Happy 1st Birthday Pebble

March 2, 2014 | Comment

So I’ve now had my Pebble smart watch just over a year so I thought that it would be a good time to reflect on the aims and whether they have been met.

For those that don’t know the Pebble is the darling of the crowd funding site Kickstarter, the first and to my knowledge still the only project to have raised over $10M. This was significant because it was only aiming to raise $10,000 and showed  what a huge demand there was for smart wearables.

I, along with thousands of others, pledged my support and settled down for … Read the rest

Sneaky LinkedIn

February 21, 2014 | Comment

So what’s the difference between the two images above? Well at first glance they would seem to be the same. Both invite the individual to connect with you on LinkedIn, right? Well almost but there is a very subtle difference that if you miss it you could end up spamming people who are not already on LinkedIn.

At some point in the past I must have let my guard slip and allowed LinkedIn to suck up all my contacts from my address book and since then it has been keen that I connect with everyone. Of course, not everyone is … Read the rest

What we did Before StackOverflow

February 18, 2014 | Comment

So StackOverflow the question and answer site for programmers went down yesterday and if what you read is to be believed all coding stopped. Of course that wasn’t the case but it did make me stop and think about what it was like before the internet.

As I have stated before I have been coding a very long time. Professionally since 1988 but I have been programming in one form or another since I was 11, i.e. long before either StackOverflow or the Internet was around. Just how did we cope back then?

While they aren’t too popular now, for … Read the rest

4G Arrives in Reading (sort of)

February 14, 2014 | Comment

20140214-085900.jpgI noticed this morning that my iPad was now showing a 4G notifier in the header rather than the usual 3G.

Three, my network provider, have been very good saying that they wouldn’t charge any more for this unlike other operators. Today I found out why – it doesn’t work, at least not in Reading where I am.Switching to 3G I immediately got a lovely fast signal whereas on 4G nothing.

I am hoping that this is a temporary thing and will quickly improve when more cells are rolled out. Here’s to super fast mobile access.… Read the rest

Accessing Amazon RDS Instance from Remote phpMyAdmin

February 3, 2014 | 7 comments

imagesOne of the great services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack is Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). This is a properly managed database server that you can run alongside your existing application server instances allowing the load to be spread.

This all works well but management can be a little tedious especially if you have been used to managing your existing MySQL server through phpMyAdmin. However, do not despair as it is possible to manage RDS from phpMyAdmin running on a remote server and this post shows you how.

This article assumes that you already have both RDS and … Read the rest

3 Things Evernote is Missing

January 30, 2014 | 1 comment

20140130-082701.jpgI an a keen and active user of Evernote paying for the service not just to gain access to the “pro” features but also because I want to repay Evernote for the use I derive from it.

That’s not to say that it is perfect though so here are three things that I would add to it from the normal to the whacky.

Better table support

Evernote has support for tables but it is pretty basic. Once created you cannot add new columns, change the width, add new rows anywhere but at the bottom and you cannot apply any styling … Read the rest

Magnetic Clasp for Chain

January 22, 2014 | Comment

This just about squeezes into technology as a gadget (well it’s is my blog so I can cover what I like!). Recently the clasp broke on a chain and I looked at replacing it with the usual hook kind but the local jewelers wanted to charge me £20 for the privilege. I politely declined feeling that I could get it cheaper elsewhere and do it myself.

While searching on eBay I found a company selling magnetic clasps so I gave that I go and was really impressed. The clasps use rare earth magnets and are incredibly strong but easy to … Read the rest

Hat tip to Kernighan & Ritchie

January 15, 2014 | Comment

IMG_7937My last post was all about what has changed in the world of databases since I graduated. This post is all about what hasn’t.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 1988 and during my course we learn’t a number of programming languages including C. Then THE bible on the subject was by Kernighan & Ritche.

My younger son has just started his second year Computer Science degree and this year they too are learning C. When he told me this I mentioned the book and wondered if they would still use it. Yesterday was his first lecture … Read the rest

The Evolution of Databases

January 10, 2014 | 1 comment

iStock_000016066249XLargeOne of the beauties of a long career is that you get to see how things in your sector evolve over time. Being in IT is no different other than the phenomenal rate of change.

Nowhere is this more evident than in databases. When I started out in the late eighties I was a COBOL programmer working on hierarchical databases and specifically IDMSX on ICL’s VME platform. These databases worked on the basis of linked lists and you had to “walk” through a whole chain in order to get to the record you wanted.

Hierarchical databases were straightforward to learn … Read the rest