It looks as if I may have to reinstall WordPress and restore the missing plugins, so I will have to find some time to do this soon. In the meantime, apologies for the inconvenience, and I hope things will be back to normal here soon (i.e. quiet, but at least all working ).

If your first reaction to the above paragraph was something like, “who’s Ada Lovelace?“, I’d suggest reading the page at the link above, which summarises the answer to that question quite nicely, as I’d rather devote the space to what I pledged to do. So, without further ado, I would like to nominate my candidate for consideration on Ada Lovelace Day: one of the pioneers of electronic music in the United Kingdom, whose name goes largely unrecognised amongst the British public, who would nonetheless be familiar with her most famous piece of work, even if they don’t realise it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001).

A Cambridge graduate in mathematics and music, Delia Derbyshire applied for a job at Decca Records in 1959, only to be told that women were not employed in their studio.  Undeterred, she joined the BBC in 1960, soon finding herself part of the fledgling BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where she quickly found kindred spirits in the likes of Brian Hodgson and Maddalena Fagandini. (The latter is one of a number of female electronic musicians to have connections with the Workshop, including Daphne Oram and (later) Elizabeth Parker; others have written more on the sizeable contribution of women to electronic music in the UK, so I will concentrate on Derbyshire’s work here.)

In 1963 Derbyshire was tasked with “realising” electronically, a composition by Ron Grainer which was to become one of the most unique and recognisable signature tunes in British television history. Weeks later, when Grainer heard what Derbyshire had fashioned from his manuscript, he is reported to have asked in astonishment, “Did I create that?” (“Most of it”, was her response.) I can barely imagine how unearthly Derbyshire’s realisation of the theme tune to “Doctor Who” (YouTube—this is the 1973 single mix) must have sounded nearly half a century ago, but it is a tribute to her talents that all these years later, the piece still sounds as if it was telephoned in from the ether.

Despite working on this and many other projects for the Radiophonic Workshop, and coming into contact with (and gaining the respect and admiration of) musicians as diverse as Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, Derbyshire struggled to gain wider acceptance. She eventually abandoned music in the 1970s, only to be tempted back in the late 90s by a younger generation of electronic musicians (most notably Sonic Boom (Peter Kember)), inspired by the path she laid many years before, and singing her praises to all who would listen. Welcome as it was, her creative renaissance was all too brief, and she died on 3rd July 2001 of renal failure whilst recovering from breast cancer, at the age of 64—leaving behind an unfinished album, her first in over thirty years.

So, how do I sum up what Delia Derbyshire and her work means to me personally?

It’s a coin (or if you will, a record) of two sides. On one side, as a recording musician, I feel a sense of great injustice on her behalf; that such a prodigiously-gifted musician and composer should have faced so many obstacles and prejudices in her career. I have no doubt that her gender played a part in this (particularly coming from higher management), but—and this may sound a contentious point—I wonder if this factor may have been overstated a little. From my reading, Delia and her work seems to have inspired almost universally positive reactions amongst fellow musicians (male and female alike) who came into contact with her, eliciting responses ranging from the fascinated to the outright awestruck (Exhibit A: colleague Brian Hodgson’s heartfelt obituary for her in the Guardian).

It’s hardly surprising; this is the woman who assembled (literally) the “Doctor Who” theme using junkyard oscillators and spliced and varispeeded tape fragments, two years before Robert Moog built his first custom modular synthesisers. Whilst I could fashion a passable imitation of the “Doctor Who” theme in Logic on our iMac in a couple of hours, I wouldn’t know where to begin to recreate the piece in the way that Derbyshire did (although in fairness, back in London in 1963, she would’ve had little choice). “Genius” is often a glibly-applied term, but every time I hear the “Who” theme and consider how Derbyshire generated it, I feel she deserves it in spades.

Still, it’s hard to learn that by the 1980s, judging by one account, Derbyshire was languishing in a number of unsuitable jobs (including a radio operator for British Gas and working in a bookshop), struggling with drink and understandably bitter about her experiences. Would she have had an “easier ride” if she wasn’t a woman? No-one can know for sure (and I know it could be debated heatedly), but I would proffer just one thought: a musician who pointedly eschewed synthesisers in favour of cutting up tapes and whacking an old metal lampstand to create tones to manipulate, was not one to make an easy career for herself.

The other side of the coin, however—and the one I prefer to dwell on—is the body of work that Delia left behind, and also the fact that she lived long enough to witness the beginning of her recognition as one of the founding mothers of British “electronica”. Beyond the Time Lord’s theme, an excerpt from my personal Derbyshire favourite can be heard at her Web site’s sound samples page: “Dreams”, a 1964 collaboration with Barry Bermange for the BBC Third Programme (later BBC Radio 3). Disturbingly evocative of its subject, the full work is a 45-minute collage of musique concrète and recorded interviews with individuals describing their dreams. The nine-minute slice at the Web site is presented as a lo-fi MP3, which if anything accentuates the woozily hypnotic nature of the piece. I’d love to hear the entire work, preferably alone at midnight, only I shudder to think how my own dreams would turn out afterwards.

So, there you have it: my own somewhat hastily-created tribute to a woman who, in my humble opinion, deserves entry to Ada Lovelace’s metaphorical hall of fame. I hope I have done Delia a measure of the justice she deserves, and that the reader may agree in at least some measure with why I chose to pay tribute, on this of all days.

As you may know, installing the Dropbox client on your Mac, Linux or Windows computer, gives you a special folder into which you place other folders or files; these are then copied not only to the online Dropbox storage space, but to any other computers linked to your account. This is very handy, especially if you have a laptop or other portable machine; it’s perfect for my Eee netbook, as I can back up files to Dropbox and my Mac with very little effort.

But what if you wanted to link folders/files on one machine to Dropbox, which aren’t located within the Dropbox folder? For instance, my Eee (running the Eeebuntu Linux OS) has a “Documents” folder in my home directory, and I’d like this to be backed up to Dropbox (nothing sensitive or confidential there, BTW), even though the folder should really stay where it is.

The answer—certainly if you’re on Linux/Mac—is simple: you just create a symbolic link (or ’symlink’—like a Mac alias or Windows shortcut) within the Dropbox folder, which points to the folder (or file) you’d like to link to. In the Linux and Mac terminal, you would change to the Dropbox folder, and from there, enter:

ln -s /path/to/your/item

This would create a symlink in the Dropbox folder with the same name—if you wanted a different name, you enter the new name for your symlink after the path:

ln -s /path/to/your/item alternative_name

(I would recommend symlinking a folder rather than a file for this purpose, just to be ‘tidy’.)

I use this method to ‘place’ my Eee’s Documents folder within Dropbox, so it appears to exist in two places (within my home directory, and within the Dropbox folder). The contents of ‘Documents’ are backed up to Dropbox, and also to the Dropbox folder on our Mac, meaning that in effect I have three copies of each item in the folder.

Check out the original Lifehacker article (“Sync files and folders outside your Dropbox folder“) for more details, including how to achieve the symlinking effect on Windows (basically, if you’re on Vista or Win7, use MKLINK at the command prompt).

Four months on, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t made much progress in the interim. To recap, these are the essentials of the setup which existed prior to last October:

• The N95 calendar synced “over the air” with Google Calendar via the GooSync service.
• The Mac calendar synced with the N95 via iSync on Mac OS X.
• The Mac can also update Google Calendar directly via iCal, thanks to GC’s CalDAV interface.

You may have worked out that Google Calendar acts here as the de facto “master” calendar, i.e. the primary copy of the calendar data. In this setup, the Mac doesn’t have a “local” copy of this data (it connects to Google’s server and displays what’s there), whilst the N95 does have its own copy of the data, but still treats Google as the “master” version.

This arrangement worked fine until last October, when GooSync ended its free service level, in favour of “GooSync Lite” (£5.99 per year). I haven’t renewed my subscription to date, as I’ve been prevaricating on what would be the best option—a lifetime subscription to GooSync Premium is £40, with a fair number of additional features, so that might be worth consideration. (The same service costs £20 for 12 months, and £30 for two years; how likely is it that GooSync might disappear within that time?)

So, at present, I can access Google Calendar via the Web, or via CalDAV (using either iCal on our Mac, or Mozilla Thunderbird (via the Lightning calendar add-on) on my Linux-powered Asus Eee 701 netbook). If I want my calendar synced to the N95, at present I would have to sync the phone with the Mac rather than Google; this is all well and good, but what if I am away from home and therefore unable to access the Mac?

I am also unsure whether iSync will transfer calendar items which aren’t located in the Mac’s own iCal database—i.e. because they’re on Google’s servers instead. For me, this is a wider issue: the Mac and netbook can only display the calendar if they have Internet access (more of a problem for the netbook, as the Mac stays at home). Therefore, I would like to find out whether it’s possible to sync the Mac and netbook calendars with Google (i.e. create synchronised copies on these machines of the events on Google), so that the events can be viewed and interacted with when the machines are offline.

I think I have a few options at this stage:

• “Admit defeat”, and cough up for a GooSync subscription. Otherwise known as the “path of least resistance”, at least this would sort out the N95/Google sync issue. If there are SyncML-compatible clients for Mac and Linux, I suspect GooSync Premium might also solve the “local copies on Mac and netbook” issue above, as GP allows up to four “devices” to use the service; this may require an email to GooSync to clarify.
• Sync the N95 with the Mac (and/or netbook) instead of Google. This would rely on a few “ducks in a row”: for one, clarifying whether iSync on the Mac needs the calendar items to be present in the Mac’s iCal database first. There is apromising-looking “one ring to rule them all” syncing utility for the Linux GNOME desktop—Conduit—which looks like it might be able to act as the go-between for Google, the netbook and the N95, but so far it appears that mobile phones are not yet supported explicitly (no doubt that will follow).
• Some combination of the above—e.g. GooSync for the N95, and other methods for the Mac and netbook.

So, the saga continues—just hope I can come up with a suitable solution before that vein in my head goes “pop”…