Status-Q

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

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This is, in my opinion, some of the finest salami yet created by mankind. I'm sure it's the finest at my local Waitrose, anyway. It's... well... creamy.

If you're a salami enthusiast, ask yourself when you last described one as creamy. If it wasn't recently, give this a try. Goes nicely with mozzarella in a salad.

I'm chuffed to discover, while looking for something else, that a script I wrote - called newslist - is still included as a demo in the Python distribution. I sent it to Guido in 1994.

It was basically a simple interface to Usenet (NNTP) news servers, so I shouldn't really draw attention to it because it probably hasn't had a lot of use in the last decade or so!

The included documentation, however, may induce a little nostalgia in those who were involved in the early web. It begins:

                             NEWSLIST
                             ========
            A program to assist HTTP browsing of newsgroups
            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WWW browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allow the user to read newsgroup
articles by specifying the group name in a URL eg 'news:comp.answers'.

To browse through many groups, though, (and there are several thousand
of them) you really need a page or pages containing links to all the
groups. There are some good ones out there, for example,

    http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/News/Groups/Overview.html

is the standard one at CERN, but it only shows the groups available there,
which may be rather different from those available on your machine.

Newslist is a program which creates a hierarchy of pages for you based
on the groups available from YOUR server. It is written in python - a
splendid interpreted object-oriented language which I suggest you get
right now from the directory /pub/python at ftp.cwi.nl, if you haven't
already got it.

Note that we hadn't yet started to call it 'the Web'. I was just too late to make it into the Python 1.0 distribution. But for this and a couple of other small early contributions, I find I've been in the Python acknowledgements since 1.0.2, nearly 19 years ago. 'Tis an honour I dreamed not of. :-)

And your second interesting technology statistic of the day:

• iPhones are being born at a faster rate than people.

 

I learned a couple of interesting technology statistics in the pub last night, and I feel it my duty to pass them on, so that you too can astound your friends at your weekend dinner parties. I'll post them separately, as a cheap ploy to increase impact and heighten suspense.

OK. Here's the first:

• The rate at which ARM processors are being produced is approximately middle C. (around 260/sec).

Hum it to yourself for best effect.

Thanks to John Biggs of ARM for that one.

 

Wow. Just seen what, to me at least, is a surprising statistic.

Approximately half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended.

source

Evernote sent me an email telling me to reset my password because of their security breach.

My spam system filtered it out.

Mmm. C'est la vie moderne...

 

I've been trying to shift much more of the paperwork in my life into the digital world, but I was very keen that filing a bit of paper electronically should be as easy as putting it in a folder in the filing cabinet. "Wouldn't it be nice", I thought, "if the only thing I had to do was type a name or a few keywords and everything else happened automatically?"

So I built a system which did just that. This video describes in some detail how the script is set up. You may want to use the full-screen and HD options to make things more readable. If you're less interested in the details and would just like to see it in action, watch the first couple of minutes and then skip to about 13:30.

One thing I don't talk about in the video is the fact that Hazel rules can also look at the contents of the file. So, once the document has been OCRed, the automatic filing can happen based on words that actually occur on the paper -- it might detect your car's registration number (licence plate), for example, in a document and know to file that under 'car stuff' -- which I think is very cool.

Some further links:

• David Sparks' Paperless ebook
• Hazel, and some more things you can do with it.
• PDFpen, from Smile Software.
• Fujitsu Scansnap scanners

Richard has his cafetiere workflow nicely optimised, both for time and energy.

It’s 12 years today since my first blog post -- the first post, at least, on a publicly-readable system that we’d recognise as blog now. I had registered this ‘statusq.org’ domain a couple of days before, and started tapping out miscellaneous thoughts with no particular theme, and no expectation of an audience.

I was using Dave Winer’s innovative but decidedly quirky ‘Radio Userland’ software, a package which is long since deceased but was very influential in the early days of blogging and RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve moved the content through a couple of different systems but I think -- I hope -- that all the URLs valid in 2001 still work today! Most of my early posts do not have a title. The convention of giving titles to what we thought of as diary entries wasn’t yet well-established.

Things that caught my attention in the first couple of months included:

• An appreciation that Windows 2000 was really rather a good operating system. Certainly the best Microsoft had produced so far. (It was also -- though I didn’t know it at the time -- the last version I was to use on a regular basis.) Microsoft were pushing an idea called the ‘Tablet PC’, which was marketing-speak for what had previously been called WebPads, and something called .NET, which was marketing-speak for nobody-knew-what!
• The importance of this new thing called XML, which was giving the world a standard way to store and transmit structured data. I was at a conference where Steve Ballmer described the major revolutions in computing as The PC, The Gui, The Web, and XML. Well, the brackets have become a bit more curly since then, but it was indeed a major change.
• Astonishment that, with the upcoming launch of Mac OS X, the world’s largest Unix vendor was about to become, of all people, Apple! I’d been playing with the early beta versions. It’s been my operating system of choice ever since.
• The bizarre level of press coverage when we announced the impending shutdown of the Trojan Room Coffee pot.
• A survey saying that less than half of US college students were taking hi-fi systems to college, because they were now listening to music from their PCs instead! It was still nearly a year before an amazing thing called the iPod was to appear, and surprise us all.

Here’s a snapshot of Status-Q captured by the Internet Archive in early May 2001