Rav Casley Gera’s Blog

Adobe Air. Google Gears. What is it with offline-web applications and alliteration anyway?

February 26, 2008 in Asides, Rav Idly Wonders | 0 comments

worst.

brits.

ever.*

* oh, ok, for twenty years or so.

“I went to my friends house, to play some serious music, and he kept playing me Huey Lewis and the News!”

why are goals always compared to 1990 levels? The Millennium Development Goals were designed in 2000 but are all measured against 1990 levels. And the EU emissions reductions targets, agreed in 2007, are also against 1990 levels. Why? Do the bureaucrats of transnational organisations all really love Twin Peaks? And isn’t it kind of cheating? If I lost ten pounds in two months, and then loudly declared my intention to lose a stone (against the levels of two months previous), that goal wouldn’t actually be that demanding, now, would it? I think I’m going to aim to increase the amount of my time I spend in a godforsaken office by 50 hours a week compared to 1990 levels. Oh look, finished!

I can’t believe it’s taken less than two years for Jeff Han’s multi-touch megascreen to go from amazing at TED to annoying on CNN.

who put the dumb, pretty office poof on CNN?

If John McCain wins, will he be the first divorced president?

This is one a comment on Talk Show: David Letterman Gives Hillary One Last Chance To Shine (wonkette.com)

ravcasleygera says: "When did these late-night talk shows start featuring politicians? Does this have something to do with that Writer’s Strike?" Seeing as Letterman's had writers for a month, I'm thinking, in this case, *no*. Just sayin', is all.

tuesday!

program that tells you if anyone in your email address book is online (if they have the program too) and lets you chat over email using subject lines as text. instant cross-network IM. maybe if i post it someone will spontaneously build it…

A new report argues that fifty years of urban policy have failed to revitalise the economies of Britain’s Northern towns. If they’re right, the very future of our Northern cities may have to be rethought

Those who know me will be surprised to hear I’ve been reading a Policy Exchange report recently. PE, for those who don’t keep up with the ever-growing roster of UK think-tanks, is the leading centrist (read: sane) entity amongst the conservative ‘tanks. Unlike its crazier cousins, such as Civitas and Politeia, Policy Exchange serves as more than a mouthpiece for bored minor ex-ministers and a peddler of slightly silly state-the-obvious reports.¹ Despite the concerns of the Fourth International, PE is essentially a serious enterprise. And, determined to be taken as seriously as lefties such as IPPR, PE has taken the radical step of commissioning and publishing actual academic research by actual academics.

This report, into the history of Britain’s urban policy, makes depressing, if fascinating reading. Five or six decades of urban policy, it argues, have essentially failed. [Read more →]

This is one a comment on Microsoft and Yahoo: Perfect partners? (dot.life)

ravcasleygera says: What's more, how many of those areas is Yahoo ahead in? It's abandoned its social networking and blogging offerings and its instant messaging service is minimal. Yahoo and Microsoft don't do as well as Google because they aren't as innovative. I used to use Yahoo for everything - not just search but email, rss feeds, blogging and so on. But one by one google services have come along and been better. Yahoo have tried to make up for it by buying services, but they've had a nightmare integrating them with their own platform (as in the case of the new Yahoo! Mail, which took two years to work properly) or not bothered at all (as with del.icio.us and flickr). Microsoft, meanwhile, have always weighed down their offerings with over-complex payment systems and bad branding. A case in point: online documents. As the people who run the number-one office site, it's obviously Microsoft who should dominate this. But Google bought Writely and within months had established an integrated Google Docs system, plugged it into gmail, and watched the users pour in. Microsoft has something called "office live", but it's a weird web hosting offering for small businesses. Nowadays users find their way incredibly quickly to the best new services. To succeed, you either need to be developing those yourself, or very quickly buying them and integrating them into your platform. Microsoft can't do the first one well, and Yahoo don't seem to want to do the second. So it's hard to see what real difference this merger would make.