‘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.

[But] the people they have now who rendered JDS release three have
done a terrible job. I think they’re going to find out that it’s not
going to do well at all.

What
they’re referring to here is the theme that shipped with JDS R3 on
Solaris
10, which was also the default theme in our Linux beta release. 
While I haven’t heard many Solaris users complaining about it, there’s
no doubt that it wasn’t to everyone’s taste in the Linux beta. 
Just for the record, since it’s not mentioned in the interview, beta
customers were
given an update that reverted it to the JDS R2 look and feel while we
refine the JDS R3 one to take account of their comments.

The Linux model is to give away the software and sell services,”
Adelstein added. “They’re going to give away the software, but they
don’t have any services to sell.

I was under the impression that Sun was selling support– a service that leads most enterprises to choose to buy their
*nix systems in the first place, rather than rolling their own.

Anyway…
time will tell who’s right and who’s wrong.  Look out for the Linux version of JDS R3 in
the next couple of months and make up your own mind 🙂

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…