Status-Q

Have just come back from a wonderful four-day trip with friends through Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges & Dunkirk. At one point we stopped at a beach on the Dutch coast not far from Rotterdam amidst tumultuous weather, and I took some pictures of grass on the sand dunes.

I was intrigued by how different it looked in different lights. These shots are of the same type of grass, within a few metres of each other and within two minutes of each other:

[Original Link] A scary Newsweek article about Nathan Myrhold's company Intellectual Ventures.

Quentin's helpful hint for the day. Remember audio cassettes? You know those cassette-head cleaning kits? They would cost a few quid and come with a little bottle of cleaner which you'd drip onto Q-tips or some special device which would clean your cassette heads so that everything would sound nice and crisp and you could turn Dolby back on again?

Well, that cleaning fluid is basically Isopropyl Alcohol, and it's jolly useful stuff for cleaning all sort of things. About 14 years ago, I went into Boots, our local big chemist, and asked if they could sell me some because I was fed up with paying three or four pounds for a tiny little plastic bottle of cassette head cleaner. Sure enough, for 85p, they provided me with a cute little 50ml glass bottle.

Well, I only use this stuff in small quantities, but recently, the level in the bottle has been getting a little low, so I went back yesterday and asked for some more. Sadly, they no longer keep the stuff. I presumed this was on the grounds of public health or something, but thought it was worth trying again, so I went to the nasty new Superdrug around the corner. And sure enough, I was able to purchase a pint of isopropyl alcohol, which at my rate of usage should keep me going sometime into the next millennium.

And it still only cost me three or four pounds. But I like the old bottle better.

[Original Link] Mac techies interested in the 'Spotlight' search technology that's coming up in Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, should have a look at this article.

I like this example. Backup all the files on your system containing the word 'Tiger':

for i in `mdfind Tiger`
do
    cp $i /Volumes/Backup/$i
done

[Original Link] John Naughton on the subject of Coarse Phishing.

[Original Link] If you're a Mac OS X user and you do any programming in Python, you should check out the Wiki at PythonMac.org. If, like me, you miss the proper readline editing support when using it interactively, grab Jack Jansen's add-ons which make it really easy to install readline and various other handy things.

How many Microsoft programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Let's define darkness as the new industry standard. [seen here]

More shots from my recent visit to the Netherlands:






Farming the wind

Ah, I'd forgotten what fun it was maintaining a Windows machine. Looking today at a friend's computer which was running rather slowly, I went to defragment the hard disk. "You last defragmented this disk 1417 days ago", said the dialog box...

[Original Link]

It's not often that I'm ashamed to be British, but this is one of those times. The Guardian newspaper has the names of many thousand supposedly undecided American voters which it will give out to those Brits who sign up to send them a letter telling them which way to vote. They stopped short of actually saying that you should tell them to vote for Kerry, but nobody who knoows the Guardian would assume otherwise.

They no doubt had good intentions here. It is important for every country, and particularly America, to be aware of what the rest of the world thinks and to take that into account when voting. But such initiatives should be invited from within the country and should not be proposed from outside. As Rose said, can you imagine the uproar in the UK if it were the other way around, and large numbers of Americans started writing to individuals suggesting how they should vote?