Posts in category "software"

I don't know whether Ask have changed their agency but I think this advert is a marked improvement on the previous campaign.

Imagine you were a tourist looking to visit London, which site would you choose ?

Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning.

Any client who is interested in people running projects from cradle to grave' intrigues me.

Just installed the Lightning extension which provides an embedded calendar (Sunbird) within Thunderbird.

This is made even more useful by the addition of the Provider for Google Calendar add-on that enables seamless, two way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Thunderbird.

Back in the old days, things were very simple. You filmed endless hours of footage with your analog camcorder; your summer holidays, opening Christmas presents around the tree, your child's first steps and birthday parties.

Then, the night before you set out on your next summer holiday, the wife utters words that strike fear into the very heart of your soul:

'Charge the camcorder batteries and have you transferred all the tapes to video so we can re-use them ?'

Of course, you haven't. So while everyone else slumbers, you untangle the wire spaghetti and transfer six hours of tedious footage spanning 364 days that no-one will ever watch. Worse, to prove you did a proper job, the wife has included crafty snippets of footage of grey cloudy skies, the inside of the camcorder case and an inadvertent curse. Of course, she has done this deliberately to ensure you locate and edit these mistakes out of the directors cut presented for her final rigorous QA review. This task involves skillful dexterity with both hands on the play/record and pause buttons on the video and the camcorder and prolongs the agony.

Eventually, you decide there must be a better way and this is to embrace the digital age so you buy a digital camcorder.

Excited and eager to play with the technology, you make a short, 72 minute film, alone in your bedroom.

You unwrap all the wires, connect them to the computer only to discover you need something called a Firewire card. Your interest wanes and you tell the wife you 'need a part and I haven't got one in the van so it will be 6 weeks'.

Weeks later, and much to your surprise, you successfully install the Firewire card needed for video capture.

Finally, you can transfer the footage to the PC. Sony helpfully include software (curiously named 'Picture Motion Browser') to perform the transfer. Staggeringly, you can even rewind, play and fast forward the camcorder from your computer.

Amazingly, you transfer your alternative film which traces the life of a pair of socks from the drawer, through a full day worn on a pair of feet and finally into the wash basket.

You proudly gather the family to review this stupendous and life changing event. Feedback is mixed; 'Is that it ?' and tantalisingly 'Can't you edit out the 32 seconds of the ceiling ?'.

Of course, you can edit the footage. You are a master of the digital age. You are a budding film director. You quickly remove the spurious footage from the final cut. Only you can't because the Sony bundled software doesn't support video editing. You have to shell out £50 for a separate product called Sony Vegas.

Alternatively, you can use Windows Movie Maker (freely available with Windows) which is capable of importing the AVI files and actually editing clips. Even better, you can add opening titles, closing credits and an impressive fade effect as the socks are tossed into the wash basket.

Your life is complete. You turn the computer off and forget all about digital video technology.

Until 8 weeks later, when you are going to visit the in-laws and the wife says:

'My mum and dad would like to see the DVD of our holidays and that alternative film you make about a pair of socks.'

No problem. You simply turn the computer on, open the project and click 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. Your computer doesn't have a DVD burner. No problem. You share the files to another computer and hit 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. Windows Movie Maker can't create DVD's.

No problem. The computer happens to have a trial version of Video Studio installed so you simply save the Movie Maker film as a new, large AVI file, import it, and click 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. There isn't enough disk space.

You count to 10. 10 times. Then, in a fit of pique and a last desperate effort to preserve your sanity, you spontaneously splash out on an external hard disk drive with half a terabyte of storage dedicated to digital video data and a DVD writer.

The Freecom drive simply plugs into a USB port, has a separate power supply and works out of the box. No need to read the non-existent instructions. Oddly, the drive is formatted as FAT32 so you perform a quick format to NTFS and start copying files. Happily, the drive is quick and more importantly quiet.

Similarly, the LG DVD writer also plugs into another USB port and has a separate power supply. The drive includes a copy of Nero Express so you can finally burn the godforsaken video footage to DVD.

Finally, the holiday footage is edited, trimmed with effects and titles. There is even a top level menu including Chapters, humorous out takes, interviews, biographies, versions in French, German and Italian and an 'Extras' disc.

You are delighted and even though you say it yourself, quite proud of your achievements in the past 3 weeks. You go downstairs to share the glad tidings and sit down with a bucket of popcorn and a gallon of Coca-Cola to enjoy the DVD with the family.

It is unusually quiet and there is a note on the kitchen table

Couldn't wait any longer.
Gone to Crete.
Back in 2 weeks.
Hoover upstairs, mow the lawn and wash the pots.
Window cleaner on Wednesday.

I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees.

I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me.

The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.

Inevitably, I guess - Google lead the way (again) but I was surprised to see that Sun Microsystems have a significant proportion of Facebook members.

IBM were slightly lower than I expected until I remembered that half their 350,000 employees are busy building fantasy worlds in Second Life. No wonder I can't get spare parts for my Thinkpad.

Nice to see Oracle positioned just ahead of SAP after recent discussions about the companies' respective contributions and reputation in the Web 2.0 community.

I still have wildly oscillating feelings about Facebook; on one hand, a walled garden, puerile, teenage and gimmicky but undoubtedly an insidious, strangely compulsive and probably important platform.

PS. For example, I have just seen the immortal words 'Andy and Mark Burgess (The Chameleons) are now friends'. Superb.

Weird. This was also the subject of my final year project at University. My AI creation was written in C on Unix and used the curses package.

However, my effort wasn't so accomplished, had severe problems when a piece was crowned and didn't implement the 'huffing' rule correctly.

Having said that, it did beat me on four occasions.

OK. I couldnt resist any longer. Scobles recent post about this killer Google Reader application forced me to sign up for yet another pointless, short-lived, social network, Web 2.0 application - Facebook.

I was keen to preserve my 'Johnny Come Lately' status and was relieved to find, coincidentally, that Donncha had signed up just ahead of me so I am now confirmed as the very last person in the world to sign up for Facebook.

Scoble's right. Mario Romero's Google Reader application is blissfully simple and lets you browse friends' shared items and aggregates the most popular shared items. Once it gets enough traction, this application will indeed be 'Digg for intelligent people' (and me).

Facebook is better than LinkedIn because it's more human and it's more fun. That senior partner at Accenture with a tedious, dry 6 page CV can now be seen half-naked, pole dancing in Bangkok, juggling firesticks, laughing and simultaneously drinking a colourful cocktail through a novelty straw.

Facebook is aimed at a teenage audience and people who snigger at 'Poke Norman !' and I do have some difficulty with people writing graffiti on my 'wall'.

For example, some cheeky Irish builder wrote this: 'Urgently needs re-pointing. Can do you a deal if you get your drive done at the same time.'

Lyrics plugin for Media Player and Winamp.

Although you will spoil the Reading festival for your immediate neighbour with your loud, tuneless, intoxicated karaoke at least you will know the words.

The Safari Web browser on Macintosh currently accounts for a paltry 4.34% of visits to this blog. It will be interesting to see whether this figure increases now Apple have released a version of Safari for Windows.

I've downloaded Safari and while I like the fonts and appearance, I probably use too many Firefox add-ons to make the change permanently.

Not its not unavailable but Google have added support for offline reading of up to 2,000 items using the recently announced Google Gears.

Another much requested feature and a surprising omission from Reader - the ability to search feeds - is also thought to be on the horizon.