Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer program in 1843. The computer on which the program would have run, Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, was never built, though Babbage continued with his designs until his death and is remembered as the father of computers. The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is to sing the achievements of women in technology and science – often their contributions go unnoticed.

On Ada Lovelace Day, today, anyone and everyone is encouraged to blog, podcast, videocast, tweet about the achievements of a woman in technology and science.

Laura Czajkowski

I met Laura Czajkowski last September when part of the Ubuntu UK Podcast team shipped off to Dublin to attend her OssBarCamp conference, have a weekend of geekery, and an evening of BBQ and cocktails. Since then, I’ve seen Laura working passionately to help kickstart the Ubuntu Women Project and I’m aware that she is also on the Ubuntu NGO project which looks at how to make it as easy as possible for charities, not-for-profits, and other NGOs to benefit from Ubuntu and Open Source Software.

After I tweeted a few weeks back that I was working on OggCamp10 planning stuff, she replied, offering her help. I wasn’t sure how serious she was but as we had a load of large tasks that needed doing around that time, I figured it was worth asking. Within a week, she was a fully signed-up member of the OggCamp planning team (ie she gets all the emails and can edit the wiki), despite having her own conference to organise as well. OMG Ubuntu published a great interview with her today.

Ana Nelson

Another ace woman I met in Dublin that weekend was Ana Nelson, who Laura had finally convinced to present about her documentation automation work. I swear (as a former technical writer), the stuff she develops on should be used by corporations everywhere to maintain their vast documentation libraries and to save their skillful writers from spending hours manually updating screenshots and code snippets. Her talk at OssBarCamp was fascinating and understated – she sat on a chair, speaking her way round a printed, illustrated mindmap, punctuating it all with physical props like wooden toys and knitting needles. Her tweets are no less insightful, witty, and slightly off-beat.

So they’re just two of the women in the Open Source world (in particular, the Irish Open Source world) who’ve inspired me recently. Go check out their blogs to find out more.

For a while I’ve wanted to update the theme of my blog but not really got round to it. So when I had a spare evening a couple of weeks back I did a bit of a search for free WordPress themes and came upon the one that now graces the area around this post (also known as Notepad Chaos).

When I set up my blog, back in March 2006, I adorned its posts (and pages) with the RedStripes theme. Which was particularly exciting because, despite never having seen PHP previously, I managed to fix a bug in it!

The RedStripes theme was always slightly awkward because it didn’t resize very well (either if you changed the size of the font, if you used page titles that were too long, or if you just added too many pages). While also rather pretty, IMHO, it was also slightly dated (I like to think ‘retro’) in style, even at the time I adopted it.

So, having seen the bang-up-to-date artistry of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge’s blogs (basically the fact that they have natural curves that emulate the real world, rather than straight lines), I went looking for something similar.

Notepad Chaos was one of the first I found and no matter how many themes I found this one stuck out because, well, it doesn’t look like a WordPress blog.

So I spent another couple of evenings customising it slightly to fit the content on my blog, including creating the tag cloud pinned note, and tweaking meta information in the post footers, I give to you my new theme–unless you’re reading this on the blog rather than via RSS, aggregated, or on Facebook – which would make it all rather pointless!

P.S. Coincidentally, when I first applied the new theme to my blog so that I could see how it looked and how much customisation I’d have to do, @benjamindyer was searching for something, came across my blog in the search results, and tweeted his reaction and observation (though I can take no credit for the actual design)!

Today, I published my first post (about the HantsLUG meeting at Hursley last Saturday) on the eightbar blog!

Eightbar (as in the IBM logo which is known as the ‘eight-bar logo‘) is a community of people in and around IBM Hursley who are into cool, techie or creative things, either in work, out of work, or both.

The thing about large corporations is that people forget that most of the most amazing things that happen in those corporations come down to individual people just getting on and doing them. It’s easy to think (from inside and outside) that employees are ‘just a cog’ and everything is decided from on-high and nothing can be done without getting it approved in triplicate.

In fact, while a corporation’s culture can play an important part in encouraging and supporting good ideas, it’s the individuals who try them that make the difference. Whether that’s coming up with a better way to do something in your ‘day-job’, or writing a cool app in your evenings which subsequently gets so many downloads it gets incorporated into a real product (several people I know spring to mind immediately), or you just do something like running Linux as your desktop when hardly anyone else is and then helping others do the same.

That kind of innovation and adventure just doesn’t happen because someone in a suit on high tells you to do it. It comes because you think it’s a good idea and decide to give it a go.

The motivation behind eightbar was the realisation that there are loads of cool things happening around IBM Hursley that no one ever finds out about. So 4 years ago the eightbar blog was started.

Until today, I’d never contributed to it because I was too intimidated – but as one of many people around Hursley who attends conferences and unconferences, maintains (mostly) a blog, twitters, and likes to talk to other people who are into cool and interesting stuff, I figured I should make the effort (and the lovely @andypiper hinted very unsubtley that I should too).

So I did.

I noticed, a couple of days ago, that my blog has acquired adverts.

For example, in my blog post It’s here, it’s green, and it’s got ears! a couple of the phrases in the post have acquired dashed underlines and Snap Shots icons, like the term ‘One Laptop Per Child’ in this screenshot (the link ‘XO (or OLPC) laptop’ has a Snap Shot icon because it’s a link that I created):

(click the picture to see it more clearly)

I’m not sure that I like this. I don’t want to be advertising random companies that I know nothing about. I was aware that the Snap Shots windows that are added to my links contain small ads in addition to the preview of the target website. But the preview of the target website is why I include Snap Shots on my blog and the ad is smaller than the preview and I can live with that. But I’m less keen on Snap Shots identifying phrases in my blog posts purely to add adverts.

I had a look at the Snap Shots website which explains that the adding of Snap Shot icons to non-link phrases is a new technology called Snap Shots Engage. It also describes the Snap Shot Shares scheme, in which I can get a share of the advertising income (I guess from both Snap Shots and Snap Shots Engage ads).

I’m not against people making money out of their websites – though I don’t choose to right now as that’s not the purpose of my website – and the Snap Shots Engage method is fairly non-intrusive compared with, say, Google ads. My objection is to a third party inserting adverts into my blog without me knowing and explicitly agreeing to it. Also, while the normal Snap Shots ads are obviously ads below the preview of the link target:

the new Snap Shots Engage ads are less obviously ads that have been chosen by someone else:

and in this particular instance, the tone of the text in the ad jars slightly with my enthusiastic OLPC post.

I’ve had a look at the Snap Shots FAQ page to work out how I can opt out of them putting ads on my blog but they just say:

“At this time, Snap offers advertising exemption to educational and governmental institutions. If you feel that your web site fits these criteria and would like to apply to be exempted, please send an email to customerservice@snap.com and we will review your application and get back to you shortly.”

And I’m neither an educational nor governmental institution. So, I’m going to disable the Snap Shots WordPress plugin and lose Snap Shots completely.

In my little world I’m hoping that people tried to comment on my blog posts recently. My apologies if you were hit by a Fatal Error. It’s now fixed. It was my fault (not my theme, which I’d tried to blame at least once). But it’s all fixed now.

So you can comment away, to your heart’s content!

Please.

Do.

p.s. Notice too that my del.icio.us tag cloud (below) is now Snap-icon free – thanks Erik (thanks also for persevering beyond my broken site to let me know – yay for Facebook!). If you too want to know how to prevent Snap icons appearing on specific bits of a post, see the Snap Shots FAQ (note to self: RTFM).