Category Archives: Technology

Miscellany, Personal, Technology

Debateamongous

Was involved in a debate at work a couple of days ago. Idea was to get people thinking about tech issues, and it worked. The content of my argument – justifying Google’s self-censorship in order to gain access to the Chinese market – was fairly unoriginal, but had fun piecing it together nonetheless. Cheers to Rach for organising.

I really thought I’d had it when SK popped out with “The Great Firewall of China” to close his case – a good pun always impresses me.

But the rhythm of the thing reminded me v. much of my debating days (before I was completely put off the notion of intellectual debates by the Cambridge Union) at school under good old PASF. Peter (who is one of many Mr Miyagis I’ve had the good fortune to encounter), he taught me well – even though in my debating history at school I never once convinced the audience that my case was worth voting for.

Technology

Tagging vs. Categories

I’m beginning to really hate categories. I have too many, and yet there are never enough. On the other hand, I’m loving the Flickr/Delicious model of tagging – and want to adopt it here. Haven’t found a plugin I like yet. If there are any recommendations out there, or if there is a strong reason to stick with categories, I’d like to hear it.

Meme, Personal, Technology

Should I, or shouldn’t I?

1 Comment

I need to be saving for a house, really, but there’s a few goodies I want and being the materialo-centric person I am I feel like I really should satisfy this craving. Here’s the list, and some pros and cons. Help me out.

PSP

Probably the device I want least. But it is *damn* cool, and I hear there’s a way you can read comics on it. Which is exciting to me. So, pros…

    It’s sexy looking
    It reads comics

And cons…?

    The only game I want to play on it is Lemmings… oh, and maybe Worms
    It costs too much money
    I don’t really have the time for it

Next up, Xbox 360

Very tempting.

Pros:

    Looks a damn sight better than my gen1 Xbox
    Damn sight cheaper than the PS3
    Available *now*
    Oblivion

Cons:

    I barely play on my current Xbox
    Can’t think of any game other than Oblivion I’m hungry for
    GTA4 and Halo3 aren’t out for a long while
    The price will go down when the PS3 launches, just to spite them
    My TV’s not HD-compatible
    The time thing
    It’s also too expensive
    I have more productive things I should be doing with my life

That last one probably applies to quite a few of the things I’m talking about.

Batter up, Pocket PC

It’s possible these have been branded ‘Windows Mobile PDAs’ now…

Pros

    Gil’s lent me his and it’s really cool
    I have bought a Bluetooth keyboard which will let me use it for writing my novel (if I can ever get it started…)
    They let me log on to free Wifi everywhere…
    I’ll look like someone on Star Trek tapping on one
    I get to fly the flag for Windows Mobile, which I really do like

Cons

    It really is expensive – £250-£300 ish for a decent one
    I’ll look like someone off Star trek tapping on one
    Do I *really* need one?

Ooh. This one is winning so far. What’s next?

New PC

Ok, I’m not even going to argue the case for this one. Can’t afford it, or at least one that would be significantly better than this beast. But Oblivion will not run on my PC and the demo of HOMM V was just rubbish. I can’t face swapping out the graphics card, either, it just seems purposeless.

What else could I possibly want, being the greedy greedy man I am?

Well, a ukelele. And a banjo. And a 12-string guitar. But given that I have barely strummed a tune on my other instruments of late… hard to justify.

So I probably shouldn’t buy any of these things. I might keep playing with Gil’s PocketPC until I really have to give it back and then think about buying one, if I can get the keyboard set up. I’ll let you know how it goes…

I wonder if this material craving is worth a meme? I’ll tag some people and see if they play: Tom, Chris, Ben, Simon B (come on, you know you want to ;) – list four things you want and talk yourself into/out of buying them).

Software, Technology

Firefox issues

7 Comments

Does anyone else find that Firefox occasionally decides to suck up 100 meg of RAM and 95% of your CPU? Is this a known bug? Is there anyway to fix it other than restarting FF a couple of times a day?

Come on, my fave browser!

Also (and a long shot) – anyone know if Firefox will be made Sharepoint compliant?

And who am I talking to, exactly?

Software, Technology

Feels like bloatware

Just installed the public beta of Windows Live Messenger after reading about it on Pocket Lint.

It has been reskinned, and sure there are other cute features, but the install package is up to 16 meg. COME ON! People use it to send instant messages, it is an instant message client. Plain, simple, text messages.

The ‘collaboration’ machine it seems to be turning into resembles the kind of software bloating that killed ICQ (well, it was either that or the AOL acquisition, but I think the bloating came first). Who knows, though? Maybe this whole ‘Live’ strategy will pay off.

But it seems a step in the wrong direction: I’m enjoying thin client web-apps that leave my machine stable (well, within reason. I’m no (shudder) Mac User). Case in point: Google Talk is 900k and does nearly everything I want it to (if it did multi-way chat, that would be it). And it has a web interface that doesn’t require 10 minutes to load…

So, will Office 12 be bloated? Or slimmed up? If anyone at MS is reading and wants to give me a beta to try I’ll be happy to blog my opinion ;).

Technology, Writing

Ill

…but thinking about posting on various topics, including:

    [[Wikipedia]].
    Smart tagging for WP in place of categories
    Moblogging
    More on zombies & hard sci-fi
    Lots of anecdotal stuff from several great weekends/evenings out
    The difference between wine bars in London and Tallin…
    Bluetooth portable keyboards and PDAs
    Xbox360s, PSPs, and the Nintendo WII

& more. But it will have to wait for the moment whilst I try to fend off a cold that seems to be making its best efforts to take me out after a very relaxing and entertaining bank holiday weekend.

Happy May-Day to all for now, more to follow soon.

Technology

Bloggi-quette

I’ve been writing more recently (as, erm, you can see) and my list of categories is growing slightly unwiedly. Is it useful to have dozens of categories? When I blog on technology, should I add tech categories for specific areas of technology I’m writing about?

Not quite sure how it affects search, or how people use my site. Interestingly, according to the various analytics packages I have working, categories ‘2’ and ‘3’ are the second and third most pages on this blog (other than the root) – technology and media.

Answers on a comment.

Oh – and my blogroll is expanding. Finally getting around to adding the people I read… sorry for the delay, folks, I’m sure I’ll be winging dozens of referrals your way soon ;).

Technology, Work

Taking care of business

I really hate the task tracker in Outlook – the reminders it fires up are irritating, and I haven’t found a useful way to track sets of actions. Googling around revealed nothing satisfactory, but I’ve found some cruddy freeware client that lets me do hierarchical task management – which makes it slightly easier to keep track on what I’m working on, stuff I’ve delegated, etc.

What I really need is one that (1) lets me print out my task list (a limitation built into the client I’ve downloaded, the premium version costs money and (2) I can access from anywhere. This local client model really doesn’t work for task management.

So really I probably want Google to design one.

The reasons I haven’t linked to the software I’m using are twofold: firstly, I’m not sure I want to even implicitly recommend it to anyone and secondly, I can’t remember the search string I used to find it. I didn’t deem it worthy to add to my Linklog…

Technology

Mail betas

So I’ve been using the new beta services from both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, and I’m slightly underwhelmed.

Both Yahoo and MS seem to think that users want their webmail to work exactly like their POP email client. Which is just wrong: having a clunky, slow, messy web interface that looks like a mutated version of Outlook is probably not how people want to read their webmail. The key thing for me reading webmail is that everything is as responsive as possible: which is why I love Gmail Google Mail so much – the Ajaxified pages let you flick straight into and out of emails, compose new ones, etc… and I love the keyboard shortcuts.

That said, of the two, Yahoo are doing it much better. They have the ads in right place so that they’re not too intrusive, and so that you actually get more than about 2 square inches of frame in which to read your mails. But: abdicate, find a friend with Gmail invites, and get a new, bling, Google account… (I have a 100 invites for anyone who wants an account…)

Media & Marketing, Technology

Social bookmarking is really useful

I was asked today about a news story I read back in October in the Times. Much as I like Times Online, the search function is moderately dire, and I had no chance of finding the particular story (about the computer programmer who had outsourced his job to India) using conventional means.

Fortunately, I had linklogged it with delicious and searching for the tag ‘outsourcing’ returned one hit. Bonza – and here I thought it was just a way to share the memes I get emailed every day :).