Permiere Pro has lately proven itself to be the singular worst piece of software I have ever had the misfortune to use. It has cost us far more time than it has saved, certainly several times its RRP in wasted hours. Normally I’m a software developer, but a project I was working on required me [...]

GridVoices have published my article “Cloud for Academia“, which takes a brief look at how various Cloud offerings could be used for HPC applications.
UPDATE 4/11/2009: This article has now been syndicated (if that’s the right word!) on HPCWire.

Package managers – your yums, portages, apts etc – must be one of the best features of linux. It used to be pretty impossible to keep an installation up-to-date, now it’s trivial most of the time.
I actually wonder if this is Linux’s killer feature – whilst your Windows installation slowly rots until you are prepared [...]

David Weinberger writes on “Joho the Blog” that “transparency is the new objectivity“. In the post, he explains how journalists have traditionally strived to appear objective, but today’s bloggers typically go down a different path and aim for transparency. That is to say, a journalist will not openly reveal their biases (which sometimes grow into [...]

The GridVoices blog on Gridipedia has just moved to a WordPress installation. Back in April, I wrote this article for them, which looks at the similarities and differences between Grid and Cloud computing.

Normally when I’m programming in Java I’ll use Eclipse. However, in some cases Eclipse can be a bit heavyweight and I’ll fallback on Vim. The last time I did this I started to miss the ability to quickly and easily run unit tests on a per class basis. For this reason, I added the following [...]

I’m the author of the diffxml tool for comparing XML documents. In this post I’d like to explain why you might want to use diffxml to compare XML documents rather than traditional text tools such as the UNIX diff command.
There are two things that diffxml understands that diff doesn’t; the syntax of XML documents (e.g. [...]

I nearly called this blog “Tergiversations”, after an essay by Richard Gabriel in his book “Patterns of Software”. It’s a very important book to me. I found the book in a bargain bin in the academic bookstore on my university campus at the end of my first year. At this time I was considering if Computer Science was the correct choice of course for me, or if I should do something completely different, perhaps in Arts & Humanities.