A new blog is created every second, more than half of them are still going three months after creation, and the number of blogs has been doubling every six months for some time.
This, and lots of other good stuff, can be found on a page on Dave Sifry’s site.
Status-Q, for what it’s worth, is more than 5 years old now. I wasn’t very early to the game, either, but looking at these graphs makes me feel like a pioneer… 🙂
Documentation is something every organisation should do, but not to excess.
Whether it be an online user guide for a piece of software, or an employee guide for a pensions scheme, there are typically two problems:
And, often, keeping it up to date is much more hassle than creating it in the first place. It certainly feels like it, anyway, because when you’re fixing an old document you don’t have the satisfaction that comes from creating something new.
So my philosophy has generally been that you should have as little documentation as possible (and no less). The more you have, the harder it is to maintain, and incorrect documentation is usually worse than no documentation at all.
It struck me recently, though, that there is a rather wonderful aspect to blogs in this regard. The great thing about a blog entry is that it has a date prominently displayed on it. Why is this relevant? Because it’s immediately obvious when a posting may be out of date. You never have to go back and maintain your old blog entries, or check that things you said in the past are still correct. It’s understood that they’re perishable goods and may have an expiry date.
So if you want a low-maintenance website, perhaps the best model is to put the absolute basics as static pages and cast as much of it as possible as a blog. You may need to make special provisions for those who visit and need to find something – like having a good search facility, and referring back regularly to past posts which are still important – but in general, the more you can put in blog format, the more interesting your site will be, and the easier your maintenance task.
Ah… cool. Not only can you subscribe to Google Calendars using iCal but you can subscribe to iCal-published calendars from Google. When you go to add another calendar, you can choose to add one with a ‘Public Calendar Address’. Simply put in the URL of the .ics file that you’re publishing from iCal, and it works fine.
My friends at Newnham Research have started to get some news coverage, from PCW and from ExtremeTech.
Their problem is that you really don’t get a feel for how well this stuff works until you see it in action – it’s hard to do it justice on paper. But it’s good to see that Newnham is coming out of stealth mode at last…
Thanks to Seb for the links.
Google’s latest attempt to show that the only thing you need on your desktop is a web browser has now gone live here. It’s nice, too, as long as you’re using one of the supported browsers.
Mac users will need to pick something other than Safari. On the other hand, they can use the addresses listed under ‘calendar details’ to subscribe to Google calendars using iCal.
UK readers might be interested in this new offer from the Carphone Warehouse. It’s not anything new technically, but it’s an interesting, and appealing, way of billing for connectivity.
Basically, for £21/month, you get a phone line, all your national phone calls, most of your international phone calls, and broadband. I’m quite tempted to use it to replace my second phone line with something that will give me a backup broadband connection.
Anyone know a good router that will failover automatically when one network goes down?
TextMate is a fabulous text editor for the Mac. The best way to get a feel for its capabilities and see what all the fuss is about is to look at some of the screencasts.
Here’s one about writing screenplays.
Here’s another about Python programming.
And there’s an excellent new one about how to customise it which is well-worth watching, especially if a bit of shell-scripting doesn’t disturb you.
Highly recommended.
John quotes a great story from today’s NYT. Where actually is the person who’s taking your order?
Some interestings stats and other thoughts from Martin Geddes.
Springtime light may lift the spirits, but in Rattenberg, residents have a long memory for shadows. From late fall to midwinter, this tiny Austrian town, famous for its glassblowing, gets no sun at all. And it has been that way for centuries…
But it may be about to change, according to this Scientific American article.
Just to prove it works, here’s a screenshot of Ubuntu running in a VM window on my Intel Mac:
This is using Parallels Workstation, which is still definitely beta, but shows lots of promise. I hope they make their money quickly, though, because it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple included this functionality in the next release of their OS.
There are a benefits of this over BootCamp besides not having to reboot. One is that the disk image is just a file, and you can clone it and move it around – so you can run your virtual machine from an external hard drive, for example. Also, it can be substantially smaller – you have to set aside 10G or so for BootCamp, while my 4GB ‘disk’ for the virtual Ubuntu installation is actually less than 3GB on the disk – presumably because the disk isn’t full and it does clever things with compressing sparse images.
I did a slightly more interesting experiment with this, too – see the Ndiyo blog for more info.
This is going to be the hot topic of 2006. Virtualisation (he writes, doggedly employing a British spelling which won’t do him any good on Google) is a technology that creates a complete ‘virtual’ computer as an application on your existing computer. Within that virtual machine you can run a complete operating system and applications, which may or may not be the same as the one you’re running on the machine itself.
It’s been around for a very long time, but things are moving very fast at present. VMware, the leaders in this space, have started making more and more of their (excellent) products freely available. Microsoft’s Virtual Server is also now free. Much of this is probably driven by the high regard in which Xen is held, an Open Source virtualisation technology created by a research group at the Cambridge University Computer Lab (a group I used to be part of, a very long time ago…)
There’s no shortage of rumours that Apple are also getting into this space – in fact, I think it may have been a key part of the move to Intel processors. And hot on the heels of the various announcements about official and unofficial ways to dual-boot Macs into Windows comes the announcement of Parallels Workstation, a Mac virtual machine product that lets you do the same without rebooting…
I’ll have to try this, partly because I think it would just be too wacky to run Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS on my Mac… I’m actually more interested in running virtual Ubuntu Linux machines than I am Windows ones, having just been around the world carrying two laptops so I had a Linux box on which to demo Ndiyo systems.
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