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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.
Geek of the Week: Don Syme
by Richard Morris | 01 February 2012 |
With the arrival of F# 3.0 Microsoft announced a wide range of improvements such as type providers that made F# a viable alternative to their other .NET languages as a general purpose workhorse. So what exactly are type providers, and why are they a killer reason... Read more...
Scott Shaw: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 24 January 2012 |
Scott Shaw was one of the finalists to the 2011 Exceptional DBA Award (XDBA). The award was founded in 2008 to recognize the essential but often overlooked contributions of DBAs, the unsung heroes of the IT community. In this interview, Scott describes the... Read more...
Chuck Moore on the Lost Art of Keeping It Simple
by Richard Morris | 18 January 2012 |  1 comment |
Chuck Moore is still the radical thinker of Information Technology, After an astonishing career designing languages (e.g. FORTH), browser-based computers, CAD systems and CPUs, he is now energetically designing extremely low-powered 'green' multi-processor chips... Read more...
The Marmite or Miracle Whip of Computer Languages
by Richard Morris | 03 January 2012 |  4 comments |
What is it about C++ that makes it one of the most important computer languages for systems work, yet so reviled by so many? Like Marmite, or Miracle Whip, nobody seems to take a neutral opinion of it. We asked the languages' creator, the great Bjarne Stroustrup. Read more...
Jeff Moden: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 24 November 2011 |  23 comments |
Jeff Moden's election to the Exceptional DBA of the Year award for 2011 was a popular one. Although all the finalists were exceptional, Jeff has impressed everyone with his energy, stamina and wit, particularly with his work on SQL Server Central. In conversation... Read more...
Michael Pilato: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 08 November 2011 |
For a large number of .NET developers, Subversion is Source Control. The book they go to to find out how to use it is O'Reilly's 'Version Control with Subversion'. Both Subversion and the book owe a great deal to the Subversion open source development team,... Read more...
Geek of the Week: Linus Torvalds
by Richard Morris | 17 October 2011 |  2 comments |
For Windows programmers, Linus Torvalds work has suddenly become relevant. No, we don't mean Linux, but Git. This distributed Source Control system now works sweetly as a nut on Windows. We contacted Linus for a second interview; this time to talk mainly about Git,... Read more...
Jez Humble: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 28 September 2011 |  1 comment |
Jez Humble and David Farley achieved fame through a book that tackled the least glamorous but most intricate part of the application development cycle, Deployment. It was no accident that the book achived so much attention, since it was a lively and iconoclastic... Read more...
Agile Techniques for developing SQL Source Control
by Richard Morris | 03 August 2011 |
In this interview, Stephanie Herr, Development Manager for SQL Tools at Red Gate, talks about the recent SQL Source Control development project. As a certified Scrum Master, Stephanie was keen to use Agile techniques throughout the development process, and she... Read more...
Benjamin Pollack: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 06 May 2011 |
Benjamin Pollack is well known for his work on Fog Creek Copilot, and Kiln. He is famous amongst young geeks for his role in a documentary film and website 'Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks', which plotted his internship with Fog Creek back in 2005. Read more...
Eric Sink: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 21 April 2011 |  1 comment |
Eric Sink became well-known for his work with the Spyglass browser, which was acquired by Microsoft and morphed into Internet Explorer. Since then, he has succeeded at the difficult double-act of combining programming and the software business. He is living proof... Read more...
Steve Furber: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 28 March 2011 |  1 comment |
Professor Stephen Byram Furber CBE, FRS, FREng was one of the designers of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. The result of his work, the ARM chip, is in most mobile phones, calculators and other low-power electronic devices in the world. At the... Read more...
Rob Pike: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 17 January 2011 |
Rob Pike's contribution to Information Technology has been profound, both through the famous books he co-authored with Brian Kernighan, and his contribution to distributed systems, window systems and concurrency in Unix. Now at Google, his creative skills are in... Read more...
Roland Waddilove: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 21 December 2010 |  1 comment |
A whole generation of British geeks owe a debt of gratitude to Roland Waddilove. He is a journalist with a rare knack of being able to explain complex technical ideas in a very simple way. Many successful developers cut their teeth many years ago on an Atari,... Read more...
Jorge Segarra: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 26 November 2010 |  3 comments |
Jorge Segarra, also known on Twitter as 'SQLChicken', was one of the finalists of the Exceptional DBA award this year. He lives and works in Tampa, Florida. As well as working as a DBA, he's a Hypervisor for the PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter and chapter leader... Read more...
Kevan Riley: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 18 October 2010 |  5 comments |
When the ASK.SQLServerCentral.com site started, something magical happened. A band of DBA and developer volunteers got together to ensure the very best quality of questions and answers about SQL Server. Kevan was one of them. Through a couple of happy chances, the... Read more...
Dr Byron Cook: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 27 September 2010 |  3 comments |
On moving to Cambridge University after developing the SLAM model checker used by Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier, Dr Bryan Cook's new computer locked up with what turned out to be a faulty driver. The result was TERMINATOR, the first practical tool for... Read more...
Ted Krueger: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 15 September 2010 |
Ted Krueger is well known for his 'Less-Than Dot' website. He is a SQL Server MVP who has been working in development and database administration for over 13 years. He was one of the finalists to the Exceptional DBA of the Year Award for 2010 Read more...
Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell: Geeks of the Week
by Richard Morris | 13 September 2010 |
Learning .NET doesn't have to be dull: not when there are geeks like like Carl Fraklin and Richard Campbell with the wit and ability to talk interestingly about it. If you don't listen to their podcasts on .NET topics, then maybe you're missing out on a great way of... Read more...
Josef Richberg: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 20 August 2010 |
As the winner of the Exceptional DBA Awards 2010 is announced, we take a moment to recognize last year's winner Josef Richberg. We sent Richard Morris to meet Josef to find out what has happened in the past year, and if life has changed for the Exceptional DBA of 2009. Read more...
Grady Booch: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 09 August 2010 |
Grady Booch is probably best known for being one of the original developers of the Unified Modelling Language (UML). He defined much of the way we go about the Object-Oriented analysis of applications. He's also interesting to chat to about programming, as Richard... Read more...
Roy Fielding: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 02 August 2010 |
Almost certainly, you use the results of Roy Fielding's work every day. After all, he was one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, was active in developing HTML and the URI, defined REST, and remains one of the directors of the Apache Software... Read more...
Don Woods: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 13 July 2010 |
Of all the original thinkers in IT, few are as original or as amusing as Don Woods. INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure, the Jargon file and the New Hackers' Dictionary all owe much to his irresistible brand of humour, and his immense knowledge and experience in IT. Read more...
Tom Kyte: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 24 June 2010 |  2 comments |
Tom Kyte's contribution to the AskTom column and site over ten years has been outstanding. Much of what he says has relevance to all relational databases. His views are straightforward, the discussions he provokes are lively: Not only does he know a frightening... Read more...
Giancarlo Niccolai: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 07 June 2010 |
Falcon isn't exactly new. It is a scripting language that is designed with a number of programming paradigms for multi-threaded applications. It is growing rapidly in importance. Richard Morris decided to contact Giancarlo, the language's creator, find out why there... Read more...
Erland Sommarskog: DBA of the Day
by Richard Morris | 26 May 2010 |  8 comments |
Erland is best known for his famous SQL Server site http://www.sommarskog.se/. It is plain, it has eight articles in it, it is short on jokes: However, it is hugely popular and one of the great 'essential' SQL Server sites. We sent Richard Morris to find out more... Read more...
Brian Kernighan: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 19 May 2010 |
When anyone mentions 'Kernighan and Ritchie', we all know what they are referring to: that brief book that introduced the C language to programmers, and set a high standard for all subsequent books on computer languages. Now over thirty years later it is still in... Read more...
Chuck Esterbrook: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 26 April 2010 |  3 comments |
The Cobra Programming Language is an exciting new general-purpose Open-source language for .NET or Mono, which features unit tests, contracts, ‘informative’ asserts, generics, Compile-time nil/null tracking, lambda expressions, closures, list comprehensions and... Read more...
Cristina Cifuentes: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 30 March 2010 |  1 comment |
Cristina Cifuentes was already well-known for her work on decompilers before she took the development of Sun Microsystems 'Parfait' bug-checking application for C/C++ source. Unlike the classic 'Lint', Parfait is careful about avoiding false positives. What is more,... Read more...
Doug Crockford: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 17 March 2010 |  2 comments |
Doug Crockford is the man behind JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). He is a well-known critic of XML and guides the development of Javascript on the ECMA Standards Committee, as well as being the senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo! He is also the author of the... Read more...
Rich Hickey: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 02 March 2010 |  1 comment |
With Clojure soon to be ported to the .NET framework, as ClojureCLR, we felt that the time had come to see what the fuss was all about amongst the Java Geeks. We sent Richard Morris to find out from the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey. Read more...
Bruce Schneier: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 16 February 2010 |  5 comments |
If one were to close one's eyes and imagine a BT Executive, one would never conjure up Bruce Schneier. He is one of the greatest experts in cryptography, and a well-known mathematician. He even got a brief mention in thebook 'The Da Vinci Code'. He also remains an... Read more...
Peter Norvig: Geek of the Week
by Richard Morris | 03 February 2010 |  1 comment |
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 |  1 comment |
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 |  20 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 |  2 comments |
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 |  21 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 |  9 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 |  2 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 |  4 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 |  13 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 |  16 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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