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Ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network; it is also used to self test the network interface card of the computer, or as a speed test. It works by sending ICMP “echo request” packets to the target host and listening for ICMP “echo response” replies. Ping measures the round-trip time[1] and records any packet loss, and prints when finished a statistical summary of the echo response packets received, the minimum, mean, max and in some versions the standard deviation of the round trip time.

– wikipedia explains ping

This is why I love SP. He reads duck / decoy and emails me a book review I had forgotten about. Of A Story About Ping. Except it’s from a geekly point of view, so perfect for all those of you out there who are breeding little computer geeks. Because, at least according to John E Fracisco, Ping can teach the way of ping:

TODAY IS Ada Lovelace day. Today, 1,980 people pledged to write a blog post about Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and the first recorded programmer, known simply as Ada Lovelace.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. This is a truly magnificent enterprise, organised by Suw Charman-Anderson, in which more than 1,000 people have signed up to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admire. Suw [Charman-Anderson] was inspired to found Ada Lovelace Day after hearing female friends in technology say that they felt disempowered and invisible.

Ada Lovelace herself is widely recognised as the world’s first computer programmer; born in 1815, her friendship with Charles Babbage and her understanding of his difference engine and analytical engine have given her a lasting legacy.

From the Guardian technology blog

THE FIRST woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science — from Stanford University in 1968 — Barbara Liskov was awarded the coveted Turing Award on Tuesday, and with it $250,000. She is the second woman to receive the prize.

“It’s a great honor; it’s very exciting,” Liskov said. “It recognizes my contributions and their importance to the field.” Professor Liskov will be presented with the award in June.

Liskov’s most significant impact stems from her influential contributions to the use of data abstraction, a valuable method for organizing complex programs. [...]

Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known. [...]

AND FINALLY, the big day is here. It’s 2pm in Palo Alto, home of the man himself, Steve Jobs, and the vibe is tangible. The air is full of electron excitement, people are mingling outside the Apple store. This is the equivalent of cocktail parties except with more keyboarding and live feeds.

Two media trucks are already in place, bright umbrellas pepper the sidewalk.

The first folks in line have been there since last night. This is nothing to them, to be camped out. They themselves are news: blogger Robert Scoble is amongst them posting breaking news type updates (check it out); there are other faces I recognise, names I’ve heard.

Bloggers are blogging, snappers snapping. Video feeds are running, citizen journos and pros tripping over each other to get that one shot no-one else captured.

THIS COOL sticker (good for any coffee mug) from HackerStickers got me thinking about geek-speak. The mind of a geek is a curious one; the vocabulary curiouser. For the uninitiated, geekly conversations are a minefield of TLAs, unlikely trivia and unfathomable tirades on the pet topics. The difference is these subjects will not be anything as straightforward as baseball, or the Six Degrees of George Bush to illegal invasions and oil. Noooooooo. It might be armadillos. Or 14th century calligraphy. Or the lesser-known destinations of Pico Iyer. But that’s another story.

To negotiate your way around conversations with your SGO (Significant Geekly Other), it’s a good idea to initiate your very own GVB — Geek Vocabulary Builder. And b has just the starting point for you: The origins of w00t (and all its variations). This sound — quite like a surpised owl — is not just a randomly chosen expression of excitement, especially if your SGO is of the genus tech. It is so much more.

AND, LIKE stuntprogrammer, you happen to be a geek’s geek, then you already know that the original Star Wars film (Episode IV) first saw TV release on this day in February 1983.

Two years later to the day, Steve Wozniak left Apple Computer. It’s not known if there was any connection to George Lucas, Darth Vader or Yoda, but Steve is known as the Woz of Oz. Could this be a Jedi epithet?

But further back into last century: Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, had his debut on radio show Your Hit Parade in 1943. It was about the same time he became known as The Voice. It was strong in the force.

You would also know that today is Bob Marley Day in Rastafarianism (Jamaica and Ethiopia). Bob was born on this day in 1945, in St Ann’s parish, Jamaica. He too was strong in the force.

1. call my mother-in-law and my best friend, at the same time, to tell them the outcome of the Cisco Systems law suit, using the conference option
2. and concurrently send a totally lascivious text message to stuntprogrammer on that dinky QUERTY keyboard
3. as well as that catchy little tune, Let’s Impeach the President, to George Bush via iTunes
4. while standing on my head (to avail of the accelerometeric feature)
5. and taking photos of people’s faces as they look at me and wonder what in tarnation I think I’m doing. Little do they know I’ll also be
6. finding directions to get to the nearest Starbucks so I can
7. order 4,000 lattes to go and charge them to Steve Jobs…

Steve Jobs showcases iPhone

Greenpeace spoofs Jobs

THIS IMAGE of Julian Beever’s pavement art has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere recently. No wonder: Beever’s great skill is the art of illusion; he can make us feel as though there exists a portal to hidden worlds. A doorway to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere could lie beneath our feet; perhaps we could peel back time, glimpse Rosny‘s Moedingen or explain the violated laws of physics that allow vanishings within the Devil’s Triangle. Any realm seems possible, any dimension plausible. And why not?

Poincaré’s Conjecture, recently in the news because of Perelman’s reported solution, proposed that

all closed, simply connected, three-dimensional manifolds — those which lack holes and are of finite extent — were spheres…. To the astonishment of most mathematicians, it turned out that manifolds of the fourth, fifth, and higher dimensions were more tractable than those of the third dimension.

– New Yorker Magazine

I HAVE never been domestically gifted. I loath cooking on a daily basis (I just like doing the fun stuff, pies and deserts and such).

I don’t knit or sew in any way you’d recognise. Laundry gets done because I can’t quite come to terms with the combination of nudity and anything less than an unchanging 28°C (that’s 82°F for all you Fahrenheit babies). So when I find eternal summer, believe me, laundry will be the next thing to go.

I do have bouts of obsessive springcleaning, but it stays seasonal. So you see, I’m no Martha Stewart. I’ve always maintained my strengths lie elsewhere.

I CANNOT believe it. Chickenpox at 30-something. It’s not just embarrassing — it’s agony. Or it’s not just agony — it’s embarrassing. I forget in which order mortification of the flesh occurs.

Not only does the need to scratch hit an 11 on the one to 10 of the Ichter um, Itcher scale, but I look like teenage angst personified. I’m a freaking speckled Jen. A spotted Jane. I am a technicoloured multicentric range of little Mt St Helens, all rebuilding their pissy little damn peaks.

It’s not pretty; I’m incoherent with cat scratch fever, and I’m in full bad pun mode, feeling utterly bloody, and distinctly peaky. Har har.

Pox redux sucks

Not only that; there’s also the whole déjà vu thing going on. Because I’ve been here before! It’s a B-grade rerun of my thirteenth year on this planet just when hormones, a new school and parental inquisitions weren’t bad enough. But of course I’m so special, I have to get this pox twice.

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