Status-Q

Sir Walter Elliott, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, likes nothing better than to look himself up in the Baronetage and trace his family line. Those of us who have unusual surnames but somehow missed out on being part of the landed gentry, now have a modern equivalent of Sir Walter’s pastime.

Amazon is putting the entire text of a substantial portion of its books into its search engine, which means that you can find books based not just on what’s on the cover, but on what’s inside.
And so it was that this morning I did a search for ‘Stafford-Fraser’ and discovered that, amongst other places, there is a brief reference to me in Frederick S. Lane’s book Obscene Profits: Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age

Somehow, I don’t think Sir Walter would be impressed.

[Original Link] Mark Pilgrim has a pretty thorough list of the main user-interface changes in Panther.

All the major political parties here are concerned about the fact that fewer and fewer young people are involved or interested in politics. I think this is inevitable. As most political extremes collapse towards the centre, we may end up with more stable ways to govern the country, but it’s hardly the thing to excite young minds. Teenagers want protests to take part in, causes to fight for, rogues to be outraged at. They don’t want anything middle-of-the-road.

Who was it who said, “If you’re not a communist before you’re thirty, you haven’t got a heart. If you’re still a communist after you’re thirty, you haven’t got a brain.” ?

[Original Link] John Naughton on Microsoft Office 2003.

Apple’s Mail.app has some problems, but in general I like it very much. A handy feature I’ve just discovered is that you can select more than one mailbox at once, and the message list shows the union of the messages in all selected mailboxes. Handy, for example, if you want to track a conversation and see messages in chronological order from both your incoming and outgoing mail.

I also like the ‘Highlight thread of selected message’ option, which keeps the messages in their natural order but highlights those with the same subject as the one you’re currently viewing. This is much more natural for me than a fully-threaded list, though that option will also be available in the next version of OS X.

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This looks like quite clever hardware, but there’s no way I’d buy a Microsoft-based phone after my own experiences with the iPaq and, more importantly, seeing a friend’s constant frustration with his SPV – a phone which would regularly do such things as ring and then deny you the ability to answer the incoming call, and which would need regular rebooting.

I mean, come on – pick one big software company in the world that you would least like to trust your personal communications to..

Here’s a fact that’s reasonably well-known among anybody who’s been tinkering with Windows for a few years: If you don’t want your machine to run the software on a CD automatically when you insert it into your machine, hold down ‘shift’.

In what must be one of the silliest of the recent “Let’s sue a student” cases, SunComm are planning to sue John Halderman for pointing this out. Why? Because the ‘autorun’ feature was used by their CD copy-protection software, and by pressing shift you can bypass it.

The company claims to have lost $10 million of its value as a result of Halderman pointing this out. Which makes me wonder what they think such blatantly useless technology is actually worth? It doesn’t need a PhD student to deduce how to break this – it’s the first thing most 12-year-olds would look at as well.