I was one of 15 people selected to receive the pre-release copies of Naked Conversations (about Business Blogging, not as exciting as you may think) and I gave a fairly short review on my other blog. (I wish I had had time and skill to do a fuller review, in accordance with the privilege of being one of the chosen few.)

It's interesting to hear two sides of one meeting between the authors of the book and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com. I'm not taking sides, I just think it's interesting. If I were to break rule 1 then I'd say something about the way the debate has been conducted after the meeting...

Today I have mostly been writing procedures. Procedures are our lifeblood, but you can't get away from the fact that they are boring. Like with programming, test driven development, would have been a good approach, but I didn't think that it might apply to what I was doing before I started. However I will be writing tests next, as the thing that the procedure is covering (Direct Debit) could get complicated.

Writing procedures is a bit like programming, but what you can't be sure is how your "compiler" will treat the "code".

tags: tdd

I did a training course last week for some of our Raiser's Edge users. I cannot recommend Creating Passionate Users highly enough if you are involved in training or software production.

tags: training
raisersedge

Charity news from the budget.

Tags: charity

I'm sure many of my colleagues working abroad could tell some good stories and show some good pictures, but not many do. Mark Woodward, however does. And his site is updated regularly, unlike some.

More interesting news from the NRSI. They are putting Graphite into OpenOffice.org 2:
"This project integrates the Graphite smart font rendering engine for complex non-roman scripts and writing systems into OpenOffice.org 2.0.0, the well-known cross-platform FLOSS office suite."

This is where Open Source really comes into its own, when you can extend a powerful application to make it really useful in the parts of the world where the normal font rendering software won't do what you need. It's still got a few rough edges, and is "not extensively tested", but it really opens up possibilities for people needing non-Roman script support.

tags: fonts
openoffice

Spikesource is an interesting company. They do thousands of tests on open source software and sell you "stacks" of pretested software. Their supported platforms are Fedora, Red Hat and Suse Linux. So you get the features of open source software, and the comforting thought of commercial support.

I came across this with the announcement that SugarCRM are reselling their stuff.

tags: opensource