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.

The reason for this is that Dennis Ritchie will always be associated with two things: he invented the C programming language and he co-invented the Unix operating system. While both of these can trace their development back to previous languages and systems, it is what he made of them that is important, and what they became.

The C programming language has become the programming language of choice for many operating systems and many applications. Many other programming languages (C++, Java, PHP) carry the C syntactic heritage. Moreover, C showed a generation of programmers that they didn’t have to write low-level code in assembler language – a fact which is not questioned now. He also, with Brian Kernighan, wrote the definitive book on C – which should also serve as an example to many others about how to write books on programming languages.

Every operating system that came after Unix has copied some of the features that were first introduced in Unix. Unix had a unique way of looking at processes: processes were used for ’system function’ and new processes were created by duplicating other ones. Files were no longer collections of blocks but were collections of characters. As Unix was written in a high-level language it could run more easily on multiple machine architectures. The list goes on.

And the Unix of Dennis Ritchie gave us BSD Unix, which can be directly traced to Mac OS X and iOS. Moreover, Linux is a Unix clone, which means it needed something to copy in the first place. Dennis Ritchie didn’t stop after C and Unix but continued to work on operating system projects and have involvement with distributed computing research – which is where I met him in a project office in Cambridge.

In computing we tend to get distracted by the flashing lights and the polished interfaces, but we should not forget there are people who make it all work in the first place. Dennis Ritchie was one of those people.

(BTW Written on a Unix system (a Mac) and published on a WordPress blog running on a  Unix system)

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.

The three big problems I have with having an exchange in my office:

1. It is in my office which means that if I want to work from home/someone else’s office/the pub we have to perform all sorts of telephonic knitting to get calls to me. With VoIP I shouldn’t need to do this.
2. It is in my office which means if a disaster befalls my office, I don’t have a phone system. More importantly, I want a disaster recovery plan which allows me to say something better than ‘call our mobile phones’.
3. Why do I want a phone system in my office?

Now before you say Asterisk and 3cx, I know about those but they don’t really help me with all the points  above – I don’t really want to own and maintain a phone system. I could put an Asterisk system in our racks and pipe in phone calls but then I will have to look after it. If it goes wrong while I am on holiday then I have to persuade someone else to look at it.

Interestingly BT come close with their hosted VoIP service which costs £5 per month plus phones at £68 each. My problem with this service is that you have to use their phones — you can’t use a soft phone for example — and it does not seem to be as flexible as I would like.

Obviously I have typed the appropriate keywords into Google and have seen there are other services but what I want to know is does anyone out their use these services? If so please comment on this blog and let us all know or if you want to send me an email with your comments on send it to pcpro.blog (a) widearea.co.uk and I will summarise and make anonymous as appropriate.

Thanks for the help!

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.

Secondly, iPhone OS 3.1 was released at the same time as iTunes 9.0. I dutifully upgraded my iPhone and entered into the game of ‘hunt the feature’. I was in a maze of twisty little paths which did all look all alike. In truth, if I squint my eyes and hold my memory of what iPhone OS 2.0 (and I mean 2.0) was like at arm’s length, I don’t really see much difference. Yes, there are differences between 3.1 and 3.0 and, of course, between 2.x and 3.0 but what are they? Ok in the AppStore application, it will tell me because I have various apps I should try various others. Very much a ‘me too’ idea borrowed from iTunes and very much like Amazon’s “people who bought also bought” and also something that needs some work. One of the apps it suggested for me was in French and another was in Russian. Beyond that there were some other changes (you can now see what apps are making the most money) and that’s about it. So what was the point of this release?

And finally — and probably setting the record for the fastest point release of an OS in history — Apple brought out Mac OS X 10.6.1. Installed it and there are for me, no differences to speak of. Obviously the point of this release was to fix some bugs.

So what is the point of Apple’s point releases? In some cases it is bug fixes and we can all argue until we are blue in the face about whether the problem would be solved with better testing before release. We can also say that Apple gets away with bugs — and in particular security bugs — because of its relatively small installed base (compared to Windows). There is, however, more to it than just bug fixes.

Each time Apple brings out a full decimal point release, there are always new features. Sometimes they correct ‘omissions’ and other times they are new features. Often these omissions are for ‘good reason’. For example, tethering of iPhones was probably omitted for battery life reasons as much as software. Using a tethered iPhone on Bluetooth is going to run done the battery very quickly — which is, of course, why there has been emphasis on using USB tethering. Similarly, the lack of “cut and paste” in iPhone OS was easy to pick on and was easily fixed in 3.0.

As with all these features, they suck in a few more users and give them less reason to move. Compared with other OS’ and applications, Apple’s are constantly evolving.As an individual user this evolution is good for me because I have a reason to upgrade and use the most recent release. That is not to say that these new releases are always for the best reasons. Richard Stallman in a recent blog post “Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures“ – retracting his previous comments about MacOS having a back door to allow Apple to impose software changes  – went to cite cases where Apple’s upgrades have removed ‘features’ others were using.

This point release approach has not been lost on other manufacturers — Palm’s new Linux based phone OS WebOS has rushed through a number of releases to 1.2 before it even arrives in the UK next week. Arguably WebOS was released in an unfinished form but that is half the point of what why manufacturers are doing this because the other option is the stagnation of the Microsoft release cycle. I’m sure Microsoft will argue that they don’t need to make point releases every other month because of their great quality control — but the patches that get released every month seem to to suggest that is not the case.

Release 1.1

In the first release of this blog post as above, it seems that I confused some readers with my examples. The point I am trying to make is that while some ‘point releases’ are just bug fixes others incorporate new features. It is the idea of adding new features which is particularly interesting as it locks in more users and acknowledges the fact that an incomplete product was shipped in the first place. Another example is search in iPhone OS 3.0 which lets you search the contents of your iPhone or rather it doesn’t. It does let you search the records from the built in applications but not third party applications — there is no API for that but one can guess there will be in the future. Does that help?

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.

If this is true then a new content battle will start soon. On one side, there will be Amazon with its relationship with the publishers and its online store selling content through very neat but monochrome devices. On the other side, there will be Apple with its proven system of selling content in bite-sized pieces to handheld electronic devices.

It would be a safe bet to assume that an Apple eBook reader will not be a monochrome device – it will be a device that will show you the printed page as it is meant to look and allow you to watch video. Apple has already hinted at a way of distributing printed material with iTunes LP which is a file format that supports song lyrics, liner notes, photos, special features and videos. In the middle will be poor old Sony (again), who will be neither one thing or the other.

And finally – lest we forget – there will be Google. While the Google book deal may be having problems, we have to remember that Google has released Chrome OS,which sounds like an excellent operating system to run on a tablet. Its wish for an open standard may rescue Sony and help others.

So everyone seems to be lining up to ensure that print dies and is replaced by a tablet and an online store. So will the print version of PC Pro go the same way as photographic film next year? Probably not, but I would be surprised if you could thumb through a printed version in the stands at the London Olympics.

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).

What makes this game special is that it is completely implemented in HTML and Javascript. No Flash, Java or plugins were used. This is important and noteworthy because it shows where certain web browsers are going. We have a game here which implements high-quality interactive animated behaviour through a familiar interface - seeing what Google did with two-generation-old technology we will have to see what others can do with this. Modern web browsers don’t just have interface changes there are other changes. For example, HTML 5 allows client side storage in SQL databases. Now there are all sorts of potential security problems with that which developers will have to think about and users might need to understand but we are starting to see people use these facilities in websites – particularly iPhone ones as Safari on the iPhone supports the standard.

Obviously the issue is going to be what web browsers can do this. JSWars works in Firefox (and other Gecko web browsers). In principle it should work in Safari (and other WebKit browsers like Chrome) but doesn’t seem to. So that it can work, it has to use the new HTML canvas tag – and you know which web browser does not support it but there may be a way round that.

So if you want to waste some time on a Friday afternoon, you are going to have use Firefox.

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?

Before answering that question, what did I get for my £25? Apart from a DVD in a box not much to mention. Having spent an hour watching it installing I did notice a number of differences. Firstly, the upgrade liberated 9GB of space on my hard drive. In these days of terabyte hard drives that is not much – but to me with a MacBook Air with an 80GB hard drive that doubled my free space. Secondly, it does do various things more quickly. I did not use a stopwatch to do ‘before’ and ‘after’ timings but I have noticed that many of the standard applications are more responsive and the machine is quicker to wake from sleep. The Time Machine backup system does seem to be a lot faster. Thirdly there are a number of places where the interface has been tidied up. A few of the displays are neater and present information in a better way.

Some fuss has been made of changes ‘under the bonnet’. The main change that will get people chattering is that Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system – kind of. On every Mac (except for an Xserve), Snow Leopard boots a 32-bit kernel which can run 32 and 64-bit applications. If you want to boot your Mac into 64-bit mode then you can hold down the 6 and 4 keys at boot time to see what happens. If you have any third party drivers that are not 64-bit compatible then you may have some problems. Apple have shipped all but three of the standard applications as 64-bit versions but you will have to wait for other vendors to catch up. There does seem to be some speed advantages in running 64-bit applications – it is claimed that Safari is twice as fast in one benchmark – so may be some of the speed differences I have seen have come from 64-bit applications.

In terms of compatibility problems, I had one problem which was with the software for my Vodafone 3G dongle. Bizarrely I found the most recent software from Vodafone UK did not work but a slightly older version which was mentioned here did work. One other application (Chicken of the VNC) seems slightly more fragile than usual but everything else is fine.

Other changes such as Exchange support and improved QuickTime have not affected me as I don’t use Exchange at work (we use Google Apps) and the only time I use the QuickTime application is when someone says it has changed and I have a look at it. As such, I had a look at it this time and it has changed.

Snow Leopard really is a stepping stone from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.7. All the internal changes for a 64-bit system are to tell everyone that the next version is going to be 64-bit only. Certain new APIs are only available to 64-bit applications and Apple has said strongly to developers with this version that ‘we have done it and therefore you should’.

So was it worth £25? Yes – for me the speed improvements and the freeing up of disk space. In Windows terminology it is more than a Service Pack (which are free upgrades) and more like an ‘R2′ release (like Windows Server 2003 R2) which are not free. For PC users, it is a bit of side show before the main event.

Update: 4th September 2009

I just thought I would add a quick update to this post. Firstly, I have had no problems with the upgrade over the last four days. There was other thing that did not work (the GPGMail plugin and the author has said he can’t fix it which is a shame).

Secondly, thanks for the comments. I do agree with most of them as they agree with me! On disk space, it turns out that some disk space was reclaimed by leaving out old PowerPC code — Snow Leopard is Intel only. As for the printer drivers, it has not affected me and I don’t understand the policy of the printer manufacturers. A very old LaserJet 5 in my office is supported and by the sound of it, a relatively new Deskjet is not — though it might be with drivers from 10.5. On the other hand, it seems it can be cheaper to buy a new ink jet printer than cartridges for an old one!

Thirdly there was a lot of tweaks I did not mention and some of them do grow on you. It is also worthy of note that apart from the Microsoft Exchange improvements there are better links to Google Apps for Address Book and Calendars.

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.

The Spotify music library is also very good. Apart from the usual suspects being missing (no Led Zeppelin which took an age to come to iTunes) I found plenty to listen to. I did end up using it rather like Friends Reunited — looking up music I had listened to at school like To Our Children’s Children’s Children and Close to The Edge. (I should point out I listened to these at school but they were released much earlier — I am not quite that old). I also managed to reappraise Goldie (it didn’t take long) and introduce my children to odd novelties of my youth such as The Laughing Gnome, Doctorin’ the Tardis and Star Trekkin.Not bought the premium edition — I can put up with the adverts. You can pay 99p to get an advert free day or £9.99 for the month

The question is whether Spotify can make music downloads work? After all there were MP3 players before the iPod and there are other music download services. In same way as the tell tale white headphone cables started appearing around the place, I keep seeing Spotify.  On a recent holiday, the hotel bar was using it to (illegally) play music and many people said they were using it at home. Spotify really could be the application that converts other people.

What will make the difference for me is the iPhone app. The idea of being able to go to the kitchen, put my iPhone in the dock and listen to whatever I want is really compelling. There is music I have not listened to since I was at school and I may never listen to it again (Sabbath Bloody Sabbath) but the ability to easily pull it up on demand is truly compelling.

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.

All of these browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I use Safari as it is fast but I also use Firefox because with extensions like Firebug and Selenium, it is great for web development. The big problem is all of these browsers are slightly different and these differences make producing websites harder to develop. Of course, we could all just pick the lowest common denominator and produce websites that work in IE6 only. In fairness, Chrome and Safari are reasonable similar as they are both based on WebKit. Also, most Firefox versions are close but there seems to be little similarity between Internet Explorer versions. We don’t know what Rockmelt is based on — it may be Gecko as per Firefox — but we know it will be subtly different.

What we all want is a fast web browser but that is something we don’t seem to have. Apart from tabbed browsing, it is really hard to think of a really useful new feature in a web browser for the last five years. I always wondered if I somehow managed to resurrect a copy of Netscape 1.1 would it be blindingly fast compared with any of the current browsers. Probably not and it would almost certainly be incapable of rendering any web site I pointed it at. Web browsers remain slower than we would all like. Some of this is down to the person who implements the site — there can be many ways of implementing a page in modern HTML/CSS, some of which are fast and some of which are slow. Again there are tools which help developers analyse this — Yslow and PageSpeed — but if the browers were faster we wouldn’t have to worry about such things.

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…

Firstly, let us look at the News Corp story. News Corp made a loss of $3.4 billion to the year ending June 2009. In the US, News Corp has had other bad press — it has to pay $300 million damages to another company. There are some exceptional things in the loss — a write down for MySpace which News Corp bought in another blaze of publicity four years ago. It seems that most of the problems are arising from a down turn in advertising revenue which has been caused by a recession.

Of course, in old media if there was a recession, your advertising revenue went down, you printed less pages and sold them to less people. As the publications were smaller, you shed staff as well to cut costs. In new media, when the advertising goes down you could produce fewer pages but the chances are the same number of people will read them. However, compared with old media you have no printing costs and distribution costs which should be going down.

Secondly, is anyone actually going to pay for ‘mass market’ content? The short answer is ‘no’ because of the way that people find that content. At a publishing conference last year, someone from The Times Online said that the biggest proportion of traffic to the web site came from Google. Unless Google were to change, you introduce barriers and your content does not get listed which means you don’t get the traffic. Even if your charging site is listed, users will learn and they will not click on your links, which will lower your ranking and you will lose traffic.

So if you introduce charging, you will lose the traffic you need for the charging to work. In narrower B2B markets, people do pay for web content already because the content is unique and the users can see the benefit. It is doubtful that will work in the mass market.

Lastly, how are News Corp going to get the money? Obviously you are going to do it via micropayments. Micropayment platforms come in two forms: one where you put credit somewhere which you then make micropayments from; and one where the micropayment comes directly from your bank account. The former platforms have been successfully used outside of the web — the Oyster Card on London transport, for example — but from Mondex to Barclaycard Pulse they have failed in the mass market.

It seems unlikely that real micropayments from your bank account is going to happen any time soon. This is the real problem. If The Sun wants to charge me for the latest celebrity footage or PC Pro wants to charge you to read the latest iPhone review, how are they going to get the money? It seems unlikely I will charge up my ‘Sun Micropayments’ account (or even my News Corp one) for one thing.

If News Corp wants my money they have to find a way of getting it off me which is, at the moment, very hard. Things might change here but it will take some time for a platform to appear. The payment industry is littered with platforms which went nowhere — anyone remember Secure Electronic Transactions (SET), which is how we were all going to pay for things on the web?

So is charging for content is just a good way of burying bad news? Probably. After all, when the recession ends and the advertising revenue returns — it may well be business as usual. And everyone will have forgotten about what was said this week.

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.

In the middle of the week, we had the story that ITV is to sell Friends Reunited to the Beano for £25 million pounds – a loss of £150 million in four years.

I don’t suppose we should be surprised by this. After all, ITV has a large number of problems which are not related to social networking and it does need to concentrate on its core market. Friends Reunited was never really a social networking site in the way that other sites were.

I will admit I did register on it myself but was disappointed that few of my school colleagues were there. One of them did contact me but he did not seem to have changed from school. Maybe that was Friends Reunited’s problem – you stay in contact with people from school for a reason and those you lose contact with, you do so for a reason.

And now today, Twitter and Facebook have apparently been taken down by the Russians. Personally I don’t believe it. I think there are two much more plausible theories.

Firstly I think it was the Iranians trying to take down the sites after their involvement in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections. Don’t forget, it happened the day after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president.

Secondly it has been raining and all those potentially suicidal teens could not go out and were adding to their Facebook and Twitter pages. After all, the summer weather has been dreadful and all those teens sitting at home must have overwhelmed the social networking services.