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I’ve been playing with ThinkFree Office for a bit this evening. It’s a web-based Office system running via a fairly intense Java applet that allows you pull in Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from any machine via a compatible web browser. That last bit is key – I originally loaded it up through Firefox on my Debian system and it didn’t want to play. Admitedly that was probably caused by the Java runtime environment of which I had an old version seemingly not compatible with Firefox 1.5, and ThinkFree Office do give you a pretty pop-up letting you know they’re working hard on improving non-Windows / Internet Explorer support.

A few months back when Google and Sun first started pal’ing up, a few people thought maybe they would push a web-based Office product, which I thought would be pretty cool at the time. I still think it would be, and can see some good uses for the ThinkFree Office system, but I’m not keen on it being so reliant on Java, as even on my Windows laptop it took 5-10 minutes to download the latest version, install it, then download + configure the cabinet files for the applet itself.

But, it was cool to login to work via WebDav interface and find when choosing ‘File | Open’ through ThinkFree Office it will pull in such network drives via ‘My Network Places’ and open files across the Internet from work into a web-based Office app and save it back to the servers behing my desk in the office!

Whether it’s something I’m likely to use much, I don’t know. I’d need to read their terms of service a bit more closely to figure out, for example, whether there are any restrictions on educational use. As you can open + save documents from / to your local computer, the 30Mb space with a basic account becomes obsolete other than storing documents to move between computers, but technically you could do away with Office licences on workstations in schools and simply have a shortcut that points users through to the ThinkFree Office portal to login and load the app. They prohibit multiple accounts from a single individual, but nothing to stop multiple persons each creating an individual account.

Certainly an interesting app and with features such as an iPod version which looks very cool by utilising it as a portable hard drive for transfering documents, and a server version seemingly allowing you to purchase + install into your own servers for use within a network environment, it’s got a lot of promise.

Well, I’ve been after a Mac to play with for a while, and have finally got one on order for work! It’s the new 20-inch iMac 2GHz Intel Core Duo with an upgrade to 1GB DDR2 SDRAM and 256MB ATI Radeon X1600 graphics. Very sweet! Having checked the budget at school and realised we have a few quid left over that needs spending before the end of the financial year, figured I would treat our media studies department to a fairly decent machine for their media work. Am a good guy at heart really. That and it will give me a chance to play with it for a while too!

Usually I ignore hardware catalogues, or just casually flick through them, but anyone that got issue 37 (March 2006) of the dabs.com business catalogue should check out the servers section for a right bloody bargain (click for larger image):

Unfortunately it looks like a bit of a typo – checking out the specs on the dabs.com website only leads to disappointment…

I *so* want a go on this! It’s The Falkirk Wheel, and possibly the most sedate fun-fair ride there is!

For those wondering what on earth it is, check out this wikipedia article, but basically it’s a lift for connecting together two canals! Using the basic laws of science, it rotates itself through 180°, lowering any canal boat in the upper chamber into the lower canal and vice-versa, all in about 4 minutes and using the same amount of electricity as it takes to boil 8 kettles. Very cool, and about £8 a ride

And for those really interested, a slightly less high-tech version (by modern standards!) has actually existed since 1875 – the Anderton Boat lift.

We’ve had 3 power cuts this afternoon, but only half the estate has been going out – a couple of blocks down it’s been fine Not impressed! But, my £3 APC 1400 SmartUPS eBay steal from a few months back has kept my computer going each time – though there wasn’t much left on the battery by the time it came after the last cut! There was me sitting all smug thinking “Ah well, least I can carry on even with the power out” until I realised my wireless router downstairs isn’t covered by a UPS, nor does it have a steam-powered backup…

I decided that rather than have a 160Gb hard drive sat doing very little except for occasionally playing Flight Sim, it was about time I just re-sized the damn thing and made use of it! I’ve used QTParted in the past to re-size NTFS partitons using a Knoppix CD, but as I’d read GParted released an updated live CD yesterday, I gave it a go. Only took a couple of minutes to re-size a 160Gb NTFS partition down to 40Gb and create a new 100Gb ext3 partition, leaving a little left over for later. Worth a look if you’re wanting to play with your partition tables – it’s not just for NTFS

Ah, I remember the good old days when *reading* from NTFS partitions was considered playing with fire…

Stuffed in with my DVD rentals from ScreenSelect yesterday was a leaflet for 40 free prints from Snapfish digital photo printing, which is a service of HP (whatever that means!). Usually, I’m quite happy with just browsing my photos either online or locally on the computer so haven’t bothered getting any printed. But, just like with the 10 minutes of free SkypeOut credit mentioned yesterday, I’m never one to miss a freebie so uploaded a batch of photos early yesterday afternoon. Bugger me if they didn’t arrive on the doorstep this morning!

Although the free prints were 6″x4″, with those direct from camera actually re-sized slightly smaller due to the aspect ratio, they’re very, very good quality! I’d probably pick the 7″x5″ if I was getting more done as these are maybe a tad too small, but as with most other online print services, Snapfish offer a ton of extras you can have your photos printed onto such as t-shirts, coffer mugs, mouse mats, jigsaws, etc. Cost-wise they seem very competive, and definately worth a look if you’re after holiday snaps printed when you consider the quality and speed these were processed!

After my rant last week about Skype and purchasing SkypeOut credit, Jeff pointed out they’re running a promotion for everyone to get 10 minutes free SkypeOut credit simply by signing in to their account today. Never one to miss a freebie, I signed in, and lo and behold – purchase your SkypeOut credit through PayPal and get an extra 120 minutes of call time for free!

And I wondered if it was just me being sceptical when all my payment methods were being rejected except PayPal, especially since eBay also just happen to own PayPal as well as Skype…

Well, I’ve been playing around quite a bit the last day or two. As I’d pulled down an update to The Gimp (no jokes please – check the website if you don’t know what it is!), I wanted a chance to try it out. Usually I’m crap with graphical stuff, but the spiffy logo at the top of the site was knocked up in about 5 minutes and will stay until I get bored!

I’ve also integrated my photo gallery completely, thanks largely to the WordPress Coppermine integration plugin which is pretty cool. Let’s me grab photos straight from the gallery and put them into postings, and upload photos directly into the gallery from WordPress. Plus, with a change to the search section, whenever you search for something, it will also pull back results from the available photos and albums in the gallery! The gallery itself has been themed to match the Kubrick theme the blog runs off, but heavily modified to take version 1.4.3 of Coppermine. The theme only existed for 1.3.x – anyone after a copy, let me know.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of coding lately trying to bring some stuff up to scratch. At work, we’re running a system I’ve developed which is a fairly comprehensive web interface to our Internet proxy + content filtering. It’s pretty cool, and quite a few people that have been in + out of school have been asking how on earth it actually works!

As I’ll be leaving work in a little over 3 months (that’s becoming scarier every day!), it seems like a good time to release all this code. Have spent so much time over the last 18+ months on this, I should have done it a lot sooner, and it would be such a waste for it to just to sit at work once I’ve gone. Plus, although I’ve tried to keep the code as clean as possible, there quite a few things hard-coded into it which would be difficult for someone else working with it to understand. Luckily, I agreed right from the start with my boss that all the code would not be tied to the school, meaning I’m free to distribute it all.

So, having read a few of the comments from a Slashdot article this past week, I’ve now got subversion installed + configured on a server at home and am able to update and commit changes from both home + work now. A lack of this kinda thing has what’s slowed things down so much as I couldn’t be bothered with manually copying bits of code back + forth from my test server at home into work. At least now I have a method to keep everything current + up to date. Is pretty cool and very easy to use – wish I’d implemented something like this a year ago!

For those not familiar with subversion, it’s basically taking CVS a step further, though for my purposes I probably won’t really notice any advanced features. Is definately worth checking out for those wanting to move bits of code between systems with the minimum of fuss, and also provides an easy method of loading code from previous revisions when your changes don’t quite work