Status-Q

“After 2.5 years of Linux, I’ve finally found joy in a Unix operating system“, writes John Hummel about his conversion to Mac OS X.

Peter Martin in the FT: ruup4 multimedia messaging?. The service-providers’ enthusiasm for the new MMS phones is because “At least in its WAP form, there has been very little public appetite for third-party content. Meanwhile, user-generated content, in the form of SMS messages, continues to grow. ” Will this apply to multimedia?

Computerworld: Wireless LANs gain over cellular. “A growing number of U.S. localities, including the California cities of Glendale and Oakland and counties of Orange and San Diego, have embraced Wi-Fi technology as the high-speed wireless backbone of their networks.” [Tomalak’s Realm]

Wi-Fi (802.11b) really isn’t designed for this kind of deployment but, hey, if it works, then I guess that’s already an advantage over 3G. I’m dubious about covering a county, even a very small one, with just 12 base stations, though.

I’ve installed the ‘htdig’ search engine here now, and the search box on the right will use that instead of Google. The Google link worked well, but sometimes wouldn’t index Status-Q often enough, and would discard bits from time to time. I realised that I was having trouble searching for things and I’m supposed to know roughly what’s in here. I think the new one’s a big improvement.

Hywel Williams has a fascinating site about the Disused Stations on London’s Underground.

The Tipping Blog – How Little Links can Make a Big Difference: "On the Internet, nobody cares if you’re a shy introvert."

John Hiler produces some good stuff. He wrote an interesting article a couple of weeks ago about the effect of weblogs on search engines. In this latest piece he discusses weblogs in terms of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”.

Surfing hobbits. Bizarre concept.

Excellent New Scientist feature on Open Source ideas. [from John Naughton’s weblog]. I hadn’t come across the Wikipedia before. It’s rather good. Topics for discussion in your coffee break:

• We all know that you should take everything you read on the web with a pinch of salt, but we’re used to reading things in reference works and assuming they’re fairly authoritative. Does presenting information in that form make us more likely to believe it?
• Is an encyclopedia which anybody can update more or less likely to be ‘authoritative’?

My current favourite utility for Mac OS X is LaunchBar, which allows you to start apps, open web pages, send emails, with just an abbreviation of a few keystrokes. Particularly handy if you’re on a laptop, where the mouse-based routes for opening things may not be quite so convenient. The clever thing about LaunchBar is that you don’t need to set up the abbreviations in advance; it learns which keystrokes you’d like to use as you go along.

I’m not normally a huge fan of alternative launchers – the Dock has always worked fine for me. But I forced myself to learn and use LaunchBar for a few days and I got hooked. It’s very clever, and saves a lot of time, while using almost no screen space. Recommended. Good to see genuine innovation is still alive in the utilities world.

Wow – I haven’t posted here for nearly a week! It’s been a quiet few days.

Spent a large chunk of this afternoon helping extract some data from a friend’s elderly Macintosh LC. His mouse interface no longer works, and on most versions of Mac OS, there ain’t much you can do when that happens, so he had been unable to get at his data for several months.

I opened it up, extracted the 40M SCSI hard drive (which required me to undo one screw – I love Apple hardware) and inserted it into a PowerMac G3. (No screws at all. Progress.) We booted up Mac OS X and sure enough, there was his disk on the desktop, with all the files inside laid out as he left them. We could even run Word 5.1 and his 1988 copy of Tetris straight from the disk with a simple double click, despite the fact that my machine was now running a version of Unix and that the windows which were optimised for his LC screen looked rather small in the corner of mine. He thought it was magic.

He was a bit less amused when we discovered that his PhD thesis, numerous letters, articles and other writings accumulated over several years amounted to about 6 Mbytes in MacWord 5.1 format. I burned them onto a CD for him, leaving it 99% empty.

Does anyone else think it’s amusing that when Internet Explorer 6 connects to a web server it still announces itself primarily as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible…)”?