First of all, for all of you wrestling with the thorny problem of whether to join the church of Steve and get an iPhone or join Ms. Palin in going rogue by plumping for a Droid, check out the xkcd comic strip on the topic. Brilliant!

Anyway, it seems the problem I posed in a recent column about how to get an Excel spreadsheet to randomize the numbers from 1 to 75 is still generating comments.

In response to the final and most elegant solution that I discussed a couple of weeks ago , one reader noted that should two identical random values be generated the spreadsheet will fail and, indeed, that is correct except it shouldn't happen.

Remember that the random number generator in Excel is actually a pseudo-random generator. The formula it uses creates a sequence of values to 15 decimal places that, according to Microsoft , doesn't repeat for at least 10^13 generated values. Given that we're using 75 values per recalculation of the spreadsheet, if we did a recalc once per second it would take something like 42,280 years before we'd get a repeat. I'd hazard that's good enough for everyday purposes.

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This week it's time to start the New Year by clearing out the cobwebs from the corners of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker .

Late last year I wrote a four part series about my Twitter topical sentiment tracking project, The Sentimeter . I explained the technologies behind the system which included OpenAmplify, a semantic analysis engine.

OpenAmplify has just been enhanced and re-released as version 2.0 .

This release has some powerful additions and, if you are interested in stuff to do with semantic analysis, this will be fascinating. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote in a book review: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

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It's one thing to provide technical or customer service but quite a different thing to do so really well. What's really changed the whole concept of outbound service as compared to say 20 years ago is that a company's customers can now find each other and talk. They can discover and publicize your weaknesses with a speed and depth of commentary that, if they are annoyed, can be astounding and result in significant brand damage.

Way back when I was running technical support for the likes of Novell UK our customers had no way to get connected unless it was at a tradeshow or a local user group meeting and even then it wasn't a really "close" connection.

Now it's very different. Users find each other through all sorts of channels and they get connected via e-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk and forums. The result is that your product or service problems are now a public issue and managing your company image and brand requires a lot more effort.

There are several things you absolutely have to do to make sure that you have the greatest opportunity to control this environment rather than have the environment drive you.  

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K Dick

It seems that many businesses believe that when you've been around for long enough whatever it is you have been successful at can't possibly ever become obsolete. This is despite the fact that there are countless examples of how business models die off as our culture and technologies evolve.

Consider the horse business. Many people thought cars would never supplant horses. In fact, in 1903 Henry Ford's lawyer, Horace Rackham, was advised by George Peck, the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, not to invest in Ford Motor Company. Peck told Rackham, "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad." Just 16 years later, Rackham's $5,000 investment in Ford became worth $12,500,000.

What brings this to mind is the New York Times just announced that, starting sometime in 2011, its content will no longer be free for customers who consume a lot. What the paper plans to do is allow people to read a few articles at no charge and, should they then want to delve into the Times archives or read more articles "below the fold", they'll have to put their hands in their pockets.

... it won't work. Here's why. [more ]

In last week's exciting installment of Gearhead I mentioned PhraseExpress published by Bartels Media GmbH and I need to correct something I wrote.

To refresh your memory, PhraseExpress is a Windows utility that, while its basic functionality is to store and organize frequently used text snippets and expand abbreviations as you type, it also runs macros for text manipulation and a range of system operations, launches programs, autocorrects, launches Web searches, closes HTML tags, can lock the CAPSLOCK key for you (prevents you from accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key which is annoying and something I do with monotonous regularity) … it's a sort of a Swiss Army knife for the Windows user interface that's linked to your keyboard.

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(from Keep the Joint Running blog )

Management Speak: More Later.
Translation: I don't consider you worthy of the converstation in the first place, and I have no intention of carrying it on with you in the future.

-Paul Novelli joins the KJR Club with this worthy translation.

A good debater, I’m told, can successfully argue either side of an issue. I’ve also been told, mostly by debaters, that this is desirable … that learning to debate is an excellent way to create fair-minded citizens.

"If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction," said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It's the "standard model" of information technology organizations -- the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.

They call the standard model "best practice." When they're in a different mood, they also call desktop lockdown a best practice, leaving you to figure out how it is that you tell your customers what they can and can't do.

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