Saturday 28 August 2010

my kindle arrived today

The device arrived in a customarily over sized box. Somewhat minimalist in contents, a nicely printed quick start guide (also available on the kindle), a power cord that doubles as a really quite long usb cable and the device itself. All have the feel of quality. Got four of my books on so far, off to do other things now though.

Friday 27 August 2010

Famous Pete Wood Security: Personal mobile devices

Famous Pete Wood Security: Personal mobile devices: "I was recently invited to a roundtable event to discuss the results of some research sponsored by Sourcefire. Part of the survey results con..."

Some great statistics here. Many folks have used personal mail and mobile devices for work purposes - is it just a matter of time before these things cause a data leak?

Royal Mail has my Kindle!

A little absurdly excited that my next generation kindle is on it's way, or so Amazon informed me in the last ten minutes. As previously posted I'm already using the free software versions on my android phone and PC but it'll be nice to be able to upload my DRM free content to the kindle and get it synced across.

Question now is - tomorrow or Tuesday  for arrival?

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Will the developer community follow Oracle?

The Android lawsuit between Oracle and Google is being well covered elsewhere, so I won't repeat that here. What I am interested in however is the effect on the Java developer community. Will Oracle lead Java to a new high and new interest as it prepares to defend the language, or will it be seen as a money grabbing, pillaging entity? There are already talks of Android moving away from Java altogether - is that even possible at this stage?

Java is still being taught in universities and schools around the world but has lost mind-share to the increasingly popular .Net framework from Microsoft. In addition new languages such as Ruby and existing languages such as Python are all proving very popular for web development.

New languages are springing up and I'm personally happy to see Nvidia's CUDA taught at universities - a language aimed at using the massively parallel nature of GPU's for calculations (always liked massively parallel problems for stretching programmers).

It seems to me we'll see a heterogeny of languages in the future and hopefully multi-skilled programmers appearing out of university. What will this mean for large scale enterprise solutions? It seems to me that Java will still be there but actually it feels as if it is moving into a legacy language state, the cobol of the next decade. Java needs some love - will Oracle provide a nurturing environment or will one of the many new languages rising up serve as the futures alternative to the .Net framework?

Wednesday 18 August 2010

Soft skills required for EA?

Whilst this book isn't directly relevant to enterprise architecture the soft skills covered here are certainly of interest - whether its studies in what works for persuasion, for self motivation or even what makes people happy. A nice read and good diversion from technical books.

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Linchpin eBook: Seth Godin: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Presently reading this on Kindle for Android and finding it very good. As a person who is new to being an analyst - it does kind of read like a guide to being an analyst.

Linchpin eBook: Seth Godin: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Monday 16 August 2010

Nice view of Google's innovations and purchases that have been shown the door

 Google Failures and Google Flops - A list of Google Mistakes

Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing Software

Ready for ARM-based server chips? Smooth-Stone hopes so | ZDNet

This trend to lower power chips is interesting, take a look at seamicro too. As for "Intel Killer" I don't think this is it although I do think alternatives to Intel's generic chips are a good thing and more are on the horizon.

Ready for ARM-based server chips? Smooth-Stone hopes so | ZDNet

Why switch ebook reader?

I must admit I loved my old Sony PRS 505 ebook reader. I like the the e-Ink display and being able to carry around a multitude of books without carrying around the actual books. That said Kindle now has some key features that are of interest to me, and actually the most interesting one is perhaps the simplest thing - being able to pick up a book where i left off from any device.

Sometimes I don't want to carry even an e-book reader with me and so my phone is good for those times I have 10 or 15 minutes to read something. The synchronising page over whispersync then is a key feature for me and has prompted me to sell my sony and get one of the new generation kindles, linked below with a gratuitous advert.

Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6" Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally - Latest Generation (Amazon.com)