UnixPoet

This week seems to be a time for anniversaries of English battles: Trafalgar was on the 21st, and today, 25th October 1415 is the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. From a review of Agincourt in the Economist this week:

The king mounted on a small grey horse and without his heralds, rides out in the damp morning over the field of battle to see where he will deploy his men. Then, at his order, 5000 English archers firing up to 20 arrows a minute fill the sky with death.


The French lost more than 5,000 men, with another 1,000 taken prisoner. 130 Englishmen fell. More on the battle here and here.

“England confides that every man will do his duty” was Nelson’s original wording before Lieutenant Pasco asked Nelson if he could substitute the word ‘expects’ for ‘confides’ as that was in the telegraphic vocabulary whereas confides would have to be spelt. These interesting details and more here. The BBC History magazine is not as clear about how the battle progressed and why Nelson’s tactics were effective.

Not all triumphs however, as on this same day, is also the anniversary of the charge of the immortal Light Brigade.

Oracle is smart in buying out InnoDB. They would be even smarter if: they hand it out for free or very cheap, which would undercut MS SQLServer, and the increasingly ambitious MySQL. They would be even smarter if they give it a decent UI and made it quick to setup and use. That means no crappy Java UIs.

Adobe are dumb. It would be ok, for Adobe, if the world had stopped a couple of years ago. Unfortunately for Adobe it has not. Microsoft are out to get PDF with Metro. It surely must be one of the ironies of nature that one of the best applications in the world, i.e. Photoshop, happens to be made by the same company that gave birth to the steaming pile of crap that is Reader. Kill it. I’ve been using the free Foxit Reader. It works great and downloads quickly.

Scoble wants Microsoft to earn our trust but the according to the latest news, it is sure not the way to do it. From MS’s own slides and IHVs it is emerging that Microsoft is intentionally hobbling one API, Opengl to favour its own home grown DirectX. Apart from all the compatibility issues, that is not the way to treat your partners. Although, seeing the way its been treating its partners and ISVs recently, Microsoft doesn’t really seem to care anymore.

and I was hooked. I’ve had a Mac mini for the last couple of weeks and I love it. Tiger is so polished; its a wonderful experience after prosaic XP and workman-like Linux. Attention to detail, polished interface, etc all been said before and all true.

A word of warning to the Linux crowd: forget it on the desktop. Not until Linux standardizes on as polished, relatively lightweight (Gnome is bloated) desktop as OSX will it gain a chance. The polish in an OS rubs off on the applications made for it. Most Linux applications have inconsistent UIs made by programmers. Most Windows apps have decent UIs but the Apple apps I’ve tried so far are well designed. A simple comparison: most people use Mirc on Windows. The IRC client I use on the Mac is Conversation and the difference between the two is like that between night and day. I really should put screens shots up so that people appreciate the difference.

I’ve tried the betas of Vista and I like it: its more polished and tries harder at looking cool. It tries too hard: at every turn it asks for meta data and every feature has a cacaphony of options. Why does Microsoft have to over engineer everything? Why the 42 buttons when 6 are enough? Yes, I’m sure the gold version of Vista will be awesome/cool/etc as Scoble keeps promising. But I don’t think Apple will have stayed still either.

Dvorak complains that Apple garners more favourable press then Microsoft and Scoble noticed that a significant percentage, 60%, use Macs at the blogging conferences he attends. Isn’t it suggestive that the well-informed turn to Apple?

Yahoo thinks Google is the enemy. Yahoo is envious of Google coz, you know, Google is cool. Which it is. And Yahoo isn’t so, along with the other envious geek, decides to gang up on Google. Oh dear!

Google and Yahoo have around 35% and 30% of the search market with Microsoft struggling behind at 15%. Teaming up with MS may seem good at first, after all, getting those 35% would be nice. What Yahoo seems to have forgotten is that Microsoft is 95% on the desktop and that if Microsoft can kill Google, it can kill Yahoo just as easily. In other words, the long term strategic threat is not from Google at all, but from Microsoft. Microsoft can’t afford to let anyone else dominate search.

Yahoo should have allied with Google against Microsoft in the IM space and in whichever space is reasonable. Yahoo and Google need to build up momentum against Redmond because otherwise they will never be truly secure.

Being more of a fox then a hedgehog I thought it better to start a separate blog for my more philosophical musings. This is it. You can find more about the software I have publicly released at blog.unixpoet.com.

Some may question the wisdom of starting a second blog if I can’t keep the first one updated. The blog.unixpoet.com will be used to announce updates and new software releases, while this one will be updated much more often; it will be more in the spirit of other blogs, i.e., full of unsupported assertians and half-baked opinions ; )

Which reminds me: are bloggers journalists?

Do I consider myself a journalist?

No.

Simply, I am a writer. I, like most bloggers, write my opinions down, no facts or proofs to persuade the reader except the post’s own logic and internal conisistency, and the reader’s common sense. Why? I don’t know for sure but I have my suspicians. I would much prefer to write an essay a month like the excellent writer and essayist Paul Graham.

In a way writing a blog is a liability. 80% of the blogs are destined to be read by only a few people, but Google being omniscient, an obscure post can be given new life, something to quote back at you. I wish I could tell search engines to only remember a post a couple of years and then forget. Or I could just stop writing…