THIS WEEK: How will you celebrate Grace Hopper Day?

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October 24, 2002 >> Receive this email as text  >> About this e-mail   In this Issue >> From the editor: How will you celebrate Grace Hopper Day? >> Featured topic from SearchWebServices.com: Meet the real Web Services >> Reader Feedback: Invisible link   From the editor: How will you celebrate Grace Hopper Day? by Margaret Rouse, Associate Editor I would like to nominate December 9th, the birthday of Admiral Grace Hopper, to be our first international IT holiday. Why Grace Hopper, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. Anyone whose obituary in Time magazine says "She is perhaps best known for having said "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" deserves a holiday named after her. How would we celebrate Grace Hopper Day, you ask? Let's take a quick look at some of Admiral Hopper's contributions and see what we can come up with. Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computer science, is generally credited with developments that led to COBOL, the programming language for business applications on which the world's largest corporations ran for more than a generation. After receiving her Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale, Hopper worked as an associate professor at Vassar College before joining the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943. She went on to work as a researcher and mathematician at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. and the Sperry Corporation. Having retired from the Navy after World War II, she returned in 1967 to work at the Naval Data Automation Command. By the time of her death in 1992, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper had left many contributions to the field of software engineering and was arguably the world's most famous programmer. But here are some lesser-known facts: The clock in her office ran counterclockwise to remind her that there's always more than one way to do something. She hated the words "because we've always done it this way." She joked that she created COBOL because she didn't like to balance her checkbook. When she was a child, she practiced her troubleshooting skills (not always successfully) by taking apart alarm clocks. She called her Admiral's uniform her "identifier" and used it to remind listeners that every record in a computer must have an identifier to be able to store data and retrieve it later. During her lifetime, she was a popular TV talk show guest She chain-smoked unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes. She liked to be introduced as the "third programmer on the first large-scale digital computer." She is credited with applying the engineering term "bug" to computing when her team found a moth trapped in a relay of the Mark II computer. She was first asked to resign from the Navy when she was 40 because she was too old. By the time she was 80, President Reagan had to go before Congress once a year to get permission for her NOT to have to resign from the Navy. Amazing Grace, as Admiral Hopper was often called, was a colorful woman who might inspire some interesting ways to celebrate a holiday, don't you think? I can just see it. On December 9, we'll all gather together in hyperspace and celebrate (virtually, of course) Grace Hopper Day. If nothing else, it'll be interesting to see what your co-workers pick as their "identifier." We can all spend the day troubleshooting and brainstorming new ways to solve old problems.  In fact, we can start practicing by taking Quiz #30. Works for me. So mark December 9th down in your calendar, and just for fun, please let us know how you plan to celebrate Grace Hopper Day! Learn more: Quiz #30: Troubleshooting http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci849563,00.html Grace Hopper http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213732,00.html Grace Hopper nanosecond http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci850361,00.html  Featured Site: SearchWebServices.com FEATURED TOPIC: Meet the real Web Services If "Web services" still seems a little mushy in your mind, why not stand directly in front of a human being who can tell you about it in person and perhaps give you a hands-on demo? Such as Anne Thomas Manes, renowned Web services author and expert; Ted Schadler, Group Director at Forrester Research; and Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. These and other independent minds and faces will be accessible to you at SearchWebServices.com's "Web Services Decisions 2003," a conference to begin all conferences! It's in Atlanta on March 19th through 21st, 2003. If you're a Web services decision maker, we suggest that you sign up for this free conference now. Find out more details at... http://webservicesdecisions.techtarget.com/html/ci_sessions_speakers.htm  Reader Feedback: Invisible link by Lowell Thing, Editor There is a kind of hyperlink - more than one, actually - that ought to exist for many of our definitions. There is a concept that predates the Web when hypertext was known only to certain multimedia developers, a concept called the "link type." It isn't supported on today's Web but perhaps it may be later. On today's Web, when you link from one place to another place, there is only one choice, click or not click. But suppose when you clicked, a little popup window appeared and asked you: Definition, picture, example, learning path, quiz, related term, short version, or crossword puzzle - and allowed you to choose one? Definition, picture, example, and so forth would all be types of content you could link to for a given hypertext or hyperimage - that is, link types. We don't expect this feature to be supported in the next version of XHTML, but it's still early yet. Meanwhile, last week, many of our readers would apparently have clicked on the "Crossword" link type if we'd had one. Although we only have five crossword puzzles available so far, many readers have printed them out and written to tell us to add more. We've received the message and are working to complete a few more. All our crossword puzzles... http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci850903,00.html All our quizzes http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci849655,00.html Definition of "link type" http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci212481,00.html _______________________________________________________________________________________ We'd like to thank all the readers who took time out of their busy day to write and provide us with the answers to these three questions: 1. If you can't find an answer on whatis.com, where else do you look? 2. What area of IT will your company focus its attention on next? 3. What IT-related problem(s) keep you up at night? We're going to be sending a set of whatis.com magnets to twenty lucky readers and sharing what we learned with you in a later newsletter. If you missed last week's newsletter , it's not too late to send your answers! You can write to us at [EMAIL PROTECTED].   This e-mail is brought to you by TechTarget where you can get relevant search results from over 19 industry-specific Web sites.  Whatis.com contacts: Lowell Thing, Site Editor ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Margaret Rouse, Assistant Editor ([EMAIL PROTECTED])     To unsubscribe from Updates on new site content: >> Simply Reply to this Email with REMOVE within the Body or Subject -OR- >> Go to: http://WhatIs.techtarget.com/register/1,,sid9,00.html    - Log in to edit your profile.    - Click on the link to Edit email subscriptions.    - Uncheck the box next to the newsletter you wish to unsubscribe from    - When finished, click "Save Changes to My Profile". Copyright 2002 TechTarget, Inc. All rights reserved.