I’m still annoyed at the whole software patents thing, don’t get me wrong. But something else in the news I’ve been reading this evening caught my eye.

So via the as always excellent ZDNet comes an article about the UK software supplier whose intranet has been ranked in the top ten in the world by a study carried out by Jakob Nielsen’s Nielsen Norman Group.

In a nutshell, the company have it seems, applied a radical new approach to the management of their intranet site, using a Wikipedia-style model whereby employees are encouraged to contribute to the site, with enormous success.

This is interesting for two main reasons. Firstly, it completely goes against the traditional model of intranet design, and secondly, it’s similar to a concept I’ve been working on recently at work. I’ll spare you the details of all that here, but suffice to say the concepts have me interested enough to be doing background research in my spare time 🙂

Oh crap.

That is all.

And so the steady trickle of photos from the infamous night continues. It’s not the last of the photos I have by any means, but it is the last of the non-shameful ones at least 🙂

Continue reading →

Tal – I tried adding you to Planet Afterlife but all your entries came up at the top of the page. So I had to remove you again, sorry! Aren’t you impressed I remembered though? 🙂

Looking at it in more depth, it seems to be some weird thing with the dates of the posts not coming through in the RSS. Is that TypePad being weird or what?

I got up early today so I had time to take a few photos of the snow in Leam before I went to work. The ones I took on campus came out better than them though.

On a slightly related note, I spent a good few hours last night tinkering with the PHP code from the old wabson.org and eventually managed to get it working again. Or at least, I got the photos section working to the extent it was when I replaced the lot with MT.

The photos will all be uploaded to wabson.org when I get round to it, but they’ll be static HTML versions, rather than being generated on-the-fly using PHP. This means nobody will be able to add any new comments, but instead it’ll all be preserved more or less the way it was twelve months ago. Which seems somehow apt.

I got my camera back on it, having found it lying on the side of Gibbet Hill Road yesterday afternoon. Amazingly, it still worked fine too! So here’s the first installment of photos from Friday night…

Last night I lost my camera, lost my friends, chased people down Gibbet Hill Road and almost ended up in a fight.

Fuck.

Got into work at 8 today, yay me! I feel so much calmer for having done so, not having had to rush in to get the last of the free parking and not having had to crawl up Stoneleigh Road to the lights at 10mph.

I’m the first one in the office and hopefully I’ll be the first one out this afternoon. Don’t get me wrong – its not like I hate my job, I just have plans 🙂

Wikipedia is simply amazing. It’s possibly the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet – a searchable repository of information on just about every topic under the sun, compiled by civilisation, for use by civilisation. And I’ve just discovered it tonight.

As a random collection of topics that mean something to me, there’s information about the island I grew up on, the town I went to school in, the University I studied at and which I now work, and the Students’ Union in which I’ve spent far too much time and money over the years. This rocks so much.

I’ve so far managed to restrain myself from editing anything so far, but as I’ve registered an account it’s probably only a matter of time…

Everyone on Planet GNOME is talking about Novell‘s latest efforts in the open-source arena: a brand new email and calendar server called Hula. It’s apparently based on an old Novell product called Netmail, which they’ve open-sourced and developed a hell of a lot of new ideas around. You can download this now should you wish to, but the really interesting stuff is some of the stuff they have planned.

So what’s all the fuss about? Why is Planet GNOME filled with so many people talking about this? Well, it’s more about what it says about Novell and their strategic direction than the product itself, as exciting as it does look.

Novell are talking a lot of risks at the moment, there’s no doubt about that. Amonst other things they’ve taken on a popular Linux distro, a fully-fledged Outlook clone that they’re now porting to Windows, a programming framework to rival Microsoft’s .NET and even brought out their own desktop Linux product. Most of these open-source products are competing with established proprietary alternatives that they already have out there in the marketplace.

Perhaps this is the last ditch attempt at survival from a company that’s been so hammered by its rivals over the years and seen the market share for most of its products plummet, but you’ve got to respect the people who are willing to take this many risks.

And I’m not Microsoft-bashing here. No doubt Microsoft used their trademark dodgy business practices along the way, but they killed the old Novell by producing software that basically works a hell of a lot better than anything Novell ever made. Netware, Groupwise and the rest of the old products really do suck ass, and I really quite resent the fact that we have to spend so much time coaxing them back into life at work when they break time and time again.

But the new Novell has something that they’ve never had before. They have energy, they have a determination to succeed and they’ve got guts. And as a result, they’re producing software that Works.

Just like the Mozilla Foundation did with Firefox and Thunderbird, they’re breathing new life into areas of the software ecosystem that have stagnated over recent years, to say the least.

They’re innovating, both in terms of software functionality and in terms of the development models used to produce it. And I for that reason I really do hope they succeed.