Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and Women in Technology

March 24th has been designated as Ada Lovelace Day and is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women in science and technology. FindingAda.com is encouraging women to blog about this today.

I've not paid much attention to her aside from being aware of her and knowing she's the namesake of the Ada programming language, but I've benefited tremendously from her contributions and the contributions of other women in technology for most of my life.

I read up on Ada at Wikipedia and learned this bit of trivia today, "she was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke."

I won't spend a lot of time dwelling on her interesting life, because Wikipedia does that far better than I could, but I'll take this opportunity to make mention of some current-day pioneering women in technology, the women who are advocating and teaching other women about Linux, computers, and other free software via LinuxChix.

LinuxChix is a community for women who like Linux and for anyone who wants to support women in computing. We are an international group of Free Software users and developers, founded in 1999 with the aim of "supporting women in Linux." Founder Deb Richardson described it as an alternative to the "locker room atmosphere" found in some online technical forums and gave LinuxChix two core rules: "be polite" and "be helpful." LinuxChix is now many things to many people, but it remains primarily a group for supporting women in computing, specifically in Open Source/Free Software/Software Libre computing.

If you're a woman in need of help or able to offer some help to others, check out LinuxChix!

The Christmas That Santa Got His Geek On

This year I received a lot of geek books for Christmas (2009), and I'm so delighted and intrigued by them that I thought I'd share them here and maybe somebody else will discover a wonderful book to read.

These are the six books I received:

1. The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh
2. Train Man, the novel, by Hitori Nakano
3. Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife
4. The Geek Atlas, 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive, by John Graham-Cunningham
5. The Annotated Turing, A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold
6. e: the Story of a Number, by Eli Manor

I haven't had time to read any of the books yet, but have thumbed through all of them enough to give a brief overview and my first impression of the quality of the book. It should be noted that these books were all on my Amazon.com wish list (thanks to Amazon for suggesting them for me) and I've read the reviews and any excerpts that were available.

The book that I've given the most attention to so far is The Code Book, and that's because I have three puzzles to solve. After my brother-in-law saw that I'd received a cryptography book, he asked if I like that sort of stuff and then promptly produced printouts for three puzzles he needs to solve to be able to locate geocaches. (I've solved two so far and one is partially solved)

Car Computers Need Reboot, Too

My Honda Civic Hybrid Needed a Reboot

To say I was surprised is a slight understatement. I take it for granted that computers need periodic reboots, most especially computers that run the Windows operating system, but it never occurred to me that my car might need one, too.

First the mysterious symptoms:

In city driving I noticed that very suddenly my battery charge would drop down to one bar or even none and the car would start acting very sluggish. This was even more likely to happen when the air conditioning was on but could also happen without a/c or heat on. Always the batteries would charge back up quite quickly, though, so it was never hazardous. This never ever happened during freeway driving. It also wasn't consistent in city driving, it only happened on some certain drives, leading to my being perplexed and wondering if it was something I did while driving.

The event that sent me to the dealership: suddenly my air conditioning stopped working. I immediately suspected that might be related to the batter power problem, so I took the car in at the earliest opportunity.

Life Without Cygwin Would be Rough

That headline may be a little overkill, but I depend on Cygwin for so much and yet I take it for granted. At home, I do all of my web surfing, studying, experimenting, everything on Linux and find that I always have the tools I need for whatever I'm working away at. Linux distributions — always the perfect tools for every job. When I go off to my place of employment, that environment is a rude awakening. My development desktop is Windoze (gasp!), Windows 2000. Cygwin is the perfect tool that makes toiling in Windows tolerable.

Mind you, the majority of the software development that I do on a daily basis is platform agnostic, being Java, Python, etc. I could easily do my job on  Linux desktop. It's the corporation that prefers that I use Windoze for Word, Excel, Outlook, you know, the usual applications, and I admit that I haven't fought the system and begged for a good Linux desktop. That's because one of the first things I did when I started this job was to download Cygwin! If I didn't have Cygwin, then it would be a different story altogether, but so long as I can have that, I can get by quite happily.

And so on to my point — I would be miserable without it and would incessantly complain about my sorry state of affairs being stuck on a Windows platform. I know, the GNU coreutils are available for Windows, and a number of other great tools, too, but those don't compare with Cygwin in my opinion. With Cygwin, I have a full bash shell and my usual load of scripts, I have sshd and crond (both as Windows services - that still tickles my funny bone), I have a seemingly endless number of packages I can install if the urge strikes.

I don't understand why more people don't depend on Cygwin to get their job done. I just can't comprehend it. Anyway, one day this week someone was asking me about it and that made me think how much I depend on it and take it for granted, so I thought I'd just put in this little recommendation. If you've never tried it, give it a shot. It's a big application, depending on how many packages you choose to install, and the graphical (sort-of) installer takes some getting used to, and it's slow to download and install, but it's worth the time and effort. You won't be disappointed.

Women in Technology at O’Reilly