sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I was at Grady Booch’s lecture last night, the 2007 BCS / IET Turing Lecture. It was a great event, which I’ll write more on over the weekend, but I wanted to put this link up now. The Computer History Museum is collecting together as complete a set of computers as it can from the early days, though I don’t think they have a Collossus from Bletchley Park yet.

Check out the timeline for computers at http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr

They’re starting to collect interesting software too. Apparently there’s great concern that some of the early software created by NASA and others is perishing, and it’s as important in many ways as early printed documents. One of the questions Grady Booch posed in his lecture was whether we need to keep the source code for Windows 95 for posterity, and if so what would people read / run it on in 100 years?

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It snowed last night, so none of the transport was working, but it’s very pretty!

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I was walking home the other day when I spotted this poster.

It’s great that the big advertisers and their agencies are starting to communicate in language their potential customers understand (perhaps some of them could try this with their English-speaking markets…) and I am very happy with the Polish influx into London, truly. Daily Mail reader, I am not.

What I’m confused about is why Polish is the first language I’ve seen non-English ads in, in the UK, and why now? We’ve had hindi, arabic, swahili, yiddish, french etc speakers in the UK, in large numbers, for decades, so why is it that it’s taken so long for non-English advertising to arrive?

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We almost booked a holiday here, in fact we did put a deposit down. Then we looked at Trip Advisor. Word of mouth has absolutely gone digital.

What we saw on the hotel’s website was a beautiful place in a small town in Greece. Lovely rooms, balconies with sea views, somewhere amazing for us to visit.

The first few comments in Trip Advisor seemed to bear this out. “Loved it all the way”, “Would definitely recommend” and so on. Then it all started to change…

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I’ve just set up my Fon wi-fi access point.

What does this mean? It means that people who have Fon themselves (or have bought a day pass from fon.com) can use a portion of my broadband, and I can use other Fonero’s connections when I’m out and about. There are an increasing number of people with the kit, especially now Skype is promoting it and is packaging it with their SMC wi-fi phone.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated with my progress on this: how many people use my access point, and how often I see other peoples’.

http://www.fon.com is the URL.

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