Gary Barnett's Blog

Having seen it mentioned in passing by Governor I thought I’d take a peek at Flock.

And here I am – blogging from it already

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock

Just filled up my car… with 50.53 litres of Petrol or “Gas” as my American buddies say.

That’s 11.12 imperial gallons of petrol.

Or 13.35 of those slightly inferior “American Gallons”.

The cost… £53 pounds – or at today’s rate $104.64 dollars.

So petrol/gas costs $7.84 a gallon.

And I’m reminded of when I lived in Boston and gas was less than two bucks a gallon… it was more or less free. So I enjoyed driving my 14 miles per gallon Jeep Grand Cherokee at top speed.

Now.. if you’re doing 1000 miles/month, in a relatively economical car – your monthly fuel bill could be as much as you’re paying to finance the car….

Eeek

I confess that I’ve been a Maco-phobe for years, I thought it was funny to mock Mac-users, I used to disparage the Mac an then hurriedly insist that “one of my friends is a Mac user”.

I’ve been quoted as saying “Macs are computers for metrosexuals” or “Macs are for men who moisturise”.

But…. lately I’ve been compelled to furtively walk into Apple stores…. trying to look disinterested… frantically wondering if the sales assistant thinks I’m actually going to buy one…

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Am bracing myself for “therapy” from a proper blogger

Zimbra looks like a pretty rocking collaboration suite.

http://www.zimbra.com/

One of the key aspects of my Move The Business To Open Source project is that any solution has to support both Linux and Windows clients – Because I just can’t, even with my small desktop estate, do the “big bang thing”.

This has resulted in an interesting “moment” on the term “Open”. One of the facets of Open must, at least in some context, be “open platform” – the ability to run on different platforms….

On visiting the OpenGroupware.org site, I learn that they don’t actually have binaries for Windows…. instead here’s what they say..

The project currently does not provide prebuild binaries for Windows. There are basically three ways to attempt to run OGo on Windows: port to Cygwin, run with GNUstep for Windows and run in VMware. Only the last option is well tested and works fluently.

So only the VMware option is tested. Let’s look specifically at that…

This option runs rock solid, fast and is well tested for years. Just install one of the Linux distributions (eg Debian) inside VMware running on Windows. The VMware approach is very similiar to the approach used by Java based solutions (run a virtual machine, in this case Intel ix86). The advantage is that VMware is much faster than a Java virtual machine given that the instruction set matches (both client and server use the ix86 instruction set).
And: VMware is now available for free!

Yes… OK, that is undoubtedly a way around the fact that the software doesn’t run on Windows… but it’s not a work-around I’m willing to engage with right now.

This stuff is NEVER going to take off unless it can be perceived as better than anything that you can get on windows today…. which means running on Windows.

Argh.

First post on this topic.

I’ve been using Thunderbird to connect (via Pop3) to exchange. Of course this hasn’t given me calendar – so I’ve been using Google Calendars with the the Google Provider and Lightening plug-ins for Thunderbird.

This has worked superbly for me; but I’ve been willing to put up with the fact that the Thunderbird plug-ins don’t actually do “sync” – they need a connection to t’internet in order to show me my google cals.

My colleagues are “Thunderbird curious” – But they need contact sharing, and sync to their phones.

So…

For contact sync I’m looking at -

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2533

And for Google cal-sync to phone I’m trying the free version of GooSync -

Next things… Outlook Mail Import (likely to be tough)

Mail Server replacement? When, how, with what.

Wow! I’ve just finished a call with the Inland Revenue, and have to say that it was one of the best calls I’ve ever made to a help-line. My advisor (Dorothy from team 10) was friendly, obviously knowledgeable, and extremely helpful. In the course of the call she also mentioned the availability of training courses to help people who are going self employed, and arranged to fax my details to the local office so that I can attend one.

Call centers have a well deserved reputation for providing pretty poor service to customers, which makes it a really pleasant surprise when you get excellent service from one.

Go Dorothy!

I am very proud of my logo. I’m sure it looks amateurish, schlepped-together and pretty poor generally, but it took ages to create. Here is is in all it’s .. logo-ness

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One aspect of moving away from one Office productivity suite to another is figuring out how to transfer all of your styles/settings/preferences etc.

So far, the process has been a fairly predictable mix of frustration (“how the hell do I set up styles in OpenOffice Writer???”) and pleasant surprises (“oooh… actually that’s pretty cool…”).

But now I’ve encountered my first proper bug… and it’s annoying the hell out of me.

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