Using Kindlegen with PHP on Linux to Create Kindle Files

July 15, 2014 | 1 comment

I’m working on a side project at the moment that requires the conversion programatically of a page of html to something that can be consumed by an Amazon Kindle. I did a quick search to see if anything existed as a PHP class library that I could use and while there was they were either hugely bloated or too alpha for my needs.

I then stumbled upon Amazon’s command line tool KindleGen which allows conversion of HTML and ePub docs to the MOBI format that the Kindle requires. This is a multi-platform too and, crucially, a version for Linux is … Read the rest

Happy 10th Birthday Us!

June 5, 2014 | Comment

So I have been blogging on technology now for just over ten years it would seem, the first post was June 5th 2004. It’s somewhat ironic, however, that I am today writing this post in WordPress and the very first post was about Noah Grey’s excellent Greymatter another great CMS. This also means that I have been connected for about 20 years launching my first website in May 1996 – The Williams Database.

How things have change in that very short space of time. That first site was launched on the “free” 0.5 mb of space that was provided … Read the rest

Ignorance of Security isn’t Acceptable in 2014

March 13, 2014 | Comment

I noticed the other day that on one of my accounts for a company I have done business with in the past (lets call them “Marketing File” as that is what they are called) was using what I considered to be a weak password. When I went to change it I found that I couldn’t do it through the web interface but had to call their support department. At this point I could hear the sound of faint alarm bells in the back of my head.

When I called the number and explained that I wanted to change my password … Read the rest

A Life in Computers

A Life in Computers

March 11, 2014 | 1 comment

A trip to The National Museum of Computing at the weekend was a real trip down memory lane for me. You can read about our visit to Bletchley Park at a later date but I wanted to highlight some of the more significant computers that have featured in my life that were on show there. The dates are pretty loose as my memory is not what it once was!

Teletype (c. 1976)

I have written previously about how I encountered my first “computer” at secondary school. In fact this wasn’t a computer at all but basically a printer with a … Read the rest

What we did Before StackOverflow

February 18, 2014 | Comment

So StackOverflow the question and answer site for programmers went down yesterday and if what you read is to be believed all coding stopped. Of course that wasn’t the case but it did make me stop and think about what it was like before the internet.

As I have stated before I have been coding a very long time. Professionally since 1988 but I have been programming in one form or another since I was 11, i.e. long before either StackOverflow or the Internet was around. Just how did we cope back then?

While they aren’t too popular now, for … Read the rest

Hat tip to Kernighan & Ritchie

Hat tip to Kernighan & Ritchie

January 15, 2014 | Comment

IMG_7937My last post was all about what has changed in the world of databases since I graduated. This post is all about what hasn’t.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 1988 and during my course we learn’t a number of programming languages including C. Then THE bible on the subject was by Kernighan & Ritche.

My younger son has just started his second year Computer Science degree and this year they too are learning C. When he told me this I mentioned the book and wondered if they would still use it. Yesterday was his first lecture … Read the rest

The Evolution of Databases

The Evolution of Databases

January 10, 2014 | 1 comment

iStock_000016066249XLargeOne of the beauties of a long career is that you get to see how things in your sector evolve over time. Being in IT is no different other than the phenomenal rate of change.

Nowhere is this more evident than in databases. When I started out in the late eighties I was a COBOL programmer working on hierarchical databases and specifically IDMSX on ICL’s VME platform. These databases worked on the basis of linked lists and you had to “walk” through a whole chain in order to get to the record you wanted.

Hierarchical databases were straightforward to learn … Read the rest