Author Archives: alankent
Is it 6 months already? (Life at eBay)
Wow. Last night I got to attend a panel session and dinner with the eBay board. Everyone in the room had to get up and say who they were and how long at eBay. It struck me then it was 6 months already! Doesn’t time fly. The eBay board by the way I found to […]
eBay – a few weeks on
The move with family to Silicon Valley to take up a position at eBay has been full on. Diving into work, which has been pretty fun to be honest. Lots of good people, lots of challenges, (lots of positions to be filled!!!) Interesting to see that programmers here are just like back home in Australia. […]
My new job at eBay
Well, I was not sure what was commercial in confidence before, but this article in The Register is where I am fitting in, in charge of the search back-end team looking after Cassini and Voyager. A big challenge, but exciting times and a great team. They have some great people there already and more joining […]
iPhone apps for preschool children
Some time back I moved all my reviews to a dedicated site, A Touch of Learning. Later I posted app suggestions using chomp. I have two young boys that are precious and a lot of work. A friend once described children as “very”. Very tiring, very hard work, very rewarding. (You can add your own […]
The End of LiveScribe App Development
Well, I must say I am not particular surprised, but LiveScribe seem to be giving up on an app store with third party app development. They instead seem to be putting more into integrating with other popular systems (like EverNote). At least they are planning to keep the store around for developers who have built […]
Fascinating High Performance Concurrency article
Matthew Farwell sent a note about an article on LMAX by Martin Fowler ( http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html ) to the Java Posse mailing list. I found it a very interesting read for anyone interested in high performance computing. Having recently completing a Java project achieving 3 million business operations per second using the Actor model with a […]
Trac and SVN on Mac OS X
I quite like Trac as its an integrated Wiki, ticketing system, and SVN repository browser. I particularly like the fact that you can create links between any of these three: Wiki pages can contain links to SVN commits, tickets can contain links to wiki pages and commits, you can even set it up so SVN […]
Thomas the Tank Engine home movies on YouTube
My boys love Thomas the Tank engine, and now have a reasonably good set of the wooden railway. They make up various tracks almost daily, and tear them again just as quickly. For fun, I made a couple of YouTube videos based on some recent tracks. I was hoping to get them interested in the […]
DLNA–what is it? First steps on a path to wisdom…
I am looking at DLNA to work out if I can use it as a sensible alternative to a HDMI matrix + HDMI extenders. This article I found contained a nice overview of DLNA that I could understand. There is of course the DLNA web site – but I have not found that site so […]
Distributing HDMI sources (DVD etc) to multiple destinations (TVs)
In my ongoing quest for a decent AV set up at home, one of the approaches is to distribute HDMI output of various devices out to other rooms. This post is a quick list of technologies in this area (certainly not definitive!) HDMI extenders are used to send HDMI signals over longer distances if a […]
Alan Kent's Blog 