Nov 26th, 09
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I’m not fully understanding the idea behind Google’s Chromium OS, but as we know the market does love to have a googasm everytime they release everything out into the market.
It’s a given that in the long term, everything is going to be in the cloud and the idea of holding data locally will – for most types of organisation – seem a little crazy. And in a 30 year timeframe, some of the businesses that we know today will still be around and doing that. (I presume Google will, although on that sort of timeframe they almost certainly would have been overtaken by someone else and will be looking like today’s Microsoft.)
What I’m not understanding about Chrome OS is… why? There are already two players in this space – Windows and Linux. Linux has been trying to beat up Windows in the alternative OS space for, what, 15 years plus? Is it getting anywhere – well, for me, until I can replace my wife’s PC with a Linux box then no. I can only do that if the Office apps in the cloud, which will happen, then all I have to do is give her something that runs Firefox. (We recently updated her PC, and it was a breeze because so much that she does is in the cloud now.)
It’s a “so what” test thing for me. What is Chrome giving me that Firefox on Ubuntu is not. Firefox isn’t going away – my recent thoughts on this is that those guys are kicking the living daylights out of Microsoft in terms of bringing features to market and controlling the environment (recent press about Firefox’s desire to implement hardware accelerated rendering in the first, and the fact that Microsoft has to support IE6 and 7 forever and cannot push out new versions as easily as Firefox in the second). Ubuntu isn’t going away – and frankly that OS is *awesome*.
Google seems to be looking to replicate Microsoft’s proprietary lock-in approach with Chrome OS… I presume to keep dominant. Nothing about this glorified advertising company’s strategy on anything has been like this. So why now? Much as I don’t want to say this just to be proven wrong in five years time (damn Way Back Machine), but Chrome OS feels like a flash in the pan to me.
If I’m going to buy any new kit to play with in the next six months, it wouldn’t be a Google Chrome OS netbook, it’d be a Microsoft Courier.
(Those who like the etymology of their idioms may like this: http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=pan)
Nov 26th, 09
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Topaz Filer, our unique-in-the-market email filing tool has been growing great guns, and we’ve recently decided to restructure our operations. The new name for the makers of Topaz Filer is Invocation Software Ltd. The Topaz Filer Web site remains the same, but there is a new one at http://www.invocationsoftware.com/.
Sep 16th, 09
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Was liking Agile Modeling today…
Sep 4th, 09
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Here’s a neat site for creating colourways for Web pages if, like me, you’re not so good with the aesthetic side of development.
The idea is pretty cool, give it a base colour and it will come up with a bunch of matching complementary colours: www.colorsontheweb.com.
Sep 2nd, 09
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I’m pleased to be able to introduce our latest service offering – Twitter Ad Box.
The problem that Twitter Ad Box solves is this – if you’re into social networking to boost credibility and promote yourself as having something interesting to say about a given problem domain you have to refer people to interesting things on the Web to read. (As I do – through this blog, @mbrit and LinkedIn.)
However, when someone clicks off of your Twitter (or whatever) profile you’ve lost them – they’re no longer thinking about or reading about you, they’re (hopefully) into whatever content you’ve promoted. Twitter Ad Box allows you to create URLs that contain an ad for your own services that sits alongside the content you’re looking at.
Here’s an example link created with Twitter Ad Box: http://tr.im/xI9V
This is a service that I have built based on my own needs as someone who uses social networking tools for business – namely that if I refer someone to some content, I want my message to continue through to that visitor with that click-through. What we are looking for is people to come onboard as early adopters of the service, tell us what they think and see if we can get some momentum going. I personally think it’s a great service, but any comments are always appreciated.
Here’s more blurb about how it works, with pictures!
Aug 30th, 09
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A while ago I found this excellent site for creating those “loading” or “busy” graphics that appear on Ajax-based sites. Took me about an hour to find it, but here it is: http://www.ajaxload.info/. It is most clever. Give it the colours you use and the type of graphics you want and it will provide you with an appropriate animated GIF file.
Aug 24th, 09
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We have an issue with a customer whereby they have a whole farm of servers running an application, but each server has been setup using a variety of approaches towards SQL Server instances – some are the regular default instance, some are named instances, not all the same names.
We needed to be able to add dependencies to the SQL Server service from the command line after the fact. Turns out this can be done using the where-have-you-been-all-my-life sc.exe:
To add a dependency to the default SQL Server instance:
sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssqlserver
(That space after “depend=” is important, btw.)
If you want to do the same for a named instance:
sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssql$<name>
e.g.
sc config “soupy twist service” depend= mssql$foobar
Aug 20th, 09
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I have a machine at home that, for reasons unknown, works prefectly well when running but if you happen to reboot it the thing will not start properly. It will keep rebooting and crashing for sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes several hours, until it runs.
Imagine my joy at having Windows do an automatic update and keep popping up that “restart now” dialog every five minutes.
Apparently you can temporarily disable the popup it by stopping the Automatic Updates service. Thanks to this blog that pointed me in the right direction: http://asymptomatic.net/2005/08/11/831/how-to-disable-that-blasted-restart-now-message-from-windows-update…
Aug 19th, 09
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SharePoint can be an excellent repository for email, but it works really well when using a SharePoint email filing system like Topaz Filer… read more.
