Hmm...just as I'm about to buy my own Macbook, a lazy Sunday trawl through the interwebs shows some rumours of a new thinner, shinier Macbook that may or may not be announced sometime in the near future, or next year, or never.

Now normally I'm pragmatic about this kind of stuff and generally resistant to buyer's remorse. If the only change was a faster processor or more hard disk, then I wouldn't have a problem, but boy would I be completely gutted if I bought a Macbook next week and watch Apple launch a complete replacement.

The problem is, of course not helped by the fact that I'm currently without a laptop (well a proper one - I've got a 5 year old Dell ultraportable that only works when plugged into the mains, but that doesn't really count).

So, really struggling with what to do - probably wait until OS X 10.5 (leopard) is released and see if anything is announced.

[tags]Mac, Apple, Macbook, laptop, hardware[/tags]

I've recently started to get a lot of comment spam forwarded to me for moderation, which means that Akismet can't decide what to do. This might be because I've recently posted here again, after an over-long break from blogging.

Rather than continue to plough through hundreds of spam comments a week, I'm taking the simpler path and have installed the rather wonderful Comment Timeout plugin. Essentially this closes comments on old posts, but generally does so relative to the last approved comment - so old posts that are still generating some worthwhile conversation won't get shut down.

We'll see how it goes, but I think this will help a lot.

[tags]spam, comments, wordpress, blogging, plugins [/tags]

SixApart have announced that Chris Alden is the new Chairman and CEO. Mena Trott makes a rare posting on her corporate blog about the move, and Chris also posts about the change on his blog. I met Chris at the beginning of the year, while I was at Headshift, and was impressed - and I think having someone who has developed and innovated in the blogging space can only be good for SixApart. GigaOm and TechCrunch also have the announcement, and you can follow any reaction on Techmeme. [tags]SixApart, Movable Type, MovableType[/tags]

I've been at Headshift for almost exactly a year now, and in that time have had a chance to work on and contribute to some very exciting social software projects, meet some great people and be totally immersed in the world of social software.

But, with other things happening in my life, I've decided that it's time for a change, and Friday will be my last day at Headshift. I want to thank Lee and Livio for giving me the opportunity to work here, and wave a warm goodbye at the great team here.

So - what's next ? Not really sure - but it will be something social, that's for sure ;)

[tags]headshift, socialsoftware, london, consultant[/tags]

If you're like me, you've got data all spread out across the place on different machines (PC and Mac), smartphones and in the cloud. And you probably spend a lot of time trying to synchronise data, emails, contacts, appointments, bookmarks, browser state, RSS subs, documents, and everything else across all these devices, and invariably, when you actually need something important it's somewhere else. And of course, keeping all this stuff backed up is a nightmare - either it doesn't get backed up, or you end up with multiple copies of everything in several different places, with no sense of which is the canonical version. So, here's a list of the tools I find pretty essential to get over some of these problems.

• Gmail - sort of obvious, like.
• Foldershare - Groove's younger, more lightweight, and generally easier to use cousin. I've just realised that it has an OS X client as well, which means that you can transparently synchronise your files across your various PCs and Macs, and never lose those important documents again.
• Jungledisk - backup to Amazon's S3.
• Nokia N73 on 3's XSeries. Flat rate web access, and a pretty decent browser.
• OS X iSync - keeps contacts and events on your phone and mobile synced up. You'll need to do a little work to get your N73 hooked up - check here for a nice blog post, and here for the plugin.
• Lifeblog - syncing up pictures and SMS's between phone and PC.

So, basic strategy is to use Foldershare to keep your important bits sychronised and distributed across all your computers. Use Jungledisk on one computer to back everything up to S3. If there's stuff you don't want to distribute across all your computers just run Jungledisk and back up those particular bits to a separate bucket. Starting out, there will be an inevitable big hit as everything synchronises and gets backed up - but after that you can just let it all transparently tick over in the background, in the knowledge that as long as you ensure that you save everything into your synchronised folders, it will be safe and secure - that's gotta be good :) [tags]mobile, synchronise, synchronize, foldershare, jungledisk, backup, onlinebackup, n73, isync, lifeblog[/tags]

Jeffrey Walker, the President of Atlassian Software, wonders if Razorfish should have started with MediaWiki as the base for their new enterprise wiki.

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box. One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish's Enterprise Solutions lead, responds:

... Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

I commented on his blog, but thought I'd post here as well:

Shiv - not sure I agree with you... I think you're lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available - a lot of companies aren't in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation - what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ? Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ? Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I should disclose that the company I work for - Headshift - does a lot of work with Confluence. [tags]confluence, atlassian, wiki, mediawiki, socialsoftware, enterprise, enterprise2.0 [/tags]