joyous employment & open source challenges

since i wrote my last post i have become employed! yes! a real live job! and i'm really enjoying it to. i am a "learning technologist" in the e-learning department of the imperial college business school, working on an assortment of online courses, which is proving very interesting and not too taxing (yet. ask me again when the students return in october...). the people are lovely, the office is nice and the commute a reasonable length. the college is in south kensington, literally just around the corner from the royal college of music, royal college of art, royal albert hall and the v&a museum, just to start with. i really must plan to go to a prom while i'm there because it couldn't be more convenient! but the best bit is that i discovered the library...

now, i should clarify that imperial college is a science and technology university. their students are all engineers and biochemists and doctors and mba-types. not an artist to be found anywhere on campus (they're all round the corner :-) but i came across the campus central library on my second day and figured i might as well find out if i was allowed to borrow books. i figured it never hurts to belong to another library and there was the slim possibility that the computer books section might have some useful webby books (it does. planning on checking out quite a few of them very soon). so i joined up, checked the list of floors and discovered that 'computing' was on the top floor. and that, unexpectedly, so were 'cds'. well, i didn't really hold out much hope. it's not unusual, after all, for libraries to keep a few random cds for the students and given student preferences, they'd probably mostly be pop music. but it was worth checking.

HOW WRONG COULD I BE?

honestly, it's like there's some weird terry-pratchettesque L-space thing happening on the 5th floor of that library. yes, there are computing books; yes, there's a bunch of studious sciencey bods scattered around the tables with their books on dna strands and how to build a bridge and whatnot, BUT there's also a whole freakin' arts library up there!

ok, to backtrack. i sauntered over to the cd section, seeing, as i approached that it looked a pretty decent size for one in such an unexpected place. then when i got there, discovered that 2 of the 3 large double-sided racks contained exclusively classical cds. and a quick glance led to an estimate of about 40% of that being music written after 1900, which is just unheard of in any cd library and like heaven on earth for me. next i decided to check out the books and see if i could find the css tomes. and the first thing that caught my eye was a book on segovia (famous spanish classical guitarist for those who don't know) and i thought "huh?" so i toddled over... only to find three racks of music scores of all types - including scores for (relatively) modern operas such as britten's peter grimes and tippett's child of our time. next discovery was row after row of music texts - from the standard norton scores to biographies, harmony texts (even one written by the university of western australia's david tunley). then art books. philosophy. poetry. history. just an amazing collection! and all for meeeeeee!

so my lunchtimes have been spent working away at library books. at the moment i'm focusing on research for my article on erik satie and dada. i've had such a hard time getting hold of decent scholarly books on dada up till now - i've had to buy every book that's been of any use at all because normal libraries just haven't provided anything that was helpful. and this brings me to another of the joys of this job. i have done research at lunchtimes at other jobs, but always ended up feeling a bit like an unsociable freak. now i can just plonk myself down and beaver away at what i want to do without a care in the world - because all the tables around me are filled with people doing exactly the same thing! HUZZAH!

so extremely happy in the new job and for once hoping that it goes on for the full three months. i'll barely touch the tip of the iceberg of books and cds in the library in that time, but at least i should be able to get through a fair few!

one of my projects at work at the moment has also seen me dipping my toe into the murky waters of open source development. and i must say, it's been quite a challenge. it seems to be an unwritten law that anybody who's even thinking of getting involved in an open source project must be an uber-geek who lives and breathes the unix command line and has an intimate knowledge of arcane programmes that run only from that command line. woe betide the newbie who, while she has a certain amount of programming experience, hasn't touched a command line since dos and has never so much as shaken the paw of unix or subversion or python or any of the other behind-the-scenes wonders that seem to be required. it would seem that the easy part of the whole thing is the actual coding. getting the source code took far longer than identifying the file i would need to tweak to do what i wanted. and the project, of course, has nothing so simple as a "how to get involved" page. you just know, apparently. and unfortunately i didn't, so i've been flailing about for the past day and a half trying to work things out. fortunately, around 1.30 this afternoon, things started to click into place a bit and now my key concern is why won't the source code (which i haven't touched since i checked it out) build without errors. i wrestled with that for a few hours, then come 6pm gave up and posted it to the project forum. too hard. need expert advice. the frustrating thing though is that i can see pretty much exactly what needs to be done to the particular file to achieve my goals, but i need to get through all this setup dross first. honestly, the uber-geek who takes pity on us less experienced souls and writes an introduction to open source dev and its tools will win bucketloads of undying gratitude and will no doubt be responsible for a ton of eager new helpers, so very keen to do the dull jobs, on open source projects all over the web...