Windy City

OK, well town. And this in the UK, not Chicago.

So it seems that we live in a hotspot (windspot?) for tornadoes.

We were getting ready to get out to work yesterday morning when we heard the wind absolutely whipping at the building. Ola actually commented on the noise. As we drove out of the car park we saw that a branch had been brought down onto the nearby bus stop in the street.

Coming home in the evening it turned out that the UK had been struck by a series of tornadoes, and one of them was in Farnborough. The major damage was about a mile away from our place. This follows earlier extreme weather conditions, making this the second time in a year.

I wonder what makes the place such a magnet for high winds…

Technorati tags: wind, tornado, weather, Farnborough, UK, England, news

The Times goes RSS

The fact that The Times has revamped its website failed to pass me by. It was mentioned in the paper on Saturday (I buy the dead tree version on a Saturday, it lasts the whole weekend and the TV guide lasts the week), and diamond geezer talked about it on his blog.

Now, when it comes to following events, I’m usually a BBC News kinda guy. I subscribe to several BBC news feeds.

I noticed that the new Times site also has a set of feeds – I’ve no idea whether the old one did, too. Rather unintuitively, they are located in the “Audio/Video” section of the site, despite not actually referring to audio or video stories.

They are RSS feeds rather than Atom, which is sure to disappoint some.

Another trivial annoyance is that the title and description of all of the feeds is “TimesOnline:rss” regardless of category. And the files are presented as XML, which doesn’t validate due to undeclared entities. And the feeds themselves don’t validate either.

So, all in all, good effort, but no cigar.

I’ve emailed them to point out all of these issues. No response so far.

Technorati tags: news, feeds, RSS, Atom, XML, Times, The Times, UK

Lotusphere is live

Hanging out in the live blogging channels at Lotusphere Live. It’s kind of like being there, but only textually.

More cool stuff than I can take in… Lotus Connections (Ventura), Lotus Quickr, Google Gadgets running in WebSphere Portal, composite applications…

I’m going to watch the replay of the opening session in Second Life tomorrow…

Some of my favourite comments from the live blog, reporting the announcements live from the conference floor:

Julian Robichaux

Notes 8 supports SmartSuite docs as well as Office and OpenOffice

Ed Brill

integrated RSS feeds in Notes 8 sidebar

Julian Robichaux

(Lotus Connections) has integration with profiles, internal blogs, sametime, dogear, tags, communities, activities

Ed Brill

(…) showing blogs in Connections — blogs becoming a commodity capability in all IBM Lotus products

Chris Byrne

(on Connections) This demo reminds me more of LinkedIn thatn MySpace or FaceBook, which is very good
(…) MySpace and FaceBook, being discussed now, are not good for corporate use, but many corporations scan them for content posted by potential employees, and have retracted job offers based on what they have see.

See Ed’s Flickr set for some screenshots

Technorati tags: Lotus, IBM, Lotusphere2007, Orlando, Quickr, Ventura, Lotus Connections, blogging, Second Life, Lotusphere_07

Statues of London

There was a remarkable piece on the BBC London news on TV last night (I see that it is also on the website).

They had a chap on who was basically arguing that because he didn’t like certain historical figures, their statues should be ripped down and replaced by others voted for by “the people” or some pieces of sculpture or something. He stood in front of a statue of William Gladstone and said something about what a lot of harm he and his contemporaries had done.

Fortunately there was also a very sensible woman who argued that the statues represent our history; without knowledge of our past, how can we make judgements about the future? (fantastic – great argument for the study of history, too).

Frankly, the guy who didn’t want the statues came over as a bit of a crackpot, with a very thin argument indeed. I think it is madness to say that just because you don’t, with hindsight, agree with the policies of certain individuals in British history, you should tear down their images. Of course there is a case to be made here… and we tread into discussions about various dictators of the relatively recent past… but I think to suggest that the statues in London should be replaced is remarkable. Who makes the judgement about which individuals we no longer celebrate or want to remember? Thin end, long wedge.

I’m somewhat gratified to see that people who are responding to the BBC article are in line with my way of thinking…

Technorati tags: london, statues, history, historical

An IBM contribution to the history books

Both The Register and the BBC are reporting on the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. Woohoo.

Will my blog ever hit BBC News?

Scoble’s just did…

Cabbie was job applicant

Following on from the weekend story about the London cabbie who was mistakenly interviewed about Apple vs Apple, Ola phoned me yesterday to say that he was being interviewed on Five News… and now the BBC themselves have reported on it. Apparently he wasn’t at the Beeb to pick up the real interviewee in his taxi, he was there for a job interview. Marvellous stuff!

McNealy out from Sun CEO role

It was rumoured for the umpteenth time last week (via Slashdot), but now he's actually going. Only as CEO though, he remains chairman.

Richard has an interesting viewpoint.

(hmm, just realised the original post title was really misleading, so i changed it…)

Another new Google service

Google Calendar went live – I’ve had a quick play, but I’ve not really used calendaring software much in the past (other than my work calendar) so I’m not expecting to be a significant user of the service. The interface is similar to Gmail. Looks like it can import existing calendars stored in CSV or iCal format (Settings->Import Calendar, if you’re interested).

RedHat acquires JBoss

A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Java, Application Servers and RedHat.

Today, RedHat announced that they are acquiring JBoss. I’m stunned – where did that come from?! Last I’d heard, they were supporting JOnAS and thinking of shipping Geronimo. And I thought Oracle were after JBoss. Shows how well I keep up with the news.

This is an interesting situation.

My lost youth

The man responsible for two of the games that wasted much of my youth – Populous and Black & White – has gone to Microsoft. Guess this means that the PlayStation 3 is going to lose the chance to have such genius producing games for it… although I have to admit, those were the only two Molyneaux games that I actually liked… I played Populous to death on the Acorn Archimedes when I was at school, and enjoyed Black & White on the PC a few years back, but since then my gaming time has drastically reduced.

Technorati tags: gaming Microsoft PS3

WordPress statistics widget

I logged on to my WordPress dashboard today and noticed a new post in the WordPress.com News blog. Within seconds, I’d added the new statistics widget to my page, by just dragging and dropping it to my sidebar using the Presentation section of the dashboard. The hit count is looking fairly small at the moment, but I haven’t had to register with a third party site and then hack my template code to get this in place, like I had to do with Blogger.

The other news is that you can now have multiple blogs for a single account on WordPress.com, like you can with Blogger. So if I do feel like separating my technology-related musings from the other ones, I could do.

Nearly two weeks on from my move, and there is still no sign of this blog appearing on Google. Technorati has picked me up, at least.

Technorati tags: WordPress widget Blogger Google Technorati