At Home with John and Debbie

… and Sandy reminds me about Twitter.
Twitter is a peculiarly simple thing. If you ignore the technology, it’s basically micro-blogging. That is, it lets you publish a short piece of text, which gets a timestamp, and is broadcast for anyone to see. And that’s pretty much it. An individual entry is known as a […]

I mean who wouldn’t. Look at that cheeky ‘hot secretary’ smile. The saucy bob; the perfectly curled eyelashes, and that pencil behind the ear denoting efficiency. Hubba!
Sandy, at IWantSandy.com is a ‘virtual personal assistant’. Really, ’she’ is a cross between ‘Eliza’ the old and unconvincing AI conversation program, and an online calendar, contact list […]

In wondered what the details of the Kindle’s main file format, AZW, was. It’s well know that it’s based on the common .mobi format, which has been used by MobiPocket for eBooks for some time. But where is that format documented? Nowhere public, it seems.
There are enough interested parties to be working it out, […]

Since talking about the Kindle the other day, I’ve been reading articles and comments, and thinking about eBooks some more.
A pervasive attitude is one of reverence towards the book’s form. You can’t replace a book, people say, because the shape of a book, it’s cover art, its smell. All these things are important, they […]

I’ve written a fair few TCP/IP servers in my time. In C, always based around the accept() and fork() model. In Java, both using the similar accept()/Thread.start() model, and with the schmancy NIO select() approach.
Now, really, most of us don’t have to worry about the massive loads that make process spawning overheads or thread […]

Amazon has launched its eBook reader, and it’s called ‘Kindle’.
It’s a nifty gadget, and it throws up a lot of questions about what it is we expect from books, and what we can expect in future.
To get the basics out of the way, it costs US$400, for now, it’s about the size of […]

Are you interested in power kites? Did you cobble together a Genetic Algorithm project for your degree? Did you also study Neural Networks (although the maths was a bit tricky)?
Are you my doppelganger?
Would you therefore be interested in a paper from the University of Sussex in which they breed neural networks to fly power […]

I ran out of space on my laptop, so I put a new disk drive in. Too tight to buy Ghost or anything like that, I elected to migrate my old stuff using Open Source tools. All the tools I needed were on SystemRescueCd.

I did hit a few issues, and I didn’t find an […]

The thing I like about O’Reilly books is that they get straight to the point. They’re not too dry — there is wit and readability, but not at the expense of conciseness. The antithesis of this is the Idiot’s Guide series, which patronises the reader with overlong explanations of simple concepts.
And then there’s Why’s […]

I have spent way to much of my precious time picking holes in the iPod.
On Saturday (after watching Leamington scrape an FA Vase victory away against Croydon, then getting a meal in London waiting for our discount train tickets to become valid), we passed the Apple Store on Regent St. and popped in to […]