Tom Oakley's Articles

HTC Desire questions and answers 16 June 2010: The HTC Desire is a fantastic smartphone but there are some obvious questions that neither HTC, Andriod nor Orange answer.
How to read a Picotech data logger using Python 29 April 2009: Picotech makes a good range of data loggers for logging pretty much any physical measurements. The commpany publishes the APIs for their devices, which means that they are easy to control from a program written in the Python programming language. This article shows an example temperature logger.
How to set up Mercurial on Windows 16 January 2008: Mercurial is an excellent lightweight distributed revision control system that makes software development (and web development!) easier. Even though it is used by organisations with large projects such as the Mozilla Foundation, OpenSolaris and OpenJDK, it is not obvious how to set it up on Microsoft Windows. This article attempts to lead a new user through the necessary steps to get Mercurial working.
Reasons to learn Java 10 September 2004: Programming languages seem to be cropping up everywhere. A few years ago virtually all widely used programs were written in C. Now there's C++, C#, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, VisualBasic and so on. Tom Oakley discusses why Java might be a good choice for many applications.
Open source alternatives to Microsoft products 15 October 2002, updated 9 March 2008: There are many free open source programs that can be used to replace proprietary Microsoft products. This document outlines some major classes of software and list open source alternatives.
What's the difference? 10 May 2002: There are many words that are used interchangeably when they have distinct meanings. Due to the frequency with which I was asked "What's the difference between...", I have written down what I think are the most common examples.