Some Sunday Links – 11/03/2007
Ok, the mid-week links were missing in action. Whoops. Oh well, this will be a more meaty post…
In an article El Reg describes how many companies who make use of open source products are struggling with new management when they are taken over. Or just as commonly, management misunderstanding open source software and taking the usual hard line against it. As they do when confronted with anything that they don’t understand. Technicians and developers often use products because they are the best tool for the job, or the one that the techie knows best. Often managers who don’t understand such products react negatively to such usage. I’m not at all surprised by this kind of reaction. This blogger predicts much more such coverage in the future as open source becomes even more mainstream and moves more strongly (as it is currently doing) into markets that it currently isn’t strong in.
In a rather neat piece of webdesign, Katherine Gallia has coded a rather nifty site that changes the design depending on the time of day. Reminds me of the shame I have of not updating this site or even re-theming WordPress.
I’ve mentioned Jacob Nielsen before on this site. His columns are generally quite interesting and this most recent one doesn’t disappoint. He makes a good point in that learning a specific UI isn’t really a particulary good way to teach children computers. It would be much more worthwhile to teach them generalist skills that will allow them to use pretty much any program, not just Microsoft Word by rote. Which does seem to be what some people consider computer education.
Plenty of good meat for rantage coming from The Register today. Another shout out to how businesses are not catching up with technology at all. To those you who work in IT, you’ll probably know that virtualisation is the new thing, here to save us lots of time, effort and money. You know, the new silver bullet. Yes, of course… Anyway, the reg article notes how quite a few IT departments out there are unsure about how many virtual servers they have out there. Potentially creating a licensing hell. Unless you use *nix. But if you use Microsoft, they are trying to limit how many times you can move a VM about, or move a license from VM to VM. What a shocker there. Microsoft in trying to squeeze even more revenue from the enterprise market.
I’ve been using the GTD Tiddlywiki for some time now. It is a skinned and tweaked version of the rather fantabulous Tiddlywiki. It is basically a single HTML page, with a large chunk of javascript to provide the dynamic content and CSS for styling. The GTD version is mainly based around the Getting Things Done philosophy. It is slanted towards generating lists and the like quickly and easily. Even if you aren’t interested that much in that sort of thing, it and tiddlywiki are both good pieces of software and well worth a dabble if nothing else.