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Authors  >  Richard Morris

Richard Morris Richard Morris
Richard Morris is a journalist, author and public relations/public affairs consultant. He has written for a number of UK and US newspapers and magazines and has offered strategic advice to numerous tech companies including Digital Island, Sony and several ISPs. He now specialises in social enterprise and is, among other things, a member of the Big Issue Invest advisory board. Big Issue Invest is the leading provider to high-performing social enterprises & has a strong brand name based on its parent company The Big Issue, described by McKinsey & Co as the most well known and trusted social brand in the UK.
Peter Norvig: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 03 February 2010 |
It's likely that you are already using the results of Peter Norvig's work every day, if you search the internet with Google. One of the smartest moves that Google ever made was to hire the man who not only was a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence, but was... Read more...
Don Syme: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 19 January 2010 |  2 comments |
It came as a surprise to many of us when Microsoft pulled from it's hat a rabbit in the form of an exciting, radical, language that offers an effective alternative to the Object-oriented orthodoxy. The creative force behind this language, F#, turns out to be a... Read more...
Robin Milner: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 14 January 2010 |
Although Robin Milner is best known for creating ML, which has evolved into Microsoft's new F# language, he would, had this never happened, still be renowned for developing LCF, one of the first tools for automated theorem proving, and for calculus of communicating... Read more...
Itzik Ben-Gan: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 06 January 2010 |
Itzik Ben-Gan, who was one of our first Geeks of the Week in 2005, is so well known and popular because he has all the instincts of a database developer and teacher, as well as being a certified DBA. His books and articles on Transact SQL are memorable because they... Read more...
Guillaume Laforge: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 21 December 2009 |
Guillaume Laforge is the project manager for the development of Groovy and Grails, and the creative force behind it. He has since shown, in a number of projects, how veratile Grails can be for the rapid development of web applications. Groovy is a dynamic language... Read more...
Buck Woody: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 10 December 2009 |  5 comments |
Buck Woody is an irrepressibly ebullient DBA who, since he joined Microsoft, has managed to give the SQL Server development team a much better insight into the everyday problems facing DBAs. He remains refreshingly independent-minded and entertaining. Read more...
Donald Knuth: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 26 November 2009 |  19 comments |
Donald Knuth is an extraordinary man. As well as inventing 'Literate Programming' and writing the most important textbook on programming algorithms, he is also famous for designing and programming one of the most widely-used digital typesetting systems ever, even... Read more...
Simon Peyton Jones: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 13 November 2009 |
Simon Peyton Jones is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research’s lab in Cambridge. Although he is best known as the developer of the definitive Haskell Compiler, his influence on the development of the new generation of functional languages such as F# has been... Read more...
Interview with the Scary DBA – Grant Fritchey
by Richard Morris | 30 October 2009 |  23 comments |
For our first feature on working DBAs and their lives, we chose Grant Fritchey, the self-styled Scary DBA, who has been so successful in the past year with his books and presentations. How does he manage to pack so much into his life? we sent Richard Morris to find out. Read more...
Tucker Taft: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 28 October 2009 |
What do military networks and a 19th Century Difference Engine have in common? Tucker Taft; industry leader in compiler construction and programming language design, and SoftCheck CTO. Tucker has taught disseminated his encyclopaedic knowledge at Harvard University,... Read more...
Geek of the Week: Joe Celko
by Richard Morris | 16 October 2009 |  12 comments |
Joe Celko, the Database Developer and writer from Austin Texas, is not a man to mince his words. His encyclopedic grasp of SQL and relational Databases in general comes from a mix of academic knowledge and practical experience. In discussions he can be... Read more...
Stephen Curtis Johnson: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 01 October 2009 |  1 comment |
Stephen Johnson, one of the team that developed UNIX, can claim to be the man who originally wrote the software tool that has been the longest continuously advertised and marketed software tool ever, since 1984. Lint for C and C++ was not his only success, though.... Read more...
Walter Bright: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 01 October 2009 |  1 comment |
After developing the first native C++ compiler, the Zortech C++, and writing the Symantec Java compiler, Walter Bright created D (C Done right). He has written a number of commercial compilers for a number of languages, and D is the culmination of everything he has... Read more...
Alan Kay: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 14 September 2009 |  3 comments |
The development of Object-oriented programming, the windowing User-interface, Ethernet and the Laptop all had essential contributions from a brilliant, visionary, former professional Jazz and Rock guitarist. Alan Kay. His second career as a computer scientist led... Read more...
Luca Cardelli: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 02 September 2009 |  4 comments |
Luca Cardelli is probably best known for Polyphonic C# and Biocomputing, but he has designed a number of experimental languages and published a variety of papers on Theoretical Computing subjects such as type theory and operational semantics. He is now Principal... Read more...
Sir Tony Hoare: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 18 August 2009 |  2 comments |
After inventing the QuickSort algorithm, and designing the compiler for the Algol 60 programming language, Tony Hoare went on to apply axiomatic semantics to compiler design and his work and writings have since had a great influence on software engineering, and the... Read more...
Chuck Moore: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 05 August 2009 |  20 comments |
Charles Moore is one of the greatest ever programmers. The 'Forth' language he invented is still in use today, particularly by NASA, and has never been bettered for instrumentation and process control. He still argues persuasively that the only way we can develop... Read more...
Richard Stallman: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 20 July 2009 |  18 comments |
Many famous geeks work away at their programs without considering the wider implications of what they, and others, are doing. Richard Stallman isn't like that. Richard (rms) is one of the great brains behind Linux Distros, as he wrote the GNU compilers and GNU... Read more...
Niklaus Wirth: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 02 July 2009 |  9 comments |
It is difficult to begin to estimate the huge extent of the contribution that Niklaus Wirth has made to IT as it exists today. Although now retired for ten years, he remains a abiding influence on the design of computer languages. It is likely that the first... Read more...
Craig Newmark: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 15 June 2009 |  1 comment |
Occasionally, readers of Simple-Talk will ask quizzically if the 'Geek of the Week' that the editors have chosen really is a true 'geek'. Nobody could ever ask that about Craig Newmark, the founder of the famous website 'CraigsList'. The site is uncompromisingly... Read more...
Ken Blanchard meets the One Minute Reporter
by Richard Morris | 28 May 2009 |  3 comments |
With economic doom and gloom all around him, Richard Morris decides to seek advice before starting a business. Who better, we suggest, than Ken Blanchard, the relentlessly optimistic purveyor of uplifting materials to the wannabe entrepreneurs, and author of the... Read more...
Marc Wick: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 06 May 2009 |
Marc Wick is the genius behind GeoNames, the free Web Service that powers a number of popular GPS applications and games. It is an open-source database of geographical information that is used by hundreds of applications from iPhone apps to political... Read more...
.NET Reflector Saved their Bacon: The Gremlins strike back
by Richard Morris | 24 April 2009 |  1 comment |
Quite often, .NET Reflector is downloaded in an emergency. Whereas most of the users are developers who use it as a routine to explore objects and methods inside Assemblies, the occasional user is getting it because they are in desperate straits. We've always felt... Read more...
Sarah Lacey on The Rise of Web 2.0
by Richard Morris | 14 April 2009 |  5 comments |
Sarah Lacy's commentary on the IT Industry for BusinessWeek is widely read and causes polarised opinions. She is a skilled and experienced writer whose work on TechCrunch is a virtuoso display of the art of blogging. Her treatment at the hands of the audience at... Read more...
Anders Hejlsberg: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 19 March 2009 |  14 comments |
Anders Hejlsberg, the creative genius behind C#, and much of the .NET framework, had already been famous for sixteen years as a compiler-writer before he joined Microsoft twelve years ago. His BLS Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Delphi had revolutionized the way that we... Read more...
Gail Shaw: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 09 March 2009 |  8 comments |
Gail Shaw, the fabled 'gilamonster', earned her MVP, and the gratitude of a great number of SQL Server professional seeking technical help, through her expert forum posts on SQL Server Central. She brings great enthusiasm to everything she does, including SQL... Read more...
Simon Sabin Says SQLBits
by Richard Morris | 03 March 2009 |
SQLBits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe. Because it is held on a Saturday, and is free, it has proved extremely popular with database professionals, especially in the current economic climate. SQLBits is renowned for the quality and independence of... Read more...
Michael Meeks: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 09 February 2009 |  3 comments |
Richard Morris talks to Michael Meeks, a young Geek who has made a huge impact on the quality of Open source software in the past eight years. He is a Cambridge graduate, a committed Christian, and is modest about his impressive achievements. He gives an... Read more...
Up Against It: Gary McKinnon
by Richard Morris | 22 January 2009 |  12 comments |
In the first of a new series about IT people or organisations in trouble, or 'Up Against It', we send Richard Morris to interview a curiously nondescript hacker from Crouch End called Gary, who gives an impression completely at odds with the 'evil Genius' described... Read more...
Larry Gonick: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 08 January 2009 |
Cartoonist, mathematician, historian and environmentalist. Larry Gonick proved that learning could be fun by producing a wide range of educational books, all done as comic strips. Many present-day geeks attribute the awakening of their enthusiasm for science to... Read more...
Bjarne Stroustrup: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 12 December 2008 |  1 comment |
Without Bjarne Stroustrup, object-oriented programming would have taken much longer to gain mainstream acceptance. Bjarne wrote and popularised 'C with classes', later C++, which changed the way that mainstream computer languages worked. It is still the language of... Read more...
Verity Stob: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 27 November 2008 |  7 comments |
Real geeks read Verity Stob. Verity writes her painfully funny invective from a powerful advantage, she is a geek herself, and her humour comes from the pain of every-day life as a programmer. Verity Stob, with her unique, and hilarious, contribution to making our... Read more...
ANTS Profiler and the Un-Rest Cure
by Richard Morris | 10 November 2008 |  4 comments |
After a while, successful applications can get set in their ways. Bart Read and Andrew Hunter decided to go for a much more radical approach when given the task of bringing ANTS Profiler up to date, and, almost accidentally, they reinvented the way we do Performance... Read more...
'Peli' de Halleux: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 21 October 2008 |  3 comments |
It is extraordinary how much 'Peli' has achieved in a short space of time. Here, our choice for Geek of the Week, 'Peli' de Halleux, talks about his contributions to MbUnit, .NET Reflector, QuickGraph and Pex. Read more...
SQL Response: The dim sum interview
by Richard Morris | 30 September 2008 |  7 comments |
Richard Morris met David and Nigel of the SQL Response team, in a dim sum Restaurant in Cambridge. They had just finished a new Red-Gate product called SQL Response. Away from the office, they described the fourteen month software project that had been dominating... Read more...
Kalen Delaney: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 16 September 2008 |  6 comments |
Kalen Delaney has been involved in SQL Server from the beginning. Her talks and her writings are always interesting but, most important of all, she was able to successfully take on authorship of the 'Inside SQL Server' series of books from Ron Soukup, and make them... Read more...
Women in IT: Change at Every Level
by Richard Morris | 10 September 2008 |  7 comments |
In the past, straight-forward sexism was a real problem in the IT industry – women in IT were discriminated against simply because they were women. Overt sexism like that is finished, legally, and in the western societies we have moved on. However, a second, more... Read more...
SQL Toolbelt 2008: Predominantly an Engineering Task
by Richard Morris | 18 August 2008 |  1 comment |
The conversion of the Red-Gate tools to be compatible with SQL Server 2008 might not seem, on first impression, the most interesting or creative project ever undertaken by the company. However, the two people most involved in the project were adamant that it was a... Read more...
Andrew Tanenbaum: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 14 August 2008 |  6 comments |
Andrew Tanenbaum has had an immense influence on the way that operating systems are designed. He provided the inspiration for Linux, in his lightweight kernel Minix, and his classic textbook 'Operating Systems: Design and Implementation' that Linus Torvalds... Read more...
Ross Anderson: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 31 July 2008 |  4 comments |
Professor Ross Anderson is one of the foremost experts in Computer Security in the world. He has published widely on the economics of security. cryptology, formal methods, hardware design, and the robustness of distributed systems in general. He is best known for... Read more...
Linus Torvalds, Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 17 July 2008 |  64 comments |
Linus Torvalds is remarkable, not only for being the technical genius who wrote Linux, but for then being able to inspire and lead an enormous team of people to devote their free time to work on the operating system and bring it to maturity. We sent Richard Morris... Read more...
Dr Richard Hipp, Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 04 July 2008 |  12 comments |
Simple-Talk's Geek of the Week is Dr Richard Hipp. His code is probably running on your PC, and running completely reliably, for he almost single-handedly wrote SQLite, the most widely deployed SQL Database system in the world. Then he put it in the public domain... Read more...
Tim Berners-Lee, Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 20 June 2008 |  6 comments |
We interview Simple-Talk's Geek of the Week, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA. , ranked first in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses, and director of the World Wide Web Consortium. What has he achieved? He invented the World Wide... Read more...
Risking your Reputation
by Richard Morris | 27 May 2008 |  2 comments |
IT companies sometimes don't survive an incident that damages their reputation. Often, when happenstance brings a commercial disaster, businesses make things worse by their instinctive reaction to clam up. We sent the square-jawed Richard Morris off into the rain in... Read more...
The Burning Men - The IT drug habit
by Richard Morris | 29 April 2008 |  10 comments |
It would seem bizzare that IT staff who depend on their quick wits for their living should ever think it a good idea to fry their brains with recreational drugs. It is therefore worrying to hear that there has been a 34 percent increase in IT employees in the US... Read more...
Blogged to death
by Richard Morris | 14 April 2008 |  4 comments |
Suddenly, Bloggers aren't just writing the news, they are the news. Are we expected to believe that the pressures of the job are enough to cause premature death and disease amongst professional bloggers? Is it now time to feel sorry for the high-profile... Read more...
The Dark Arts of Journalism
by Richard Morris | 16 March 2008 |  2 comments |
Although the IT industry is usually blamed for security breaches in confidential databases, it is likely that it is usually the staff that operate the databases that are responsible. Should we be designing IT systems that log and report every access by the users? We... Read more...
Level Playing Field
by Richard Morris | 27 February 2008 |  3 comments |
The Federal Government in the States accepts tenders for their IT projects from a wide-range of competent, innovative software companies. In Britain, by contrast, 11 firms account for 80% of the UK government IT projects, despite some spectacular disasters. Why... Read more...
Exporting our Competence
by Richard Morris | 05 February 2008 |  9 comments |
There are several initiatives that have ambitions to replace the Internet. Some of these, in the States and Europe, we know about, but the ones that should concern us are the ones we know almost nothing of. In China, the funding and the political will is at its... Read more...
The Seven Billion Dollar Man
by Richard Morris | 29 January 2008 |  10 comments |
When the incredible news broke, last week, that a trader at the third-largest bank in France, the Société Générale, had allegedly managed to over-ride the entire compliance mechanism of the bank, implemented at immense cost by a department of 2000 IT compliance... Read more...
Cybercrime Cop-out
by Richard Morris | 21 January 2008 |  1 comment |
In the US, the IC3 has shown the world how to tackle the immense threat of Cybercrime. Britain's current government record makes a painful contrast. Richard Morris, our roving reporter, exposes a sad, but familiar, tale of British muddle and spin. Read more...
The Winter of our Missing Disc Content
by Richard Morris | 08 January 2008 |  11 comments |
The UK government, ten years ago, launched several reforms of the public sector, pinning their faith in radical IT initiatives to create a powerful, efficient, welfare state. Only now is the full extent of the failure of this dream becoming apparent. Our... Read more...
A Life After Crime
by Richard Morris | 25 November 2007 |  5 comments |
Our redoubtable reporter goes in search of the stories of some of the IT high-flyers who blew their tech career by getting in trouble with the law. Read more...
Restraining the Workplace Bully
by Richard Morris | 05 November 2007 |  11 comments |
Workplace bullying is not to be taken lightly. For the victim it can be traumatising. It is a symptom of poor management and badly-functioning teamwork, and now, at last, it is not only contemptible but also illegal Read more...
IT Interviews and the law
by Richard Morris | 09 October 2007 |  4 comments |
Have you ever wondered whether those odd questions and tests you are sometimes asked at interview are actually legal and pertinent. The answers may interest you and are important for any interviwer to know Read more...
Handcuff Your IT Staff
by Richard Morris | 24 September 2007 |  3 comments |
Our fearless and intrepid reporter investigates the constant struggle between IT headhunters and the IT departments that are using employment contracts to defend against their activities. Read more...
When the wheels come off
by Richard Morris | 21 August 2007 |  3 comments |
It is somewhat comforting to know that even the great and the good in industry make mistakes. The IT industry is amongst the leaders. Our investigative reporter is on the trail... Read more...
The DBA and the Battle for Reputations
by Richard Morris | 18 July 2007 |  8 comments |
Richard Morris comments on the perception amongst some DBAs that the reputation of their profession is declining. In today’s world of burgeoning information theft, are DBAs part of the problem or part of the solution? Read more...
Enabling the Blind to See the Web
by Richard Morris | 14 March 2007 |  1 comment |
For most net users, trying to navigate a badly designed website means irritation. For disabled people, particularly those with a visual impairment or who find it difficult to use a mouse, bad design means many sites are out of bounds. Not only are these websites... Read more...
Second Life: A Virtual World of Real Money
by Richard Morris | 29 January 2007 |  5 comments |
As more and more people invest in alter egos to live a pseudo life online in Linden Labs' latest creation, Richard Morris investigates the potential of Second Life's cyberspace and the motivations of many corporate brands to join the international virtual world. Read more...
Why editorial freedom is worth fighting for
by Richard Morris | 05 January 2007 |  3 comments |
One of the biggest challenges in running any publication is balancing editorial freedom …the ability to report on all events that affect the community without fear or favour …against the need to meet your "bottom line". Currently, the advertorial, pop-up and... Read more...
The India Skills Gap
by Richard Morris | 28 December 2006 |  15 comments |
As outsourcing demands continue to grow, Richard Morris investigates a worrying shortage in India's pool of IT talent, and its potential consequences for their burgeoning technology sector. Read more...
An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee
by Richard Morris | 20 December 2006 |  2 comments |
Richard Morris offers some revealing insights into what the "father of the web" thinks about his invention, where it is heading, and how it can fulfil its full potential. Read more...
Tales of Corporate Espionage
by Richard Morris | 16 November 2006 |  1 comment |
Corporate espionage eats into an organisation's wealth, but Richard Morris explains how corporate detectives are often hired at great cost to root out what is sometimes viewed as a harmless crime. Read more...
Cyber Crime
by Richard Morris | 23 October 2006 |  8 comments |
Richard Morris investigates the increasingly sophisticated tactics of an industry that survives and thrives by feeding off the wealth of others. Read more...
The CV Detectives
by Richard Morris | 12 October 2006 |  24 comments |
As more and more CV fraudsters creep into the technology sector, increasingly covert tactics have to be employed to hunt them out. Richard Morris reveals all... Read more...
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