There is an EV charging station just opened near our house in Ealing. I am bemused by the way they are going about doing this. I mean I can buy a railway ticket, or pay for petrol for my car just by tapping a machine with my credit card. But to pay for a charge to your EV you have to go through a grotesque procedure that involved giving the supplier a lot of personal information for no obvious reason. Click on the thumbnail on the right to see the full set of instructions.
Continue Reading »Posted in Technology | Tagged EV, GDPR | 1 Comment »
You are in a pub and you hear someone say “that is Betamax vs VHS all over again”. What is that about? It is an interesting story which might effect your next career move, so listen up.
Continue Reading »Posted in History, Technology | Tagged betamax, cp/m, History, networking, osi, pc-dos, procurement, vhs | Leave a Comment »
I learned to code in 1963. Things were different then.
There were some obvious things, like 24 hour turnarounds on tests, and storing code on paper tape. Oh – and the computer had about .000000001 of the processor speed on my watch, but at the time we thought it was pretty cool.
I am beginning to sound like one of the four yorkshiremen so I will move on. I want to talk about the pioneers of structured programming and structured design,
Continue Reading »Posted in IT Pioneers, Still-coding | Tagged Coding, History, IT Pioneers, PL/1, Structured design | Leave a Comment »
A schema means different things for an SQL and a NOSQL database management system. If you are using SQL, you have to tell the system about the format of the data before you can use – that is the schema. When it comes to NOSQL databases everything is different. You don’t need a schema, you simply present data and the system stores it in whatever format you send it.
Each document in a collection1 can be a different layout and different types of data. The flexibility of NOSQL databases suggests that data design is less important. For example I read: “… since NoSQL doesn’t necessitate the need for a schema, you avoid the expense and time of that initial design stage.”
I don’t think so
Continue Reading »Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology | Tagged json-schema, NOSQL, SQL | Leave a Comment »
For decades, software developers had to struggle with getting computers to talk to each other. Businesses developed systems to do different things at different times on different hardware, and integrating the data was rarely on peoples priority lists. Customers would tell the bank about changing their address and still get mail about their mortgage sent to an old address because the mortgage system had it’s own address file.
Then came XML. A standardised way of exchanging information, with formal standards for different types of application. For example: FIXML – Financial Information Exchange and BEERXML – Brewing information. There is a list here. There are about a thousand of them.
XML is human-readable and similar to well-know HTML so easy to use if a little long-winded.
Well, I am glad that is done and dusted. A major problem for IT systems has been solved. Then came another standard.
Continue Reading »Posted in History, Technology | Tagged json, XML | Leave a Comment »
Over the years people have developed an unbelievable number of coding languages. They all do pretty much the same job in pretty much the same way. Personally I have coded in Mercury Autocode, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, LISP, Assembler, PERL, basic, C, C++ and JavaScript plus probably some others I have forgotten. Check the list of popular coding languages and you won’t find any of these except C variants and JavaScript1. That is because I have been out of the business for a while and coding languages are items of fashion. Every couple of years a new language becomes the latest hot language. Right now that is Python for reasons that totally escape me.
To make this clear. The world only needs a couple of coding languages, one for regular applications and another (maybe) to write operating systems in. None of the languages for general coding discussed here are a significant improvement on PL/1 which was invented in the 1960s2 , except for support for object orientation, which at the time had not been invented. Had a PL/2 been developed with Objects supported we could all just get on with coding.
But we are where we are.
Continue Reading »Posted in History, Technology | Tagged Coding, javascript, PL/1, typescript | Leave a Comment »
I started coding in then 1960’s on a Ferranti Mercury. It was as big as a house and had less computer power than my watch. But at the time we thought it was pretty cool. Over the years, Moor’s Law turned out to be pretty accurate. The most powerful computers doubled in power about every two years. Commercial systems got smaller. From as big as a house, to the size of a room, to the size of a desk, then a largeish box in a rack.
But in the mid 1970’s something happened off the Moore’s Law track. They managed to fit all the components of a low-power computer on a single chip. They were mass produced and relatively cheap. The engineers that built it had in mind using them for process control, calculators or computer terminals.
Enter Gary Kildall
But a genius called Gary Kildall saw another potential use for these devices.
Continue Reading »Posted in History, IT Pioneers, Technology | Tagged apple, cp/m, Gary Kildall, History, IT Pioneers, micro computers, superbrain, visicalc | 1 Comment »
I recently went back to one of my old projects to see how it is working out. And it is looking great. It started as a quick demonstration site and now it is an important resource for the FinTech industry.
Continue Reading »Posted in Fintech, History | Tagged Fintech, History | Leave a Comment »
A schema means different things for an SQL and a NOSQL database management system. If you are using SQL, you have to tell the system about the format of the data before you can use – that is the schema. When it comes to NOSQL databases everything is different. You don’t need a schema, you simply present data and the system stores it in whatever format you send it.
Each document in a collection1 can be a different layout and different types of data. The flexibility of NOSQL databases suggests that data design is less important. For example I read: “… since NoSQL doesn’t necessitate the need for a schema, you avoid the expense and time of that initial design stage.”
I don’t think so
Continue Reading »Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology | Tagged Database, express, json, node.js, NOSQL, sailsjs, schema, SQL | Leave a Comment »
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