Wimbledon serves Linux volley

It’s always nice to hear of another suc­cess for Linux; Wimble­don serves Linux vol­ley (from BBC News)

Fol­low­ing a pilot pro­ject in 2003, the internal com­puter net­work at the All-England Club has been con­ver­ted to the open source oper­at­ing system.

Mr McMur­rugh said IBM had pre­pared a Pocket Wimble­don for the 60 – 70 PDAs that will be given to these spe­cial guests.
The PDAs, which will be O2’s XDA, will give users access to scores, stat­ist­ics, bio­graph­ies and plot their pos­i­tion on an inter­act­ive map of the All Eng­land Club.
Data will be sent to the PDAs via the wi-fi net­work installed around Wimble­don for the tour­na­ment. Mr McMur­rugh said IBM is also tri­al­ling the send­ing of video streams of matches to the hand­held computers.

If it all works (and why shouldn’t it after a suc­cess­ful trial last year?) it will be another feather in the cap for IBM and Linux.

Alan Turing honoured

The father of the mod­ern com­puter is being hon­oured, 50 years after he died in tra­gic circumstances.

From the BBC news story ‘Father of the com­puter’ hon­oured

He killed him­self on 7 June 1954, by eat­ing an apple he laced with cyan­ide. On Monday, a blue plaque will be erec­ted out­side his home in Cheshire.

There has been very little to hon­our this great man. The largest sym­bol to date being a life-size bronze statue of him in Sack­ville Park in Manchester, where he sits on a bench, apple in hand. I pass that statue every day walk­ing or cyc­ling to and from my office. I always glance over as I pass. Some lunch­times I take my lunch and sit near him.

Fur­ther read­ing: The Alan Tur­ing Home Page a fab­ulous site full of inform­a­tion on Tur­ing by his bio­grapher Andrew Hodges

Return of Colossus to mark D-Day

Cool and Geeky!
Return of Colos­sus to mark D-Day

Colos­sus Mk2, a war­time code-breaker hailed as one of the first elec­tronic com­puters, has been rebuilt and reunited with Bletch­ley Park veterans.

Colos­sus was also ground-breaking because it was put into action two years ahead of its nearest US rival, the Eniac (Elec­tronic Numer­ical Integ­rator and Computer).

Although, Mr Sale said, Eniac was thought to have been first because Colos­sus was kept a secret until the 1970s.