Category Archives: News

Ever wanted to work at Hursley?

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If you’ve been following our adventures here on eightbar for a while and have always wondered what it’s really like to work at IBM Hursley, now may be your chance to find out. Hursley is hiring. Current job openings in research and development include…

The above list is not exhaustive; several more openings are listed at the Jobs at IBM Career Center too.

IBM & Dojo

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Given the buzz of Web2.0, its not surprising to see lots of ajax-based toolkits emerge from lots of different sources, Yahoo! and Google included.

I am glad to see that IBM are getting involved by contributing to an open source project.

Dojo has been on my list of things to learn about for a while now. As a starting point, I can recommend this talk by Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation that was given at the XTech 2006 conference.

One thousand paintings

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I recently discovered One thousand paintings, a project with the aim of selling 1000 paintings of the numbers 1 to 1000. The pricing model is quite interesting:

Generally, the value of a number is defined by the number itself, in the following way: value = 1000 – number. However, this is only the maximum price. Initially, a discount of 90% applies. This discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings that are sold (for example, after 300 sold paintings, the discount will be 60%)

I thought the whole thing was quite cool. Having showed it to my wife (who is herself an artist), we quickly started looking for numbers that were still available. Many of the likely choices had already gone (including my preference, 404) but she pointed out that 365 was still up for grabs (yes, yes.. we should have got 366 as well, for leap years). Before long, we’d ordered it, happy to support a cool project and wondering where we’d hang our unique 12″ x 12″ painting.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Million Dollar Homepage was taking off. Ian, while wondering whether gullibility was a pre-requisite for early adopter status, bought an ad for eightbar, which I notice still manages to bring us in over 30 clicks per month. While these are undeniably different projects, it’s hard not to compare them.

When Mrs Roo and I bought 365, it was the 98th painting sold (handily just within the maximum discount). Today, having been linked from boing boing and other prominent blogs, he’s already sold 144 225 and rising very fast. Surely mainstream media attention can’t be far behind.

O’Reilly protecting the “Web 2.0” name

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A few of us were so busy drinking nice red wine and chatting about Web 2.0 yesterday that we didn’t notice O’Reilly attempting to protect the use of “Web 2.0” as a service mark and prevent its use in conjunction with a 3rd party conference.

Thus did controversy ensue.

I can’t help thinking that O’Reilly are victims of their own success here. Like it or not, “Web 2.0” has stuck pretty well as a term. Protecting their Web 2.0 conference while still hoping to keep it in popular use is going to be a difficult line to walk.

How is anyone else going to have conferences about what is, after all, a popular subject? Well, in this instance, O’Reilly are offering to let the “IT@Cork Web 2.0 conference” go ahead this time, but have requested that they agree not to use the name for future conference.

It seems Tim O’Reilly himself is on holiday. I wonder whether things will change when he returns.

New EightBar Theme

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When we first setup EightBar we didn’t spend much time on the theme. I’d quickly put something together so that we could the site live but I never really liked it. Last week I saw this picture Roo had put up on Flickr. It turned out it was actually Mrs Roo who took it, but I loved it. It seemed perfect to use as the base for the EightBar, so he’s the first version of a proper theme for our site.

Interesting new blog on consumer electronics

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Some of our readers might be interested in a new consumer electronics blog that has recently popped into existence. This is interesting for me in that as we often don’t get thought of as part of the consumer environment. However many of the things we do, be it the social computing, cool devices etc here in Hursley and around the company are actually aimed at people. My previous post reminding the world that “you cant but a next gen games console without buying IBM” also highlight this.

For anyone working in a company its great for your network of family and friends to see what you do. Consumer devices therefore help a great deal, as does general media sponsorship. My 90 year old grandmother knows that I work at Wimbledon during the championships and when the IBM logo appears on the TV she has a pride moment. (Technically I am usually on the website, and not a great deal to do with the TV graphics but it is all part of the same company).

However as techies it is also nice to know what we have under the covers that maybe everyone else (as in general public) does not know. Where CICS is used, where MQ is used, a little buzz of ‘I know how this works’ when I access a banking service.

Fame, and bananas

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Following on from my previous post about Blue Fusion, the local newspaper has picked this up. I’m the one on the left holding the inflatable banana…

The event has just finished, incidentally. Yesterday I hosted Search for a Planet, which was a way of exploring planets, physics, and geology. A short video from the ship’s computer explained to the team that they (the crew) had been woken from hibernation to help to find a new planet to land on, since the ship’s database has been destroyed. Information on various physical factors was available – star type, temperature, gravity, atmospheric composition etc. – and the team had to use that information to search for an appropriate planet to make their new home. It was a very cool activity, with a strong visual impact. The science elements were key to solving the puzzle, i.e. understanding the difference between degrees Kelvin and Celsius (most of the students hadn’t come across Kelvin before); working out the correct mix of gases in the atmosphere; knowing how much gravity is OK before you get squashed flat.

The talk yesterday morning was by Dave Conway-Jones, who showed off the Hursley Emerging Technology lab by remote control, and talked about motes and zigbee and various other new, cool technologies. Today we had Ian Hughes talking about Wimbledon, as well as a talk by Peter Robinson from Cambridge University on using computers to analyse emotions through facial expressions.

Today it was back to Three Wise Monkeys for me. Strangely appropriate, given the press coverage. Anyway, I’ve had a great time – roll on next year.

I’m emerging

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For the past couple of years I’ve been working in the Pervasive Messaging Technologies team. This has been a great time for me, for so many reasons. The team is fantastic and my manager (who recently posted here himself) is not only a great boss but also a Master Inventor. What a title! It is refreshing, in a company where you can describe your cupboard as a TSU and most people will know what you’re talking about (and many will not assume you are joking), to work in Pervasive Messaging Technologies – one of the few departments which did not reduce itself to an acronym.

Recently, and very suddenly, I was invited to participate in a twelve month job-swap with Martin Gale from Emerging Technology Services. Despite being insanely happy where I was, it seemed to good an offer to pass up. Having moved in, met new friends and learned more about old friends, posted on the department’s wiki and blog and had a crack at a couple of rather fun demos (which I’ll to post more about one day) I’m now three weeks in. Here are some observations on the move.

  • ‘Upstairs’ in Pervasive Messaging, people went for coffee. ‘Downstairs’ in ETS people go for a tea. I assume this is because of the relative proximities of the coffee bar and the Cha Bar. I have finally discovered a taste for tea without sugar.
  • The S in ETS stands for Services, and being a services team has meant I get to see more customers in the flesh. This is a good thing by the way. Being close to our customers and personally understanding what they want and need is not only essential but fun. I’m averaging over one customer meeting per week already, and I’ve barely started yet.
  • The E and T stand for Emerging Technology. This means we’re interested in new, cutting edge, innovative things. And everyone really is interested in these things. People ‘get it’, where it can be anything from how to make this server perform better to why tagging is more powerful than catagorising and why AJAX, despite being an overused buzzword, is important and useful. Hobbies and work time overlap pleasingly in an environment where today’s part-time project could be part of tomorrow’s customer demo.

So I’m enjoying it. I feel at home. The only worry so far has been this falling clock.

Fortunately Ian and I were safely in the lab at the end of the hall, but the noise of crashing metal and breaking glass was impressive.

– Roo Reynolds (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

Update: comments closed due to oddly high levels of spam on this particular post.

Good move by VMware

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VMware have released the VMware player a cut down play only Virtual Machine that will run images created using their VMware Workstation, ESX and GSX products.

This is a clever move by VMware, the VMware player will be especially useful in the Enterprise market where pre-installed demo images of serious heavy weight middleware and other applications are an easy way of providing try before you buy demos. The availability of a free player will help encourage software firms to use VMwares fully featured products to create such demo images.

The player could also help in the uptake of linux as well, there are plenty of pre-installed Linux ISO images out there such as Knoppix to use in VMware. This provides a free means for users to try out Linux while still running their Windows setup.

‘Gmail’ becomes ‘Google Mail’ for UK users

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Google recently announced that they are changing the service’s name here in the UK due to a trademark dispute. From today, all new invites sent to people in the UK will be for @googlemail.com (rather than @gmail.com) addresses. Nothing changes (so far) for existing users.

Gmail logo
The Gmail logo.

Google Mail
The new Google Mail logo.

Why is this happening? The dispute with gmail.co.uk has been rumbling away for a while, and this seems to be the result. Google are still contesting their right to use the Gmail name in the UK, only now it’s being done in court.