Bagel Belly Blog

Mozilla vs. Netscape

Ovidiu writes that "it looks like Mozilla's main target audience, at least from a consumer perspective, is going to be Linux only". I suspect this is not true - yes, there are alternative browsers on the Mac, but Windows users will shortly be forced to upgrade their operating system if they want new versions of IE.

For many people, this is not acceptable, as it often involves upgrading the computer too. For many others, the security problems with IE are good enough reason to change.

It's entirely possible that mozilla won't win out on the desktop, but it may be a surprise contender that does - Opera, perhaps? People will start looking for the same browser on all their platforms. Given the increase in mobile phones, mobile browsing is going to become a significant market share. Only Opera is actively catching all these platforms.

So I don't think the browser war is over just yet...

Trust Funds

I'm trying to work out the best way to set up a trust fund for my two nephews. Here's the deal: we want to seed the fund with a chunk of cash, and add to it over the years, but have the money locked in until the boys reach 18. (Tricky, since one is 8 and the other is 2 ... maybe I need two trust funds, but that will surely impact on interest earned).

Critical factors: the fund (or whatever) must be set up by Monday 28th. Interest rates in the UK are low at the moment, so purely interest-bearing accounts may not be the best. The UK government also gives something like an additional 20p per pound of donation to charities. It would be nice to take advantage of that. And finally, we'll need two signatories on the account - the uncles from both sides of the family.

Anyone else out there got experience of doing this? I spoke to the family accountant and he's "still working on it", and the company accountant hasn't got back to me yet. So lazy web, I invoke thee!

Update: This article on tax-efficient ways to save for school fees has some interesting hints about bare trusts and ISAs, which could be useful (although we envisage the money would be used as deposit on a house or paying university fees).

From the article: Charles Ansdell of Inter Alliance, an independent adviser, believes equity Isas can usefully be employed for school-fees planning, although you have to choose your funds with care.

He says: �You want a balanced portfolio with a mix of bonds, cash, property and stock-market investments. As a rough guide, I would invest about 50% in bonds, 30% in equities, 10% in property and 10% in cash.�

The Times also has a good article on Children's savings accounts compared. For simple savings accounts, it looks like Scarborough Building Society offers the best deal.

The Children's Portfolio looks like an interesting concept and one that bears looking at further. Not sure if it requires a regular monthly investment or a lump sum investment though.

The National Savings Children's Bonus Bonds are similar to what my sister and I had as kids, but when we had them, interest was around 10%. It's now 3.2% - hopeless!

Cheers, Andy

On Monday afternoon, I hope you'll all raise a glass of red wine with me to say "cheers!" to my brother-in-law, who died suddenly and unexpectedly at home on 15th July this year.

Andy Willmott

My brother-in-law, Andy, passed away on Tuesday.

He leaves behind my sister and his two sons, Thomas (8) and Ben (2).

We're setting up a trust fund for Thomas and Ben, his "baby boys". I'd like to help ensure that the boys get the kind of future Andy was working so hard to achieve for them.

So, if you've:

• ever had a brother-in-law (or sister-in-law) who made your life better
• ever had young children that you've wanted to provide for, to give them a happy, secure, loving home
• ever built a business (and reputation) from scratch, battling through the low times when money is tight and appreciated the good moments as it starts to take off
• ever had a carpenter, builder, or other tradesman who did a really good job, who was "a pleasure to have working in the house", "a friend, not just a tradesman and master craftsman"

... then please consider making a donation.

I'm visiting the family accountant on 23rd, but if you simply can't wait, then you can use Paypal to send money to andrew@luminas.co.uk, and I'll be sure it gets to my nephews.

New route to work

I found a new route to and from work yesterday, basically by going as the crow flies, straight across meadows and beside the river. It's far better than walking through the new housing developments, and as quick as waiting for the bus (which goes round the houses quite a bit rather than taking the direct route).

This morning's walk was like something out of a wildlife programme, with me having to watch where I walked to avoid stepping on frogs and ant hills. And then I took a peak under the bridge I normally walk over, and found a family of swans. How cool is that?

Perks

One definite advantage of being in the incubator (and of working for Luminas, folks ... send in those CVs!) is the fact that we have access to the open air heated swimming pool. It's about 20-25 metres long, and a decent temperature even at 8 in the morning. I've been swimming the last three days in a row, and hope to keep it up whenever I'm in Norwich.

Now I just need to get into playing squash and tennis to really make use of the on-site facilities. And to get value for money, I suppose I should visit the on-site bar, too. ;-)

Quirks

Because the building we're in was primarily designed for biotech research rather than IT, there are lots of "features" in here that you don't find in your average incubator office block. It certainly makes life interesting (and provides us with great opportunities to diversify if we decide biological warfare is more profitable!).

Here's just a couple of the things we've noticed over the last couple of days. When we get photos of the vast liquid nitrogen tank or Dr Death's virus lab, we'll post them.

	The goods lift here is padded. Like a cell in a psychiatric ward. We don't think it's coincidence.
	Warning signs. Lots of them. These two are some of the less worrying ones. Don't let it stop you visiting us, it's perfectly safe really :-)

Office snaps

Here's a load of pictures of our new office.

Outside the incubator

The interior - before the furniture arrived

The view from the windows

With furniture

Office day ...

Today we move into our new office. In theory all the furniture should be delivered this morning, and with a bit of luck the network will be set up by the John Innes Centre networking team (we're not allowed to go patch in the other end of the fibre ourselves, unfortunately).

Then we just need to move the filing cabinets and get a wireless hub, and we should be all set.

Excitement!

Office!

So, we went to see the new office again today, and we should be moving in on Wednesday if all goes to plan. It's all very exciting! The office is a pretty good size, and it should be no problem to fit four or five people in there. Most of the offices around us will shortly be vacated, so if we need more room, I doubt it will be a problem.
Pictured here from left to right: Adam, David and Thang. Better photos on Wednesday, no doubt!

Extracting RSS from Office docs

"The tool is a simple command-line utility that generates an RDF document from one or more Office documents." -- Leigh's blog. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Ethical Artificial Intelligence

"Announcing the newly issued U.S. patent concerning ethical artificial intelligence. This innovation is the 1st affective language analyzer incorporating ethical/motivational terms, serving in the role of interactive computer interface. It enables a computer to reason and speak in an ethical fashion, serving in roles specifying sound human judgement: such as public relations or security functions." -- http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6587846

A good example of yet another software patent that shouldn't have been awarded. Still, the idea of ethical AI is interesting, although I'm not convinced of their definitions or areas requiring it. Security I can understand, but public relations? I've never met an ethical PR person yet! ;-)

Roaming Access

Matthew talks about a fictional WLAN global passport granting him wireless access throughout Europe and the US. A nice idea, and it would certainly have come in handy when David and I were over in the States earlier this year. We managed to get by, however. Here's some tips for those travelling to America.

Look for Beaner's. The Beaner's coffee shop chain appear to be pretty well wired. We spent many hours working late into the night in the Lansing branch, with good, free, fast connections.

Ask the proprietor. A number of places we went in to looked like they didn't have wireless, but after some friendly questioning of the (usually) bar staff, we found a few places where we could get paid-for connections. It became a routine to sign up for wireless with companies in each location.

Prepare services beforehand. One of the most common problems we had was that no local SMTP service was provided. If you can, configure your company mail server to support authenticated SMTP, so you can send mail via it regardless of where you are. You may need to set up a VPN in order to do this, since occassionally traffic on several useful ports was blocked.

3650 software

Just been updating a few bits and pieces on the 3650, since I'll be on the road again at the end of the week, doing a presentation on Open Source software at a JISC project meeting in Warwick.

Following on from the comments I got back from the blogplanet guys, I'm giving version 1.02 a whirl. Sounds like some of the annoying "confirm" menus have been removed, so I'll see how it goes. I'm also trying azure, which looks like it might be a nice moblogging application - sadly, no picture support though. I really need to write that linux version of the image upload server.

A quick update of FExplorer to 1.10 and an update of Opera too, and I'm trying a new web browser, webviewer. I'll report on how I get on with that.

For fun, I'm going to try the Gameboy and C64 emulators.

I also need to register WirelessIRC (I use IRC all the time, so having it when I'm on the road is useful), and HandyClock (because HandyClock's multiple alarm is useful and the built-in Nokia clock application is truly awful).

Finally, I want to sort out why the gnome-vfs plugin for bluetooth doesn't work for me. The temptation to be able to drag-n-drop files on my phone is too great. I want, I want!

Update: blogplanet's update means it's forgotten all the previously saved server settings and blog entries on the phone. It seems that 1.0 and 1.0.2 are installed side-by-side, instead of 1.0.2 overwriting the 1.0 app and inheriting the 1.0 data. No doubt this is due to limitations in the phone or somesuch, but still ... grrr!