Happy Bunny

Update from last post – we managed to replace our fridge and washing machine with new appliances acquired on six months interest free credit. My Applecare talked me through resetting the PRAM and repairing Permissions on my iMac. So far it has not crashed again but if it does I have a reference number and can get it sorted under warranty. It has been seven weeks and I finally have my car back from the bodyshop, they’ve done a grand job. The courtesy car is being picked up today.

About the courtesy car. It was a Renault Espace and having now driven one for several weeks, given the choice I would not buy one. Yes it is economical on fuel, but many things annoyed me about it;

1. The door mirrors are small compared to my Toyota Lucida.
2. The rear view mirror creates a left side blind spot. It’s too low and you have to look under it.
3. You must choose between having third row seats or a boot, you cannot use both. With our lifestyle I found my self shifting seats all weekend, every weekend.
4. The automatic handbrake release is weird.
5. The SatNav which we only needed to use once (no manual provided) could not be persuaded from believing we were in Oxfordshire which we weren’t.
6. The CD player just said ‘No Disc’ even when there was one inserted.

We have enjoyed a quiet half term this week as the kids spent most of it with their Nan. I have received my certificates for the completed NVQ in IT level2, and made a good start on the NVQ in IT Advanced level 3 which is a different style of distance learning to the first course. I am learning more on this one and enjoying it. My partner passed her her CLAIT spreadsheets course too, doing databases next. So we’re both pleased.

Unhappy Bunny!

No, I am not a happy bunny at the moment. A while ago our fridge started collecting water in the bottom. So it looks like it is dying soon. On February 27th I was rear-ended on the motorway traveling home from work. On March 10th I was rear-ended yet again in the courtesy car on my first day back at work after a week off. Last week our washing machine started banging when spinning and now seems it is beyond the cost of repair, so will need to be replaced (like the fridge). Now my G5 iMac has started randomly shutting down so either/both the power unit or logic board may be faulty. And I think my car may be written off as uneconomical to repair. I dare not ask ‘What next?’

WebTop

Wow, it’s been a long time since my last post.  Apart from finishing my ITQ studies, lately I have been experimenting with different online desktops. All of these are free, but will charge for additional storage.

The first one I tried a while back was Ulteo (see previous post), which I think is very good. There are now several more of these web virtual machines/online desktop/webtop whatever you happen to call them.

Here are a couple more that I have played with. eyeOS that has a simple, attractive and very fast desktop environment.  I haven’t found out yet how much free storage you get.

G.ho.st give you 3Gb of free storage plus 3Gb emailbox. Though slower to run than eyeOS, Ghost is smart looking and useful.

To my mind the best of the bunch seems to be DesktopTwo.  They give you 1Gb storage for free, then start charging $24 pa for 5Gb.  I think this is quite reasonable.  Others charge $5 pcm for the same volume.  Yes you can get larger flash drives now, but it can be a hassle having to change the drive letter each time you plug it into a different WindowsPC.

Both Ulteo and DesktopTwo use OpenOffice.org for document creation.  Better for me as I use OOo wherever I can, even at work.  For stability and smaller storage all my docs are in ODF.

ITQ project

For my latest IT Qualification assessment I had to demonstrate that I could code and build web pages using framesets and tables. This is what I came up with. An homage to the excellent chaps at TheOpenCD.org

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Busy Weekend

To start the weekend off on Friday evening, as it was my nine year old daughter’s birthday I took her to see the latest Harry Potter movie, The Order of the Phoenix. This was in my opinion the darkest and best of the Potter movies made so far. We both loved it.
Saturday morning saw us grocery shopping while our kids were at the local Kids Club run by Beacon Church. It’s usually a close thing to get the shopping dropped at home and pick the kids up when they finish at noon. We went straight from there to Faversham as Hyde Housing tenants we had been invited to a Fun Day. There was food, tombola’s, bouncy castle, face painting, hair braiding and a magician all for free. We got home about five in time for tea before friends came around at six.
For Sunday we took my Mother-in-Law to Northiam in Kent in order to pick the cherries from the orchard tree she had rented for this year. We must have harvested at least sixteen pounds in weight. After the picking which the kids thought great fun, we sat between the rows of trees for our picnic. On the way home we stopped at Headcorn Aerodrome where you can park for free and watch the aircraft land and take off, also the nutters jumping out of planes.

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Ulteo desktop

Quite a while ago I registered with www.ulteo.com volunteering to test their ‘Connected Desktop’. What? Ulteo is a Linux OS run in a web browser and accessed from any computer with an internet connection. Think of web applications but with an entire operating system around it.

This means you can create lengthy documents (no limitations like Google Docs) using openoffice.org in your personal Ulteo linux desktop from an internet cafe, sign in to your webmail account using Firefox (still within Ulteo), browse to and attach said file from you virtual Home folder and email it.

This is not fantasy because I just did it. It means you can use Linux from any computer with any platform without so much as a Live Distro CD. And I don’t think Ulteo will be the only one to take this route. It’s pioneering stuff, and where pioneers lead, others follow.

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Week 20/2007

This week I am listening to Bill DeSmedt’s Singularity podcast about a microscopic black hole trapped in the Earth’s crust, and those who would misuse it. I am also really enjoying Linkin Park’s Minutes To Midnight album.

Last night I went to see Mexico Fallz, a local band play at the RIVER bar in Maidstone. They were awesome, the crowd went nuts for them. If you get chance, go see them live.

I’m now 5 assessments (2 passed, 2 submitted and 1 started) into my ITQ course. This week I’m on databases Still, got a three day weekend coming.

Today I posted this question on Yahoo! Answers. Does it annoy you too?

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I choose ODF over OOXML

I know I’ve plugged Open Document Format before but have read a fair bit more about it now. Through work and pleasure I create no small amount of electronic documents. Many have to be shared with other people using different Operating Systems. I use Windows at work because I have to, Mac at home because I want to, and Linux on my laptop because I can and it’s fun. All this requires a level of interoperability. Open Document Format (ODF) gives me that.

ODF is my preferred choice of file format for several reasons.
1.Use of ODF is free as are many Office suites that use it.
2.ODF is an ISO/IEC 26300:2006 approved standard.
3.Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML) used in Office 2007 is not.
4.ODF is built on existing standards for: page size names, language codes, colour names, dates and times, math, scalable vector graphics, also readable XML.
5.OOXML is not. It’s XML is not human readable, a standard requirement I believe?
6.ODF is being adopted by numerous global companies, governments and local authorities worldwide. This is because they wish to avoid vendor lock-in and preserve accessibility to documents for decades to come.
7.ODF files are many times smaller than doc, xml, ppt, etc. They are also far easier to get data out of and recover.

Microsoft could easily use ODF instead of OOXML, yet bring confusion by creating a specification for use where an approved standard already exists, and through monopoly force it’s adoption by those unaware of what it is doing with their documents, or alternative formats.
Accessibility to documents should not be dependent on the software used to create them nor the platform on which they are read. The point of this post is to open peoples eyes and invite discussion on an alternative to the perceived standard that is Microsoft.

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Why OOXML will fail

This is a good post by Bob Sutor titlted “Why OOXML wil ultimately fail“

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Tea Bags

I posted this question “Why do some tea bags float, and others sink?” on Yahoo! Answers just for fun, as are the replies.

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