Being a life-long fan of Charles Babbage,  someone who I feel is often overlooked in celebrations of this country's past heroes, when I learned about Lady Ada day and a chance to celebrate some of the women in tech today who are also overlooked, then I couldn't resist dusting down my old blog and having a little go at writing something.

In case you didn't know (and why should you?) Lady Ada Lovelace (after who this day is named) worked with Charles Babbage on his Difference Engine and in the course of this work and the documentation of this machine wrote what is widely acknowledged as the first algorithm to be processed by a machine - in effect making her the first computer programmer.

Whilst I would love to write something about Babbage himself, today is to remember Lady Ada, his 'Enchantress of numbers' and the many women in technology past and present.

There are no doubt countless numbers of women working tirelessly  today in the field of technology and science, very little of who get the recognition they deserve. I am not sure why this is, but I do remember when at school (1980's) there were very few girls in my computer science class and even fewer (only the very brave) that were in any science class I attended.

Things do seem to have changed for the better recently, with technology becomming more pervasive and it being taught as a general subject in schools. My teenage neices do not seem to view technology in the same view that it was held in by females in my day ('that's a boy's subject') and have started asking interesting questions like 'What is web 2.0?'. So, in short, I think we are in good hands for the future.

Having recently read an article on Lifehacker I was particularly inspired by the stories of two women, namely Limor Fried and Jeri Ellsworth and it is those people I would like to mention in this posting for Lady Ada day.

Perhaps Limor Fried is not such a surprise in this slot, as she runs a website called Ladyada.net ! This is a young woman who 'is' technology in the nicest sense - A masters in Engineering from MIT doesn't come easy. She has designed and constructed some extremely interesting devices, not least of which is the Portable RF Jammer which I would *love* to have the skill to construct and silence the 'important' people on my train on the way home who simply have to carry on conducting business no matter where they are. Anyway, don't get me started on that one....she is also heavily involved in Adafruit Industries, from which I seem to be buying a lot of stuff via Oomlout in the UK - I have been playing with an Ardunio a lot lately :-) Talking of which, Limor also designed and built this- also based on an Arduino!

The second person named above, I was not aware of before the article on Lifehacker but she is also an inspiration, not just to women but any tinkerer out there, although that is probably thw wrong word...I think electronics genius is probably closer. She is described on Wikipedia as '...an American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer'. However, that really doesn't do her any justice, as a bit later in the Lifehacker article, it goes on to say:

'She reverse engineered and designed the entire Commodore 64 audio and video system on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and then managed to get it made cheap enough so it could be sold on QVC.'

Whilst i'm not really interested in the QVC bit, the first bit is simply incredible - utterly astonishing. It also goes on later to note that she just looked a picture of the chips in a C64 to achive this. My poor puny brain can't even comprehend this feat of skill, and what it must be like to be able to do this. I struggle to add two numbers together. I really can't find words to articualte how amazing I think this is.

So....my posting for Lady Ada day is nearly over. I hope that if even one person sees this post and the people named above get even a little more coverage and celebration then it will have served its purpose. If you have a daughter / neice then try and get them engaged in technology and the sciences. Buy an Arduino, show them how to create content for a blog or a myspace page, and then get them to understand the science or technology behind that creation, so that they can take the first steps on what will be, I think, a very enjoyable path.

Thanks for taking the trime to read this :-)

Steve