Went for a drink last night and the barman mentioned that Guinness is now brewed only in Dublin. Not sure I could really taste a difference, but I suppose it’s cute from a brand identity point of view?
Guinness now brewed only in Dublin
November 5th, 2006We have educational videos on WebSphere MQ
November 4th, 2006The IBM Education Assistant now has some WebSphere MQ content.
If you’ve not seen the ‘Education Assistant’ before…
IBM Education Assistant integrates narrated presentations, Show Me Demonstrations, tutorials, and resource links to help you successfully use IBM products.
The range of topics that are covered by the new WebSphere MQ materials is a little narrow (some XA stuff, security topics, and a bit on the new accounting and statistics features we added in version 6), but they’re a nice start. It’s great to see WMQ included, and I hope to see us add more soon.
Collaboration is the key
November 3rd, 2006I was reading a book in bed tonight. My wife was curious about it, and asked questions about what I was reading. We talked about it for a bit, and it got her interest.
As with most of the books that I read at the moment, I read it as an e-book on my phone. So, I was able to go into ‘File Explorer’, select the book file, click on ‘Beam File…’, and choose my wife’s Treo from the list of nearby Bluetooth devices. After a brief pause, a prompt showed up on the Treo screen asking if she wanted to install it. She clicked ‘yes’ and a copy of the book opened on her phone.
I’m impressed – how cool is that? We have different OS’s (I use Windows Mobile 5, and my wife uses Palm OS), no cables, no need for having to get out of bed and connect our phones to a PC to swap files, no need to convert file formats, no setup… nothing. Just choose a file on one phone and send it, then receive it and open it on the other. This is how all our devices should work.
Local authorities will have to find stuff for kids to do
November 2nd, 2006How many times do you hear the argument that young people “get up to no good” because they’re bored, and there’s “nothing to do”?
The “Education and Inspections Bill” hopes to change that. From January, education authorities will have a duty to make sure that young people in their area have sufficient “positive leisure-time activities”.
It includes provisions not only to make sure that enough activities are available, but that young people’s views are taken into account. A pot of money has been set aside to help pay for the creation and promotion of activities and facilities.
I like the idea – I wonder if we’ll see a difference?
There is some mention of getting help to develop and deliver activities:
… a local education authority may assist others in the provision of such facilities … [and] organisation of such activities; [and] the assistance … may include the provision of financial assistance; (ref)
It will be interesting to see if local authorities work with youth charities on this. A holistic approach for young people where education and activities to contribute to their local community are developed together sounds like a good thing to me.
We can do more than just technology
November 1st, 2006Today was a fun day – and not just because I didn’t go anywhere near my desk all day! Hursley House was the home to a workshop for staff from a variety of local charities. I’ve been organising this for the last month or so now, and today was the big day.
The idea of the day was to try and provide some of IBM’s business and consulting expertise to local charities and voluntary organisations, by providing a day’s training on evaluating the effectiveness and impact of their projects. Through work with SYA, I know that this is something that is really important for charities – not only to be able to improve and develop, but in order to justify and compete for funding. The approaches we covered today produce the data that is needed to attract funders, staff, and clients.
‘Hursley’ is pretty cool
October 31st, 2006I visited Hursley tonight.
As I work at Hursley, this might sound a little stupid – but I mean that I visited the Hursley island in Second Life. (Depends on your point of view how stupid that sounds, I suppose! Opinion seems divided about the whole Second Life thing…)
I’m still at the “wandering around trying to figure out what I should be doing” stage. Unlike a more traditional game, there isn’t a particular task or mission – and as I haven’t yet talked anyone else I know into trying it out yet, my previous two brief visits in-world consisted of aimlessly ambling about trying to get the hang of the controls and cursing how slow it runs on the four-year old PC I borrow to play it… (even with all the graphics settings turned all the way down!).
So, when Ian Hughes at work sent me an invite to the private ‘Hursley’ area of Second Life, I jumped at the chance. I’d heard of it before from a few places… even The Register, but this was my first time seeing it for myself.
A lot of us at IBM are blogging
October 30th, 2006I had a read of our external site about blogging this evening. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in blogging, and want to see an example of a positive corporate attitude towards it. I especially enjoyed looking through some of the profiles of other IBM bloggers, seeing why they do it, and what they think they get out of it.
Using .NET WebBrowser to create a mobile wiki
October 29th, 2006Wrote another Windows Mobile app tonight – this time I even tried it out on my phone and not just the emulator!
The idea of this one is an alternative to the built-in Windows Mobile “Notes” application. Instead of single ‘post-it-style’ notes, the idea is to use a wiki approach – a personal wiki, entirely hosted on the PDA. (Partly because it is quicker to use local files, but mainly because I’m too skint to pay the mobile data fees to access an online wiki :-))
I prefer the wiki approach to note-taking – mainly for the quick and easy formatting and the hyperlinks between pages. I’ve used something similar before on Palm OS for a couple of years now – ‘NoteStudio‘ by DogMelon. This is a brilliant app, which I really miss since moving to Windows Mobile as my main PDA. (There has been some talk of a Windows Mobile for a while now, but this is looking a little like vaporware).
When I saw that the .NET compact framework included a web browser widget, I thought I’d see how hard it would be to knock together a wiki tool tonight.