March 02, 2005

Domain madness - new blog

The domain madness begins to clear.

This site will be going away soon. The new main website will be www.alancfrancis.com.

The blog will live on blog.alancfrancis.com and the RSS1.0 and ATOM feeds are also available from there.

The rest of the sites (alanfrancis.com and twelve71.com) will soon fall into place around the blog site. Update your bookmarks or Aggregators :-)

February 26, 2005

Email

While all hell is breaking loose with all my domains (see previous post) my mail is seeming a bit flaky. I'm moving webhosting of twelve71.com to the new bytemark universe, but I'm leaving the MX records for twelve71.com pointing at kgbinternet (who've hosted me for many a year). This is because I frankly don't trust myself to manage exim properly on the bytemark Debian machine. In the meantime, mail me at my gmail account, which is alancfrancis. (nb, I've still got fifty-zillion gmail invites. Mail me at my gmail account if you're interested)

February 21, 2005

All Hell May Break Loose For A While

Big changes are afoot.

All my domains are being shuffled, so DNS weirdness might occur over rthe next week. I'm shifting all my domains to one registrar and one hosting provider.

domains affected:

  • twelve71.com, twelve71.org, twelve71.net, twelve71.co.uk
  • alancfrancis.com, alancfrancis.org, alancfrancis.net, alancfrancis.co.uk
  • isaacfrancis.com, isaacfrancis.org, isaacfrancis.net, isaacfrancis.co.uk
  • cardboardsoftware.com, cardboardsoftware.org, cardboardsoftware.net, cardboardsoftware.co.uk
  • cardboardprogrammer.net
  • xpcoaches.com

XPExaggerated.com is business as usual :-)

When the dust clears and everything is reolving properly, this blog will be abandoned (although the content will remain) and a new typepad hosted blog will begin. The other blogs here will be unaffected.

February 08, 2005

Simply Beautiful

via Sociable Media:

Nice.

I am familiar with the technology called PowerPoint. I know there are 59 possible slide transitions and 135 custom animation options, each with five speeds. I know about the 127 fonts and the 142 colours with almost unlimited hues. What I don't know is why presenters feel they have to use every single one?

I have a theory about this. I think salespeople are no longer measured by sales, by revenue and certainly not by customer satisfaction, but solely by the number of slides they show each month.

GMail Invites a-plenty

I've now got 50 (!) invites to gmail. If there's anyone left in the world who wants one and doesn't have one yet, mail me at my gmail account. It's alancfrancis.

February 04, 2005

Mac Mini "review"

This review allegedly by a Microsoft Certifed Engineer is, really, just about the funniest thing I have ever read. It took me until about half way down to realise it was a joke. I was buying all the 'where's the parallel port and why no floppies' stuff. I started to get suspicious around the 'it ships with a stripped-down OS a bit like WinCE' and I was sure by the time we got to 'the mail app can't execute my vbs scripts and it doesn't ship with anti-virus or a defragger'. The final nail was 'the browser isn't standards compliant because it doesn't render MSN properly'. This is total genius and I bet it catches a ton of people out.

February 03, 2005

[grid::fatherhood] sort of

From theage.com.au:

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of reasons for male hesitation when it comes to committing to partnering and parenthood. Foremost among them is the desire of men to fulfil their obligations to their partners and children without committing career hara-kiri.

Sadly, research suggests that the handful of men who really do swear off breakfast meetings, leave the office at 5 o'clock to pick up the kids from creche, and refuse to work weekends find themselves in the same career cul-de-sac as working mothers. Indeed, Australian managers are good at making clear to men that any worker who modifies his schedule to accommodate new fatherhood will be struck off the A-list for the crime of being inadequately "serious".

Via Benno Rice.

Domain Questions again

I'm tried of spam on MoveableType. I just got hit with a zillion trackback spams for online poker. MT2.66 offers no way to turn off all the trackback permissions on all the existing posts, and I can't just delete mt-tb.cgi as all teh other bloggers here are using it.

With GMail for my mail, Flickr for my photos and adding TypePad for blogging, I'm starting to wonder whether I need a separate hosted domain at all.

Jane and my main email addresses are at twelve71.com, and all my friends blogs are at twelve71.org...but that's about it.

I think I'll shortly stop posting here. I'll leave it around as an archive. All my pals can keep blogging here at twelve71.org, and I'm going to be moving my brand identity to alancfrancis.com.

I'll start using my alancfrancis id at gmail, map blog.alancfrancis.com to a typepad account and use the main www.alancfrancis site to simply aggregate recent blog posts, recent flickr photos and maybe an article or two.

This is the plan, we'll see how I do at it. (slowly, I suspect)

February 02, 2005

Unedited Notes from the Gosling thing

These are the cut'n'pasted notes I typed while I was there. There was a bit of marketing of their tools beforehand which I'll blog about with some more thought and editing. Suffice to say the aim seemed to be 'VB for Java programmers'...they want to let developers with less actual java skill write enterprise apps. They consistently referred to 'corporate developers' as pretty dumb...not a good thing to say to an audience of corporate developers :-)

The Gosling thing was Q&A. Here's the notes.

Continue reading "Unedited Notes from the Gosling thing" »

February 01, 2005

James Gosling in Sydney

I'm going to this tomorrow.

Could be rubbish, could be fun. At least it's free :-)