Category: General

Today's Observer column by John Naughton quotes something from Umberto Eco about drawing analogies between Catholicisism and Protestantism and Macs and PCs which I hadn't heard before. The rest of the article goes on to talk about the Apple-toting Obama team being shocked by the locked down state of the White House's IT infrastructure (I'd … Continue reading The true church of Steve

With about half of the 400 people who are provided IT by my team using Apple devices, I'm particularly sensitive to all of the news about Steve Jobs' ailing health (see Medical leave for Apple boss Jobs). The future of Apple as a supplier is one thing (and concerns about the company's imminent demise without … Continue reading Steve Jobs – get well soon

Interesting article on The Register, summing up some of the challenges that I find in trying to provide Mac OS on a corporate scale... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/apple_more_closed_than_microsoft/

An interesting day spent today at a conference run by IDC looking at the world of Unified Communications (the convergence of telephone, mobile and data). The main observations that I had out of the back of the event was that there seems to be little or no unification of mobile and fixed-line technologies at present (mainly … Continue reading Unified communications

Over the years I have had many a heated discussion about how generally ineffective money is in motivating people. "Oh, but the only reason I go to work is to get paid" and similar... Now, this isn't to say that there is no connection between money and how motivated someone is - just that it … Continue reading The (de)motivational effect of money

...by linking to its article about the death of blogging...

Six weeks now into my new role, and it is becoming clearer to me that there are still major challenges for the open source community in providing services into corporate environments. Whilst the "products" from the open source community are often as good (if not better) than commercially licensed software, at the moment it seems … Continue reading Open source challenges

My continuing attempts to get with the 21st century are being experimented with again here - in principal, this should mean that I can blog automatically via email.   Heck, I still see Teletext as being fairly neat...

Two and a half weeks into my new role now, and unfortunately have spent quite some time in the past few days in Kingston Hospital as my partner has required some treatment. At one point, when yet another paper form was being filled in by one of the extremely helpful nurses, she commented that (given both my partner … Continue reading Why a single NHS computer system is so scary…

I've completed my search for a new job now... I've a couple of week's off before I get started, but will soon be going to work for Imagination. Thoroughly looking forward to the new challenges.