Copacetic

Bob Cringely talks about Apple’s movement towards running Microsoft Applications. Always  a good read.

Chris Chedgey is blogging about his company and its software. Chris was my first boss after I left college and put up with horrendous abuse both physical and verbal from me and others when we worked together at Generics Software.

This is an easy one to fix, but a problem that still plagues most of London’s overland rail stations (its a problem in lreland as well, but given we only have half a dozen railway tracks it hardly seems worth then while). The problem? Why can’t  I see what station I am in from every carriage on the train.

I’m forever craning and bending to see the two or possibly three signs posted in each station. If you are in the end carriage forget it, your missing your stop, end of story.

The underground fixed this problem years ago so lets not hear excuses like not possible, too expensive, no demand etc. etc….

Ed’s Easy Diner tucked behind the Palace Theater off Cambridge Circus is quite simply the best short order food on offer in the Northern Hemisphere. I ate here practically every weekend for about ten years when I lived in London and I went back yesterday to exactly the same service, quality and life renewing burgers I left behind 8 years ago.

Some things do not fade….

In London for the week. A city not to everyone’s taste but it definitely floats my boat. Saw the London Gherkin yesterday. It looks less striking up close because its not much bigger than the Nat West Tower.

Many people (including myself) answered Damien Mulley’s call for help with converting the garda road deaths statistics page to a news feed. A free tool, feed43 seemed to be most people’s weapon of choice.

Take your pick, John kelly was first out of the blocks followed rapidly by Bernar with his more detailed effort. Yours truely was two days late with this effort (serves me right for not reading the comments).

Bottom line is that feed43 is a great screen scraping tool for creating feeds.

Gene Pitney passed away yesterday. I will always remember as a child listening to The Man who Shot Liberty Valance over and over again on an eight track cartridge as we drove from Luton to Holyhead on the way back to Dublin for Christmas.

He was legend then and that was over 30 years ago…

Ok a bag of chips €2 I can just about stomach, but an additional €2 to throw a cup of curry sauce over the top, someone is taking the piss. I reckon a weeks supply of the stuff couldn’t cost more than €10.

Don’t even try and get me started on garlic sauce….

I see in today’s Irish Times that Steeltrace was sold to Compuware for $20million. Steeltrace was a company that was salvaged from the wreckage of Ebeon. They have a requirements management tool (a pretty good one I might add) that gives you a soup to nuts requirements process based on Use Cases. I’ve known Fergal (the CTO) since his Ebeon days and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Another nice exit for TVC on top of Similarity Systems (that Caulfield fella seems to be everywhere these days:-)) so good times all round for the Irish Software Industry…

I came across the microformat website via Jon Udell’s blog. Some pretty good design principles in here. Could be retrofitted quite usefully on the RFC process (from whence many of the ideas came, I guess).