logiccolony.com/blog

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be attending the Google Developer Day in London this week. I managed to get a late invitation to the event, and secured some time away from the project I am currently working on for a client.

I’m looking forward to learning more about Google’s Web Services API designs and their work in the mobile space. With this and the upcoming Hack Day event, on top of regular client work and various other projects, it’s a busy time. Hopefully I’ll manage to find some time soon to finish off and publish the new Logic Colony website…

Came across some nice Twitter visualizations:

• RailsConf Twitter visualization (from twitter.com)
• Twittervision
• Flickrvision

I’ve got to say I really like the twittervision and flickrvision web mashups. Both are really nice pieces of information design.

“The UMPC is essentially a failure because it’s still a generic PC with only the most superficial software added to make it work, barely,” Frog’s Rolston said. “With a form factor like this, what people need is a purpose-specific feature set and user interface.”

Wired.com: Ultra Mobile PCs Still Struggle With Performance, Relevance

Years after the Psion 5mx, why is the computer industry still getting mobile computing wrong?

Why are so few people making use of the features of all those Nokia smartphones that are flooding the market?

Yesterday I ordered the Nokia N800, a WiFi Internet Tablet device with an open source development platform. It’s not a phone, but it should give me a platform to try out some concepts I’ve been sitting on for a while.

Ideally I also need a modern Symbian smartphone (my old Nokia 3650 won’t even run some of the newer Symbian apps, such as Python), but I think I’ll wait a while before buying one. And of course, there is the iPhone to consider, but despite the hype, it is still an unknown quantity.

The BBC has confirmed that online education service BBC Jam will close, with the loss of around 200 posts.

Today’s announcement comes after the BBC Trust suspended BBC Jam in March, following concerns raised by the European commission about its commercial impact.

Full article at Media Guardian.

“iPlayer is swarming with people,” one source, who asked to remain anonymous, told MediaGuardian. “They’re throwing more and more people at it - a classic mistake - while McKinsey suits run around carrying wads of paper and trying to look important. The BBC often tries to be a software development company, and fails every time.”

Bobbie Johnson on where the BBC’s attempt to lead the new media revolution went wrong. Registration required. (Via plasticbag.org)

The rap against designers is that they design CRAP that hurts the planet. That’s the argument. Let’s take your favorite toy, designed by one of today’s design gods, Jonathan Ive and his team at Apple—the iPod. Apple does fantastic things with materials. Amazing things. And it has recycling programs for its products. But what it doesn’t do is prioritize cradle-to-cradle design. It doesn’t design a long-cycle product that you can open and upgrade over time. It doesn’t design a process that encourages the reuse materials again and again. It doesn’t demand sustainability.

Bruce Nussbaum in Business Week

Yahoo! and the BBC are holding a Hack Day event in London. Nice to see some London based events for technologists springing up. Sign up and hopefully I’ll see you there.

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn’t support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn’t mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren’t a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Just Say No to the combined evils of locking, deadlocks, lock granularity, livelocks, nondeterminism and race conditions.

Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) discusses Concurrency

It looks like why is bringing an end to the RedHanded blog.

RedHanded’s death is Hackety.org’s birth. Be sure to check out the very, very cool Hackety Hack project out: