LadyAda and Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace
Today is Ada Lovelace Day; a celebration of women and technology. I have to say the first person I thought of when I heard about this day is LadyAda. Maybe it is because of the namesake, but probably because LadyAda is featured a bunch on my favorite blog, Make:
Lady Ada is a tinkerer, inventor, and all around creator. I discovered hear reading a post about a miniPOV kit that looked super cool (I even asked my mom to get me one for christmas that year [she said she could find them anywhere]). The idea is that you program a message into the Persistance of Vision toy and then when you wave it, it displays the message via LEDs. I went to her website and found a bunch of awesome gadgets and kits. Of particular interest to me back then were, the gamegrrl; a gameboy sized NES emulator and the Mini MintyMP3; an mp3 player that fit into a mint tin.
Since then, LadyAda has started a website to sell her and other kits (today they are giving 10% off in order celebrate). I don’t know for sure, but I think she may work for (at least contributes to) Make: magazine and blog. She is definitely an inspiration to me. I wish I could put the right parts together to make sweet gizmos.
Enjoy the day and checkout other Ada Lovelace Day blog posts and articles.
Leave a Reply
Mar 4th 2010 • 12:03
by Gary
I’m gratified to find another fan of Lady Ada. Did you know that the ‘latest and greatest’ programing language was named after her? Did you know that she wrote THE first computer program? It was for Babbage’s ‘Difference Engine’ (never fully operational). It wasn’t until sometime in the1990′s, when someone succeeded in building the difference engine, that it was discovered that her program had a bug in it!
A truly remarkable lady, in an age when her peers thought that tatting doillies was their highest calling.
Keep up the good work.