Technology

Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper

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With the Amy Johnson festival celebrating the life of a pioneer aviator now winding down, I wanted to do a very quick blog-post about women in ‘traditionally male’ vocations. I think we all dislike both the condescending manner in which such topics are framed (“I believe that girls can do some things almost as well as men!”), and from the opposite side, the right-on brigade and their (or perhaps I should say ‘our’) insistence on lecturing everybody about how study after study has proved that female women of the female persuasion are better than men at most of these things.

All that being said, that’s exactly what I’m going to do now. It is worth noting that of engineering apprentices being trained under the auspices of the Green Port Hull project, 90-something percent are male. I know that the project has taken measures to address this, but it is still something worth mulling over, perhaps whilst stroking our beards and lighting our pipes and nodding sagely in front of the fire, ruminating on what is to be done about what was referred to as ‘The Woman Question’ during the suffragette movement.

Even in an industry which has traditionally been so skewed towards men as computing, with its cliche of the lonely male geek, wonky glasses perched on the greasy skin of his nose, can of caffeinated soft drink and junk food by his side, hunched over, clacking away on his macbook air, staring out the window as that same squirrel I saw 5 minutes ago wanders past agai…….ahem. Anyway, even in such a field, two of the most pivotal figures in its development were female, each contributing something that would place them probably somewhere not far behind Alan Turing in their impact – worth about, oooo, let’s say, at least two Steve Jobs’s plus three and half Bill Gates’s, and half a Wozniak each.

The first computer algorithm was entirely theoretical, and was written by a lady named Ada Lovelace approximately 100 years before the first computer was ever even fabricated. Ms Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and according to legend became a mathematical whizz because her mother was so utterly determined that their daughter turn out as unlike her father as possible, that Ada was force-fed mathematics and science in enormous quantities and isolated from poetry as a child, and surprised everyone by thriving on it. As a young adult she became an indispensable assistant to the brilliant but irascible mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage, and when Babbage drew up plans for his ‘analytical engine’ (what we would call a computer), Ms Lovelace was the only person to realise the implications of this machine, that it would not just be useful for performing arithmetic, but could also be used for symbolic logic, taking it from a simple calculator dealing only in numbers, to a mind-boggling complex calculator that could eventually allow geeks to post gubbins about her in blog posts like this.

The second lady I wish to mention was named Grace Hopper, who worked for the US Navy. She invented the first computer programming language, and thus took the first step towards the computer moving away from the men in white lab coats in their fan-cooled government installations, and into our homes, schools, and offices. Machines only speak in ones and zeros, and humans only speak in…..well, human speak. Admiral Hopper (I’m just going to go ahead and say she was an admiral, I don’t know what rank she attained, if she wasn’t an admiral I’m sure she should have been) created the bridge between the machine world and the normal people world, and she really doesn’t get enough props for it. Also, I’m pretty sure that it was Admiral Hopper who first described a compiling error as a ‘bug’, after an actual real-life bug got squished in the computer she was using, resulting in an error and the first ever ‘computer bug’.

(In the extremely unlikely event that any biographers of Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper or historians of computing are reading this, I apologise profusely for the implied disgrace to your profession that my lame summary of their contributions provides.)

I’ve already wibbled on far longer than I intended, so I won’t talk about Hedy Lamarr – but fascinating to say, that the actress billed in the 1940s as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ was also a genius inventor, responsible for the frequency-hopping technology that is an integral part of modern wi-fi and GPS communications.

One of the reasons I was thinking about all this, is because my wife introduced me to a fantastically put together (love that mint green colour) website called ‘Girls who code’, which is some kind of movement and/or training facility for young ladies to learn to write computer code without the stigma of humiliating all the boys by being better at it than they are.

Coding is going to become even more crucial as our lives are improved by technology, with drones, self-driving cars, 3-D printers……I suppose I’m biased, but it’s a tragedy if such an ever-increasingly important industry as computer science is only running at half its potential capacity.

My hero is a man named Eli the Computer Guy

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“Then why don’t you just go and marry Eli the Computer Guy?” is what my long-suffering wife says, in exasperation, when I wax lyrical for the gajillionth time about Eli the Computer Guy. To which I respond by pouting and muttering to myself that Eli would never say such a thing if I WERE married to him.

Eli the Computer Guy is a technician-guru from Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He used to own a computer repair shop, until he decided to become what is referred to as a ‘content creator’. And the content he creates comprises the greatest teaching tools since the days of Aristotle, or……one of those Greek lads, I don’t know their biographies, whichever one it was that was good at teaching. I have been a huge fun of Eli the Computer Guy’s instructional videos since I first discovered them in around 2012.

There are so many well meaning computer geniuses out there who wish to share their knowledge with the world, but for nerds like me who are fascinated by computers and technology and love working in the industry, but are not packing even half as much mental RAM as those guys (“I’m not a nerd! Nerds are smart”, as Milhouse from the Simpsons would have it), their attempts at teaching can be nothing more than an abject lesson in frustration. Many a time I have clicked on a youtube video or blog post that appears to tantalisingly offer the precise instruction I need to solve the exact geek problem I’m having, and am lulled by the siren call of reassurance that “This video is for absolute beginners – from zero to hero in 17 easy steps” and the like, only to find myself hopelessly confused at the 1 minute 20 second mark when my would-be tech mentor is telling us ingenues that “to build out this class we simply need to inculcate binary file dependencies on the blood of the first born of Steve Wozniak’s Pontiac” or some such, and I’m left staring at the screen with my lip curled like Elvis after a lobotomy.

Not so Eli (henceforth ‘ETCG’). ETCG is a tech guru who has a knowledge of computing that is as mind-bogglingly broad as it is deep, which includes, but is not limited to: hardware repair, servers, programming, hacking, digital surveillance systems, networking, web marketing…….he offers classes on all these subjects, for free, available for anyone to view on youtube. The difference between ETCG and other tech content creators I have found is two-fold: firstly, production values. Whilst Eli the Computer Guy’s videos obviously aren’t Hollywood productions, his classes are shot professionally, with lighting, inserts, and all the appropriate ‘props’. Secondly, and most importantly, ETCG has the extremely rare gift of taking quite complex and involved subjects and presenting them in an understandable and easy to follow manner. This is a common boast but a very rare accomplishment.

Take, for example, the ETCG course on PHP programming. Anyone wishing to learn php, or any kind of coding, I can’t recommend this series highly enough:

I believe that anyone could learn the basics of programming if they follow along with these lessons, and Eli doesn’t condescend, he doesn’t accelerate too fast, he doesn’t introduce a dozen concepts in passing and then expect you to remember precisely what each is and what it does 3 videos later. He gives the following analogy: writing code is not like going to the gym. At the gym, you just need to grit your teeth and push through, and you’ll feel the benefits. The problem so many new starters have with coding is not that it’s excessively difficult and they can’t understand it, it’s that when they don’t fully understand something, they just try to ‘power through’, then they get all frustrated, they throw their hands up in the air and give up. EXACTLY, is what I said aloud, to nobody, as ETCG said this. Because that is exactly how it is with learning coding. It isn’t like going to the gym, and that IS the problem with so many people when they start to learn programming (me included). Rather than forging ahead come what may (no surrender! no retreat!), if you find yourself confused it is vital to slowly and carefully re-trace your steps, and go over the bit that you didn’t understand – once, twice, three times, until you get it, and only then continue. Unlike other tech geniuses and gurus, ETCG understands such things. He isn’t trying to show off how smart HE is, he’s trying to help newbies to learn (and in doing so he is showing how smart he is, by demonstrating perception and empathy of those of us who don’t know as much as he does). And learn newbies shall, if they watch and re-watch ETCG. If you want to learn something specific or general about computers and technology, I’d recommend the ETCG youtube channel as your first port of call (or your first port forwarding, if you will).

Alongside the tech instructional videos, there are also ‘business advice’ videos which are very helpful and emboldening for the self-employed. For example, this one, entitled ‘Perfectionists are Cowards’ (a sentiment I agree with and would do well to remember):

All his videos are worth watching, although the man himself seems to have become somewhat jaded about his role as a ‘ce-web-rity’ recently. I imagine that he has grown weary and wary of being relentlessly challenged to a duel to the death by a new model army of keyboard warriors, all wishing to assert their claim to be the chosen one. It’s a shame, because so many stars are born online and make bank from singing into a hairbrush or biting their brother’s finger, but ETCG is the only online personality I have come across who I believe genuinely deserves to have made a fortune from his ‘content’ and should spend the rest of his life at the beach drinking cold beer. Well, maybe Trev the Aussie too, my VBA programming hero – but he’s an Australian, so I can only assume that he spends his entire life at the beach drinking beer anyway, including when he’s creating his youtube content. I hope I can do a blog post about him too.

 

Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel

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I told my wife that I wanted to write a blog post about pivot tables in Microsoft Excel (despite the odds, wanting to write a blog post about pivot tables in Microsoft Excel and being married are not mutually exclusive), and that I was really struggling with how best to frame it. Not enough good can be said about pivot tables, but my impression is that they are viewed as complicated, ‘techy’ things. My wife, in her sagacity, told me that I should focus on addressing 6 questions : who, what, when, where, why, and how, like she was taught in primary school. So I’ll try and do that.

Who?

Anyone who uses Excel could benefit from the use of pivot tables. I would go so far as to say that any business which utilises Excel but doesn’t use pivot tables, is not making best use of the software.

What?

Pivot tables take your data and present it clearly and concisely in a familiar Excel table format, while allowing the results to be manipulated easily. It provides ‘headline’ information about your data, without affecting the data itself. If, for example, you log all of your expenditure in one spreadsheet with a date for each item, wouldn’t it be useful to automatically keep track of the total expenditure for the individual months? Or by type of expenditure? Pivot tables can do this and more.

When?

Pivot tables help to track information, and to give a neat summary of large data sets at a glance. Very useful for a snapshot of where your project is at, how much you have spent, who the top salesman is, or preparing a report or demonstration for someone unfamiliar with the information in your spreadsheet.

Where?

Although I think pivot tables are usually regarded as a work-place accounting tool for budget monitoring, they can be useful for almost any ‘like for like’ data that is stored in a spreadsheet. For example, if the results of football matches are logged in Excel, a pivot table could be used to track the number of goals scored by the individual teams over a season.

Why?

The idea to write a blogpost about pivot tables grew out of my complete inability to articulate what a ‘bespoke spreadsheet’ is, and why a business would want one, but in my experience many organisations benefit greatly from spreadsheets that are more tailored to their needs, and I have received more (undeserved) gratitude for spreadsheets that just ‘do what you need’ than for anything else I’ve done. This almost always involves pivot tables, and doesn’t necessarily mean any fancy backstage programming in VBA, or colourful charts or user-forms or graphics. Often it is just something as neat and helpful as a pivot table. Say what you like about Bill Gates (but say it quietly, because he’s listening), Microsoft Excel is a wonderful piece of intuitive software, and I believe that rather like that slightly confusing but oft quoted remark about the human brain, without pivot tables we are barely using 10% of Excel’s full capacity.

How?

I’m convinced that pivot tables are a victim of their reputation – insofar as it’s possible for a function of some computer software to have a reputation to be a victim of – and that most Excel users could learn how to use them effectively with just a minimum of coaching. I found this neat video on youtube which explains how to create a pivot table in around 2 minutes, with nothing more complicated than pointing and clicking, dragging and dropping:

I would encourage anyone who is a regular user of Excel to experiment with creating pivot tables, you can always just delete them if they don’t work out (they won’t affect your original data, but if you are unsure I’d recommend experimenting with a copy of your file at first).

A wonderful Eddie Izzard quote: “I don’t have techno-fear, I have techno-JOY!”. Me too, Eddie.

World Community Grid and Boinc

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I’m a quiet evangelist for World Community Grid and the boinc software platform. Technology seems to me to be becoming religious to its adherents, and these projects are helping to fight diseases and find more efficient ways of creating clean energy, so it’s a difficult association to avoid once you start thinking about it.

This software utilises unused computer cycles to perform calculations on data of scientific interest, flipping proteins and discovering prime numbers and such, making your machine into a single node on a massive scientific supercomputer. You can do some good without expending any time, effort or money, and you don’t even notice it’s running. Pretty incredible, I reckon.

World Community Grid is the more corporate and slick version operated by IBM, but it runs on the same boinc software that is the free platform offered by Berkeley University, so you can run that and also pick whatever scientific projects tickle your fancy, and my fancy is much tickled by scientific projects. It’s all pretty cool. Actually, it’s all VERY cool.