Growing up is optional

This weekend I managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on my PC, along side Windows XP. In the past I have tried to get away from MS products, but the hurdles have just been too high. There are still some hurdles with Ubuntu, but they’re not show stoppers for me. However, since my wife and kids use this PC, I can’t ditch Windows totally. This is a major source of Microsoft’s great power.

The two things that stop me ditching MS are office macros and kid’s games. Open Office is great, but there are still some issues between it and MS office. Our dependence on some spreadsheets means that we need to stick with Excel for a while. And the kids games are windows-only. I may be able to get them going with WINE, but haven’t tried yet.

I will never buy another Brother printer again. Not long ago I got hold of a brother MFC 210C multifunction printer/scanner/fax. I know it’s not the best, but nor was it the cheapest. Where they really screw you over is the ink. If one of the colours runs out, it just stops printing. No gray-scale or black only, it just stops. So I shell out for yellow, even though nothing colour has been printed for 3 months, then, as if in a coordinated attempt to con more money out of you, the other colours run out too. I pull the cartridge out to find that it’s about quater full still. I put it back and the printer still says empty.

Will we see commercial/enterprise Gmail? I was thinking the other day about the whole Web as a platform thing and how Google, with their huge platform is going to utilise this. What I though is that one of the next big things Google will do is look at the possibility of commercialising the ‘killer app’.

Google have already proved they can take email from the desktop platform to the web platform. Personally I prefer Gmail to Outlook or Thunderbird. However, for a commercial user, one thing they have over Gmail is the scheduling/calendar functionality, although this is not yet at version 1.0 in Thunderbird. Also, I don’t know whether Google are working on this , but I suspect that someone there has the foresight to at least assess its value. We may even see it as part of a ‘Gmail Pro’ targeted at the serious, but not necesarily enterprise user.

However, there is the issue of privacy and security. Google would have to ensure that these were well sorted out before any commercial organisation would seriously consider using it.

Administration could be an interesting issue for an enterprise version. Although keeping it simple is best, I can hear the cries already of ‘but I need to change this to stop our users…’

My home email address gets a huge amount of spam, as does my Gmail. The great thing about Gmail is that all of its spam filtering is set up already. I don’t have to mess around and configure all sorts of folders and filters, tag all of my mail so that Thunderbird know that it’s spam etc.

Instead of filtering it with email headers, I just forward all mail sent to joe@kapiti.net.nz to my Gmail account, which has a filter that returns it to [secret-nonsense-phrase]@kapiti.net.nz and set thunderbird accordingly.

One disadvantage of this method is that mail sent directly to [secret-nonsense-phrase]@kapiti.net.nz would get through without being filtered. This is only a ’security through obscurity’ type of thing, which is in general a bad idea.

My seven year old PlayStation has decided it has had enough. I haven’t thoroughly tested/diagnosed it, but it looks terminal. It’s not detecting any disks, and booting to the music/memory card screen. Unfortunately, my PC is too old to run an emulator.

I’m still working on saving for a new PC (I would love a Mac, but thay are just too expensive for what I need at home). Looks like I’ll have to save for a console too. Or should I just buy a better PC?

I haven’t researched thoroughly, but If I had to make a spot decision now I would go with the PC/XBox combo, rather than PC/PS2 or fast gaming PC, but I’ll do some more research.

Update: Well it’s not terminal! Woohoo! Nothing pulling apart and fiddling with the drive unit couldn’t fix. Still, I want your opinions: which is the best way to go for a computer/gaming setup?

Update2: It is terminal

After about a year of using RSS bandit as my feed reader I’ve switched to Bloglines. If I only accessed feeds from one place I would stick with RSS Bandit, but I could not sync my feeds between home and work as read/unread etc. That was the only thing that made me switch. I prefer a nice rich interface with lots of features, but the pain got too much.

I tried Bloglines over a year ago. I didn’t like it. Can’t remeber why not. I don’t know what’s changed but it is now my reader of choice.

What do you use? Why? What’s wrong with it?

A quick search of the Intellectual Property Office patent database shows quite a few from microsoft. An article by Adam Gifford in the New Zealand Herald recently brought this to my attention:

Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.

Of course this is a defensive strategy designed to prevent other programs from openning/reading/writing MS documents and try to force users to use MS products.

This is bad two ways: bad for MS and bad for users.

How is it bad for Microsoft? The history is well documented: look at betamax and DAT compared to VHS and CDs. The open standards are mainstream while the proprietary standards (despite arguably being ‘better’) lost and were relegated to niche markets. It’s bad for users because it tries to shoehorn them into MS products.

As a bit of a though experiment: Suppose a pen manufacturer required that all document written with their pens could only be editited using their pens. Would they be granted a patent for the writing process? Microsoft are not using magic ink, nor magic paper: it’s been done before.

I don’t know enough about patent law to lodge an objection to it. But a document is a document whether it is electronic or not. Using microsoft’s pen because of how it is written is not something that should be forced upon me.

I installed Google Desktop Search last night. I’m removing it now. It would be great for a computer that’s not as old as mine. The constant whine of the fan and rattle of the harddrive is too much.

I’ll put it on my new computer when I get it.