Goodbye, Steve....

I got the news on my iPhone.  I was on my way home from classes in Computer Science, and I had pulled it out of my purse to look up something I saw on a sign, and the push notification from AP News popped up on the screen.


Steve Jobs, co-founder, and former CEO, of Apple had passed away.  The news hit me hard.  Over the past few years I have become a major Apple fan girl.  And I came to admire Steve Jobs for all he has done for the world.


About three years ago, I bought an iPod Touch.  I read an article that pointed out how you could do almost anything on it that you can do on a laptop.  While that might be viewed as a bit of an exaggeration, there is truth in that statement.  I didn't realize it, but I had taken the first step towards addiction.


When the iPhone 3GS came out, and they dropped the price on the iPhone 3G, I bought my first iPhone.  I loved my iPod Touch, but I wanted to have access when WiFi was not available.  


Then, I began to think about developing apps for the iPhone.  That would require the purchase of a Mac.  I was eyeing the Macbook, but wound up going for a bit more and buying the Macbook Pro I am typing this on.  Joining the Developer's program, and a large number of books, quickly followed.


By now, I am sure many can see where this is leading...the iPhone 4 arrived, and I upgraded.  A full 32 GB version, of course.  Now I could have all the apps and music I wanted.  


And of course, I had been wanting an iPad, but that was just a bit beyond my reach for while, but I bought one of those as well, the top of the line 64 GB with 3G.  I use it everyday.


And, every Tuesday night, I attend a class in iPhone programming as part of my major in Computer Science.  Apple, and more specifically the genius of Steve Jobs, helped draw me back in to programming.  I had wandered away a few years ago, mainly because of my lack of a degree.  I was self-taught, but that doesn't work these days.  Now I am working on my degree, and my ultimate dream would be to work for Apple.  That, or to teach Computer Science to the next generation of geeks.


But I owe a lot to Steve Jobs.  He will be missed.  It may be a bit trite, but he really did change the world in insanely great ways.

It's Been A Long Time...

Sorry to be so long between posts...but life has been crazy.


I decided to take the plunge and return to school.  I followed by geeky little heart and I am majoring in computer science...and I love it!


During the summer term, I completed a introductory course in C++ programming.  It mostly served as a refresher for me, since we focused on procedural programming and not object oriented.  Now I am continuing with the next course in the series, which will delve more into object orientation.  I am also taking courses in UNIX, Java, and iPhone programming.  My schedule is rounded out with a class for emergency medical responders.  It is primarily for those going into a public safety career (which I have no interest in) but it a) fulfills a graduation requirement, and b) will teach me some really strong first aid skills (and living in San Francisco where we all are waiting on THE BIG ONE that is not a bad thing.  


I realized something...being a student is sort of a natural environment for me.  Or, more specifically, being in an academic environment is.  I have missed this sort of thing.  I love being in class, working on homework, and especially learning new things.


I have been programming for almost forty years.  I wrote my first program in FORTRAN on punch cards in the fall of 1974.  I quickly learned BASIC, and spent several years using a multi-million dollar mainframe as a personal computer before anyone had heard of a personal computer.


Over the years, I moved on to Pascal, C, and other programming languages.  I learned a bit about algorithms, and data structures.  I worked at several jobs as a programmer, and even did some work in hardware design.  But, I was always the one without a degree.  Now, I am formalizing my knowledge.  And I am loving every minute of it.


So, hopefully I will find the time to update things more...besides, Doctor Who returns Saturday, and that is always something to write about.

Songs about Computers...

PC World has an interesting weekly email called "Talk Nerdy to Me."  This week's features the "Top Ten Songs About Computers."  I actually have a pretty good collection of such songs myself, including a few I added from their list:



Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton
Behind the Scenes at Microsoft by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie
Binary Code (Makes Sense Wherever I Go) by Nonso Ugbode
Computer Chanty by Dr. SETI
The Gates by DaVinci's Notebook
I Love My Computer by Nonso Ugbode
I Love My Mac by Daphne Kalfon
I Love My iPod by Daphne Kalfon
If This Geek Ruled the World by Geoff Smith
Internet Love Song by Bob Ricci
MySpace by Joshua Grosvent
Log In to You by the Arrogant Worms
On the PC by Tom Smith
PC99 by Tom Smith
The Nerds Who Rule the World by Hot Waffles
Reign of Error by Sudden Death
Reinstalling Windows by Les Barker
The Rise and Fall of the SupaSucka 9000000™ by Flying Like Wilma
Spam by Sudden Death
The System Administrator Song by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie
Tech Support by Geoff Smith
Tech Support by Tony Goldmark
Welcome to the Internet Help Desk by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie
What Joe Saw on the Internet by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie
The System Administrator Song by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie
2600 by Positive Attitude

And of course one could also include:

Having Trouble Sneezing by Scott Olson (Mac vs. PC ads)
New Soul by Yael Naïm (Macbook Air ads)

Okay, I admit it...I'm a major geek, and an Apple fangirl.  These are just some of the almost 200 songs I have in my "Geek Songs" playlist in iTunes.

A Very Geeky Saturday

Sorry to be so long between posts.  I have had a lot going on, and I keep putting off writing something.  I promise to try to be a bit better.


On Saturday I attended the open house at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA.  LBNL is one of 16 national labs operated by the Department of Energy.  It is a part of the University of California.


It was original referred to as the Radiation Lab at the University of California. It was part of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.


I first became familiar with LBNL when I read the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll. He was managing some computers at LBNL and was asked by his supervisor to figure out why there was a $0.75 accounting error in  the usage records.  This led Stoll to discover that a hacker has accessed the system.  


LBNL performs unclassified research primarily in the field of physics, though it has diversified into almost every area of scientific research.  


LBNL has a very distinguished history.  Eleven of its research have won Nobel Prizes, starting with Ernest Lawrence, and most recently George F. Smoot.  Smoot is one of my favorite scientists.  He not only won the Nobel Prize for the COsmic Background Explorer, is also the cousin of Oliver Smoot who is famous as the "Smoot" who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge by students at MIT.  The Smoot Marks are still visible, being traditionally restored each year.  Appropriately, Oliver Smoot went on to be the chairman of the American National Standards Institute(ANSI) and the president of International Organization for Standardization(ISO).  George Smoot has also made a cameo appearance as himself on "The Big Bang Theory" where he asked Dr. Sheldon Cooper if he was on crack, and was the second person to win a million dollars on "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader."


In order to get to LBNL we had to go to the University of California campus where we boarded a shuttle bus that took us up through the Berkeley Hills to the lab.  


When I arrived at the lab the first impression I had was "Eureka."  That is, I felt like I was visiting the fictional town of Eureka from the SyFy television show.  The whole event seemed sort of like "Fonder's Day" from the first episode of the current season of the show.  


I wondered around, checking out the various booths highlighting aspects of research conducted at the lab.  I then took a bus tour of the campus, which included a trip by the Bevatron building, which is, sadly, being torn down.  The Bevatron was the first particle accelerator to achieve billion electron volt(BeV) levels.  The Bevatron was where antiprotons were first observed, which confirmed the existence of antimatter.  It also allowed the discovery of many other particles leading to a new era in physics. While it will soon be gone, its legacy will live on at locations like the Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland.


The real highlight of the open house was visiting the Advanced Light Source(ALS).  Housed in a building original designed for a cyclotron, it is a synchrotron providing over 40 beamlines.  Both ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams are available for scientific research.  It is one of the brightest light sources of  ultraviolet light and soft x-rays, which allows research that had previously been impossible.


The ALS facility defies easy description.  During the tour we walked around the outer area surrounding the facility.  This allows access to the various experimental stations which can be used by approved researchers.  Each station has a specific purpose.  


Overall, the ALS is a maze of wires, pipes, computers, instruments, etc.  Much of the pipes are covered in a specialized form of aluminum foil that helps protect the vacuum that the beams travel through.


Another facility at LBNL,houses a pair of scanning tunneling microscopes, that are capable of a level of resolution to half the width of a hydrogen atom.  Unfortunately, that building was not open during the recent event.

One other highlight of the visit was seeing Ernest Lawrence's desk.  Among the items preserved there are a cigar box that was used to house the first plutonium ever produced, some of Lawrence's lab notes, and the first radiation warning sign.  The now familiar symbol was first created at LBNL.  The original version was magenta on a blue background.  Today, the official version is black on a yellow background.  The design was based on a pattern observed in a cloud chamber.

Visiting Lawrence Berkeley was the fulfillment of something I had desired since first reading "The Cuckoo's Egg."  It was also a chance to get an up close view at some of the cutting edge research going on while making a connection to scientific history.

History's Greatest Geeks, Part One

Geeks are not really all that new a thing.  We have been around for a very long time, though we were not always called "geeks."  In any case, history is full of those who fit would we would call "geekdom."  I thought it might be interesting to consider a few...

The problem is not finding ones to name, but instead is having an abundance of riches.  I know I will miss more than a few, so this list is by no means meant to be comprehensive, but instead to look at some of the great ones.

Archimedes

Archimedes is a good one to start with.  He was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.  His is credited with several discoveries, including his work in determining density, which arose from the request that he determine if a crown produced for the king was solid gold, or if the goldsmith had pilfered some, using silver to make up the difference.

He was taking a bath when he realized that his body was displacing an amount of water equivalent to his volume.  Based on that, he could determine the volume of the crown, and therefore determine its density, which would be less if silver had been substituted for gold.  He was so excited that he ran back home without remembering to dress, dashing through the streets yelling "eureka!"(literally, "I have found it!").

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.  He discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, he was the father of modern physics, and in perhaps one of his geekiest moments, he gave us Galileo's Paradox.  He observed that some numbers are perfect squares, that is, they are the square of an integer.  But not all integers, are perfect squares and in fact, most are not.  So, there must be more that are not perfect squares than that are.  But, all integers are the square roots of a perfect sq are.  Put in simple terms, there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares.  This seems a contradiction, and Galileo concluded that more, less, and equal do not apply to infinite sets.  But, in truth, as strange as it seems, some infinite sets are bigger than others.

He, along with Archimedes can thought of as the giants whose shoulders our next geek stood on...

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who was one of the most influential people in human history.  He gave us the basis for classical mechanics including the three laws of motion:

First Law: An object at rest tends to stay at rest, or if it is in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a sum of physical forces.


Second Law: A body will accelerate with acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass.


Third Law: Every action has a reaction equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Another major contribution of Newton was the development of calculus.  He was the first to organize it into a specific field of mathematics, and also was responsible for some of the first applications.  He was not the only one to contribute to its development, which brings us to our next figure from history...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz was a German mathematician who a invented calculus independently of Newton.  In fact, they were involved in a bitter rivalry over which invented it first.  Today, Leibniz's notation is the one used in calculus, though both contributed ideas to the subject, and as noted above, Newton was the first to organize it into an independent subject.

Of equal importance to geeks everywhere is Leibniz's documentation of the binary number system which he associate with the I Ching.

Leibniz also made contributions to the field of topology.

Leonhard Euler

Euler was a contemporary of Leibniz and the man who gave us the exponential function and logarithms. He also contributed to the field of complex numbers and gave us Euler's Identity, which is one of the most profound statements in all of mathematics.

This combines five of the most important constants in mathematics.  The constant e is an interesting, number that shows up in many diverse places in mathematics and science.  It is an irrational number(i.e. it can not be expressed by m/n where m and n are integers.  Pi, the ratio of the diameter and circumfrunce of a circle, and is also irrational.  And i, is the imaginary number that is the square root of -1.  And of course, 1 and 0 are rather obvious in their importance.

Well, that is just a few of the numerous geeks from history.  In future articles we will look at others, both living and dead.  And both real, and fictional. 

Welcome to Geek Girl's Chronicles

Hi! Welcome to my new blog.

Since today is April 1st, I thought I would start things off by sharing my favorite prank...

The first occurred back in my college days. I was working as a computer tech on work study, and part of my job was to be the first level of tech support. It wasn't April Fool's, just a Sunday evening, things were slow, and I was...well, I was bored.

One of the problems people faced was people stealing their terminal. If you walked away to the restroom, or to otherwise take a break, someone might log you off and then log on. To prevent this, someone wrote a program called "Scope Saver."

The program made it look like the terminal had timed out, like you had walked off and let it log off by itself. Well, I went down to the terminal room, and put the program on all the available terminals.

It was only a few minutes before my victim appeared. A freshman came to my window, his eyes as big as saucers. I knew what up, but I played dumb.

"There is something wrong with the computer," he muttered.

"No, everything is up and running fine," I said, pointing to the larger status sign in the middle of the machine room behind me.

"Really, there is something wrong," he repeated.

I followed him down to the terminal room, looked at the one he was trying to log onto, and in my most patronizing voice said, "It is just timed out. You need to enter the site ID."

"I did that," he said.

I sat down, and entered the site ID. The machine responded normally. I started to get up, but he repeated that he had done this. I asked for his account and password. I typed those and again, everything appeared normal, and I again started to get up to leave...

"No, wait," he insisted.

It was getting hard to keep a straight face, but I waited.

After a moment, the words flashed across the screen:

I remember you, you're the idiot who was banging on my keyboard yesterday. I don't like you, and I am not going to speak to you anymore!

"See! See! I told you there is something wrong with the computer," he practically screamed.

I gave him my most piteous look, shook my head, and said, "Well, the computer just doesn't like you."

Tears well up in his eyes, as he pleaded, "But I've got to do my homework!!!!"

At that point, I just lost it. Laughing uncontrolably, I cleared the program, gestured at the screen to indicate that it would work know, and then removed the program from all the other terminals.

Anyway, in coming posts, I will be talking about various and sundry geeky things. Feel free to leave a comment.