RE: What will happen to Millennium Volunteers?

February 8th, 2007

See this post from last October for background. To sum up, it talks about the future of Millennium Volunteers, a government programme which we deliver in Solent Youth Action. In particular, wondering about the future of the scheme.

I heard an update about this today in a statement issued from the Cabinet Office:

As an Millennium Volunteers (MV) delivery partner you are aware that the management of the MV programme is transferring from DfES to the Cabinet Office from 1st April 2007 … The funding for this period is secure and the MV programme will be funded in its current form until 30th September 2007.

The Cabinet Office wishes v to take on management of the programme from 1st April 2007 as recommended by the Russell Commission. We wanted to update you on the discussions that are currently taking place regarding this suggestion.

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Accessing Pocket Outlook email programmatically

February 6th, 2007

screenshotI mentioned ages ago about a little extension I wrote for my phone that lets me dump the contents of an email that I receive into any other bit of Pocket Outlook – turning an email about an event into a Calendar item, or an email asking me to do something into a Task item – with a single click.

I recently noticed a problem with it, and finally got around to looking into it tonight. The problem was that sometimes the body of the email wouldn’t make it to the new Calendar or Task item. Everything else, like the subject and the sender’s name would be fine, but the body of the new item would be blank.

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The importance of presentation, part 3

February 4th, 2007

I’ve mentioned before about how impressed I was by the difference made by improvements to the style and appearance of our revamped Annual Report last year. This week it was the turn of Solent Youth Action’s website to get the makeover treatment.

Have a look – this is before and this is after. The content is more or less the same, but the appearance has been massively improved, consistent with the style and colour scheme of the Annual Report.

It’s amazing what a difference it makes to how professional we seem. There is a lot more that we want to do with the website to make it more of a tool for the young people that we work with, but in the meantime this is a huge improvement.

Posted in charity, web | Comments Closed

Starting a new blog

February 4th, 2007

I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve been working on the creation of a new blog. This one is a group blog that I’ve started for people that I work with on a software product called “WebSphere MQ”. It’s now live at hursleyonwmq.wordpress.com.

I went for a hosted service this time, rather than set it up all myself, so if I don’t have to worry about bandwidth usage if it proves to be popular.

And – also unlike this one – I actually bothered to customise the style of the blog and draw a custom banner image (my artistic skills truly know no bounds! ;-)).

Other than writing some posts for it myself, I’ve also been persuading colleagues to write me stuff, writing some of the static pages like ‘About’ and ‘Disclaimer’ to get it all ready, and double-checking our work guidelines on blogs to make sure I’m not breaking any rules!

Unless you have an interest in WebSphere MQ, it’s unlikely to be very interesting to you. But if you do, please take a look and add a comment.

(And if you work on WMQ and I haven’t badgered you already, please join in! Give me a shout with your wordpress ID and email address and I’ll add you to the list of authors. :-))

Posted in blog, ibm | 3 Comments »

gaim broke gimp

January 28th, 2007

Since installing the latest update for my instant messaging client, Gaim (2.0.0 beta6), my photo editor, GIMP stopped working. More specifically, it wouldn’t start – reporting missing DLL’s like libexpat.dll.

They both use GTK for their interface. A quick Google shows that the gaim update comes with a newer version of GTK which breaks gimp.

I’ve upgraded to a newer version of GTK which seems to have fixed things – all is right with the world again. 🙂

Posted in tech | 13 Comments »

Nintendo could produce accurate game charts

January 27th, 2007

Spent too much time today playing on my Nintendo Wii. And when I say I spent too much time, it’s official – I have proof.

When you play any game, a message is added to the Wii Message Board for today with the time you spent playing. The message is an itemised list of time spent on each game today, and is entitled “Today’s Accomplishments” (an interesting choice of title – perhaps Nintendo thought that “This is what you’ve been doing when you could have been accomplishing stuff” was a little negative. 😉 )

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Sending long web addresses in emails

January 26th, 2007

From Macworld (snipped for length):

If you send URLs using your e-mail program, you may have an issue where the receiving client breaks really long URLs. For instance, if you were trying to send a URL for a site like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BI5KV0/ ref=amb_link_4263902_/002-5510588-1062447

You might find that your recipients are unable to click on the link in their e-mail program. That’s because many e-mail programs will do what I did above – break really long “words” (for that’s all a URL is to them) into multiple rows. Typically when this happens, only part of the URL will show up as a clickable link. When this happens, your recipients will get a “page not found” message when they try to load the URL – because the browser will only receive that portion of the URL that showed as clickable.

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Building in Second Life is kinda fun

January 24th, 2007

I’ve dipped my toe into Second Life from time to time, although I’ve mainly been an observer of the whole thing – the increasing media coverage it has been receiving, and some of the interesting things that companies like IBM have been doing in this space.

After spending most of today “in-world”, I’m starting to get into the whole thing a little more. I’ve always liked the idea of Second Life and been excited by the potential, but my experiences with it before today could be pretty much summed up as “wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do”. When you actually have something to do, it all starts getting much more interesting.

I got to spend today in Second Life for work (a nice change from WMQ!), as a few of us spent the day developing a recruitment centre for IBM in Second Life.

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Posted in ibm, tech | 2 Comments »

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