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Drupal

by | Jan 12, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

My sister is the Akela of a cub pack back home in England. She wanted something ‘on the web’ – she now has a blog and a website.

I looked at all sorts of options for building the website – it needed to be easy to use, minimal maintenance, good functionality – but also secure, not resource hungry and obviously run on Apache, PHP and MySQL.

I eventually selected Drupal.  It has an active developer community; the architecture and structure was logical; the security seems good. Best of all it’s easy enough for non-IT people to use.

Travelling to New York

by | Jan 12, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

It’s Thursday – today I am on Wall Street to see a large financial services customer.

I took the train in from Philadelphia – that was fascinating. Amtrak looks starved of investment. Grand old stations like Philadelphia 30th Street – look magnificent in the main hall; once on the platform it is dark, unkempt and pretty dirty. The new Acela “high speed train” looks good; with a striking similarity to the French TGV or Eurostar. The similarity ends with looks. Turns out that the original plan for the Acela was a fast TGV-like corridor between Washington, New York and Boston. The reality is the investment in new track, dedicated running and then compromises and beaurocratic meddling made the train slower, heavier and unreliable.

On the positive side – the transportation was pretty well integrated. Train to 30th St Station, Acela to Newark, PATH to the World Trade Center site. Pretty good.

Philadelphia, New Order and Apple

by | Jan 10, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

I’m in Philadelphia for a couple of days visiting customers; currently in my hotel room IMing with Jose and talking about Apple.

The new MacBook Pro looks sweet.

I’m watching a DVD of New Order music videos –  NEW order A COLLECTION. It’s stunning. Music videos that are almost twenty years old for Bizarre Love Triangle, True Faith and Round&Round look really fresh.

There is also an interesting – and half completed – web site http://www.kinoteca.net from Michael Shamberg which describes a lot of the background to his music videos for New Order.