Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Ribbons and Bangles and Bows

by AdminTim

…. or maybe Knots

An interesting little article on the up and coming ribbonification of the Win 8 Explorer

Windows 8 Explorer Ribbonification

Especially in comparison to the pending adoption of the HUD interface by Canonical

Ubuntu HUD (ooo look, a linux article on the beeb)

Interestingly these developments seem to fly in the face of the prevailing assumption that in the future we’ll all be pokeing our fondleslabs, as neither interface seems to be particularly touch friendly.

My own takes is that adding the ribbon to explorer seems a fairly pointless change, esp as it is going to be hidden most of the time. It takes up too much screen real estate on a desk top, yet too little for touch interfaces. And it doesn’t help explorer “power users” (if there is such a thing) much, as they are more likely to use the the CLI anyway….

This week I am mostly…

by AdminTim

listening to…..

Punk & Poetry by The King Blues (punk, ska, love songs and agitprop)

reading….

The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (I finished reading American Gods recently and thought ‘God thats a lot like Soldiers in the Mist’ turns out Gaiman is Wolfes biggest fan)

Little known fact GW is one of the engineers who designed the Pringles making machine.

trying out…..

Protobufs
Hadoop
Different linux desktops (and despite self quite liking Gnome 3)

thinking about buying…..

a Raspberry Pi

Scala and the Guardian

by AdminTim

Here is a very interesting article on migrating to Scala from Java, not only on the technical gotcha’s (readability, null handling and what parts of Scala functionality they avoided), but also in the route they took in getting general acceptance of the new language within the organisation.

InfoQ Guadian Scala

BTW I have read the Odersky book they mention, and it is very good.

This makes me sad

by AdminTim

Microsoft shafts Nokia

I’m still using (and loving) my N900 after suffering 2 consecutive HTC WinMo phone. I was quite looking forward to the Meego phone, but I’m not going to buy into another dead end.

I’ll stick with my Nokia until the contract expires then see, maybe WebOS maybe Android but definately not Nokia…..

Sad

Patent Mexican Standoff

by AdminTim

Here is an interesting little article about the current Mexican Standoff between the various vendors in the Smartphone market , and the products that would be directly affected if the relevant complaint is upheld….

You’ll notice that there is no line between HTC and Microsoft, that because HTC agreed a patent protection deal a while back , probably with the proviso that they keep making Win 7 Phones.

Sadly this isn’t even the half of it what with the infamous Oracle/Google case.

and even Kodak(!?) getting in on the act 1, and 2

This looks like turning onto a mess of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce“-ian proportions, and you can’t help but wonder where it end up, especially as the US patent system seems to be held in such high esteem by developers.

I’ll finish up with an oldish post from Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz about patent wrangles, as viewed from the inside

A new programming language for Xmas

by AdminTim

What with all of the FUD and uncertainty around Oracle’s ongoing transformation of Java into it’s own version of .Net, and what with the, xmas book season creeping up on us, the jobbing programmer thoughts turn to what new programming book to order next for your Kindle/iPad/whatever ebook reader/dead tree edition.

Helpfully DZone has come up with a list of “up and coming” programming lanuages for 2011

9 Programming Languages to watch

* Go figures (go figure?) fairly prominently
* Inexplicably Lua (which has been knocking around for ages, there’s even a Psion version) seems to be quite popular, though I suspect a lot, of this might be because it’s the scripting for World of Warcraft

* Scala seems to be winning the battle of the JVM languages, over Clojure and Groovy
* Erlang gets mentioned, but not Haskell

Of course, for the bleeding edge of you there’s always…

* Rust from Mozilla – which is so bleeding edge it’s still in alpha
* Fantom – for meta JVM and CLR portability
* Mirah – seems like a way of writing Java bytecode using Ruby, from the chap who brought you JRuby.

New Phone …… New Posts

by AdminTim

Time passes and tech rolls on. My little HTC Touch Diamond has just been replace by a nice new Nokia N900.

Over all It’s been quite a nice experience, a perfectly acceptable little keyboard some nice little apps and with a switch from Orange to T-Mobile RECEPTION AT HOME !!!!

I’ll post some more as I go on.

The best laid plans

by AdminTim

Well, if the intention of getting this little eee pc is to post to this blog more often, then I guess it’s a complete waste of money. In practice it’s kinda turned into rather an evening hog. Yes it’s small and I have mange to use it while up in bed without too many disparaging remarks from Mrs Grepppo, but in all other respects it’s taken up quite a bit of evening time to get where I am now,

And where is that, I here you ask….

Well so far I have:

1.configured a proper KDE desktop (easy)
2.got a new SD card to run apps off, found that the limitations of FAT mean that was impossible, then had reformat it to ext2 to make this possible
3.installed java jdk

This latter took most of the time and was painful. I guess I’m more used to Solaris and Red Hat forks (well Mandrake/Mandriva) so I thought that setting up a jdk would be just as simple as untarring the file, setting the paths and permissions. Bob’s your aunties live in lover …JDK.
Well it appears it’s not that simple, and Debian forks (such as Ubuntu and Xandros) expect thiing done in a certain way. Unfortunately the way I wanted to run the JDK off the SD card didn’t really fit in with this,

Well, I eventually managed to get my repositories to pull the jdk 5 packages via apt-get onto my precious hard drive space. So it works, but it still leaves a bad taste.

Next up, Postgres or MySql, and this time no apt-get.