Author: Matt Johnston

I’ve volunteered to write a tutorial/reference application for Nitro/Og. It will be a bug/issue tracker, and will make use of some of the nifty features of these libraries. It will also give me a chance to learn more about Nitro (the web part) – right now, my expertise is in Og (the ORM part). I figure infurious can use the bug tracker once it’s done 🙂

A group of bloggers in Cork are arranging a meetup in April. There’s a definite community feel with the bloggers in that area. I think this is something that really needs to develop in the North of Ireland as well.

Speaking to some very smart people the other night and we seem to agree on a few things. There isn’t the same sort of community spirit here in the North and if it’s something we want to foster, then we have to be the people to do it.

I reckon the first place to start is Momentum and from there see if InvestNI want to come to the party. I’m extremely motivated in this space. I wonder how far we can get.

I’ve seen aspoke doing the rounds of the blogs. It started in the Alpha Blogger camp with Scoble et al, and it’s now doing the rounds of the little fishes.

Express your individualism. Buy some vinyl stickers for the top of your laptop.

There? Do you feel as if your inner soul is now bared? No, I didn’t think so. The problem is that this is essentially tarting up some butt ugly laptops, the proverbial dressing of mutton as lamb.

Problem is that this idea isn’t original and that makes it uncool. Everyone remember the Powerbook 1400? It shipped with a replacement part for it’s casing that was clear – meaning you could slip some art, or one of the pre-supplied templates, under it and have a stylish machine. It meant you could have some striking designs and the design wouldn’t wear and tear because it was under the case!

But sure. Who am I to be a snob. We’re talking about people who buy laptops which have stickers on the palm rests.

Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on his web stats raised a lot of discussion. Some people disputed the results while others denounced the blog as being low in content.

I think some people need to take a chill pill.

It’s Guy’s blog. He can write what he wants. I personally found it interesting what he produced – it shows that the combination of celebrity plus great content can produce great results in a short amount of time. It’s a great comparison to our own efforts in self-branding through infurious. Some readers of that blog were disheartened somewhat by only generating 1300 hits in two months without realising it’s still an incredible result.

Anyway.

This post is meant to be about the difference between DATA and INFORMATION.

Data is meaningless. It’s just numbers and words and noughts and zeroes. It’s raw, it’s unformed and because it’s unformed it cannot be used to INFORM. Information, on the other hand, has had the crap stripped out of it, and it’s been reordered and sorted so it actually means something.

The problem is that the line between Data and Information is blurred. It’s not really a process where you pass data through a filter and pure, uncontaminated information comes out. Data analysis is a continuous process. There’s information available almost immediately. And new information will come to light the more you examine it.

Web stats are just the first extract of information from data, not the last.

And if I was internationally famous[1], then we’d have had higher hits on our blog and we’d not have made a red cent because we’re not doing the adwords thing.

[1] technically I am. But not for this…

Dave Moore at The Norman Transcript asks whether Apple will “do right” by Mac OS X.

This is emotive language. It assumes that by doing anything other than what Dave wants, Apple would be doing the wrong thing. So what does Dave think is the right thing?

The hope is that Apple will release an officially sanctioned version for all Intel-based machines, and finally give Microsoft some well-deserved competition.

Dave cites Apple’s low market share as being down to licensing policies while at the same time suggesting that Apple is going easy on people who install Mac OS X for Intel on non-Mac hardware. He claims only Apple has manufactured Macs (ignoring the clones debacle but also ignoring the fact there have always been some vertical solutions for Macintosh in some markets). He says that “savvy users” have been looking for a superior alternative to Windows that runs on cheap X86 hardware. Well, who wouldn’t want great software on cheap hardware. In truth, Dave, the savvy users have been running a superior alternative to Windows on inexpensive hardware for a few years now.

Q. What has anything here got to do with “doing right by Mac OS X”?

A. Absolutely nothing.

What Dave doesn’t realise is that nothing changed back in January. Sure, a nondescript chip inside a computer changed to another nondescript chip, but really who cares?

Apple have just had the best quarter of sales in the company’s history – that’s 30 years building up to this one. But like every pundit before him, he knows better how to run Apple.

ZDNet is reporting that the recent Kama Sutra Worm hasn’t been nearly as bad as expected. It slid into third place behind MyDoom and Netsky.

Isn’t this just ridiculous?

The doom and gloom of virus outbreaks is only lessened by the dull ache of viruses and trojans which have been plaguing us for years?

Brilliant.

Guy Kawasaki has been reviewing the results of his blog in terms of hits after a month. By the end of January, we’d been running this blog for 20 days.

We’d made 38 posts.
According to our statcounter, we had 33108 hits and served 313 Megabytes. We’re maintaining an average of about 1500 hits per day which is nice. Traffic was lowest at the weekend which means a lot of people read this during work hours.

But what does this all mean?

Ultimately, it means very little. It sounds impressive though. all these numbers.

And I didn’t get home til 6 am. As a result I’m completely busted today. But it was a great night out and we spent time talking about all sorts of things – everything from Lucy, to how many definitive bones are in the human body, to realising that (for the time being) Exchange & Outlook present an intimidating 900lb gorilla for anyone working on a messaging platform. We all admired the industrial design of Apple hardware, we reserved some criticism for a 17″ Sony Vaio (I have never seen a bigger laptop) running Vista (okay it’s a beta but I’ve never seen a slower operating system – are they sure it’s coming out in less than a year????).

We chatted about more immediate things – what we’re doing here, what our plans are, some super secret non-software projects that we have thought about and the general state of the union with regard to the Mac market.

I’ve spent the morning slurring my speech and being generally belligerent to the guys in the office. God knows what it would be like if I actually had been drinking!!!!

Damien Mulley posts about trade shows and unconferences.

I used to be involved in the “convention” track for their RPG club at my local university. To be honest, these present a much more interesting model than the traditional trade conference (which I’ve been attending since running my own business). They have a little more structure than “unconferences”, and they’re shedloads cheaper than trade shows.

Adapt this to a technology model.

Read more!

In a recent blog post, George Moschovitis said that his favourite company was IBM. I’m still waiting to hear exactly why he chose IBM, but it got me to thinking about which companies I admire most.

Read more!