Blogs

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in technology. Now, there are the obvious people that I could blog about, namely Limor Fried (aka ladyada) who runs Adafruit Industries, or Susan Kare, who designed the Macintosh Trash Can, the Happy Mac, Claris the DogCow and now is at Chumby, or Mary Lou Jepsen, who designed the One Laptop Per Child and then went off to start her own company called Pixel Qi.

No, I’m going to talk about Grace Hopper instead, only because she is attributed to this quote:

“It’s better to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission”

She’s also the mother of COBOL, and a female pioneer in computing. She obtained a PHd in Mathematics, and she was credited for being the person who found the Moth in the computer which is often referred to as the first computer bug. It also should be noted that she had a long career in the US Navy and she eventually also got promoted to Commodore, which later got renamed Rear Admiral, Lower Half. She also has a US Naval Ship named after her as well.

Honestly, I think I really like Grace Hopper because of the quotes that she’s attributed to, namely the one above and this one.

“I believe in having an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

It’s this sort of attitude that leads to go open source projects, in my opinion and is similar to how other people explain their pragmatism, and it shows the ability to get things done. In my opinion, we need more people who show this sort of dedication to what they are doing. She was a fan of the paperless office, and she hated clutter. She also believed (and rightly so) that we wouldn’t be able to get rid of paper, and that microcomputers (AKA PCs, Laptops, iphones, etc) would take over from the Mainframe. She really understood where we were going and how we were going to get there.

While I’m not a fan of the military, I think you would have to be a fool to not salute the memory of Grace Hopper. Someone who worked hard and got things done!

I just realized that I haven’t blogged in a couple of months. This is partly because I’ve been busy working on various projects, some of which I may write about in later posts. However, I’m going to contribute yet another blog post about Android and this time it’s about the build, flash and hacking process.

Android is meant to be an open platform, and I’m proud to say that I’m able to easily reflash my phone to Cupcake and test out the latest and greatest. However, my verdict on the latest and greatest is that it’s not ready for primetime. Anyone who says it is clearly hasn’t ate their own dog food. The device I used to test Android is my ADP1 phone, which is an HTC Dream. That being said, it should be clear that Cupcake is not meant for this phone.

The reason I say this is obvious:

• The On-Screen Keyboard buttons are too small
• The animations are slow and choppy

Now, if I turned off the animations, and the on-screen keyboard, I would have no problems with this phone, BUT it would mean that I would be running the exact same thing as Android 1.1, which makes this exercise somewhat pointless. I also did run into other bugs, but I chop that up to me actually grabbing the trunk and throwing it on the phone every day for a week instead of grabbing cupcake-stable (does that exist?)

I’m assuming that the HTC Magic and later Android Devices will be faster, and have larger screen real estate, and as such will not have the problems the HTC Dream currently has with Android. Then, what I have to ask is when will Google distribute these handsets? If Google raises the bar on the dev platform’s minimum requirements, then what will developers have to do to keep up. Having to buy a new Dev Phone every 6 months is fine, but not at $400 a pop.

Perhaps they’ll speed up the Animations and fix the keyboard in future releases of Android, but right now, Cupcake isn’t quite ready for primetime on the Dream, of course assuming that’s the device it’s meant for.