Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90

March 19th, 2008

Listening to the radio, I heard that there would be a discussion about Arthur C. Clarke on Front Row. I made sure I caught the program, but didn’t realise until afterwards that the comments were posthumous.
I discovered 2001 by chance, picking it randomly out of the science-fiction section some years ago in the library. I […]

Can Amazon’s Kindle Set Books Alight?

December 16th, 2007

The Kindle is an e-book reader released by Amazon this November.
Ergonomics
Like the Sony Reader it uses electrophoretic technology to simulate ink on a real page. It doesn’t require a constant stream of power and can be read outside, both advantages over a common LCD display. Personally I find concentrating on anything with a backlight uncomfortable […]

Learning PHP Data Objects

October 20th, 2007

Popel, D. (2007) Learning PHP Data Objects, Packt Pub
Commendably the book keeps a tight focus, providing the minimum context in which to show PDO features: in this case a basic library program with simple PHP methods providing HTML. However in a later chapter it provides a useful example that shows the advantage of the model, […]