Bill Ray

The Highlands of Scotland might not be the most obvious place to take a yacht, but a combination of sea-canals and the largest body of water in the UK make it a surprisingly accessible destination for all but the largest yacht, with a history which still echoes today and some of ... (more)

Back in 1957, US scientists tracking the first Russian satellite, Sputnik, noticed that they could use the Doppler effect to work out exactly how far away it was. Since they knew where they were they could use that information to work out where the satellite was, and from there i... (more)

  Almost everyone has a mobile phone, but not everyone has one of these models. Available bejeweled, or in gold or platinum, they can top $40,000.  The mobile phone may be the curse of our time. With some phones even the open sea may not separate you from interruptions, but while... (more)

Is it possible to get an entire film onto a mobile phone or PDA? Would it be a practical viewing experience? We started with a DVD, then used only free software in an attempt to view the film on a Nokia 3650 handset, a Microsoft Pocket PC device, and a PalmPilot. Everyone seems ... (more)

Everyone is looking for our trust at the moment. Schemes for digitally signing applications seem to be popping up like gophers across the mobile landscape, each of them confident that we'll place our trust in their authority. Microsoft, of course, has been trying to convince us t... (more)

"The killer application for a mobile phone is the ability to make phone calls" Mobile phones are the success story of the last five years. While budgets are cut across the IT industry and companies are increasingly looking to do more with what they've got, mobile technologies co... (more)

It was quite a wireless Christmas in 2003, with wireless speakers; a wireless headset that's (apparently) all done with magnets; a wireless thermometer (so we can tell the temperature outside without leaving the house - very important here in the Highlands); and even a round flyi... (more)

Gaming on the move has always been the poor cousin of console and desktop gaming, generally limited to the various incarnations of Solitaire or basic puzzle games. It wasn't until Nintendo's GameBoy that companies started to take handheld games seriously. But even with dedicated ... (more)

Now that I've got my satellite uplink working, it's time for some luxuries here in Scotland, the first of which will be central heating. Coal is not the fuel of the future, and going out every morning to fill the scuttle isn't something I'll miss. First to arrive is an oil tank -... (more)

Any day now (November 24) you'll be able to change your mobile phone network and take your number with you, something that Europeans have been doing for awhile. The networks hate it. As long as you were tied to your number you were tied to their network, and changing networks mig... (more)

The games industry is a horrible place to find yourself, long hours working on projects that might just be the next big thing, but probably won't be. Very little recognition and not much money for the developers who can spend several years working on the same title, only to have ... (more)

I've recently moved house, never an easy process, and made less so when the place you're moving to is not so much off-the-beaten-track as off-the-untrodden-footpath. The Highlands of Scotland offer little in the way of shops and houses, let alone the modern conveniences of ADSL o... (more)

Mobile telephony is a very competitive industry, as we all know. But how many people realize that the model of device manufacturers competing against each other while the carriers vie for customers is about to be turned upside down, and that some companies are about to find out t... (more)

We hear that Vivato has raised $44.5 million for their wireless infrastructure business. It's nice to know someone's got the cash! It's enough to remind us of the excesses of the dot-com days, with inflatable boardrooms and business plans written on the back of napkins sure to fol... (more)

Introduction by Bill Ray, editor-in-chief Wi-Fi has never been in the news as much as it is now, far beyond the few techies and hobbyists who first showed what was possible. Wi-Fi is hitting the headlines now, more than ever before, mainly because it's starting to attract real m... (more)

I have the dubious honor of having written one of the very first implementations of the RSA cryptographic algorithm in Java some years ago, and very badly I wrote it too. With a 4-bit key it worked great, with an 8-bit key it took about 30 minutes to encrypt or decrypt anything,... (more)

Parts 1 and 2 of this series (JDJ, Vol. 7, issues 6 and 9) demonstrated how I developed a remote control MP3 player by using a Bluetooth connection from my handheld (a Compaq iPaq) and employing a client and a server written in Java. Tracks were weighted to increase (or decrease) ... (more)

In Part 1 of this series (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 6), I showed how I developed an MP3 player in Java, and then added the ability to control that player from a wireless handheld device using a PersonalJava application. While I could only stop, pause, adjust the volume, and select the ne... (more)

In this business we often talk about how easy it is to get computers to talk to each other; computers without networks are almost inconceivable. Despite being standardized as little as five years ago, we now expect them all to play nicely together. Even in the home, a CAT-5 conn... (more)

I'm looking at my huge field of corn, millions of ears ready for harvest, every one genetically engineered to be identical. From the root structure to the tips, every stalk's the same, and offers the maximum yield made possible by modern science. But enhancing production is only ... (more)