Well, my del.icio.us daily link blogging has been broken for a long while now and I’ve got totally fed up. Their support system was very poor – just got a generic reply saying the fact it hadn’t been working was “temporary” and should be fine now (it wasn’t). I started to look for alternatives.

I didn’t have to look far. Ma.gnolia does all the things del.icio.us did plus it has a much prettier interface and its bookmarklet system integrates with Safari more efficiently. Oh, and the daily link blogging worked first time (oh, okay – I ended up with three copies because I kept going in and testing different settings – apologies to anyone whose RSS got confused – I’ve deleted the rogue links entries now).

Now all I have to do is import all my del.icio.us bookmarks. Oh wait… they have a system for that too. Easy peasy.

You can find my new links file at: Pewari’s Ma.gnolia.

Many of you will already be aware of the concept of grid or cloud computing, even if you don’t recognise the term. SETI@home is the famous example – I’m not sure if it was the first, but certainly the first to become really mainstream.

For those still looking slightly bemused, SETI (short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) analyzes radio telescope data to look for a certain kind of signal that is known not to occur naturally. Unfortunately, their computer capacity was limited and the amount of data they needed to analyze was huge.

The solution? Combine a whole load of geographically distant computers that weren’t actually being used at that moment (such as when the screensaver kicks in), and get them to do the work for them – a kind of virtual voluntary supercomputer.

Now if you were anything like me, when SETI@home first came out, you got very excited… installed it, forgot about it for a while then either did a complete reinstall or bought a new computer and never bothered to put SETI@home back on, or you decided you wanted a different screensaver.

Anyway, recently a scientific podcast I was listening to reminded me of the project, so I thought I’d go and see if there was a Mac version of the client to run it. What I discovered is that it’s now run using a completely different type of client – BOINC.

The exciting thing about BOINC is that it’s not tied to any one project – it’s a gateway to a whole host of scientific endeavors that need help processing their data. At last count there were over twenty different projects covering a variety of scientific disciplines.

Also, it no longer seems to be tied to the screensaver. Sure, there is a screensaver provided so you can see pretty graphics of the data you are processing – but if you’d rather see snaps from your photo collection or flying toaster whizz by, that’s no longer a barrier to volunteering your computer’s resources.

It’s also available for Windows, Mac or Linux.

I don’t know about you, but I have very little spare cash I can donate to anything and with two children very little spare time. But my computer has oodles of time when it’s doing nothing in particular so there is something significant I can contribute at least.

So my computer at the moment (in moments of boredom while I’m off elsewhere) is helping look for ET (seti@home), analysing protein structures from diseases such as HIV, malaria etc (rosetta@home), searching the skies for new pulsars (einstein@home) and creating a complex computer model to analyse climate change (climateprediction.net).

What’s your computer doing when you aren’t there?

I shall probably have a bigger and more in-depth rant about regionalization and DRM in the near future, but in the meantime I would like to point you towards this article: No More Regionalization.

There really is no excuse, in these days of increased globalization, to treat your non-US customers with such disdain. And it’s not just a problem with a single MMORPG. With the dollar weak, European customers are actually worth a lot more money and generate more profit per person. Yet we are often treated as second-class citizens at best – charged more coin for less functionality and content.

It is getting worse, and it will continue to get worse as long as we allow these companies to get away with it. I think it’s time to start making some noise.

In which I draw a line in the sand and declare this an official podcast. You can also now subscribe to The Prattle on iTunes!

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Saw these two links on the Martin Money Tips email and just have to find the time to make them:

• Dalek knitting pattern
• TARDIS knitting pattern

Well, I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be reading a Daily Mail article and nodding vigorously, but Why women don’t want top jobs is really worth a read.

Sexual equality is all very well.

But real equality comes from making your own choices, not just following the well-trodden path towards careerism, simply because it has been signposted by society as the only path to success.

Liberation must always be about being yourself, not simply a clone.

There’s the usual generalist nonsense in the middle which makes so many sweeping statements I was inclined to glaze over, but doesn’t detract from several very well thought out points that are expressed well.

Is it just me, or have other people noticed a sudden spike in grocery prices?

Normally our weekly shop for the four of us comes in at around £55-75 … pushing £80 if I’ve been a bit extravagant (or had every household cleaner run out at the same time).

Over the last month it has suddenly shifted to being between £75-90… sometimes pushing £95, yet I’ve been scouring the receipts and we’ve not been buying anything different or unusual to explain the dramatic increase.

I menu plan on a five week rota so theoretically our food bills should stay pretty steady. Going to have to reassess other household budgets if this is going to be a continued trend…

I have recently been on a computing course at Akra Jr’s school – its purpose is to help parents get up to speed with what their children are doing in class, but my goal was to find out why Akra Jr was loving using computers at home, but saying he didn’t enjoy ICT classes.

It’s been great – the teaching is fantastic, they’ve invested a lot in computer hardware and software and getting to “learn” with Akra Jr sitting beside me and showing me what he can do has been absolutely fantastic. Well worth sitting through a whole heap of tutorials on things I already knew how to do and had been using for years.

It’s given me a better idea of what sort of tasks they need to be able to do, giving me the impetus to search out the mac equivalents which can complement any schoolwork at home. It’s also given me some new language – a sort of kiddy tech talk – although mostly relevant for Windows than mac: “kiss the window goodbye” to remind children to use the X to close the window, “dog in the box” to remember which icon is for text wrapping round images.

However, one thing I am finding really frustrating is the inappropriate use of Microsoft Word for desktop publishing tasks. Now, I can see why they are doing this:

• the curriculum probably insists they learn a well-known word processor, but for young children learning needs to be fun. When you’re 7 years old, fun is pictures and very little text – this implies posters, fact sheets, newsletters etc.
• in terms of licensing for school use, using Word for as many different tasks as possible will be cheaper for them than buying a separate DTP package license.
• kids are likely to have some incarnation of Microsoft Word at home so it will be familiar, but are much less likely to have a DTP program at home.

So logical, yes. Easy to learn? God, no.

Using Microsoft Word 2008 to manipulate text boxes and pictures reminded me why I love my iMac so very very much. Getting a picture and text box to stay where you wanted it required more voodoo than mouse skills. To add insult to injury, every now and then when you added a text box (seemingly if you had the cursor in the wrong place but no rhyme or reason as to why) then it would wipe out everything else you had on the screen. I was getting frustrated… Akra Jr just looked a bit bewildered and gave up trying.

It reminded me very much of my experiences of Lotus SmartSuite in my days of working in the insurance industry where colleagues would beg me to fix complicated layouts and I would be able to after a few minutes of faffing – but wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly how I did it, or repeat it in exactly the same way the next time it was needed. Voodoo and confidence were more successful than logic.

Anyway, I’ve bought Swift Publisher for similar tasks at home which is so much easier for a child (and me!) to use, so hopefully we can build some confidence and experience at home with a tool that’s actually designed for the job. We’ll save the Word Processor for when he’s actually got some words to process.

In which I loathe the sound of my own voice, talk about school admissions and dream of the day I find a real life friend who gets all my nerdy references.

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