Farewell Vista

The IT news today is full of reports that most purchasers of Windows PCs will from now be able to upgrade their system from Windows Vista to Windows 7, for little or no money, when it becomes available in October.  This – along with Windows 7’s ‘XP simulation’ mode – is indeed probably the death [...]

OERs, radical syndication and the Uncourse attitude

Liveblog from a technology coffee morning, 17 June 2009, by Tony Hirst.
Please ask Tony what he does – he looks at web technologies and sees what can be done with them, being “dazed and confused”, then communicates them to people through blogs and presentations.
Information and technology silos – information gets stuck in repositories, the IET [...]

A new Babel

There’s an explosion of platforms to develop applications on at the moment, which is exciting in many ways – lots of new environments and possibilities to explore.  But it makes life harder for everyone – people who are making things, and people who are choosing things.
Back in the mid to late 90s, it was pretty [...]

New ways of interacting: Lessons from non-standard games controllers

I gave another IET Technology Coffee Morning talk this morning, on non-standard games controllers.
Abstract
How do computers get information from you? The standard keyboard and mouse setup has been widely available since the mid-80s. Things are moving on. Other talks in this series have covered touch-sensitive surfaces, but there are other developments. Games consoles in particular [...]