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Category Archives: Tech

BCS Lovelace Lecture now available online

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The video and slides from the lecture about digital companions that I wrote about here are now available to view at this link: http://zest4streaming.co.uk/bcs/lovelace2010/lovelace2010.htm

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Windows on ATMs – a good choice?

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

If you’re building something as secure and reliable as a cash machine, the choice of operating system is an important one. Something that’s always crashing, prone to security flaws and viruses would not be your weapon of choice. Not always, apparently.

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Google unveils Android App creator for all

Monday, July 12, 2010

Google have launched a tool that will anyone (anyone, not just developers) to build applications for the Android mobile phone platform. All the details are here. It looks like a very powerful tool: I’ve signed up for access, which is being rolled out incrementally by Google as it’s a Beta program.

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Nice to meet you! Digital companions are coming…

Thursday, July 8, 2010

I went to a lecture yesterday given by the excellent and entertaining Yorick Wilks, in which he explained the concept and evolution of companions – digital agents that accompany humans through their lives, helping them and improving the quality of their lives. The project he described combines face recognition in photography, speech recognition and natural [...]

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Java 4Ever

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Thanks to Neil at Major Players for this.

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Clever, clever Google

Monday, June 28, 2010

How many times have I sent an email and forgotten to include the promised attachment? Google has introduced (on its gmail client) a check for the dreaded missing attachment, and this morning I therefore received this message when I hit ‘send’. I’m now eager to find other expressions I can include in my emails that [...]

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WordPress 3.0 now out

Saturday, June 19, 2010

I’ve just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress, which was officially released last week. I haven’t looked at the new features very much yet, but the upgrade process was quite smooth. Because I was being cautious, here’s what I did: – Backed up my database using mysqldump – Made a new directory [...]

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Android phones – first impressions

Monday, June 14, 2010

I’ve been using an HTC Desire for almost a week now, so I’ve got enough knowledge of how it workable and how it compares to other phones like the iPhone to write this short piece. First of all, it’s a great device in its own right. Very fast, a great screen, the on screen keyboard [...]

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Are projects actually supposed to be fun?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

When Wembley Stadium was being built, I remember all sorts of media stories about how badly the project was going, how incompetent the company doing the work must be, and what a disaster it was. Now we have this fantastic stadium, that we’ll be using for decades. Even my recent new kitchen was painful. Often, [...]

Also filed in e-commerce | | Comments (0)

Magento on OS X – Snow Leopard and php

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how to get Magento running on an OS X system, using the Entropy php distribution. When I wrote that I was running OS X version 10.5, and I’ve since updated to Snow Leopard: OS X version 10.6. This has presented some problems, as Entropy is not [...]

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