Category: Commentary

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software tells us to forget the shortest path to an objective as it is often a distraction and other times a mirage.

His example of sailing reads like an existential philosophy and something I can really relate to.

The cool lesson from this fact of sailing life is that by merely changing your position in any direction you may alter the viability of your goal from the impossible to the possible.

I guess you have to read the article to appreciate what he’s saying but in essence, there’s more than one way to skin a cat and it’s not about whether you can choose the shortest path but about choosing the shortest possible path and being able to recognise the difference. In Networking, this is how I always thought of the OSPF protocol. Through creative use of path weights (the price a network packet has to pay to move through the network along a certain path), you could force packets down one route or another.

Using a million tons of dynamite to brute-force your way through the mountain to get to your destination may actually be the worst possible approach.

Miss Rogue asked on her blog,

What means more to you? Money or Human Life?

End of the day, we’re decent people and we think “Human Life, obviously” but I’m not sure we’re being honest with each other there.

Are we talking ALL human life? Or just one? Is that one person a nice person? Are they a scumbag? If they’re a scumbag, then how bad are they really?

And for those of us that categorically said “human life obviously”,

How many of us exceed the speed limit? I don’t just mean, a little bit or just when overtaking? How many of us drive at speeds considerably lower than the speed limit from day to day? Based on what I see from day to day: not many.

What would you give to save another human life? All of your money? All that you have now? All you will ever earn? To save a life knowing that for the rest of your life you’ll be in abject poverty?

James at EirePreneur links to us as a Bedouin WorkSpace and that’s cool.

Funding. Funding. Funding.

That’s where we’re at. We entered the Seedcorn challenge from Intertrade Ireland more as a motivator to get the business plan done. We registered a wee domain and got some email running so we can be contacted through it. That’s the first step.

At the moment now we’re filling in the forms for the HALO business angel network in Northern Ireland and hoping to submit them before the end of the month.

We also have to visit two more banks.

We’re squirrelling away on Infurious stuff in the background as well making plans for the next big release of SyncBridge and the first release of our second piece of software which we see coming in the new year sometime.

On top of that, MacSys has added a new member of staff in the form of a printer guy. I’m sure he’s not mad keen on being defined as such but it’s cool to see them expanding as well.

And tonight is this month’s episode of Cocoaheads. Chris has promised to show us the fruits of his labours, done entirely in the last month with the help of Philip. I’m really impressed that something has come together and it’d be lovely if we could have a big projector screen to show it on. Another time maybe. When we get a venue, hehe.

Tonight I had a reminder about something I tried to forget.

I hate that.

When you put something down it should stay put. How annoying is it when you put something down and someone tidies it away? As my co-workers wil tell you, there’s not a lot that makes me angry more than people moving stuff needlessly.

Anyway, the put-down thing. It was just a glimpse of a reminder, a solitary blue box, but it reminded me of good times and ultimately not-so-good times. The good stuff is still with me tonight as I lay down, keyboard illuminated, to write this blog post. The bad stuff? Well, it’s just baggage. And we should recognise and embrace baggage – it defines us.

I watched “The History Boys” recently. Marred only by it still being a play and not actually turned into a screenplay, I found it interesting, thought-provoking and a little inspiring. The “gobbets” made me wish I’d not spent my degree years cloistered in a laboratory. I have a hankering to go back to university and study something for the sake of study. Philosophy? Being “the love of Wisdom” it would seem to be the ideal choice. That said, I think I really just want to talk about stuff. About how “Men are from Mars….” is really just a rehash of The Naked Ape. And to make bold statements designed to boil the blood, get some heated debate going and then order some more capuccino. Extra marshmallows on mine, please. In the film as presumably in the play, the characters are excessively verbose in their speech which is the benefit of being a character in a play as opposed to real life. We would hope few people speak like that in their day to day dealings. It made me think that it might actually be a crime that I’ve been to Paris as an adult, six or seven times but never been inside the Louvre. I don’t think it makes me a bad person but I feel that next time might be the time. Even just to sweep through the highlights (but which ones? The actual masterpieces? The ones mentioned in The DaVinci Code?).

Man, these words speak to me tonight. Bennet’s play/film was funny, irreverent, used a little too much “taboo” to give it edge and we can debate for hours on whether the use of profanity was ironic or cynical. It’s not a bad show, though and if you decide not to see it, then I can tell you that they all die in the end. So sad. A little like real life, n’est ce pas?

Frost’s poem “The Road Less Travelled By” is very poignant for me for many reasons. Would I be substantially different had I studied arts rather than science? If my family had not moved from the countryside of Fermanagh to the divided town of Lisburn? Should I have zigged rather than zagged? Did I tell the truth too soon or too late? A friend of mine calls this “the If game”.

I’m going to leave you with the immortal words of Van Halen, a great 20th Century philosopher in his seminal work, “Best of Both Worlds”,

I don't know what I've been livin' on, but
It's not enough to fill me up
I need more than just words can say
I need everything this life can give me.

On other news, we’re going to open the source to SyncBridge. Let me hear ya say yay…

This post on “positivesharing.com has some pictures of seriously cool workspaces. While the Pixar workspace could only work for Pixar, the Red Bull workspace shows really the excesses of clean white space. Mindlab in Denmark again has some cool and funky workspace – but does cool and funky really mean that your work will be so much better?

At the NewWorkSpace we’re looking for “cool” but “neutral”. What works best? Where have you seen the best places to work?

Last night was the third local Cocoaheads meeting. Thansk to Phil and Chris for turning up and making me not sit like a spod with no wireless.

We discussed IP routing through odd interfaces (as Chris likes his Frankenstein machines) and whether or not Mac OS X is a real UNIX as judged by gnarly old UNIX cusses with long beards. We discussed SyncBridge, Leopard, Calendar server and some of the things that Infurious plans to do with the recent announcements. Business is brisk enough and I think we’re really entering a new era for Mac calendaring. There’s certainly opportunity.

Apple’s interface for iCal is really clean but then they can “make it so” because they have the source code 🙂

I attempted (and Phil took over) to show Chris about Cocoa and Interface Builder and we both espoused the advantages of comprehensive libraries. We discussed Delicious Library and their sales, Gus Muellers “The Life”.

It seems CocoaHeads is less about the Cocoa and more about just “technical Mac stuff”. If that’s the way the vox populi wants it then who am I to argue?

We are looking for a talented, motivated code monkey who wants smoke and promises in lieu of salary. Any takers? 🙂

I’m at Apple Expo this week, soaking up the rays and generally enjoying myself. If you’re there too, drop me a quick line and we can do coffee!

There’s “standards” and there’s “standards”. The former is an agreed set of protocols or formats designed to assist information exchange. The latter is a ad-hoc adherence to a certain format or protocol because “everyone else is doing it” or “I’m too lazy to configure my email properly”.

Email users sometimes find that they receive email messages with a strange file attached, called winmail.dat. When they attempt to open this file, either it can’t be opened at all, or it contains garbage.

The situation causing this is that people are using several different email client programs to receive, read, and send email. Normally that’s fine and causes no problems. Microsoft Outlook does not “play nice” with the other email programs all the time unfortunately and this causes problems, not for the sender of the email, but the recipient, particularly when actual files are attached to messages.

If someone emails you to complain that they couldn’t read your attachments, or to ask what this “winmail.dat” file is that you sent them, chances are you sent this email using Microsoft Outlook 97/2000 (or, very remotely possibly, another product using Microsoft Exchange Server). Although you are not the one having the problem, you are the one who gets to fix the problem because, at the end of the day, YOU CAUSED THE PROBLEM by using a proprietary version of RTF which wrapped your attachment up. If you’d used plain text or even HTML it would be okay….

Solution:

If you’re kinda selfish but the the recipient is in your address book and he complains a lot:

• Open up your Outlook Address Book, either by clicking on the Address Book icon or by choosing Tools->Address Book
• Select the recipient’s entry in your address book and open up their Properties, either by clicking on the Properties button or double- clicking on the recipient’s entry.
• Select the “Name” tab in the Properties dialog window.
• Check the box at the bottom of the window that says “Send email using plain text only”.
• Click the “OK” button.

If you enter the recipient’s address manually in the To: line of your email message and like the extra work:

EACH TIME you send a message to this person, you must:

• Create a new email message as you normally would, but before sending it,
• Choose Format->Plain Text from the menu bar.
• Now send your message.

If you want to change your default sending mode which proves you might be ready to be an internet citizen:

You may change your default sending mode in Outlook, thereby sending all email messages as plain text, by doing the following:

• Select Tools->Options from the Outlook menu bar.
• Select the “Mail Format” tab in the dialog window.
• In the first drop-down list, under the “Message Format” heading, select Plain Text
• Click the “OK” button.

Can you tell I spent half of this week working on Windows problems and the other half working on Mac OS 9 problems? That’s BOUND to annoy the nipples off anyone!

The Mulley posted a link to a YouTube-hosted AmEx advert “Pong v Roddick”.

Now, obviously I’m a sucker for this. I’m unlikely to ever get AmEx again having escaped from their vicelike grip four years ago. I’m certainly never walking down that road again. But I digress.

The advert, for those who can’t be bothered watching, has some tennis player (Roddick) being placed against the PONG cursor. I remember playing PONG YEARS ago (I mean, pre-1980 – which in itself is, for many of today’s entrepreneurs, a distant age which they label as “before I was even born, man”). I am getting so old. Damn. Even my 4 year old daughter tuts at the white tufts in my beard saying that it makes me look like an old man….and that’s bad because, in her words, “old men die!”. More digression.

PONG, in the video, represents an almost unbeatable, implacable foe. With it’s smooth, white exterior it weathers all of Roddick’s best plays. It moves with the speed of thought, it’s massive surface reflects the ball with ease. In this way we see the small-business entrepreneur represented by the lone human and the vast, blind PONG cursor as being your big competitor (BT, Google, Microsoft, Sage – pick your own Goliath!). In the end the human wins by zigging instead of zagging – by making a move that takes advantage of the relative lack of agility of the big cursor. Sure – it, like a big company, can move blindly fast when you stick to it’s rules, when you force it to move along it’s well-established and well-crewed lines of business. But getting a corporation, ostensibly the ultimate committee, to move “diagonally” just shows how lumbering they can be.

So, while we try to be all Bedouin everywhere (and more on that elsewhere as we start moving our pawns and I refuse to digress right now), we need to learn how to move diagonally. And as an example I’ll tell a wee story.

When my first business moved into it’s second office, we needed to put up some stud walls. The obvious instinct was to put up a wall parallel to the existing walls of this small “suspended ceiling and trunking supplied” crypt.

Don’t just do something, stand there!

I questioned this assumption at the time and managed to convince the other guys to help me construct a strange serpentine affair which maximised the amount of wall space we would gain. Sure – working out the angles probably doubled the time it took to build – but we ended up with more space to put desks, narrower corridor-type spaces and a decent sized “reception” area for customers to lounge about in.

Was it a mistake? Well, probably. After the fact there were some complaints about it – but no-one had a better idea at the time and we planned it for two weeks. I’m unsure sometimes about whether it was a lack of commitment to the vision, but essentially the “out of the box” idea beat the “same old thing” ideas without hesitation.

Do you take the time to look at the current plan and see whether there’s a diagonal route?