Ooh, this is interesting

(but only if you’re a Mac geek, that is.)

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 2 (to give it the full, formal title) is a port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. There’s been an X11 port for a while, but the downside of that is that you need to run an X Windows emulator for the OpenOffice application to sit in - which sucks, to put it mildly. So the fact that there’s now an Aqua version is Rather Good News as far as I’m concerned. So far, so good - it’ll get a thrashing tomorrow as I’ve got a couple of large-ish documents to write.

Geek cookery

Via Euan Semple I came across MacGourmet, which is billing itself as the iTunes of recipes. A neat idea, but it’s lacking the one thing I really need in a system like this - reverse-engineering of recipes. Otherwise known as “I’ve got two tins of kidney beans, half an onion, three cloves of garlic and a jar of something vaguely oily and threatening that the label has come off - what can I make with this?” But the idea of making the recipe display bigger so you can park your PowerBook out of batter range is a neat one.

Cooking For Engineers is a definite find, though - where else would you find a page dedicated to the smoking point of various fats? The recipes also use a diagramatic format rather than the traditional Delia-esque linear style - it doesn’t make the end results any more consistent, but it’s satisfyingly geeky. There’s also a fair dose of tool pr0n as well - because as any fule kno, you can never have too many gadgets for removing cloves of garlic from horses’ hooves…

Ten Cool Things You Can Do With Webfeeds

Getting bored with using webfeeds to read blogs? Then here’s the Cutting Through Guide To 10 Cool Things You Can Do With Webfeeds

Get a new slant on the news

Get a new perspective on the world by subscribing to a webfeed from the world’s most respected broadcaster. The BBC offers webfeeds for all its news and current affairs output, together with much more besides.

Find out what’s going on with the weather

Want to know if it’s raining in Linton-on-Ouse? Pay a visit to RSSWeather.com and enter a city, state or ICAO airport code to find out what the weather’s doing at your nearest airport.

Follow in a guru’s footsteps

The management guru’s management guru Tom Peters has a blog where he holds forth about all things guruish - and the contents of his suitcase…

Find out when Granny lands at Heathrow

Waiting for a flight to arrive? Then use Robert Price’s UK flight arrival and departure feeds to check on the ;latest movements of flights to and from the UK. Want to know if her flight from JFK left late - PubSub’s airport alerts feed will keep you informed.

Spy on other people’s bookmarks

Interested in what other people are linking to? Then take a look at the webfeeds at del.icio.us. You can subscribe to the latest bookmarks or an individual keyword that you’re interested in.

Keep track of your bookmarks

Once you’ve set up your own del.icio.us account, grab a webfeed of your bookmarks straight into your newsreader…

Keep an eye on what others are saying about you

Want to know what’s being said about you on the web? Don’t bother Googling when you can use PubSub - just create a personalised feed to search for the search term of your choice, and have the results delivered driect to your newsreader

Find out what your MP has been up to

Wondering what your Member of Parliament has been doing to justify your vote come the next election? Subscribe to their Recent Appearances webfeed, and get details of their questions and contributions to debates in the House of Commons - then fax them about it

Roll your own newsfeed

Found a news source that hasn’t got webfeeds yet (oh, the shame)? No problem - use Newsisfree to grab and build a custom webfeed from their database of 14,000 sources…

Look for items on eBay

Looking for that perfect Christmas present? Set up an eBay search, and then subscribe to the results in your newsreader…

Tom Peters blogs…

If you’re a fan of the management guru’s management guru Tom Peters, you’ll be interested to see that he’s started blogging at his site.

Tom being Tom, he’s not doing things by half-measures, either. He’s prolific, wide-ranging and controversial - everything from his thoughts on the dominance of US universities to the contents of his suitcase (you have to hope it has wheels, if only for the sake of his back!) And it’s not just a token effort ‘vanity blog’ - it comes with comments and permalinks too (no sign of trackbacks, however.)

And if you follow some of the ‘blogging gurus’ (actual and so-called) you may have seen a lot written about ‘finding your blogging voice’ and so on. Personally I tend towards the opinion that it’s better just to get posting than agonise too much about such things - part of the appeal of weblogs in a corporate setting is that they get away from the bland over-produced voices that you tend to find in too many press releases and corporate information material. But interestingly, Tom Peters blogs in exactly the same way as he writes - LOTS OF CAPITALS and many exclamation marks!!!! You almost get the feeling that what he really wants are sidebars and graphics and typographic gizmos of the kind that pepper his books.

The upshot of his blog is that he’s now front-of-my-mind on a daily basis, whereas previously the closest I’d come to remaining aware of him was seeing the spines of his books when I happened to glance at my bookshelf…

FQ TOPIC: Search

FQ1: In one word, describe a luxury item you would want if stranded on a desert island for a year. Why?

The internet. Because then it wouldn’t matter that I was stranded - at least I’d be able to contact the outside world…

FQ2: In one word, describe a food you wouldn’t mind eating every day for a month. Why?

Bananas. Maybe then I’d actually convince myself that they were good for me, and I did like them…

FQ3: In one word, describe an occupation that you wouldn’t necessarily want as a career, but wouldn’t mind trying out for a week. Why?

Plumber. Then I’d be able to find out just why it’s so damn difficult to find one when you need one, and whether it’s as lucrative a trade as the urban myth would have us believe…

FQ Search: Enter your first name PLUS the above three words into a Google search and see if anything interesting comes up!

Erm - a runner-up World Conker champion and star of “Rabbit Fever”?

I don’t get gmail - am I missing something?

A bit of a confession here - I’m not sure I get the excitement over gmail.

It seems to be a perfectly well-designed online mail system, and the search facilities are neat - but why does this make it so different and wonderful? I use an IMAP-based service - Fastmail - and it gives me the best of both worlds, online access and offline replication. There just doesn’t seem to be a killer advantage to gmail in comparison - so am I missing something??

Telling Mr Scoble why his products suck…

Oh, boy - talk about opening the floodgates. Robert Scoble asks why Microsoft products suck.

This has provoked any number of responses far more eloquent than I can make them - they crash (but so does lots of software); they’ve got clunky interfaces (but the worst interface of all time came courtesy of Lotus); they’re not open source (but neither is Apple software). So no point in rehashing those arguments: here’s mine:

They’re bloated: technology is moving towards small pieces, loosely-joined - but M$ products are bloated behemoths of marginally-useful functionality of which < 10% ever gets used. And it’s all a compromise - I go pale at the very thought of an IIS server because it’s been nailed on top of file and print functionality with the end result that neither works particularly well.

Microsoft can’t respond fast enough: Without exception, every interesting, exciting, must-have new development I’ve seen in the past three years or so has originated from somewhere other than Redmond. Firefox, PHP, NewsGator, iTunes, the iPod, RSS, SubEthaEdit - the list just goes on and on. I’m sure that deep in the bowels of the organisation there are any number of people who are having as good, if not better, ideas - it’s just that they can’t get them through the layers fast enough.

They’re evil: Microsoft could be an incredible force for good if they wanted to be - they’re bigger than any government can control. But instead, they’re a convicted predatory monopoly who (we have to assume, because their past behaviour suggests it) would boil down their own grandmothers for glue if they thought there was any commercial advantage for it. They’ve squandered any brand equity they once had. I’m sure that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Robert Scoble are kind-hearted, considerate and personally-principled individuals, but once they’ve taken the Microsoft shilling I want to count my fingers after metaphorically shaking their hands, because the organisation is so flawed and corrupt. They’re the Enron and the News International and the Wal-Mart and the Nike of the software world - sometimes it’s impossible to avoid dealing with them, but afterwards I always feel just that little bit unclean. Instead of embracing the incredible possibilities that digital media could bring, they’re cosying up to the media oligopoly and helping to prop up an ever-more redundant business model. Rather than positioning their products on the basis of them being the best tools for the job, they seek to lock me in with proprietary and ever-changing file formats. I’m not a customer, I’m owned - it’s not “embrace and extend”, it’s about “embrace, extend, lock-in, control, squeeze, and control some more”.

Every organisation eventually fails - the classic illustration of this is comparing the FTSE-100 or Dow indices in, say, 1904 and 2004. Most of the names are gone, because industries rise and fall. But when other industries died they didn’t do too much damage (aside from the individuals whose livelihoods disappeared) in the long-term. But Microsoft is in such a unique and overly-powerful position that when it fails - and history suggests it will, eventually - the damage it could inflict as it thrashes around in its death-throes is so much more widespread and pervasive, because by this time much of life as we know it will have gone digital.

What I think I’m trying to say is that it’s not really about the products sucking - it’s the organisation. And great products aren’t going to solve that problem.

A short rant about pensions - please do not adjust your set

OK, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my retirement years are going to be spent huddled over a single lump of coal eating leftover catfood - I might as well have buried my pension contributions in a hole in the garden. But when are we as a society going to wake up to the fact that if we want a Scandanavian-style crade-to-grave social system where pensioners don’t freeze to death in winter, the trains run on time and there’s a decent chance of getting treatment before whatever you’ve got kills you, we’re going to have to pay for it?!?

I mean, would you really notice an extra 1p or 2p on the basic rate of income tax - and if you’re earning over £100,000, is it going to be such a problem if there’s a 50% marginal rate? So why do we seem to have boxed ourselves into a situation where we’re stuck with the idea that Taxes Are Bad, but still expect to get the services without paying for them??

(Rant inspired by the latest waffling from Margaret Thatcher Tony Blair - apparently the only way to plug the pensions shortfall is for anyone on incapacity benefits to be boiled down for glue…)

Out of control

If you’re plugged into UK news, you may have heard some back-and-forth over the last couple of days about the ever-rising cost of the IT projects within the National Health Service - depending on which source you’re following, the cost is variously £15bn, £20bn or even £30bn over the 10 year lifetime of the project. That’s more than it cost to dig the Channel Tunnel.

Not that this is coming as a surprise to anyone - the normal budgeting process for IT projects in the UK public sector seems to be think of a number, double it and then add a nought to get the final cost - which is irrelevant anyway, because the project gets cancelled two-thirds of the way in before any actual use takes place. Anyone remember the runaway catastrophe that was Read Codes?

I can think of several reasons for this, not least the approach being taken by some consultant acquaintances of mine - to hear them talk about the NHS IT programme, you’d think that it had started raining banknotes. There certainly seems to be a rerun of the Millennium bonanza taking place in certain sectors of the industry.

But it seems that the main problem is simply that it’s the type of monolithic supertanker of a programme that’s doomed to fail because it’s just too damn big. Certainly some of the intentions are laudable - electronic patient records for example, or on-line booking of hospital appointments - but the impression that’s being create by much of the press coverage is of a programme that’s taken on a life of it’s own through the sheer scale of the undertaking.

Which is ironic, given that the prevailing trend in technology at the moment seems to be “small pieces, loosely joined”. Rather than vast, complex, all-singing, all-dancing applications, we’re instead looking at a world of discrete applications performing specific functions, glued together by standards-based services and APIs. Instead of the HokeyCokey 2000 system being the single behemoth of functionality, it’s about specific tools being deployed for specific purposes.

And what’s also intriguing is that the real breakthroughs seem to be coming not from the corporations with their million-dollar R&D budgets, but small groups of hackers who are in it for the challenge rather than the reward. Steve Bowbrick goes as far as suggesting that we should hand over to the job of the NHS systems to the same people who brought us MySQL and Linux. And it’s a very valid point - after all, it’s difficult to see how it could be possible to do a worse job for more…

What he wants for Christmas…

Euan Semple:

What I want for Christmas ….

…. is an RSS feed with all the TV or Radio programmes watched or listened to by the people on my blogroll each day. In the same way that I trust them to filter the web effectively for me this would allow me to be automatically fed the best broadcast content from around the world.

Problem is, we’re all so busy reading the contents of our blogroll that we haven’t got the time to be watching TV or listening to the radio (unless you count what’s streaming in the background)…