Tim Hardy

Starting with Bjarne Stroustrup’s observation “our civilization runs on software”, Grady Booch offered a thought provoking overview of the history and promise of software at this year’s BCS Turing lecture, taking listeners from the austere beauty of Alan Turing’s 1930s thought experiments through to “the rise of the machines” in 2030.

Booch is an interesting, relaxed and witty speaker, whose asides on the superiority of OS X to Windows, George Bush and Google (”Am I the only one who thinks there’s a company in desperate need of some adult supervision?”) provided comic relief in an at times informationally dense speech.

One point that intrigued me was his observation that much of the history of computing is unrecorded, existing only in the “tribal memory” of the greybeards. He foresees the emergence of both software artists and historians who might translate and record some of the strange beauty of code for non-programmers as well as formally archiving a form of communication in danger of vanishing with the death of its authors.

The full lecture is available as a recording from the link below and is well worth watching.

Now anyone with $2400 (£1200) can build a machine at home capable of generating 3D objects from plastics.

Hod Lipson from Carnegie Mellon and PhD student Evan Malone have developed a desktop fabricator as detailed in this week’s New Scientist: Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution.

The developers define fabbing on the project’s main page:

Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques.

The design is open source enabling anyone to download the blueprints and build their own.

I’ve been fascinated by the potential of home fabrication ever since I read Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication a couple of years ago. It’s coming out in paperback in the UK early February and offers an inspiring if slightly breathless tour of the potential of giving the power of manufacturing to people. If you enjoyed Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat you may well like this too.

Bulldog broadband have no instructions on their site on how to switch off voicemail. The keypresses you need are:

*1571# = Activate voicemail
#1571# = Disable voicemail
*#1571# = hear voicemail status (i.e is it on or off)