tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13125100810469322932014-02-23T18:51:28.583Zilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-19763739786480364482010-04-30T10:17:00.000+01:002010-04-30T10:17:47.948+01:00

And so this week was the launch of Sci-Fi London 2010, a film festival dedicated to that most intriguing of genres and hosted at the Apollo cinema, just off Picadilly Circus. As a big sci-fi fan, I thought I had to go and so you'll find a few short reviews of what's going on, starting with Radio Free Albemuth, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's novel. My friends and I arrived to find a fairly

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-71647335951133060282009-10-17T18:41:00.001+01:002009-10-17T18:56:38.158+01:00

In this last article on Google, I'd like to bring to the fore how Google deals with customer service and discuss what I see as a problem with the company: customer service, or lack thereof. GMail I have been using this service for about a year now to host my personal e-mail account. When I first signed up, I had a gmail.com address and, when the facility became available, moved my domain's email

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-92169162724497371162009-10-15T23:35:00.002+01:002009-10-16T00:01:45.138+01:00

I have been somewhat reticent to release this article into the public domain as it relates to a project I am working on privately at the moment and I think it might be a little precipitous to publish. Nonetheless, as the old adage goes: "publish and be damned"... In addition to current privacy concerns, Google faces the more general issue of public trust. To make people trust the company, it

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-4885894626790868422009-10-13T22:44:00.001+01:002009-10-13T22:44:58.065+01:00

Since Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it has continually lost money because of the large bandwidth costs involved in the download and upload of millions of videos on a daily basis. Google has recently started to try to recoup some of this loss by implementing an advertising programme directly within video streams in addition to the AdWords Sponsored Links which appear on search results page. The

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-80877510359028342242009-10-12T20:03:00.002+01:002009-10-12T20:08:59.488+01:00

Since 2005, Google has been investing in dark fibre, the parts of the vast (and mostly ocean-spanning) fibre optical networks which connect telecoms and Internet traffic across long distances around the globe. Initial comments at the time and after have been that Google was planning to build a telecoms network, something which goes against the ethos of the company and would move them into the

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-27684685827490353702009-10-11T23:21:00.002+01:002009-10-11T23:28:14.232+01:00

One of the key issues surrounding Google at present is consumer perception of the privacy of the data they store within the company's systems: primarily in GMail and Google docs. Over the years since these services were launched, I have seen negative comments from the media (for example the BBC) as they believe that, as the company produces contextualised advertisements from their data, the

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-78876336445779700352009-10-11T23:10:00.004+01:002009-10-11T23:21:52.618+01:00

I am fascinated by developments in technology; I read technology news services daily and follow interesting people on Twitter. If I hear about something interesting, I'll do a little digging and see what I can find. Some time ago, I heard about Google buying up a lot of dark fibre, the unused capacity that comes from laying undersea fibre optic cables. There was a brief flurry of discussion about

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-63795276198699755642009-10-11T18:25:00.000+01:002009-10-11T18:26:35.895+01:00

Lynne D Johnson, Fastcompany.comThe survival of print is being threatened by the web; we all know this. To allow it to continue, print prices are going to have to go up - printed media will become a luxury of the privileged as printing and distribution costs continue to grow.People have often blamed Google and other search engines as contributing to the death of print: by providing some of the

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-54564455234348050402009-10-02T12:13:00.005+01:002009-10-05T22:02:04.285+01:00

Robin Christopherson - AbilityNet.org.ukIn the US, the disabled commuynity (19.4% of the population) has $1 trillion purchasing power (£120 billion in the UK), meaning that they are an audience worth marketing to and therefore an ordiance of significant size such that they should be catered for.According to Robin, an accessible site reaches 10-20% larger audience; so the benefit is clear: make

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-78763927182199999922009-10-02T10:28:00.002+01:002009-10-02T10:38:25.940+01:00

Joel Moss of Codaset is showing off the future of mobile web application development: Widgets. This is a technological approach from Vodafone that's been driven by a reaction to Apple's App Store and is, in many ways, technologically superior. Why? The answer is simple: the Widgets approach uses standard web development languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, together with widget/application

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-49139896665983105632009-10-02T10:06:00.001+01:002009-10-02T10:08:45.031+01:00

So, second day of the conference and I'm listening to Simon Wardley give a talk on the future of cloud computing - who's delivering 248 slides together with a very funny narrative. One of the best speakers so far.He has a point though: there isn't a clear definition of what cloud computing is - a lot of people have a lot of different impressions and, because of this lack of definition, the

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-14193273873206242062009-10-01T15:43:00.000+01:002009-10-01T15:44:35.109+01:00

Osama Bedier spends a considerable amount of time talking about legacies; specifically why the space shuttle's voyage distance is limited by the size of its rockets, the history of railroads and the electric toaster. He's been rambling of for fifteen minutes now, having just flown in from the 'States and I'm wondering quite why. Meanwhile though, I am keeping my mind awake by trying to get onto

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-89765559493533710222009-10-01T12:31:00.001+01:002009-10-01T15:32:18.108+01:00

FOWA London 2009: Francisco Tolmasky: AtlasStraight out of college, Francisco is a new kind of maverick: one who sees a problem noone else does and finds a solution. His team developed a framework call Cappucino, which is designed to allow building desktop-style applications on the web.His demo application is 280 Slides, an online version of a tool similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. Its interface

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-54687535654165248592009-10-01T12:19:00.000+01:002009-10-01T12:21:19.246+01:00

According to gossip, in previous years MySpace has sponsored the wireless connectivity. This year, no sponsorship has been arranged which may explain why the Carsonified guys are using domestic wireless access points from Linksys, who're not exactly reknowned for their scalability.In terms of Open Source, Addison Berry from Lullabot is telling us what lessons can be learned from the adoption of

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-35609751340559595252009-10-01T10:29:00.003+01:002009-10-01T10:46:13.295+01:00

One of the more interesting talks for me today has been by Dustin Diaz from Twitter, who I'll hopefully be talking to more later this afternoon. His topic has been to introduce DHTML frameworks within Javascript, such as jQuery, Mootools and others so that developers can easily introduce flexibility into the interaction between their applications and end users.At Redwire, we've been using DHTML

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-20896339112854576712009-10-01T10:14:00.000+01:002009-10-01T10:23:29.831+01:00

Given that this is my first paid conference, ever, for work I'm a bit dissapointed. The initial failure of ticketing I discovered yesterday, when a load of people turned up a day early because the tickets were printed with the wrong start date - yesterday was for workshops, in another location. As I hadn't paid for that, I'd expect my ticket should show only the dates relevent to me. Thankfully,

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-78802859964234718942009-08-18T03:23:00.004+01:002009-08-18T03:48:24.109+01:00

For many years I have been a fan and a user of Linux and having experienced many different flavours from MINIX back in my school days to the latest version of Fedora and Ubuntu. One of the common questions that gets asked is: why distribution should I use? I have seen this question many times and even asked it myself a few times too and recent developments in distributions merit an answer. To

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-12151002744073460702009-08-18T01:14:00.014+01:002009-08-18T02:00:19.372+01:00

Recently, Redwire created a holding page for one of its newest clients. Their hosting is currently managed by a third party company and, because of our dependence on that third party, we were unable to put the site live when the client most needed it. This document has been written so that the lessons learned from that experience are shared and that the problems encountered are not repeated; it

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-77412993275490130882009-07-28T22:19:00.004+01:002009-07-28T22:54:28.589+01:00

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard [...]"These are the words spoken by John Fitzgerald Kennedy, spoken in Dallas, Texas on September 12th 1962 and launched the United States' space programme which resulted in the first three men setting foot on an alien planet (see the full speech

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-72712836980438215622009-07-24T21:22:00.002+01:002009-07-24T21:43:52.020+01:00

I've just been talking to some friends on MSN Messenger and, for reasons I can't fathom, was reminded of the very first website I made professionally, back in 2001. It was for the National Business Angels Network (aka www.nban.com) and was made when I worked for iDesk plc under the guidance of one Ben Joyce who was a brilliant boss and taught me a lot of very good lessons. He's since become not

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-75770407137701211702009-07-19T20:23:00.000+01:002009-07-19T20:58:10.112+01:00

I've been asked what I mean by special potatoes, so I thought it was high time I shared the recipe. It's dead easy, requires no special equipment (except a cheese grator and/or mandoline) and only takes about 20 minutes to prepare.The recipe was inspired by dinner at Mon Plaisir, London's oldest French restaurant, in particular their dauphinoise potatoes. I was a bit unhappy with just how

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-55441794306664813292009-07-14T20:23:00.002+01:002009-08-12T17:50:16.920+01:00

Recently, there have been an awful lot of people speculating about Google's new product: Google Chrome OS. This has been a product which has been talked about in hushed circles for some time and, like everything else Google does, there has been very little said from the company on the subject until the recent press release. They've slated a release for it, according to their blog, for 2010 and,

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-38182748789083719242009-07-12T08:12:00.001+01:002009-07-12T08:24:04.108+01:00

So this morning, I am greeted with the shocking revelation that Duncan James from the boy band Blue has come out as bisexual. For him, it seems to have been quite a step forward. The Sun, in all their wiseness actually published the video interview they used for material for the story, which actually makes them look bad because in their story, they've massively overemphasised the wrong points (as

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-9237707763962463892009-07-11T17:19:00.000+01:002009-07-11T17:33:22.296+01:00

I have just been to see one of the finest museums in all the world and it is right round the corner from my home in Forest Hill. It is The Horniman Museum. It has a crap website, but I have just emailed the curator to pass on some compliments so maybe I can use that as an opening to get Redwire some more work. The museum has an amazing story, which I would like to relate to you here.The museum

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1312510081046932293.post-8404391881640527722009-07-11T13:14:00.000+01:002009-07-11T13:33:12.028+01:00

Oh, my god. The BBC have finally come up with something truly brilliant: Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire - an utterly brilliant piss-take of fantasy series, with a similar sense of humour as the idea I had for "Xena: Tit Princess". Starring Sean Maguire, who I've always had a thing for since he was in Grange Hill, now returning to form as a bit more of a serious actor (it's very hard

ilithiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00255761964585606593noreply@blogger.com0