An open challenge the UK technology industry should embrace

Surevine are members of Intellect, and we have been asked to contribute our feedback on the the Beta of the Government Digital Service’s Design Manual. In the spirit of Surevine’s model of “working in the open” I have chosen to … Continue reading

Surevine sponsors first UK-based regular XMPP/Realtime meetup

With the rise of XMPP and realtime technologies on the web, and the highly successful Realtime Conf (and its new European branch Realtime Conf EU), several of the staff at Surevine felt it was time for a regular meetup in … Continue reading

Web Security: Blacklists, Whitelists and WAFs Part II

I’ve received a teeny amount of “I agree, but…” feedback for last night’s posting; in this case from two fellow geeks whom I respect deeply. Their criticism – singular, shared –  is this: There are times when having a WAF around can … Continue reading

Web Security: Blacklists, Whitelists and WAFs

Consider a computer or network that is protected by a “firewall”, there will be two basic ways to configure the firewall: blacklist, ie: everything is permitted except for these items whitelist, ie: everything is forbidden except for these items …oh, … Continue reading

Email and the curse of the carbon copy

One of the great things about working for Surevine is the careful avoidance of email. I know some of you are going to find that hard to understand or even imagine. But really, we don’t use email unless we really … Continue reading

A little Alfresco / Tesseract OCR integration

I attended Alfresco DevCon in Berlin this year (a fantastic event) and two of the sessions that really caught my eye were given by Neil McErlean and Andy Hunt about content transformations. I’d been playing around with an OCR tool called … Continue reading

Explosion in Need for Software

On Software development I read the other day that the honorary British citizen, Will.i.am, who performed at the Jubilee, carried an Olympic torch and tweeted through a prime time TV show has committed to become a software developer. I don’t … Continue reading

“A quiet life stimulates the creative mind”

There are two full floors of TechHub goodness at the Google Campus in London. One is studious and conducive to knowledge work. The other is like a nineties rave with music blaring from speakers, and people goofing off… …or perhaps … Continue reading

Licensing is so passé

I recently read an article titled “GitHub needs to take open source seriously” from InfoWorld, and it was all kicked off by this tweet: younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, … Continue reading

The pains of cross frame scripting and GWT

We had a kind of niche case client requirement recently. The client has two (very) separate web applications deployed on their network. One a regular web app, the other a GWT based IM client. The interesting requirement was having the … Continue reading