Z303

So I first learnt about Ada Lovelace day on del.icio.us and signed the pledge, and then spent a long time thinking about who I should write about, Ada Lovelace seems a little like the safe option. Being a hardware architect in a former life and still working on embedded platforms, Lynn Conway seem to be the perfect choice to for me to write about.

I’m guessing many people will not have heard of her, but nearly everyone will have benefited from her work. She worked on out of order execution at IBM, is used in most CPU today. Not to get too technical but exploiting the parallelism of the units inside a CPU, you can get a much greater throughput, so programs run faster and you do more ’stuff’ done.

Another large contribution was her work in VLSI design, taking the technology from a handful of companies and giving smaller companies and universities access to the toolbox and a structured method to use them, giving much cheaper and faster prototype, leading to an explosion of companies producing ASICs which powers many consumer electronics products.

She was also at Xerox PARC when the foundations of current personal computers were being developed and was part of that hive of creativity.

Part of reason for picking Lynn was that people who work in the more ‘hardcore’ side of technology, tend be less visible than people working in the web,games or the more user facing part of technology. Not to take anything away from people who work in those areas (I’ve also worked on web projects and games in the past), partly I guess this is because these deeply technical subjects are harder to explain, less visual and well less interesting to most people (or perhaps were telling the stories wrong). So all of this is to say don’t feel limited to ‘acceptable’ career options, if your interested in an area go for it.

So finish off here’s a few other people I could have written about: Wendy Carlos,
Delia Derbyshire, Grace Hopper , Aleks Krotoski, Kathy Sierra, Alice Taylor , Sophie Wilson

I was getting this on my server, so I did what anyone would do and googled it.

So to hopefully stop other searching for a solution, when moving from one authentication module to another they changed how spaces in passwords were handled, whatever the new modules is does not like them, so you may find you just need to change your password.

As twittered back in December, I got a new PC, so my mother got my old system, which left her old system spare.

It seems so simple, get a big hard drive and rip all my CDs, at last, I mean its not like its was a 286. Its a 900MHz AMD Athlon with a 120Gb ATA100 drive, 512Mb RAM, two extra ATA133 ports, 1 ethernet port, so more than fine for a bit of file server.

I now got around to getting the drives and ripping out the modem, floppy drive, CDR and slapped Ubuntu server on the main drive. Which was super minimal, even the ssh server is an extra package.

Its still very much up in the air what I’m going to use it for, but so far I have Music server (no idea which one but maybe SqueezeCenter), so form of IMAP email to get all that data off my desktop, a bit torrent client so I can just leave them running and I’ve really wanted to play with Asterisk for a while now.

I can see this taking lots of time and having a learning curve but I’ve been admining my Ubuntu laptop for a few years now and a few of the servers at work, so I should be fine and anyway not knowing what I’m doing has never stopped me in the past.

I wonder how many time I end up reinstalling stuff?

via Spyblog, NO2ID are calling in their pledges from 2005. I just did mine.

A lots has happened since then, the costs have risen, the one database has become a merged view of the existing data, and no reason has been given, again you can see all the good work they have done and if you can help them out.

They have released a report of what they have done so far and where all the money came from and went.

Here’s two of the founders take on things, Cory Doctorow and Danny O’Brien and Becky Hogge’s overview if you don’t want to read the full report. If you like what they have done, you are always become a supporter.

Just uploading a few new photos from the journey back to Bristol and well the upload page had completely changed from last night.

New flickr upload page

I must say the new version is much better, at least you can see how far it got with each file, and you have an overall progress bar, much much better feedback on the process.

ZOE-0805008605B481572

From the BBC’s new HIV/AIDS site: G.I Jonny launched at the end of the Stephen Fry’s HIV & Me. Like Dolly Mix, I did find some of the stories hard to listen to, that people are still being knowingly infected by partners and even people who want to get the virus. I just can’t think of anyone else who could of presented the programme half as well Stephen Fry, just the right amount of honesty and shock ,all with a real human touch.

or how I came to understand why I would want GPS in my phone. Here’s the story.

We were in the new (relatively speaking) part of Carcassonne (which is well worth a visit if you are in the area). This area framed by wide boulevard (which are on the site of the city walls) with lots of parking around a the grid like centre of narrow streets full of shops and places to eat, so we parked the car. Asking my mother that she remembered where we had parked, and off we go to window shop and get some food. So after a few hours and a very lovely meal finishing with a fantastic pear tart, we headed back to the car, or at least tried.

We had been having such a good time that my mother had forgotten where the car was, but had an idea which direction so off we walked, out from the center towards the car, no joy. In the end it was nearly two hour before we found the car, this was in February, and yes the south of France is cold at that time of year.

Since, I’ve always used my phone to take a picture of the street name where the car is, as a sort of outboard brain thing. But it would be so much easier with a GPS, set a marker where the car is, then just forget about it, shop, go for a meal whatever, then simply walk back towards that marker, easy.

We have Lotus Notes inflicted on us at work, it made me really apreciate Outlook. That is high praise indeed for a former life long Outlook hater (over complex, cluttered gui, feature overload).

Todays Notes horror, got a meeting request, it overlapped with existing ones, nice dialog box telling me it overlapped but not on which meetings caused the problem. I was given the option to look at my calendar but not edit it, for that I had to go to another screen, open up the calendar, find and delete the overlapping meeting. Still the meeting request was saying meeting where still overlapping, turns out I had to close and reopen the meeting request, so it would then check the updated calander, and everything was fine.

I’m now getting to the point where if I ever go for another interview and that company uses Notes, then I’m not going to work for them.

Reading reddit today, and the story about France opening its UFO files, I now understand why the band O.V.N.I. are called that, its French for U.F.O. (Objet volant non identifié).