Dave Snowdon

After months of procrastination, over the Christmas break I finally got around to converting my site from running SPIP to running drupal. SPIP is easy to use and configure and quite good at what it's aimed at - on-line magazines. However, I never really got on with with it and got the site set up the way I wanted.

I like VMware. I run Linux on my home machine and VMware makes it pretty painless to run a Windows XP VM (not to mention other flavours of Windows and Linux) so I can test sites on different browsers and run MS Word when Open Office is not sufficient.

Each time I start VMware workstation a tip-of-the-day dialog appears. I rarely pay it a lot of attention but haven’t turned it of because I figure that one day it might tell me something useful. However, that day is not today.

Take a look at this:

It’s perhaps not the most interesting subject, but it seems to me that packaging has (mostly) got smarter over the last decade or so. I don’t mean that technology is built into the packaging itself but that it seems to have been designed more intelligently. For example, boxes that might once have been glued or stapled together now unfold out of a single piece of cardboard and require glue on one seam at most (maybe I buy too much stuff from Amazon).

For a while now I’ve been on the lookout for some project planning software that suits my needs better than my current system which consists of a collection of text files, some MS Word documents and bits of paper.

I was browsing the book bins randomly in a charity shop when I came across "From here, you can’t see Paris" by Michael Sanders and since I was short of something to read, bought it.

It’s a lovely and poignant description of life in modern rural France.

My father died last week and in his memory I’ve decided to publish the only part of his autobiography that he got around to writing. It covers the period from June 1927 to December 1944. Apart from my emotional involvement, I feel his account is interesting because it describes a world that feels so different to the present day.

I was wasting time looking at today’s poll about frequency of air travel on slashdot when I came across this comment.

I finally got around to buying an iPhone 3G about a month ago. I thought about writing a review but didn’t because there is not exactly a shortage of iPhone reviews out there. However, I do feel that one of the central lessons of the iPhone’s success has not been learnt by Apple’s competitors.

When the iPhone was first launched there were people queuing up to announce that it would be a flop because:

I came across this blog entry entitled "Woe is Wii" a couple of days ago and can’t resist commenting any longer.

Apparently the Wii is still the best selling console and supposedly, unlike Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo makes a profit on hardware sales so you’d think there would be nothing to complain about, right?