Software Development in North Wales

IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has broken its own record to achieve more than double the number of calculations it can do a second: 280.6 trillion calculations a second. The machine, housed at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, officially became the most powerful computer on the planet in June.

From Computing

IBM has opened up its entire patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards. The pledge means that Big Blue will not enforce its patents or charge a licence fee if any of the covered technologies in this sector infringe upon the patents.
The company expects the initiative to stimulate the creation of interoperable standards that allow for information sharing through standardised medical records and educational resources.

IBM has extended its patent pledge to 20 specific working groups or technical committees in six standards organisations. "If these designated groups build their next generation of healthcare and education standards on web services, electronic forms and open document standards, and they do so within rules on maintaining compatibility and interoperability, IBM will not assert any of its patents on implementers of these new healthcare and education standards," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source.

Venue: Main Lecture Theatre, School of Informatics, Dean Street, Bangor LL57 1UT
Refreshments are available from 4:30 pm in the Student Common Room (will be signposted)

At this year's lecture, Professor J.P. McGeehan (CBE, FREng) of Bristol University will be giving a talk entitled "Mobile Communication: Ideas that Changed the World"

Professor Joe McGeehan CBE is the Director of the Centre of Communications Research at the University of Bristol and Managing Director of Toshiba Research Europe Limited: Telecommunications Research Laboratory. He is involved in teaching and research within the Centre and is a member of a number of national and international committees in the field of Communications.

ALL ARE WELCOME. NO ADVANCE BOOKING NEEDED.

Kudos and thanks to Philip Roche who not only gave an excellent presentation at this month's SIG meeting, but has also set a new gold standard by hosting a PDF of his slides and an MP3 recording of the presentation (minus the first 7 minutes). Nice work fella!

Buy The Daily Post today - there's an interview (and glamorous photo) of our very own Dr Gittins, in the pull-out section on Objective One. There's no online equivalent, so it's off to the paper shop with you!

A repository of useful snippets of code. Snippets are tagged to help you find items of relevance.

My Transact-SQL snippets are here.

A Hong Kong man has been convicted of movie internet piracy in what is believed to be the first case involving BitTorrent file-sharing software.

As a follow-up to that earlier posting about a US company trying to cash in on a patent that allegedly presaged XML, here's an excellent commentary on this (and other) patenting scams:

Neither Europe nor Asia generally recognize the concept of Software Patents, and despite repeated attempts on the part of corporations to change that this stance seems unlikely to shift significantly in the near future. They don't recognize them for a very solid set of reasons... more

Great article about using your USB flash drive as a portable toolkit: "Now I have my USB Flash Drive loaded with a password manager, a complete office suite, virus scanner, encryption tools, and a whole lot more."

Links included to a .torrent and .RAR archive of the apps.

"Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.

When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

'I was surprised when a white glow covered the table,' Bowers said. 'The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow.'"

A great summary from TipMonkies:
"Unless you’ve been living in the tech-closet, you may have heard the latest buzzword in the blog and news world, feeds. Feeds are everywhere. If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you’ve surely seen websites with RSS or XML buttons. So what are newsfeeds and how can they help you browse the web faster and more effectively?"

We are now signed up with BritBlog.

Flock is FireFox with del.icio.us, blogging and Flickr integration, and lots of other cool Web 2.0 stuff.

From CNET News: "Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of 'data in neutral forms.' These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert. Scientigo intends to 'monetize' this intellectual property."

Steve Rubel's "Micro Persuasion" blog has a great posting about making the most of RSS, including how to track your favourite website via RSS when they don't even have an RSS feed - very nifty! Click here to read the article.

(From PC World)
Hats off to Ofer Springer for this crazy hack which runs a virtual needle around a scanned image of an LP to create a .wav file of the recorded music! Don't expect great quality though (yet). Springer's sample file, a scan of Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons,' sounds like it's being played at your neighbour's house - across the street. more...

My first job in North Wales was as an 'educational software developer' working for Martin Owen (then a Dr, now a Prof) in the School of Education at Bangor Uni. Martin now works for Nesta Futurelab and is quoted in this recent Guardian Unlimited article about interactive whiteboards:
"Interactive whiteboards are large touch-sensitive panels connected to a digital projector and a computer. In schools, their big attraction is that they can display video and graphic material directly from the web - and that everyone can join in. 'The whiteboard creates a big space for collaboration around ideas, which transcends what small screens can offer,' says Martin Owen of Nesta Futurelab, the lottery-funded endowment organisation. 'It makes the blackboard much more lively and effective.'" more...

del.icio.us is an online repository of bookmarks - users can store bookmarks in del.icio.us and tag them up wth descriptive metadata. The site provides facilities for sharing, searching and navigating bookmarks. more...

CollaborativeRank is an experimental search engine that ranks hits according to shared bookmarks posted to del.icio.us by their most high-ranking users. Chanchal Gupta from New York state ranks as the web's most influential bookmarker according to CollaborativeRank. more...

FYI, Bangor-based guru Mike Malloch (co-founder of theKnowNet) is currently ranked 42nd in the world! To see the top ranking del.icio.us users, click here.

Atom is a simple way to read and write information on the web, allowing you to easily keep track of more sites in less time, and to seamlessly share your words and ideas by publishing to the web. Created by leading service providers, tool vendors and independent developers, Atom is designed to be a universal publishing standard for personal content and weblogs. more...

Welcome to our weblog, which will hopefully be of interest to other software developers in the North Wales area. Watch this space for news of forthcoming events and links to items of interest to us.

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If you haven't got a news reader yet, then you should! There are loads of free readers available - do a Google for 'RSS Reader' and check that it supports the 'Atom' standard.