A sad weeks news in computing

Yes - just about everyone is mourning the passing of Steve Jobs, but less public fervour has been made of Dennis Ritchie's recent death.

Just about everyone who has learnt to programme at University will have been introduced to the C programming language in the seminal text, know affectionally as Kernighan & Ritchie, I have my precious copy still in near mint condition with a sticky-backed plastic cover on to strengthen it, alongside it sits my other precious book, The UNIX programming environment by Briane Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of whom have paid their very personal respects to Dennis Richie.

This is my small thanks to the contribution that Dennis Richie has made to the world of computing, without his work I would have not had the C programming language, UNIX operating system and my career as a software engineer. Thanks and God bless. Wired puts the contribution he made much better than I could.

Time flies - when you're looking in the other direction!

This post is a brief moment to capture the fact that time has traveled on since the last post and at times has felt that little progress has been made. But on reflection a lot has been done.

I've busied myself in the day job working my way through various installation and user guides for Woodwing's Enterprise server and working my way through installing the software under Ubuntu and Centos 5.6, together with a number of builds of iPad Reader software and a couple of versions of Android.

Combine this with a number of evenings collaborating on updating the Wraycastle VoIP course notes, with friend and colleague John Timms.

And finally reviewing and writing up the High level design for a multi-VLAN bladed data centre environment for Sensee's new CosmoCom system.

Plus a couple of ad-hoc sessions on tele-medicine design work with Inmezzo, and I've just realized where the last 2 and half months have gone!

Discovering more about Macs

This week I've been having fun with AppleScript, it's a pretty cool Apple version of the likes of bash scripting and Windows script, with a more natural language based syntax. It works well for automating all sorts of things from applications, and the core elements of the OS X experience.

The need arose to look at a quick means of moving InDesign Plugins around as some of the plugins clash with functionality of other plugins, preventing InDesign from Starting.

I thought there ought be a quick way to make an easy program to move the files from the plugins folder to a "plugouts" folder. I started with the idea of using a command line script like a bash script, since OS X is based on Unix (or at least based on OpenStep), like most people discovering OS X and Macs in general - and with a fondness for Unix I found AppleScript was a great answer.

Living and working in an always-on always-connected world

I recently (Jan) started a daily commute to Central London, from my Suburbian utopia of Henley On Thames, this involves around 45 minutes on the train and a further 45 minutes on the tube each way. The trip gives me a mixture of time to reflect on what the day holds and what the day has held...

This journey also involves the "catching-up" on emails from a number of different client personna from the various roles I perform for my customers. Mostly I spend this time reading through emails on my X10, but since having access to an Apple iPad, I have spent more of my time using this touch screen tablet computer, which combined with the bluetooth keyboard that I bought for my X10 is proving more and more that for a small business owner and having multiple customers and identities for these customers, being "Always-on", is proving both productive and compelling!

I have the time to read the books in the form of PDFs or write emails and keep in touch with friends and collegues. Social media in the form of: Facebook, linked-in, twitter and of course IM tools like Skype.

The conclusion from this is that being always connected helps me both professionally and personally when I could be in dead time travelling.

New Year - New Projects for Aeonvista

By chance rather than design - this New Year has brought a change to Aeonvista's usual projects in Telecoms and Network design....

An architecture and design role for iPad and soon Android applications for News International's Sunday Times Newspaper.

This has a new set of challenges from weaving though Apple's AppStore and Xcode development using Objective C, to working in a content production department.

Merry Christmas from the Aeonvista HQ

X10 experience - living with Android 2.1

In my last post I complained about the touch screen responsiveness as I have in other posts, Having lived with it for a few more days and Downloaded the fabulous Angry Birds games (Season special and Original!).

I have to say the touch screen when playing games is usable - but for writing texts is still pretty poor! I tried for comparison a friends iPhone and another friends HTC Android phone both have better touch screen performance.

Now I am lusting after the new Samsung Galaxy Tablet, Android 2.2 and a 7" screen. 3G data and WiFi N.