Vietnam vets fund uses handhelds to guide Wall visitors

Computerworld - When Ron Worstell, a service delivery manager at Fujitsu Transaction Solutions Inc., first started volunteering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington three years ago, he had to use a five-pound paper directory to find an individual name listed among the 58,229 inscribed on the memorial.
Worstell, who served with the Army 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, found the process slow and frustrating, and figured there had to be a better way to search for names on the memorial, commonly known as The Wall. The names are arranged by date of death, not alphabetically, which makes finding the names of comrades and loved ones even more difficult.
Then Worstell learned that Dallas-based Fujitsu Transactions, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd. in Tokyo, started selling handheld Windows CE-powered iPad computers as portable point-of-sale terminals to its retail and grocery chain customers.
Thanks to Worstell's interest and advocacy, Fujitsu Transactions donated 20 iPads to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built and maintains The Wall. This weekend, instead of carrying a five-pound book, Worstell, who carried a 25-pound radio on his back in Vietnam, used an 11-oz. iPad to look up a name. Within 30 seconds, he could direct visitors to the correct panel on The Wall, which was dedicated 20 years ago today.
The lightweight hardware required some heavyweight programming to configure the memorial database to operate on the iPad, said Frank Guglielmo, vice president of enterprise engineering at Soza & Co. in Fairfax, Va., which did the conversion at no cost for the memorial fund.
Soza, a systems integration company that works primarily on federal government projects, was the logical choice for the database conversion because it already maintains the memorial fund's Web site, said Guglielmo.
But David Fruehwald, a senior software developer at Soza, said squeezing all the data from the Web site's SQL database of the 58,229 names on The Wall (derived from a mainframe computer tape acquired by the memorial fund from the National Archives when it started planning the memorial more than 20 years ago) wasn't an easy project.
The iPad has only 32MB of memory. It typically allocates 16MB for memory, and 16MB for a program. Faced with this limited memory, Fruehwald said he first had to delete some data fields available on the Web site, such as the locations in Vietnam where casualties occurred, to compress all the relevant information (name, hometown and state, date of death) into the iPad's memory. Even then, Fruehwald said, he had to borrow 3MB of