I call it stealing

    I have a friend who receives Disability Living Allowance. She can walk for about fifty yards, then she has to sit down, such are her medical problems. The DLA is paid to her so that she can keep herself mobile, it pays for the maintenance on her mobility scooter as well as the numerous taxi fares she needs to get herself around town.
    Her scooter is showing its age though. The gearbox is

Read More

Android vs. iOS apps: it's a matter of status

So my mission has been to research a category of smartphone apps. I've been to the iPhone App Store, the Android Market, the Windows Phone Marketplace, and the BlackBerry App World.

And I've seen a lot of apps, and a lot of screenshots. A hell of a lot of screenshots.

iPhone screen shots normally have the status bar included. The time, the battery and the connectivity status. Or 'iPod' if

Read More

FAILBlog #fail

    My life is complete. A piece of software I wrote for the Oxford Words Blog, an online Shakespearean vocabulary checker, has been featured on FAILBlog.
    Pretty funny, the FAILBlog submitter has picked up on the fact that if you put the word 'balls' into the form repeated more than 20 times it tells you your English is 100% Shakespearean. Which though undeniably entertaining is entirely

Read More

How smart does a smartphone have to be?

    It started with an argument I heard last year at an event for mobile application developers. On my left, a developer, on my right a mobile phone industry maven. The developer was waving his three-year-old Nokia E71 and using it to illustrate a point about the smartphone market.
    The maven remarked that in the context of the smartphone market in 2010 the Nokia was not a smartphone even

Read More

The annoyance of writing stupid things

   It is with some surprise that I notice six months have passed since I last published anything here. It's not that I haven't written anything, I see I have four draft posts stored up, or that I haven't been writing things elsewhere, just that what I have written here has seemed so banal when reviewed that I haven't pressed that 'Publish' button.

   Better to say nothing than say too much and

Read More

Precomputing for fun and profit

    Last year I wrote a post about my keyword analysis tool. I wrote this piece of software in the years before I started working for OUP, and only now I have seen the tools at the disposal of the lexicographers do I realise that I created what was in effect a corpus analysis tool.
    I used the technologies I was familiar with using for web sites, PHP and MySQL. These are the bread-and-butter

Read More

My travels over four decades

  While planning a holiday with my wife a few weeks ago I was left wondering where in the UK I had yet to see. She doesn't hail from these shores, so I wanted to show her something new.
   I started with a map book, but soon realised a broader stroke was required. I can get too engrossed in maps. So I found a blank topographical map of the UK, loaded it into Paint Shop Pro and started work with a

Read More

A dictionary search box for your website or blog

The Oxford Dictionaries Online search box widget I mentioned in a previous post has now gone live and is available for you to put on your own blogs or web sites. It is available in two versions, one for each of world and US English, and an instance of the final result can be seen at the top of the right hand column of this blog.

Get it here: http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/searchbox

Read More

Yet another set of browser stats

    It's worth posting these graphs of browser market share over the second half of 2010 generated from real-world Urchin traffic figures. The first one shows the percentage traffic for each of the five main browsers, and the second one breaks the MS Internet Explorer figure down into separate versions since version 6. April and May are best ignored due to the site launch distorting the figures,

Read More

2010 as viewed through Daily Express headlines

    A couple of years ago I was working in a small business centre in Oxfordshire, a building that was home to several small tech companies. We had a common room with a kitchen and dining area, and the building management provided us with a selection of daily newspapers.
    Among those papers were a high-end broadsheet, a red-top tabloid and the Daily Express. I became fascinated by the Express 

Read More