Violent Acres has a wee sermon on how to fight.

It’s fun reading. I’ve always found that responding to imminent violence with confidence works wonders.

I used to fight a lot in school. Always hauled up for it. In primary school there were two guys, Martin and Colin, who I fought with a lot. Just stupid kids stuff. I remember feeling horriby guilty when standing over one of them after bloodying his nose and stuttering “Well, you shouldn’t have pushed me….” In later years in primary school we played “Bulldog” which was just organised brutality. We played fighting like a sport.

In grammar school, things were different. I fought a lot with a guy (Philip) over a girl (Bronagh). And neither of us got the girl anyway. He found out that I was, frankly, besotted and spent 4 years teasing and generally being an obnoxious ****. And it was all because he liked her too. And I lost a lot of fights. A lot. It was never too bad because I don’t bruise easily but it was damaging to the ego. The fights stopped in Lower VIth because he lost once and spent the day with a bruise on his cheek. And mostly because I stopped fighting like a 4 year old and actually made a fist.

I immediately enrolled in my first martial arts class and since then I have never needed to fight. Fighting just never finds me. I’m not that good at fighting because, well, my heart was never in tournaments (fighting for the sake of fighting) but there is an impression others have that I’m a big guy who can do “high kicks to the head”.

Confidence in the face of greater numbers also saved my brother from a beating when, growing up, he was chased home by a dozen kids from the local council estate. We, being Catholics, were the odd ones out in that town in the late 80s and it was Northern Ireland with all that implies. One of his friends had reached the house before him and told me about the impending mob and I went calmly downstairs and out into the street with my nunchaku and every single one of the thugs turned round and walked away. The confidence and implied threat of violence from an older brother was much greater than their intended beating of a small, thin boy.

My attitude to fighting is summed up by a quote at the end of The Mexican. Jerry is captured by Margolese and extolls about how if they take him down “someone is going to lose an eye or not be able to fuck or something”.

It’s that confidence and philosophy which has kept me (physically) fight free for 15 years….

The speaker is David Heinermeier Hansson. He created Ruby on Rails. The full quote is:

• Apple will continue to trounce everyone else for the preferred geek platform. The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.

To be honest, the stigma of being on Windows no matter your occupation will increase. Now more than ever, Mac OS X is seen as a premium computing device as much as the iPod is a premium music player.

The quote above comes from the annual SYS-CON predictions from top industry players.

It’s interesting to compare some of the predictions. Gary Cornell, founder of Apress (a company that is to Windows as O’Reilly is to Open Source technology) says:

• IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
  Sales of high powered desktop will slow.
  Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.

Interesting take, Mr Cornell. More wishful thinking rather than prediction I reckon.

Mark Hinkle of Enterprise Open Source Magazine reckons:

• Microsoft’s launch of Vista will start to prompt hardware refreshes which can be nothing but good for Apple. Apple already has momentum, Intel hardware, dropping prices and all the tumblers are becoming aligned for it to creep above its measly 5% market share. Linux desktop vendors will likely see a few defectors from the Redmond camp…

John Evdemon of Microsoft says:

• IT finally admits that there is no silver bullet. Every year I hope to see this happen and every year my hopes are crushed by buzzword-of-the-minute hype machines.

Uh John? It’s your employer who was been promising the Silver Bullet all these years. You’re an Architect at Microsoft, John, you write the software that powers the hype machine.

Bill Dudley of the Eclipse Development Journal says:

• Macs will continue their ‘thought leader’ adoption curve. This is not the year they start to penetrate the corporate IT department.

Brandon Harper of Acxiom Corp says:

• People who normally wouldn’t use Linux start to explore it and even replace Windows with it permanently.

This will be dwarfed by the number of people upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows Vista with the purchase of a new machine.

I’ve just cherry-picked the Mac-relevant its but there’s heaps more in the article. A lot on AJAX, web services, Software as a Service - it’s worth a read if you have any interest in emerging technology. All of the writers have something to contribute, apart from David Cornell.

I like Paul Murphy, the nom-de-guerre of Rudy de Haas. His book, The Unix Guide to Defenestration was a very good read from the point of view of someone wanting to set up a service-based IT organisation and a lot of the hints and tips in there are worth their weight in something much more valuable than gold.

He also writes one of the blogs at ZDNet which I guess is a good place to go if you want to be paid for this sort of writing.

But Fridays MacTel: “the real story” is a load of tosh. And Thursdays Cringley, MacTel, and nutty theories is just raving lunacy. Slow news day?

But it’s more explained that Paul is a SUN/SPARC/Solaris bigot the way that I am an Apple/Mac/Mac OS X bigot. That is to say neither of us are blind in our decisions - I blieve we both make educated decisions about our technology and we know what we like. I used to really like Slowlaris but then I found myself with no hardware to run on it (and I have had passions for HP-UX, Ultrix and even the odd Linux distro in the past). I’ve not heard of anyone running Solaris on the new x86-based Macs…which might prompt me to have a fourth HD in my Mac Pro (adding to the existing Tiger, Leopard, Windows).

I don’t know all the facts obviously but I do know what Apple will do and both Paul and Cringely are way off base here.

I’m just going to point you at a comment I made on Jame’s Eirepreneur blog about the differences between Serviced Offices, Virtual Offices and Bedouin workspaces. Apparently it was good enough to deserve it’s own post.

This is an area I’m really excited about.

In this post I’m kinda defining the difference between Bedouin and Hobo. See, Bedouin to me kinda of assumes that the worker is running around with his “tribe” (sometimes called a ‘posse’). this can just be one other guy or it can be a bevy of workers, assistants and anyone else your company needs to function. The Hobo is the lone worker. Not quite as fun I imagine but then in cubicle workspaces in a big company you may as well be a hobo worker.

Back in 1999, with the development of a new office building, I pleaded with my employer to put in wireless and hot-desking. I saw it as being a real opportunity. They ignored me at their peril. Heh! Blindness was only one of their faults. It took a 1:10 reverse stock split to bring that price back into respectability.

We’re still looking for funding for some stuff before we open the doors…..but after we do, I fully expect to move in full time

I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had a chance to blog in a wee while. Or so it seems.

I find myself presented with not only a dentist appointment (*groan*) but also three exams. Sure, they’re just multiple choice exams but they’re for a certification - one that means something. So it’s not really like the others I’ve done in the past which were as much “for fun” as anything else.

Anyway - the big hoopla at the moment is the rumour that Adobe intends to release a public beta of CS3 on the 15th. It’s unlikely because when has Adobe ever released anything 2 quarters earlier than their announcement date, but there you have it. They must be hurting from the reports of Universal Quark Xpress.

As a bloke on the Nutters mailing list put it -
“it won’t be just a beta, it’ll be in production the very next day. I can just hear the sounds of a million Mac techs screaming!”

and that’s a very valid point. I know quite a few designers who have migrated to Intel Macs already and are just waiting for the release of CS3 and taking plenty of opportunity to have a wee moan about the state of Rosetta on the Intel Macs. Rosetta is fabulous but some of these guys are expecting it to be native. Unrealistic I know - but there’s no telling some people!

So the moment this beta hits the streets there will be plagues of print bureaus (most of them still with Mac OS 9 remember?) complaining that they can’t open these new file formats. Or something. Or if there are unsupported features? Where do you get support for a beta? Answer: you don’t!

Beta seems to be the fashion now. Beta has always meant “unfinished” but these days it’s seen as a “bonus”, a “marketing flash”, a “corporate gift”.

Michael Kanellos has the dirt.

He tells us that Apple will come out with a new phone and tells us that it will fail.

This has got to be some sort of record. A product, that a company has not acknowledged it is developing, will fail, based on projections from a journalist on properties the company has not claimed, actions from Apple that have not been revealed and just sheer conjecture. This is headline-grabbing at it’s best.

“So when consumers get to that counter at CompUSA, they will debate buying the Apple phone, and even hold it up for a look. But when they whip out the credit card, they’ll probably opt for a Motorola.”

This is why technology journalists should probably be tagged with some sort of indelible dye. And a radio transmitter. So that the rest of us can acknowledge they are living in their little Walter Mitty lives.

He’s not alone of course. There was an article last week claiming that the iPhone had run into trademark troubles because the name “iPhone” is owned by a Canadian company. Are these people shrinkwrapped?

It hasn’t been named, hinted, announced, press released and doesn’t exist so far outside of the fevered imaginations of headline writers in the technology industry.

Fucking idiots.

The Seattle Times writes:“Imagine this. One of the world’s most powerful monopolies puts 10,000 people to work for five years to create one new product. And nobody is really sure if anyone wants it. How’s that for a gamble?”

And what a great effort it is. Turns out it’s still vulnerable to MyDoom and Netsky. Brilliant work there guys. Probably $10 billlion dollars spent, at least 2 years late and it’s still vulnerable to 2-year-old Windows malware!

“Ballmer says Microsoft tried to innovate too much. So the company reorganized and tried to placate impatient consumers by shipping Service Pack 2 for Windows XP then rebooted the whole Vista effort in mid-2004. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much Microsoft flushed down the toilet.”

Ballmer’s only half right. The whole shebang was developed by marketeers and executives using Flash/Director to emulate what should happen long before an engineer wrote a line of code.

They didn’t try to innovate too much. That’s doing a disservice to their legions of dedicated engineers who were told to create real magic out of smoke and mirrors.

I hope every software company takes note.