Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

It’s easier for women to feel motivated to pursue traditionally male-dominated interests if they can see other women working in those fields; but yet, women’s contributions to technical fields are often invisible. So Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day to bring these women out of the shadows by encouraging as many people as possible to blog about women in technology on the same day.

March 24? Why, that’s today! Here are some of my computing heroines:

• Ada Lovelace herself, of course! She’s now thought of as the first computer programmer — she was friends with Charles Babbage and wrote a set of instructions for calculating on his Analytical Engine that’s thought of as the first program (although the engine was never built, so she would never get to test her code).
• Grace Murray Hopper was a freakin’ badass. She was a Navy admiral who pioneered the idea that computer programming languages should be similar to English (helping make possible COBOL’s leap away from assembly language to a new level of abstraction, which made programming a lot easier!). She was also one of the first people to develop and promote standards for computer languages and systems.
• Maria Webster is the author of the blog dotfiveone: Geekspace for Women, which covers everything from science fiction to hands-on electronic circuit building. By providing a space on the internet targeted toward women who are already quite geeky, thanks very much, Ms. Webster definitely helps to fill a niche that’s too often neglected.
• Valerie Aurora (formerly known as Val Henson) is a kernel hacker, filesystem geek, and Linux developer who also wrote this great HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.
• Cathy Malmrose overcame childhood discouragement of her technical interests to found and run ZaReason, one of the few hardware vendors to sell systems with Linux preinstalled. Ms. Malmrose also makes a point of sharing information about open-source software in an open, friendly way to people in her community; as a t-shirt on her site says, “Friends help friends use Linux”!
• Everyone involved in LinuxChix, a great support/information-sharing organization whose motto is “Be polite, be helpful.” Words to live by!
• Gina Levow is an AI/computational linguistics researcher who was also one of my computer science professors in college; she gave me my first technical jobs, first as her research assistant (which is where I first learned UNIX-y command line magic) and then as a grader for an introductory CS class.
• Anne Rogers was another one of my CS professors; her Operating Systems (and Computer Architecture) classes were an intense boot camp for learning the inner workings of computers, and after taking them, I knew I was compelled to pursue even more technical knowledge.

Yikes, that list ended up way longer than I planned (I kept thinking of more awesome ladies to add)! I’d also recommend searching for more Ada Lovelace Day posts — I really enjoyed seeing other bloggers’ profiles of accomplished technical women.

So Internet Explorer 7 has been out for a while now, and I finally caved — I can’t get it to work using the wonderful ies4linux, so I need to have a copy of Windows available to test sites in action.

Fortunately I still had the re-installation disc from the copy of Vista I wiped from the laptop when I got it. Here’s how I set up my dual-boot:

1. Burn an Ubuntu Live CD; boot from that CD, and launch the GParted partition editor from the System > Administration menu.
   

   Note: This step is where I ran into the most issues. I tried to create a new partition for Windows, following the instructions from this guide — but the Windows install would freeze at “expanding files 0%”, and later give me error # 0×80070017. Googling suggested that this error might have been a problem with the disc, but that didn’t really make sense since this was a factory disc. Eventually I figured out that it just meant there was some problem communicating between the disc and the hard drive — Vista didn’t like the partition I’d set up after my Ubuntu partition.

   Here’s how I solved this issue: I used GParted to move my Ubuntu install forward on the disk, then created a partition (without formatting it) for Vista at the beginning of the drive. Then — since Ubuntu’s bootloader was still at the beginning of the drive, and Vista gets confused when it sees that trace of another operating system — I needed to zero out the new partition, with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 where sda1 is the new partition. Warning! If you try to use that command without knowing what you are doing, you may well zero out your whole drive!! ALWAYS HAVE BACKUPS.

2. Put in Windows CD; choose “Custom Install”; select the new partition as the destination (it should be called “Unallocated” or something — it was pretty recognizable after my work with GParted); click through until it starts installing; wait a LONG LONG time.
3. Boot into Windows! Plug in ethernet cord; reboot to install drivers, etc. that allow me to have nice things like correct screen resolution and wireless internet.
4. Use the Ubuntu Live CD and these instructions to restore my bootloader and set up dual-boot
5. Happily choose between Ubuntu and Vista every time I boot up!

In general, this install would have gone a lot smoother had Vista been able to peacefully coexist with another bootloader. Different versions of Linux have no problem living on different partitions, and when you have an existing Windows install, you can easily install Linux in a separate partition without any confusion. But then, I guess that’s because Linux is designed to be used the way its users want to use it, and Windows is designed to be used the way Microsoft wants you to use it.

Using Vista a little bit gave me a better appreciation for people who try Linux and don’t care for it — I found myself disliking things about Vista just because it was unfamiliar and didn’t come set up the way I like it. But even though I know I could customize it and get more comfortable with it, I’ll still stick with Ubuntu for most of my computing, since I know it’s what ultimately gives me the most flexibility.