Cloud why now?

I wrote and published a paper, called Cloud why now? on the Knowledge Transfer Network site. How new is Cloud Computing? It is a clear evolution if two trends in IT architecture that have had an immense and limited success. The successful trend is distributed computing and the less successful one utility computing. What is driving this evolution and why now? This article has a quick look at the trends that have brought this to this point and looks at the fact that like most economic revolutions, it’s a confluence of both socio/economics and science. The article concludes by looking at the paradox of data, to see how it is both a driver of change, and an inhibitor. …

Xmas Markets

I am staying in London this year for my Birthday holiday. I was very tempted by the Guardian’s Xmas markets and winter glacier trip, particularly Prague & Berlin but we decided to stay in London. I am throwing the paper advert away today. So this year, I expect to visit the British Museum and see_Avatar. I’ll have to make up on the WinterFests by having lunch at the Canary Wharf barbecues.

Perhaps we’ll do Prague & Berlin next year, the Guardian promised a train trip to Brussels, then onto Prague for three nights, and home via Berlin. It’d be good to do it, perhaps next year. …

Wish, Boomy icons and imagemagick

I need to write a program for managing my windows host, well actually, someone else’s windows laptop. I fired up TCL/TK and discovered that I haven’t copied my tcl/tk icon library from my home systems and I decided to improve my library, which is a big mistake.

I went looking on the ‘net and found the lovely Boomy icons. Annoyingly the transparency representation doesn’t work on my platform and the lovely transparency on the GIFs comes out a delightful shade of pink. There is no .bmp set; the .png set work and look fine. GIMP allegedly supports batch operations, as does Imagemagik. I have been impressed with Jonathan Soma’s trip map http://www.triptropnyc.com/ site about the New York transport system, which uses Imagemagik ever since I saw it, so an excuse to play with it would be good.

The alternative might be to find and install the TCL/TK IMG package which seems to be at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/.

I have opened a wiki page here, to record my notes, successes and failures, which now includes how to use ImageMagick to perform a simple format conversion. …