'Traffic light' labelling of food

I was interested to hear that the general public support the 'traffic light' approach to labelling food. The survey did ask only parents who I feel may have an affect on the results as, if they are like me, they will want to make a very quick health decision on a product while they keep thier children amused.

Head over to the Food Standards Agency's website to see the different labels currently used by supermarkets and see which label works for you:

http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/foodlabels/trafficlights/

The label I think is most successful for my needs as a parent, is the one used by Marks & Spencer. At-a-glance I quickly use the 'traffic light' colour coding to see how healthy a prodcut is for the recommended serving without having to worry about any additional calcualtions - per 100g etc. I can then easily make an apporximate calculation of how this will 'fit-in' to the guideline dialy amounts if I really need too. The label information is presented clearly to the user through good use of hierarchy and easy-to-read type.

PowerMac in '96, MacBook in '06

The last Mac I bought was a PowerMac 7500 in 1996 with a 100 MHZ 601 powerpc cpu and 16MB RAM for £1500 (no monitor). (Previous to this I owned a Performa 400 (a.k.a. LC II) with a 16 MHz 68030 CPU and 4MB RAM which cost £900.)

Ten years later and I have returned to the 'bright' side and bought a MacBook. My Macbook has core duo intel chips running at 2GHz with 512MB RAM with monitor (13.3") for £899 which is really quite an awesome box. I opted for this particualr model as I felt it had the right balance of features for the price, the most significant is the superdrive which the 1.83 Ghz model lacks (off the shelf) and I could not justify the extra money (£129) for a paint job and an extra 20GB Hard Disk which is what you get if you opt for the black model. Really neat touches include the MagSafe power adaptor and the iSight camera.

I am currently familiarising myself with the iLife software suite...

Microsoft Windows XP SP2 running on a Mac mini

After learning about Apple's Boot Camp application that lets you run Microsoft Windows XP SP2 on an Intel based Mac, I decided to give it a try.

Here at Alfresco we have an Intel Duo Core Mac Mini with 1GB RAM we use for testing, a suitable box for this experiment.

The update of the firmware went smoothly, although I had to use Disk Utilites to correct an error with the start up disk before I could partition the drive. After this initial set back the whole process has been a breeze and completed in around 2 hours.

Superb! All this on a box no bigger than a typical external hard drive.

Alfresco v1.2

I am very pleased to announce the release of Alfresco v1.2. Alfresco is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System.

Read more about this release at http://www.alfresco.com

Alfresco Winner in 5th Annual EContent 100 Awards

I am pleased to announce that Alfresco has been named as one of the winners in the annual EContent 100 awards for content management and also for intranets and portals. Other winners include such names as Google, EMC and Microsoft.

Read more at www.alfrescosoftware.com/news/

Alfresco v1.1

I am pleased to announce the release of Alfresco v1.1. Alfresco is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System. Improvements and additions in this 1.1 release focus on adding the security and permissions framework to the open version, first phase of JCR-170 Level 2 support and adding Groups support and management to the Enterprise version. A large number of bug fixes and enhancements also present in this release.

Read more at http://www.alfrescosoftware.com

Download the open version at http://www.alfresco.org/download.html