Category: Miscellany 2004

I am sitting in Madrid thinking a little bit about my last post about Movable Type. Yes, I am on another business trip. This time, the hotel is close to the airport and was a quick taxi ride away. I should be asleep in 30 minutes, but I have been thinking about software that is apparently free.

As I noted earlier, I don’t have much of a problem with the concept of Movable Type morphing into a proper paid-for, licensed piece of software. They say it will not be crippleware and that trust will very much be part of it. Six Apart allows you to determine how many ‘blogs’ make your site (it’s not a hard-coded limit) and allows you to determine how many users are really active in using the software. There is a great deal of trust there, which I am not sure is sustainable. Nonetheless, I think this is a good approach.

When I look around, I look at what else I use regularly (and I will stick with personal software rather than work-based software). My version of Windows XP at home was pre-installed and properly licensed. I use HomeSite if I ever need an HTML editor. It’s fully paid for. Paint Shop Pro is my image editor. It was a full free version which they chose to give away on some magazine cover or other, so it is, therefore, properly licensed despite being unpaid for. I tend to use Windows Media Player (which is free), but I have paid for Real Player Plus to get some of the additional features.

So far, so good. I’ve noted before that I have licensed Opera as a browser even though I do not use it a great deal. But the most-used piece of Software on my machine is Mozilla. I use it for web-browsing and for mail. It handles all my mail accounts. I think it’s superb. I have never contributed to it since the very beginning when I acquired a licensed version of Netscape 0.9/1.0 (and even then, the company I worked for bought it for me). I can’t write code, so I can’t contribute in that way, so I really ought to pay something for it. I think it’s only right. As with Movable Type, there are people who work for the company that makes it. If I want them to be around, I should support them.

And that’s why today I will make a donation to Mozilla.

So Six Apart have finally announced Movable Type 3. I have to confess that, from what I have read, I will be disappointed. It doesn’t appear to be loaded with a great deal of new features, which is sad. I hope this is the foundation for some new development. To be honest, if there were some way of handling photo galleries from within the tool, then I think I would be very happy. I will, however, not pass further judgment on it until I have installed it, and I am going to wait until it is released properly (rather than the developer’s edition) before I install. In that way, I hope some of the plug-ins that I would like to install will have been tested, and then I can upgrade and add functionality all at once.

The views of other users also sadden me. There has been a long history of collaboration online. I remember when I first joined the connected world, having some basic legal questions answered via Usenet. How great it seemed back then. In the end, of course, nobody was going to dish out free legal advice forever, and properly paid-for advice will always have a place. In the end, good things will – in the main – be worth paying for.

I believe the good folks of Six Apart deserve some recognition for the work they have put into building a publishing tool that’s as easy to use as Movable Type. It was never open source software. It’s always been the work of Ben and Mena (and now Six Apart). I find it sad that the large number of negative comments does not reflect the fact that the continued development of such a fantastic tool requires a full-time commitment from people and, somehow, these people have to be paid for it. Even Mozilla has a staff!

I honestly believe that we can be sad at the lack of additional, out-of-the-box functionality, but we should not be sad that Six Apart is turning into a business that needs finances to support it. Of course, our expectations as users will now change too. Six Apart is really going to have to show that this is a professional product backed up by proper support. Once, users would forgive the lack of customer service (we weren’t paying anything), but no longer. And in my experience, it is the mishandling of customer service/support that always lets people down.

Movable Type must continue to lead, and if it is to keep my trust. I will pay for this version, and I hope my commitment to the product is rewarded. If, in the future, Movable Type does not live up to users’ expectations (brought on by the way it was streets ahead of other systems at first), then the company suffer. Yes, as Jason Kottke notes, the pricing structure is wrong at the moment – but that’s no reason to leave. Yes, there are alternatives which really are free (as Mark Pilgrim notes and goes on to prove by– apparently – switching seamlessly), but for now I am sticking with Movable Type because they haven’t let me down. They’ve shown that they have addressed the need to turn it into a product that needs people to develop and support.

But please, sort out the pricing structure.

The oddest things come into your mind while travelling. While I was sitting on the plane earlier in the week, I started to think about humour. I have no idea why. But I wondered what the reactions were like to the first joke? What was the first joke?

I can understand how language developed. As we evolved, we needed to find ways to communicate (where is the food, or what dangers are there out there?) But how did the first joke happen (and by that I mean the first gag rather than the first thing somebody did that brought on laughter)? How did those who heard that first joke know to laugh? What were the cues?

I’ve no idea why it came to me but now it’s fascinating me.

Over the weekend, I brought Man of the Moment into the new look. It was pretty easy, so once again, I’m understanding the value of style sheets. I also changed the naming convention of the individual pages, which was made very easy by Movable Type and a little harder when I decided to try lots of URL re-directing.

Reading through today’s web-reading, I hear Blogger has also had a face-and-feature lift (here,here and here). It doesn’t interest me a great deal as I don’t use Blogger, but then I went to the new site and found that my browser had a username already populated. Lo and behold, I found an account I created in 2001. It does appear that the new blogger has some nice features, but I’m going to sit and wait for Movable Type 3.

The main event of last weekend was a visit to Olympia to look at the Urban Gardens show. As we were there early, we managed to catch the first ‘celebrity’ presentation. It was Matt James on things to look out for when planting an urban garden. As it turned out, he’s a good speaker, and I found it really interesting, which is a little more than can be said for a lot of the rest of the show. It was full of stands offering a lot of hard landscaping, garden ornaments and furniture and very little about plants – although there were some fantastic ferns and Canadian Maples on display. Matt himself is very good-looking in the flesh so I imagine he was a very big draw to the show. We didn’t get the chance to see Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan on the Sunday but I guess that might have been fun.

All of this home-style probably explains why I spend part of Saturday afternoon glued to UKTV Bright Ideas(or whatever it’s called now) watching lame home shows. Still,Wild & Fresh(which seems to be a Canadian/UK co-production) has one of the most amusing title sequences of any show I have seen for a long time and a would-be Jamie Oliver in the form of chef Danny Boome. It was kind of fun, but, as the Why Don’t You? used to say, I should have got up and done something less boring instead. Sadly, I started to watch the Coronation Street omnibus to catch up on the latest Todd and Karl storyline. Wish I hadn’t.

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Originally posted at musak.org | Wayback – original | Wayback
Posted May 10, 2004

One of the sites I most visit is ‘Downing Street Says‘, an unofficial site recording the official opinions of Downing Street and, I assume, the Prime Minister. One of the real benefits of reading the transcripts of the briefings rather than a journalist’s interpretation is seeing how the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman tries not to express opinions. It’s no wonder people have a disregard for the political process in the country when you read,

Asked to explain why the Prime Minister was willing to express a view about the pictures relating to alleged US mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners when their investigations had not yet concluded either, the PMS pointed out that the Government’s view had been set out very clearly by General Sir Mike Jackson last Friday night when the pictures had first emerged. [source]

What I think most right-thinking people won’t understand (and I am sure the civil servants can explain it away very well) is why disgust can not be expressed every time the question is asked. If the British pictures are real, then such treatment should be strongly condemned. If the pictures are fake, then the actions of those who made them should be discussed in the same terms. Why do they have to hide behind the diplomatic speak?

Really, there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in having a ‘Big Conversation‘ with the people if you don’t understand what one half of the room is saying.

Welcome to Europe

At midnight ten new countries join the European Union. Welcome to Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

I don’t use branded webmail systems a great deal. All my mail is handled by my hosting provider, which provides a thoroughly adequate web-based mail service for times when I am not using an email client. Still, with all the web ramblings about Google’s Gmail service, I thought I would review some of my web-based mail services and see what was in them and realised that most of the accounts have long since been removed or disabled due to lack of use.

To my mind, the premier web-based service is Fastmail, which is a very well thought-out and usable mail service. If you’re looking for a new mail provider, you should seriously consider them, and there’s no advertising!

The only other service active is Yahoo Mail– simply because I have had that for ages, and it used to be my way of reading normal mail accounts in a browser. Some of my mailing service lists still go here. Today I logged on and reviewed some of the settings and cleared out some of the junk, and I realised it is an excellent mail service. I really like their new feature AddressGuard, which allows for disposable email addresses that can be removed if they receive too much spam.

So, will I sign up for a Gmail account to compare it? You bet I will.

Thanks to the joys of SkyPlus, I caught up with a fascinating BBC programme that was originally aired a week or so ago.If … we don’t stop eating was part of a series that I wasn’t following, but I have to admit, I was attracted to this show thanks to a very large billboard advertising it (but, like everyone, advertising never works on me).

I hadn’t seen the others in the series, so I wasn’t prepared for the mix of talking-head, documentary footage and fiction.If .. we don’t stop eating, looked to 2020 in a Britain where obesity is the biggest killer in the country and is predicted to affect one in three people; there are no tested drug treatments, and any help from an over-worked NHS relies on your co-operation (failure to co-operate means that treatment is revoked).

It was very, very well done, thought-provoking, and, when it came to looking at what overeating does for us, it was a little unpleasant. And very worthwhile. It discussed medical and political solutions to this growing threat to Britain’s health. I particularly liked the analysis of the fat tax:

NARRATION:By the end of 2020 the Government’s efforts are rapidly going off-course. Consumers won’t be bullied, and the food industry plays on fears of an interfering nanny state. The idea of a fat tax is history.

And, helpfully, the BBC has a transcript online which allows me to tell you that it’s Tim Land, a Professor of Food Policy, who has one of the best lines in the programme, when responding to the suggestion that any fax tax will be played up as being the nanny state interfering in people’s lives:

TIM LANG: PROFESSOR OF FOOD POLICY: I say what’s wrong with nannies! Most of the people who criticise the nanny state have actually got nannies! Have you ever noticed that? Anyway, delete the word ‘nanny’ and call it ‘parent’ and we’re all suddenly in favour of it! Actually, I like guidance — what’s wrong with guidance? Let’s hear it for nannies!

Are those McDonald’s salads a sign of things to come?

Happy Easter. I had a great day on Friday visiting some vineyards in Kent. Yesterday evening, this afternoon, and tomorrow evening are all to be spent with good friends. On top of that, I managed to start to clean up the garden and have ambitious plans to tidy up the tiny amount of loft space that we have, so that we can load up even more junk!

My Mum and Dad have been married for forty years. It was their anniversary yesterday. PY and I are took them to Lightship Ten at St Katherine’s Dock which was wonderful and they treated us like very well indeed. We wen’t there for our own anniversary in October. It’s a superb – and different – place to go for a celebration.