Saturday, October 20, 2012
Two towers
Quite by chance, I find that two important features of my civil service life are no more.
First, bullingdoning across Vauxhall Bridge I noticed that Riverwalk House is being demolished. A small, rather dreary looking 12 story tower block, probably from the 70's. Rather dreary inside too, and the whole only relieved by quite a decent Henry Moore in the garden. The home for a while of the late Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (an outfit with a rather grander title and rather grander aspirations than their product justified, at least by the time that I got there) and my home for a few months. I was cycling from Liverpool Street at the time so it was handy that there was a store room in the basement which doubled as a bicycle shed.
Second, cruising around the Internet, I noticed that Filenet had been gobbled up by IBM. Filenet had grown from nothing to be quite a big company by the end of the millennium on the back of selling large optical discs and associated imaging and work flow systems to insurance companies and the like for hard core image processing, and I got to know them on the back of their document management product, knowledge which earned me one or two trips across the pond and one or two more to the back rooms of the National Archives. Not to mention one to the storage company somewhere in East London which took on some of our paper records, where we learned to horror of some senior staff that our vital records were apt to be stacked up next to pallets of baked beans. Who know what else beside. Not clear from the Wikipedia entry whether Filenet's fortunes were declining as their specialised offerings became less specialised, perhaps with some of them being given away with Windows, whether the founder-owners wanted to cash in and go surfing (the company was Californian) or whether the company was simply an attractive plum to pick to a cash rich IBM.
PS: idly wondered about how protected the images were on yesterday's pictures library. Answer: fairly well, with no saving allowed at all, unlike some picture palaces which let you save a thumbnail. On the other hand, you can save a screen scrape. Presumably with some loss of resolution and not good enough to hang on the wall but possibly good enough to include in a word document. The stolen image looked OK on my screen but did not come out very well on my cheap skate printer - which does well enough with pictures from some more legitimate source.
First, bullingdoning across Vauxhall Bridge I noticed that Riverwalk House is being demolished. A small, rather dreary looking 12 story tower block, probably from the 70's. Rather dreary inside too, and the whole only relieved by quite a decent Henry Moore in the garden. The home for a while of the late Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (an outfit with a rather grander title and rather grander aspirations than their product justified, at least by the time that I got there) and my home for a few months. I was cycling from Liverpool Street at the time so it was handy that there was a store room in the basement which doubled as a bicycle shed.
Second, cruising around the Internet, I noticed that Filenet had been gobbled up by IBM. Filenet had grown from nothing to be quite a big company by the end of the millennium on the back of selling large optical discs and associated imaging and work flow systems to insurance companies and the like for hard core image processing, and I got to know them on the back of their document management product, knowledge which earned me one or two trips across the pond and one or two more to the back rooms of the National Archives. Not to mention one to the storage company somewhere in East London which took on some of our paper records, where we learned to horror of some senior staff that our vital records were apt to be stacked up next to pallets of baked beans. Who know what else beside. Not clear from the Wikipedia entry whether Filenet's fortunes were declining as their specialised offerings became less specialised, perhaps with some of them being given away with Windows, whether the founder-owners wanted to cash in and go surfing (the company was Californian) or whether the company was simply an attractive plum to pick to a cash rich IBM.
PS: idly wondered about how protected the images were on yesterday's pictures library. Answer: fairly well, with no saving allowed at all, unlike some picture palaces which let you save a thumbnail. On the other hand, you can save a screen scrape. Presumably with some loss of resolution and not good enough to hang on the wall but possibly good enough to include in a word document. The stolen image looked OK on my screen but did not come out very well on my cheap skate printer - which does well enough with pictures from some more legitimate source.
# posted by Jim @ 2:14 AM 
