It's been a long, long time since I was breathlessly excited about a web site. In fact, it hasn't happened since Wikipedia demanded my attention. LINFO is such a site. Get a load of this from their about section:

"The Linux Information Project (LINFO) was launched in early 2004 by Bellevue Linux Users Group (BELUG) for the purposes of (1) promoting an interest in and the use of Linux and other free software and (2) making such software easier to use by providing high quality, comprehensive and easily accessible information about it in a single location."

'We believe in open source and we want to help you understand just how and why it's fabulous.' 

A customer recommended CrossLoop for remote desktop between Windows boxes - it works a treat. The key features which put it ahead of the competition (VNC, Citrix, RDP etc.) are:

• free (but not open source)
• tiny - quick to download
• tidy - it doesn't leave crap everywhere
• intuitive i.e. easy for a typical user to download and install
• simple and friendly - host/join, click to connect
• encrypted (it uses tightVNC for this)
• simple to share files
• excellent compression, works well on thin-ish connections
• it bloody works

Your mother/father/guardian/Luddite friend can use this!

There is now absolutely no excuse not to give Linux goodness a fair go. Wubi is a small .exe which allows you to run Ubuntu without having to nervously pfaff about with partitions or run in toffee-slow virtualisation. Utilising Red Bull, prayer and superstring theory it creates an entry in the boot record allowing you to restart your box, select it from the boot menu whereupon it downloads Ubuntu and runs it inside an NTFS partition. No performance hit, all hardware detected. If you decide you don't like it - boot into Windows and delete the file - bonzer! Get it here: http://wubi-installer.org/

I found an old Olympus m:robe iPod pretender this morning and wouldn't have been surprised if my Ubuntu Feisty 64bit distro's various media players recognised it but alas, no joy. After some piling around the web, I could only find forum posts lamenting its incompatibility with Linux in general. But if it isn't compatible with Linux...

I had a Window XP disc kicking about so I gave VirtualBox a go. Selecting it for install in Automatix, it took a couple of minutes to download and install. I opened it, created a new 10GB disk image, popped in the XP disc and powered up the virtual box. I was straight into the Windows installation routine and 45 minutes later, I had a full installation running with the network card and CD drive functioning. It was then a simple matter of selecting which USB device to allow (the m:robe mp3 player) and install the horrific Olympus iTunesy software and Bob had become my uncle. Performance is first rate - I can watch DVDs with Windows media player - and cloning the image is as easy as copying a file.

Interesting article on Slate:

"A week ago, I ceremoniously yanked out my MacBook's Ethernet cable and toggled off the Wi-Fi. Once I was positive the machine was cut off from the Internet, I added a task to my online to-do list. It worked. I sat back and smiled, agog—I had just seen the future of software."  - http://www.slate.com/id/2168419/fr/flyout

I was using a web application yesterday and was stunned how dopey the design was. The search yielded irrelevant results, tables of data were poorly formatted with vanishingly small text, meaningless icons littered the page and I couldn't figure out the menu system.

A web application for me is a web site that contains information you want and generally does stuff. While it is true to say all web sites do something, product 'brochure' sites typically only waste your time with Fancy Dan flash animations and the like. Look and feel is important of course but not to the detriment of accessing the information you're interested in. Some 'good practice' basic design examples include:

• Good text contrast, size
• Good resizing
• No needless menu duplication
• Contact information easily accessible
• 'Top' anchors throughout long pages

Things I would like to see more widespread concerning the more application-leaning sites include:

• All text at least 1em for readability
• Subtle Colour coding of sections
• System messages in same place, persistent if possible
• Message severity colour-coding
• Sectioned search results
• History - preferably every action with associated links, time stamps etc.
• All tables of data sortable
• Tables have adjustable length
• Ajax inline editing where possible. Editing text has always been a case of 'there's the text I want to change - I can see it. I wonder how I can get to it?'
• A phone number at the top of every page
• Search results which include menu titles - Drupal (this site) seems to require 50 clicks and 3 blind alleys before revealing a menu option.

Here's a diagram showing the simplest layout I could imagine. I used Dia for this - a good albeit buggy and limited open source (pronounced 'free'), multi-platform vector diagramming tool.

The two concepts customers must be clear on before embarking on web application development are user management and work flow. Both are naturally linked and easily ill-considered. Specification diagrams of course are essential. While the details shouldn't be ignored (or assumed), the presentation of the logical flow should be as simple as possible.

For example, a publishing house with writers, reviewers and publishers would like an application that enforces roles and centralises their effort. The first thing that must happen is an agreed model of the required work flow - the traditional 'back of the napkin' diagram. Cleaned up, and rendered in a faux-UML format, it might look like this:

OS X Leopard is looming and represents the next mile on the Apple treadmill. No doubt, it will be £100 and will focus developers who will gradually drop support for earlier versions of the OS. I'm getting off the treadmill and going low-end. I've replaced my Mac (which is going on ebay) with a super cheap PC loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 10 (SLED 10).

Reasons I ditched Mac

• Windows can only be resized with the bottom-right corner grippy. This has always bugged me.
• iPhoto is molasses slow and makes little sense.
• Pages word processor is dog slow. It lagged when typing 'hello world'.
• DVI didn't work. Millions of Macs left the factory with faulty ATI cards. Apple shipped defective products, basically.
• Terminal just didn't behave properly.
• Mail.app started lying to me. Its indexing broke and only returned 'some' search results which of course is worse than a sharp stick in the eye.
• Firefox would occasionally slow down/freeze. Seemed inexplicable. That little spinning colour cursor failed to distract me (a la the snake from Jungle Book).
• Updates. 80MB Java updates bothered me with restarts almost weekly.
• Couldn't play HD video. This is a hardware issue but shouldn't be as the graphics card is poky enough in other systems.
• Unmappable keys (F14-16?) and a hidden # key.

Reasons I'm now using SLED