Status-Q

Fortune had a nice article entitled “Torrential Rain” about Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. But it’s gone behind a premium-rate wall. There’s a copy here. I liked this, against the background of Cohen’s Asperger’s Syndrome:

Last month venture firm DCM-Doll Capital Management bet that Cohen could indeed make BitTorrent a business, investing $8.75 million in the startup. Now Cohen has to prove himself again, showing that he can thrive not just in the programming world—a place where logic rules and theories can be proved true or false—but in the fuzzy corporate world too, where compromise reigns and intellect doesn’t always trump idiocy.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the last couple of years playing the patents game, and developed some strongish opinions about it. So I decided to write them up in an article I’ve called
The Patent Cold War.

The current patent system is something of a farce. Almost everybody involved in it knows this, but it’s a game we all have to keep playing because nobody can afford to be the first one to stop.

It’s not often these days that I really covet any particular car, but I’m afraid this is definitely an exception.

Thanks to Tom Coates for a link to “An astonishing set of images of scenes and structures constructed out of paper that sit on or with the original sheet, the negative space of which add context.” This is fabulous stuff!

And there’s more work by the artist, Peter Callesen, here.

(Yes, this is paper too).

John’s Observer column.

I’m experimenting with MacJournal, considering it as an alternative to my paper notebook (which I don’t seem to be able to search with Spotlight).

It’s quite cute, and if you can read this, it means that I’ve been able to get it to post an entry to Status-Q. The posting facilities are fairly basic compared to a dedicated blogging tool, but I quite like some of its other features.

The real problem with using an electronic log book in place of a paper one, for me, is that I think it’s very rude to be typing and looking at a screen while somebody else is talking. Maybe society will get over this in time (or I will). And it’s well-nigh impossible to record anything while talking on the phone unless you have a headset or good speakerphone.

Anyway, in situations where keyboards are appropriate, MacJournal looks good as an option. It does seem to have lots of happy customers.