Ada Lovelace Day 2010
It's Ada Lovelace day today, and just like last year, I am pondering whom to blog about.
On the CARET blog, today we've featured our wonderful technical women, and I'm proud that without any positive discrimination our small department has managed to hire so many.
If you've been wondering why we celebrate Ada Lovelace, there is history on the Finding Ada site. But in recent weeks I have been reading the wonderful stories of Sydney Padua, who is crafting splendid comics from the real history of Lovelace and Babbage, and giving them exciting lives in a parallel universe where they succeeded in realising their early potential. Their true histories shine through, though, in scholarly footnotes, from Babbage's real anecdote about cheese to economic commentary.
So, which woman working with technology will I blog about this Ada Lovelace day?
I shall go off the beaten track, here, and nominate my mother. (Hi Mum!) Mum is not only on FaceBook, twittering, emailing and surfing the web, but has been running a website for many years, and also maintaining a charitable society's membership database in Microsoft Access, a technology beyond many of my deeply technical friends - not to mention me. We have finally migrated the database to OpenOffice now, but the ability to create queries and maintain data in this form is a non-trivial technical skill, of which she should be proud. I certainly am!
On the CARET blog, today we've featured our wonderful technical women, and I'm proud that without any positive discrimination our small department has managed to hire so many.
If you've been wondering why we celebrate Ada Lovelace, there is history on the Finding Ada site. But in recent weeks I have been reading the wonderful stories of Sydney Padua, who is crafting splendid comics from the real history of Lovelace and Babbage, and giving them exciting lives in a parallel universe where they succeeded in realising their early potential. Their true histories shine through, though, in scholarly footnotes, from Babbage's real anecdote about cheese to economic commentary.
So, which woman working with technology will I blog about this Ada Lovelace day?
I shall go off the beaten track, here, and nominate my mother. (Hi Mum!) Mum is not only on FaceBook, twittering, emailing and surfing the web, but has been running a website for many years, and also maintaining a charitable society's membership database in Microsoft Access, a technology beyond many of my deeply technical friends - not to mention me. We have finally migrated the database to OpenOffice now, but the ability to create queries and maintain data in this form is a non-trivial technical skill, of which she should be proud. I certainly am!