sbisson

I worked with Tim as part of the founding team at UK Online, from an old brewery in the middle of the Mendips in Somerset.

I learned a lot in those three years in Shepton Mallet, as we kept pivoting to ride the wave of the early commercial internet. It's good to think that part of what we built back then is still here, now the consumer parts of Sky Broadband. I believe they still use that old brewery for customer support.

Downstairs from our space were the Perihelion folks, who were working on building VR systems on top of transputers Now that was fun...

That team all went its separate ways over the years, but many of us are still in touch.

Yes. There are multiple UI projects that build on the WinUI 3 components in the Win App SDK.

There's the first party MAUI which is an updated version of Xamarin Forms. The two best-known third-party implementations are AvaloniaUI and Uno. I prefer Uno, it has more cross-platform targets.

Someone has read the impossible game sections of Iain Banks’ Walking On Glass…

There's a fair bit of detail in the recently released Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, one of a series of in-universe documents from various Anderson shows.

I had a third-party shadow ROM kit for a BBC Micro in 1984; it let me back-up and load add-on ROMs into its memory and switch between them quickly.

It and others regularly go pat my home. It’s a great view!

Two things for me. An electromagnetics finite element analysis package that was then used to design the actuators for the landing gear for the 737NG-series; where millions of people’s lives have depended on that landing gear working. And the coupling filters for the HF amplifiers in the Australian over-the-horizon radar array.

In all these I was only part of the project, but everyone’s work added up.

I recently put Ubuntu one one. A nice little device!

Based on the classic book of computing history “Fire in the Valley”. A recommended read for anyone interested in the history of our industry.

Ringway 2 would have been right behind my home. Instead I have an electric railway and a lot of trees…

Amusing to see that the last line of the piece refers to "sci-fi on speed", as amphetamines were the drug of choice for the spiritual forefather of the movement, Philip K Dick...

Reminds me of my first car, a Mini Clubman estate with the fake woody panels on the side. The only thing you needed to know was that it had been re-engined with a hill-climb tuned Cooper S engine. Great on an island with a 40mph speed limit and too many rich folk with Ferraris and the like, as it could out accelerate them anywhere on the island. Sure it wouldn't go faster than 50, but that was fine as it got to that speed almost instantaneously.

It is a snakerboard

They do have their own teams, but the governing bodies don't let them play internationally.

I used to go blackberrying on the common above the cliffs at Portlet with my grandfather’s cabbage stalk cane to hold back the thorns…

Vernor is a proponent of ubiquitous sensors as an alternative or as an adjunct to AI; the example he likes to use is what he calls the "localizer", a simple sensor that can detect its position relative to other nearby sensors of the saem type.

So instead of complex vision systems to find, say, a part in a bin in a warehouse, a locator attached to the item would inform the network that it was "Two items down and three across in bin #243. Oh, and I am upside down", allowing a robot to quickly retrieve the item. It's an interesting approach to what Robert Forward called "artificial stupidity".

See Azure Private Edge Zones, part of the full product. Azure is offering both network-provided and private 5G as options in the same service.

Catching up with Azure, I see. Edge Zones has been available since May.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/private-multi-ac...

An example of inner source becoming open source; YARP began as a way to unify multiple internal .NET reverse proxy projects. Once mature and used internally it was opened up to the rest of the world...

Exactly; with a credit card paid off monthly by direct debit and an interest paying current account, you're earning interest on your cash and not paying any on your purchases. What's not to like getting what's basically free money with a little bit of no-brainer arbitrage?

It’s not quite as bad as presented here; yes Microsoft is in the process of deprecating kernel mode drivers as part of its current security push, however it’s following Linux and implementing eBPF as a more secure alternative that runs mostly in user land and in a sandbox in kernel space. For the type of thing that this app does, it’s a logical change of direction that does not require the same level of EV code signing.

Desktop peek is now a three finger swipe down and up on your trackpad.

To be fair to the architects of the Millennium Bridge, the structural engineers used a vehicle bridge model, not one for pedestrians.

Back in the mid-90s I was running tech at UKOL in Shepton Mallet; in a converted brewery which we shared with Perihelion Software, which was the team that wrote Helios. They were an interesting bunch of smart people who were using Transputers to run some of the first VR gaming rigs.

Amusingly Perihelion was founded by many of the folk from compiler company Metacomco, who were mainly Cambridge University computer science folk perhaps best known for the Tripos research OS. Tripos, of course, was commercialised as AmigaOS, and was the basis of Helios. So Atari shipped a computer using the same core OS as the Amiga...

As an aside it's interesting to note that Collabra are working with Microsoft on a Mesa 3D/Direct X bridge. With Wayland support coming to WSL 2, it's possible to speculate that this approach could also be used to bring a Wayland compositor to the Windows Remote Desktop for application window-level remote access to for WSL 2.

It gets less confusing when you realise that the original specification for containerd came from Docker (the company) and the current implementation of docker (the application) use containerd as their runtime.

By using containerd (or podman) in K8s, you're getting rid of a lot of unnecessary overhead and so should get more containers per host...

Our first Maine Coon was called Jeoffry, a big old lovable six-dinner-Sid of a cat who had several homes down the street, but always came back to us at the end of the day. He would definitely arise and do his morning orisons.

His spiritual successors arrived last weekend (nearly two years after our other Maine Bentham, The Cat Of Marginal Utility died at 18), a pair of calico Maine kittens, sisters who are currently asleep beside me.

They are going to be big...

Yes, there are a similar bunch of Falcon 20s from Flight Refuelling in the UK that are worth tracking...

I've moved my Pi4-based system over to SSD; living here near Heathrow I destroyed my first SD card in 3 months of writes...

It was originally set up to cater for folk photographing low flyhing in the Welsh mountains, particularly around the Mach Loop. So it's historically a subscription service with its own ICAO lookup database for military aircraft in the UK, which is very accurate indeed...

Now anyone can subscribe to 360radar, but it is limited to the UK and a small part of northern Europe. It's not the cheapest service, but if you're an aviation photographer in the UK it and its linked community are a key resource.