually find it very easy to just start a conversation with someone, even though I’m usually happy to talk to random strangers who strike up conversations on trains. My first borrower was an academic who was, himself, slightly apprehensive, I think, and very serious. We had an interesting discussion about energy use and flying. He pointed out that academics typically made their careers from becoming experts in very very specific areas, and then it’s a career highlight to arrange a conference in that area in an exotic location that you have to fly to. We discussed how video-conferencing could be improved and the problems we’d each experienced with it.

After that it becomes something of a blur. I talked to a primary school teacher about energy monitoring and how it can be hard to reduce household energy usage when you share with friends. I talked to a musician about Open Source Software (he’d tried Ubuntu but didn’t think it had the software he needed for his music) and the software we use to produce the UUPC podcast. I talked to a single mum from New York and her young daughter about using computers and how awkward it is to get photos off a camera, on to your laptop, edit them, upload them. And I did a joint booking with the Vegetarian Ecologist for a group of teenage boys with whom we discussed Second Life, Open Source Software, home automation, and agreed that my Christmas tree lights project really was very geeky. (You can see me as a book in one of the photos on the Human Library at WOMAD website.)

It actually went really well, though it was exhausting. In all but one of my bookings, we were still happily chatting away when the 30 minute bell rang to say the session was over. In the one that finished slightly early it just came to a natural end of conversation, which was fine. Over all my bookings, I think I probably ticked all the boxes of things I’m interested in and have blogged or tweeted about at some point…usability, climate change, energy monitoring, Open Source Software, Ubuntu, my Christmas lights project…

In the odd session when I stayed on the shelf, I chatted to some of the other books, including the Dyslexic Egyptology Student book, who was inspiring in what she does, and it was fascinating to listen to her talk about her life as the daughter of the Council Tenant Mum of 7 book. The Dyslexic Egyptology Student also had a great story to tell about some ace young girls who borrowed her and shyly asked her about her dyslexia and whether she’d got bullied about it and whether she thought they could go to university as they too had dyslexia.

The sessions all ran really smoothly and the yurts were lovely and shady from the hot sun outside. I really enjoyed being a book and would recommend it as an experience to anyone. I think it would also be a brilliant way for a company to do diversity training. A few weeks later, I read a profile by a guy at work who has multiple sclerosis; the insight I got into his life just from reading that article had a similar effect on me as listening to some of the books talking at the Human Library.

As for the rest of the festival, I ate breakfast at the frightfully middle-class Riverford organic cafe (as in the delivery people), and learnt how to plait garlic (a fine skill, I feel), though I didn’t win the Riverford garlic-plaiting competition. I ate loads of vegetarian food from the various vans and stalls, discovered the lovely hot apple and cinnamon at the Tiny Tea Tent:

And watched the bubble experts (as seen on Blue Peter many many years ago making massive bubbles around small children):

As I left Charlton Park on the Sunday afternoon, leaving the WOMAD 2010 music festival, I realised it was the first time since Friday lunchtime that there was no soundtrack. Since I arrived on Friday, there’d been a constant music bed of drums, singing, guitars, or PAs. WOMAD wasn’t somewhere I would’ve gone had it not been for taking part in the Human Library but it was a fun experience, and I saw both Cerys from Catatonia and Chumba-wumba live (she sang Mulder and Scully; they refused to sing Tub-thumping). Sadly I missed the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer program in 1843. The computer on which the program would have run, Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, was never built, though Babbage continued with his designs until his death and is remembered as the father of computers. The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is to sing the achievements of women in technology and science – often their contributions go unnoticed.

On Ada Lovelace Day, today, anyone and everyone is encouraged to blog, podcast, videocast, tweet about the achievements of a woman in technology and science.

Laura Czajkowski

I met Laura Czajkowski last September when part of the Ubuntu UK Podcast team shipped off to Dublin to attend her OssBarCamp conference, have a weekend of geekery, and an evening of BBQ and cocktails. Since then, I’ve seen Laura working passionately to help kickstart the Ubuntu Women Project and I’m aware that she is also on the Ubuntu NGO project which looks at how to make it as easy as possible for charities, not-for-profits, and other NGOs to benefit from Ubuntu and Open Source Software.

After I tweeted a few weeks back that I was working on OggCamp10 planning stuff, she replied, offering her help. I wasn’t sure how serious she was but as we had a load of large tasks that needed doing around that time, I figured it was worth asking. Within a week, she was a fully signed-up member of the OggCamp planning team (ie she gets all the emails and can edit the wiki), despite having her own conference to organise as well. OMG Ubuntu published a great interview with her today.

Ana Nelson

Another ace woman I met in Dublin that weekend was Ana Nelson, who Laura had finally convinced to present about her documentation automation work. I swear (as a former technical writer), the stuff she develops on should be used by corporations everywhere to maintain their vast documentation libraries and to save their skillful writers from spending hours manually updating screenshots and code snippets. Her talk at OssBarCamp was fascinating and understated – she sat on a chair, speaking her way round a printed, illustrated mindmap, punctuating it all with physical props like wooden toys and knitting needles. Her tweets are no less insightful, witty, and slightly off-beat.

So they’re just two of the women in the Open Source world (in particular, the Irish Open Source world) who’ve inspired me recently. Go check out their blogs to find out more.

N.B. I updated the bit about dash/bash on 23rd March after feedback from Gavin and Dom (see below).

This week, I decided to install Rational Software Architect so that I could try out (again) the User Interface Generator which comes with IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server–and other products too, I believe. You can find out more about what user modelling is and how you can use the UIG in RSA (lovin’ the IBM TLAs yet? ) in this series of articles on developerWorks. The rest of this post is not about the UIG but about how to install and configure Rational Software Architect for WebSphere, which is relevant to anyone wanting to do this, regardless of whether they’re wanting to use the UIG.

So I wanted to install Rational Software Architect (RSA; an Eclipse-based piece of software) on to Ubuntu, which is what I run on my work machine, a Thinkpad T61p. Not only that, but I wanted to install RSA for WebSphere, which includes WebSphere Application Server Test Environment (WAS). This meant that I was installing not one but two pieces of software that are not officially supported for Ubuntu Karmic (or indeed for Ubuntu/Debian as far as I know). But as the Linux binaries are .bin files rather than .rpm, life should be easy.

And indeed installing it is. It’s when you want to create a WAS profile that the fun starts. And that’s where it had all fallen apart for me when I tried much the same exercise this time last year. That time, I gave up.

This time, I tweeted my predicament, knowing there were people who might know the answer. Unfortunately, the person I thought might know the answer had failed in much the same way as me only 6 months ago and was now relegated to using Windows. Still, others came back to me, including Gavin Willingham, who I’d not met before but who works possibly 10 minutes walk from my desk, and Jay Limburn, who I’ve known for a year through Twitter and internal instant messaging but, though he also works max 10 minutes walk from my desk, never met in person until yesterday (he’s shorter and blonder in real life).

So, if you’re trying to install RSA for WebSphere 7.5.4 with WAS Test Environment 7.0 (other versions probably work the same way), I’ll end the suspense and start here:

Running the installer

1. Download the many parts of RSA for WebSPhere 7.5.4 and WAS Test Environment 7.0 with licence/activation bits and pieces. (NB this isn’t free software; you have to buy it from IBM so I’m assuming you’ve got that far by now.)
2. Extract all the zip files. If you do a right-click > ‘Extract All’ on the zip file in Ubuntu, the extraction tool doesn’t like to overwrite directories of the same name, so you end up with directories called ‘RSA4WS’, ‘RSA4WS (2)’, ‘RSA4WS (3)’, and so on when actually, you want the contents of each of those directories to be in the same place. So move the directories around so that you have just 3 directories:
   • RSA4WS (contains 7 directories called ‘disk1′, ‘disk2′, ‘disk3′, etc)
   • RSA4WS_SETUP (don’t do anything with the contents of this one)
   • WAS70 (contains 4 directories called ‘disk1′, ‘disk2′, etc)
3. In the RSA4WS_SETUP directory, as sudo, run launchpad.sh to start the installation process.
4. Follow the installer through but when it asks you for a user name and password to create a WAS profile, select that you will create a profile later and that you don’t want to create one now. The installation should run cleanly (if you let it try to create a profile, it will fail part-way through the installation).

You should now have a nice installation of RSA with WAS on your Ubuntu box. Next, you need to create a WAS profile so that you can use the in-built WAS server for development and testing (or in my case, to run the user interface generator).

Creating a WAS profile in RSA

There are a few things that prevent this just happening (some are generic Linux things and some are specific to Ubuntu):

• On Ubuntu, /bin/sh uses dash, not bash, but WAS scripts seem to use bash specifically, so the profile creation scripts fail.
• Something extra that I have no understanding of is required in the eclipse.ini file (which is key in starting the Eclipse-based RSA environment).
• The default location in WAS’s profile creation wizards is in the /opt part of the main file system which you typically won’t have write-access to as a normal user.

So here’s what you need to do (at least, this is what I did and hopefully will work for you to to get a running WAS server in RSA):

1. Change Ubuntu’s /bin/sh to use bash instead of dash.
   In a terminal (sorry it’s the command line but you’re changing some system settings here that you would very very rarely have to do normally, or just if WAS didn’t specify bash specifically), run the following command and select the bash option as the default for /bin/sh:

   sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

   (As pointed out by @oldmanuk (Dom Evans), this is the proper way to reconfigure where /bin/sh points to (though I used Gavin’s method). )

   After you’ve created your WAS profile and everything’s up and running nicely, run the command again to change back to using dash. The benefit of using dash is speedier boot time, which is lost if you leave the setting as bash (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh – thanks Dom).

   Now you’ve sorted out the bash/dash problem. One down; two to go.

2. Check that you have a version of xulrunner installed (I have no idea what xulrunner is for but, looking in Synaptic Package Manager, my Ubuntu installation included xulrunner-1.9l.1-gnome-support, but not the xulrunner package itself, which seems to be fine for RSA purposes).
3. In your RSA installation, find the eclipse.ini file. I installed RSA to the default location so mine was in /opt/IBM/SDP. In a terminal change to that directory:
   

   cd /opt/IBM/SDP

4. Open the eclipse.ini file in a text editor, such as gedit:

   sudo gedit eclipse.ini

5. Add to the end of the file the following line:

   -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner

   (From an Ubuntu forum post.)

   Now you’ve sorted out the ‘xulrunner’ problem and you can actually start RSA. Two down; one to go.

6. Start RSA from the Applications menu: Applications > IBM Software Delivery Platform > IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere 7.5.4.

7. RSA should suggest a directory in your home directory in which to put the RSA workspace. That’s fine; I just accepted the suggested location.

8. When RSA has opened (NB, my Welcome view doesn’t load – I don’t think that’s a problem), give it a moment to think, then it’ll pop up a wizard to create a WAS profile.

9. In the profile wizard, clear the option about security unless you know what you’re doing with WAS security and have a need to use it in a development environment.

10. You’ll also notice that there’s a warning about the currently selected location for creating the profile. This is the third problem I listed above. The default location shown is for creating the profile in the installation directory of RSA. Change the location to a directory in your home directory. For instance, I told it to use /home/laura/IBM/profiles.

11. When the wizard has created the profile (which will take a few moments – you can see the activity in the bottom-right of the RSA window), the default server for the profile is listed in the Servers view on the right-hand-side of the RSA window.
    The server is listed as ‘stopped’.

12. Right-click the server then click Profile. This opens a dialog box about the profile; I just accepted the defaults then it failed to start the server (the error said it had failed to start within 300 seconds). But when I repeated this step, the server started.

And that’s as far as I’ve got but it’s further than ever before. If I come across any more gotchas, or take some screenshots, I’ll update this post.

Yes, it is a pain to have to do all this but remember that WAS isn’t supported (as far as I know) on Ubuntu Karmic. If you want it easier, install it on something that is supported. If you want it on Ubuntu, I hope this post (and the others I cribbed information from) helps.