28 July 2010
When I was first asked to look at it, text telephony was very much a niche technology. It was also "non-native", i.e. it was using networks (in this case the analogue telephone network) to transport information (text) for which it was not at all designed (it's a voice network). This creates huge problems, because not only is the equipment not designed for text (textphones end up masquerading text as voice in the form of audio tones), the network itself is also unable to properly support it.
11 July 2010
Endless religious debates have been had about case sensitivity in programming languages. As with all such debates, fundamentalism and stubbornness quickly take over from common sense and rationality, with incessant flame wars as the result. But the basic fact is very simple: for humans, case sensitivity in identifiers (I'm deliberately limiting scope of this article to identifiers, ignoring for now strings and other code or data) impacts negatively on readability of code, on productivity of writing and debugging and, therefore, on maintainability, stability and reliability of applications.
22 June 2010
PDF documents have become commonplace and for most of us are now essential tools of everyday work. As a concept, they certainly have merits, the main one being that they allow documents to be distributed with high fidelity entirely independent from the environment (hardware and software) that was used to create them.
10 June 2010
One of the first things I did this morning after booting my computer was to launch Firefox. The Web has become such a key tool in our lives that this action should hardly come as a surprise. However, I did get quite a shock when I noticed that my google.co.uk homepage, up to that point a reasonably clean, uncluttered page, now appeared with a background picture.
