Software Development in North Wales

"Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author." more

All us new bloggers would do well to read this article (see if you can spot how many beginner's mistakes I've made!).

TinyApps.Org is an index of (very) small footprint apps, mostly (but not exclusively) for Windows PCs (there are lists for MacOSX and Palm as well). Almost all the apps are free of charge. Categories include: Internet, Text, Graphics, System & File Tools etc.

Dr Pieter Kok visited Technium CAST (Parc Menai) in early December to give an overview of Quantum Computing and Information Theory.

Born in the Netherlands, Pieter came to Bangor to study Quantum Teleportation with Prof Sam Braunstein, and he received special commendation for the high standard of his PhD. He moved to the US to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, before returning to the UK to work at Hewlett Packard's prestigious HPL research laboratory in Bristol. He has recently been appointed a Research Fellow in the Department of Materials at Oxford University. Pieter is a recognised expert in the field of Quantum Physics, with a string of publications (including articles in New Scientist 1, 2 and MIT Tech Review) to his name.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are making their courseware (at undergraduate and postgraduate levels) freely available, and no registration is required! Some of the courses are available as Zip archives of HTML-based material, while others come in a format that requires a Scheme reader.

Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program, back in 1979) has created an interesting update that incorporates spreadsheet functionality into a Wiki. The result, WikiCalc, is currently in alpha and available for download.

A recent posting on CrunchNotes reminded me to post a link to this fun tool for generating logos from Flickr photos.