We sold one sofa on craigslist – now it’s time to sell the other.
Novell Cool Blogs – hopefully the final update
We’re in the home straight; final testing for the new Novell Cool Blogs.
I’ve been hitting the test system hard in the last week – making suggestions to the Novell team that are making this happen. There are two main updates – the plan is now to use WordPress for the blog infrastucture; second launch is due ‘next week’.
The internal test system looks really great; all Novell branded and look and feel – but with live blog content. All of your favourite features should be there – comments, trackback, pings – as well as some unique blog posts from Novell’s strongest personalities.
I’ll leave it until announcement time so as not to spoil the surprise – but watch out – this is going to be big!
Special kudos to Mr Jared Nyland from Novell’s web team; he’s been awesome.
Harvey Balls
Ah – a favourite for Powerpointers world over – Harvey balls (or meatballs in Novell parlance) represent the relative impact of various options.
I found a great font with the balls in here – soniacoleman.com – and some great graphics here.
A sidenote: “Harvey balls” are named after their inventor–Harvey Poppel, a partner in the international consulting firm Booz Allen.
Green Card
Our application for permanant residence in the US has been approved; in short our Green Cards are in the post.
It’s taken eight months to process – from first paperwork filing to approval. Sounds like a long time – but this is one of the fastest processed applications I’ve known.
Woo! We’ll be celebrating this evening – this removes a lot of risk.
Novell Community Podcasts
At last – the flood of community content I’ve blogged about for the last month or so is starting to appear.
First out of the gates is Novell OpenAudio – Podcasts for the broad Novell Community.
I’ll not spoil the suprise – but I recorded a series of four podcasts with Erin Quill about a month ago. Watch out for them to show up.
Building a Community
Guy Kawasaki has a great post tonight on Building a Community.
I’m not going to post it here – but take a read.
We’re right in the middle of getting the Novell CoolBlogs kicked off – this is great timely reading.
[Edit: this also got picked up by Robert Scoble; who added ‘go visit your community’. My comment back was this was great for well funded evangelists. What I also meant to add was that it also only works if you have clusters of community members in places you go.]
San Jose, CA
I’m in San Jose all week – working at the RSA Conference.
San Jose is lovely at this time of the year; it’s sunny, warm and friendly. It’s good to be out of the cold of Utah for a few days.
It’s been an interesting few days; there was a PETA demonstration on the corner of Market and San Carlos. Scantily clad girls protesting about the fur trade. Certainly an eyeful for the geeks. Apart from that – press, analyst and general show stuff.
Vegetarian Indian Food
I got another recipe book for Grania for her Birthday: Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking
It’s been a great resource; even though it’s over twenty years old! We’ve taken some Persian, Thai and lots of Indian ideas from it.
This weekend (as I am going away for most of the week) I cooked up a batch of veggy curries – ranging from spicy chickpeas to a hot madras. I also did a Goan style fish and banana curry – slightly milder, sweeter and suitable for Aoife. Mmmm.
Novell Cool Blogs – another update
Well – we’re almost at mid-February – and getting closer to the release of the Novell Cool Blogs.
Hopefully internal testing soon – and live before the end of the month!
Ham, Spam, Viruses
I’ve been running a more aggressive anti-spam and anti-virus regime on my inbound mail servers for about six weeks now.
The statistics are interesting; inbound spam outnumbers ‘real email’ or ham by around 2:1.
This means that during any day there are at least twice as many unwanted, spam emails – as opposed to real mail. That’s unwanted bandwidth usage and unwanted costs for me! If I wasn’t filtering and capturing this then I would have to be more alert to unwanted emails and delete them.
I’m also using ClamAV to check for viruses within email attachemens. Typically around a dozen or so viruses attached to mail per day. Captured upfront.