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Last week, I visited Kiev - which is the capital of Ukraine - for a couple of days. Before I forget why it was special, I would like to share some of my initial impressions of this fascinating place.

Immigration at the airport was effective and painless, although the officials were as stern and humourless as those types always seem. The airport is also not very large (at least compared to Heathrow The Monster) and I was outside quickly.

Here, I was met by a driver holding a sign, and as I nodded to him he walked off, leaving me to follow him into the car park. The walk was short and I got in after him, asking him if he had been waiting long.

“No English”, he said and smiled. This turned out to be quite common - most Ukrainians know Ukrainian and Russian, and not much else. Not too far from most English, who know both English and American.

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At Tideway Systems, we have recently launched a blog as a way for people to publish their thoughts on small and large things that may or may not be related to what Tideway does.

This is the first part of an initiative to set up a community that will allow Tideway’s employees, partners, customers (and anyone else vaguely interested in large-scale infrastructure management) to communicate in a way that is meant to be both rich, interesting and non-intrusive.

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I love to play boardgames, and the main obstacle is unsurprisingly a lack of time. It used to be that I didn’t know anyone in London that played games, which also was a hindrance, but fortunately this has changed.

Firstly, I became a member of the London Board Games Club, where a growing group of us members on every other Sunday or so. This is always great fun - we play a varied selection of games and often try new games as well. This is how we have recently discovered such excellent games as Imperial - a new game that is truly excellent and at the same time reminds old-timers of the good old Diplomacy board.

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Several people have asked me whether the multi-user setup mentioned in my previous blog posts will work for Wordpress 2.0.x - and the short answer fortunately is Yes.

The even better news is that changes to WP2.0 makes it even easier to apply, and that a guy named Stephen Rider has taken the time to describe the setup, package it neatly and include a little readme file with instructions that are better than what I originally wrote so I’m not going to improve on it.

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I have been moving house the past couple of months, which unfortunately has meant that my Net time has been limited. And this, right on top of a Firefox upgrade that broke Define Word…

Yesterday, I managed to plug in the machine that has the source code and made the changes necessary for it to work in Firefox 2.0: I give you Define Word v0.7.0.

There are no other changes to this version of the plug-in. Thanks to all of those of you who emailed me to get me to make the update work!

The police in Britain has adopted a policy of “shoot-to-kill” when encountering suspected suicide bombers. I find this both extremely worrying and completely counter-productive: I just don’t get it. The stated reason for the new policy apparently is that it is necessary to have a credible last-ditch defence against suicide bombers.

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The Define Word plugin has been upgraded to work with Firefox v1.5: Define Word v0.6.0.

At the same time, I also added the ability to choose whether the tab should be foreground or background, and changed the way UTF-8 search strings are dealt with.

A number of other changes will have to wait until a later version, and I have had lots of ideas from everyone. Some of the things I would like to do when I get the time:

• Allow the user to specify a default lookup
• Add a hotkey to launch the default lookup
• Add an option to specify how UTF-8 should be dealt with
• Allow the result to be shown in a mouse-over hint instead of in a new tab/window. I tried this ages ago, and it’s quite hard to get it to work well, which is why it isn’t there today.
• Make it work in Thunderbird. This is probably simple, but I have not been able to find out how to do it

Have you got other suggestions?

I just realised that it has been months since I last updated this blog. There are lots of reasons why it has been so long, but I’m not sure that any of them are really good reasons - so here is a brief update in case anyone is interested

Firstly, I am currently trying to keep typing to a minimum as I suspect I may be suffering from the beginnings of RSI. My right hand and arm ache if I type for more than a few minutes at the time - and since my job involves at least eight hours of sitting at the computer every day, this is a slight problem. The only solution to the problem (short of quitting my job, which I am not quite prepared to do) was to find a way of not having to type. I could of course try to fill my calendar with meetings all day, but instead I decided to see how well speech recognition software works in 2005.

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