Make "Enter" in Twitter Typeahead Select the First Item

This is just a quick post which may not be applicable for long but fixed the problem I had where I was trying to get the first item even if you hadn't selected it with the mouse or cursor.

$('input.typeahead').keypress(function (e) {
  if (e.which == 13) {
    var selectedValue = $('input.typeahead').data().ttView.dropdownView.getFirstSuggestion().datum.id;
    $("#input_id").val(selectedValue); $('form').submit(); return true;
  }
});

I appended the same information to this GitHub issue.

Grace Hopper on Programmers and Programming

I've started to read "Show Stopper!" and it has an excellent part in the first chapter about Grace Hopper, who created the first compiler that basically created the jobs that modern programmers perform:

"Hopper was convinced that overcoming the difficulties posed by proliferating computer languages would rank among the greatest technical challenges of the future. "To me programming is more than an important practical art," she said in a lecture in 1961. "It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge." Ironically, she fretted that the greatest barrier to progress might come from programmers themselves. Like converts to a new religion, they often displayed a destructive closed-mindedness bordering on zealotry. "Programmers are a very curious group," she observed. 

They arose very quickly, became a profession very rapidly, and were all too soon infected with a certain amount of resistance to change. The very programmers whom I have heard almost castigate a customer because he would not change his system of doing business are the same people who at times walk into my office and say, "But we have always done it this way." It is for this reason that I now have a counterclockwise clock hanging in my office."

I would love to know what the name of the lecture was and if there were any transcripts or copies of it around.

Copying between two uploaders in CarrierWave

To copy between two cloud providers using CarrierWave and Fog is a bit tricky.  Copying from one provider to a temporary file and then storing it in the other seems to work but the problem is that the file name is not preserved.  If you wrap the temporary file in a SanitizedFile then Carrierwave will update the content without changing the name of the file.

The following code preserves the file name between providers (where "obj" is the model, "source" is one uploader and "destination" is the other):

def copy_between_clouds(obj, src, dest)
  tmp = File.new("/tmp/tmp", "wb")
  begin
    filename = src.file.url
    File.open(tmp, "wb") do |file| 
      file << open(filename).read
    end
    t = File.new(tmp)
    sf = CarrierWave::SanitizedFile.new(t)
    dest.file.store(sf)
  ensure
    File.delete(tmp)
  end
end

To use it:

copy_between_clouds(o, o.old_jpg, o.new_jpg)

You might need to change "src.file.url" to "src.file.public_url" for some cloud providers.

Elliott, Dina and Steve

I was reading "'Memo' Functions and Machine Learning" again.  It's an interesting article, appearing in Nature, before an article about mammalian reproduction, and uses balancing a pole on a trolley as an example of artificial intelligence.

In the paper, the trolley is controlled in real-time by two computers: a PDP-7 and an Elliott 4100.  I hadn't heard of the 4100 before but the Elliott and others come from the start of the British computing industry - including others you may never have heard of like LEO and English Electric Computers. You can read more about them in "Early Computer Production at Elliotts" and "Moving Targets - Elliott Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain 1947-1976" (review of the book).

One of the pictures in the Elliott computer archives has the caption, "Switching on the Elliott 405 at Norwich City Council in 1957. The woman to the right is Dina Vaughan (later Dina St Johnston), who did the initial programming for the Norwich system." In 1959, she was the first person to start a UK software house.  This being a company that only wrote software - not software that came bundled with hardware.  The first, according to Wikipedia, was Computer Usage Company in 1955.

The best resource on her I could find was in "The Computer Journal" called "An Appreciation of Dina St Johnston (1930–2007)".  It describes how she was writing software in the mid-50s making her a contemporary of people like Michie, Turing, von Neumann and Godel.  It describes what programming was like then:

"She wrote with a Parker 51 fountain pen with permanent black ink and if there ever was a mistake it had to be corrected with a razor blade. Whereas the rest of us tested programs to find the faults, she tested them to demonstrate that they worked."

One of the first commercial jobs for the company was a control system for the first industrial nuclear power plant.  Her company, Vaughan Programming Services, was visited on the 10th anniversary of the British software industry by "Electronic Weekly":

"The staff in a company run by a woman might be expected to contain a high proportion of women, and this expectation is fulfilled", runs the EW report, "but, unexpectedly, a low proportion of the professionals employed have degrees, and there is no great emphasis on strong mathematical background in the mix of skills used."

The industry norms don't seem to have changed very much.  More details can be found on Google Books by searching, "Dina Vaughan" (or St Johnston).

In "Recoding Gender", Dina St Johnston is mentioned along with another female programming pioneer, Dame Stephanie Shirley.  A refugee of World War II, she entered the software industry as a "late pioneer".  She became interested in programming and got into the computer room by sweeping up chads, "I could not believe that I could be payed so much for something I enjoyed so much...early software was fascinating...it was so engrossing."  In 1962 she started "Freelance Programmers", the second software company founded by a woman in the UK.   Her view of the computing industry seems to be one that offered a way to address social and economic problems, "a crusade", a flexible workplace with policies designed to support women with dependents.  Originally designed to help women with children to continue to work, its charter gradually became more broad to include supporting women's careers, then for women with any dependent and in 1975 was expanded, by law, to include men.  The final mission became "people with dependents who couldn't work in the conventional environment".  She says in her biography, the company had always employed some men and at the time of the passing of the equal opportunities law three of the 300 programmers and a third of the 40 systems analysts were male.

A Guardian article, written in 1964, quoted in "Dinosaur and Co", about Shirley and the early IT industry:

"The main qualification is personality...Much of the work is tedious, requiring great attention to detail, and this is where women usually score...Mrs Steve Shirley...has found in computer programming an outlet for her artistic talents in the working out of logical patterns.

Now retired with a young baby, she has found that computer programming, since it needs only a desk, a head and paper and pencil, is a job that can be done from home between feeding the baby and washing the nappies.  She is hoping to interest other retired programmers in joining her work on a freelance basis."

The difficulties in starting a software company in the 1950s and 1960s seem immense.  There was the idea that you couldn't sell software, that it didn't have any value as a product or a service by itself, as customers expected it to be free with the hardware.  Then there is the inequality and sexism.  She called herself "Steve" as no one responded to her business letters when she used "Stephanie".  Banks also required written permission from a man so that a woman could open a bank account.  Furthermore, almost all companies and the public service required or expected women to leave their job when they married or had their first child, so you "retired with a young baby".  One of the few ways women could continue to work was to start their own company.

She mentions her title was for "services to the industry" and as any good programmer does, she defines Dames: "...recursively by saying, a Knight is a male Dame".  She recently released a biography called "Let IT Go" which includes many personal struggles as well as parts that are a more practical, British version of "Lean In".

You can listen to her talk in "The Life Story of a Pioneer: From Hi-tech to Philanthropy" (the subject of about IT and running a software company begins about 12 minutes in, the second half of the talk is dedicated to her philanthropy mostly for autism).  There's also an earlier recorded video of that talk and others on her University of Oxford page.

The early British IT industry wasn't only about commercialising military projects or solving hardware and software problems but it was a way of affecting social change - to allow more people to work more flexibly.

Removing Large Files from Git

When I've used git I've used it pretty much CVS, SVN and any other version control system I've used before - I've checked in binary files.  Whether that's dlls or jars or gems I've checked them in.  Pretty much everywhere I've worked people have said this is a problem and I've tended to argue it solves a lot of problems - one of the main ones is when where the repositories and management software along with that fails - I still have a working system from a checkout/clone/etc.

The price of this is that sometimes you need to cleanup old binary files.  Git makes this complicated but once you've found a couple of tools then it's relatively straightforward.

Stackoverflow has a Perl and Ruby script that wraps around a few git commands to list all files in a repository that's above a certain file size "Find files in git repo over x megabytes, that don't exist in HEAD".  The main gist of it is (in Ruby):

IO.popen("git rev-list #{head}", 'r') do |rev_list|

  rev_list.each_line do |commit|

    commit.chomp!
    for object in `git ls-tree -zrl #{commit}`.split("\0")

      bits, type, sha, size, path = object.split(/\s+/, 5)
      size = size.to_i

      big_files[sha] = [path, size, commit] if size >= treshold
    end
  end
end

big_files.each do |sha, (path, size, commit)|
  where = `git show -s #{commit} --format='%h: %cr'`.chomp
  puts "%4.1fM\t%s\t(%s)" % [size.to_f / Megabyte, path, where]
end

Then to remove the old files from the repository:

git filter-branch --force --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch [full file path]' -- --all
git push --force

Then to cleanup any used space in the git repository:

rm -rf .git/refs/original/
rm -rf .git/logs/
git reflog expire --expire=now --all
git gc --aggressive --prune=now