Facebook and Twitter Costing The Uk Economy Billions

According to this article Morse IT has commissioned a survey to find out how much time people spend on-line on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently the cost to the UK economy is £1.38bn!!

Why?

Has to be the first question. Perhaps it is me but I tried Twitter and it was rubbish. I was getting "followed" by half the eastern blocks porn stars spamming me with tiny-url.com postings leading to their sites and people who really need to get out more if they want to follow whats going on in my life more than once a day. The only decent use I got was following KDE and other open source developers updates on code and projects. However, they all now use the rather much better identi ca open source stack based alternative to Twitter. So if you do want to follow me thats where to find me!

As far as Facebook goes all I get are friend invites from someone I once worked with or went to school with who would not speak to me in the flesh but wants to boost their Friend Count or stupid games dreamt up by teenage programmers thinking they are "cool". I do however, have a soft spot for Myspace and keep a relatively up to date page there for my second love of music.

The next question is why are more IT departments not locking down these sites. In my current role we do not but then if anyone at my present company spent that long on non work related items it would be noticed as we are so small. Now I know people will say "but if you lock it down then people will use their mobile devices .... " and your right they will.... but it will be at their cost and not their employers. It might also make it harder when they have to use their mobile as it would become more obvious as to what they are doing.

Vim-fugitive

Git-hub link for a Gvim/Vim script to enable good git support.

Personal Productivity

This is a (slighty light hearted) guide to improving your productivity. This is an area that I feel I could perhaps improve as I have me hands in many areas these days. I do have a remember the milk account but find it hard to use (not the software which is great just me remembering to actually use it!!)

From this article I love the idea of writing a card for the next day with 3 to 5 things on it and then doing them.

Linus Giving Windows 7 The Thumbs Up....

Perhaps Kernel development will move to Windows 7.... hmm.... then again!

Creating a readonly Checkbox control

I had to make an ASP.Net checkbox readonly today and found that adding the following :

w.AddAttribute("onClick", string.Format("javascript:{0}.checked = {1};", this.ID, this.Checked.ToString().ToLower()));

to the overridden Render() method of a control that inherits a standard Checkbox control did the trick. The call must be place before the call to the parent classes Render() method.

Amarok Issues.

For a while I have been having a strange problem with Amarok. You could set up a playlist, let it play the first song and then wait upto five minutes before it moved to the next track.

Anyway, enough was enough tonight, (a guy needs Dave Grohl to run to!) I found this helpful little post on the Arch forums. Basically it is a known problem and if you switch to xine as your backend for phonon your good to go.

KDE 4.3.2

Here is the latest release announcement for KDE 4.3. 4.3.2 is a maintenance release with fixes for core libraries, KMail and KWin amongst others.

Arora 0.10.1

Already a major bug fix is out for Arora 0.10.

Grab the sources here

Chakra Alpha 3 Is Out

This is a link for the latest Chakra alpha release. This release has been brewing for sometime and appears to contain a large number of fixes and improvements.

Chakra is a live cd based on Arch and KDE (from the team that package KDE-Mod).

Help the team out and give it a whirl.

Arora 0.10

Just pacman -Syu my laptop to find a shinny new version of Arora waiting for me.

Arora is a Qt based Webkit browser which has now become my browser of choice on Windows (with keyboardr as the home page it just flys). This means that for now Google Chrome has been relegated to my second choice browser (since the v3 release anyway.... maybe it's me but it seems very buggy).

On Linux Arora and Firefox are fighting for my attention. Although I think for now at least I will use Arora for research and development work and Firefox for entertainment, rss and social.