March 31, 2006
.jpg "UNDP")
March 30, 2006
Plazes
This makes me smile: where is Andrew? This makes me wish more airports had free wifi: where is Andrew over the last 365 days? (there should be crosses on Austria, Germany and Latvia too) ... join me on my quest to put a cross in every country on the map ...March 28, 2006
The Hippo speaks!
Just time in between preparations for Albania and more domestic chores like sorting out broken boilers to bring this hot-breaking news ...
Arjé has finally done what he long threatened to do and get a hippo blog going. Good to hear it straight from the hippo's mouth! I'm looking forward to frequent posts on all things Hippo.
Albania
My trip to Albania this week (departing very early Wednesday, stopping over in Austria en-route) is to introduce Free and Open Source software to students, academics, and the government as part of the United Nations Development Programme in Albania. I'll be leading a two day workshop (actually two mornings).
Slides should be available some time afterwards.
March 27, 2006
March 26, 2006
Normal for Norfolk
I love this: "Officers find small pony in Mini". Somehow that could only happen here.Serbia pictures
A selection of photos from Serbia are on flickr. Some quite nice ones there, I particularly like the ones of the Danube. I'm a bit annoyed though - I seem to have a spec of dust on the CCD. I thought it was on the lens, which I cleaned before going to Serbia, but the problem persists.
I'm also having annoying problems with flickr export, which occasionally seems to just refuse to export, sitting there saying "Uploading 1 of [n]", and doing nothing. Grr.
March 24, 2006
Novi Sad
So, my time in Novi Sad is almost over already - a whirlwind trip indeed. After two days of training, I hope to spend tomorrow morning running around the city with my camera before flying back home to the UK. Until then, I have a really exciting picture of my hotel room (which was quite luxurious, compared with the more spartan hotel room in Amsterdam) and a picture of one of the many churches here, which has the most stunning tiled roof.
Although it was pouring with rain when I arrived in the early hours of Thursday, by yesterday evening the weather had cleared and my hosts gave me a tour of the city. I've been pleasantly surprised by the place - after getting over the initial disorientation of seeing place names on road signs that I've heard about in the news, I've really enjoyed looking around. I'd certainly consider coming back here in the summer as a tourist.
More travel
Confirmed: next week I'm in Albania. More details to follow ...March 22, 2006
Frankfurt
.jpg "Desk and power")
I thought Schiphol was pretty large as airports go. And then there was a ten minute bus ride from the plane to the terminal at Frankfurt. One good thing - a desk and a power socket in the departure lounge. Sadly, no wifi though - or at least, none that I can pick up. There's a guy round the corner with an insane antenna plugged into his Vaio, though maybe not so insane since he has network and I don't ...
March 21, 2006
More travel
Tomorrow evening, I'm off to another new country - this time it's Serbia, where I'll be in Novi Sad helping a team at Levi 9 get up and running with a Hippo CMS website. Niels, one of the Hippo developers, has already been out there, and has some photos on flickr. Looks great - I can't wait!March 20, 2006
March 19, 2006
Macbook Pro: a bit fast then
So Paul has got a Macbook Pro. This is good news, as it gives me a chance to do some performance comparisons before deciding whether to wait some more, take the plunge, or buy something completely different like an iMac.
Paul's Macbook is 2.16Ghz, 1GB RAM, 100GB 7200rpm HD. My Powerbook is 1.5Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, 80GB HD (not sure of the rpm). What's the best way to compare these two? How about a task I wait for several times a week: compiling Cocoon.
This is doing a ./build.sh webapp on a clean download of Cocoon 2.1.8, using JDK 1.4.2.
Paul's Macbook Pro: 1 minute 21 seconds.
My powerbook: 4 minutes 38 seconds
With JDK 1.5, the times were a bit different: 1 minute 11 vs. 3 minutes 2 seconds. Over a minute faster ...
I think I might just go take a look in the Apple store. Just to, you know, see if they have any in stock. Not to buy or anything. Really. Back later ... ;-)
Update: on one of our servers (3Ghz, SATA hard disks) Cocoon takes 1 minute 2 seconds to compile. But that machine is not quite as portable .....
March 13, 2006
March 10, 2006
In defense of the hippo
Steven writes some good stuff about communities and content management products. He's totally spot-on when talking about the importance of community participation. But Steven, I think you may be hitting below the belt with this:
Next, I detect a subtle difference in style between this and this. I'd say the first link with its big red box isn't particularly inviting.
Steven carefully links to the download page for Hippo, which carries the warning. A fairer equivalent would be the Hippo CMS home page.
Steven knows the history behind the Hippo CMS product - a long slow march towards being able to fully release it as an Open Source product. (Who doesn't remember the fateful "it will be released as Open Source by December" statement during the CMS shootout at the 2004 Cocoon GetTogether?)
Inevitably for a product with a long history and a product that was not conceived as an Open Source solution, there's a need for the Hippo folk to do some housekeeping to ensure their product is truly open - in the same diligent way and with the same attention to detail we find in Apache projects. So is the Hippo message Steven refers to any less of an honest warning than the one given by Daisy?
Yes, it's hard to make sure the system is documented enough for external developers - but why the emphasis on making money off them? Isn't it more important to get them involved in the community, where they are far more valuable than a simple financial bottom line? If you are able to get a viable community, the documentation will follow - as in the case of Daisy's contributed documentation.
Yes, it's hard to open up a development process. It needs encouragement and support by the wider community, not subtle pot-shots from those fortunate enough to have started in the open to begin with. Let's save that for the bait-and-switch folk ;-)
Disclosure: I'm one of the Hippo integration partners, currently feeling the pain of helping them move toward a viable Open Source product (and after today, I think I'll start muttering that they need to blog more, too). I've also helped customers to get up and running with Daisy. I think both CMSes are mighty fine products.
March 9, 2006
March 4, 2006
Plumbing
According to lifehack, plumbing gives a 260% average return on investment. This is good news. I got home this evening to find out my long-suffering boiler is no longer boiling. It is an ex-boiler. It is no more. Just as we get some arctic weather. Ooops. Looks like I'll have to move forward my plans to replace it.March 3, 2006
Switcher
So after my problems with Mail.app, I really did it: I switched to tbird. The thing that finally convinced me to switch was Mail displaying a subject line for one email and the body of another. Deeply weird, and restarting didn't help.
About thirty seconds after switching, Torsten pinged me to point out his thunderbird posts, around the same time I started cursing about tbird's lack of Address Book integration. I know how I can work round this - set up an LDAP server and dump my addresses into that, and then point tbird and Address Book at it. But there's no easy way to keep the LDAP server updated (Address Book only does read-only LDAP I think), and if integration is just around the corner, I think I can cope for now.
On the whole, tbird is a big improvement. The pluses and minuses:
- I like that folders with new mail (rather than unread) are highlighted in blue
- I like that you can add extensions for additional functionality, like the British English dictionary or the bounce command (a big win for redirecting mails to internal mailing lists and making them appear to come directly from the sender - extremely handy for finding them later).
- Threading seems a bit broken: it's not on by default, even though I have threading set to 'all'. So it only seems to work for threads with unread messages. And when I do have threads working, I can't figure out how to delete an entire thread in one go.
- I like the identity management: setting up separate profiles for each address seems much less hacky than Mail.app's method of specifying multiple email addresses separated by commas.
- I haven't figured out how to make all email available offline yet.
- Search that isn't broken by design! Fantastic! I can select what I want to search, and then enter the term, rather than Mail's blatantly stupid "type something and I'll start searching and then you can decide what to search". It doesn't appear to be possible to search just a subset of folders though.
- The toolbar could be more customisable ... but then more recent versions of Mail started to limit options here too, so it's not a big deal.
- Memory usage doesn't seem any better or worse than Mail, but too early to tell yet. I haven't had to restart every day though, which is a bonus.
And of course the biggest win of all is flawless IMAP support. That alone is worth switching for.
All in all, if you're a power user of email and on a Mac, I recommend you ditch Mail.app and give tbird a try. It's definitely an improvement.
Update: spoke too soon. Apple are bad bad bad people. Thunderbird is set to be my default email client, and yet when I just accepted an invitation in iCal, Mail.app started up in order to send my response .... this is not good.