Small firms to cash in on software bargain bonanza

But they need to negotiate them to the floor. For example, small firms should be aware of the fact that vendors often try to base maintenance contract prices on the 'list price' of software licenses (usually 20 per cent to 22 per cent) when dealing with SME buyers.

It is important for SMB buyers to leverage the interest in their market and negotiate maintenance agreements based on 'as sold' prices, or contract deliverables in return for their business.

Orphaned or balck archive pages? Use this.
A few days ago I posted some advice re deleting posts, saying that one may end up with blank pages in your archives. Not that anything would point to them if you used my repair script.

I've found an old script that deletes those pesky files off your hard disk.

More than likely there'll be nothing there, but you may want to run it in check mode, to see if there are. If there are and there are lots uncomment the delete line and it'll really delete them.

Here's a screen shot to help you understand the script. You can just look in particular archives.

As my posts to the Radio discussion board is syndicated into my Radio aggregator it's much easier to snip it out of my aggregator than to copy, open new editing window, paste... (I think :-)

The Many Faces of Mount Everest

"Not an easy peak to locate while zipping over the mountains at 7 kilometers per second" [Via kuro5hin]

Once upon a time: India 'floated' up to Asia, and bashed the Himalayas up, and up, and up.

Mobile Phones Enter 2-Mpixel Era

Auto-focus (AF) mechanisms and electronic flashes are likely to become more common in mobile phone cameras once the 2-megapixel mark is reached.

I guess this will make me move from my current still digiCam ==> puter ==> thumbnailed to blog. Would prefer direct to blog, but will also require editing on the phone (crop, colour correcting). Though imageMagick does this... {Via Roland Tanglao]

Good Mars photos in German

ESA has new evidence of water on
Mars like we have oil on Earth.Site is in German (well, it is the European Space Agency's Mars Express) but you can download 17Mb tifs which give fairly good detal...
From metaFiler: At this point it seems fairly certain that a lot of the water is now underground (ESA artist's impression), and occasionally makes its way to the surface, sometimes carrying salt along the way (forming some of the more interesting surface structures on Mars, evaporites). But this can only be verified by the radar onboard of MEX, which will start operating in a couple of months.

The AtomEnabled Directory

"More AtomEnabled tools and services are being added every day. Check back soon for even more sites and software using Atom."

I don't hear of anything happening in the Radio or Manila world. I just had a quick look at Mark Pilgrim's feed made by MovableType. Doesn't look that tricky to do, knowing the system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile script (though I'm probably missing something, as I've ignored the developement process). If I had some time I'd make that system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeAtomFile and make one for my Manila hosting server too.

It would be good for business to be listed as the only Manila hosting service and quite probably the only service that both writes and reads Atom.

Manila themes and CSS

I'm creating some new themes for the Government's intranet. 20 of them. Valentines. St David's day. Christmas. Eid Al-Addha. You know, all the most important holidays.

I'm starting from scratch. Trying to have very little HTML and do most of it with XHTML and style sheets.

Once I have a layout that I'm happy with, I can very quickly alter the stylesheet, or the arrangement of the columns and produce 20 different designs with basically the same structure. Kinda like the CSS Zen Garden, only without the switcher. The intranet has 30 odd micros sites (Manila sites) and the IT geezer wants to 'one click' swap themes for the entire installation. People will still be able to use the Editors' only: Prefs: Appearance, to change background and link colours — I'm still using the body macro.

Each site will be fully loaded, with all the usual macros plus:

• searchThisSite
• alteredUserland.siteMenu: a Windows Explorer view of the hierarchy
  
• lastUpdate
• alteredUserland.newsDeptLinks: links with XML buttons to news departments
  
• recentNewsItems
• displayLastUpdatedHomePagesCSS
• printFriendlyLink
• mailStory
  
• xmlCoffeeMug
• rssLink
• viewRssBoxCSS
• alteredUserland.mailToLink: a mail to: member's name with envelope icon

I may add some CSS tool tips as well. Maybe a monthly archive macro too, and I have been thinking about doing a print CSS but if it takes as long to do a screen CSS then I think I'll stick with the print friendly template.

Currently, I'm ripping out the discussion group theme. Still has to be an HTML table but much simpler, whilst giving more power to the CSS.

I'll remove the non UserLand macros and add in modules instead of the includeMessage and release them to the community when they're finished.

Fish with faces on

About a year ago, I gave Esme some slid out of a tin... Little three inch long whole fish in a tomato sauce. She'll eat just about anything, and normally likes tinned fish. I say it's good for her brains. "What's brains?"

She looked down at them, and said she didn't like them. "Well, try them first!"

Still months later, nearly a year, Bradley won't eat fish. Any fish. He says. "I don't like fish with faces on."