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!

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)

The Code Book is a pleasure to flip through because it's packed with illustrations, examples, photos and more. I find it impossible not to stop on pages with interesting graphics to read a little and what I've discovered so far are troves of ciphers and codes interspersed with interesting stories about the circumstances and people involved in those discoveries. Case in point, the curious turn of circumstances that lead Whitfield Diffie to spontaneously hop in his car and drive 5,000 km "to meet the only person who seemed to share his obsession," Martin Hellman, thus setting the stage for the Diffe-Hellman-Merkle key exchange.

The pages I've read in this book have been engaging and educational, and the math is minimal so as not to off put the less mathematically-inclined reader. I happily give a hearty thumbs up to The Code Book.

Train Man is a very unusual novel. This is the only book on the list that Amazon didn't suggest for me. Instead, this suggestion came from a fellow Twitter user named @rodet . What makes Train Man different from standard novels is that it takes place as an online conversation between Japanese Internet chatroom participants. It follows the story of a geeky young man and a young woman he meets, charting the progress of their relationship. The Asian emoticons and ascii art used throughout the chats are nifty and will require some deciphering. This book would definitely not be for everyone because of the unusual format, but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it.

On the back cover of Zero is written, "The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics." I never realized that the number zero had such a history. This book looks at the uses and misuses of the number zero throughout history and the current controversy surrounding it. The book has quite a few illustrations and some math, but not too much. I think it will be an interesting read. The last appendix is titled "Make Your Own Wormhole Time Machine."

The Geek Atlas is a fun book highlighting "128 destinations around the world where breakthroughs in science, mathematics, or technology occurred - or are happening now." The book gives a few pages of information about each site with a web link or other source for more information and when to visit. There are a lot of places included that I'm not likely to visit, such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, but many others that would definitely be worth some time and effort to see. It looks like a fun book.

I wasn't expecting The Annotated Turing to be a big page-turner, but am pleasantly surprised at the extensive annotations contained within this book and am thinking my preset notions about annotated works need to be re-evaluated. In quickly flipping through the book, the casual observer might think it's filled with more of the elaborate Asian emoticons as in Train Man, but no, that's math, and a lot of it, and it looks a bit daunting, but it will be great for keeping my brain spry and young.

I'm expecting to particularly enjoy the final book, e: the Story of a Number, in part because I recently finished reading a terrific book, Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire. In thumbing through the book, I discovered a fun section on e and its relationship to music that confirmed my expectations that I should enjoy this book thoroughly. As would be expected, this book contains quite a lot of math and is not for the faint-hearted.

That's it for new books to read. They should keep me busy for quite a while.

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.

The diagnosis:

This was complicated by the fact that the a/c unit started working again after letting the car sit over night. Oh how aggravating it is to arrive for an early morning service appointment only to have to tell the service technician "well, it stopped doing that". Anyway, I informed the mechanics that the a/c suddenly worked again, but I had this other mysterious power problem with my batteries and did they think the two were related?

The expert called over to hear my strange tale said he thought it was the computer and said they would reset it. The person who wrote up the paperwork afterward wrote that they reset the batteries. Whether there's a slight difference between resetting the computer versus resetting the batteries, I don't know, but that most certainly fixed the problem. That's the reason why I'm writing this — in case anyone else ever wonders what might be causing their battery voltage to fluctuate suddenly.

Some quick statistics:

I get 40mpg average most of the time, no matter how I drive. I can ignore all of the smart driving techniques that are supposed to improve mileage, and drive like gas costs mere pennies (ha ha) and still always get 40mpg. I also can get 55mpg when I drive more thoughtfully and am careful to maximize the mileage.

In closing, I want to say that I love this car. It's just the perfect car in my opinion. When I win $100 million in the lottery, I will buy one for everyone in my family.

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.

Tatiana Apandi, an associate editor at O'Reilly Media Inc., is the series creator of Women in Technology, a series "comprised of articles written by women on the topic of 'Women in Technology'". The series is running through September.

Here's a list of some of the women who will have articles in this series (copied from an announcement email):

• Anna Martelli, Ravenscroft, Pythonista
• Audrey Eschright, independent programmer/designer/publisher
• CJ Rayhill, SVP of Product Management and Technology for Safari Books Online
• Dawn Foster, Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software
• Dru Lavigne, Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc
• Gabrielle Roth, member of the Portland Perl Mongers
• Jeni Tennison, independent consultant and author
• Jill Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting
• Juliet Kemp, Systems Administrator for the Astrophysics group at Imperial College
• Julia Lerman, Board member of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance, runs the Vermont.NET User Group
• Kaliya Hamlin, unconference Shesgeeky.org organizer
• Kirsten Jones, webmaster for The Perl Foundation
• Lauren Wood, Chaired for the W3C DOM Working Group
• Leslie Hawthorn, works for Open Source Programs Office at Google
• Selena Deckelmann, leads PDXPUG, a PostgreSQL Users Group
• Shelley Powers, software developer/architect, photographer, and author