A Crisis...

real or perceived is the only way to drive change. At the same time change meets resistance. How can one overcome this resistance? Apparently using one of the methods below.

Fragile...

No not the song, my laptop that is or to be more precise its operating system. Ubuntu. Yes it is a low end laptop, it came with Vista and it was not performing. Yes Vista have their imperfections and need 2GB RAM to work decent, copying file was a nightmare before the service pack BUT:

a) network cards (wifi) would not disaapear after upgrade (as it happened with ubuntu)

b) keyboard mappings would not messed up after some security upgrade (still not clear what exactly triggered this)

If I was not a young IT guy happy to tinker around, but in my 50s with a family, limited time would I have the luxury of spending 2-3 evenings (so far) to sort out the above? Let alone whatever else might come. Or would I get the 'consumer solution' and pay if /when needed 30-40 quid for tech support?

The answer is simple.User experience. It doesn't matter what is under the hood, what matter is the hood.And as long any tinkering under the hood (linux) breaks the seems of the hood, it will not be a consumer solution (except in limited cases like the asus eee)

The Giant on his knees...

from a user's perspective at least... I am talking about yesterday.First time ever that I have been unable to access Google. No email, no search, no Google documents. I did not spend much time into this, so I can't claim to have investigated the cause. In all likelihood it was related to something on my side of the ISP given that during the outage I could not get a DNS lookup for Google.

However unlike this
blog entry that suggests Google is down use Live Search instead, choice is a good things yada yada (something with which I fundamentally agree) the same can't be said for other services such as email or documents.

Perhaps Gears can help a bit with that or one could write a utility to mirror documents between Google docs and Zoho... Any volunteers?

Virtualisation... the only way

Visual Studio 2008:
Is not supported by SharePoint Solution Generator...
Is not supported by the compilation scripts for VirtualBox...

Having both 2005 and 2008 on the same machine is a nightmare at least...

Virtualisation, the only way (64bit and 8Gigs of RAM please)

The wind of change...

is blowing across the capital of the UK and takes with it all the historic music venues. Next weekend is the last weekend for TurnMils, and by the end of the year Astoria will go too. How many bands and concerts have they played there ? How many memories ? The vast majority of the gigs I have been to London were held in Astoria.

Maybe super-duper mega venues like O2 arean are the way to go . At least facilities wise. As for retro / emotion / underground /real that is a different story.

I am ... accessible...

says a web site. But what is the actual level of accessibility and how can this be measured? Well the following tools should help:

1. Wave
   
2. Content Quality
   
3. TAW
   

Crossing to the other side...

After many years of being a customer of source forge I crossed over to the other side: codeplex. What can I say, goodies for SharePoint. Some promising ones below:

01) MOSS Faceted Search
02) SharePoint Visual Studio Project Templates
03) SharePoint Solution Installer
04) A Google Mapcontrol for ASP.NET and MOSS or Sharepoint WSS3 as a webpart
05) Predefined Search for MOSS2007
06) Accessibility Kit for SharePoint
07) SharePoint Developer Explorer
08) SharePoint 2007 Wildcard Search
09) 3-tier application design in wss 3.0 or MOSS 2007
10) PowerShell SharePoint Provider
11) SharePoint Builder
12) Project Compliance Audit
13) SharePoint AJAX Toolkit

Furthermore, Microsoft has released a number of very useful tools and docs:

• System Center Capacity Planning
  
• SharePoint Capacity Planning
  
• SharePoint Deployment Guide and Checklists