Posts by The Grime

Nuke support in UK hits record high

er, Bristol Channel, 1607 anyone?

Laptop bags: 13- and 14-inchers

If Santa brings me a laptop bag I'll know who to blame.

Adobe confirms mobile Flash Player's race is run

I'm surprised to see The Reg has done a balanced and accurate take on a Flash related story. Elsewhere there's a Flash is dead, Jobs was right, yay HTML5 feeding frenzy going on. Any Flash content I've developed for mobile has been delivered with AIR, as I had no use-cases for browser delivery. AIR will continue to be the way to go. Move along, nothing to see here.

The problem today is how Adobe's PR managed to screw this up so it sounds like a very bad day for Flash. It is in fact a very bad day for Adobe's enterprise solutions- the 750 (9% of workforce) redundancies are in that area. On a day they have announced record revenues of over a billion dollars for the quarter, those affected employees must be feeling especially bitter. We are not told what enterprise product(s) are affected, but it can't be looking good for the expensive Jave EE LCDS products. That was a viable and important part of the business. I get the impression Adobe are reacting to predictions of future growth (marketing good, finance bad) rather than being pragmatic and supporting the here and now.

Adobe announces Creative Cloud, acquires PhoneGap

Well, no. If you watch the Flash technology keynotes you'll realise that Flash is now both a 3D games platform that can rival some consoles as well, as the widest used RIA technology for enterprises. HTML5 is all well and good, but the feature set is years behind Flash, and Javascript is stuck in the 1990s.

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

you've got to be kidding right?

Once again Lewis observes that the earthquake/tsunami were catastrophies; yes they were, but potentially Daiichi (or more likely Hamaoka, cf. Katsuhiko Ishibashi) could make large parts of Japan uninhabitable. It isn't helpful to compare Daiichi to Chernobyl or an earthquake, it just muddies the issues- can we just concentrate on the Daiichi disaster and its consequences for health?

As for Lewis's analysis of the situation- I don't know where he gets the idea that only "miniscule amounts" of radioactive material have been deposited around the area, and that danger beyond the plant fence is effectively nil. Radiation has been detected in milk and vegetables in the prefecture- this is a Level 7 event meaning "a major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended counter measures." Like the BBC, you could play that down by saying its only 10% of the Chernobyl release. 10% of the Chernobyl release is still a massive amount! And then we come to the clincher... "Chernobyl actually killed fewer than 60 people". What will I read next in The Register, an assertion that the Jews didn't do too badly under the Nazis? Estimates range from 4,000 to 500,000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl. The Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths in Russia so far and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus. Perhaps I could point Lewis and the rest of you in the direction of this work if you'd like to know more about the health effects of Chernobyl?

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B-Ikqg4T4F30OWJmYjgwYWQtZmFiOC00NmM5LWI3NzYtMzVkODA2MmRmMmI1&hl=en&authkey=CLXh9bkN

Ignoring the content, the overall tone and language used by Lewis shouts that this isn't serious, impartial journalism. If he wants to be taken seriously, perhaps he could look at the wider issues- especially as they relate to Britain. How about the fact that Japan has now cancelled all MOX orders with Thorpe/Sellafield, a plant built specifically to supply Japan at the cost of billions to the taxpayer, and almost £100 million a year to keep going? Perhaps nuclear industry PR mouthpieces would like us to ignore such a massive recent failure, both technically and financially, in the UK nuclear industry. Perhaps Lewis could analyse the data coming from Daichii a little more comprehensively and truthfully in order to salvage his professional standing as a journalist. He could learn a lot from Arnie Gunderson, who has been deeply involved in the nuclear power industry since the early 70s, and has held licenses to operate nucler reactors. I'm not aware of Lewis's credentials, but I think Arnie might have a little bit more of a realistic perspective. He's the only commentator I've come across who has pointed out that the neutron beams detected around the plant indicate that chain reactions are still occurring in the fuel. You can watch him and decide here:

http://vimeo.com/user6415562/videos

I'm starting to suspect these Lewis articles are just stuck in here to create controversy, that sort of thing seems to work wonders for the Daily Mail's circulation figures. Perhaps Lewis could follow up Arnie's mention of the recent US study that found that a spent fuel pond boiling dry would lead to 100,000 deaths from lung cancer? I mean, that would actually be what a real journalist does, right?

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

Oh dear

So the world has divided into "Chernobyl-denyers" and "radiophobes". Great, that's going to help informed, rational debate. So what has Chernobyl-denyer-in-chief ignored in his latest tirade?

"Extremely high radiation found in soil"

Japanese authorities have detected a concentration of a radioactive substance 1,600 times higher than normal in soil at a village, 40 kilometers away from the troubled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture..... The results announced on Wednesday show that 163,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium-137 per kilogram of soil has been detected in Iitate Village, about 40 kilometers northwest of the plant. Gakushuin University Professor Yasuyuki Muramatsu, an expert on radiation in the environment, says that normal levels of radioactive cesium-137 in soil are around 100 becquerels at most. The professor says he was surprised at the extremely high reading, which is 1,630 times higher than normal levels. He warns that since radioactive cesium remains in the environment for about 30 years it could affect agricultural products for a long time. He is calling on the government to collect detailed data and come up with ways to deal with the situation.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/23_28.html?play

"he nuclear safety agency said tests on Friday showed radioactive iodine had spiked 1,250 times higher than normal in the seawater just offshore the plant."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8408419/Japan-nuclear-crisis-Radioactive-seawater-surrounds-stricken-plant.html

I guess the above articles were written by radiophobes, desperately trying to show nuclear power in a bad light. In fact, radiation is very beneficial to your health, after all, cancer is cured with radiation from nuclear power stations!

And remember folks, the gubbingment/nuke power industry are desperate for all the new stations to get approved on a nod, we can't have no-nothing radiophobic Joe Public throwing a spanner in the gravy train works.

Adobe open source code backs – gasp! – HTML5

Write one then

The reason there is no open source flash player is presumably there's no point writing one. Adobe has published the swf format information and the player code, and you can download Adobe's open source contribution in project Tamarin to get a headstart. But why would anyone bother? The open nature of the Adobe player / tooling technology is being used by developers to use languages other than Actionscript, or roll their own compilers to produce the byte code in a Flash app.

The sheer ignorance displayed time and again about Flash and the related technologies by commentards does really start to grate after a while. I despair reading through the comments on the Flash on Android story today. It works, its not a resource hog (if the app isn't written by a bozo), in fact the Flash player has had major rewrites and redesigns over the last few years to get it right on mobile. And they've succeeded. Then you come on hear and read comment after uninformed comment saying Flash is not designed for mobile. Change the bleedin record, and actually do a bit of research before writing your biased sheep-like anti-Flash bleating.

Nexus One resuscitated as 'Pure Google Nexus S'

cutting-edge at the time...?

The Nexus One is still less than a year old, which admittedly is an aeon in cellphone terms, but it's spec still stands up today. In fact I purchased one for Android development as I believe it will still be a harware yardstick for a good couple of years.

Adobe combats Apple with 'mobile first mindset'

Yay Flash!

Only two knee-jerk reactions so far? Come on commentards, you can do better than that!

Adobe AIR 2.5 adds Flash to Android, TV and RIM tablets

change the record already

Isn't the endless knee-jerk anti-Adobe diatribes from el-reg commentards getting a bit boring already? Sweeping statements about performance with not one jot of evidence. Meanwhile in the real world developers are doing brilliant things with Flash. Global shipping companies use it to visualize their operations down to real-time mapping and scheduling; its used by the military; its used widely for front-ends to financial trading apps. In fact anywhere where a complex rich client is needed, to be deployed multiplatform over the web, mobile, or as a desktop install with AIR, Flash/Flex is the default choice, unless Silverlight is a better fit for the organisation. There are countless enterprise level apps developed in this technology dealing with vast amounts of data in real time. All you commentards who have a Pavlovian response to the word "Flash"... yes, we get the message, now change the bl@@din record!

Apple threatens Java with death on the Mac

not surprising

Showing my age, but I was coding Java on the Mac in the 90s using Metrowerks Codewarrior IDE. When Sun released Java 1.2 (Java 2), it took Apple over a year to release the software update. My choice was be stuck on 1.1.7 or whatever it was, or switch to the PC. I missed Codewarrior, but haven't looked back. I've watched the recent trend for developers to choose MacBooks with an arched eyebrow - how could so many people be so shallow as to choose a platform based on how shiny it is? Can't say I'm surprised to see the wheels coming off the wagon again. The question is, which PC laptop will the trendies migrate to?

South African police hunt Twittering speedcam spy

We have..

Or rather, most of the world does - its called trapster.com

Another reason to get a smartphone if you havent already.