Dennis Ritchie RIP

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

It has been announced today that Dennis Ritchie has died.  His death will not receive the news coverage afforded to Steve Jobs’ death and, having met him a couple of times, I am sure he would be shocked if it did. However, if in computing there is a case of other people standing on the shoulders of giants, Dennis Ritchie could be nominated as one of those giants.

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Outsourcing a telephone service

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This year we outsourced our email service. We threw out our  internal mail servers (based on Postfix, Cyrus IMAP and MailScanner) and moved to Google Apps Premier. It has all worked very well and I am very happy with the decision — well worth the £33 per user per year.

What I want to do next year is get rid of the telephone exchange in my office. When we moved into our office we inherited a Panasonic switch and a collection of their feature phones. It hangs off a couple of ISDN-2 lines and works but costs more than it is worth. I feel that if in the 21st century I can out source my 20th century communication system I should be able to outsource my 19th century communication system as well.

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iTunes 9.0.1, iPhoneOS 3.1 and Mac OS X 10.6.1

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Release 1.0

Apple is the king of the ‘point release’. Of course, its critics will say these are ‘pointless releases’ — they are not really releases at all, they are just bug fixes. However, as with all things Apple there is often more to the releases than meets the eye.

Firstly, iTunes 9.0 released a couple of weeks ago with a set of new iPods. Obviously it supports the new iPods (and apparently stopped Palm Pre’s syncing with iTunes for a few days) but was the difference to everyone else. When I opened iTunes did I go “Wow that’s great” or did I say “Just what I always wanted?. Of course, I didn’t but that wasn’t the point of the release. (more…)

Will UK Kindle kick-start the eBook boom?

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

So after much waiting, it seems that the Amazon Kindle may be coming to these shores soon. Anonymous sources have told the Bookseller magazine that the eBook device will be announced in the UK next week — just in time for the Xmas rush.

It does have to be said that eBook readers are starting to catch on. A measure I use to assess whether something is popular is whether I see people on the London Underground with it. A few years ago, the tell-tale white headphone cables of iPods first started to appear, and now I am starting to see the Sony eBook reader — maybe not on every journey, but at least once a week.

However, the Kindle may just be the start. There are rumours flying around that the much talked about Apple tablet might also be some form of eBook reader. The Gizmodo website has been reporting that Apple has being in discussions with publishers about selling content through the Apple iTunes store.

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The power of a modern web browser

Friday, September 4th, 2009

It’s very rare to find something that really shows what browsers are capable of if people put their mind to it. An example we have all come to love is Google Maps which was truly unique and even worked in IE6. At the other end of the spectrum, I have recently come across JSWars. This is unashamedly aimed at Firefox 3.5 but really does show what a modern web browser is capable of.

For those of you who are not using Firefox, JSWars is an arcade style shoot’em up game in the old tradition. On one side of the screen is a ship which you can move up and down and which can fire bullets at streams of baddies which fire back. It does all this while subjecting you to a crushing sound track and the usual bullet and explosion sound effects. (It is loud, so if you are reading this on Friday afternoon in the office and fancy a go, turn the volume down on your PC first or people will know).

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Mac OS X 10.6: a quick look at Snow Leopard

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

It wasn’t mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. It barely got a mention in the newspapers. Many non-Apple interest web sites didn’t mention it. When I went to the flagship Apple Store in Regents Street on Friday lunch time, there weren’t queues round the block (though there were a few inside). It seems that Apple have managed to launch a new product without all the usual fuss.

However, I am sure that everyone who reads this article will know that Snow Leopard is the update to Mac OS X that was released last week. Obviously as a keen Mac user, I did go and buy it on the day it launched and I did install it on my MacBook over the weekend but was it worth the £25 I paid for it?

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In praise of Spotify

Friday, August 21st, 2009

I had heard of Spotify some months ago but it had washed over me. I only took serious notice of it when I read an Economist article about it and I have become an instant convert.

For those of you who don’t know, Spotify is Yet Another Music Download Service. As far as I am concerned the main difference between it and the others, is that it is legal and it works. I registered with the site, downloaded the application and started listening to music. On my Mac, the application works really well so I would expect the Windows version to work as well — if not better. The search feature works well and it has all the usual playlist features but you can set up a queue of the tracks you wanted played. I find this really useful as I can set up my play queue for what I want in the next hour or so and the application just plays it for me — something you cannot do in iTunes without creating a custom playlist.

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RockMelt: Yet another web browser

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Another month and another web browser. This week, we have been introduced via a New York Times article to Rockmelt. Details are at the non-existent end of sketchy but we do know a little bit about who is behind it.

Back when the web was young, we all used the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape which was founded by Marc Andreessen and it is he who is funding Rockmelt. There seems to be some hints that the browser could be linked in some way to Facebook but little more.

Do we really need another web browser? As a web developer the answer is a firm ‘no’. In common use we now have three versions of Internet Explorer, quite a few variants of Firefox, at least three versions of Safari, Chrome and if you are really counting, Opera.

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Psst – want to buy some content?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Last week News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss. The same week, Rupert Mudoch’s media machine announced it was going to start charging for content in all sorts of places. It had tried the scheme on one site and it had been a great success and as such it was going to start rolling out across the world — the first UK site was going to be The Sunday Times. Every other news organisation carried the story — the BBC suggested people might pay to see the exclusive Michael Jackson rehearsal footage which The Sun’s website had published a few days before.

Oh and last week, News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss.

I thought I would mention the loss again as no one seems to be talking about it. On the other hand everyone is talking about charging for content. Will it really be the case that some time soon, everyone will be charging for content? Will it be the case that to read this blog post (and other better ones!) you will be getting out your credit card/debit card/micropayments wallet to fill the coffers of PC Pro? I doubt it…

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A bad week for social networking

Friday, August 7th, 2009

All in all it has been a bad week for social networking. It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.

His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide. One might have thought with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, they might prefer social networking liaisons to real ones – but we better not go there. (more…)