Upgraded Apple Safari, Killed my Access to my bank

Apple released a small upgrade to Safari this week and from I read includes security improvements. My bank has decided they don't like that version and report "we do not support this browser". Sigh.

NY Times Notices SharePoint

The New York Times has an interesting article about Microsoft SharePoint in today's edition. Probably the result of good PR by Microsoft, but the truth as I understand it.

I introduce SharePoint to teams as a way to get a "single version of the truth".

Burma with Nuclear Capability

Mentioned by Secretary of State Clinton a few weeks back as I recall. Now a newspaper report. The world remains bonkers.

(first noticed at James Fallows's blog).

"Why SharePoint Scares Me"

Good reflective article by Peter Campbell on why SharePoint scares him. Scares me to but my take is that by keeping it simple, avoiding MOSS, use by teams with leaders (not individuals), it can work. I'm proving that.

Office for Mac vs Windows

When I bought the new MacBook, I vowed to myself that since I was going to install and run Windows XP via VWware Fusion, I would not need to move to Microsoft's version of Office for OS X (Office 2008) . However as time went on I grew curious about how Word and maybe Excel would be if run natively in the Mac. I downloaded and tried the demo version and was pleasantly surprised to feel that I liked writing in Word 2008 for the Mac than using Word 2007 on Windows. Word 2007 is just "too much" sometimes, but I do appreciate it's richness of functionality.

I discovered that the Office for Mac version was really not that expensive (about £100 here) so I splurged and bought a copy. I find that I'm using for many of my writing projects as I do like it. [It reminds me of Word 2.0c from the early 1990's which I think is still the best writing program ever--alas, that for another posting someday.]

Today I discovered why Office on the Mac is a "deal". The product lacks macros. I cannot do keystroke recording of macros. I cannot create macros. I cannot edit macros. I'm told it "respects" macros in files created by other versions of Office, e.g. Office 2003 and 2007 for Windows. But macro functionality has stripped out. Gosh. There are times that with a small macro I can do a lot to remove the drudgery of something.

What a surprise. No macros in Office 2008 for the Mac.

Time Logging Programs

I decided to take the plunge with my new MacBook to use one of the time logging programs. I needed to be able to show my customers what time was spent; more importantly I wanted to understand where my time was going. I did my research for the possibilities with the help of Google (as you do). I tried out a few.

Billings. Heard about this from Apple's web site. The good is that's is "pretty" and the reports look great. The bad is that the data is hostage. Can't get it out into a database or a spreadsheet.

TimeCache. From pandaware.com. This appeared interesting. It had a lot of settings and it appeared that the data could be sent from a report to a CSV file that could then be imported. It seemed like it was written by and for accountants as it used a lot of nomenclature that I found non-interesting, e.g. Posting. While it had a lot of settings and it appeared to be the one I wanted. I went ahead and bought a license key. However, after a couple weeks of use I grew less enthralled with its odd user interface (caused maybe by its Mac roots), the complexity of getting data in and out, and all that. I looked around again.

OfficeTime. I can't remember how I found this. At first glance it looked great. Less complexity than TimeCache which could be good or bad. Sometimes with complexity the software can be around for the long term since it can handle most anything. I used it in parallel with TimeCache for a few days and soon discoved that OfficeTime was just better for me. It's now the "standard" around here. They even have a Windows version which could be useful for some business opportunities I see.

Since it had only been a few weeks since I bought a license for TimeCache, I wrote them and asked for refund, explaining why I wasn't going to use it anymore. I got back a snotty email from them about how they had a problem with that since I had full opportunity to test the software before buying it. True. But who would have thought to treat a customer that way. I told them to keep the fee and and I'm glad the relationship is severed.

Meantime, I'm using OfficeTime. I've been in contact with the developers to suggest how they could do some simple integration with SharePoint to make it a more valuable product. Hopefully that happens.

First Advertisement

I found an opportunity to include a small advertisement in an up-coming supplement in a major UK daily newspaper "Report on Project Management". They plan to focus on why project management is vital to every business strategy as efficiency & effectiveness is key to succeeding in a recession. Here's what will be published. I was going for the "look" that I remember from Mobil Corporation's ad's on the editorial page of the New York Time from the 1980's.

Saturn V Launches

In honor of the Mercury, Gemni, and ultimately the Apollo missions and people behind them, watch this video of Saturn V rocket launches. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXtG3vfAlA. The most powerful machine ever built my humanity.

Math on the Television

Last evening on UK's Channel 4 news there was an alarming report about planned increases in charges by water companies to customers. Gosh, but they propose "9% increase from £345/year now to £375 by 2014".

Isn't that slightly over 1% per year? Isn't that a reasonable plan? (Unless of course deflation occurs, but how can water companies or us know that?)

Example of the Media Not Serving Us

On a weekend with Iranian authorities arrest employees at the British Embassy in Teheran (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?_r=1&hpw), the media (television news, newspapers, etc.) are leading with stories of the tragic death of a sad and damaged man.

Windows 7 Install Scratched my Laptop Screen!

Not really. But it sure seemed to.

At the invitation of Microsoft I download the ISO image of the latest Release Candidate for Windows 7. It was about 2.3 gb and amazingly the download worked. I launched the install process inside of VMWare Fusion running on my brand new Macbook.

Once the black screen turned into Windows 7, there was what looked to be a scratch on my beautiful and brand new Macbook screen. Upper left quadrant there was this ugly white streak. I went searching for my screen cleaner cloth and try as might I could not remove it. It was hard to see in the daylight as I was running the laptop in the back garden on one of the first beatiful sunny days this year. But none the less, the "scratch" was there.

After Windows 7 finished loading, I noticed it was not a scratch, but some sort of light flare on the new Windows 7 desktop. Sigh.

In any event. Windows 7 seems to work just great in VMWare Fusion, alongside XP, Ubunt, and OS X (the host operating system).

--rms

Five Disease Outbreaks that Are Worse Than Swine Flu

Joshua Keating writes in Foreign Policy Magazine about five outbreaks THAT EXIST NOW that are worse than Swine Flu which are not discussed in the media. More support for my view not to worry about risks that talked about in the papers and TV news.

: Cholera
: Spinal Meningitis
: AIDS
: Ebola
: Dengue Fever

Wow. The Reference Still Exists

I was meeting with someone this week who was heading out to the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. That conversation made me remember that many years ago I was a co-author of a paper presented at that conference.

Thanks to the internet, found it!

http://www.onepetro.org/mslib/servlet/onepetropreview?id=OTC-3802-MS&soc=OTC&speAppNameCookie=ONEPETRO

NY Times Notices Zoho

The April 4 edition of the NY Times has an article by Randall Stross about Zoho, and in particular its word processor tool:

The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.

I've been experimenting with Zoho for a few months now. I'm impressed at it's capablities for team collaboration. Collaboration requires much more than a word processor, and Zoho has what's required.

Two Articles on "The Other Side"

In my daily newspaper reads, I have ran across two articles each with the common theme of looking at the "other side" of the convential (politically correct?) view.

In the New York Times, Daniel Hamermesh writes I Fell for Their Data in Freakonomics about

I fell for a stupid article and turned off my home PC last night. The article says that Americans who leave computers on overnight are wasting $2.8 billion on energy costs per year.It ignores the cost of turning computers off — and having to turn them on again the next morning.

And in the Telegraph there is an article The rise of sea levels is 'the great lie ever told' by Christopher Booker who writes about Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about. The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

P.S. Why can't Mr. Booker punctuate and capitalise his title correct? When did the apostrophe replace the quotation mark? I frequently see apostrophes when quotation marks should be used.