How tech loosens our grip on reality

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

We cannot really understand yet how much technology has changed our lives. Those of us in our forties or older have the advantage of having seen a shift from an essentially analogue world to a digital one. We have seen interpersonal communication move from a pipe dream to a daily, second-by-second reality.

Today’s yoof have grown up in a world of Facebook, instant email, IM, smartphones in their pocket. They cannot function without an IP connection. It is more important to them than food. It is the new era drug that each of us consume. They know no different.

Thus it is particularly sad to see what happens when it goes wrong. And two very lovely people’s lives get turned upside down. Go over to the Vexentricity blog and read how a dependency on technology has ripped a family apart. And ask yourself this: honestly, how close are you to that reality too? And is that somewhere you want to be, or feel you ought to be? Or even should be?

Why I’m deleting Adobe from my PC

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now. (more…)

How a wonky DIMM ruined my server upgrade

Friday, December 16th, 2011

As you may be able to see in the highest-resolution version of the snapshot above (click to enlarge), it’s not every day one comes across a physically distorted DIMM.

This is one of a set of eight 4GB sticks, originally intended to boost the performance of a Hyper-V host machine at Ratcliffe & Brown Wines & Spirits, the subject of a forthcoming PC Pro Business Clinic. The server upgrade wasn’t part of the subject, but it pretty quickly turned into a source of aggravation – this bendy SIMM is not immediately apparent until it’s placed on a flat surface, and I tend to land DIMMs on a lump of textile, like a mouse mat or a rucksack; anything but a conductive perfectly flat plane like a rack-mounted server lid.

Surprisingly, it sat in the DIMM slot perfectly well. Unsurprisingly, the server (a Dell PowerEdge 2970) spat the dummy the minute power was restored, quite accurately complaining about “unusable memory” in the scrolling front-panel display.

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How do we make the public understand programming?

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

In response to a recent survey telling us that schools are getting the teaching of Information Technology all wrong by not including “computer programs” in the syllabus, the BBC has offered up seven questions about computer programs. I urge you to take the quick quiz and then come back here when you’re done.

I scored five out of seven. I don’t know the correct HTML for inserting an image, and I couldn’t work out which subset of acronyms the question with GNU in it was driving at, mainly because the preceding five questions were not about “computer programs” at all; they were about the history of the people who happened to be involved in the invention of programming, either as a general concept (Jaquard) or as an incredibly early implementation (Hopper and COBOL).

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Steve Jobs’ last laugh: good riddance to Flash?

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Steve Jobs isn’t here to enjoy his triumph, but this week’s announcement that Adobe has stopped developing the mobile version of the Flash player would undoubtedly have delighted him. The title of yesterday’s Guardian story says it all: “Adobe kills mobile Flash, giving Steve Jobs the last laugh”. The first comment is even starker: “Flash – good riddance!”

So why has Adobe taken the decision? Is this really the end of the road for Flash? And is it really good news?

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Why you shouldn’t let builders anywhere near your Wi-Fi

Friday, October 14th, 2011

I’ve just had a proper argument. My circle of friends and even a few colleagues at Dennis will tell you, this isn’t unusual of itself, so I won’t do the down the pub routine that relies heavily on the phrase “So then I said…”. I’ll give you the helicopter view.

It was an argument about Wi-Fi. I went to a meeting to go through re-wiring a retail shop to accommodate a CCTV system, the sales PCs, the PDQ card-payment setup, and the email workstation. There was also a couple of new ventures, in the shape of kiosks for customers to look through the website and ask about styles, sizes and colours not visible in the shop.

At this meeting were the proprietors, me, and a jobbing interior decorator. The list of snags, water leaks and bits of paint and the like was long and diverse: then we came to the wiring. Just a small shop, but very quickly we arrived at a total of 15 locations. It’s also an old building, which means that it won’t be falling down any time soon; but conversely, drilling holes is going to be a proper rufty-tufty builder’s job, one I am very glad I won’t be undertaking. Looking at the job in hand, the jobbing builder decided to propose a different approach: Why not just put in wireless?

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Eight of the best projects at Intel’s Research Day

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

I’ve just got back from one of Intel’s occasional research days. The last one I went to – in Santa Clara, California last June – showcased some fascinating projects, including wireless power, a processor with 48 cores and a home energy sensor that could automatically identify when particular devices were switched on and off.

None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights. (more…)

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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Windows 8, Flash and Silverlight: some very bad news

Monday, September 19th, 2011

In amongst the flood of details emerging about Windows 8 is the news that the IE 10 browser in the lightweight Metro front-end won’t support plugins. In the scheme of things this might sound pretty small beer, but it’s hugely significant for the long term future of Rich Internet Application (RIA) development and for the web in general.

Most immediately it’s another kick in the teeth for Flash, still reeling from Apple’s iOS ban. It’s not exactly a death blow, as the Windows 8 desktop version of IE will still support the player, but it’s clearly another major disincentive for developers who believed Flash was as universal as HTML.

Understandably all the focus has been on Flash, but even more telling and extraordinary is the realisation that the new no-plugin policy means that the Metro browser won’t even support Microsoft’s own cross-platform RIA technology, Silverlight!

So just what is going on?

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The everyday computing behind F1

Friday, September 9th, 2011

It’s properly, seriously hot here at Monza. This is, many would say, the most theatrical of the Formula 1 weekends and in the 30-plus degree heat, there’s a vast amount of technology on show. Most of it’s related to making cars go round at over 200mph, and this is the province of items like a solid tungsten nose-weight, or a £200,000 steering wheel — and that’s what you’ll hear about when the big TV stations walk around the pit lanes or chat with the drivers and managers.

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