Adium X

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So, I have been playing with IM a little this weekend, trying to reconcile the many IM accounts I seem to have acquired recently (mostly with something else). I now have a Google Talk IM for work use, my Yahoo! account that I’ve been using for a long time, my GizmoProject account and a test account I setup at Jabber.org (though I don’t use that for much). I also wanted to play with iChat‘s video conferencing.

But how to deal with all these different IM systems without running them all (if that was even an option, which it is not since Google haven’t learnt to support Linux and Mac OS X yet).

So, on my Linux box I am using Gaim. It works, though it is not exactly the most advanced client out there. On the Mac though I found Adium X. Now this is cool, and yet more evidence of how far Linux desktops have to go before they come close to Mac OS. It looks good and it works well. Gaim works OK, but does not have the looks of Adium X.

Finally, I used the iChat video conferencing system for a trans-Atlantic video conference and it worked pretty well. Was a little fussy getting connected once or twice (gave a very strange error message saying I didn’t respond when I was the person initiating the call), but when it worked the video looked good and the sound worked using the builtin mic & speakers (no headset needed).

Please Close the Light

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The sign on the inside of the restroom at the Bubblezone restaurant on Clement Street in San Francisco. I only had the cell phone with me so the quality is not great, but considering it was inside a small room and has no flash of any kind, I thought it did an OK job. Certainly good enough to read the engrish in the sign.

The Chinese version reads (I believe): ‘Close light & Close door’ (é–‰ and é–€ are two of the few things I know; I’m guessing that the first word in each clause is meant to be some form of ‘close’). My Mac translates turn off the light as ‘關閉光’ and close the door as ‘關閉門’ (notice the similarities).

Bayport Sales Procedure Changes

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Cove PricesWe were in the sales office today and learned of a new sales procedure to be used from the next release (in two weeks). Instead of the in-person lottery, they are going to use a telephone based system where people call in and leave a message on the answerphone indicating the lot they are interested in, and optionally a second choice. The sales office will call the winners back later on the Saturday, or on Sunday to make an appointment for the initial paperwork to be completed.

I have also tried to update the graphs from the information Carl provided (with some different phase numbers taken from the old master plan, and the fact that the next Cove release is in fact phase 44 (which matches the original plan).

Developing a Web Application?

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Ryan Carson, creator of DropSend, has an interesting audio [mp3] presentation [pdf] about launching an enterprise web application. You can check out his blog entry at 37signals for quicker overview of the presentation.

There are more audio presentations from a CarsonWorkshops one day conference on the future of web apps. Haven’t listened to them all yet, but I’m working on it…

Thanks to John Sinteur’s posting at the Daily Irrelevant for the pointer.

Cherry Blossom Macro

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Taken a while back, on my walk around Marina Village in Alameda, this is a much closer shot of a single cherry blossom. I suspect that the heavy storms of the last week have probably stripped the trees of any remaining blossoms (there were reports of winds gusting up to 100mph in the bay area – it would take a tough cherry blossom to survive that!).

New Laptop

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A funny sequence of events resulted in me trying a Thinkpad X40 as my work laptop (replacing the T41p that I had been using). The X40 is slower, has less HD space and a lower resolution screen, but it is smaller and lighter.

First job was to remove WIndoze XP and replace it with Fedora Core 4. That was painless (assuming you have the media tray piece that adds the optical drive). Getting some other things setup took a little longer. I ended up with the MadWiFi driver from their old sourceforge project CVS. Running on top of that is Devicescape‘s Secure Wireless Client (basically wpa_supplicant) and its associated GUI (seen in the screen shot).

I also have gdesklets to provide some desktop utilities like the calendar, world time clocks and Wi-Fi status indicator. And then the desktop wallpaper, which I got from a Novell site, and shows Tux trying to swat a Microsoft butterfly.

Unusual Graffiti

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On a column outside the Longs Drugs store in Marina Village, Alameda was this very unusual graffiti. At least, I assume that it is graffiti. Looks like it was sprayed on through a template. Didn’t see any more like it (and I’ve not noticed them anywhere else before). All in all, very strange.

More on Flickr.

Faith Partially Restored

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In the last few weeks I have received two requests from people who would like permission to use one of my photographs for a project that they are working on.

The first was for a shot of some meerkats at Oakland Zoo, to be used in an educational program at the Boston Museum of Science. The second was the shot of California’s Capitol building shown to the right, being used on a web page for a student lobbying day event. Thank you both for asking first.

In general, I have no problem with people using my photos for non-commercial reasons as long as they ask first. I am less impressed by the increasing number of people using my photos on their pages at myspace, xanga, livejournal and other similar sites without asking or even adding a credit. Beyond my limit though is usage by sites like Fark.com on pages that require a paid subscription; that is unauthorised commercial usage.