Status-Q

Yesterday I visited the Møller Centre here in Cambridge.

Interesting architecture, and a great view from the tower:

There’s some other quite interesting architecture visible if we zoom in to the right:

The buildings on the right are the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and the other tower, on the left, is the University Library, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who created several other rather Stalinist-looking buildings but redeemed himself by designing the iconic British red telephone box.

Giles was continuing in the family business - his father was also an architect responsible for some notable buildings, and his grandfather designed the Midlands Grand Hotel which formed the front of St Pancras’ Station. Now, that is something to be proud of… take a look!

Last month, my friends Gerry & Tessa took a picture of me working outside a Cambridge café.
I knew nothing about it until our Christmas card from them arrived!

Kings Parade, Cambridge

There was an amazing light against a dark sky over Cambridge on Friday.

Aha! You know things are really getting serious at CamVine now… we’ve just created an ‘Opportunities‘ page! Keep your eye on it!

The first post we want to fill needs somebody who really understands web applications and enjoys creating them, and who has excellent all-round software skills and IT interests.

I’ve been doing much of this development in the past, but I now have to concentrate on other things, so somebody else gets to do the fun stuff. Besides, we now need somebody really good!

Could this be you? More info here.

Around the CamVine/Ndiyo office yesterday.

St Columba’s church cast a splendid shadow on the side of the new John Lewis building in Cambridge this morning.

One of the reasons I think I’m so lucky to live here is that our walk into the town centre this morning incorporated feeding ducks, watching kayakers, drinking lattés, grocery and shoe shopping, and took in both the view above and the one below.

Oh dear. This isn’t going to do my bank balance any good at all…

One of the many joys of working in the Ndiyo/Camvine shed is the view from the window, looking westward towards Grantchester. It rained for much of today, but the sun came out in the evening.

Click for different sizes

Michael and I were in Paris in July, just a few days after the launch of the Velib’ scheme (Vélo Liberation) - which provided bicycles for public rental at hundreds of ’stations’ around the capital. We didn’t get a chance to try one, though I’ve used a similar facility in Copenhagen before. The Paris scheme works partly because it was funded and managed by JCDecaux in exchange for control of large amounts of advertising space, and partly because users need to provide a credit card-based €150 deposit to be able to hire one.

Anyway, apparently it’s been a huge success, with 10,000 bikes deployed and people using them for 100,000 journeys per day.

Ken Livingston, are you listening?

There’s more about the scheme here and here, and many other successful operations are running in other cities around Europe.

Ten years ago in Cambridge, of course, we had the Green Bike Scheme, which has passed into local legend - almost into mythology, because even if you lived in the city at the time you might have missed it. 300 unclaimed bicycles from the police pound were painted green and deposited at special stands around the town with the idea that people would just pick them up at one place and drop them off at another. Well, they got the first half right. All of them were stolen within the first day or two. I lived in the centre of Cambridge at the time and never even saw a Green Bike, let alone rode one. The special stands were quietly removed a little while later.

Perhaps, though, in some way, we played our part in the success of such schemes in other parts of the continent, by illustrating how not to do it…

A while back I thought virtualisation technology was going to be the hot topic of 2006. Well, it was, in certain niche areas, but the momentum is still growing.

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…

It’s always a bit embarrassing to discover that a friend has been involved in a really good initiative and you didn’t know about it until months later. I was even invited to the launch, but was away at the time.

So I’ve just discovered (sorry, Vicky!) the Shape Walks guides to Cambridge, created by Stride Design and Shape East, and in particular the audio guides, which you can download into your iPod or phone and then stroll (or stride) around the town with a very nicely-produced commentary on your surroundings - especially if you’re interested in architecture.

If you’re feeling a bit less energetic, you can click on their online map and hear the tour commentary through your browser while sitting at home in an armchair.

I went looking to see if Stride had done this for any other towns and found just one more - amazingly, for me, it’s for Ware, in Hertfordshire, where I grew up, and which I now discover I knew very little about despite living there for 15 years.

These are very good; every town council or tourist information office should commission one.

As a slight variation on this theme, a couple of winters ago I found another good way to explore a new place…