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.

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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. :-))

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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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Sony can work together

January 21st, 2007

Finally got round to seeing the ‘new’ (Sony Pictures) Bond film, Casino Royale, last night. It was pretty good, although I couldn’t help thinking that when it gets released on DVD, it’ll make a great drinking game. Drink every time a Sony product makes it’s way into a scene, and you’ll have a fun evening.

Not just in the most obvious ways, either: like every character in the film having a Sony Ericsson phone, or all computers being Vaio laptops, or pictures taken with Sony digital cameras. Even opportunities you think they might have missed were used for a bit of Sony product placement – like security guards recording CCTV footage onto Sony-branded blank CD media.

I guess we should be impressed – nice to see that the different bits of Sony can work together!

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Finding out what young people want

January 20th, 2007

I’ve been having a look through some results of the Hampshire LPSA survey conducted at the end of last year. LPSA stands for ‘Local Public Service Agreement‘, and are voluntary agreements negotiated between a local authority – in this case, Hampshire County Council, and the Government. The idea is to improve local public services by focusing on targeted outcomes from Government.

In order to measure progress on the targets in these agreements, Hampshire County Council gets MORI to conduct surveys and research. A lot of this is public information, available on the web, which makes it very useful to charities like us, who can’t afford to carry out such large scale research.

It means that not only do we get the raw statistics, but also the benefit of statistical analysis included with the published figures. Reports often also include comparisons with surveys conducted by MORI for other authorities in recent years, “intended to act as a context in which to place findings for Hampshire and to aid in the interpretation of results”. This makes them a valuable resource when developing and evaluating the projects we provide for our local community.

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