I got invited to a Conservative "Five More Years Dinner" in 1997. I knew the party didn't have a hope in hell of winning, so I didn't go. I knew the 2001 election was a no-hoper. I knew that under Iain Duncan-Smith, there similarly wasn't a hope of winning. But, wierd though this may sound in some quarters, I really do think Michael Howard has a chance of winning the next election.

I have quite a collection of Adam Smith ties. After all, every self-respecting free-marketeer in Westminster wears one. My favourite version of the Adam Smith ties is, or couse, the Adam Smith Institute one, made in St Andrews colours. Not that I'm biased or anything. The St Andrews connection is particularly appropriate as the very first Adam Smith tie was made for the Political Economy Club at the University of St Andrews.

I've been downloading FreeBSD for what seems like an eternity, and it has still only downloaded 200Mb out of nearly 900Mb. How did I ever cope with just a dial-up connection?

Here's an interesting blog on how Quark is giving the DTP market to Adobe:

Never before have I witnessed a company so creatively advertising the superiority of a product or company as I have Quark, Inc.'s efforts toward promoting InDesign and Adobe.

It's well worth reading the full blog piece. Since it was written, Quark did finally release a Mac OS X native version of XPress - version 6. But because InDesign is just such a better product, I can't help thinking that Quark 6 was too little, too late.

PCW reviews the Hoojum Cubit 3 Mini-ITX PC, a very chic PC case. Apparently the FT said that it is "so beautiful you may be siezed with a desire to stroke it". I can empathise with that. This blogger also thinks it stylish.

I wouldn't like to be Quark or Macromedia at the moment. Both offer popular products. But with the recent introduction of Adobe Creative Suite, a joined-up suite of design programs, they don't look so good. Quark produces QuarkXpress, the desktop publishing (DTP) package, but it doesn't do graphics or web design software. Macromedia does web design, drawing and graphics software, but doesn't do a DTP package.

On the other hand, Adobe's Creative Suite provides practically all the tools a designer needs in a single box. And good tools, too. It produces the market-leading graphics packages (Photoshop), an excellent drawing package (Illustrator), the best DTP package (InDesign), and a now-excellent web design package (GoLive). Once users learn one program, they have a head start at the others. Creative Suite is also priced such that it is cheaper to buy everything from Adobe rather than pick and choose between suppliers.

Adobe InDesign is the best DTP package on the planet. It's a newcomer, and the huge installed user-base of Quark - along with the experience printers have with the software - has meant Adobe has struggled in its task of usurping Quark. But it's starting to happen. Major publications are starting to switch – even newspapers like Britain's Daily Telegraph and Guardian. Quark annoyed users by being slow producing a Mac OS X native version of Xpress. This is not a good idea when you have a competitor like InDesign. Quark will need something big up its sleeve if it doesn't want to be wiped out.

I've been using Macromedia Dreamweaver for three years, but have recently jumped ship to the latest version of GoLive (which Adobe has made work really well). Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs like treacle on Macs, making GoLive a much better choice for Mac users. Dreamweaver's problems are added to by the fact that its sister graphics package, Fireworks, isn't as good as Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is the market leader, is more powerful and has a better user-interface.

I'm sure Creative Suite is going to give Quark and Macromedia a lot of grief.

Forbes magazine makes its predictions for the year, including:

The end of "free." Free didn't work for dotcom pet food stores, yet much of the rhetoric around technologies like Linux and voiceover-IP still involves this crazy notion that companies can make money by giving things away. They can't. One sign that some are recognizing that this is folly: Red Hat's move to migrate its Linux customers to a paid-for "enterprise" version of its software. Others will follow suit.

Free software will continue to be produced by those employed at universities and in people's spare time, just as it always has been. But you can't run a sustainable business by giving your software out for free under a GPL license and then hope to make money by selling support. Your competitors in the support market can undercut you by simply selling support and not employing a programming team. So we're going to see the big Linux companies moving to a sounder business model. RedHat has shown the way.

I've just installed Mandrake Linux 9.2. Installation was a lot smoother than when I installed version 8 about a year ago, but still not as simple as Windows makes the process.

The machine I'm using only had Windows XP Home on it (there wasn't an existing Linux installation). The installer for Linux offered me the option of partitioning the hard disk, so that Windows would take up part of the disk, and Linux would take up the rest. The problem is that it didn't work. Apparently, my hard disk was too fragmented. It wanted me to go off and type in commands into a command line. I didn't want to be bothered. Frankly, I don't see why Linux shouldn't sort out this for me. Since most people installing Linux will already have Windows on their machines, it strikes me that Linux needs to make setting up a dual-boot system as easy as possible. Instead of going off the command line, I went back a step and selected "Remove Windows(TM)". (Is that really a trademark?) I had, however, already taken backups of all my files, so I wasn't worried about the hard disk being wiped.

Mandrake 9.2 is now up and runing, and this post is being typed in it. I'm of course using Konqueror as a web browser. After all, Apple's Safari, my usual browser, is based on Konqueror, so I know I'm in good company.

One of the problems with Windows is that it is very difficult to move programs between disks and computers. Primarily it's because program files are littered all over the hard disk. Dan Kalowsky explains all this, and says that Mac OS system is much tidier.

When RedHat announced that it was to dump the free version of RedHat Linux, some users were understandably upset. The open source world is supposed to work by people giving away software, along with the source code, for free. Developers are supposed to make money by selling support and other services.

RedHat's decision to make people pay for new versions of its Linux distributions is quite a blow to that model. The biggest Linux distributor has decided that being free isn't worth it. Its competitor SuSE Linux - recently bought by Novell - can be downloaded for free, but if you don't pay, the package excludes some features "for licensing reasons".

Of course, there are plenty of other Linux distributions out there. Maybe we will see a move towards Mandrake Linux. Indeed, Mandrake seems to be gaining momentum with HP's decision to start selling computers aimed at the SME market with Mandrake installed.

At a Spiked seminar earlier in the year, Philip Hands, a Free Software advocate, defended the model. He said it had allowed him to go two skiing holidays that year (or something like that). After the event, I looked up his website. My impression from his site is that he earns money from installing Linux servers and other network equipment. However, it doesn't seem to me that he is earning his skiing holidays from actually writing open source software.

Most likely the future will involve a lot more hybrids. Apple's model of taking FreeBSD and designing a user interface on top has created a very usable operating system. It combines the reliability of FreeBSD (let's face it, earlier Mac OS versions liked to crash) with an innovative user interface (something that the open source world hasn't been all that successful at).

I've managed to move all my e-mails for the past five years across from my Windows machine to my Mac, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been. Microsoft Entourage (on my Mac) has importers for lots of programs, but not for the obvious one: Microsoft Outlook (for Windows). Of course, my e-mail was in Outlook. Quite why Microsoft wouldn't include an importer is beyond me, unless they are keen to hinder people switching from Windows to Mac.

I found a work around after doing some Googling. I got my ISP to create an IMAP e-mail account, uploaded all my e-mail up into that account (which took hours), and then pulled the e-mail down again from my ISP. Worked perfectly: even the attachments transferred properly.

I watched the third installment of Lord of the Rings on Saturday. Compared with the second, it was a lot less tedious. It has excellent scenery and an expensive budget. Nevertheless, Lord of the Rings 3 is really not a great movie.

Movies, to be truly brilliant, need a purpose. They need to express an opinion or emotion. Or, for example, they need to make you laugh or cry. What is the purpose of Lord of the Rings? Where was the message of the movie? It was hard to relate to the evil characters, who were just evil. Gandalf was just wise - and too perfect. The mad acting-King, who wouldn't prepare for battle, was just mad.

Few of the characters seemed to have emotional depth. The hobbits were better in this respect, particularly Sam who stuck by Frodo through thick and thin. But despite the length of the movie, the dialogue between the two never got very deep.

Further reading: Bored of the Rings

Is it just me, or is Microsoft Word a pretty stagnant program? Sure, Microsoft keeps changing the appearance of the button bar, but what about real innovation?

To some extent word processing software is a tool that has been sorted out. Microsoft Word is the best word processor ever produced, and I wouldn't want to swap it for anything else in the market. The problems come when you want to do something complicated. Word has basic desktop publishing tools built-in, but they're a right royal pain to use. If you've ever tried to get a text frame to 'snap' to the right and left page margins, you'll know what I mean. Maybe it's just me, but I end up having to manually enter numbers into a dialogue box.

And from a typographical point of view, there's room for improvement. Most fonts come with 'ligatures' - special characters that combine two letters together. Ligatures are useful when you have, for example, an 'f' followed an by 'i'. They stop the top end of the 'f' clashing with the dot of the 'i', a particular problem when using a serif font in italic. But because Word doesn't use ligatures automatically, everyone's documents look worse than they should.

The depressing thing is that whenever people try and compete with Word, they end up producing second-rate Word clones (albeit at a lower price). To beat Microsoft, you need to produce something better. That means real innovation. It means taking a lot of what Word does and binning it. Maybe readers believe it's time that word processors become generic. I'd like to see some more innovation first.