Just look at the smirk on that… dentist.

At the Forsk we talked a bit about our women tech heroes. Jeri Ellsworth, see picture, is clearly in my pantheon of heroes.

Taught herself everything. Had a DIY racecar career. Then she got into custom-built electronics, and designing chips. Well, she got very good at it. She built a simulated Commodore 64. And tells her lifestory in this longer video talk.

Here’s a nice photo gallery of Jeri’s home etching setup.

The Fatman and Circuit Girl is her video podcast. Slogan: Too smart to be cool, too cool to be a nerd. Welcome scientists!

Do you have women heroes in technology or science, give me a tip in the comments section.

Thanks, Mark! You provided much more than a glorified walkthrough of the extant documentation, you gave us insight into how the workflow feels, and how a finished product can look.

That went well.

When one participant muttered “Anyone interested in… pizza?” we trudged throught the snow to Drottningtorget, around ten Open Source enthusiasts had gathered for the bi-weekly MOSIG social event. Yep, that’s short for Malmö Open Source Interest Group. Affectionately known as “Linux pizza”.

Next meetup date, in Copenhagen, is at 23’s headquarters in Vesterbro.

Regulation (2009:689) on state aid for solar cells

To contribute to the transformation of the energy and industrial development in the energy sector, the government decided in June to introduce a state support for the installation of all types of grid-connected photovoltaic systems. The support may be up to 60 percent of costs for project costs, labor and certain materials. For large enterprises, aid cover more than 55 percent of the cost. It is the investing in solar systems that can be supported and the application review by the provincial government in the county in which the system will be installed.

The regulation came into force on 1 July 2009.

Kan du säga shibbolet is the title of her latest novel, which I’m currently enjoying.

She’s like the anti-Pär Thörn.

Me: “The Web has enormous reach.”

Peter Stuge: “Yes, unfortunately.”

In an unthinkable turn of events, this man took up blogging in English at peter.stuge.se. Peter’s a non-webby electronicist and hardware man, so this step’s huge.

Read his moving story.

Met a guy tonight that wanted to hear biographical anecdotes about Townes Van Zandt before he could listen to his music. He knew everything there was to know about Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys fame. Since we were at a loud club, he was unable to tell me anything about Wilson’s music. He mentioned an inaudible Beach Boys record title, with the gnomic description:

They were trying to pick up (inaudible, “pieces”?). And they sound so bad. But it comes out very good. Sincerity.

I retorted by gushing a little about Van Zandt. Recently, me and Luisa went to see Steve Earle who looks precisely like he does in The Wire. It turned out that the concert was part of a tour for a recently recorded album of Townes songs. With Earle’s telling yarns between singing great songs, it all swept us up into the New Country legend.

Meredith L. Patterson has an anagram for a URL. Envy poisons my fingers as I type this. Meredith is a defender of learning skills yourself. (See Autodidacticism for more poetry on this.) She defends rights to educate oneself. She kicks anyone’s ass that says she university’s the only place to learn biology. Ergo, she is my heroine.

But what I wanted to point to was this special interest item, from the CNC world.

TUBE is a bi-annual conference about tubes, held in Düsseldorf. I saw it mentioned in a very old news item from Nissin, makers of this:

And, at the music event tonight, I came to realize that I’m becoming more entrenched here in Malmö. I have friends here. I was dragged to dancing by my friend the illustrator, and my college buddy the moviemaker reinvited me to his opening night tomorrow. A Forskningsavdelningen biologist stepped up and asked if I knew her, I had to introduce myself. Again. She unmasked herself (this was Halloween, and a folk theme was in full swing, around us you could find Herne the Hunter, the Green Man, and other weird wooden masks). We talked science, quit the club, and had Middle Eastern fast-food (At “Jalla Jalla”, whose slogan is “Best falafel”), and then it was time to report all this. Oh, the biologist will equip herself with skills at the Royal Holloway in London. She can tell it all to me in a few years.

Bonus link: GPL3-licensed chemistry tools.

Just a picture (taken by Peter Rukavina). This is Robert, and he is my Peak Oil mentor.

It turns out that JSpec is a BDD specification tool, which uses some Ruby to run its specs. The syntax was a mix of Ruby and JavaScript in the same file.

Mats Bryntse had quit his job to make an ExtJS web app, and he’ll be on his way to San Francisco in a few months. The app he made, Ext.ux.Scheduler is impressive.

Later, I got fiddly. Programming languages had come up in conversation. Scala! Clojure! Erlang! OCaml! So, I installed a few of them. We deciphered a bit of Scala, and tried it out. Quite entrancing, getting it to run, when four people stand around and shout suggestions. The Erlang Eclipse extension Erlide was hastily installed, but we ran out of time before we got anything done with it. And the title of the meetup is “Öresund JavaScript Meetup”. The irony was not lost on us.

“It’s dead easy to make Erlang web backends!”, I later exclaimed. “Can I quote you on that?” David retorted.

So, there’s my challenge. Using ErlyWeb, MochiWeb, and others, and perhaps Mnesia (the database), I’ll have to work hard until the next meetup to get an environment running – and make a web application.

Speaking of the next meetup, David, who’s working for streaming outfit XStream in Copenhagen, will try and convince his people that a JavaScript Meetup is just what they need to host, so we’ll probably be in Copenhagen next time.

What’s more? There were shoutouts to the Copenhagen PHP Meetup, and talk about coding dojos.