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Well I’m shortly departing for the Middle-East. No I haven’t been drafted into the marines, I’m off to Tel-Aviv to support England as they play Israel in a Euro 2008 qualifier. So the next posting will likely be from the game!

Come on!!

…well no-one really. Of the 15 or so people who entered no-one actually got all the questions right.

So the answers were:

1. World’s Strongest Man (most people got this one, and although I never actually stated it was my favourite it was fairly obvious from the postings).

2. 12 seconds. The Sudoku vs. Powershell posting that Mark did stated “In the end I got the script to solve Adrian’s hard puzzle in 12 seconds – not bad!” Quite a few people put 1.2 days for this. Sorry but that’s wrong, that’s how long it took Adrian’s script to solve the problem. You needed to read the whole posting.

3. BlogCritics. Ashleigh and Dan do write for 3WordReviews too, but the review site I had in mind was BlogCritics. This one caught a good few people out.

So no-one got all the answers right. But one person did submit and excellent tie-breaker which made me smile. It went:

“Han shot first” because Greedo had WMDs. Although the WMDs were never found on Greedo, he was still an evil guy and anyone who helps Jabba is a terrorist. Han was just protecting himself from future attacks.

So with 2 out of 3 questions right and the best tie breaker I pronounce Linh the winner. A Joost invite is in your mailbox now.

I’m also sending an invite to Chad Dambrowitz for his sheer persistence. Chad posted his answers on the comments page (good job they need approving) but spotted this and emailed me to highlight the error and said that he actually had fun doing the contest. Chad also got 2 out of 3.

Best of luck with Joost to the pair of you, hope you enjoy it. And make sure you provide the Joost folks with lots of feedback.

Nintendo continue to stretch the boundaries of interactive gaming (or are they just applying old ideas to modern technology?) and the Phantom Hourglass for the DS is no exception.

Check out this trailer at Kotaku.com. The “see through the boss’ eyes” view on the second screen is truly impressive. Windwaker on DS? It’s almost.

Microsoft’s flagship office system has a facelift and a new lease of life in the Office 2007 version which launched at the end of 2006. A new simpler user interface, a new document format and… er… new icons to click when you launch Office

For home users Microsoft Office 2007 introduces easier ways of doing exciting stuff like letters using Word and weekly homework timetables using Excel. But, these things can now also be done for free, equally as simple and via any web browser (and therefore any PC) by using Google Apps.

So how will Microsoft compete in this new world of free applications supported by advertising revenues? Well I started to get an insight into what the mighty Halls Of Redmond are thinking. There have been a few articles on thr web so far highlighting a slighly new direction for Microsoft Office starting with the next release - Office ‘14′.

ZDNet reported in April last year that Office 14 would be far more aligned with businesses. We can expect to see a version of Office for people who work in Human Resources, one for Finance, an a special version for people in R&D. This ‘Office as business application’ approach has been building for some time now. MIcrosoft have an alliance with SAP which has produced Duet, an application and framework for using the Office suite to front business processes built on SAP.

Then earlier this month AeroXperience posted an article giving a few more details about what Office 14 is likely to hold. The article states:

Three major organization-wide areas of investigation and investment will be “Enterprise Content Management,� which pertains to the authoring, management, and organization of complex documents and content, “Communication and Collaboration,� which pertains to keeping communities, co-workers, partners, and customers in sync, and finally, “Business Process and Business Intelligence,� which involves making the right information available throughout the process of doing business. At the center of these three areas is “Individual Impact� which is explained as helping businesses amplify the impact of their people/customers.

So Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Communication and Collaboration and Business Processes and Business Intelligence are the three core areas of Office 14. Arguably you could say that about Office 2007. For instance, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 now includes aspects of document management, web content management and workflow. Office 14 will go further. How do I know? Well I was invited to speak with some guys from Redmond at a meeting with Microsoft in London. Specifically to talk about ECM. For the last month or so Microsoft has been talking to major customers about what their requirements are in these three areas.

All I can say is that Microsoft will go further with Office 14 into the area of the Office System being the main front end for people in organisations to do business process work. No, people are going to manage power plants, or run production lines using Excel but more and more products from companies such as SAP and EMC will ‘disappear’ behind a veil of Office.

So what’s in it for those companies? Well, SAP stated at SAPPHIRE last year that Duet was all about targetting the hundreds of millions of users of Office in business. SAP have about 15 million users of their software so the slice of the pie to aim at is much larger for them. The native SAP GUI is notoriously hard to use and not well presented. Putting Office infront is a way of making the core business processes offered by SAP more approachable. And what’s in it for Microsoft? Well they get to spend their time integrating with middle and back office systems. At the same time Microsoft will deliver higher and higher end business systems in areas that they have traditionally had weak offerings. I anticipate the next version of SharePoint Server to include much of the functionality of mature document management systems like EMC’s Documentum.

Come June 2007 the guys from Microsoft will have analysed the requirements and decided what they’re going to build and what they aren’t going to build. At that point it’s heads down and $980 Million dollars of R&D to go. Expect Office ‘2009′ in…. er… 2009.

Being conscious about how high-technology impacts our environment (see previous postings on such topics here, and here and here.) I was interested to see that there are those who think that Google should tone down it’s homepage to have less white on it. The Thinking Blog has highlighted that changing the background of Google to black could have a significant impact on the amount of energy that the world’s most popular search engine consumes while it sits on people’s screens. As much as 750 Megawatts says ecoIron. Note that the example cited is in relation to CRT monitors and not LCDs.

Clearly a black Google background might effect it’s mantra of ‘Do no evil’ as the colour could be interpreted as being something a bit macabre. However, at least presenting the option for people to use a black background version of Google without having to use plugins would be a good move.

The BBC does present a variety of options for its users to change the display of it’s website. This is done primarily in the name of accessibility for people who may have trouble reading the site with the default colour scheme. Perhaps such a feature should be added to Google.com.

Will Google turn to the dark side? Well I can’t see them accepting apologies by force choking people or starting to use mechanical breathing. But perhaps they could take one leaf out of our favourite Dark Lord’s book and adopt the colour or his wardrobe.