adoption curve dot net

Actually, it’s faster than I’d get at home…

So here I am, roaming the interweb courtesy of Swisscom and Megabeam Networks, whoever they might be. Presumably there’s a reasonably chunky base station nearby, because I’m getting a solid five bars, and the throughput is pretty damn respectable too. I’m not sure if there’s a bandwidth cap, so I’m not going to go mad with the streaming audio just yet, but it beats sitting in a flat sans carpets and plus concrete dust for the sake of a DSL link.

But it does throw up two interesting questions. Firstly, who the hell sets the pricing for this – £17.95 for 24 hours is less eye-watering than the £5 per hour I’ve paid in the past, but it’s would still have been high enough to make me think twice if someone else wasn’t picking up the tab at the moment. I can see that the costs of rolling out the network have got to be recouped somehow, but it’s a chicken-and-egg situation – the higher the price the fewer people will actually use it the longer it will take to reach break-even (forget profit, after all, this is telecoms we’re talking about

The second question is why there’s absolutely no mention of this service anywhere in or around the hotel. The only reason I became aware of it in the first place is because Lucy turned on her Centrino-powered Latitude and saw an “I’ve found a network, what would you like me to do?” message. If that hadn’t appeared, I’d probably wouldn’t even have taken my Powerbook out of the bag. So Swisscom/Megabeam networks, whoever you are, you’re doing a pretty crappy job of marketing yourselves. At the very least there should be something in the room along with all the “What To Do On A Wet Thursday Afternoon In Yorkshire” leaflets. (Answer: stay in and surf at £17.95 per day)

Hot off the press, it appears that our current gaff (the Grange) is a wifi hotspot. I’m scurrying back there immediately – waiter, some cucumber sandwiches and an 802.11b connection if you please…

This sort of ‘reporting‘ annoys me almost as much as the analyst ’studies’ that the report relates to. Yankee Group’s Microsoft shill Laura Didio is plastered all over the net with a study that finds that migrating to open-source platforms can cost more than simply upgrading the in-place Windows systems, and Jack Schofield does his bit by posting the story onto the Guardian Online blog.

Gosh, how exciting! A scientifically-rigorous double-blind placebo trial which once and for all nails the question of which platform is more cost-effective? Er, not quite. Firstly there’s the obvious point that moving from anything – be it Windows, Linux or MegaCorp’s Hokey Cokey 2000 operating system – is going to cost money, and the bigger the rollout, the greater the pain. And then there’s the ever-so-minor point that the ’study’ was conducted with Sunbelt Software, who in their own words are the ‘World’s #1 Windows NT/2K/XP Tools Provider’. Not that Our Jack mentions this of course, despite the fact that thirty seconds and a Google search would have unearthed this particular fact-ette.

In related news, nine out of ten turkeys said Christmas was a bad thing.

If there’s an upside to getting flooded out of your home, it’s that you get to stay in some quite nice places at someone else’s expense. Not on my insurance, because their definition of ‘uninhabitable’ means ‘no kitchen or bathroom’ (so where do I sleep? the bath?), but as our friendly neighbourhood developers have all-but-accepted liability by starting to fix things, they get to pick up the tab.

So last week we were staying in the Dean Court Hotel in York – trying valiently to spend the hotel allowance we’d been given, but failing. It was one of the first hotels that came to mind after dismissing the big chains with a mental shudder as I remembered far too many nights in far too many big chain hotels, mainly because it’s got about the most central position it’s possible to have in York – about sixty feet from the front door of the Minster. Because I walk past it on a regular basis, I’d been aware of the refit that had closed it down for about two months just after Christmas, and the rumours of unfeasible amounts of money having been spent there. So when we turned up, we expected big things.

The public areas don’t disappoint if you’re looking for evidence of money having been spent – short of a little sign on the front door saying ‘Beware – designer interior’, it couldn’t be much more obvious that they’ve been Llewellen-Bowened. We’re talking brown sofas that look like weebles, glass coffee tables with no visible means of support, tinkly lounge jazz through Bang & Olafson speakers and lots of etched glass. The problem is that the front of the building is bog-standard ecclesiastical Victoriana, so walking through the front door is a bit like being walking through a hole in space-time continuum and finding yourself in a Leeds winebar. So there’s a bit of a mental disconnect pretty much from the word go.

Going upstairs is even more of a head-spinner, because the Llewellen-Bowened carpet rises up from the ground floor, rounds the turn in the stairs and then terminates abruptly at the first floor, which can best be described as a ocean of mid-Eighties chintz. That’s those bits that haven’t been stolen from a 1960’s office block – all the firedoors are white gloss-painted melamine. The overall effect is that the money ran out on the ground floor – and there doesn’t seem to have been much spent on the rooms themselves since about 1989. We stayed in two over the course of the week – the paper was peeling, most of the paintwork look like it had been polished with an orbital sander, and the first bath had a non-functional spa function and a crack in the side that gaped whenever any weight was put onto it.

The food was a bit of a redeeming feature, if you’re into slightly-pretentious nouvelle-cuisine with twiddly bits; and there’s a decent wine list at the usual outrageous markups. The problem with the restaurant wasn’t so much the food as the clientele – the menu reflected the trendy decor, while the diners reflected the rooms upstairs. We brought the average age down by about fifty years – there’s something vaguely unsettling about Harvey Nicks-style designer cutlery being grasped by Ladies Of A Certain Age dressed in twinsets and pearls, while they try to get their dentures around braised polenta and aubergine coulis.

All in all, it was a bit of a let-down – I came away with the impression of a major refit that ran out of money after the ground floor, and a clientele who have been coming back twice a year since 1850 and are now slightly bemused that an old friend has had a facelift and taken to wearing Versace jeans above the sensible shoes. It’s almost as if the management didn’t fully have the courage of their convictions to rip out the chintz and go whole-heartedly Modern.

I’m trying to get excited about this, I really am, but the only response I could think of having read the MacWorld review is “so what?” The major ‘improvement’ sits in Entourage, which has the clunkiest ‘don’t care if you’re running Panther, we’re going to make this look and feel like Windows’ interface on the planet, and the rest of the added features seem to be little more than bloat. Oh, and the DRM features don’t work, because they need Active Directory. Which will be released for OS X about the same time as hell freezes over, no doubt.

I’m not sure there’s been an actual usage improvement in the Windows version of Word since the 97 edition. It still drives me nuts with the ‘hi, I think you’d really like to indent your bullet points and change them to slightly blurry ovals at the same time as I capitalise the first letter of every line’ syndrome – I seem to spend as much time fighting the application as I do actually creating content. Which is not to say that I’m pining for the days when men were men and word processors were emacs, but how about a feature which meant that you could turn all the other features off? No autocorrect, no style pallets, no automatic indents – just text on a screen with a true WYSIWYG layout and preview, and code that doesn’t consume 99.5% of system resources every time you reformat a header. Please?

This is probably getting boring, me ranting about how wonderful Macs – and in particular OS X – are. But then how many other boxes could you run a fully-featured Apache webserver, PHP, PERL, and MySQL on – and then to top it all, Moveable Type?

Admittedly, getting MT to work was a little bit of a challenge – I tried to figure it out myself and failed miserably, largely because it involved such scary things as compiling PERL modules and other such Unix wizardry. But of course the great thing about the net is that there’s no such thing as a unique problem, and the instructions at Maczealots meant that second time around, it was up and running in about twenty minutes.

All of which is going to make sorting out the new blog site that I’m currently working on a great deal quicker and easier, not least because I don’t now need a live net connection to test the layouts and what have you…