On eating proper food: Thinking back myself to the point around 6-12 months ago where I stopped getting ill and dropped down a jean size was also the point at which I started cooking proper food myself.

Last night myself and housemates D and M forsaked the usual Friday night takeout for a chicken curry that was surprisingly easy to make. And heaps cheaper, of course. Also this week I’ve had pasta in a tomato sauce with chicken and bacon, chicken stir-fry with a lime, corriander and soy sauce and pork with mashed potato and a creamy leek and musard sauce. Sometimes when you don’t feel like cooking it’s nice to have housemates that will either motivate you to do so or even to do it for you.

My two sources of inspriation at the moment are the BBC Food site and the Sainsbury Local by South Ealing tube. I usually decide what meat (including none) I want and build a meal up around that. Add some carbs, a few vegetables and the rest is all down to experimentation. I’m still learning which flavours go well with each other and which herbs and spices to use under different circumstances.

Stir fries are always good if you’re not sure quite what you want to eat – the shops always seem to have the right ingredients even at 9pm after a long day at work. And the corner shop always has fresh ginger.

I try not to buy packets or jars. It’s easy to cook up that jar of pasta sauce in five minutes if it’s sitting there in the back of the cupboard but if it’s not there then I’ll use the can of tomatoes, the tomato puree and the vegatables instead. It might take a bit longer but it’s worth it for the feeling of accomplishment alone.

I think cooking is like blogging – it’s all about keeping up the disclipline. Get out the habit for a while and youn lose it. But keep on at it and gradually over time you start to suck less ;-).

Matt – working in a small company is new to me too. or at least it was two months ago. Now it’s just that daily routine of getting as much stuff done in a day as you can that I have to deal with.

This week the big event was undoubtedly yesterday’s web seminar with MySQL. I spent a lot of time working on the web infrastructure for this, and the effort I’ve put in will hopefully mean we’ll be able to deploy similar resources more readily in the future. Now that we have a proper place for white papers and for newletter sign-ups, it’s just a simple matter of linking this into the existing content we already have on the site.

I’d also like to welcome Chenoa and Villmond Luxembourg SARL as officially-listed partners on our site, which sees the total list rise to 19 partner organisations. It’s not me who’s put in the hard work in bringing these guys on board, but it’s nice to be part of the process that gets this news out to the world.

When I think back to the second I first read about Alfresco some five months ago (and on the other side of the globe, to boot) I was convinced that this company was going places. This week has done more than any other to cement this in my mind. And yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done to realise this, but I guess at least it’s better than being bored :-).

Catching up on blogs seems to be all I’ve had time to do lately with the hecticness of work being as it is at the moment, but now I’ve discovered a way of absorbing the latest open source goings on while I get on with other things!

Mirroring what we’re working to get off the ground at Alfresco at the moment, Novell recently launched Novell Open Audio to the world. I gave it a listen to last night mainly to see what kind of stuff they were doing in their podcasts, and ended up listening intently to the guys talking about iFolder and the collaboration features that they’ve built on top of the stack with the latest 3.0 release. Very interesting stuff indeed, and quite a lot of potential cross-over with the colloboration stuff that we have in Alfresco.

Also interesting is how they’ve now split off a community version of iFolder (complete with the compulsory shiny-MediaWiki-for-a-website thing just like F-Spot, Banshee and Mono – clearly a great way of getting content up on your site) from the enterprise offering and how they’ve split their people between those two areas.

I didn’t get round to listening to the second half of the 50 minute show about NLD, but I’ll make sure I do when I get a chance. Truly engaging stuff – we’ve got a lot to live up to!

The thing about blogging is that whenever some really big thing happens in your life, you get so caught up in dealing with that really big thing that you never get round to actually writing anything about it.

So we moved into the new flat (it’s shiny!) last Monday and since then things have been slowly coming together. The compulsory trip to IKEA was undertaken on Saturday (the car park experience being one which I hope I won’t have to repeat anytime soon), the new sofas arrived yesterday and today the most wonderful thing has happenned – our broadband has been turned on.

Maybe I’ll get home and it won’t work at all, but for now I’m happy. And I’m certainly not staying late in the office today. I have things to play with!

Update: It works!

Apparently the fantasticness of Gmail is soon to be available for business use, with Google now piloting the service within San Jose City College in San Jose, California. They’re also accepting registrations from other organisations interested in taking part, via the original blog post. (How scary does the “Google Blog” sound?)

This kind of service that offers a real compelling alternative to the hosted Outlook type of service that we use for email at Alfresco at the moment. With 2GB of storage per user and the power of Google’s search technology, this is going to turn the market on it’s head.

Today we followed up our recent aquisition of alfresco.com with the quiet deployment of our two newly re-designed web sites.

We’ve made a big effort to cater to two distinct audiences (call them markets, if you like) with the new sites. Our company site at www.alfresco.com (although the www.alfrescosoftware.com also still works for backwards compatibility) has been overhauled to make it much easier to get at information about the Alfresco platform and the services we offer around it.

Some of the bigger changes we’ve made here are as follows:

• The creation of a five-step introduction to Alfresco, designed to help people get to know the product and featured prominently on the front page of the site
• An overhaul of the news feeds featured on the front page – we’ve added separate feeds for news stories, events and product updates so you can just get the news you want
• A complete re-design of the registration form for our basic online demo, and the addition of two new forms that allow you to register for our extended 30 day demo or our enterprise download trial
• Our training information (a key part of our strategy to introduce more people to Alfresco) has been brought up to date
• We’ve improved the general usability of the site by increasing font sizes and making links clearer
• Many other bug fixes and cosmetic changes…

Our community site at www.alfresco.org will become the focus for community activity around Alfresco. This has been through some even more radical changes, having been re-implemented from the ground up to give it a better fit with the look and feel of the company site.

• We’ve added a brand new downloads page that we hope will make it easier to get at the open source download you want faster
• We’ve started linking through to content that we already had in our wiki and other developer resources but hadn’t really publicised before – this marks the start of our pulling together of the developer/community content that we have scattered across various systems
• We’ve added a new community page where we’ll be providing a bit more information about how to get involved with Alfresco

The key thing is that this only marks the start of our efforts to improve our web infrastructure and we’ll be debuting a number of other changes in this area over the next few months. Stay tuned! 🙂

ZDNet have a story today about a pretty big deployment of Zope that’s going to be happenning at RBS. The article discusses how open source is slowly moving up into the application layer, previously a place filled with mostly proprietary apps.

I’ve personally tried to use Zope before, but only the once. Maybe I was looking for the wrong thing, but I ended up disappointed and didn’t use it again. Obviously there’s a few people out there who have different views.

What Zope does seem to have is a large base of developers and contributors around it, which has given RBS somewhere to recruit a number of specialists from (I can personally testify that most recruitment agents don’t know a lot about the open source industry). So could the characteristics of the group of developers around a product actually be a factor for an organisation looking to deploy an open source platform?

I never liked that block of flats by the river, but somehow they almost seem to fit in with the rest of the picture.

I’m still pretty tired from my trip up to Leam at the weekend but I’m glad I decided to go. Hope the phone’s OK, Matt! 🙁

Consider this a “I’ve just set up my blog!” token post, that however old and experienced I get I can never resist writing, despite the fact that these kind of entries rarely contain any useful information at all.

Setting up WordPress was less straightforward than I’d imaged (or hoped), although I suspect this was mainly due to MySQL not liking two character user names. Shame it didn’t tell me that.

Other random installation notes:

• WordPress doesn’t let you specify your name during the install, so unless you want all your subsequent blog posts to be posted by ‘admin’ then you have to create a new user straight away. This takes more clicks than necessary.
• Version 2.0 is still a bit buggy, it seems. As it suggested, I deleted the existing ‘Hello World’ post that had been created as part of the installation without any problems. Then I came to delete the orphaned comment that seemed to have left behind, but it seemed it just hadn’t bothered updating the screen. I got a really nasty error about there not being a post with that ID and had to click the back button. Gah.

Wrapping WordPress in a PHP container that can automatically create new blogs and populate them with sensibly-named users, etc. is definitely something that needs doing. That should make the installation process at least less painful. Or we can wait for version three :-).

Today I officially entered week two of the flat hunt, with a second Saturday spent tramping round Ealing looking for somewhere to live. The more time I spend wandering around the area, the more I [heart] Ealing, although that doesn’t necessarily help me find somewhere to live there.

So nowhere concrete yet, but there’s a couple of promising places, and more leads to follow up on next week.

The Park was nice, even if today in general was disgustingly wet and miserable. Enough to dent the enthusiam of even the most determined of flathunters. But not too much.