Well-connected applications

In a brief exchange with Steve Hodgson (@BestofTimes) on Twitter, I recommended TextSoap — a brilliant utility for munging and cleaning up text in a multitude of different ways. It's not a very glamorous application, and it seems pricey until you actually use it intensively. I've had it a while now, and on most days I use it once or twice, but it really pays its keep when I have big tasks that require a lot of text manipulation.

Yesterday I had to copy a lot of information from PDF files and emails and enter it into forms on a website, many (many) times over. Copying from PDFs resulted in odd problems with the text like line breaks instead of spaces between words, orphaned hyphenation and so forth. Since the forms required strictly ASCII text, I also had to convert curly quotes to straight quotes and accented characters to LaTeX format accents.

That would all have been a huge chore, but for TextSoap. It has a variety of built-in 'cleaners' (for example, straighten or smarten quotes), but you can also build your own cleaning components using regular expressions, and you can chain together the existing cleaners to form custom workflows. So cleaning the text was only a case of a making a few clicks.

However, TextSoap doesn't really do anything you couldn't do with a text editor and good knowledge of regular expressions and scripting languages (it has a 'convert to Markdown' cleaner, for example), albeit that it packages those functions up in a user-friendly way. The real beauty and utility lies in how easy TextSoap makes it to access those functions. You can use the Services menu (which has incidentally become a lot more powerful with Snow Leopard), which also means that you can assign global keyboard shortcuts to your most-used cleaners. You can use the contextual menu or even Automator workflows, and there are specific plugins for text editors like BBEdit. So whichever application you are in (provided it supports Services and/or Applescript), you have easy access to the cleaners.

That — it seems to me — is one of the most powerful things about Mac OS X as a platform, and the thing I miss most when I use other platforms. There is standardisation of a lot of important features¹, and a lot of different technologies that allow you to connect your applications together in useful ways that save time and effort.

¹ For example, I love Linux dearly, but it drives me absolutely crazy that there's no standard keyboard shortcut to quit an application. ↑

On the ball

Last week, our beloved, elderly Dyson vacuum cleaner finally packed up. We've had it about 12 years, so it has done well, but has been getting gradually more decrepit. We had the power supply replaced a couple of years ago, but the problem this time was a burnt-out motor. It could be fixed, but with such an old unit, it wasn't really cost effective.

We're lucky to have an excellent, independently owned vacuum shop fairly near us (Midland Vac), which has a great range of Dyson units, so we visited at the weekend to try to decide on a model. After a lot of indecision, literal weighing up, and pushing units speculatively around the shop floor like a Freddie Mercury tribute act¹, we settled on the Dyson DC24. It's one of the models which uses a ball rather than wheels, and it's really tiny. Compared to our old clunker, it feels incredibly light, which makes you much more inclined to lug it upstairs to do the vacuuming.

We worried slightly that it might be too small, but as soon as we tried it out — and saw the proper colour and texture of our carpet for the first time in ages — we realised that it's a very capable machine. They have improved the cyclone mechanism a lot in the years since our old model was made, and even though the new one has a smaller motor, it develops much greater suction. It's also great fun. The ball makes it very manoeuvrable, and you can sweep and glide around the furniture, making "neeyoww" noises like a racing motorbike going into a corner. Well, you can if you like — the noises are optional.

I think people either love Dyson products, or they think they are overpriced and over-engineered. I'm in the former camp, and I also like the fact that they are readily repairable, and tend to last a long time. I also get unreasonably excited whenever I find an Airblade in a bathroom. No matter how many times I use one, I still think that it's tantamount to magic.

¹ No mini skirts or pink earrings, though. ↑

Mac mini and EyeTV

Since we got rid of our VCR, several years ago now, we've been using EyeTV on our iMac to record TV and radio, streaming the resulting recordings to our living room TV using a discontinued Elgato product called EyeHome. This worked well for a long time, though if there happened to be significant wireless network activity while we were watching, we'd get a stuttering picture. The rest of the time it was great, as we don't watch much live TV, and we could also easily edit out the adverts and reduce the length of films scheduled in 2 hour slots by as much as 25 minutes.

This neat setup recently fell apart when our EyeHome developed a fault with the video card, and also started to randomly drop the audio while streaming some recordings. Since Elgato doesn't make the product anymore, I had to decide whether to get a streaming box from another manufacturer, or to try something else. I also wanted to take the opportunity to move all our music to a dedicated machine, and solve the network streaming problem. I thought it would also be good to be able to record TV on a box in the living room itself, as our iMac is in the office/spare room. Overnight guests Chez Bsag have often been surprised and delighted to be woken at 2am by the (very bright) iMac screen turning on when EyeTV starts to record some late night film on Channel 4. We tried to remember to clear the scheduled recordings when we had guests, but it didn't always work out like that.

The Mac mini was a fairly obvious choice and others, like Jon Hicks, have written in detail about setting the mini up as a media centre. I was tempted for a while by the AppleTV, but I'd still have to record TV using EyeTV then export the recordings to the AppleTV, which seemed like a bit of a pain. The other advantage of the mini is that I could run Squeezebox Server on it to pipe music to my venerable old SliMP3 player.

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A huge 8K of RAM

I've been so busy at work the past few weeks that all I've been fit for at the end of a long day is flopping in front of the TV. One programme that I really enjoyed (for the nostalgia factor as much as anything else), was Micro Men, a drama about the rather strained relationship between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they competed to produce the most popular home computer in the 1980s.

Some of the detail was fictional (as they stated at the start of the programme), but they did apparently consult with both men, so I guess that the end result was something that they could both agree on as being mostly true. I had no idea that Sinclair had such a temper, but various interviews I've seen with people who knew him at the time suggest that he did blow his top fairly spectacularly on occasion.

We had a Sinclair Spectrum at home ("the full 8 colours!"), and I vividly remember pecking out long, tedious programmes gleaned from magazines and manuals on its rubbery, imprecise keyboard. I also remember the woefully unreliable method of loading stored programmes from a portable cassette recorder. If ever a piece of technology encouraged the superstitious belief that you needed to do a special dance or sacrifice a chicken before it worked, the Sinclair Spectrum was it. Despite all that, we loved it, and my brother and I spent hours fiddling about with it and (inevitably) playing games with rudimentary graphics.

I also used Chris Curry's products during my PhD (which immediately makes me feel ancient). I wrote a programme on a BBC Micro to control a bit of apparatus, and used a later Acorn RiskPC to run a more sophisticated set up, using a little-known programming language called Arachnid.

One thing I'd forgotten was how incredibly diverse the British home computer ecosystem was at that time. It was a kind of early technological Cambrian Explosion, with a massive radiation of weird and wonderful forms of computers before the inevitable mass extinctions occurred. As with the space rocket industry, there was a time when the UK (briefly) led the world in computer literacy and usage, before it all went pear-shaped. A glorious — if frustrating — time when 8 colours seemed impossibly dazzling, and 8K of RAM was more memory than anyone could need.

QuicKeys

I've had a bit of an on-and-off relationship with QuicKeys, but it has certainly been a long one. When I have stopped using it for periods, it has usually been because I have adopted other ways for accomplishing the kinds of tasks it deals with, and it seemed like overkill to have a separate application running to deal with those things. However, with version 4, QuicKeys has become even more powerful, versatile and easy to use, and I am using it in earnest again.

For those of you who haven't encountered QuicKeys, it could be described as a macro utility for your whole system. You can create 'shortcuts' from a series of steps which automate actions that you would otherwise perform manually. There are a very wide range of possible actions in steps, from executing applescripts or shell scripts, to selecting from menus, manipulating windows, typing text or dozens of other things. You have quite a lot of control over the timing of these events and whether you need to wait for a particular window before moving on, which helps a lot in making the shortcuts reliable.

Once you have constructed your shortcut, you can trigger it in many different ways, from the obvious hotkey or mouse click to running if it is a certain date and/or time, if a certain volume has just mounted, or if an event occurs in another application. What makes this even more powerful is that all of the shortcuts can be limited to certain scopes (i.e. active applications). In practice, this means that you can reuse triggers in multiple applications without worrying that the wrong thing will happen. So you can — for example — launch a particular web page when you press F1 in Safari, and check for new email when you press F1 in Mail.

There are now also abbreviations (text replacements which happen automatically when you type a trigger) which replaces the need for TextExpander or similar utilities. In fact, the scopes make it very easy for me to type two dashes and a space and have them replaced with the HTML entity for an em dash in MarsEdit, and a unicode em dash in a rich text editor (which I've already done a couple of times in writing this article!).

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Alpine

A few weeks ago, I got an EeePC 1000HE netbook for work. I needed a dedicated, cheap machine to run some Linux-only stuff on, and I thought it would be nice to have a lightweight portable to take on trips. I'll write more about the EeePC later, but I wanted to mention my new-found love affair with the console email client, Alpine. I installed the ArchLinux distribution with the Awesome window manager, both of which are very lightweight and speedy, and I wanted an email client to match.

Over the years, I must have used a pretty large number of email clients. From Eudora, Mailsmith, a brief and regrettable affair with Microsoft Entourage (about which we will never speak again) to settling for a number of years on Apple's Mail, it actually all started with Alpine's predecessor: Pine. Back in those far-off days, I used Pine by connecting to the University's VAX machine, and I hated it. To be fair, it has come a long way since then, and I have learned to love the command line. After a few days of playing with Alpine on the EeePC, I decided that I wanted to switch to it on my Macs too.

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New photoblog

I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal. Flickr is great for the social aspects, but it doesn't feel like my space. I also upload more stuff to Flickr than I want to display as my photographic portfolio.

I considered a variety of different approaches, which varied in complexity and functionality, before stumbling on Flogr. It's a fairly simple but rich PHP photoblog, which pulls your Flickr photos into a gallery that you can style to your liking. By default, it gets all of your photostream, but you can also restrict it to certain tags or photosets. I've set it up to pull in photos with the tag 'photoblog' which makes it easy for me to be selective. Optionally, you can cache the photos and information in a MySQL database, speeding up display somewhat. If you click the 'Details and Comments' link, you can see — well — details and comments, and you can click the comment link to go to Flickr to leave a comment. There's also a nice Lightbox view for the recent photos, allowing you to navigate between them, or view them full size by clicking the title at the bottom left.

I like it a lot, so I've set it up here. I didn't want to break any existing links, so I've left a link to the archived Wings Open Wide on the new page. I might do a bit more restyling of the page, but I'm pretty happy with it as it is. One thing I haven't quite sorted out yet is the display of thumbnails on this blog. I've used the Flickr badge, so it shows the right images, but links directly to Flickr rather than Wings Open Wide. That's not a big issue, but I might see if I can fix it at some point.

Fever

I've used RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and other websites I wanted to read for a long time. I used to use NetNewsWire, which was (and still is) a great bit of software, but when Google Reader came out, I switched to that. I liked the quick keyboard shortcuts to navigate around, and the fact that using an online reader meant that I could read feeds on any browser and not have to deal with items that I'd already read elsewhere.

However, recently I've been finding that I'm overwhelmed with information, particularly if I've been too busy to check Google Reader for a few days. I subscribe to a few high volume feeds for the occasional useful item that they throw up, but that means an awful lot of stuff I'm not interested in to wade through. That's why I was intrigued by Fever, a new feed reader by Shaun Inman, who also designed the lovely web site analytics program, Mint.

There must be hundreds of feed readers out there, but Fever distinguishes itself in two ways. First it is a self-hosted service, meaning that you have to install it on a web host. This would be a problem for those without a web host, but it does mean that it is available on any computer you choose to access it from and also under your direct control, unlike Google Reader. Second, it offers a way to pick out interesting items from your feed, without overwhelming you with information. To do this, you assign your high volume, high noise feeds to a special 'Sparks' group. Any items that share links or topics in common with your other 'Kindling' feeds will promote those topics to the 'Hot' list. This shows you feeds grouped by topics, so you can skim them or read the individual feeds as you wish. It's a great way to keep up with the things everyone is talking about, without being submerged by your unread feeds count. Other people's Delicious feeds are perfect for Sparks, and you can add feeds to the group with impunity knowing that it's going to make your Hot list more interesting, rather than bogging you down.

It's always a bit of a gamble paying for something ($30 in this case) without being able to try it out, but the screencast was reassuring and showed most of the fetaures. It's really easy to install (unusual for a self-hosted service) and importing my feeds and groups from Google Reader was quick and accurate. The UI, as you can see in the screenshot above, is very clean and rather pretty. There are Google Reader-like keyboard shortcuts for most things, and it's easy to move around the feeds. There's also quite a lot of customisability at the level of groups or individual feeds, and by default, feeds with no unread items are hidden, making it easy to see what you've got. Shawn Blanc has some good tips for using Fever efficiently, and he's right that it works very nicely as a standalone Fluid app. But it's also good as a tab in Safari, particularly if you use this tip to make Safari open links with the target="_blank" attribute in a new tab, not a new window.

Fever also has a truly lovely iPhone interface — one of the best I've seen — for reading feeds on the iPhone. Of course, because it's getting data directly from your Fever installation on the server, there's no syncing issue, but that also means no offline reading, which iPhone apps like Byline offer, and which can be useful at times. If you have long articles to scroll through, the interface on the iPhone can be a little bit longwinded, so a few more navigational aids would be a benefit, I think, but other than that, it's really slick.

Fever is only at Version 1.0, but is already a very competent and useful web application, which distinguishes itself well from the competition. The only thing I really miss from Google Reader is some way to share articles I come across. It would be nice to have a command to post items to popular services like Delicious or Twitter, or to share items publicly. I'd also love a command to save an article to Instapaper, particularly on the iPhone, where you'd like to save long articles to read at your leisure. Alternatively, if there was an API available of some kind, people could find ways to pipe their saved articles to other services. I'm sure that these kinds of improvements will come with time. Shaun has done a great job, and it's obvious that he's thought quite deeply about what a good feed reader needs.

Dear Google Maps

Dear Google Maps,

We need to have a quick word about your walking directions feature. Don't get me wrong -- I love your maps, and dragging the selected route around to re-direct it is brilliant. I use your service a lot, and not just when I'm trying to find directions to an unfamiliar destination. For example, this weekend, I used the walking directions when I was too lazy to get out a map and a bit of string and measure a distance we'd just walked to a familiar destination.

You see, we often walk out to a favourite country pub at weekends, and take a number of different routes, depending on whether the footpath will be too muddy, or how much time we have for a leisurely walk. We were wondering how long each leg was, and had guessed at somewhere between 7 and 8 miles for the round trip. So I turned to Google Maps and set directions for each leg separately. Combined, the route came to 7.7 miles, which was pretty close to our estimate, but the time estimate was out. By quite a bit. Despite having set the method as 'walking' the time estimate read 11 minutes for the 4 mile leg.

That would make the pace 2.75 minutes per mile, which is quite a lick. The winner of the men's race at the London Marathon this weekend set a roughly 4.8 minute pace for each mile. Granted, 26 miles is more than 4, but even so. Furthermore, when you've had half a pint of lovely real ale (OK, a pint. All right, a pint and a half) while sitting in the sunshine in the pub garden, and are then meandering home in Fotherington Thomas mode, looking at the pretty wild flowers and butterflies, listening to birds singing and watching buzzards circling on thermals, your pace is substantially less than 2.75 minutes per mile.

In fact, it should be much easier to predict the time taken to walk a given distance than to drive it, because you are not going to get held up by traffic, roadworks and so on. So here's a suggestion, Google. Why not provide a slider next to the dropdown for walking directions, with which you can set your own walking pace? Set it at 3 miles/hour as default (which will be pretty accurate for most people), and then fast or slow walkers can increase or decrease as necessary. Then all you need to do is a simple calculation based on the measured distance.

Love, bsag xxx

P.S. In case you are wondering, our actual time for the 4 mile return trip was 1 hour 15 minutes. Without the beer, sunshine and when not in Fotherington Thomas mode, it would have been about an hour.

Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie -- a Twitter client for Mac OS X (the 'desktop' version, as I suppose we must refer to it now) -- was released today. I use Tweetie for the iPhone, and like it so much that -- until now -- I tended to access Twitter on the iPhone rather than the Mac, even if I was sitting in front of my computer. It's difficult to define exactly what is so good about it, but the smooth behaviour, beautifully designed user interface and carefully thought-out features all conspire to make Twitter much more fun to use than it would otherwise be.

Twitter for Mac does not use quite the same design, but brings the same design sensibility, and is equally fantastic. When I started to use Twitter, I used Twitterific, but while I liked it, it niggled at me in certain ways. I then switched between a variety of Twitter clients, most of which I stopped using fairly quickly because they also didn't sit right with me in one way or another.

Twitter is such a simple and well-defined thing that you'd think it would be easy to design a good Twitter client, but it really isn't. In my opinion, a good Twitter app needs to be there instantly when you want to read tweets or post something, but stay out of your way the rest of the time. I'm with John Gruber: I think Tweetie does that wonderfully. I thought I would miss Growl notifications or beeps when new tweets arrived, but I've found that I don't. The menu bar item turns blue when something new is waiting (you can tailor what triggers the notification), which is just enough to be a notification, without distracting you. The hotkey to trigger the main window is great for quickly summoning or dismissing the window to read tweets, and I love having a separate window and hotkey for writing them. In short, I really like Tweetie, and I'm happy to have the 'Twitter Experience' I love (I can't quite believe I've just typed that) on my Mac as well as my iPhone.

Logitech VX Nano mouse

I've just got a new mouse for my computer at home, and I'm really pleased with it. It's a Logitech VX Nano cordless mouse, and I got a really cracking deal on it from Amazon. Despite the abomination that is the Logitech Control Centre, I quite like Logitech mice, and I've had a variety of them over the years. My work mouse is a MX 1000 Laser, which is also good, but has a tendency to 'skip' a bit sometimes.

What I wanted for home use was a compact mouse with a small receiver that I could easily travel with when my laptop and I are on the move. I also wanted a mouse which has an 'off' switch: the previous one didn't, and ran through batteries as if they were going out of fashion. Buying a mouse without being able to handle it is always a little risky, but I felt fairly confident that I would get on with it. Now, I have Tiny Hobbit Hands, but have always used quite big, chunky mice and felt comfortable with them. The VX Nano is small, but with my fingers on the buttons, my palm sits quite comfortably on the top of the desk in a natural position.

The tracking is excellent and very precise (much better than my MX 1000, actually), and the extra buttons are very useful, as you can remap the functions with the software. I've mapped the forward and back buttons to forward and back in Safari and Path Finder, and the switches which activate when you rock the scroll wheel from side-to-side trigger the keystrokes for the next/previous tab. The software now allows you to set up different mappings for different applications, which means that I can have the same button action to navigate through tabs in Textmate and Safari, even though the keyboard shortcuts are different. Very handy.

The best thing about the mouse is the scroll wheel. By default, it behaves like any mouse wheel, with 'notches' for each increment of scrolling. However, if you press the wheel down and release, it goes 'frictionless' (almost -- obviously it can't break the laws of physics). It's hard to describe how cool this is, but you can flick the wheel to scroll very quickly, or move it gently to scroll very precisely in small increments. The receiver is also incredibly dinky, so that you can leave it plugged in to a laptop all the time, without worrying that you'll snap it off accidentally. I've plugged the receiver into the USB port of my wired aluminium Apple keyboard, and it is completely invisible from the top. When you travel with the mouse, there's a little slot for the receiver inside the battery compartment, which also turns it off automatically. All in all, it's a very nice mouse.

Canon PowerShot G10

I've been planning to replace my old camera (a Casio Exilim EX-Z40) for a while, so when I got some money for my birthday recently, I put it towards a Canon PowerShot G10. I spent ages trying to decide what to get. I wondered initially whether I should get a low end digital SLR, but I really wanted something that I could easily carry around with me routinely. Whenever I've regretted not getting a photograph in the past, it has usually been because I haven't had a camera with me, not because I haven't had the right camera with me. So that narrowed the field a bit. I was also sure that I wanted a camera which could produce RAW format files, and one which allowed a lot of manual control. My Casio Exilim is actually quite a good camera in many ways: it's very small and light, it generally exposes images pretty accurately, and the battery life is great, but there's really no manual control at all. There are 'scene' modes (for portraits, night shots, landscapes etc.), but since you have to dive into the menus to set them, it's a bit of a pain, and you end up shooting on automatic all the time. Your only artistic input into the photograph is in composing the shot, which was starting to annoy me.

After narrowing it down a bit more, it came down to two cameras: the Canon PowerShot G10 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Both are very nice cameras, but quite different in many ways. The Panasonic has a lovely Leica lens, and a lower pixel count, supposedly resulting in better image quality. But the lens is rather short at the longest end. The Canon is very well built with plenty of dials to control the most-used settings, but some people have reported a poorer image quality, particularly at high ISO levels. But Aperture can not yet read the RAW files produced by the Panasonic, while it can deal with the Canon files, and I worried about the restrictive length of the lens.

Eventually, this in depth review by Bill Lockhart, and actually handling both cameras swung my decision in favour of the Canon. As he says, the image quality is great provided that you stick to ISOs below 400 (or embrace the noise in the same way that people enjoy film grain). It's a compact camera, not a DSLR, but it's remarkably good for a compact camera, and being able to carry it around all the time is a huge bonus.

I'm still getting used to the camera, but I'm having an enormous amount of fun with it. I've been quite dismissive of huge Megapixel counts before, so I'm astounded how much difference 14.7MP makes to the detail over a 5MP image. Working with RAW files in Aperture is another revelation, and I'm really impressed about both the initial quality of the images, and about how easy it is to make them really pop with small adjustments. The LCD is gloriously crisp, and seems huge after the screen on the Casio, and the optical stabilisation is amazing. I hand-held this shot of Cleo with a shutter speed of 1.0 sec: I was steadying my hand on the sofa, but even so, it's pretty impressive that the shot is as sharp as it is.

The camera handles very well, and most of the controls you need for day-to-day shooting are directly accessible, without needing to go through the menus, which is very useful. It's a camera which makes you want to keep taking photographs. I've been screeching to a halt regularly on my bike commutes, and leaping off to take some image that's taken my fancy. I've posted a few photographs on wingsopenwide, and if you start with this image on flickr and work forwards through my photostream, you can see some more that I've taken with the Canon. There will be many more to come, I'm sure!

Ada Lovelace Day - Jean Bartik

War is hell. Everyone knows that. But sometimes the incidental effects of war can have some tentative, positive side-effects. During both World Wars, so many men were away fighting that -- for the first time -- women were actively recruited into work that would once have been considered too physically tough, technical or otherwise 'unsuitable' for them. In Britain during WWII, the Women's Land Army employed women to work in the fields, others worked in factories, producing munitions and other vital components of the war effort, while 'Wrens' in the Women's Royal Naval Service shuttled aircraft between airfields, among many other important tasks. Until the recently, other more secret roles have gone undocumented: Wrens and civilian women were important in the code-breaking work at stations such as Bletchley Park, Eastcote and Stanmore. Similar recruitment campaigns (including the famous Rosie the Riveter campaign) operated in the USA, encouraged women into manufacturing jobs in the States. I'm sure that some of the women disliked the work they had to do and acted out of a sense of duty, or were conscripted and had no choice in the matter. But for many of the women, it was a taste of freedom and opened up an exciting new world of work that they relished and were extremely good at.

This Ada Lovelace Day pledge encourages us to write about one woman in technology who has inspired us. I'd like to dedicate this piece to all the women who accepted the challenge of technical work during the World Wars and flourished intellectually in what had previously been considered a man's environment. Since those women are now mainly nameless (as well as far too numerous for a brief article), I'll use one woman as an example: Jean Bartik.

I mean no disrespect to Jean Bartik -- her story is remarkable, and the honours she has received are richly deserved. However, as she herself has modestly insisted, she was in the right place at the right time. Born in rural Missouri and brought up on a farm, she had a strong interest in mathematics from an early age. This was unremarkable in her family, since all of her siblings were talented mathematicians, but she was the only mathematics major in her College. People may have no longer insisted that teaching women mathematics would damage their brains, as was commonly believed in Ada Lovelace's time, but it was still relatively unusual. Jean came from a long line of school teachers, but resisted joining the profession. When she heard that the US Army was recruiting mathematics majors as "human calculators" to calculate trajectories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Jean jumped at the chance to apply. The war effort provided opportunities for women, but that did not mean equality. Jean's rank was 'Sub-Professional 6', as women were not allowed the rank of Professional, even if they had doctorates in mathematics.

The trajectory calculations were needed to compile firing tables for the artillery, which were used to look up the appropriate angle and elevation at which to set the gun to reach a particular target. The work was rather repetitive and dull, as so many variables needed to be considered to calculate the trajectory of a shell. Initial velocity, wind speed and drag all contributed to the trajectory, and as Jean put it "when it breaks the speed of sound, all hell breaks loose!". Each trajectory took a human computer 30-40 hours to calculate and 1000 trajectories were required to complete the firing table. There had to be a faster way to do it.

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was a secret project funded by the US Army at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. A huge all-electronic, general-purpose computer, the ENIAC lined four walls of a room and was 80 feet long and 8 feet high. It had thousands of components, including 18,000 vacuum tubes, and reached the then blistering processing speed of 5,000 additions per second. While the hardware was largely complete, they needed people to program ENIAC to calculate trajectories, and when they advertised for mathematicians, Jean became one of the six female programmers.

It is difficult to appreciate now how difficult the programming task must have been. If you want to learn any computer language today, there are usually thousands of resources available to you in books or online, which explain the syntax, operators and classes in great detail with plenty of practical examples. Jean and her colleagues had no such guides, because no-one had ever programmed this computer before, and there was no 'language' as such. Programming the computer was done by physically connecting components with cables. All they had were block diagrams of ENIAC, and because their security clearance was delayed, they were not even allowed to see the machine itself until several months after starting work. Nonetheless, with their formidable talent, and with their questions answered by John Mauchly (one of the inventors of ENIAC), they began to understand the computer from the inside out -- something that Jean considers helped them enormously when they came to programming the machine and knowing how it performed the calculations.

The women -- as Jean puts it -- were the "workhorses and finishers". She describes (in a way that will be wearily familiar to many women reading) how the men liked to design the exciting bits, and were happy to leave the boring, lengthy debugging and finishing jobs to the women. They worked in pairs, and Jean describes with great affection and respect how skilled her work partner, Betty Holberton (neé Snyder), was at debugging systems and finding the solutions to seemingly impossible problems.

In February 1946, ENIAC was finally ready to unveil to the scientific community. It was a great success, but Jean and Betty were devastated when their contribution to the project was completely ignored. They were not even invited to the celebration dinner after the event. The prevailing view at the time was that the hardware was the really special part, but it's clear to anyone today that the hardware and 'software' were inseparable: without the hard work of the women programmers, the hardware would have been useless. The women appear in many of the photographs of the time, in front of the huge computer, but when historian Kathy Kleiman (who has done a lot to publicise the work of the ENIAC programmers) tried to find out about who these women were, she was told that they were "refrigerator ladies", there to add a bit of glamour to the photographs. Refrigerator ladies. Pfftt.

Jean was clearly hurt by the snub, but she is a practical, stoical woman and picked herself up and carried on. She went on to have a long career in computing, working in the 1950s for the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation on the UNIVAC mainframe (among other companies), and then after a career break to raise a family, on the new breed of minicomputers. Her work partner Betty apparently had a saying: "Look like a girl, act like a lady, work like a dog... and think like a man." Sadly, the kind of workplace environment which made that grimly comic statement instantly familiar to women in technology (and other technical fields) is still prevalent today, though to a lesser extent. It is still difficult for women to be taken seriously and treated equally in such fields. Still, we're getting there gradually, and consciousness-raising events (to use an unfashionable phrase) like Ada Lovelace Day can only help. Let's make it an annual event!

Technorati tag: AdaLovelaceDay09

iPhone version of Papers

I'm a very keen user of Papers, the Mac software for collecting and organising a collection of journal articles and their associated PDF files. It never fails to impress colleagues when I pull it up and do a quick search to find some paper we've just been discussing. Now I won't even need to be in front of my computer to impress them, because Mekentosj have just released a version of Papers for the iPhone.

I've been playing with it for a few days now, and it's very well done. You can choose what you sync with your desktop version of Papers, so if you've got a huge collection, you don't have to fill your iPhone with it. I have a Smart Collection for my 'to be read' articles (which seems to grow by the day), so I've been syncing that. However, I might add a Smart Collection of my own papers too -- more about that later.

Most of the features available on the desktop version are available on the iPhone -- certainly all of those that make any sense on the platform are present. You can even use the search engines to find new articles and download the papers to read, which could be very handy. The PDF viewer works quite well, though there seems to be a little bug in the PDF viewer for third parties that means that some files are rendered with slightly blurry text, but I'm sure this will be fixed in time. I haven't found it a big problem with most files, and the convenience of being able to reduce my huge 'to be read' virtual pile in spare moments away from my computer overwhelms any minor issues with the display. You can also make notes on the paper, which are then synced back to the desktop.

I mentioned that I might keep a collection of my own papers on the iPhone. Why should I want to do that? Well, when you are viewing an article entry, you can choose to share the paper: either by email, or by sending it directly to nearby iPhone Papers users. I haven't had a chance to try out the latter, but I think that would be incredibly cool. Still, just being able to chat to someone at a conference or meeting about your work, then pull out your iPhone and send them a copy of the paper you're discussing, there and then, would be genuinely useful.

Bag lady

My name is Bsag, and I am a bagaholic.

I'm not remotely interested in your Prada or Gucci or other 'It' bags: no, my thing is rough, tough bags with lots of pockets. My problem is not that I want to collect a lot of them, but that I'm absurdly picky and a perfectionist when it comes to bags. I want something that's comfortable to carry fully loaded, particularly when riding a bike (like a rucksack), but that is easily swung around to access the pockets (like a messenger bag). I want a bag that doesn't look huge on me but has enough room for the daily essentials plus a few extra bits for longer excursions. I don't want to rummage, so I like lots of pockets which happen to be the perfect size for exactly the kind of stuff that I carry. I want it to be tough, well made and engineered to last. Oh, and I want it to be waterproof (or at least showerproof) as well. That's not much to ask, eh?

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