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Lotus Symphony - second thoughts
2007-09-20 13:54:00
I went to sleep last evening giving IBMs recent announcement quite a lot of thought. Sleep came quickly, insight is a bit slower. The old adage ?follow the money? floated to the front of my mind. IBM wants to make Microsoft suffer, it needs to slow or reverse any haemorrhaging of customers to the MS ?Stack? however above all of this it needs to deliver earnings per share to its stockholders. This is a game with a multiplicity of teams on the field of play at the same time. So can IBM make money out of Symphony and what does this all mean. The background message strikes me as having two distinct plays. Firstly infrastructure, the big money is still in tin and string, companies adopting IBM client side technologies are more open to the notion of IBM provisioning organisational infrastructure (not to mention the services that go along with them), secondly Eclipse. Eclipse (the open standard development platform for J2EE) is the root of Lotus Symphony, companies adopting Lotus Symphony ...
More About: Thoughts

At last Facebook gets the applet it deserves!
2007-09-20 10:37:00
We are all connected, they say it only takes 6 hops to get from one person to another, Facebook is the medium to prove it. Karl Bunyan has created a really interesting application that will show you how far you are from any ?open? Facebooker and how you are connected. Interesting twist on the FB phenomenon.
More About: Serve

Changing boots
2007-09-19 18:38:00
I have been using Techrepublik for a little while as an effective portal to a broad swathe of IT related news. It takes a more traditional editorial view than the somewhat in yer face Register. As I was drifting through the content I came across this advert for a chargeable download...?This presentation, entitled Standardizing on Windows XP Instead of MAC OS X, provides a pre-packaged option for defending Windows XP against MAC OS X. You can use this debrief-and-defend to educate people about why you chose Windows XP rather than Mac for a desktop operating system. This download consists of a preformatted PowerPoint presentation that you can use as-is or modify to suit your needs. It also includes a set of speaker's notes and one page list of talking points that answers some common questions about why one should stick to XP rather than migrating to Mac OS X.?I never thought I would see the day...
More About: Boots , Changing , Chang , Chan

Its free, its fun, its one in the eye for Ray 0.
2007-09-18 20:55:00
So IBM are taking on Microsoft, and in the spirit of - in you can?t beat ?em just underprice them - Big Blue is is giving away its latest offering. <Fanfare> Here it is folks, Lotus Symphony!What - you may be thinking, isn?t that the multipurpose PC software (Spreadsheet, Word-processor, Database) thingy that was invented by the Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Lotus Legend and inventor of Lotus Notes - Ray Ozzie.Well it is the same name (retro is chic you know) but everything else is new and ?Open?. IBM is not just trying to jump on the Open Source bandwagon but also pick up the baton to boot.It is certainly disruptive from a technology standpoint but will it work and what are the implications? I will give my views on the value of this announcement over the next few blogsIf you are interested in playing or using this click here to go to the Lotus Symphony site - it is going quite slow right now :-(
More About: Free , The Eye

Food Porn
2007-09-18 10:51:00
Nigella was on the box again last evening doing fast food her way. Delicious. However I had to laugh at the head tossing, coquettish side glances to camera and her verbally expressed pleasure whilst impaling a lemon. Her grasp on the instrument was positively one of a closet dominatrix. Great fun
More About: Food

Yearning and Learning
2007-09-12 15:40:00
I am being examined, Friday to be precise and hopefully found to be worthy of the MCP moniker. I am doing this because we as a company need the appropriate number of certified bodies to rise up the Microsoft partner ranks. The best thing is that I am really enjoying the learning. I want more and I want it now. This is rather fun.
More About: Learning , Earning

New food highlight
2007-09-09 12:05:00
I am please to add another place I eat entry today. Yesterday evening we had a fabulous Greek meal in Retsina in Belsize Park Village. A great location for really great food, some of (if not the) best Greek food I have ever had in London.
More About: Food , Highlight

Lord Voldemort is dead
2007-09-08 01:01:00
Alright you may have guessed that the baddie had to meet his end with the conclusion of H Potter esq. and the Deathly Hallows I am not going to give away any more of the story just in case you have yet to read itAbout a month ago I decided that with the availability of the complete set of books I would read the lot. It has been an interesting journey that JKR has taken me and other readers on. Having seen the films its has quite interesting to see how faithfully or abridged the books have been when realized on screen, it has also made me want to re-visit the films to see how the small / important items, the significance of which I would have missed as one who had not read the books prior to seeing their visualization.One of the strongest characters from the films has been that of Severus Snape, as played with his usual flair by Alan Rickman. However the later books made me wonder whether J K Rowling had expanded the role with Rickman in her minds eye as he made the character come to...
More About: Lord , Dead , Voldemort , Mort

My life with Linux
2007-09-07 09:49:00
Well its not really a very long story frankly - I sort have stayed out of the ?X? world for most of my working life, Gareth who goes back a long way with Unix has built and managed various Linux boxes we have installed to run our business with over the years. About 3-4 years ago I bought a copy of Red Hat desktop and gave it a (shortish) spin and more recently I have played quite a bit with Ubuntu. All in the name of a sort of half hearted personal development program. This week we have needed to build a ?staging? quality machine and although I am by no means a low level Linux guru I am pleased to find that not only my installation of Centos 5 (essentially free Red Had) went without a hitch I have managed to locate and install external drivers for NTFS. My fear of Linux has essentially been conquered and I have found that with the graphical interfaces (Gnome in the current deployment) and liberal use of Google I can get most things done without to often running to ask Gareth every ...
More About: Life , My Life

Whoops Apocolypse
2007-09-05 17:43:00
When the end comes it will be by mistake ! ?I wonder what this button does - dont? push it Dougal .... you pushed it didn?t you? see bang!
More About: Poco

Groovin?
2007-09-04 09:59:00
We spent yesterday (and most of tomorrow) Grooving - my dining room turned into Mission Control - Bushey, cables, internet, servers and suchlike and we ran a Groove training session. Gareth has recently returned from creating the Groove exams for Microsoft and was a useful guide taking us through the key points of managing a Groove environment. I forgot how nice it is to learn new stuff, most refreshing.In thinking about this blog post up popped a memory to Groovin? with Mr Bloe (Mr Bloe) at fat tune if ever there was one and is now myPod selection

September thought for the month now ?live?
2007-09-01 17:30:00
It is right here on my home page
More About: Live , Thought , September , Sept , Month

New feature - where I eat added to Home page
2007-08-31 15:34:00
I thought it would be nice to record where I really enjoy eating - a little box has been added to the front page which will be linked to some maps as soon as I work out how / what to do!
More About: Home , Page , Feature , Home Page , Feat

I want that one
2007-08-30 12:50:00
This is it, what we have all been waiting for Moller International will sell you a flying saucer (and it works), ok so its not anti-grav but hey its one small step. Check out the BBC video clip showing it in action!

Beijing penises (or is that penii)
2007-08-29 14:16:00
?Its what we do? is a recent promotional tag line used by the BBC and for the most part I like to feel I am quite supportive of what ?they do?, however occasionally I do wonder, Today?s From our own Correspondent reported from a Beijing Penis Emporium, is this the beeb at its best? The article starts ?There are many thousands of Chinese restaurants around in the UK and everyone has their favourite dish, but only in China itself do chefs specialise in a range of slightly more unusual delicacies.? the rest is here however the read might be difficult for some.
More About: Jing

The Lotus Position
2007-08-24 10:35:00
Cliff Reeves (Microsoft formerly IBM) has commented on IBM?s recent acquisition of WebDialogs. Cliff in the past has found himself in interesting banter with his former colleagues at Lotus with regard to the market status of of Lotus. In January 2006 I for one noted that IBM was focussing more intently on Lotus brand and by this year Lotus took primacy over a very subdued IBM message. It seems at long last that Big Blue?s strap line ?Middleware is everywhere? (which always caused me to comment ?who gives a cr@p? has been well and truly buried. Cliff observes that presence on the desktop is critical to IBM?s longer term future and with the sale of the IBM PC business to Lenovo, the brand is starting to disappear with removal of IBM stickers vis-a-vis hardware renewals. Thus IBM is left with only Lotus having any visual impact on its user base, if the rest starts slipping then it will not be in ones and twos it will be on one or two hundred thousands.The next couple of years will b...
More About: Posi , Position

Little things
2007-08-24 00:16:00
Why is it that it is always the little things of life that annoy the most? They are unimportant but they can feel like a pick-axe through the skull. Oh for serenity from time to time
More About: Things , Litt

Battle of the Belge
2007-08-23 14:44:00
I obviously ate and drank to much because this mornings trip to the gym was very disappointing. Not so much the workout but the scales were very cruel. Of course muscle weighs more than fat.....
More About: Battle

Little things
2007-08-23 06:16:00
Why is it that it is always the little things of life that annoy the most? They are unimportant but they can feel like a pick-axe through the skull. Oh for serenity from time to time
More About: Things , Litt

Boulogne - remembered
2007-08-22 10:56:00
When I was about 4 we put the car and ourselves on the train ?auto-couchette? from Boulogne to Lyon.I vividly remember leaving the boat and waiting on the side of a street for the massive steam engine to arrive (all smoke and whistles). The being heaved up from ground level into the train which set of down the road before departing to the right to join the mainline.On our return via Speedferries on Monday I found myself going through some doors which left to the now disused car ramp and rail tracks that left such an impression on me. Magical. Well worth the trip just for that alone!

myPod hot track
2007-08-22 10:56:00
I am starting a new feature, a simple reference to the iTunes store for a track that I have really connected with on my iPod recently. I listen semi-randomly so anything might pop up - and stay for any length of time. You can click here for today?s selection, Sergio Mendez - Mais Que Nada
More About: Track , Trac

Business and Politics - not so different
2007-08-22 10:08:00
Over a conversation with our fellow diners at the Parkrestaurant the other evening the thorny subject of Belgian politics came up. It has been a long time since I lived in Antwerp however even in those many intervening years very little has change. Belgium is a federated state, central and regional government operates on a proportional representation basis (I?m not sure which one). The alignments go from neo-Marxist across to neo-Fascist with all shades in between however this is then further complicated by each political entity being divided on language lines. The result - mostly nothing - why, well there is unlikely ever to be a majority to do anything radical, so Belgium politically changes very slowly, rarely over reacting but also rarely taking a lead - a sort politics by negative consensus. This is interesting from a business perspective as planning starts to become quite straightforward. As far as government regulation is concerned last year, this year and next year are goin...
More About: Politics , Business , Poli , Politic , Sine

Ostend pictures now on line
2007-08-22 00:58:00
Click here for a gander
More About: Pictures , On-line , Line , On Line

ParkRestaurant - A welcoming embrace
2007-08-21 10:28:00
Around 10 years ago we were wandering around the less touristy bits of Brugge when we came across the Parkrestaurant. Situated a short way to the south of the town centre we were delighted to find a restaurant in a building that was not simply old and quaint (like most of the local hostelries) - I would say the building is Victorian or Edwardian - but eclectic in style, charm and great use of space,But a building is nothing without good food and a welcoming atmosphere and the Park has both of these by the metre. Axel (pictured above) runs a tight ship with fine attention to detail, not too pushy but very attentive. The food spans the full spectrum of Belgian classics (Americain, Vissoep, etc.) to much more sophisticated Haute Cuisine (Hoge Keueken?) but the the Flemish style of large portions is never lost. The food arrives HOT. No I do mean HOT, I was deeply impressed this week-end with the temperature as my soup seemed to have emerged only seconds before arriving on our table dire...
More About: Embrace , Ming

A Bruges to far
2007-08-21 01:37:00
I?m back, l?m tired and over-stuffed. Typical week-end in Belgium really. It warrants a few blogs entries but I will make do with one just to get going;European harmonisation - I hate it - walking (and Melissa hobbling) around the great city of Bruges this morning it hit me that maybe 30-40% of the retail outlets were multi-national. This is a great shame. I have been visiting Bruges for over 30 years and the ancient charm has held it own but it is now defiantly in danger of becoming Euro retail homogenised if the tide is not held back, ?Let op Brugges?.Oh by the way both Brugges and Bruges and occasional Brugge seem to be acceptable spellings.

Ostende - here I come
2007-08-17 14:20:00
Its going to be a fun weekend (I am determined) as we head off over the Channel to Ostende, Belgium. Belgium boring, most certainly not - with great food, clubs and shopping I know even if it tips it down on Sunday (as predicted) we will still have a great time

Its quite a look!
2007-08-17 12:03:00
So having taken the plunge the job is now to promote the new blog look, I need to find a muse for the end of the month. Facebook is so hot at the moment it is sizzling and that combined with its constantly changing features means keeping track is a bit of a challenge. It would be nice if they fix the RSS feeds soon as well

I did it
2007-08-16 20:47:00
Its been a tough day, I took the plunge and updated from iLife 06 to iLife 08...its not for the faint hearted. Bless its cotton socks it does its best to preserver your old settings but life is full of change and the biggies are around the important apps to be, iweb and iphoto,iWeb has been mostly a labour of re-creation, after 4 or 5 conversions of the old format it became clear that I was probably barking up the wrong tree . So I have created a new template, recreated most but not all entries and will back fill the remaining over the next few weeks.iPhoto has a lot of changes especially around the formatting of the database that will need a lot of checking when I get back from Ostend
More About: I Did It

Weather, we get a lot of it
2007-08-14 16:13:00
Its difficult not to react to the odd summer (winter, spring.. autumn?) we are having this year. More extremes are expected we are told; rain, heat, wind, locusts (who knows?). I can?t help remembering the number of years where we have had ?extreme? weather since well... every year as far as I can remember - most of them to some wet/windy extent or another, but one mans extreme is someone else?s normal.Weather forecasts for example in North America  cover huge areas in 30 seconds then cut to local forecast tracking one particular nasty looking cloud across an obscure freeway. Sub-Saharan African weather forecasts could last for years on end - ?there will be no rain?, in Asia you might hear ?its the 23rd the monsoon will be here at 3 o?clock?.At the end of the day we are very lucky, never too hot, never too cold, rarely extreme and giving us the greenest isles on earth. Well done weather.