Writing ... or Just Practicing?

Clock This Writer

Alex Homer — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:19:00 GMT

It's easy to imagine that the computer is a recent invention. A search of the web reveals a host of machines claiming to be the first electronic computer, and all are mid-20th century. However, what's harder to determine is the first appearance of a truly programmable computer. After watching a fascinating TV documentary this week, it seems that amongst the first was a model of a small boy writing on paper with a quill pen. And it was built more than two hundred years ago.

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A Very Short Financial Honeymoon

Alex Homer — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 07:01:00 GMT

It comes as a bit of a shock when you phone your bank with a routine enquiry, only to be told that they're no longer a bank. When I mentioned it to a colleague she asked what they're turned into. Perhaps now they are a greengrocer? Or maybe a pet grooming salon? Have they spent my meagre savings on hair dryers for dogs? Or cabbages and carrots?

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Touch, But Don't Look

Alex Homer — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 07:07:00 GMT

So my Windows 8 adventure has been terminated after only a brief foray into the delights of the new O/S. It's annual review time here an Microsoft, which means I need to connect to the corporate network. But my Windows 8 machine can't do that because the TPM module is faulty, and I need to have BitLocker enabled before they'll allow me to talk to the big iron in Seattle. So the old hard disk with Vista has seen the light of day again (or, to be more accurate, the dark of inside my laptop) and I'm back in 2006.

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A Green Train Of Thought

Alex Homer — Sun, 26 May 2013 07:02:00 GMT

It's safe to assume that nobody could accuse me of being an eco-warrior. I buy cars that have more engine than I need, and computers with more power than is required to run any software I might ever use. And I quite happily squander electricity on a waterfall in the pond and lights in the trees, just to make the garden look nice. The trouble is that the electricity company seems to think that I should pay an increasingly exorbitant price for it.

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Peeping Out From The Microsoft Matrix

Alex Homer — Sun, 19 May 2013 06:58:00 GMT

I suppose it's a bit like that film The Matrix - you realize that you live in an ethereal and closed world only when you actually get to step outside of it. Or, like some people who have never been to another country, your view of the rest of the world is shaped just by what you see on TV. I suppose I've been like that with open source stuff, and particularly Java; looking out incredulously from my little village of Microsoft technologies and products at the wide world beyond.

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Wot? No Webcam? And No Rock Music Either...

Alex Homer — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:27:00 GMT

So this week we had another digital failure in our household. At least I'm happy about the fact it was much less embarrassing than some other technical discrepancies that seem to have befallen the worlds of science and engineering recently.

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Evolution Through Technology Selection

Alex Homer — Sun, 05 May 2013 06:45:00 GMT

You have to wonder whether the increasing use of tablet computers and touchscreens means we'll soon be back to the equivalent of a world that depends on stone axes and making fire by rubbing two boy scouts together. At the moment I'm doing my utmost to hang on to some semblance of advanced device interaction technique but there's a good chance that, in time, I'll also succumb.

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Taming Microsoft Media Center

Alex Homer — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:18:00 GMT

So I'm still fighting to keep Media Center as the main TV system here at chez Derbyshire, despite the continual aggro it seems to spew out at regular intervals. On top of the increasing vagueness of the program categorization in the guide (it seems to think that "The Only Way Is Essex" is a documentary), the habit of the TV tuners to go walkabout when asked to do three things at once causes huge disruption to my wife's carefully crafted soap recording schedule.

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The Windows Server Update Service That Doesn't

Alex Homer — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 06:55:00 GMT

One of the great things about being a technology pessimist is that you don't suffer that sinking feeling when something doesn't work as expected. And, of course, you get to experience a nice ripple of surprised elation when stuff actually does work as it's supposed to. This week I've experienced a roughly equal mixture of both.

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Highly Distributed Insights

Alex Homer — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:27:00 GMT

Why would you want to use a "Big Data" solution? It's a question that we've been trying to answer in the first chapter of our forthcoming p&p guide to Windows Azure HDInsight. For a long while, everything we found on the web and in the original HDInsight docs on the website talked just about the volume and unstructured nature of the data as the justification.

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