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Category Archives: Geek Stuff
Woot! First Private Craft Flies Into Space
I’m so pleased they made it. CNN has the story: Private craft flies into space as does MSNBC Private rocket ship breaks space barrier.
There’s still a way to go but this is a huge step in the right direction. The folks over at slashdot have plenty to say on the subject SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully.
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.
Viruses Galore
I’m not sure what today’s new virus is, but this evening I have returned to one of my email boxes to find I have 5144 unread emails for a total of 340MB! There seems to be a new virus emailing 64, 65, or 67KB emails to various made-up addresses at zed1.com. The problem is that it mails 25 copies of each one! As is normal for these things the from address is also faked, some of which are made-up zed1.com addresses too. So then I get 25 rejection messages from various other people who have received it!
This is probably the first time I have actually felt a little cross about these viruses. I normally don’t bother. I never get infected — I use Mozilla and have never yet executed an attachment received in an email; and though I get, on average, 5 to 10 pieces of spam or viruses or virus rejection notices every 10 minutes (my email client poll time), 24 hours a day, Mozilla’s spam filter takes care of most of them, and I teach it about the rest.
Todays is a pain for a change because Mozilla is far too slow at handling large mail folders. 🙁
CDDB Dump Updated
I’ve just updated my CDDB dump page. That page is quite literally a dump of the CDDB files created by my favourite CD player (Notify CD Player). This little player sits in the taskbar and plays CD’s. Quite simple like most of them. The nifty thing about this one I like so much is that it puts the details of the currently playing song in the title bar of whichever window has focus. I love that! It gets it’s details from freedb.org and stores the data locally so it doesn’t need to go to the network again. This local data is the source of my CDDB dump page. A quick grep and a couple of regex search and replaces in epsilon and nearly 700 files are converted to an unordered list.
After sorting and de-duplicating (again in Epsilon), the list is down to about 628 CDs . There are probably another 10 or so duplicates in there and 15 or so that I don’t actually own but have borrowed at some point. Plus I have CDs which are not in the list (I can see at several to my left now!). If you want to see what they look like here is a photo of the collection I took a couple of months ago. It has grown since then!
DMOZ Editor
W00t! I have been accepted as an editor on the Open Directory Project (ODP) (AKA DMOZ).
My category is Arts: Music: Styles: Dance: Radio and I have already started editing: Clearing out a couple of dead links and approving some recommended ones.
I am particularly pleased with this news: I remember DMOZ starting up as a project way back when Netscape acquired it and thinking I really should get involved… Here I am 5 plus years later and I finally found the inspiration and motivation to actually do it!
