My wife and I have four children and we have always spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the best way to raise children in modern America. One of the things we realized early on was that children no longer have a rite of passage or any point where they can say they are now an adult and ready for the world.

We set out defining a set of criteria that the children had to pass with a final test as a kind of modern rite of passage. We now have one through this process and two in the middle of it. We have spoken to quite a few parents (and some want-to-be parents) about it and they all thought it was such a great idea that we decided a while back to turn it into a book. It will [probably] be called "Aostach – A Modern Rite of Passage"?. Aostach is a Gaelic word meaning Adult.

I plan to put some of the concepts out on this blog and hope to get feedback from anyone reading it.

The Aostach is broken into a number of sections with each section having 6 to 10 topics that the child has to learn or demonstrate. The sections include the following:

Domestic Skills

Financial Skills

Safety and Survival

Physical fitness

Daily practical knowledge

Ethics, Morals, Social Responsibilities and Manners

You can see that it is a diverse set of knowledge and abilities. The culmination of all of it is a somewhat difficult test that the child has to perform.

The next blog will be about the first section of the Aostach.

As of this week Pluto is just a dwarf and our solar system, according to the astronomical union, only has eight planets. I know many people are upset about the decision, but really it was the right decision. Anything else would have just been confusing and would have continued the controversy. Personally I think the union made the right decision and I'm sure it was a difficult one given the emotions flying around about the topic. Sean

The big guys are increasingly getting into the open source game with preconfigured stacks and supporting services. Unisys, which recently threw its hat into the ring, is a perfect example. Matt Asay blogged about this and echoed the case made by Forrester that these fixed stacks are a good way to give their enterprise customers the stability and safety they want, even if the price of those benefits is reduced choice and flexibility.

At OpenLogic we don't think it is an "either/or"? option. We think enterprises require both. On one hand the production data center needs fixed stacks that work and don't need a lot of tinkering and updating. (In fact, change at any level is resisted here as it can bring down production servers.) On the other hand, development teams need rapid access to many sets of components, integrated in ways that cannot be imagined or pre-built by anyone other than the team members themselves.

Even the most basic OS/database/app server combos can vary widely. Since no one is going all open source all of the time, the reality is that everyone has a mixed environment. These normally include commercial products from vendors like Oracle, IBM and BEA, mixed right into the sauce with JBoss, Geronimo and PHP.

When you combine the production data center, the wide array of development teams, the large number of open source products, and the installed base of commercial and proprietary software, the reality is that fixed stacks do not work in the enterprise. They may have been a good starting point, but are not a viable end point.

That’s why OpenLogic focuses on building a technology platform that gives enterprises the flexibility to create their own open source stacks with an easy to use interface. OpenLogic Enterprise leverages a built-in knowledgebase that has the "smarts"? to automate the technical configuration, integration, and testing to ensure that all components–open source, commercial, and proprietary–work together. This approach, along with commercial-grade maintenance and support, gives enterprises the stability they want and need in their open source infrastructure.

I was listening to a presentation the other day about open source and the advantages and was surprised to not hear the thing I consider one of the most important. The presenter seemed to me much more financially oriented as he centered around the cost savings in using open source. He also listed a number of other advantages, ones we have frequently heard. What he didn't list as an advantage was the inherent high quality in open source. Imagine for a minute that you are a developer and are going to contribute some code to an open source project. The entire time you are developing that code you know that anyone in the world could end up looking at it and you know for sure that there will be a lot of eyes on your work. Any person in that situation is going to develop the absolutely best code s/he can. Then, if anything is wrong with that code, the developer is much more motivated to fix it ASAP as it is their reputation on the line. I have worked at many different software companies, both developing software and managing groups of developers and I've worked in IT doing similar work. In every one of those cases the checked in code was nowhere near the quality that open source projects maintain constantly. Even with peer reviews and agile methodologies, you still don't have the care to produce the perfect snippet that you would when working on open source. This is one of the big reasons open source projects tend to be so much better than commercial products (of course there are exceptions and this doesn't really count the bottom of the open source pool where it is just one guy submitting code to SourceForge). And this, to me, is one of the biggest advantages of open source - the high quality of the projects we get just because of the model.

I've been at startups for my entire career and at the executive level for most of it. One of the nice things in the startup world is that the dress code has always been fairly slack.

But this seems to be changing. Recently I had the misfortune of having to find a new job. One thing that happened during that process was that it became clear that the interviewers were expecting nicer dress than I was use to. One even had concerns about my ability to present to the board - that made me laugh; I think the concern though came from the fact I wasn't wearing a nice suit and he was. I also go to networking events and I've seen the trend moving more and more back to wearing suits or at least a sport coat. A few years ago at similar events I would see maybe 20% of the crowd wearing ties and the ones I've been to this year it has been more like 70%.

I have mixed feelings about the trend, but I do wonder what is driving it…

Kathy Sierra's post I am not a "woman blogger" really got me thinking about women in computer science.  Kathy's point is that she's a blogger and she's a woman but she's not a woman blogger as if that's something different than a man blogger.

I'm very interested in "women in computer science" - I think it's an issue.  There are very few of us in the computer science field and I'd like to understand why and make sure that all women who might enjoy a career in computer science see it as an option.

However, understanding what the problem(s) is, how to address it and how I feel about them is much more complicated.

• Do I think that there are very few women in computer science?  Absolutely.
• Do I think that's a problem?  Absolutely, because I think it's because many women don't see the career as a choice.  (Which I have to think is the problem, because it's a great career! If they considered it, many more would pursue it. :)
• Do I think it's because women lack the aptitude?  Absolutely not.
• Do I think it's because of the attitude of those in the field?  Not really.

One of the dilemmas I have with the "women in computer science" issue is that I haven't really had any problems that people seem to think are lurking around.  The field is full of extremely supportive people and I've been surrounded by them since the very beginning.  Not only did my mom and dad teach me that I could be anything I wanted but every time I ran into a computer, somebody was encouraging me to use it, take it apart, play with it, program on it.  In college, my fellow students (almost 100% male) were very friendly and helpful, my professors (100% male) were extremely supportive … even the IT staff and office staff were supportive!  I've never felt like anyone thought I couldn't do it or couldn't make it and I've never lacked for any help or support I needed.

Am I just lucky?  I don't know.  My experience seems to be similar to other women in computer science.

Now I'm not saying that I never had any problems.  I've had my fair share of "you're in computer science???" comments - almost always by non-technical folks.  The most bizarre type of behavior (which I haven't experienced in a long time, thank goodness) was the number of guys in college who somehow thought sending me pornography would encourage me to accept a date with them.  But that was well balanced by my male friends who could commiserate with me, my professors who were outraged (one guy threw a Playboy centerfold on my background while the professor was sitting with me helping me with a problem - it took me quite a while to convince the professor it was a joke and I would handle it), and then there were my male co-students who were always ready with creative solutions to my problems (the Playboy guy ended up with kittens - the cute furry four legged kind - stuck on his screen for at least a month.)

So what's the problem?  I don't know but I think they fall into several categories:

• Girls not entering into computer science.  I still remember helping out with a science day for eight year old girls and they all wanted to be teachers or nurses!  (Not that I'm nixing being a teacher or a nurse.  I think I wanted to be a teacher for the blind and deaf at 8.)   But obviously they weren't considering a technical career or at least one of them might have raised her hand!
• Women leaving computer science in college.  At the chairman's request, I started a Women in Computer Science group in college to find out why women were leaving the computer science major.  I didn't come up with any definite answers.  In large part, the reasons mirrored the reasons guys were leaving - there just seemed to be more of them left in the field in the end.  (I do remember one girl's advice, "date someone who's a computer science major so that the rest will leave you alone."  She's now married to that computer science major and still in computer science, so it worked well for her!)
• Women leaving the computer science fields in industry.  (My personal theory on this is that when companies start treating people poorly, it's the women who feel empowered to leave.  It's more acceptable for them to be unemployed or take lower status or lower paying jobs than it is for the men.)
• Women being promoted.  One of my friends seriously debated turning down a promotion to management, not because she didn't want to be a manager, but because she didn't want to leave the new women in the field with no technical mentors.  We'd all recently been promoted and the lack of women engineers was weighing on us all.
• Being a minority.  Even when it's a minority that's not looked on disfavorably, you still stand out.  I imagine that's more uncomfortable for some than for others but either way, it's always there.  I tend to notice that I'm the only women in the room at a conference even if it doesn't bother me.

In summary, I think we should encourage more women (and girls) to pursue careers in computer science, but we shouldn't necessarily assume that it's because the field doesn't welcome them.  It's much more complicated than that.