Status-Q

“The footsteps grew louder, and now Mary could make out the dim figure of a man advancing towards her. What was he doing on that lonely stretch of road on a dark, inclement night? It seemed impossible that he was an innocent traveller, however much she wished he might be. His tread was too cautious, almost furtive, and he was carrying something… it looked like an unlighted lantern. Surely an honest man would not choose to travel in the dark?”

The UK edition of Rose’s novel, The Blackstone Key, hits the shelves on Thursday.

To follow on from my last post, it occurred to me that I could probably run IE on my Linux machine using WINE, which would save me having to run the whole of Windows. A friend had mentioned doing this, but I presumed it would be quite complicated. My Windows VM is currently “installing Security Update 64 of 97”, so I thought I’d look around while I was waiting.

It turns out to be very easy now to get IE5, 5.5 and 6 going, thanks to a script called IEs4Linux.

On Ubuntu, you need a couple of packages from the Universe repository first:

sudo aptitude install cabextract wine


(More detailed info here)

Then you can just follow the instructions on the IEs4Linux page.

This post was made with IE6 running on my Linux machine. Good. It works. Now I can go back to Firefox.

Regular readers will know that I’m a Mac user, but I do have a copy of Windows on my machine as well, which I can run using Parallels. Generally, the only time I fire it up is to check that web sites I’ve created using standards-compliant browsers also work under Internet Explorer. Generally, they don’t, and I have to start inserting nasty hacks to get around the bugs in IE. Anyone who does web design will know this process only too well.

It struck me tonight just how ironic it is that the only reason I ever need to run Windows is because it’s broken!

 One of my favourite actors, Paul Schofield, died yesterday.  He was always good, but I remember him most fondly as Martin Chuzzlewit Sr. in the BBC production.

A great loss.

Considering buying a low-end Dell machine this evening, I saw that it comes with a very basic version of Vista by default. But of course, even if you have to get Windows, you’d be daft to get that. For only £30 more, you can get a basic version of XP.

Amusing to see that it’s a pay-extra upgrade…

The UK is being swept by very strong gales today…

When my parents, many years ago, used to fly around northern Kenya in their work with the Flying Doctors, they would occasionally be able to get radio reports from people on the ground as they came into land at some of the remote desert airstrips. Usually it would just be information about wind speed and direction, how many camels were on the runway, etc.

But I remember my mother telling me about an abbreviation they used under certain wind conditions, and it came back to me today: EBAW.

“Even birds are walking!”

“Europe is set to launch the biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft in its history.”

Oh, and it happens tomorrow. Splendid stuff.

Intelligent Life magazine has a light-hearted article by Will Smith… I liked this:

Football involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your feet. Rugby involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your scrotum. Cricket involves a maniac hurling a piece of red concrete at every part of your anatomy. But golf: I think golf could be the sport for me. There’s no body-contact, and it involves strolling round a large garden.

The FT has an article about my pals at AlertMe. (They have a fun product – low-power wireless devices that monitor your home and can report back to you in a variety of ways. We have one of their early kits in the CamVine office.)

The article talks about the benefits for a UK startup of getting US-based funding, something we also did for DisplayLink in the early days. I suspect, though, that the relative speed with which they accomplished it is more down to the nature of the funding round, the particular fund they attracted, and the fact that there was only one investor rather than several, than it was to a real difference between the US and UK.

With CamVine, I decided to go for Angel rather than VC investors for the first round, and even stayed clear of Angel groups. I think dealing with just a few individuals made everything much easier. Perhaps we were just lucky, but we got a great group of investors… from this side of the Atlantic!