Social media is innovating software and systems architecture

Twitter bought Blacktype in July 2011 and as part of that acquisition got hold of Storm. This is a press release detailing the publication of Storm’s code on Github.

They position Storm as a parallel messaging, disk less system.

M Davey asks if this has much use in Capital Markets here.

I wonder if ‘Time Series Order’ might not be a serious inhibitor to its adoption, but Chief Engineer, Nathan Marz on his blog seems to think it could be part of the answer to a large number of problems. …

The Digital Divide in the UK

While researching another blog article, I was pointed at the ONS’ Statistical Bulletin, “Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2011“. This reports that 77% (up from 73% last year) of UK Households have internet access, and 79% of internet users think they can protect their privacy. (Yeah right!)

They ask those who do not have the internet “Why not?” and the reasons are, price of equipment, lack of skills or lack of need. I’d be interested in those who find the cost of connection too high? …

Software Migration

I had reason to revist some of the thinking behind my book on Software Migration, the key lesson of which is that the drivers and hence the tactics for software migrations vary. I worked with colleagues at Sun Microsystems in writing a book, which while called “Migrating to the Solaris Operating System”, and thus maybe past its best, it had a tag line of “The discipline of UNIX-to-UNIX Migrations”. It’s available to buy on Amazon, or possibly available on the.net, the link I published in 2011, seems to have gone. The rest of this blog, highlights the super strategies and lists two gotchas. …

A Free Digital Society, with Richard Stallman

So I went to hear Richard Stallman speak at an ORG meeting. He was late, and couldn’t be contacted because he doesn’t use a mobile phone, or not one that you can make calls to.

He started with the recording rules and distribution rules. Any films must be open format friendly, and published under CC-ND terms. There are to be no pictures posted to Facebook, of him presumably, anyway his advice is to “Unfriend Facebook Today”. …

The new ‘delicious’, startup pains

Delicious, the social bookmark site was taken over by avos.com during the week. They have rapidly refreshed the javascripts used for storing one’s bookmarks directly from the browser and are communicating with their new users via their beta blog. There remain some problems with the Firefox Addin but the Chrome extension seems pretty solid now. 4th Oct 2011 …

Orange, Android and POP mail.

I changed my mobile phone recently and like most people there is a period between getting it and being able to do what you want and I have been struggling. The new phone is an HTC Android, provided by Orange. Orange have put a mail client app on the phone, which you can’t uninstall and want to charge me £5.00 per month to use. Given that there are free mail clients on the Android Marketplace and one comes free with the phone from HTC who is going to pay this outrageous tax?

This attempted scam has undone (some of the ) two years worth of great support  and service that I have had. This has not been helped by the fact that the Orange Technical Support have a shit script when speaking to them about this. It took me 4 calls over 30 days to find someone who knew that to avoid this fee, you just need to avoid using the app.

I know it’s not just Orange though. …

Censoring the Internet

In August, earlier this month, Vince Cable announced the Government’s response to the Hargreaves Review aka the Google review into intellectual property law. Some of the UK’s IT companies, including Google together with many economists, strongly believe that the current intellectual property laws in the UK inhibit innovation and growth and persuaded Cameron to launch a review into the intellectual property laws. The review was chaired and directed by Professor Hargreaves and it published its report “Digital Opportunity, A review of intellectual property and growth” earlier in the year. This article looks at the Hargreaves Review’s recommendations and reactions to the report and comments on Cable’s speech which de-committed the Government from pursuing the web bocking clauses of the Digital Economy Act. …