Category Archives: General

Protopage

Protopage is really very impressive. With this, and Writely, and GMail, and Google Maps and so forth, the in-browser experience is becoming amazingly rich. There will be a viable Open Source desktop environment after all. And it will be called Firefox.

Interesting question… At present, more than half of the machines sold are laptops, because people are getting more and more mobile and they really want their data with them everywhere. Will we ever see a reversal of this trend, as less and less of our data is stored on our own machines and it becomes accessible from anywhere? Will we see a ‘desktop PC’ renaissance?

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Ring In the New Year

Quentin at Newnham

Today was my last day consulting for my old company Newnham Research. Over the last six months I’ve been doing some work for them, some for Exbiblio, some for Cambridge Research Systems, and one or two others. It’s been fascinating, but exhausting!

In January, however, I’m going back to Ndiyo, the non-profit that my friend Martin and I started just over three years ago. Ndiyo exists to promote a model of network computing which is more environmentally friendly, more reliable and maintainable, more affordable and generally more sustainable for the world than the traditional PC network. We find that the vision really captures people’s hearts and minds, and our trials show that it can really work in the real world, too.

I’m looking forward to getting back into it again.

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What is it with the Wikipedia?

A good post by Bill Thompson on what has been a rather interesting last few weeks for Wikipedia.

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Inspiration

Follow-up to the spoof corporate stock photos: Dave Hill pointed me to the nice ‘demotivational calendars’ at Despair Inc:

1% inspiration

Click for more…

(I only feel able to post such things about engineers because I count myself as one of them 🙂 )

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Stock Images

A UK design firm has released a set of spoof corporate stock images, in categories such as ‘Team building’ and ‘Success’. Here’s one you can use when your company does a circular on ‘equal opportunities’:

Equal opportunities

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Xinha

OK, so this is a quick test using Xinha Here, a rather neat Firefox add-on which gives you WYSIWYG html editing in any text-edit box.  Quite sweet if you end up creating HTML posts, for example for your blog, and you do it through the browser.  I like it. 

I’m using Firefox more and more now, but it still hasn’t quite replaced Safari as my main browser on the Mac.  There are just too many convenient drag-and-droppy-type things you can do with Safari.  It may only be a matter of time, though. Here are the current stats:

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Fun and beauty

Jim Bumgardner, better known as KrazyDad, does some wonderful stuff. He does things with Flickr, he does things with Flash, and it’s all great fun.

This is his Mona Lisa, for example, made entirely from Flickr photos with the tags ‘mona’ or ‘lisa’. Click on the image to see some more. And make sure you know about possibly the most important button in Flickr which is the little thing labelled ‘All Sizes’ just above a photo. You really want it for these! You can get some of them as posters, too.

Go to his site and browse around. It’s worth it.

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The Zen of CSS Design.

I’ve just been reading a thoroughly enjoyable book on web site design. It comes from the creator of the CSS Zen Garden, a wonderful site which I first mentioned here nearly three years ago.

The idea of the Garden was to promote standards-based web design and, in particular, to show people what could be done with CSS in an age when most people were using tables for all their layout and embedding <font> tags in their HTML. And so the site became a showcase for a single web page – a single page of HTML, that is – but rendered in hundreds of different ways simply by changing the CSS and the associated graphics. The HTML remains unchanged. Have a quick look at
this,
this, and
this, for example. The designs are generally carefully tailored to this particular page, and wouldn’t always work for a whole site, but it’s still a great resource and inspiration for any web designer.

And now David Shea, who created the site, and Molly E. Holzschlag have written The Zen of CSS Design, which looks at 36 of the designs and talks through, in very readable language, what we can learn about design, and what we can learn about CSS, from each of them. This is not a book for CSS beginners, but if you know the basics it comes very highly recommended.

I now want to go and redesign all my web sites. Oh, for some time….

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Bacula on Mac OS X

I’ve been experimenting with the Open Source backup system ‘Bacula‘, which is gaining popularity as an alternative to the venerable Amanda.

I wanted to use my Linux machine to backup our two Macs, so I needed a version of the Bacula agent bacula-fd which was built for Mac OS X. That turned out to be pretty easy to do, but since I’ve had an amazing number of visitors to the post where I made a copy of ‘wget’ available, I thought I’d put this up here too in case anyone else is looking for it.

Continue Reading

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Tony Blair and the Succession

An interesting post on John’s blog. Who does Tony want to take over the family firm? All may not be as it seems….

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What the customer really needed…

Everybody in a business has their own special view on its products. Use this rather nice cartoon to find out where you fit in…

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Bram Cohen

Fortune had a nice article entitled “Torrential Rain” about Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. But it’s gone behind a premium-rate wall. There’s a copy here. I liked this, against the background of Cohen’s Asperger’s Syndrome:

Last month venture firm DCM-Doll Capital Management bet that Cohen could indeed make BitTorrent a business, investing $8.75 million in the startup. Now Cohen has to prove himself again, showing that he can thrive not just in the programming world—a place where logic rules and theories can be proved true or false—but in the fuzzy corporate world too, where compromise reigns and intellect doesn’t always trump idiocy.

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