why does your website suck so much?
it doesn't. it rocks. but yes, it's in pretty early development.
i've been a consultant for a number of years now but since we finished our full-time contract with Outsource Technical Concepts we've not had too much time to get ourselves organised again -- although in truth this is the best our website's ever been -- please be patient and hopefully we'll have more interesting stuff [tm] soon.
what software do you use to create such rubbish?
first, see #1; i use ikiwiki because i don't really believe in the web as a platform.
how can you call yourself a consultant if you don't believe in 'web2' and and all that jazzy jazz?
because i inisist on maintaining a level of sanity and refuse to engage in common-delusion of the 'webbies'. it's what makes me a good consultant. there's lot the web can do and more that it'll be made to in the coming years -- and i'm not against it -- i just won't put my customers at the bleeding edge of fundamentally flawed development strategies. or to put it another way, you need to throw a lot of money at something moving that fast to make it stick.
if you want rock-solid stategic development advice, i'm your man; if you want cutting-edge, next-generation web strategies -- well, i'm afraid i can't recommend anyone but i certainly won't recommend myself either.
you annoy me. do you have a blog so that i can post abusive comments about the tripe you write?
no i do not. it was bad enough when everyone was writing 'whitepapers' but the mental diarrhea of blogging is beyond tolerable. of course, it will continue to explode and our children shall focus on doing nothing very quickly in order to deal with the results. which is precisely what computers are meant to do for us. ain't progress a beautiful thing?
however, i will put up a section on my magical ikiwiki site that will allow you to complain to your heart's content. of course, if you are a customer of mine just give me a call and you can do that face-to-face. no charge.
Why do you have builds of other people's software?
Well, that's a good question and remember that you're (generally) free to go and download and distribute originals (which are linked on each of the software pages) but there's a couple of reasons; firstly and foremost we'll often customise our builds in some way; sometimes that'll be to add a feature but more often it'll be to remove or hide a feature that's not needed by our clients (and so only causes clutter); sometimes it'll be to alter terminology for our customers in general or a customer specifically.
We are happy to point out that we're not the calibre of developer that the original coders are; we're just engineers at the coal-face who can code a little; and, as such, we try to feedback to the main trees wherever we think we have a "generic" improvement and change everything else as little as possible.
PS: it's not "other people's" software, it's "our" software; that's what #opensource is.
