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App Inventor for Android

By Anton Piatek, on July 26th, 2010%

Saw this recently on the Google blog:

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

via Official Google Blog: App Inventor for Android.

It looks really cool, and allows really quick generation of apps via a gui interface which is powered by MIT’s Open Blocks framework which sounds like a really cool way to get children and students into programming

I can’t wait to get my invite to try it out!

Leave a comment   Programming, Technology   , , ,  

eBooks on Android

By Anton Piatek, on July 23rd, 2010%

Since buying an Android phone I have been starting to think about using it to read books. The screen isn’t bad, and it turns out that there is some good software out there

Aldiko is a fantastic program for reading free ePub books, so I am working my way through a few H. G. Wells books as they are now public domain and available directly through the program (along with many other free books). The software has good options for font styling, line spacing, page turning, black on white vs. white on black as well as quick shortcuts for changing the brightness.

One thing I have yet to figure out though, is buying eBooks.

Sure, there are loads of places out there that sell them, many including their own software (available for Android) for reading the books with DRM. However it is almost impossible to work out which ones use which DRM systems, and what the restrictions are on them (some may even be per-book)

Why am I worried about DRM? Well, what if I want to read the book on a train on a laptop, or what if my phone dies and I get a different phone? Can I transfer it to another device? What if I decide to buy a hardware eBook reader? Will I be able to copy my books to it and read them there?

I haven’t even addressed the idea of lending the book to my wife without giving her my phone.

DRM worries me greatly, and so I doubt I will buy an eBook anytime soon unless it comes without DRM (but no sites make it very clear that they are DRM-free). Why can’t they come to the same conclusions as online music distributors and realise that DRM-free means more sales?

I guess it is paper books for the forseeeable future

6 comments   Reading, Rights, Technology   , , , , , ,  

WebSphere Message Broker Fix Pack 7.0.0.1 available

By Anton Piatek, on July 22nd, 2010%

Finally – All that hard work has paid off and the release is available!

Fix Pack 7.0.0.1 (V7.0 Fix Pack 1) for WebSphere Message Broker v7.0 is now available.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg24027267

You can see what is new in 7.0.0.1 by looking in the Information Center

  • Simplicity and productivity
    • User-defined patterns
    • Solar Pattern Authoring sample
    • Service Access from WebSphere MQ: one-way pattern
    • Using a subflow as a user-defined node
  • Universal connectivity for SOA
    • New CORBARequest node
    • New CICSRequest node
    • New WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition nodes
    • New DatabaseInput node
    • New SecurityPEP node
    • JMS transport for SOAP nodes
    • Querying WSDL with ?wsdl
    • HTTP nodes can use the embedded listener in an execution group
    • New HTTP Timeout terminal on HTTPInput and SOAPInput nodes
    • Securing the connection to IMS™ by using SSL
    • Propagating security credentials to IMS
    • Closing unused connections to Enterprise Information Systems
    • Propagating security credentials to SAP
    • New WS-Trust V1.3 compliant security token server (STS) support for message flow security
Leave a comment   IBM, Message Broker, My Job   , ,  

Ubuntu in Business

By Anton Piatek, on July 15th, 2010%

On Tuesday I attended the Ubuntu in Business event run by the Ubuntu UK Community and Canonical, and unlike Proactive Paul I really enjoyed the day and thought it was a success.

I will agree and say that there should have been more introductory talks on Ubuntu and Open Source for those people that were not familiar, especially as they were trying to target new and potential users, however given half the audience was already running Ubuntu I am not sure if that would have been a waste. Certainly introduction demo’s are always good and especially for someone new to Ubuntu or Linux this would show that really it is not very different from using windows and is certainly not scary!

The talks and targetted demo’s were good, in particular I was curious about the Ubuntu Cloud and Landscape which both seem really good. For me the best part of the day was when the guest speakers and Canonical hosts got up on a panel and were interviewed by Glyn Moody which resulted in some fantastic discussion, excellent answers and some good questions and responses from the audience.

Of course the ubuntini cocktail afterwards was interesting too – not really my thing, but was nice to try.

The conversation after the cocktail was possibly the best part of the evening – actually getting to talk to some of the Canonical folks and forging a few new links. Some good conversations about IBM and Ubuntu, hopefully it won’t take too long for sanity to break-out and IBM to consider Ubuntu seriously
(If you are a business buying IBM software and want to use it on Ubuntu, make sure you tell your salesman this – If IBM doesn’t hear people asking for software on Ubuntu then there is no reason to ship it for Ubuntu).

One comment   Technology, Ubuntu   , ,