Boardmad

Well after little fast work with the old web tools and some graphics shenanigans TimeSwappers.org is now live and online. It’s currently pretty sparse but I’m intending to flesh out content on the barter economy, time-banking, community activism side of things…if you have any links or suggestions don’t be afraid to drop a comment on here.

In the meantime the inaugural East Lothian TimeSwappers group already has a member and I’m hoping grassroots word-of-mouth will help get the message around, after which here’s hoping it goes viral !

I’m a huge fan of Halo…I played on multiplayer long before Windows Live came online using a nice wireless connection across the village to my mate’s front room where him and me and our respective partners would snipe, butt-stroke and run one another over with warthogs to our hearts content. This was all on the Xbox which I still have but no longer play much of anything on.

Then a while back I hear that Halo2 is due out on PC, read some reviews, watch come ingame play and am intrigued then wallop !! You find that it’s only to be released on Vista…what a bunch of cheeky, self-serving ingrates these Microsoft gamestudio gits are !

For some time now (2 years in July - wow !) I’ve been running and moderating the East Lothian chapter of the FreeCycle organisation. I was looking for a couple of stairgates for No. 1 daughter and managed to secure them from a very nice couple in Edinburgh. Not an issue for me as I worked in Edinburgh at the time, however given I lived fully a 40mile round trip from the collection point I thought there had to be a group in East Lothian…on checking I found there wasn’t and so I kicked it all off.

I think it’s fair to say it’s been a success and shows every sign of continuing on in a similar vein however today I’ve decided to kick off a new project .

Time Swappers will fill another void I’ve noticed is lacking in local communities. Very often I’ve had to reject posts or ask members to re-word their offers as they are offering items for the explicit benefit of others either by monetary gain or by barter, well I’ve decided there has got to be an outlet for this.

The premise is simple. You have a skill, ability or talent that you are willing to trade or barter against something you need or want doing around the home etc, eg you’re a champion cake-baker and you’re living-room needs redecorated. Post to that effect, meet a decorator in your local community with a sweet-tooth, come to an agreement on terms. Job done !!

Time on your hands…go on! Swap it !

For those of you packing your sleeping bags and camping stoves to spend the next few nights outside your Apple shrine in preparation to layout a significant wedge for the iPhone the Financial Times here in UK has a great article on the phone’s fundamental flaw.

It is an organiser, a music player, a photo viewer and a phone all of which it does with the aplomb and svelte asceticism we’ve come to know and love from Apple, but…there’s always a but…the networking connectivity is awful, you can’t get near-broadband speed content unless you’re near a wifi spot as there’s no 3g or GPRSD connectivity bundled in with your (extortionate !) contract. So to get your music purchased through the iTunes store you’re going to have to be at home with the iPhone plugged into or wifi’d to your router or paying another fee to connect via a commercial hotspot.

We’re still a long long way from ’setting the web free’ as I saw on TV last night…sigh !

So Office 2003 is being binned for OEM’s from the end of this month less than 6 months from when it received it’s full MS launch. Which does rather beg the question…Why ? I use it at home and in the office on one of my machines and it’s perfect for my needs. So why is being taken from us ?
Call me a cynic but I view this as a deliberate and none-too-subtle means to keep us on the upgrade path. I recently attended an excellent MS open day showcasing amongst other things VS Orcas (Now entitled VS 2008 - bet that had the marketeers scratching their heads for hours). Within this presentation there was a lot of web stuff, winforms and .Net framework v3.5 goodness (LINQ to XML/XSD looks like with a bit more work it’ll be a killer feature)However something that did slip past a little unnoticed from most in the room was that much of this loveliness was only going to be available on Vista…no back-porting the .Net API down to XP. Very interesting as they (the MS drones) were making a big deal about no need to recompile and regression test code as the CLR was all the same as current .Net framework (v2.0)

What has this all to do with Office 2003 going out of production ? Well they were very clear that they believe the biggest expansion in future MS software usage is going to be in Office application extensions. In other words out-of-the-box your Office 2007 install will do 75%(ish) of your required business function and to complete the picture you will extend the Office function by programming against the .Net framework to develop hand-rolled office extensions within a managed codebase…not shonky old VBA ! So in other words if their projections come true and folks out there really are extending the Office object model for their own specialist requirements then there’s only going to be one place and platform on which to do it. Office 2007 on Vista !

So rather than the “Carrot and Stick” approach it’s the “Stick and Stick” approach !

Sneaky huh ?

I’ve steadfastly refused to be swayed by the sleek design and aesthetic qualities of the Apple brand, whether this is an inverted snobbery or a general mistrust of the label (and most labels for that matter) I’m not too sure, however in recent months I’m finding myself increasingly drawn toward their machines.

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve done too much OEM building for friends, family and myself to be bothered much with it anymore unless it’s really niche and of personal technical interest (see WHS, Kubuntu and IPCop). So much so that my last machine to reside chez Broon has been a gutsy desktop-replacement laptop but I think this trend is set to be bucked !

Hi..! My name’s Scott and I want an iMac ! There…! I’ve said it…it’s in the open and the way to overcome your fears is to face them and prevail ?!?! Well I’d like an iMac and not any old one but one of these puppies. It’s a self-contained unit with everything built in round the back of a glorious 24″ screen. Of course first thing to go would be the ludicrous keyboard and single-key Mac mouse but other than this I love this thing.

So what’s swayed me on them ? Well…sometime ago Mac in their wisdom realised that running on Intel hardware was the way forward and the rot set in ! Following on from this Bootcamp was hurriedly shoved out the door after some enterprising young Mac-ktivists managed to dual-boot an Intel Mac with WinXP. The final nail in the coffin for me has been the announcement at the recent Mac love-fest that some of the biggest names in the gaming industry are firmly placing the Mac at the forefront of their push to broaden gaming support.

I just want one…it’s liberating to admit it !

Over the last [ahem] years of mucking about with computers I’ve variably worked on spectrums, BBC’s, desktop VAX monsters, Mac’s in many shapes and PC’s too inumerable to mention. Some of the damn things I’ve even built myself !
Through this all I’ve by and large been a slave to Microsoft…until recently. I’ve been playing for a couple of years with some Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu and it’s KDE fork Kubuntu and I honestly think the latest release is at the point I’d point your average johnny at it and say…use !

The install for me was flawless, put the bootable cd in your pc and reboot and it will boot into Kubuntu (in this case) in a ‘Live’ session completely in memory without affecting your PC. You can play around, open email’s surf, edit photos and amend MS office docs with the bundled free openOffice suite.

At this point I’m going to tell you to go read the Kubuntu forums on how-to dual boot, install etc. But once you’ve got it installed and it’s updated itself with all it’s necessary patches (yes it even does that for you !) you might get something that looks a little like the desktop above.

It’s a pleasure to use, is astonishingly stable and is infinitely tweakable if that’s your thing. Moreover there’s a global OS support framework out there willing and able to answer all questions almost within minutes sometimes !

Kubuntu - you know you want to !

Being the inveterate nerd that I am I spent a happy 20 minutes going through this article in Ars Technica on the forthcoming AMD multi-core processors likely to be gracing a laptop or mobile computing device in the near future. As is usual with these articles I was expecting a brief resume of some Manufacturers blurb some hack journo had devoured while on a freebie in Taipei but was pleasantly surprised to get into a multi-page, detailed technical explanation of the Intel vs AMD architecture, it’s pros and cons where they diverge on system composition and how AMD’s multi-core machines will manage the power-reduction and increased longevity the manufacturers are forecasting. Great article if you’re interested in this sort of stuff and an equally useful article for someone keen to find out how the core components of a modern PC interact.

Well this site’s the one for you…a little bit of ajax and some scripting and lo and behold your search terms from both Search giants can be seen in parallel on screen. And it’s very interesting what disparities become evident when this kind of parallel comparison takes place.

I like the simplicity of mash-ups like this…such a simple idea and even nowadays in the age of tabbed browsing I think this sort of feature on a website works far better for the user than opening two tabs and switching back and forth between them or even worse (and my pet hate) opening multiple windows and having to sift through the righ ones to get back to the content I was looking over in the first place !

I’ve been on the beta test programme for this for some months now and I have to say I think it’s one of the more interesting things to have come out of Redmond in some time ! WHS is a slimmed-down version of Windows small business server with no win32 gui and a highly agile rich-content remoting client for access over your wireless/wired local network. It’s sole function is to store, backup and ensure granular restores of the digital soup we all seem to fill our PC’s with these days.

Basically you install the WHS iso onto a box which should have decent-ish hardware but the most important thing is lots and lots of disk space. Next you install a connector client on the machines in your lan enabling them to communicate with the WHS and allowing you to administer the box remotely (Bear in mind the hardware slated for this is meant to ship headless). Next step is to set up backup routines for the machine(s) around your lan and after that it’s pretty much plain sailing. The WHS box will wake up and interrogate your client machines for changes to their disk since last backup then essentially doing a ‘diff’ it then only takes a backup of any clusters on your client machine that differ from it’s locally stored copy. This is essentially like indexing the client machine at the disc-cluster level and only storing one copy of the cluster, even if you have multiple copies on your client machines.

Let’s say you have 2 copies of your favourite album sitting on machines around your house, WHS will compare each cluster on all the disc space in the ’storage cloud’ within your accessible locale and store off only one copy, essentially ‘normalising’ all your digital data.

I’ve had a lot of fun testing backup, destroy and restore, whole machines, bit’s of drives, system folders, etc etc and have found it to be a very capable tool. The interface is a getting better, was a bit challenging for your average user (which it’s firmly aimed at) and backup/restore wizards also improving. I should point out that it will also securely (ahem!) present specified content to the internet/lan and if they slip some additional functionality in there (cut-down mail and expose web server programmability to the developer community) it’ll be a killer bit of kit very very soon.