Category Archives: Technology

Tracking multiple email accounts

15 Wednesday Oct 2008

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In this day and age, email addresses are like bank accounts – we’ve got more than one, and we need to keep an eye on them with varying degrees of regularity.  As a sideline of webmaster and Hotmail (Live mail) email client getting heavier on resource needs all the time. Having a small tool to monitor my many email addresses without resorting to using my work Outlook being muddied by non work stuff and visa versa for my home mail client.

To help with this I’ve started using a brilliant little application called POP Peeper, it can watch webmail like Hotmail, GMail account as well as good old fashioned POP3, SMTP etc.  Its easy to setup and then let it sit out of the way on the toolbar and flag up when something arrives in the mail box.  You can then look at the email in this little lightweight tool.

SeeWhy for jBPM video demo

22 Friday Aug 2008

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SeeWhy for jBPM now has three videos that have been put together that illustrate SeeWhy what it is, and what can be done. Although the videos are aimed at jBPM they’re just as applicable to any BPM solution, not just jBPM. The videos also give some sense as to what SeeWhy has the potential to be able to do.

The videos are freely available from Google, and higher res versions that can be downloaded from the SeeWhy website. With the higher resolution versions you can see in detail what is being done.

Part 1 – Introduction to SeeWhy for jBPM

Part 2 – Business Activity Monitoring

 

Part 3 – Event Driven Business Intelligence

Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE

22 Friday Aug 2008

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With the increasingly aggressive position being taken by organisations such as the RIAA, BPI, MPAA, the British Games Organisation it is not surprising that a new advancement in peer to peer technology has occured to make the P2P data transfer anonymous.  This article on O’Reilly describes a new bread of P2P that makes the traffic anonymous – ONLamp.com — Anonymous, Open Source P2P with MUTE.

 

The effect of P2P clients such as this getting traction is that it will become increasingly harder for industry bodies to understand how to at least try and contain losses to piracy (real or perceived) and utilise the technologies to propel marketing and promotional activities – so shooting themselves in the foot.

 

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Cutting edge rocker blazes trail in digital age

22 Friday Aug 2008

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The International Herald Tribune has interesting piece on Peter Gabriel and his subtle but important influence on music in the digital age – Cutting edge rocker blazes trail in digital age – International Herald Tribune.

 

Remote PC Support Tools Mini-Guide

21 Thursday Aug 2008

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As someone who is known amongst friends to work in the computer industry I often get asked to help sort out people’s problems.  Talking someone over the phone to deal with problems can be difficult, and often it is easier to understand and solve a problem if you can see the machine which brings with it a host of practicality issues.  Remote management tools aren’t a new thing, but having one that doesn’t cost you anything to help friends and family with and works over HTTP/HTTPS without needing to know the IPs involved is important an relatively new.

 

MasterNewMedia.org has a nice little article with plenty of links to tools and services in this area with a review of what they offer which can be found at Remote PC Support Tools: A Mini-Guide, worth checking out. I’ll be trying out TeamViewer which is free for personal use doesn’t require client installation and a small app at my end to sort things out. Good security – the client has to send you details independently of the tool for connecting to them (they suggest the phone). The client tool doesn’t need to be installed – just launched via the website.

 

The Times front page – Computer games industry threat to downloaders

20 Wednesday Aug 2008

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  This article (Computer games industry threat to downloaders: ‘pay up or we’ll sue’) makes up the front page of the The Times today along with a photo of Christine Ohuruogu the Team GB athlete.  It is surprising such an announcement made the front pages of the paper, but also the fact that compared to the downloading of movies and music the games industry has been relatively quiet about the illegitimate downloading activity.   It is interesting to observe that the print edition of the article acknowledges that often people will download games and never play them, begging the question as to what proportion of the downloads do actually represent lost revenue?

 

I hope that the games industry don’t make the mistakes that the music industry (particularly  the RIAA) have fallen into which has done the industry no favours at all.

 

How portable is Java?

23 Wednesday Jul 2008

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The title is a bit of a trick question – if the JVM meets all the tests to qualify being called Java then it is portable.  However the website  JavaSpecialists  has a series of brilliant  articles about some of the depths of Java, with a rather interesting article called ‘Law of Cretan Driving’ which looks at the way 64 bit value are handled (such as long) within the JVM.  The article points out that it is not mandatory for the JVM to ensure that the bytes that are used to represent a long can not be manipulated by separate threads at anyone time. That is to say that any 64bit primitive such as a long is not guaranteed to be thread safe.  However problem is that primitive data types are generally considered by developers to be atomically safe – which isn’t necessarily the case. So we can find that a java application which is theoretically portable may actually not port.

Java Standard – http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#17876

 

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SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM

17 Thursday Jul 2008

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  SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM is the latest evolution in the integration between jBPM which forms a crucial element in the orchestration of JBoss’ SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) stack.  We’ve produced some video clips complete with commentary together that show the core parts of the SeWhy for JBoss jBPM along with looking at SeeWhy in the broader context of BI (Business Intelligence) and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). The SeeWhy page here has both low res streaming versions of the videos and downloadable high res versions.

If you’re interested in work flow and how you can monitor and measure its activity both in terms of IT operational performance and in the business context then the three clips will be ten minutes well spent.

 

Useful links …

 

RA DIOHEA_D – HOU SE OF_C ARDS

16 Wednesday Jul 2008

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Radiohead’s latest video is certainly gaining a lot of attention, purely because of the fact that it was shot without any cameras.  The end result is amazing. As you can see …

 

 

But having an engineering background I found the short video clip about how the video was made, just as intriguing…

 

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Warning letters to ‘file-sharers’

03 Thursday Jul 2008

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The BPI (formerly British Phonographic Industry)  along with Virgin Media have started getting tough with people they believe are downloading illegally.  Virgin Media according to BBC News have sent out 800 letters to people they believe are illegally downloading warning them that they may face being disconnected and possibly legal action.  This is probably a step up on the BPI’s RIAA like campaign and probably to help apply pressure with the negotiations with ISPs about dealing with illegal downloading of music (previous blog here). The downloading information has been provided by the BPI to Virgin Media according the BPI’s new page (here) – interesting given that the similar approach by the RIAA is coming under increasing legal questioning in the US. 

The chief executive of the BPI told the BBC that the BPI in very bullish terms that if necessary the BPI will take the ISPs to court and win, including ISPs who will not participate in their actions such as Carphone Warehouse. This is also very reminiscent of the RIAA’s early campaign.  It seems to me that the BPI have not looked at the way the US litigation for the RIAA is going which has resulted in both counter cases, a lot of embarrassing revelations about how the cases have been built.  Not to mention that a number of US record executives and artists have been publicly disagreeing with the RIAA.

Interviews with a few of those affected so far suggests that Virgin Media may stand to lose subscribers as the perceived invasion of digital privacy talks hold, plus the ISP dictating how people can use the service that they’re paying for.

 

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