John R. Brandt writes the column Brandt On Leadership for Industry Week. His latest article Come On, Get Happy, is another gem. Brandt says,

Invariably, I'm told that their predicament is due to: difficult market conditions beyond their control; wholesale customer defections based on currency fluctuations or unfair trade; a particularly toxic or strangled culture that prevents change.

Please.

Brandt claims all unhappy companies look alike sharing five fingerprints:

1. A belief that employees are dangerous and lazy.
2. A conviction that customers cannot be trusted.
3. A focus on policies, not principles.
4. An obsession with today, not tomorrow.
5. Leadership in all the wrong places.

Brandt does a good job elaborating on each of the five fingerprints. Take a look. While you're there, see if you recognize any of those fingerprints for your company or project.
[Reforming Project Management]

I just love Hal's blog.  Every post is a gem.

Okay so I am trying to customise a MovableType template and have hit a snag.  I can include my customisations to the edit_entry.tmpl using the <TMPL_INCLUDE> directive and this works okay.  However I need to put a dynamic url into the included HTML, the Url coming from a configuration file supplied with our tool.  And this is where I am having problems.

There doesn't seem to be a way of doing this from the template language that I can find (please tell me if i'm wrong) so my next idea was to write a simple MT plug-in to return the Url for me.  That way I could include the plugin to my template and all would be well.

Except it looks like MT doesn't interpolate custom plugins when processing the editing template.  I just see the tag (I tested with the <MTServerUptime> example) embedded in the output, not the content it should represent.

This seems like such a simple thing to want to do.  Can anyone help me?

You know, I can't imagine a more courageous thing for a US President to do than going to visit Iraq on this Thanksgiving.

If anyone reading this knows where I can download a copy of MovableType 2.51 I would be really grateful.

Thanks.

----

Update:  Thanks to Mark Paschal and John Howard for jumping in with the goods almost before the bits had settled on the page.

We've posted an essay which attempts to highlight where we think organisations can benefit from blogging.

It continues our effective organsiations theme and uses what we think is a very strong visual metaphor for understanding how different organisations can apply similar amounts of effort but get wildy different results.

Can it really be a year since that fateful day when Paolo and I scribbed on a whiteboard in Ronchi?  Can it really be six months since Paolo, Simone and I gave the first demo of the K-Collector prototype?

Time flies when you're having fun and the last year with my new partners at Evectors (Paolo, Simone, Monica and Fabrizio) has gone so quick my head is spinning.  Or maybe it's the champagne because today we are announcing the launch of K-Collector 1.0!

I'm so proud of what we've achieved together in the last 6 months.  The product is better than I could ever have imagined it would be, and the best is yet to come!

I'm sitting here in Seattle's airport. My flight is delayed. The plane is broken. A new one is getting flown in. But, it gives me some time to think about how people perceive brands and what can affect that perception. Particularly when it comes to Microsoft

What do you think when I say "Nordstroms?" I think great service. "Coca Cola?" Refreshing. "Nike?" I wanna be like Mike. Apple Innovative. "Levis" Cool. "Krispy Kreme" Hot and fresh.

Now, what do you think when I say "Microsoft?" Do you think "Monopolistic? Ruthless? Rapatious? Arrogant? Low quality? or Untrustworthy?" Many people do.

What do you think? How can we work together to make a win-win?

1. The president and his administrations handling of 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
2. The big media companies spinning things for their pals in the administration.

l.m.orchard commented regarding the using Bayesian analysis on news. In fact, as soon as I saw it I remembered, I had read his piece already. It was probably his writing that triggered my initial interest in using a Bayesian classifier in K-Collector.

Re-reading that piece I got an interesting different angle since his approach was to blend a Bayesian classifier with his news aggregator to try and have it prioritize news he would find interesting and not to categorize it by topic. I think this is a much more scalable task, from a K-Collector perspective, than what Jon is experimenting with. I think the efforts of training a system-wide recognizer to differentiate between topics would be too much for most users of the product to bear.

Our product roadmap for K-Collector already includes allowing users to personalize the system. For example we think that people should be able to say which feeds they think are relevant on different topics. Notice that this is a much very granular relationship since it means that I can say "Matt Mower is a real expert on the topic sock puppets" but that this says nothing about how relevant I am on "dating." or any other topic. Indeed each user might rate the exact same sources differently over a wide range of topics.

What might be interesting is if people could "share" and "subscribe to" preference maps. As a new user of the system you might not really know who is relevant on any particular topic. But imagine you worked with David Weinberger, Phil Wolff, or Dan Gillmor. If you knew them and trusted their judgement you could pick one of their preference maps as a starting point and immediately gain a usseful insight into the data as it is structured by topic. You might even switch between personalities to get more perspective!

Thanks to l.m.'s piece I am now wondering also about whether a Bayesian classifier might be more use in helping users to establish their own preference maps about which content is most relevant to them.

Last week I installed a Mikrotik 2.8beta box configured as a bridge after the router. We are blocking P2P file sharing and the results have been very entertaining. People will not actually call up and tell you that Kazaa is not working. It is the "Internet" has stopped working... Or I cannot get to the sites that I need.

This type of filtering is the EXACT same thing that cable companies are putting into place nation wide. Here in Mass, Our local cable company is putting caps on the kazaa downloads and uploads using this type of filter but because it only effects that application, web browsing and email are totally unaffected. Although they are not admitting to doing this, we have confirmed via actual trials that this is indeed what is going on. The trick is to figure out what a good speed ratio is and cater to that figure. For us, the 1k/s per person is perfectly acceptable since it doesn't impact downloading. Less then that would affect search packets and thus be noticed.

• CVS Commit + Weblog = Changeblog

There's been some discussion in the blog world about using a Bayesian categorizer to enable a person to discriminate along various interest/non-interest axes. I took a run at this recently and, although my experiments haven't been wildly successful, I want to report them because I think the idea may have merit. [Full story: O'Reilly Network: Working with Bayesian Categorizers]

Tog, UI expert who escaped Apple long time ago, illustrates how more security often lead to less security. Read it and weep. This is why when someone tells me about some elaborate security scheme, I often find myself sighing.

I've emphasized part of the quoted passage because I think it spells out what is wrong with so many large companies.  Here we have something like VOIP which is potentially great for consumers and has been a commercial possibility for at least a couple of years and these guys are finally admitting they can't stop it.  Which says to me that they don't give a rats about the customer.  They might as well say:

I want to write a regular expression that matches any XML entitiy except the built-in entities.  To match the built-in entities I would use:

I had the dubious pleasure today of listening to the speech by George Bush described as the keynote speech to his visit over here

I have to say I cannot work out how this man got elected to anything, he is a terrible speaker! I spent the first half wondering why he was periodically sneering at the audience, before realising this was his idea of projecting warmth!

With respect to the content I can only say this:

I cannot remember ever before hearing so many noble sentiments, wrapped in such powerful rhetoric and so completely devoid of substance or principle. I think what summed it up for me was this gem:

There's a book or two (or three) on this topic. I'll make a few points. Perhaps you can add to them with your comments.

n.b. Remember the context of this posting is doing projects.

We take our capacity for speaking for granted. We can't remember a time when we couldn't speak. It's just what we do. But communicating with language is not straight forward. We think the meaning of our speaking is clear, only to discover the listener understood something different than we meant. Humberto Maturana claims denotative meaning (precise definitions) in speaking is not possible; there is only connotation (inference, nuance). He's saying that each of us gives meaning to what we hear based on the distinctions we can make, our preoccupations (concerns) at the time, and the relationship we have with the speaker. In other words, in spite of the care we give to saying what we mean, people will listen what they listen.

One of the tragedies of projects is when someone sees that action is required but they fail to speak about it. Sure, sometimes we see people complaining to a friend or coworker. But they don't speak up to a person who's in a position to act. We can speculate why this is the case. Frankly, it's not useful. Just knowing that people don't speak up is enough to begin changing the behavior of people with the authority to act.

The work of projects is coordinated through conversations. It's not about process. It's not about schedules. Work is certainly not coordinated through controls. It's all about conversations, particularly requests and promises. Yet people don't see the coordinating aspects of commitment conversations. Instead, they see writing code, hanging doors, designing product, and doing one report after the other. It fits that people don't get highly competent at something they don't see.

To recap,

• People listen what they listen, not necessarily what was intended.
• People don't speak when they have something to say.
• People don't listen to what others are saying.
• People don't speak or listen for commitments.

Disaster? You bet! But it is also the good news for project managers/leaders. We can anticipate that we'll encounter one or all four conditions throughout our projects. I bet you will find examples today!
[Reforming Project Management]

Hello Mother.

I'm trying to put titles on my items now, which should help out my RSS feeds. Hope they work OK. I'm looking for other ways to improve my weblog's usability. Any other good ideas out there? Of course, if I forget to put the titles on, then what's the use? I really hate having to do more work, but I think it's worth it.

Compare and contrast.  A lesson from todays BBC lunch time news:

Item #1 : Bush's visit.

"I understand you don't like war, and neither do I.

Item #2 : Rising crime in rural areas.

BlogTalk 2.0 taking off. I have just received the annoucement that BlogTalk 2.0 is taking off. Vienna... here we come! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I know that Paolo and Matt had a great time at last years BlogTalk and I know that I had a great time in Vienna in Sept. I wonder if the BlogTalk folks want to hear about personal publishing that goes BEYOND just blogging (or shall I say amatuer journalism.)

There are so many wonderful, exciting things going on in the world of identity, calendar events, recipes and reviews - I hope that these "futuristic" topics make it onto the 'agenda'.

I guess the only question is - is the term blogging going to remain static or move forward?

Just received a Skype call from someone who "wanted to talk to someone in England."  This has lead me to discover that Skype has an option which, if enabled, only allows incoming calls from people on your friends list.  I'm happier with this as a default.  If you want to get in touch just IM me first and I can make you a friend (or not.)

If you ever find yourself looking at file called ggviewer67-30.exe in the taskmanager and wondering if you've acquired a new trojan don't fret.  You've probably installed the Google Deskbar.

The true reason for Buoy's event handling mechanism is that it is vastly more powerful than Swing's. It makes it easy, even trivial, to do things that are difficult or impossible with Swing. Let me give a few examples.

Suppose that you want to monitor every event of any sort that is generated by a particular Widget. Simply call

addEventLink(Object.class, this);

and you will get them all. Suppose you then want to "play back" those events at a later time. Simply pass them to the Widget's dispatchEvent() method. This will work even if you have no idea what types of event the Widget might generate, even if some of the events are a custom event class that you do not even know exists.

Doing the same thing with Swing would be an enormous undertaking. You must know in advance every type of event a particular Component may generate. You must implement the event listener interfaces for every one of those event types, and provide a nearly identical implementation of every method defined by every one of those interfaces.

Here is another example. Suppose that a window's contents are variable. Other objects may want to be notified of events being generated by Components inside it, but that list of Components may change at any time.

To do this with Swing, an object that wants to be notified of a particular event type would need to recursively go through the containment hierarchy, identify every Component in the window that can generate that type of event, and add itself as a listener to each one. Any time the contents of the window changed, each listener would need to repeat this process to make sure it is still a listener for every Component. This could possibly be done by listening for HierarchyEvents, or alternatively the window itself could provide a notification mechanism to inform outside objects when its contents have changed.

An alternative solution would be to have the window (or another object) act as a "proxy" for events generated by its contents. The window would add itself as a listener to each Component inside it, then forward events to other objects that wanted to receive them. The window would need to implement an appropriate mechanism for objects to request notification of events generated by its contents, and of course the entire system would need to be implemented separately for every type of event that could be generated. Needless to say, this system will only work if you know in advance every type of event that might be generated by any Component in the window.

With Buoy, proxying events is so trivial that it's almost embarassing. The window simply invokes the following method on each of its child Widgets:

widget.addEventLink(Object.class, this, "dispatchEvent");

Any object can then call addEventLink() on the window, and be notified of any event generated by any Widget in the window. This works even if you have no idea what event types the child Widgets might generate, or which ones an outside listener might be interested in.

One more example. Suppose you want your program's menus to be user configurable. This can be done by using a file to define the list of items in each menu. With either Swing or Buoy, the file can define the name, position, keyboard shortcut, and action command of each menu item. With Buoy, you can take this a step further and actually define what method should be called when the menu item is selected. The is an incredibly powerful technique, especially for programs that can be extended by means of a plugin mechanism.

Israeli government officials called the men's criticisms naive.

This is London reports on Bush's security arrangements for his UK visit.

In case you were worried:

• Patients given artificial blood

• Bush wants to prevent protests in UK

Something that has surprised me travelling in and out of London twice a week is how few people listen to music.  I mean, there are quite a few people with walkmans, but my lazy observation is that it is less than 20% overall.  I find this surprising.  Do these people not listen to music at all?  Not at home?  Where is all the music?

share this idea. Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff have written a book, Why Not?, with a bunch of ideas that they want to give away, as a way of teaching innovation. Ideas like "why can't I email a list of numbers I need to call to my cell phone" are there (and here) for the taking. They've also built a website with more free ideas. [Lessig Blog]

I found it interesting browsing their site.

Source control systems. Today at work we were venting a little bit about source control systems. CVS has been a great help to open source development but it has 2 major flaws:

1. It is theoretically possible, but practically impossible to go backwards in time, because there's no notion of a changeset that can be backed out.
2. It doesn't version directory moves or renames.

There are others, but these are the big two in my mind. Possible solutions include (in no particular order):

• Perforce
• Arch
• Bitkeeper
• Subversion

I'm biased against Perforce and Bitkeeper because they aren't open source. I'm also biased against Perforce because I don't know much about it. I'm biased towards Subversion because a lot of ASF'ers working on it, but I'm nervous because this will be the 3rd ApacheCon that I've gone to where Subversion hasn't yet reached beta. [Ted Leung on the air]

For Paul.

I must confess that I've rather grown to like Thunderbird since I started using it. I thought that, since I am soon to try Bloomba and then TheBat that I would check out some of the extensions and see if they addressed the few shortcomings I see. You can imagine my pleasure when I not only see a way of toggling the preview pane but also macros & sticky notes as well.

Sadly, however, this was my downfall. I installed these extensions and another which lets you grab addresses easily from messages. I restarted Thurnderbird as requested and all seemed well. I was able to turn off the preview pane (heaven!) Then I double clicked an email and Thunderbird crashed.

Ouch!

"Okay," thought I, "lets dump the extensions for now." But no, Thunderbird now crashes as soon as I open it. Anyone know a manual procedure for removing extensions from your profile?

I guess the morale is: If you're more or less happy with a version 0.3 beta of a product, don't get greedy.

---

Update: Well how odd, Thunderbird crashed 3 times in a row so I decided to leave it alone until I next restarted.  Then a couple of minutes ago I wanted to email someone and reflexively started it up and.... no crash.  I've disabled the extensions for now and am happy again.  Thank you Thunderbird!

Ok i'm pretty impressed.  I post a minor gripe about importing with Bloomba this morning and find, a little later on, a comment from them inviting me to get in touch so they can help me out.

Well Outlook is working at the moment, seemingly.  But Bloomba spent 13hrs importing and only got 14% (about 2,500 messages) of the way through before I had to stop it.  It had my CPU at 100% (Bloomba not Outlook) and I need my computer back.  At this rate importing will take about 4 days to finish importing all the messages.  I'm also not convinvced that it is entirely Outlook to blame here since Bloomba took about 5 minutes of 100% CPU to delete those messages after I cancelled the import.

This sucks.

Good grief I can't even start Outlook now. It opens then immediately runs up to 100% CPU and sits there unresponsive. I'm not even sure it will work to the extent that other clients importers will be able to get the data out. What do I do then?

One thing you can be certain of. I will never buy into a world of Microsoft controlled DRM. They don't build the kind of software that I would trust not to lose my licenses, invalidate my data or lock me out of my system. If this was Outlook + Palladium then doubtless the PST files on my backup CD wouldn't be readable by now either.

I can't wait to say "Good riddance Outlook."

-----------------------

20.30 Update

Sure enough I tried to use Bloomba to import my Outlook mail and no go.  It spent 2 hrs twiddling it's thumbs while Outlook just looked on and laughed it's fiendish laugh.  My next step will be to do a final backup and then attempt to re-install Outlook so that I can export my mail archives into another application.

What a drag.

I think this is a good speech by Al Gore on the subject of civil liberties in times of trouble.  I wanted post a summary but I've just realised I didn't re-install Copernic Summarizer after the last rebuild of this machine.  Must do that.

Once a technology has, through an open process, been incorporated into a ratified standard from a recognised body like W3C, it should be impossible to assert patent rights over it unless they were asserted during the standardisation process.

A couple of Thunderbird gripes (I should probably start a page for all this sort of stuff):

• One of my mailboxes doesn't seem to be collecting automatically even though it is configured that way
• I have had a case where the UI appeared to stall collecting mail. Turned out it was fine once I clicked on a mailbox but it looked frozen (hourglass cursor and all)
• Collapsed threads aren't marked unread if the top-level item is read
• I can't seem to delete a thread in one go

One thing about ditching Outlook will be that I will be giving up my main calendaring application.  It's not necessarily that I think Outlook is good at this (it might be, i'm not sophisticated enough to judge) but I do use it.  I could switch to iCal on the Mac but for me the PIM argument is won,  I want events in there with my messages where I can see them (it also means it's likely I'll have the client open a lot).

Thunderbird isn't doing events and I doubt TheBat or Bloomba are either.  Chandler isn't a product yet although CleverCactus sounds like it's getting close.  I'd really like something with a little beyond a standard PIM though, something that helps me keep track of what I should be doing by making suggestions to me about my actions & behaviour.  I guess Act! may do this but I think i'd need a training course.

I've just come across Denham Grey's Information Gathering Template post.  I'm not sure how I missed it before, I'm subscribed to Denham's feed.  Anyhow it's really interesting.

What he's done is to publish his informal framework for categorizing information when doing research.  It goes like this:

• People
• Places
• Problems
• Promises
• Principles
• Patterns
• Products

• Who
• Where
• What
  
• When

Some observations about Mozilla Thunderbird as a mail client.

First of all, it's very good.  By which I mean it seems quite polished, the interface is neat and responsive (take note Outlook) and best of all it's multi-threaded.  Why Microsoft cannot cope with the idea that I might want to do other things whilst it churns through mailboxes downloading spam is a mystery best known to themselves.

The filters are very good and seem to work reliably (again not something I associate with Outlook).  One thing I particularly like is that you can actually specify which header you're filtering on.  I've come across one glitch (in bugzilla) where it treats Sender as From: hopefully that will be fixed in a later build but it's nothing that can't be worked around so far.

Another thing I like is that you can define filters to apply instantaenously in your inbox.  So I can create a filter for Paolo's messages and just apply that.  It's much more convenient than searching given that I look through his messages a lot.

One thing which is not an improvement from my perspective is the separation of mailboxes.  I mean, I can see why some people might want to work that way & keep everything separate.  I'd rather just chuck everything into one mailbox and start from there.  But, whilst I could filter all messages into a local folder I can't run further filters from there.  I guess it's not a problem, but it's not comfortable for me.  We'll see how that goes.

Unanswered questions are still:

• How good is the junk filtering, i'm not convinced it's as good as SpamNet but I have no idea how long you need to train it and it gives me no feedback
• Will I be hurt by the lack of integration with my anti-virus software & is there a way to fix that?

Hey coders, there's a new font that's designed specificially for code editors who like to code in small-sized fonts. ProFont was created in the early ‘90s by Andrew Welch, a famous Macintosh shareware developer, and now it’s available on all platforms. It was designed to be a monospaced font for source code – i.e. a 0 and a O are clearly distinguished, as are ; and :, 1 and l and I, etc.

Shelley POwers says that the IRS found her weblog. Wow. Makes one think about what you should put on your weblog. But, if you've been reading here for the past three years or so, you'll have gained a huge amount of knowledge about me. My sleep patterns. My sexual preference. My religious beliefs. My work history. My school history. Even what former employers of mine say about me (there are a couple who hang out in the comments here). There really is very little you all don't know about me.

Does anyone know of a way to remove the option "Close Other Tabs" from the Mozilla tab menu?  I can't count the number of times I have hit this by accident and lost a load of open tabs and, yet, I have never had occasion to use it deliberately.   Seems like a UI blunder to me.

Nearly half the benefits of Bush's US$1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001 went to the richest 1 percent, while 60 percent of this year's cuts will go to taxpayers with incomes of more than US$100,000, according to the tax policy center run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Bush also fought hard to repeal an inheritance tax that affected only the wealthiest 2 percent, as well as cutting capital gains tax and trying to abolish the tax on dividends.

The Bush cabinet also stands out for its big money background. Every member is a millionaire and, the Center for Public Integrity says, its total net worth is more than 10 times that of the Clinton cabinet.

President Bush may not be the cause of America's unequal society, but the members of his administration arguably personify a new plutocracy.

Enter Bloomba. I can’t even begin to explain how it works (I’m sure I’ll stare at it long enough to figure it out, but right now I don’t really care): it just works. The idea is that instead of using folders to sort your e-mail, it indexes everything. Want to find a message? Just type in the words that describe the e-mail. Searches I’ve done have taken less than a second. This is the first time I’ve felt like I can Google my e-mail. (Yes, this contradicts what I said the other day. Maybe this is an answer?) You can still use folders if you want to, but after just a few hours of use I can see how folders become far less important.

So far I've had 4 email client recommendations

• Eudora
• Thunderbird
• Incredimail
• TheBat
• CleverCactus (I knew about this one anyway)
  

Today I'm looking at Eudora 6.0 and Thunderbird Milestone 3 email clients.  My first impressions of Eudora is not positive.  I find the interface confusing (and I don't think it's because I'm an Outlook user) and it seemed to take forever to display messages.   That said lots of people use Eudora so I need to give it a fair shake.  I felt rather more at home with Thunderbird and it seemed to work quite smoothly.   More later...

“You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.” -- Dean Martin

I confess to having something of a hangover this morning.

Met David Rosam last night for beers. David is great company and we talked about loads of stuff including his new phone which has a dandy camera in it. My phone will need to be replaced at some point soon and I think I am starting to crack about cameras and colour screens. I'm also resolved to take another look at Ecademy and maybe set-up a club there.

Looking forward to meeting up again soon David.

• Collaborative Filtering resources

[0xDECAFBAD]

I need to understand how the work being done on collaborative filtering can help us to improve K-Collector.

• Cougaar is a Java-based architecture for the construction of large-scale distributed agent-based applications.

[0xDECAFBAD]

It's been a long time since I last experimented with Java agents.  I think it was Voyager 1.0 (from Graham Glass' old, old, company ObjectSpace).  Cougaar seems like an impressive framework.  I could get interested in this stuff again.

I hate Outlook more and more with every day I draw breath.  It's been my primary email client for about 2 years since it was mandated by my previous company and, when I got the next version with Office Professional, I resolved to persevere with it hoping that my list of gripes would have been addressed, somewhat, in the upgrade.

I was wrong.

Among it's many catalogue of bone headed behaviours and incomprehensible problems is the new superpower of thrashing the CPU @ 100% whilst simultaneously failing to do anything useful about collecting my email.  I could go on and catalogue the litany of abuses Outlook has heaped upon me like rules only seem to work and so on but what's the point?  Even if you cared Microsoft will never fix them.

I would love to hear from you if you have a recommendation for a new email client.  Two concerns I have are losing CloudMark SpamNet and the  email scanning via McAfee.

Any suggestions?

Over the weekend I finished the basic K-Collector client for MovableType.  It's still a little rough around the edges, unoptimized and what have you, but it seems to work here.   In the first instance we're looking for a handful of MT users who are technically savvy (happy installing perl modules, CGI & don't mind mucking about with their templates and such) to do the testing, then we'll open it out when we are sure we have any problems locked down.

If you would like to be part of this first group please drop us a line.

This Plaxo thing is insidious.

I just got an email from someone I spoke to a while ago which says "I'm just updating my address details, please can you confirm or correct what I have?"  The email is automatically generated by Plaxo and shows a neat card that indicates this guy doesn't really have have my details.  So I think "Okay."  And trott off using the link provided to go update them.

But as I'm there I'm thinking "hey... if I change my details again, i've got this work to do again.  And maybe for each person who keeps my details in Plaxo."  He's put the burden of updating my details on to me.  Fine for him, not fine for me.  Of course Plaxo offer the carrot "If you get Plaxo too then you won't have to do this.  We'll do it for you."

Of course then I'm signed up for the Plaxo service.  They'll want something in return (and I still have no solution for the other people who will not be using Plaxo).  Some people might call this clever marketing, but I think it's a bit like being blackmailed and I don't like it.

For my money  Kunekt have (or had, I'm not sure if the service is still supported) a better approach.  I keep my details on their server and they provide an RSS feed that can be used to be notified when I make changes.  Two key differences:

1. The architecture is open, it's just RSS.
2. It doesn't bother you unless you want to use it (and even then it doesn't bother you).

The terms: deployment in China is royalty free and everywhere else it is 30% cheaper than alternatives. With 250 m cellular users, the ability to mandate faster acceptance, lower costs for upgrades (due to $0 royalties), and a spill over effect into the rest of SE Asia (perhaps another 100 m users): China may win big here (particularly Chinese consumers). [John Robb's Weblog]

This the first evidence that has persuaded me (in my gut) about the coming of China as a dominant economic force in the world.

It's no good, I can't finish this thing tonight.  There's one stupid bug after another to fix and I'm too tired to keep fighting with movable type.  Maybe a clear head tomorrow will make it easier to fix.