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If you are thinking about a document / content management system, and you’re an enterprise, don’t use Microsoft SharePoint. It sucks.

It really sucks.

Here endeth the lesson.

So… what did I get up to this Easter weekend? I have a whole four days to catch up on here! You know a little of what I did, but let’s see if I can remember the rest.

I stayed with my parents for the weekend, so I went back to Ipswich on Friday afternoon. In the evening, I didn’t really do much 🙂

On Saturday, I went into town and bought a few bits including an iPod (more on that to follow), a few classical music CDs (Samuel Barber Symphonies 1 and 2, Rachmaninov piano concertos 2 and 3, Mozart’s Requiem which I heard live in January), and a couple of DVDs (Futurama season 4 and Family Guy season 1). And then in the evening I didn’t do much, once again 🙂

On Sunday, I went to church in the morning, and then in the afternoon I met up with Tom (a friend of mine who used to live near me in Woodbridge). That was good – it was the first time I’d seen him in… about a year, actually! So that was nice…

And yesterday I came home. In the afternoon, Philippa came round and we got a cinese take-away for dinner and watched “Airplane!”. So, that was my Easter weekend!

Anyway, one thing I did want to mention was the iPod: I’ve managed to just about get it working on Linux. There are a couple of pieces of software I’ve found, one is GtkPod and the other is YamiPod. They both seemed to work fine, although initially I had a bit of a problem with GtkPod because it didn’t auto-detect where the iPod was mounted, and I had a bit of problem mounting / unmounting it (it now mounts in /media/ipod2, but still). This meant that I think I lost most of the stuff I downloaded from iTunes — it’s still on the iPod, it’s just not in the DB anymore. Doh. I’ll try and sort it out at some point, I can’t be bothered right now. The only other snag I’ve run into is that it doesn’t seem to want to read a couple of albums of mine – they’re on the iPod, but for some reason they’re not showing up when I browse for them?! It could just be that they’re encoded in an unusual way, I’m not sure. I’ll try re-encoding them sometime and see if I can get them on there.

Apart from that, it’s working fine — over 300 tunes on there 🙂 That should make the next train journey I have to make a lot more bearable at least.

I found a great list today of things (not) to do if you become an Evil Overlord. Here’s the intro:

Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I’ve read about in books or seen in movies invariably gets overthrown and destroyed in the end. I’ve noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time. With that in mind, allow me to present…

The list contains such gems as:

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies
34. I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.
56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.
80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and closer to my fortress.

Why don’t you have a read of the list 🙂

Yes, that’s right. I have succumbed to the temptation – I’m now the proud owner of a shiny new 30Gb iPod. But before you accuse me of selling my soul to The Man, let me explain to you my reasoning…

I wanted to get an MP3 player. Specifically, I wanted to get an MP3 player that had lots of space and would work with Linux. The iPod has a lot of space – room for my entire music collection on there! Its popularity was both a good and a bad thing: I wasn’t sure about getting something which everyone had — but, because they’re so popular, there is bound to be some software for Linux which works with it. In fact, someone told me the other day that there is some Linux software which enables you to connect to iTunes!

Ok, I know that iTunes uses DRM, and DRM is bad. But you don’t have to use it. In fact, the only reason why I’ve used it now is because I got a free £15 voucher for it, so I wanted to get my money’s worth 😉 I’ve downloaded ‘Tourist’ by Athlete (sounds like a really good album, but I haven’t really listened to it yet), also an album of Debussy Preludes (I heard some of them live last year, lovely), and also a few other random odd songs by Queen, and “Nature’s Law” by Embrace. You can burn CDs from iTunes though, which aren’t DRM restricted, so it’s not all bad in that respect.

Speaking of Linux etc, I downloaded and installed FreeBSD on my old PC, as I want to use it for a web server. I also signed up for a Dynamic DNS account 🙂 Anyway, I’ve got to go, so I shall finish this off at some point…

Yes, you read that right. You can download AVG Anti-Virus for Linux. Free. That’s all well and good, but — what would be the purpose of it? There aren’t any viruses for linux (well, very few at least)!

I suppose it might prevent you from spreading viruses through email if you’d downloaded a dodgy attachment, or perhaps check files which you downloaded, but in general I wouldn’t have thought it was particularly necessary.

Well, I might download it and try it out… see what we come up with 🙂 I’ll report back.

(Side Note: I mentioned a couple of days ago the lecture broadcast by the Royal Society on creationism / evolution. The Register wrote a short report on it today 🙂 )

Well, it’s been quite a busy weekend, this one! Friday evening, Philippa and I went to see the Nayland Village Players perform “An Inspector Calls”. I really enjoyed it – the play was very clever, and there was a lot of food for thought there about human nature and how what we do can affect someone’s life. The performance was very well done despite being amateur, and all the cast performed well! I would definitely recommend going to see them if you get the chance.

We also managed to discover a really good pub, completely by accident! We’d booked to go for dinner at the Rose & Crown in Great Horkesley, but because their chef had broken down and wouldn’t be there until later we couldn’t eat there. We decided to head into Nayland to see if there were any good places to eat there instead, and we came across The Anchor. It’s a really good pub — very friendly, good food, and a nice setting! I would definitely recommend that to anyone in the area – Philippa and I will be heading back there sometime soon! Also, Nayland is a very pretty village, it’s worth having a look around (not that we managed to see much of it, but still).

Anyway. On Saturday, we went down to Deal in Kent for Phil and Jenny’s wedding. It was a really good day! They had some lovely weather for the wedding, and I think the service & reception went well. The sermon was actually very helpful, despite all the points beginning with the same letter… and it was fantastic to see so many friends again! Particularly Joe and Chris & Louise, who I haven’t seen since their wedding (Chris & Louise, that is, not Joe. I haven’t seen him since Chris & Louise’s wedding, but he wasn’t the one getting married … you know what I mean).

On Saturday night we stayed with Philippa’s parents, and stayed on for Church & lunch on Sunday. In the afternoon we headed back to Colchester. In the evening, we moved Philippa’s stuff over to Phil B’s old flat! It took a bit of doing, but we managed to fit all of it in one car and she is now comfortably ensconced in Phil B’s old room. That’s the last place she’s going to have to live before we get married and she moves into Charles House… I have to say, I think we’re both quite looking forward to it, not least because it will mean none of this keep moving around!

Right, I think that’s just about everything. All that remains is to wish Phil & Jenny the very best for the future, even if they don’t read this! 🙂

Apologies for the rather ‘provocative’ title, but I’m just copying the title of a lecture to be given at the Royal Society tomorrow. It will be given at the Royal Society’s London headquarters, but (assuming you can’t make that) it will be webcast live.

It should be an interesting one to watch – I’m hoping that they will refrain from attacking religion, but include some balanced responses to the creationist viewpoint 🙂

I’ll try and post up here as and when I get more info.

I’m getting really annoyed by the amount of comments spam that I’m getting. I usually have about one spambot on here a day, trying to post up adverts to sites for pharmaceuticals etc. I don’t know what kind of return they’re getting on spam, but it can’t be much – do people really buy stuff from dodgy companies who advertise using comments spam? If I ordered anything through them, I’d be worried that I’d wake up in a bath of ice with my liver missing or something like that…

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that if you find you post a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site, either (1) it’s because it’s being moderated, (2) I’ve set my spam filter to automatically delete posts with certain words in them 🙂

The other thing to mention is, I have uploaded the photos I took last Saturday on Yahoo! Photos. You can find them on this page. I’ve decided to store them on Yahoo! rather than on here because there you get unlimited storage space, whereas here I’m paying for the storage and bandwidth! Sometimes you can see a “Download” button next to the photos, but in case you can’t and you want the originals of any of them please let me know.

So… what’s been happenin’ this weekend? Well, I’ll tell you! (Don’t ask me why I have these conversations on my blog. It’s not important. All you need to know is that you ain’t seen me, roight?)

On Friday evening, Philippa and I were babysitting for some friends of ours from home group. It was quite a nice evening actually, we watched “School of Rock” and then some of the Coldplay Live 2003 DVD.

On Saturday, I didn’t do much during the day, apart from go to Asda! In the evening, Philippa and I went to the Rover’s Tye where we met up with a lot of people including some I hadn’t seen in a long time – Andy B, Naomi, Steve Lucas, Foz, Liz (and her friend, Liz) and some of the usual crowd (Sarah & John, Matthew) and some of the in-between crowd (Kevvy B). I’ve taken some pictures which I will put up here soon.

Anyway. Yesterday morning, I went to Fordham. In the afternoon, I did some preparation for the home group on Thursday (where I will be doing miracles^*). And in the evening, Philippa and I went to Wivenhoe with Alex, Elysa and Anne-Marie, where we met up at Papa’s fish and chip shop for dinner. It was the first time I’d actually eaten in the restaurant bit there! Most times previously we either ate at Claremont Road, or on the quayside. Anyway, it was nice! Everyone else had battered sausage & chips, I had haddock & chips… always one to be different, eh? Anyway. Afterwards, we went down to the Rose & Crown for a couple of drinks before heading back home. ‘Twas a very enjoyable evening! And Alex took some great photos of the sunset which you will probably be able to find on his photos page before long.

We had our home group last night, which I was leading. We were looking at the question “Has science disproved God?”. We did have quite an interesting discussion, and I think quite a useful one! I think it is quite worrying that a lot of people seem to believe science and faith are in conflict (and that science is ‘right’), so it was good to take the opportunity to discuss some of the issues and be reassured that science and faith are not in conflict!

I do sometimes wonder if the only reason people believe there is a divide between science and faith is because the only voices you hear are either the hardline scientists who would destroy religion, or the hardline theologians who would destroy evolution. Because both sides are guilty of misrepresenting what the other side says, both sides have plenty of ammo to go at the other with!

What does worry me a bit is the creationist response to evolution. A lot of atheists seem to view evolution as an argument against faith. All the creationists do is lend support to the atheists: by claiming that the earth was created in six literal days as “special creation”, this sets themselves up in conflict with science and thus if evolution is ever proven to be true they have (ipso facto) disproved Genesis.

On the other hand, scientists who believe that evolution disproves the existence of God need to be sat down and given a stiff talking to, for they have incurred my displeasure.

That is all 😀