A quiet revolution in UK government IT: open source ousting big-vendor lock-in

By tim, on February 3rd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

The most striking and surprising presentation at the Monki Gras developer event in London earlier this week was from two quietly spoken men from the UK government’s Cabinet Office. James Stewart and Matt Wall work on the Government Data Service (GDS), and what they are doing is revolutionary.

What is the GDS? “It’s a

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How to brew better software: The Monki Gras in London

By tim, on February 2nd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

I attended The Monki Gras in London yesterday, a distinctive developer event arranged by the analyst firm RedMonk.

This was not only a developer event, with the likes of Andre Charland and Dave Johnson from the PhoneGap team at Adobe, Mike Milinkovich the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and Jason Hoffman with

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Storage Spaces coming to Windows 8 client as well as server

By tim, on January 6th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Steven Sinofsky has posted on the Building Windows 8 blog, making it clear that this feature is coming to the Windows 8 client as well as to Windows Server 8.

I took a hands-on look at Storage Spaces back in October.

The feature lets you add and remove physical drives from a pool

…continue reading Storage Spaces coming to Windows 8 client as well as server

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang beats the drum for GPU computing

By tim, on December 14th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

In his keynote at the GPU Technology Conference here in Beijing NVIIDA CEO Jens-Hsun Huang presented the simple logic of GPU computing. The main constraint on computing is power consumption, he said:

Power is now the limiter of every computing platform, from cellphones to PCs and even datacenters.

CPUs are optimized for single-threaded computing

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Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 with Office 365 migration wizard and retro Outlook Mini

By tim, on December 6th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has released Exchange 2010 SP2, which I have successfully installed on my small system.

There is a description of what’s new here. The most notable features are the Hybrid Configuration Wizard for setting up co-existence between on-premise Exchange and Office 365, and Outlook Mini for low-end phones with basic browsers.

A hybrid

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Twilio: programmable telephony, SMS comes to the UK, Europe

By tim, on October 26th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Web telephony provider twilio, which is based in San Francisco, has today announced its first international office, in London. You can now purchase UK telephone numbers at a cost of $1.00 per month, or Freephone numbers for $2.00 per month.

Twilio is not in competition with Skype or Google Voice; rather it offers

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Delphi XE2 FireMonkey for Windows, Mac, iOS: great idea, but is it usable?

By tim, on October 24th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

I am sure all readers of this blog will know by now that Delphi XE2 (and RAD Studio XE2) has been released, and that to the astonishment of Delphi-watchers it supports not only 64-bit compilation on Windows, but also cross-platform apps for Windows, Mac OS X and even iOS for iPhone and iPad (with

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Subversion 1.7 released: just one .svn directory per working copy

By tim, on October 12th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Yesterday saw the 1.7 release of Subversion, the widely used open source version control system. It is a significant release with many new features, bug-fixes and performance improvements, and I suggest reading the release notes or complete change log. One thing to highlight is that the default working copy metadata storage is now a

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Sneak Peeks at Adobe MAX 2011 … and that annoying updater

By tim, on October 5th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

The Sneaks session at Adobe MAX is always fun as well as giving some insight into what is coming from the company, though note that these are research projects and there is no guarantee that any will make it into products.

This time we also got commentary from Rainn Wilson, an actor in

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Adobe to ship Flash 11 and AIR 3, repositions Flash vs HTML 5

By tim, on September 21st, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Adobe has announced that Flash 11 and AIR 3 will ship in early October.

There are significant changes in this release.

Flash gets Stage 3D (previously codenamed Molehill), a set of low-level 3D APIs, GPU accelerated where hardware allows, which will make console-like 3D graphics and games possible in Flash. Stage 3D wraps DirectX

…continue reading Adobe to ship Flash 11 and AIR 3, repositions Flash vs HTML 5

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