Having worked at Vodafone for over a year now, I can really see a similar need for supporting inventors; so I’m very excited to announce that from today I’ll be starting a brand new role doing just that. I’m now responsible for all the technical aspects of intellectual property for Vodafone, primarily focusing on improving the quantity, quality and strategic alignment of new patent filings. This means I get to spend my time working with inventors across the business, talking about the exciting new technology they’re working on, and helping them identify and protect their novel ideas. I’ve loved my time at Vodafone so far but this new opportunity will mean I get to meet a whole new set of people, and learn more about the wide range of technologies used and created throughout the business. Exciting times.

• Analytics: Identifying how we can generate insight from the wealth of knowledge about our customers in order to bring them some benefit. A big part of this has been about identifying technology suppliers from a highly competitive, complicated and fast moving market, and then trying to work out how on earth you fit them into all the Vodafone operators worldwide, across a variety of differing architectures.
• Tracking: Determining how to use Vodafone’s network infrastructure to drive down the cost of device tracking (e.g. for fleet management) by trialling alternative geo-positioning and communication technologies.
• Dual persona: Investigating how technologies such as software sandbox (e.g. Enterproid), thin client (e.g. Framehawk) and virtualisation (e.g. VMware) can be used and enhanced to securely provide access to enterprise data across multiple mobile devices, some of which may be owned by the employee not the employer.

I’m not 100% convinced it’s a good way of expressing what I wanted but at least it’s colourful.

“Leading the technical aspects of cutting edge research programmes for Vodafone worldwide, from inception to commercialisation; responsibilities include: researching products and technologies, managing supplier relationships, designing architectures and solutions, running global customer trials through mobile operators, and engaging commercial stakeholders in order to drive solutions to market”

I’m really enjoying the variety and strategic focus of the new role and not missing the deep technical stuff at the moment. Is this the start of a trend or will I swap back? Who knows.

For the IBM folks – due to a large amount of remaining vacation, my last day in the office will be Tuesday 8th March.

The different news feeds supported by calibre can be found by clicking on the ‘Find news’ button on the toolbar and the Python scripts used to do this are in /opt/calibre/resources/recipes/ (or /usr/share/calibre/recipes/ – thanks Andy). You might want to modify the chosen recipes to limit the amount of data it downloads as it can take a while (e.g. filter certain newspaper sections).

In an attempt to have a play with Jetpack, the new Firefox add-on environment that allows add-ons to be written in JavaScript, I decided to write a simple add-on to check the library site for matching books when I’m browsing Amazon. While doing this, I stumbled upon Open Library, a great site that is trying to create a single Web page for every book ever published. More importantly, it offers a handy HTTP API.

The add-on is in no way perfect but feel free to try it out by downloading from here. Go to an Amazon page (e.g. here) and you should see a link appear to the Hampshire Digital Library version of the book if one exists:

Source available on github.

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (request, response) {
    doSomethingAsynchronous(function () {
        doSomethingElseAsynchronus(function () {
            response.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" });
            response.end("Hello World\n");
        });
    });
}).listen(8124);
console.log("Server running at http://localhost:8124/");

This event loop model, plus the ability to use the same programming language on the client and server (although server-side JavaScript has been around for a while) is definitely something that has caught my attention.

One thing I thought would be really useful would be to validate my JavaScript using JSLint from within the editor, rather than manually or via a build process. It seems a few other people have had the same idea but the plugin I found didn’t seem to work and other instructions (e.g. here) generally seemed to require SpiderMonkey which didn’t seem to be in the Ubuntu repositories (not that I looked very hard).

I worked out how to do it myself by using the instructions other people had used and came up with the following:

1. Install Rhino (sudo apt-get install rhino)
2. Download the Rhino version of JSLint (details here)
3. Enable the External Tools plugin for gedit (Edit->Preferences->Plugins)
4. Setup a new External Tool in gedit (Tools->Manage External Tools) with the following (or similar) settings:
   • Command: js /home/garethj/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/jslint.js $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH
   • Shortcut Key: <Control>j
   • Save: Current document
   • Input: Nothing
   • Ouput: Display in bottom pane

Then all you need to do is open a JavaScript file and hit Ctrl+j. Here it is in action:

Worth noting that it should be possible to do this without having to save the document and actually pipe the current document content into JSLint/Rhino but this was sufficient for my needs.