Status-Q

Keith Shaw has a short video over at NetworkWorld demonstrating the DisplayLink technology in a couple of different forms.

One of the pictures that didn't get used in the recent Guardian article:

Many thanks to John Robertson, who owns the copyright, for permission to post it.

Shortly after VMware's amazing IPO, XenSource, a spin-out from the Cambridge Computer Lab, have been bought by Citrix in a deal worth $500M. And not all of the money is virtual - there's a good chunk of cash there too.

Many congratulations to my pals there, who will now definitely be buying the drinks next time we meet at the pub.

But this is also a nice challenge to those who don't believe you can make money from Open Source...

This is an interesting site: TheFunded.com allows people who have received VC or similar investment to review and rate their investors. An intriguing idea.

Suppose you're a successful UK high-tech company with an interesting loudspeaker technology. Who would you naturally partner with?

Why, Hallmark greeting cards, of course.

At CamVine, we're starting to experiment with using an AppleTV as a server component of our CODA architecture. Being engineers, the first thing we had to do was take this beautiful piece of kit and dismantle it. Michael has a great photo on his blog.

Just starting to get to grips with the new features in iWork.

Keynote has a nice one: When you select the fill/outline characteristics for an object such as a photo, one of the stroke types is 'picture frame' which puts a fancy border around the thing you've selected.

This is very cute, but there aren't many frame types available. Over at KeynoteUser, however, they've discovered that there are many more hidden away inside Keynote, which can be enabled with a quick hack.

Oh, and it works in Pages too, with a minor modification.

I'm always a little bemused by those who make bold comparative statements without specifying to what they're comparing something.

Here's an example. I find myself tonight in a Bed & Breakfast near Gatwick airport. The little sachet of shampoo in the bathroom says:

Well, that's good. Mmmm... Wait a sec....less harmful than what? Than the animals, presumably?

Not long ago, Dell announced that it was starting to ship computers with Linux installed.

Now Lenovo have followed suit. Lenovo are a large supplier of PCs, having bought IBM's PC business a few years back.

This is encouraging stuff. Linux's biggest handicap in the past has been that users need to install it, which put it at a big disadvantage when compared to other PC operating systems.

Announced today - new and very pretty iMacs, an update to iLife, and iWork now has a spreadsheet application and many other improvements.

An iWork update will certainly make me get my credit card out. I've become a great fan of Keynote and Pages, and the fact that Pages now has a 'track changes' feature means that most of my reasons for starting up Word have now vanished. Hurrah!

Have a look at some of the iWork demo videos on Apple's site. Looks very pretty. My family pack is already on order...

Oh, and the Mac Mini is now a Core 2 Duo machine.