I’ve recently started working with CaterMap – a company that aims to improve school dinners and school catering. Their achievements are impressive, and they have plenty of testimonials from school caterers.

As a parent with a couple of children in primary school, I have to say that I haven’t been overly impressed with the school food and facilities provided by most schools. Many choose the easy option and use processed ingredients with far too much salt and especially sugar.

I say – get the kids involved. Get them helping in the kitchen and preparing food from an early age. If possible, let them grow a few carrots or whatever. In my experience, children tend to leave food that they’re suspicious of, like ones that they’ve never seen before. But, if they’ve prepared it themselves, they’re willing to give it a try.

Anyway, I fully recommend CaterMap’s school catering consultancy service to any school who want to improve their school catering facilities and school dinners without increasing the cost.

I’m the main developer of the AutoDirector online car showroom software system. It’s a great product that allows anyone to set up their own car dealership. In fact, they can set up hundreds of car showrooms, even on free webspace. The product was one of the first systems to use AJAX – way before the term AJAX had been thought of!

I’ve been planning AutoDirector 2.0 for some time. One possibility is that it will be PHP5 only (AutoDirector 1.0 works in PHP4 and PHP5). This will allow quicker development and some nicer features. It’ll also encourage the adoption of PHP5 throughout the webhosting community.

But,  I’m wary. Could a PHP5-only version kill the product? There are still a great many PHP4-only hosts; supporting both platforms would still best commercial decision.

What do you think? Is PHP5 viable yet?

There are a lot of PHP systems that support templates, caching, and quick development. Unfortunately, many have 600-page manuals or steep learning curves.

If you know a bit of PHP, the chances are that you’re already writing your own code. You can already connect to a database and do interesting stuff. You don’t need a third-party system to handle it for you.

This is where Optimalworks TACS (Templating and Caching System) comes in. It’s simple to use, takes about three minutes to learn, and lets you use your own PHP libraries and code. Templates and caching is it’s goal, and that’s all it does.

Read more about TACS at Optimalworks…

I’ve been a fan of OpenOffice for a while, but I’ve never sat down and used it much.

In many ways, I’ve been a hypocrite. I’ve been recommending and installing OOo for friends and relatives for several years but, like many IT workers, I have MS Office installed. It’s difficult to break the habit of launching Word, Excel or PowerPoint when I need to.

However, during the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working at a company which still uses Microsoft Office 97.  They’re not interested in paying out for new versions of Office and I don’t blame them. But, I just couldn’t bring myself to use it – and I could hardly force them to upgrade.

Bring on OpenOffice. Fortunately, I’d only downloaded version 2.2 a couple of days before and had it on my trusty USB stick. Quick install (on Windows 2000 no less!) and I was ready.

I’d always considered Write to be a fairly out-and-out Word clone. At a basic level, it is – write the odd letter, and you won’t notice much difference. But, I’m a big fan of templates and document automation, so I set about defining numbered headings, contents pages, and cross references.

First difference: bullet and number styles are applied in addition to paragraph styles. It’s a bit weird at first, but I got used to it and it sort of made sense after a while.

The next issue: automatic heading numbers, e.g. section 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1 etc. Word isn’t always great at this, and I still get confused after many years. OOo provides the very useful Outline Numbering tool to set it up, but I just couldn’t get it working correctly at first. I’d end up with numbers randomly restarting and all sorts of weird problems. I very nearly scrapped OpenOffice and returned to Word 97.

Eventually, I solved the problem. If you use Outline Numbering, DON’T use any options on the bullet/number list toolbar. It affects the heading you’re working on, but takes it out of the sequence and seems to start a new one. Weird but, again, sort of understandable.

I use automated cross-references a lot, and Word makes it fairly easy, even if the system is a little buggy and frustrating. OOo requires you to mark text before it can be referenced but, once you’ve done that, the process is better than Word.

Next: diagrams. Both systems are very evenly matched here, but OOo probably just has the edge since it provides a separate drawing program which makes it much easier (although you don’t have to use it). The only think that confused me was that OOo doesn’t offer a way to import it’s own graphic files, but will happily grab any others. A simple cut and paste is all that’s required, but I’d have liked to link to the file rather than embed the graphics.

MS Word is pretty good at creating a table of contents, OOo seems a little confusing. Although it works, the Entries tab is weird and takes some getting used to.

Overall though, I’m impressed. The document structure is retained very well – Word often resets styles when numbering is restarted, or overrides the default style too easily. In fact, I’m going to use it more. I may not give up on Microsoft Office just yet, but OpenOffice is very capable and its price is astounding!

British Gas one of the worst companies I’ve ever dealt with.

Last year, I signed up for a new service called “Fix and Fall”. As I understood it, my gas and electricity prices were guaranteed not to rise and would benefit from any price falls: hence the name of the product. There was no sign-up charge, no tie-in period, and no cancellation charge. What could I lose? Surely everyone would sign up?

Earlier this year, British Gas (who have been raising prices to ridiculous levels) decided to make a reduction on March 12. “That’s fine”, I thought, “perhaps I’ll give them another chance”.

This week I received a letter asking me to check a web address. Apparently “Fix and Fall” now means just “Fix”, and British Gas have decided not to pass any savings on to me. So, what exactly is the benefit? Well, if I stay on the scheme, then my prices are guaranteed to remain at the high fixed rate until 2008. I may not make any savings but, hey, I know what I’ll be paying.

How do British Gas executives sleep at night? How can a product named “Fix and Fall” not fall? Isn’t this against the Trades Description Act? Even the nice call centre lady was apologetic and admitted they couldn’t understand these stupid schemes.

This is not my first problem with British Gas. I naively signed up for their internet billing to save the environment (oh, and it’s 5 quid cheaper). They never sent me emails when a bill was due, but kindly sent red reminders at random intervals when they were about to cut me off. Even when I signed up for “Fix and Fall” they only applied it to my gas and not the electricity for some bizarre reason.

I’ve had it with them. In the past few years they’ve gone from being a reasonable company (I even had shares at one point), to slightly incompetent, to bumbling imbeciles. I’ve spent hours writing enquiries, making complaints, and calling them.

But no more – can anyone recommend a decent gas and electricity supplier? In fact, they don’t need to be that decent: anyone would be better than British Gas.

As well as playing with Vista, I also had a go with Beryl on Ubuntu Linux … just to keep the reviews fair!

The good points:

1.  Wow – it’s fast. I’m testing it on an AMD 2000+ with 512MB RAM and an old ATI Radeon, but it’s still quick.
2. The effects are gorgeous and are more advanced than Vista’s.
3. It’s fun!

The bad points:

1. It wasn’t easy to install and configure. I followed around 12 steps in an article and got it going, but few novice users will do that. The next version of Ubuntu is supposed to address that issue.
2. It has a lot of options, very little help, and can be quite daunting.
3. Although the effects are fast and great, it does noticeably slow down your machine. For example, scrolling down a web page was awkward, although remember that this is a 5-year old PC.
4. I had a couple of process crashes, although nothing major and the PC remained usable.

Like Vista’s aero effects, it’s great for showing off but I don’t think I’d use it all day. The good thing with Linux is that you can simply switch it off.

I’ve just had my first experience of the final version of Vista Home Premium on a new laptop. The good points:

1. It looks pretty.
2. Aero effects were faster and better than I’d imagined.

And now for the bad:

1. It was slow. Booting seemed especially cumbersome.
2. The Start menu was impossible to use. It just lists all the applications in one big folder. I’m sure there are plenty of options to configure that, but I didn’t find them quickly.
3. The user confirmation messages are irritating. I was trying to configure Norton and a prompt appeared at EVERY change I made.
4. What looks like the ‘off’ icon puts the machine into sleep mode.
5. It wouldn’t let me run the application I was trying to install.
6. I couldn’t find Windows Explorer or any decent equivalent. Maybe novices don’t need it, but I did!
7. It crashed and it wouldn’t let me shut down.

Now, I only spent half an hour with Vista, so I’m sure that I’ll reconsider my opinions at some point. But, this is the first time I’ve used a new version of Windows and actively wanted to return to the previous version.

If you’re not familiar with digg, it’s a social bookmarking site that allows users to submit URLs, rate and discuss them with others.

I’m subscribed to digg’s ‘popular’ RSS feed. It’s very handy to see what’s happening on the web and what’s becoming popular or topical. But the feed is growing and must generate around 100 posts a day! I can’t keep up with it – and if you don’t log on for a day or two, then forget it!

What I need is a secretary who will remove the dross and just give me the half a dozen useful links that I really digg!

I’m a big fan of CubeCart – it’s the only online shop / ecommerce system that allows complete control over your template with web standards and CSS.

Search engine optimisation is its only drawback. Fear not though, because I have developed a system that creates XML, HTML and plain text sitemaps that are suitable for every search engine including Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Installation is just a matter of copying a few files to your server. From then on, every product, category, document and page is automatically indexed in a single page that can be submitted to the search engines.

Many people are succussfully using the system and have reported excellent results…

Buy the CubeCart sitemap mod today…

I’ve been using Microsoft software for a long, long time. DOS 3.0 was my first exposure to the company’s products but, like most people of a certain age, I started using Windows from version 3.0.

I feel safe with Windows. It may have its failings, but I know its quirks and I know how to get around them. As anyone with rudimentary IT skills will know, a little knowledge is power … and it also means you become an unofficial free support line for your family and friends.

Supporting multiple Windows installations is a frustrating experience. Most people’s systems end up crawling to a halt after a few months of installing spyware-ridden applications, and it’s no fun trying to sort it out.

Now I’ve tinkered with various versions of Linux over the years, but never really saw it as a viable alternative. However, last year, I obtained a second-hand PC for my wife who is a complete novice. So, I thought I’d give Ubuntu a go since it would allow me to stop her installing anything dodgy.

I have to say that Ubuntu’s installation is quicker and easier than any version of Windows I’ve ever tried. Just boot up from the live CD, check your hardware works, and click the “install” icon on the desktop. Four questions and half an hour is all it needs to have a full working installation with all the applications that most people need (email client, Firefox, OpenOffice, and a few games).

Not only that, but it looks great, supports all the hardware, updates are easy, and it’s simple to use.

Like many, I’m in no rush to install Vista. I’ll get it eventually with a new PC, but there’s no compelling reason to upgrade. That’s a shame – I attended the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in LA during 2003 and Longhorn was stunning. Unfortunately, Microsoft ripped so many features out.

But Linux, and Ubuntu especially, has made computing exciting again. That’s possibly because it’s different, but it suits novices and professionals alike. There will be issues in the corporate market place, but home users should give it a go. Get a live CD and try it.