Five years at IBM, and a new start

August 6th, 2008

Five years ago today: 6 August 2003, 9am. I turned up at main reception in IBM Hursley Park for my first day. I was excited, dressed far smarter than I have for work since, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to be doing.

Five years later, today is the (official!) start of my new job in IBM, and a shift in my career: I’ve joined the “Emerging Technology Services” team.

I tried to find a good description of ETS on the interwebs that I could link to, but not had any luck. I found a description on a few intranet pages, which I’ve managed to mangle below:

Part of IBM Software Group’s Strategy and Technology Division, ETS focuses on emerging technologies and how they can be used to meet business needs. They work on customer problems to create innovative, bespoke technical solutions, which can include “architectural consultancy, technical solutions, demos, proof of concepts, pilot systems, and reference architectures” combining experience of working with customers with first-of-a-kind technologies.

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A netbook ahead of it’s time

August 2nd, 2008

Psion Netbook (left) and EEE PC (right)
I had assumed that “netbook” was a recent term that grew out of the evolution of UMPCs, MIDs, origami and EEE PC clones. And in my defence, the wikipedia article for “Netbook” says:

The term netbook was introduced by Intel in February 2008 to describe a category of small-sized, low-cost, light weight, lean function subnotebooks optimized for Internet access and core computing functions

I didn’t realise that the term has been around for a while though, until I came across an eight or nine year old bit of mobile tech history in Roo’s old office – a Psion Netbook.

Netbooks: Then and nowI’ve had a couple of Psions before (a Siena and a Series 5), but I’d never heard of the Netbook before.

It’s a similar size to my EEE PC, although a little heavier. It has a decent-sized keyboard, a 7.7″ 640×480 colour backlit screen, Opera 3.62 (with support for HTML 3.2), a Java 1.1.8 runtime, and a bunch of PIM-type apps. No bluetooth or WiFi, but it does have RS232 and infrared.

I’ve got no idea what is gonna happen to it – I will ask if I can have it, although to be honest this is largely for geek nostalgia, as I’m not sure what I’d practically do with it. 🙂

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last.fm for books?

August 1st, 2008

my 'goodreads' bookshelf

I’m rubbish at choosing books to read, so recommendations from friends who are better read than I am are very useful. I enjoy using last.fm as a way to discover new music that I might like, so thought I’d look to see if you could get the same for books.

I’ve found two sites that I quite like:

goodreads
This is a lovely site. Track the different books you have read, and are reading. Sort them into different “bookshelves” if you want to group them.

It’s got a ton of RSS feeds, and it’s focus absolutely seems to be to make it easier to track what your friends have read and are reading, what they like and don’t like.

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Revisiting a Windows GUI for CurrentCost

July 28th, 2008

tweaking the CurrentCost GUII spent a couple of evenings last month knocking together a quick example of a Windows GUI for the data you get from CurrentCost home electricity use monitors. And then promptly put it to one side and kinda forgot about it.

As a quick recap, I created a Windows app which grabbed the history data from the CurrentCost serial output, and drew a few bar graphs from it – to represent the hours, days, and months data. The app also persisted the history data in the user’s “Application Data” folder, so that older data is kept by the GUI even after it is lost by the CurrentCost meter itself.

I’m thinking about picking it up again, so spent a bit of time idea-storming what I could do with the code. These aren’t all my own ideas – they’re a random collection of ideas and notes taken from discussions with others. I’m posting them here for feedback – new ideas are welcome, as are comments on the usefulness of the stuff I’ve suggested.

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Improving TwitToday – more Today Screen coding

July 23rd, 2008

Twitter client for Windows MobileApart from adding the ability to initiate an internet connection, my Twitter widget for Windows Mobile Today screens is still virtually the same code as I wrote in a few hours overnight at the Over The Air hackday.

Which isn’t great – as I know there have been a bunch of people waiting for me to make some fixes and add some basic features.

Tonight I had a bit of time to spare, so I finally dug out the code to start making a few improvements:

  • Background worker thread
    Today screen widgets are compiled into DLLs. They aren’t a separate executable, and are run by the Today Screen in the Today screen’s (i.e. explorer.exe’s) flow of execution. When the code tries to post to twitter.com, explorer can’t do anything else until that’s finished.

    That might even be tolerable with most websites, but with twitter – which is known to fall over from time to time! – it means TwitToday could effectively hang your phone for ages until the HTTP post timed-out.

    Not good. Now it does all the HTTP work in a background thread, so you can get on with other stuff while it tries to send your tweet.

  • SIP support
    This was asked for a lot. The Today screen doesn’t include the button to show/hide the on-screen stylus/finger keyboard. So if your mobile doesn’t have a keyboard, TwitToday wasn’t much use.

    I’ve added a setting now that lets you programmatically show the SIP keyboard when you tap on the text box.

If you want to try the new version, you can download it from here. If you want to see how I did it, read on.

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Who can we trust with children?

July 20th, 2008

I took Grace to a birthday party yesterday morning for one of her friends. It was at a soft-play centre in Southampton – in many ways, an ideal place to have a birthday party for a group of excited three and four year olds. Except, as we went in, I noticed a sign:

“In the interest of CHILD PROTECTION, photography is NOT PERMITTED”

It’s such a shame – because when it’s your own child’s birthday party, of course you want to get photos of them playing with their friends on their big day. But his parents weren’t allowed to do that. Because of “child protection”.

It’s not to say that I’ve not seen this before – all of the soft-play centres I’ve taken Grace to have the same rules, and we had the same thing at Grace’s birthday party in the Marwell centre. But I noticed it more because it reminded me of a discussion from Thursday night. Thursday night was a training session for a youth mentoring programme that I’m a volunteer with, and someone mentioned something they’d seen discussed in an interview with Esther Rantzen on GMTV. The story goes that a parent was arrested for taking photographs of their own children in a public playground. It sounded pretty shocking – over the last few years, I’ve probably taken hundreds of photos of my girls in our local park, and I wouldn’t think of that as being even suspicious, let alone something warranting arrest!

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Fun with MQTT

July 18th, 2008

I’ve been quiet for the past month or so, as I was keeping my head down to finish a project at work. It’s done now, so now is a good time to crawl back out of my cave and share a bit about what I’ve been up to. This was for a customer who outsourced a software development project to us.

Some quick background: MQTT is a publish/subscribe messaging protocol that IBM products like WebSphere Message Broker can speak.

Our customer wanted an MQTT library written for the real-time embedded firmware that runs on their products. This client library needed to provide the API of the MQTT specification, implemented within the constraints of an embedded platform with significant resource constraints, and only a subset of the standard C OS functions (e.g. no multi-threading, no dynamic memory allocation, no malloc/realloc/calloc, etc.).

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Paying for a charity

June 24th, 2008

a prize from Mashed

I’ve mentioned a few times here before that I am a trustee of a youth volunteering charity. We started it a few years ago, and do a lot of very cool stuff with thousands of young people across the region.

And this isn’t cheap. Staff are the biggest expense, followed by rent and an array of other bills.

A common question I get from friends not familiar with charity funding is “where do you get the money from?”.

The short answer is “anywhere we can!”.

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