This afternoon I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to visit an Argos Extra store.

After battling my way past the chavs salivating over the Elizabeth Duke counter I made my way to one of the “self-service queue-busting kiosk solutions“. They’re a great idea and much better than having to speak to real people.

Unfortunately they were all broken. Machine number one had ran out of paper, machine number two had crashed and machine number three was turned off. Not good. So I joined the long queue for the checkouts. Thirty minutes later I’d paid for my items.

I then had to queue a second time to actually pick them up. As I reached the collection point they called number 782, I was number 891. Eventually my items tumbled down the conveyer belt and the poor overworked sap behind the counter handed them over. The whole process took almost an hour.

Every Argos store I’ve ever been in has had the same problems. They’re always short staffed, really busy and full of miserable bastards. In the future I’m going to avoid them like the plague.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (0)

• According to The Register Google is planning to provide an own-brand Windows-less PC and sell the low-cost system through a partnership with retail giant Wal-Mart.
• Engadget has some good coverage of the recent Apple news from Macworld 2006, including the new MacBook Pro. We’ve just ordered one for work and I’m really looking forward to seeing what it can do.
• Windows XP won’t work on Intel Macs but Windows Vista will according to Engadget.
• Windows XP and Windows Vista will work on Intel Macs according to this article linked to from ActiveWin.

I’m hoping Intel Macs will run both. Mac hardware which will boot XP, Vista, Linux and MacOS would be ideal, especially if VMWare release a version of VMWare workstation that’ll run on it.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (0)

I recently stumbled across an article on informit.com entitled “Five Things Wrong With SharePoint“. Having spent a fair amount of time implementing SharePoint at Talis I thought I’d comment on it here.

According to the article the first thing wrong with SharePoint is “It’s a crappy mish-mash of multiple technologies”. The author says

Once you get past the shock and horror of encountering the alien JavaScript files, to professionally program SharePoint you also have to deal with CSS, HTML, XML, ASP.Net, Visual Studio.Net, and your choice of C# or VB.Net. That doesn’t include dealing with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, and the wonderful world of IIS.

That’s not what I’d call a crappy miss-mash, each technology has it’s own strengths and I don’t really see how you could create a portal or any other modern web app for that matter, without using more than one technology, but I do take the authors point that SharePoint is relatively difficult to configure and program.

Reason number two is “The development team is playing the Longhorn card”. I guess that should read “Vista Card” but then the article was written back in July. I’m not even sure why waiting for Vista should be considered a bad thing. Updated versions of SharePoint are scheduled for 2006 to coincide with the release of Office 12.

Reason number three is “There are two SharePoint products, which is confusing”. I agree wholeheartedly. Ditch the Services edition or improve the documentation.

Reason number four is “Support for SharePoint is lacking”. Again I agree, it took an awful lot of digging just to find simple information and the books are few and far between.

Finally reason number five is “Microsoft has not stated a strategic direction for SharePoint”. I also agree with this and it will be interesting to see where Microsoft goes with the product.

I’ve grown to quite like SharePoint but I’m not beyond bashing it. My list of five things wrong with SharePoint reads

1. SharePoint has poor Active Directory Integration. A surprising amount of features that you would expect to be able to handle through the AD can’t be, and those that can don’t work particularly well.
2. Cross-browser compatibility and standards compliance. Why have Mac specific CSS if the pages still don’t render correctly on a Mac?
3. No support for Forms based authentication. Why can’t they provide an interface to match Outlook Web Access?
4. SharePoint takes over your ISS installation. This makes it more difficult then it should be add websites to ISS that aren’t part of SharePoint.
5. Administration is inconsistent and poorly documented. You still have to rely on the command line for many of the admin tasks (stsadm and setupsts), the directory structure is complex and unstructured and the central administration tool is poor.

Only time will tell if Microsoft can fix these problems, in the meantime I’m happy to work with what we’ve got. It’s a damn sight better than the static HTML we had for an Intranet before.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (1)

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to get a new phone. In the end I decided on the Sony Ericsson k750i. I was tempted by the w800, but I just couldn’t face the orange colour scheme and besides both phones are pretty much identical.

First impressions are really positive. The built in 2 megapixel camera is really impressive and the mp3 player and radio are pretty good too. I’ve ordered a 2gb Memory stick duo to replace the supplied 64mb card, this should provide plenty of space for a couple of albums, a bunch of photos and maybe the odd podcast.

I’ve also switched from O2 to Orange as the signal strength from 02 has been really crap lately.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (0)

I have nothing to blog about at the moment so here are some random links to stuff that’s caught my attention this week.

• Microsoft-Watch have reported that Microsoft have released their WMF fix patch early after it leaked onto the Internet. Our WSUS server agrees.
• In this article Sun Microsystems COO Jonathan Schwartz cites blogging as one of the major reasons behind them rising from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company.
• Developer.com is one of the many sites discussing whether AJAX will replace the Desktop
• Wired.com speculates on Apples entertainment strategy and Intel based laptops.
• Paul Miller, a fellow Talis employee, announces that he’ll be on Radio 4 next week discussing ways in which ‘Web 2.0′ changes the game for established businesses.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (0)

I’ve got myself a late Christmas present in the form of Pro Evolution Soccer: The Official Guide.

It seems pretty comprehensive and should improve my game but unfortunately it doesn’t explain why online games are so bloody slow.

Most matches suffer from lag and the connection keeps dropping. Playing PES5 online is an annoying and frustrating experience but it’s still the best footy game out there.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (3)

I’m about to build a Media PC based around Windows XP Media Center Edition and whilst I’m waiting for the hardware to arrive I thought it would be a good idea to sort out my collection of MP3’s.

The first thing I did was ditch anything encoded at less that 128kbps. The media PC will be connected to my hi-fi and home cinema setup so I only want stuff ripped at a decent quality.

I also noticed that many of the tag fields were incomplete or incorrect, so I downloaded Tag&Rename a powerful piece of software that allows you organise and tag your music files. Crucially it has support for the online freedb database so I could quickly and easily add artist and title information to my tracks.

Ok that’s my existing MP3’s sorted, I’m now left with the daunting task of ripping my entire CD collection to MP3. I’ve probably got around 400 CDs so this might take a while. I’d consider using a service such as CDlabs, but 99 pence per CD seems a little steep to me.

Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites

• Comments (0)