Google opens up its API Everyone’s ranting and raving about the new SOAP API from Google. And rightly so… Dave has been going on about this for weeks if not months but frankly I ignored him because I didn’t realise the work was even underway, let alone that a public release was imminent The applications [...]

The Future of the Microprocessor Business This is an article in the latest IEEE Spectrum magazine which describes how the microprocessor business is changing from producing long, batch runs of a single chip to individual wafers of custom-made chips. Of particular interest was the sidebar “Custom Chips and Future Fabs“. It also makes the valid [...]

Copying Music For the first time ever I copied a CD to my computer as a series of MP3 tracks and listened to them. I’ve never used Gnutella or Napster to find MP3′s and I’ve no intention of sharing the one’s I create. I did this because my home entertainment centre is a PC. I [...]

Finally the excellant program JavaNCSS (which allows you to count source statements and complexity) has been given a recurive feature. I’ve followed the development of this program since it was first created back in ’97/’98 and it does a great job of quickly producing metrics for your sourcecode. The biggest limitation was the lack of [...]

Google’s secrets… Just discovered this April Fools by Google. PageRank? No, PigeonRank!

There’s an excellent example of how a legitimate discussion can quickly degenerate into religious fanaticism on the TINI mailing list. Fanatics are always wrong – it is the quickest, sure-fire way to realise you are probably talking rubbish (and sadly this occurs too often in religion, an otherwise useful feature of human societies). But I [...]

EE Times – Sun, ARM rewrite the rules for accelerating Java Nice article about the future of Java in embedded, wireless devices including the Monty VM announced last week. Lots of performance increases on the horizon with both hardware and hardware/software optimisations. Also a brief discussion on the appalling latency found on most wireless networks.