Status-Q

There's a story, which may or may not be true, about a caller to a computer helpline saying, "I deleted a file from my PC last week and I have just realised that I need it. If I turn my system clock back two weeks will I have my file back again?".

And why not? That's rather a good idea for a system design...

"...Dr No fails, just as Hugo Draz, Emilio Largo, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and all the other nincompoops fail, largely because of their tendency, when at home in their lairs, to avoid the normal practice known as walking and instead cover extremely short distances by monorail."

"The most worrying aspect of the Brosnan era is that, while GoldenEye took $350m at the box office, the computer game of the same story made even more. How the implications of that success will feed back into future films, one shudders to imagine."

These little movies have been doing the rounds recently. Great fun.

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together.

"If the disagreement was strong enough, we could end up pretty close to the borderline of incivility."

[Original Link] BBC article on the dramatic steps taken by the Korean government to ensure wholesale broadband deployment.

[Original Link] I'm a bit late reporting this, but it's worth mentioning anyway.

A couple of weeks ago a major new version of VNC was released. This is the first release of any sort for 18 months, the first major update for considerably longer, and it includes many new features and improvements.

Development at the AT&T Cambridge lab had all but ceased while we were working on the Broadband Phone, but when the lab closed in April several of my friends who were on the original VNC team left to set up RealVNC, and have been working hard on improvements since.

It was understandable really. I'd been lulled into a false sense of security. But after goodness knows how many years in the computer industry I should never have forgotten the cardinal rule for survival: "Don't ever do what Microsoft suggests unless you absolutely have to!"

It happened like this: My wife Rose uses her elderly PC heavily every day, for word-processing, email, and the web. That's it. Nothing very fancy, and it's worked reliably ever since we installed Windows 2000 some time ago. So reliably in fact, that I was starting to think quite highly of the operating system. I, in the meantime, had switched to a Mac and had installed several different operating system versions without incident.

However, the large number of security holes found in Microsoft's software recently made me think that I ought to run 'Windows Update' to get the latest patches. I'll just quickly do it over breakfast, I thought. It suggested I install Service Pack 3, and after an hour or two (it's only a 300MHz Pentium, after all), the installation was finished. I rebooted and everything came up just fine. Except for the network card. The device manager said it couldn't find enough resources (IRQs, I/O ports etc) to install it. Suddenly, by trying to bring myself right up to date, I had thrown myself back into the bad old days of interrupt clashes.

I will spare you the details of the hours I spent downloading new drivers, trying new CMOS settings, removing other peripherals. Having to use a machine with Internet Explorer on because Microsoft's support site requires it and doesn't work with other browsers, when the machine with Internet Explorer on had just been killed by something I downloaded from that site. And so on...

Suffice it to say that in the end I fixed it. I found a page somewhere on the web which told me that some similar cards needed a registry patch to work. In particular, one had to set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\Pcmcia\Parameters\DisableIsaToPciRouting to zero. This had been fixed in recent service packs. It had certainly been 'fixed' in mine, and so I guessed that perhaps all I had to do was to unfix it by setting it to 1. I rebooted and it worked! Obvious really. I then just had to rebuild the machine.

Rose's next "Service Pack" will have an Apple logo on the box, I think.

[Original Link] Lawrence Lessig is pretty good now at coming up with sound-bites himself, but Steve Mallet is running a fun competition: "Can you summarise his main message in three seconds or less?"

Some of the responses:

"Freedom is more valuable than the right to profit"

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it"

"IP. To boldly restrict where no man has gone before."

More info on the authors of these, and other examples, can be found here.

[Original Link] I have a nice row of almost unused function keys on my Apple keyboard. I wanted to map them to do some of my regular tasks, so that F1, for example, would open Palm Desktop and prompt me to search for an address.

Keyboard Maestro allowed me to do this easily and has lots of other cute features which you can use if wanted and disable if not.

This is also a very nicely tailored use of shareware. The free version does enough for many people without nagging, but you can pay $20 if you want that little bit more. Recommended.