Looking forward to seeing the next episode of the new version of the Forsyte Saga tomorrow night. Quite fun, but not having seen the original, I’ll need to wait until the end to comment on the plot as a whole. By then, of course, it’ll be the Hindsyte Saga.
Monthly Archives: April, 2002
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A new kind of security worry for corporate IT managers. Did it leak, or was it hacked?
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John Naughton comments on a ZD Net article about BT’s plans to deploy some 802.11 hotspots in the UK.
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Wacky new PDAs from Sony. SF Chronicle comments.
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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.
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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.
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Jon Udell has written the first really coherent explanation of Instant Outlining that I’ve seen.
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Piezoelectric fans. No, I’m not going to say it. No really I’m not. OK… These look cool.
Portable outlining
Thought for the day: the iPod is now usable as a contact list manager as well as an MP3 player. My suggestion for the next step: make it an outline browser. You could create arbitrary outlines in something like OmniOutliner or Radio and carry them around with you on the iPod. The user interface is superb for that.
Some outlining programs have a handy to-do list option. Each node has a checkbox, and an item is automatically checked when all its sub-items are checked. While entering text on the move would be a pain, checking and unchecking things is something you could reasonably do on an iPod.
Checkboxes would probably require changes to the iPod software itself, but simple browsing could be done initially by creating fake MP3 tracks in an appropriate directory hierarchy. That’s how the contact list idea started. Should be easy.
In fact, if somebody gives me an iPod, I’ll implement it…
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A nice quote from the Queen Mother in Sunday’s Telegraph:
“Travel by helicopter? I think the chopper has changed my life – rather as it did Anne Boleyn’s. “
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