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Holiday this weekend

It’s only three and a half days until Scott and I are off to Boston to see Toad The Wet Sprocket in concert. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also quite apprehensive. We’re going to be away for four nights, and I’ve never been apart from Alex for that long. It’s been a good few years since Abi and I have spent that much time away from each other, too.

I’m not even sure who I’m most concerned about: Abi, for having to take sole charge of him for that long; Alex, because he’s going to realize that I’m not around, and is going to spend a certain amount of time going “Dada! Dada!” while looking around the house; or me, for missing them both.

We bought our new digital camera partly with this Boston trip in mind. It’s slips into a trouser pocket, and so is much easier to carry around than the Olympus. The plan is to take lots of photos, and find a web cafe in Boston where I can upload some of the best snapshots and email them back home. Likewise, Abi will have the Olympus at home, so she can take pictures of Alex and email them to me, so I don’t have to be denied my daily dose of boy.

Also, Alex is now willing to talk on the phone. Most of the time he just says single words, “Dada”, “Mama”, “head”, or “Po”, depending on how you prompt him, but even that little amount of contact is going to make me feel close to him. (Occasionally Alex even asks for the phone himself, if he want to speak to his mama. “Mama phone!”)

I’m sure the trip’s going to be great, though. We don’t have any plans apart from the gig on Saturday evening. We’re planning to just hang out, wander around, see some sights, do some shopping, and probably stuff ourselves silly with holiday food. In fact, the holiday food is going to start when we hit Schiphol airport on the outward flight. Café Amsterdam, one of the many dining facilities there, does a mean portion of Saté with frites. You just can’t get decent Saté in Britain, so I’m actually looking forward to this part of the journey almost as much as the concert itself.

I’ve got the tickets lying on my desk. I’m copying all of my Toad CDs to MiniDisc. Abi bought me the BBC Radio adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and that’s going onto MiniDisc as well. I’m still in the middle of Sue Grafton’s Q is for Quarry, and probably won’t finish it until Thursday, so that means that The Last Detective is going to come with me as well.

So much to do, but I love travelling for its own sake, too, so I’ll probably be spending a certain amount of the journey just sitting on the plane, looking out a window, or just enjoying the simple sensation of being on an adventure.

Cool!

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Microsoft buys Virtual PC

When I saw the news that Microsoft had bought Virtual PC from Connectix (via Sean Campbell and Andrew Swigart), my first thought was, “Wow–that’s different”. My second thought was, “What’s going to happen to the Connectix staff?” My brother-in-law works on VPC at Connectix, you see. (Further reading indicates that a lot of them will become Microsoft employees, reporting in to Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit.)

My third thought was, “Why?” This is the hot topic of the moment. Myself, I think that this has a lot to do with Linux, and selling Microsoft server OSs into the enterprise. It allows MS to go relax their stance on Linux without necessarily endangering license sales. (Not that they will change their position–just that they now can.)

Here’s the way it works: an MS client is tempted by Linux. MS can now say, “Go ahead and run it as a virtual machine. You can use whatever Linux apps you want, but at the same time you keep all the benefits of having the main server itself running Windows.” Or, to a sales target they want to convert from Linux/Unix to Windows: “You don’t have to port all your mission-critical apps over to Windows in a big bang. Just put in the new servers with Windows running on them, and let the virtual machines carry on running them until the native Windows versions are ready.” Either way, they win, because they can treat Linux as a third-party application instead of an operating system.

I also reckon they’ll gradually ease VPC away from the (Windows) desktop, and sell it primarily as a server product. VPC for the Mac will probably remain as a desktop product. Why? Because whether you use a Mac or a PC, a home user is likely to want to buy only one license for Windows. If MS promote VPC for the Mac, they gain license sales. If they promote it for Windows, they’ll be encouraging people to re-use their existing Windows license keys, and that’s a big no-no.

Interesting move, that’s for sure.

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Memory prices

I still haven’t upgraded my PC yet, but
looking at the way memory prices are going (see graph below–the vertical axis show the cost of 512MB in GBP), I don’t feel in too much of a hurry.

Drop in DDR memory prices between December 2002 and February 2003

I can get 1GB of memory now for the same price 512MB would have cost at the start of December. Nice.

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Jam Tomorrow

If I were to write a Java-based blogging tool that allowed you to post to Movable Type weblogs, I’d call it JaMTomorrow.

Gettit?

Fortunately I have better things to do with my time.

I suppose this is the right occasion to mention how excited I am about the thought of Movable Type Pro, which Ben and Mena Trott say is coming some time in the summer. Here are some of the features I can’t wait to get my hands on:

  • Custom entry fields
  • Integrated spellchecker
  • Category hierarchy
  • Workflow

The custom entry fields and category hierarchy in particular are going to be invaluable for the Bob Shaw site I’m planning. Workflow could be useful, but it depends what they mean by it.

Pricing is going to be another interesting question. Mena recently talked a bit about the cost of the NetNewsWire RSS aggregator:

“Pricing software — especially software that has previously been free — is a pretty taxing task for the independent developer. It’s an incredibly difficult game where you have to put your personal feelings aside and consider what people will be willing to pay.”

Movable Type is free for personal use, but it has a suggested donation price. If you donate more than $20, you get a license key which makes your blog show up on the Movable Type home page whenever you write a new entry. If you donate $45 or more, you become entitled to support over IM. A Movable Type commercial license, however, costs a flat $150.

Movable Type’s policy has always been that when they eventually release a fully paid-for edition (MT Pro), they will subtract the cost of any donations you’ve made from price. I’m starting to wonder now how much MT Pro is going to weigh in at.

I’m guessing it’s going to be around $145.

I think that while the Pro features are just plain lovely all round, they are going to appeal most to the people who already love and use the software. If you fall in that category, then you’ve probably already made a donation. And if you’ve laid out the $45 (we have), then upgrading to Pro would be a nice, round $100.

Would I pay that? In an instant. Movable Type is one of my all-time favourite pieces of software. It’s a sheer joy to work with.