‘Well beaten

About the only positive to take from Motherwell’s inexplicably poor performance in the CIS Cup Final on Sunday is that at least Rangers didn’t make us look bad, which would have made it much harder to stomach– we did it all by ourselves.  It was such an inept performance that I can’t even bring myself to be annoyed about it… we had no bad luck, no near misses, no dodgy refereeing decisions (well okay, there were quite a few of those actually!).  We just played like a pub team, and Rangers took full advantage.

Will be interesting to see how serious David Murray really is about banning supporters from Ibrox who sing sectarian songs, though– if he is, then after their performance on Sunday, expect the crowd at their next home game to consist entirely of away fans…

It’s not ‘kay’, m-kay?

Apparently, Scott McNealy pronounced my name ‘Kay-lum’ in his latest monthly intranet broadcast (as Americans are wont to do for some reason… especially those who live in Kay-lifornia).  I know this because everyone keeps coming up to me today and saying “Hello Kaylum”.  It’s really not that funny any more :)

New home for JDS community RPMs

Dave Southern will now be maintaining his unofficial JDS RPM repository over at Ricardo Wagemaker’s gcclinux.com site. You’ll find a large number of useful apps for JDS R2 there, with JDS R3 RPMs ready to go as soon as we get around to shipping it :)

Sam and Tom on JDS R3

Sam and Tom seemingly aren’t too enamoured with the forthcoming release of JDS release 3 on Linux.  While they’ve given us a lot of support in the past, I’d have to take issue with some of their comments about the beta versions they were given access to (not least that I was under the impression that our beta participants were subject to an NDA and shouldn’t be commenting on it publicly yet at all, but perhaps I’m wrong there).

They don’t get any credit for their real contributions to very important open source projects because they don’t have any people who actually understand or talk to individuals in the open source community,” Hiser said. “They’re not spending any time on the mailing lists.”

Not quite sure which projects they’re talking about here; Googling for sun.com addresses on the GNOME mailing lists alone turns up 65,000 hits, and that’s without counting contributions to OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, Evolution, X.org… if they mean “we don’t have many Linux kernel hackers” then no, we don’t, any more than Red Hat or Novell have many Solaris kernel hackers, despite their offering products that are interoperable with (and in some cases run on) Solaris.

Now playing: Midnight Rain (Rock Salt and Nails)

This latest CD from the Shetland outfit was actually released in 2003, but Julie only bought it for me this weekend :)  Hard to believe it’s nine years since I first heard heard them playing at the Cambridge Folk Festival— I’d never heard of them then, and my mate Paul whose tent I was sharing had been reluctant to go and see their session, expecting them from the programme description to be playing ‘rumpty tumpty music’.  As it turned out, we liked them so much that we went to see their second session next day (and got them to sign a copy of their CD for Paul’s future wife).

Back to Midnight Rain, and I wasn’t surprised to see their usual per-album change of personnel and record company— they now seem to be rather uneasy bedfellows with hardcore sixties Aran sweatsters Steeleye Span, Pentangle and Lindisfarne– but I was pleased to see Calum Malcolm back at the mixing desk.  This offering is a bit more soulful and less manic than their previous outings, but still manages to mix new songs, cover versions and traditional instrumentals to produce a take on celtic fusion that’s recognisably their own.  I’d have liked to hear more of Paul Johnston’s guitar though; he’s a great acoustic soloist, but there are only a couple of short flashes to be heard in this selection.

For a (not overly representative) flavour of the band and their music, check out this short video.

Things that changed the UI world

Jef Raskin, usability guru and Macintosh pioneer, died yesterday.

Talking of the Mac, I read an excerpt from Andy Hertzfeld’s new book at the weekend that reminded me why most dialog boxes have an OK button in them.  Apparently, when usability testing the original Apple Lisa GUI, the designers had chosen the more formal Do It as the confirmation button label, but noticed that people were sometimes inexplicably clicking Cancel instead. When quizzed, one frustrated tester eventually confessed that they thought the button said Dolt, so he wouldn’t click it because he wasn’t a dolt…