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When is the phone going to come in from the cold? How much of our lives do we spend continually giving the same information to the same companies time and again down the telephone? Only for those companies to spend even more time typing the same information into their systems.

When are phones going to be integrated into our PCs so that you can send your contact details with the press of a button. Then at the other end, with a single button press, they could include the information on a form.

Great find by Larry O’Brien, a game to play whilst you’re urinating. I wonder if it is multi-player?

I just can’t imagine springing out of bed on a morning to go program a urinal game. They must have had industrial quantities of water around for the developers to drink!

Jim Forbes wrote an interesting piece Microsoft Wake Up–Apple is gaining Intellectual Capital and Market over on his blog.

I have to disagree with most of it though. I don’t see Apple gaining momentum outside of a few new media folks, who’ve always held an exaggerated sense of their own importance.

From the home point of view: Apple has big problems on the gaming front. I can’t get the latest and greatest games running on OSX. That’s a deal breaker for me right there. Running the latest and greatest 3D games through a virtual machine just isn’t an option.

FYI there is an interesting interview with Chris Sanders, author of “Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to solve real-world network problems”.

If you are new to packet analysis, you can do a lot worse than read the book.

Hope you like the new theme! We were bored with the bog standard Wordpress theme so we thought we’d custom build our own.

The theme, and the blog for that matter, are intended to be a bit folksy and characterful whilst at the same time giving a nice I.T. feel to the place. Please let us know if we’ve succeeded. 😄

The theme isn’t completely finished, we’re short of a decent photo for the about us page. It will probably take until September before everybody is together again… because of the summer holidays. So the pictures will have to wait till then!

There does seem to be a lot of heat in whether or not the new wave open source systems management players are going to take on the Big 4 (IBM, CA, BMC & HP). You can get more info here and here.

If the new wave do end up undercutting the Big 4, won’t the Big 4 just buy the new wave companies?

The new wave are venture funded…venture capitalist want to cash out at some point. All VC funded companies are up for sale to some degree. So, when the Big 4 come a shoppin’ they’ll get what they want.

Mark Hinkle over at Zenoss mentioned Ohloh, a new open source software directory. Good find Mark!

In Black Duck Open Hub own words:

Ohloh is a new kind of software directory, combining community driven content with a unique source code crawler that monitors up-to-date development activity.

It’s an old skool software directory with a bit of Web 2.0 magic thrown in for good measure. I don’t think the community features are particularly new, you can vote for projects on freshmeat. Perhaps the project suggesting tool is new?

Tech magazines are becoming a rare breed. Even more rare for them to be in print. I’m sure you read a good number, but I thought it would be good to share my list. Hopefully, you’ll share your list. 😉

• Data Centre Management
• Network Computing
• IT Week
• Communications News
• Computer Weekly

For IT VARs and resellers, I’d recommend CRN.

If you want an exhaustive list of worldwide tech mags then the Computer & Internet category @ Yahoo is a great resource. Most mags in the UK are run either by VNU or CMP.

If you are involved in installing data, voice or video cabling then you won’t be disappointed by Data, Voice, and Video Cabling by Jim Hayes and Paul Rosenberg.

Jim Hayes, as we’ve recommended before, also has a couple of online tutorials available. Well worth a look!

The book gives a nice overview of the various technologies involved as well as more practical chapters on wiring installation, testing and termination. The book covers both copper and fibre cabling too.

Some of you may have noticed a name change. This blog is now called The Tech Teapot. Why? Well, we are pretty obsessed with tea 😄

We make nice steaming pots of tea at least three times a day. Great for team building!

Our current brew is Waitrose Kenya large leaf tea. Loose leaf tea of course, no nasty tea bags here!