Status-Q

[Original Link] In July last year I wrote a piece entitled How I survived the move from Palm to Windows CE. I've just updated it with a section on why I moved back to the Palm.

[Original Link] New York Times article. How the French must love a phrase like "using English as their lingua franca" !

While we're on the subject of the new Star Wars film, the place where Anakin and Amidala go for their romantic interludes is the Villa Balbianello on Lake Como in Italy.

Not so many Jedi around when I took this. In the film they've added some islands and stuck a couple of extra towers to the buildings of the villa, presumably to make it less recognisable. But these flowers give it away.

I'm not a real jazz fan. I know this because, despite liking a lot of the more popular jazz music, in the end I like to hear a tune. I have occasionally heard a piece on the radio and wondered what it was, only to be told by the announcer afterwards that it was "Oh When The Saints" or something similar, rendered almost unrecognisable by the (very technically accomplished) twiddly-widdly variations on the basic theme. Don't get me wrong; there is a plenty of very tuneful jazz, but there is also a great deal that would mean little to somebody unfamiliar with the tunes on which it is based. In that sense it is a rather derivative art form.

I'm not a real Star Wars fanatic either. I know this because my seeing the latest episode last night, on its opening day in the UK, was not dependent on my having booked it weeks in advance but on my friends suddenly having a spare ticket.

I was hesitant about watching it after the great disappointment that was The Phantom Menace. In that episode, I felt, the technical wizardry and the twiddly-widdly variations on the original 'tune' were not enough to make up for the lack of a simple, coherent plot and the immensely annoying Jar-Jar Binks character. In this new episode, I think they are.

There are many weak points in "Attack of the Clones", of course. I'm not convinced about either Anakin or Amidala's acting abilities, but perhaps that's deliberate homage to the original. Their son Luke won't turn out to be much of an actor either. And the critics have laid into it with great gusto. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, says: "[A] technological exercise that lacks juice and delight. The title is more appropriate than it should be."

But nobody would really expect the critics to like a fifth-in-a-series film of this type, especially one that was likely to be popular. I thought that it was visually absolutely stunning and had some interesting, if occasionally rather heavy-handed, references to the original. It also had a few jokes which showed it wasn't taking itself too seriously. Overall, a very enjoyable evening. But I don't think it would mean much to somebody who didn't know the tune already.

[Original Link] I hope they mean this rhetorically. I started to write about the success of the web being largely due to its provision of a single user interface to replace the previous melee of gopher, ftp, wais, news etc. Programs such as Watson, by trying to return to this world, were therefore taking a backward step.

But then I realised I needed to think a bit more about this, because if I really believed it I would always use a webmail system instead of a dedicated mail client. That led to other thoughts. Mmm. Will write more when I've chewed it for a while...

[Original Link] An article in the Guardian about some of the recent goings-on here in Cambridge.

Over the last couple of days I've been moving from the now-deceased AT&T Labs Cambridge into the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, a reversal of the move I made 6 years ago, though the Computer Lab is now in its shiny new building. Very strange going back - many familar faces in a completely unfamiliar environment.

It's exciting, too, though. One of the aims of my new company, Ellipsian, is to be very closely tied to the University and to find new ways for University projects and expertise to influence the outside world. And vice versa. We're already starting to see some interesting possibilities...

The quest for the origin of the saying known as 'Hanlon's Razor' continues! I recorded Joe Biglen's correspondence here and here last year, where he describes how Robert J. Hanlon, a friend of his, contributed it to a book published in 1980.

Today, Scott Enderle writes that it may be a variation on a sentence in Robert Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" (1941): "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"

So it may have been Heinlein's Razor before Hanlon's. That two Roberts with similar surnames should both be credited with the same phrase seems remarkable. Perhaps Heinlein was the originator, but Hanlon also deserves some credit for publicising it in the form which became widely known.

I've been thinking about all sorts of situations where an Instant Outline might be automatically-generated from other tree-structured data, especially filesystems.

Imagine a cvs2io utility, for example, which would monitor the changes in a CVS tree and export the changes as an IO. Software developers could then easily notice updates to their favourite packages.

And then I realised I was being a bit slow, because Radio already automatically generates an outline from its filesystem. It's called directory.opml, and by subscribing to mine in your IO-capable package you get to see all the changes on this web site. Which you almost certainly don't want to do, by the way! That's the theory, anyway. In practice, I've never quite worked out when directory.opml gets updated.