Simon’s Blog

My last blog entry about getting kids into programming languages got me thinking about the programming languages I’ve learnt over the years. I’ll be writing an entry about that in a few days. However, thinking about programming languages made me wonder what the most popular programming languages are in the Open Source […]

Personal computers are amazing devices. They’re “wicked fast”, have amazing graphics and are connected to the Internet. There is a fabulous array of programming languages and tools available – just a download away, at zero cost. I can’t think of a more exciting time in the history of the personal computer […]

Back in mid-October, Blu-ray was looking like it was going down such a restrictive route that it was in danger of becoming irrelevant, even before its launch. However, the Blu-ray group has just decided to take a step in the right direction by agreeing to incorporate Mandatory Managed Copy. This means you will, […]

A couple of syndication protocol updates hit the blogosphere today. Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems announced that the Atom Syndication Format is done; and that the Atom Publishing Protocol is very close to being done. Ray Ozzie of Microsoft announced a draft specification for an extension to RSS called SSE (Simple Sharing […]

Reviews of the Xbox 360 are starting to come in. And the question has been raised: should you buy an Xbox 360? The New York Post says:

It’s an amazing console… Plugged into a high-definition television set with a booming sound system, it’s amazing, a wonderland of sights and music.
However, if you […]

When entertaining visitors from the US in London, I find they often want to eat Indian food. The place I usually take them to is one of the best (possibly the best) Indian restaurant in London at the moment: The Cinnamon Club.
The restaurant is in Westminster - where Big Ben and the Houses of […]

Is it just me, or is the forthcoming addition of video to Skype looking like too little, too late? A couple of months ago, I pretty much stopped using Skype. The reason? MSN caught up and then surpassed Skype in terms of voice quality. And, of course, MSN can already do […]

Well the rumour is that Google is going to buy Riya (the face photo searching company), for something like $40M. Is it true? No idea. If it is, it’s pretty interesting. It’s been obvious for a long time that extracting semantic meaning from unstructured data is an important area; and […]

Tim Bray has a great post about the progress being made with Netbeans. He likes it a lot. However, he’s having problems learning some parts of the interface. Quoting Tim,
The NetBeans team loves icons to a fault, and there are a bunch of new CVS-related icons that now hang off your project […]

So - we’re on the verge of the launch of a new class of server. These new servers will deal with large numbers of threads in parallel. Sun’s new Niagara (also known as UltraSPARC T1) based servers will be first onto the market - the single CPU boxes will be able to deal […]