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Showing posts from July, 2011

Blogger Profile Change

All change! I am in the process of migrating this blog to another account. For anyone following via my Blogger profile, I am now over here .

It's not personal

Oh dear. It would appear that some people reading this blog and Twitter feed believe that I am writing specifically about them. Naturally, this makes them a little sensitive to the criticisms that I sometimes level at the industry and the comments/observations I make. Let me reassure everyone that the articles I write generally don't relate to any one client, or incident, or person, or project. There really would be little point in writing about anything that is only specific to one project; to be fair it would be deathly dull, and irrelevant to everyone else. Even in the rare case when there is a particularly interesting success or failure story, I ensure that names are changed, and generally wait a while as well before publishing to anonymise the problem and protect the guilty. And remember I have had people I have never worked with before accuse me (albeit lightheartedly) of spying on their project, so some observations must be common across multiple projects. Sometimes I pu

A blast from the past

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Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I spent several happy years working for the legendary Acorn Computers and their near mythical set-top box subsidiary, Online Media . We did some seriously cool, groundbreaking stuff there, including being (arguably) the first to stream video over internet protocols. All the computers ran on RiscOS , a homegrown, lightweight, adaptable operating system for ARM processors. Alas this time came to an end, and Acorn disappeared, but their legacy lived on. RiscOS  carried on, supported by various companies. I had mostly forgotten about it until now. An old colleague recently mentioned that in 2006 a group of ex-Acornites started a new company, RiscOS Open Limited (ROOL), dedicated to maintaining the operating system and take it forward. The OS is still available, and supported. So do take a look, and if you have an interest in RiscOS then do consider helping them out.