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Author Archives: qsf
Feeling old, and honoured…
I’m chuffed to discover, while looking for something else, that a script I wrote – called newslist – is still included as a demo in the Python distribution. I sent it to Guido in 1994.
It was basically a simple interface to Usenet (NNTP) news servers, so I shouldn’t really draw attention to it because it probably hasn’t had a lot of use in the last decade or so!
The included documentation, however, may induce a little nostalgia in those who were involved in the early web. It begins:
NEWSLIST
========
A program to assist HTTP browsing of newsgroups
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WWW browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allow the user to read newsgroup
articles by specifying the group name in a URL eg 'news:comp.answers'.
To browse through many groups, though, (and there are several thousand
of them) you really need a page or pages containing links to all the
groups. There are some good ones out there, for example,
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/News/Groups/Overview.html
is the standard one at CERN, but it only shows the groups available there,
which may be rather different from those available on your machine.
Newslist is a program which creates a hierarchy of pages for you based
on the groups available from YOUR server. It is written in python - a
splendid interpreted object-oriented language which I suggest you get
right now from the directory /pub/python at ftp.cwi.nl, if you haven't
already got it.
Note that we hadn’t yet started to call it ‘the Web’.
I was just too late to make it into the Python 1.0 distribution. But for this and a couple of other small early contributions, I find I’ve been in the Python acknowledgements since 1.0.2, nearly 19 years ago.
‘Tis an honour I dreamed not of.
🙂
Pub Facts no. 2
And your second interesting technology statistic of the day:
- iPhones are being born at a faster rate than people.
Pub Facts no. 1
I learned a couple of interesting technology statistics in the pub last night, and I feel it my duty to pass them on, so that you too can astound your friends at your weekend dinner parties. I'll post them separately, as a cheap ploy to increase impact and heighten suspense.
OK. Here's the first:
- The rate at which ARM processors are being produced is approximately middle C. (around 260/sec).
Hum it to yourself for best effect.
Thanks to John Biggs of ARM for that one.
When a child is (unexpectedly) born
Wow. Just seen what, to me at least, is a surprising statistic.
Approximately half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended.
Duelling protectors
Evernote sent me an email telling me to reset my password because of their security breach.
My spam system filtered it out.
Mmm. C'est la vie moderne…
Low-friction paperless workflow
I’ve been trying to shift much more of the paperwork in my life into the digital world, but I was very keen that filing a bit of paper electronically should be as easy as putting it in a folder in the filing cabinet. “Wouldn’t it be nice”, I thought, “if the only thing I had to do was type a name or a few keywords and everything else happened automatically?”
So I built a system which did just that. This video describes in some detail how the script is set up. You may want to use the full-screen and HD options to make things more readable. If you’re less interested in the details and would just like to see it in action, watch the first couple of minutes and then skip to about 13:30.
One thing I don’t talk about in the video is the fact that Hazel rules can also look at the contents of the file. So, once the document has been OCRed, the automatic filing can happen based on words that actually occur on the paper — it might detect your car’s registration number (licence plate), for example, in a document and know to file that under ‘car stuff’ — which I think is very cool.
Some further links:
- David Sparks’ Paperless ebook
- Hazel, and some more things you can do with it.
- PDFpen, from Smile Software.
- Fujitsu Scansnap scanners
Efficient Caffeine
Richard has his cafetiere workflow nicely optimised, both for time and energy.
A quick retrospective
It’s 12 years today since my first blog post — the first post, at least, on a publicly-readable system that we’d recognise as blog now. I had registered this ‘statusq.org’ domain a couple of days before, and started tapping out miscellaneous thoughts with no particular theme, and no expectation of an audience.
I was using Dave Winer’s innovative but decidedly quirky ‘Radio Userland’ software, a package which is long since deceased but was very influential in the early days of blogging and RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve moved the content through a couple of different systems but I think — I hope — that all the URLs valid in 2001 still work today! Most of my early posts do not have a title. The convention of giving titles to what we thought of as diary entries wasn’t yet well-established.
Things that caught my attention in the first couple of months included:
- An appreciation that Windows 2000 was really rather a good operating system. Certainly the best Microsoft had produced so far. (It was also — though I didn’t know it at the time — the last version I was to use on a regular basis.) Microsoft were pushing an idea called the ‘Tablet PC’, which was marketing-speak for what had previously been called WebPads, and something called .NET, which was marketing-speak for nobody-knew-what!
- The importance of this new thing called XML, which was giving the world a standard way to store and transmit structured data. I was at a conference where Steve Ballmer described the major revolutions in computing as The PC, The Gui, The Web, and XML. Well, the brackets have become a bit more curly since then, but it was indeed a major change.
- Astonishment that, with the upcoming launch of Mac OS X, the world’s largest Unix vendor was about to become, of all people, Apple! I’d been playing with the early beta versions. It’s been my operating system of choice ever since.
- The bizarre level of press coverage when we announced the impending shutdown of the Trojan Room Coffee pot.
- A survey saying that less than half of US college students were taking hi-fi systems to college, because they were now listening to music from their PCs instead! It was still nearly a year before an amazing thing called the iPod was to appear, and surprise us all.
Here’s a snapshot of Status-Q captured by the Internet Archive in early May 2001
Change the world with your DVD drive?
Researchers at UCLA produced graphene supercapacitors — an amazingly efficient electricity-storage medium — using a standard DVD burner.
“The process is straightforward, cost-effective and can be done at home,” El-Kady said. “One only needs a DVD burner and graphite oxide dispersion in water, which is commercially available at a moderate cost.”
More info here.
The Subscription Dilemma
Ten years ago, I wrote a piece for the IEE Review entitled “If You Love Your Data, Set it Free”, where I warned that Microsoft and other similar companies were experimenting with a subscription-based model of software.
This is a perfectly reasonable way of running the IT economy, but it has an important implication. If your data is stored in a proprietary format tied to one software package, as much of it probably is today, you may not have access to it if you don’t keep paying. Do you want to finish working on that book you started a few years ago? Sorry, that will cost you. In such a world, it’s worth asking yourself who actually owns your creative work…
Well, it’s taken a while, but Microsoft and Adobe are now actively pushing the subscription-based ‘Office 365’ and ‘Creative Cloud’ respectively. If you go to their web sites, it’s getting harder and harder to find a traditional buy-and-install product.
Software prices have been dropping dramatically recently, and it must be hard to persuade people who are used to paying under a fiver for the latest iPad app that it’s worth dropping hundreds on the latest Office or Creative Suite, however good those may be. This is particularly true if they already have an older copy. I’ve never felt a desire to upgrade my Office 2008 or Photoshop CS3, but I don’t use them very often. However, my wife, who uses Word all day, every day, also has no reason to upgrade, and in fact would probably view it as a retrograde step. So they had little choice. When you can’t innovate enough in your product, you have to innovate in your marketing.
Now, the subscriptions are not extravagant (at least compared to these companies’ traditional prices). If I used the software on a regular basis I wouldn’t mind paying. The problem is that you’re not just paying for upgrades, you’re paying for continued use. If you stop paying, you don’t, as in the past, continue happily using your current version. You get dramatically reduced functionality, in the case of Microsoft, or none at all, in the case of Adobe. So this is not a decision to pay for ongoing updates, it’s a commitment to continue paying indefinitely unless you want to go through the process of exporting all of your documents to some other format. The issue is particularly acute since these are apps into which you are likely to pour a large amount of your creative output, something you’re unlikely to want to discard. If you want to keep upgrading your software to the latest version, the pricing isn’t bad. But what you’re losing is any option about whether or not to keep upgrading.
So, on the one hand, this spurs me on to even greater enthusiasm for open file formats. And on the other, it makes me wonder about upgrading my copy of Office. Why? Well, it looks as if I won’t have the option very much longer of buying Office 2011, which, though already two years old, may be the last version for which I only have to pay once…
Inventing on Principle
This is an interesting and unusual talk, given about a year ago at a Canadian software engineering conference. I’d seen it before, but a friend reminded me of it recently (thanks, Aideen!) so I’ve just watched it again.
Bret Victor starts by talking about new ways to design software, and finishes with some suggestions on how to live your life. This is dangerous, because you may only find him credible on one of these points, and one could perhaps argue that the one-hour talk would be better delivered as two half-hour talks. And the first couple of minutes, delivered in his slow, careful style in a badly-lit brown room, don’t jump out and grab you. However, I think he pulls it off, and it certainly has the merit of being very different from your typical software-engineering talk.
Recommended.
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