Firstly a Google software engineer in Seattle, heavily gravid but officially not yet ready to pop, missed a day in the office. Concerned a colleague called her home, and was told that she was having contractions but that everything was fine and not to worry.

Fifteen minutes later however and everything was not fine. The friend got a call to get over thee fast as everything was happening in a rush. He headed straight for her house and got her in his car but before he could get out the driveway the baby popped into the world. Mother and new son are going fine.

In the second case one of Google's Mountain View office technical writers was driving into work when she was flagged over by a panic stricken dad to be. His wife was giving birth in the front seat of his SUV (think of the upholstery!) with "a grandmotherly sort had a panic-stricken look on her face and her hands out to catch the baby." She stayed and calmed down the dad and within ten minutes Google has witnessed its second premature birth.

A fun pair of tales, and something that would be useful for the young tots if they ever want to interview for the company.

"So, tell me about your first experience with Google...."

And so it should. Open source is going to have to fight its corner like everybody else and the more it does so the more respect it will get from commercial vendors.

To get open source taken seriously it will have to fight its corner, and the SFLC is doing an excellent job at managing it. The commercial vendors will find it much harder to portray the free software movement as a lot of long-haired hippy types if they're still hurting from a fistful of legal failures.

It's kind of like the two teams looking to disrupt the recently departed Japanese whaling fleet. On the one hand you've got Greenpeace who won't intervene much and concentrate on recording the slaughter, or the Sea Shepherd crew, who attack the whaling fleet and try to organise a boycott of Japanese products. While their tactics are questionable if I was a humpbacked whale I know which group I'd prefer on my side.

It seems the British tax authorities have been rather careless with the bank account details of all those 'subjects' who claim child benefit, which is basically everyone with children. The data, just two CDs worth, went missing while out with a courier and it appears no-one signed it in or out.

Leaving aside the quaintness of hand delivering data in this day and age the real scandal is that it took nine days for the government to admit what it had done. Now that's fast compared to some examples but given what online crooks can do in nine hours with that kind of data the imperative would surely be to let banks and account owners know what was going on as soon as possible.

The head of the tax service has since resigned but it only highlights why breach laws, such as we have in California, are required. With a warning and a bit of luck the effects of the online thieves can be greatly reduced. Never mind the embarrassment of a data breach - protect your customers!

The Senior fellows are something of a breed apart at Intel. It's very similar to getting tenure at a university - basically as long as you're not caught embezzling or deciding to punch out the boss you're sorted for life.

It's an interesting system, and one that many in the industry have emulated. It also relates to Intel's corporate mindset. Let's not forget that until Otellini the company was always led by someone with a PhD, and some within the company were unsure about employing someone with nothing more than a first class MBA to their name.

The lucky new Senior Fellow is Bryant Bigbee. He's had an interesting life, originally qualifying as a doctor before changing his direction and joining Intel fifteen years ago. That took some guts, considering how much doctors get paid over here and the size of their student loans.

As he points out, the internet needs some way to prevent attacks on individuals, while making it much easier to deal with false positives. Sadly such system seems a long way away.

If you're looking for concrete suggestions in the article about how to solve the problem then sadly these are lacking. It's a bit like the mice deciding to put a bell around the cat's neck - nice idea, just too bad no-one knows how to do it.

After all, bullying can only be stopped if there's concrete proof that it's taking place. Now this can be tricky if someone's being picked on in dark alleys or behind the bike sheds. But where electronics are concerned it should be a whole lot easier.

Take abusive texting for example. The text message comes with its own date and number stamp - so either the bully will have to use a separate account or someone else's phone. Email is trickier but I'm willing to suspect there are more than a few bullies out there who are dumb enough to use their own email addresses. After all, it's not a profession that attracts the best and the brightest.

Nevertheless it was an interesting exercise to rebuild the thing in the first place, given the paucity of information about the device. Its creator, Tommy Flowers, arguably did more than nay other Briton to bring a speedy end to the war and that so few know anything about him is a crying shame.

The reason for this lies mainly in the Cold War and the paranoia it spawned. The very existence of Colossus wasn't even acknowledged until after the news the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) had been built – leading to endless transatlantic arguments among geeks as to who built the first computer.

Flowers was awarded a small honour and a payment of just £1,000 after the war's end – which was less than he spent to build the thing in the first place. He was then forced to burn his blueprints and watch as the Colossus machines were broken up to ensure their secrets were kept safe. A sad end for an inspired idea.

His stepfather, an IT consultant, would have provided the killer's fee in the form of his car. Thankfully, and as is usually the case in these things, the contract killer turned out to be a police officer. But you can bet this will lead to some difficult family reunions in later years.

The chipmaker went through the entire periodic table to look for materials that would work, and eventually ended up with Hafnium (pictured above) and other other, undisclosed materials. The result is a major victory that allows Intel to bring out 45nm chips months before its competitors.

This time around, Oracle VM isn't labelled as a support programme for XenSource. That's probably because XenSource doesn't have anything near Red Hat's market share or brand recognition. Oracle VM is however drawing from the same well as Oracle Linux: Oracle VM for now will only support Oracle applications that Oracle claims you can run on top of Windows or Linux systems (which doesn't mean that Microsoft or say Red Hat will support it).

Oracle VM is great if you live in an all-Oracle-world. Admittedly, we are heading in that direction if you consider Oracle's current acquisition rate.

But we're not there yet, and few companies therefore will be appealed by Oracle VM.

You should never underestimate crazy people, but I somehow have my doubts about Al-Qaeda's desire to launch a cyber attack. The group traditionally has undertaken attacks that aim to create mass hysteria. An internet attack would mostly affect the world economy. But then again, capitalism believed to be among the group's targets on its quest to bring Islam to the masses.

We can just hope that western security agencies have been anticipating an attack on the internet infrastructure and have their defences ready. In the worst case scenario, we can always just cut off internet access to the middle east.

Blu-ray may have lost a battle, but the war is far from over. Its backers can easily drop the price of their hardware. If necessary, they could simply raise the prices of DVDs to subsidize the players. In the age of the cellphone consumers are used to low upfront costs that are paid back over time.

The consumer in me however just wants to see an end to this silly standards war. Nearly two years ago, I asked an executive with a movie studio how he would explain to consumers that they would have to choose between two standards. He didn't have an answer.

Anderson's and Foremski's measures are complementary and could both help improve the press release. I fully support both efforts.

Tagged releases benefit journalists who already decided that they will write about a certain topic. The blacklists prevents incompetent PR from wasting a journalist's time with their pitches.

Too many PR folks mistake the press release for a personal conversation with somebody they know. My personal worst practices list is topped by emails that start with "story suggestion" and ones that put my name in the subject line. The first one appeals to my journalistic sense of independence.

But the biggest frustration is when a PR agency (they are always agencies) call to pitch a new product or an event and they don't even know what it is about: they are unable to answer any questions about the product and instead read up the useless, opening line from the draft press release. If only phone services would offer a black list, I would be an avid user.

This tends to happen especially when the economy is doing well. Big profits tend to attract PR incompetence.

image borrowed from Silicon Valley Watcher