Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Snell (by alaric)

For Ada Lovelace Day I'm going to write about my aunt Barbara.

She's never been one to be arbitrarily limited by society - in the 1950s, she went and toured the world on her own; which was quite something for a woman in her early 20s to do!

She's retired now, but her career was in linguistics. In particular, she was a technical translator, translating equipment manuals from other languages to English; I've never obtained a full list of the languages she knows, but (from memory) all the main European languages, Russian, and Japanese have been mentioned.

Anyway, she happened to be working for Xerox when the job of translating some documentation relating to the Xerox Star came across her desk.

At the time, translators worked with typewriters; they'd type up a first draft of the translation, with lots of corrections pencilled in as they went along, as it's quite common to find you want to revise something you've already translated when you come to write a later paragraph. They would then have to type up a better copy incorporating the corrections; but this might then come back with amendments proposed by the marketing department or other stakeholders. So the translators spent a lot of time doing menial work.

So imagine Barbara's excitement when she read the manuals for an electronic word processor... So, never one to let convention stand in her way, she petitioned the management to let the translation department have some. This request was eventually fulfilled, and as she predicted, translation became a lot more efficient...

But Barbara continued to be vocal about the opportunities for computers to help with translation, driving developments within the company and starting a series of conferences on the use of computers in translation, which is perhaps why Xerox is considered "is the private company that has contributed the most to the expansion of machine translation"ref.

This was all about when I was being born, of course. But when, around 2000, Barbara retired and closed down her own translation business, I had the chance to take my pick of computer equipment as she was clearing out the office; I took away a 486 that became the home router - but I always wished I'd managed to claim her Xerox Star...

From Unlawful Killing to Corporate Manslaughter (by sarah)

Yesturday saw another fraught day for the family - my side. They had recieved a letter saying that the police where no longer going to be persuing the unlawful killing verdict thing on my uncles death. So of course everyone assumed that the case was just being dropped but when they got to the meeting about it, it turned out it is being handed over to health and saftey making it a far hueger thing.

I again will not write any details as I do not want to affect the case in a negative way - but this is good as from what I saw the night he died just about everything was wronge. And something has to be done before even more people die unnessasarily.

Dad couldn't make it to the meeting as he had to go to the eye hospital for a check up on his laser surgery - he hadn't been sure weather they were going to be doing more then and there or not. But they looked at it all - one eye which has been lasered twice is absolutly fine but the other one is a bit of a concern and he has to go back in six weeks time to have it looked at again - if more blood vessels are growing he'll have to have a laser round the whole thing which they don;t really want to do - I assume there is some sort of rosk thing involved there with the amount of lasering they need to do but I dont really know.

Barbara also managed to have another fall at the weekend and so she was back at the drs on Tuesday (we met in the waiting room) and today she went for physio session for it. It would appear shes done something to the muscel that goes into the arm pit :/

I think that all thats currently going on.

Circuits in Epoxy (by alaric)

Continuing from my previous experiments in epoxy casting, this time I decided to cast a circuit in epoxy, as that's my eventual goal.

So I made a test circuit with four LEDs and their series resistors on a large piece of stripboard, with unnecessarily long leads on everything and a few different orientations of components, in order to check whether shrinkage is an issue at the kinds of scales I plan to work at:

Then I mixed up some resin:

And poured it into a business card box and placed the circuit in. I chose the business card box since it looked like the same sort of plastic the proper moulds at resin-supplies were made of, and that's supposed to not stick to the epoxy:

Luckily, it seemed that the epoxy does indeed not stick to this stuff, as it came out easily, leaving a perfectly clear surface, with no damage to the electronics:

It's really weird to have one of my sloppily-made circuits that's completely waterproof and ruggedised:

We had to prop it up with one end out of the water so you can actually see that all the LEDs are lit, though:

I think I'll still need to experiment with silicone moulds, though - as I'm unlikely to find boxes of the right plastic in the precise sizes I want.

Epoxy casting (by alaric)

Inspired by this I set out to learn how to cast circuits in transparent epoxy.

You see, making decent cases for things is sometimes the hardest bit about an electronics project, and an issue that had been a major roadblock in my interest in wearable computers. What point was there in building something if it wouldn't last long under the wear and tear of being attached to me, and getting rainwater inside it?

So I obtained the smallest set of two-part clear epoxy from resin-supplies.co.uk.

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Join me blogging for Ada Lovelace Day (by sarah)

Tuesday the 24th of March is Ada Lovelace Day - this is a day of blogging about women in Technology, ones who have inspired you or that you admire.

Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer in history though she didn't actually have a computer to run them on. She made them all from the description of Babbage's machine which he never finished.

She also saw far more potential in the machine than even he did and was well ahead of her time. Now I am posting this becuase a) we are obviously going to be doing write ups on this for this blog, my astronomy blog and web-empires blog - I'm not sure I can find relevent technology craft/art and cooking cross overs in time for the Salaric blogs but I will try. b) I'm hoping that alot of you lovely people will take up this challenge - from a personal point of veiw it would be nice to see the science side of technology and not just computing to be recognised - so geologists, chemists and astrophysists pull your fingers out, oh and anyone else who wants to off course! c) this will raise the profile of women in technology so that hopefully young women choosing careers paths and those debating weather to rejoin after a the whole 'career break'/having baby/looking after sick people can see that they are not alone and that both currently and in the past there female role models without whom medical advancements and the like may never have been made. (Or at least taken twice as long as there is an idea that you just need a saturation point for idea nucleation sort of thing).

I contacted the organiser and asked what they ment by technology and they said it is perpusfully broad and would include science etc... 🙂

There is a pledge page where you can add yourself to the list of people who will blog. You can follow it on twitter and it has a face book presance. There is also a mailing list and to find tweets about it on twitter its designation is #ALD09.

I am probably far to excited about this and I think you will all be suprised by the one we have on here 🙂

So you lot lets get writing 🙂