disclaimer: this comes from an email recently forwarded to me that I found very funny. I don’t know if the events actually happened or not but it’s still worth a read.

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared
the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

‘If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we
would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.’

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press
release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be
driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash…….  Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, wasreliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single ‘This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation’ warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the ‘Start’ button to turn the engine off.

Too funny, but they forgot about buying a new garage every 3 years because the old one is no longer supported (except for a few obscure cases).

Laugh and Be Well!

~Ian

In the very simplest of terms:

Plone is to your Website

what

Windows/Linux/MacOS are to your Computer

Plone is not a website builder, though it is very often used that way. Plone is a world-class content management system (CMS) that can be used over the internet much like you use a local area network (LAN) to work within your office or home.

Because Plone is completely web-oriented it is usually accessed with a web browser and it operates like an advanced, dynamic website. For that reason Plone can be used to create anything from a very simple business website to a very large, feature-rich social networking community.

Underneath Plone is Zope, a very sophisticated webapp server developed entirely in a state-of-the-art, pure object-oriented language called Python. Plone itself is written in Python too. Python is widely used by web/development experts like Google, Rackspace, Industrial Light and Magic, AstraZeneca, Honeywell, and many others…

All three of these technologies come from large, active, open source communities: plone.org, zope.org and python.org respectively.

Some of the reasons why this is very important to you are:

• the developers created this software for their own daily use, in the real world
• these technologies are NOT developed and licensed as commercial products
• by necessity this software is tested brutally and errors tend to get fixed quickly
• you are never tied exclusively to any one vendor or company
• the system is completely customizable and scalable to meet your future needs
• complete standards compliance means your site will stay current and viable

The ‘future-proof’ nature of the Plone/Zope/Python stack is just one its many enticing benefits. Even better, the licensing of these technologies guarantees free and open distribution which means anyone can afford to use it, and can do so without fear that it may someday vanish.

The fact that the developers use the system themselves and their total lack of financial demands means that all Plone/Zope/Python development is motivated by real integrity and a need to do things right, not to turn a buck.

It also means, for you, instead of paying massive license fees for the software, you will only pay for the server resources and the technical expertise you need to put the system into use, then maintain and support it.

And make no mistake: The acronym ‘CMS’ is already being misused to describe site-builders and blogware, but Plone is the real deal. Organizations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, eBay, Trolltech, Nokia, Utah State University, the CIA and Novell use Plone for content management.

Plone is very robust and has been gaining wide acclaim for years, well before most other CMS products got off the ground.  One partial list of plone sites is in itself several dozens of pages long and by July 20, 2007 Plone had already surpassed its one millionth download.

For a system of this size, with this flexibility and of this quality the savings are nearly incalculable. No small or medium sized business could expect to develop a system of this magnitute and most small businesses could not afford to license anything like it.

In a very real way Plone gives you a multi-million dollar software team, virtually for free.

This may not be new to twitter, but it is the first I have seen of it.

Twitter accounts are being used to feed adverts/links under false pretenses. The accounts are created with profile names of famous people (Namely Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) and are not in fact the real people, but rather a link feed.

They spread simply by following you in hopes you will be curious and follow them back. The problem is that there are in fact many legitimate famous people who are using twitter so you will need to use some discretion.

If you use twirl you can easily view a person’s profile (and recent tweets) without having to follow them first. The scammers appear to be one ad link after another.

It’s not clear to me if there is any security risk or not or whether this is simply an annoying link feed. It may be possible for them to monitor your tweets for information about you, though I doubt they are (yet) that sophisticated.

At any rate, I thought I would advise those of you within my reach that if a famous billionaire decides to follow you, it MIGHT not actually be the real person.  Drats, eh?

Live well and tweet safely,

Ian

Facebook is redesigning the profile, but we will not see it until spring. Meanwhile here is my take on how it aught to be and I am keen to get your feedback.

First, here are a few points of contention I have with the current profiles.

• the new privacy settings are a good idea but not very usable – especially for those with many many ‘friends’
• we are in varying degrees of conflict about how much personal vs professional information to share, since we have an ‘all in one’ profile.
• those of us who wish to keep a more ‘professional’ business image are having to resist/ignore much of the ‘fun’ side of facebook – or having to keep our business contacts on LinkedIn instead.

As a facebook user here is what I want to do:

• First: my main profile should be ONLY for information I expect to share with all ‘contacts’ (aka friends)
• Each item on the main profile should be marked for it’s level of privacy (such as ’show to all’, ‘groups and friends’, ‘friends only’… etc.) – [much like it already is]
• I then want to organize my contacts (friends) into subgroups at my discretion (ex: social, religious, associates, employers, family.. etc). [note: this feature has recently been added]
• For each subgroup I want a ’subprofile’ that is information items added to the main profile for people in this subgroup (only).
• Each subprofile item should also be marked for privacy like the main profile items are.
• Members of multiple subgroups would see a merged profile: the main profle plus all of the appropriate items (as per privacy) from the subgroups.
• I must be able to view my own profile:

exactly as each subgroup would see it

as if viewed from different places (ex: for each of the privacy settings)

as any specific contact would see it

and be able to edit it ‘in place’ if need be

I personally think this would be much more intuitive for everyone and would provide reasonably granular control over profile information. My business associates, romantic interest, church and family could all see the information most relevant (or appropriate) for them.

Perhaps even your facebook apps could be added per subgroup (and privacy level) if you wanted to keep some things segregated. Mini feed and notes etc. could also be filtered according to the profile.

In the longer term I also think that a profile structure could become universal

• I only one profile/subprofile structure to maintain
• I want it to work across all my contacts – perhaps via OpenID, etc.
• I want it safe and secure – perhaps only on my own device(s)

So… that being said: What do YOU think?

I am nearly ‘OCD’ about poor spelling, yet I still manage to forget to run the spellcheck on my own emails and even on my documents. I just haven’t developed the habit.  Partly because so few programs actually provide spellcheck.

How is it that so many programs still don’t even have spellcheck in the twenty-first century? There’s Wikis, IM/chats, comments/forms, blogs and websites … well, you get the idea.

A couple of years ago I came across the free version of WordWeb for Windows™ and it has completely transformed my writing.  I use it so regularly that I don’t even notice it anymore.

It’s a dictionary that interactively spell checks everything you type, not just emails or documents but form inputs, wiki entries and all of the other places I mentioned above. It is even spell-checking this blog entry as I type!

WordWeb is completely non-invasive. Like the live spellcheck found in word-processors it simply adds a thin, red dotted line under any words it doesn’t know and by right-clicking over the word you can select a replacement from a short suggestion list. It also allows you to add the word to your dictionary.

A great side affect is that I have just one dictionary for everything I write, not a new dictionary to train for each new program. For me that in itself would make the program worth having, but as I began to use it I found it could do so much more!

WordWeb places an icon in the system tray that opens a dictionary/thesaurus window that automatically looks up any highlighted text. You can enter other words or click on the various synonym/antonym lists to find alternatives. At any time you can substitute the current word for the (previously highlighted) word with just a button click.

WordWeb also has tabs to automatically look up the current word (or phrase) in wikipedia or other online sources. A button on the toolbar even sends the current webpage to your default browser (which is great because WordWeb doesn’t have tabbed browsing – it’s not a browser after all).

I have easily developed the habit of looking up words I don’t really know and using the wikipedia tab for fast access to information about anything I can highlight while I am reading. My vocabulary, confidence and writing have all prospered.

WordWeb operates perfectly well in places it shouldn’t be expected to, and I would be absolutely lost without it.

Download free from the WordWeb website

Just hours after posting my article recommending the latest Safari browser I started hearing about problems with Flash sites and possibly others, so I created a fresh, default install of 3.1 for XP/Vista (without Quicktime) and I went looking for trouble.

Where to? Well, the Flash website seemed a good place to start. At the Macromedia page I was told, “You have version 9,0,115,0 installed”. Ok, good to know, but there wasn’t any flash on the page and the Macromedia.com default page just forwarded me to adobe.com.

But voila, the adobe site has a flash banner promoting Acrobat Reader. The presentation ran fine, though I wondered if I had noticed a (very slight) jitter, so I opened the same page in Firefox and ran them side by side.

While the Firefox media ran at normal speed and ran smoothly, the Safari version ran about half speed, or worse. I had to close the Firefox page to get Safari back to speed. The Safari load/reload times for the Flash were none too impressive either.

So, it certainly didn’t take long to find a problem, though it helps to know what you’re looking for. I could have gone on and looked for more, but there seems little point.

Either way, there is a problem with the Flash addin and several issues have been reported by others such as Alec Saunders and Paul McDougall, so I must withdraw my original recommendation of Safari.

Meanwhile, I CAN recommend Firefox with absolute confidence. I have been using Firefox almost exclusively for several years and it works like a dream. It is free, is truly standards compliant and has captured a growing share of the world market.

Download the free Firefox web browser

If you are disappointed with the performance of your web browser you may want to try Safari 3.1, the self-proclaimed “world’s best browser” which was released just last week and is free to use on PC or MAC computers.

Among its features, Safari is noticeably faster than all other browsers. Its website claims its performance is about twice as fast as IE 7 and nearly double the speed of Firefox too.

Keeping in mind that your internet connection (even broadband) is still the weakest link in terms of internet performance, clever strategies for downloading the images, scripts, styles and other files that constitute a ‘webpage’ can make a huge difference in its load time. The Safari team have clearly got it right.

Safari is produced by Apple™ where it has long been the native browser for MAC computers and now it has been made available for Windows™ systems too.

The look and feel of Safari is completely familiar.

Apple™ is well known for producing high quality, user-friendly products and the Safari browser is no exception.  Safari is completely “standards compliant” – meaning it will display web content as it was intended to be and it ‘plays nice’ with web sites and servers alike.

The layout is uncluttered and the feel is very familiar. The toolbar and menus are intuitive and anyone who has used a web browser before will feel instantly at ease with it.

To web developers:

You will probably want to keep your Firefox set up because of its brilliant suite of add-ins, even though Safari does offer developer extensions too (which I have not yet investigated).

Even so it would be valuable to install Safari – if not for testing, then perhaps for personal use since most web developers (like myself) probably have the Firefox caching disabled.

A faster browser for general use could be a refreshing change!

Visit The Official Safari Website

This blog intends to suggest quality, alternative technologies that can save you time, money or stress.

There are thousands of open source communities around the world, each with hundreds (or thousands) of independent developers that pool their diverse talents and skills. The results are often very high quality projects that are free or almost free and that provide huge benefits over the more commonly known products.

There are also many more companies that are now following the ‘give it away’ business model in hopes of monetizing a small percentage of those users. This means that there are increasingly advanced business tools available on the cheap.

But you have a business to run. No time to waste downloading and trying out a bunch of stuff. Can’t someone who knows this stuff just tell you what’s cool?

YES! I can.

I currently run my own web services business and, as a small business manager myself, I am always looking for ways to cut costs and streamline my work. I participate in open source communities for many reasons, not the least being that for every day that I put in, I get back dozens or even hundreds of hours worth of quality work.

I’ve been in the computer field since the beginning of the 1980’s and unlike most small business owners it has actually been worth my time to investigate a lot of technologies. I’ve realized that my customers could benefit from this experience, so why not you too?

A few of the best technologies have gained popularity by word of mouth so you may have heard of them. Perhaps you weren’t sure if you should try them. You may even be using some of them already. I may start with some of the more obvious choices and then get onto the more obscure.

This industry is truly huge so admittedly I don’t know all of it, but I will share with you what I do know, in as concise a manner as I can.  Got a suggestion? Drop me a line.

It is my hope that you will add this blog to your news feed, at least for a while, to discover what applies to your situation.