Status-Q

I was at a party today with lots of old friends from Xerox EuroPARC and some exchanging of current contact details was going on. It did occur to me that I didn't really need to give anyone a business card because one of the advantages of an unusual name is that I'm very easy to find on Google even if the only thing you can remember is my first name. And that's true of a lot of people now - even with a more common name, if you know one other thing about them, like a company they've worked for or the place they live, it can often be fairly easy to find someone.

This does assume, of course, that you know how to spell their name. So this is a post for anybody trying to find Quintin Stafford-Fraser, Quinton Stafford-Frasier or Quentin Stafford-Frazer - it should help point you in the right direction! [Update, a few days later - it works, too!]

I've been playing with the quite interesting software from Devon Technologies recently, in particular DevonTHINK and DevonAGENT. The latter is a tool that goes and queries lots of websites on your behalf for information on a given topic, and, ironically, it's quite hard to find me using that, because it interprets the hyphen in my surname as an instruction not to include pages with 'Fraser' in them, something that really should be indicated by a hyphen after a space. Not much I can do for DevonAGENT users...

It reminds me of the lovely message I used to get in the early days of Hotmail when I tried to create an account: Last Name contains reserved or ineligible word. Please select another.

You know that something has become a true part of British life when it gets mentioned on The Archers. The Archers, for anyone outside the UK, is a BBC Radio soap opera, set in rural England, that has been running for 55 years and has aired about 15,000 episodes. It started when Britain was still subject to rationing after the war, and part of its purpose then was to embed hints in the story to farmers about how they could raise agricultural productivity.

Anyway, yesterday, the subject of webcams came up and they mentioned the Trojan Room Coffee Pot which Paul, Dan & I set up in the early nineties when we were still subject to coffee rationing. The full programme is on the BBC web site but I'm not sure how long it will stay there, so I hope they won't mind me posting this two-minute MP3 clip.

I'll make no claims about whether or not this particular plot-line will increase British productivity...

I've always been impressed with the sound quality from my iPod Shuffle, but today I plugged it into my Sennheiser HD590 headphones instead of the little earbuds, and I was blown away. Amazingly good sound. It depends on the quality of your MP3 files, of course, but if you've got some good headphones, give it a try.

The band that goes across the top of my head is substantially larger than the thing storing and generating the music!

Mmm. Address-o-sync looks cool...

I'm working on a substantial document at present, which involves lots of cross-referencing between sections. It really helps to be able to refer to more than one section of the document at once. Here's the setup I like best:

This is Word 2004, showing three windows onto the same document. The top one, where I do most of the work, also has the document map switched on, for quicker navigation. I've used two separate windows on the lower display, rather than showing two pages side-by-side in one wide window, so that I can scroll them independently.

The other good thing about this arrangement is that it covers up everything else, which helps to reduce distraction!

Pixels are addictive. The more you have of them, the more you want. I'm just waiting for my pals at Newnham Research to produce something for the Mac...

This looks cool - the ice>Link allows you to connect your iPod to your car stereo as if it were a CD changer. A limited range of head units supported at the moment, and it's a bit pricey, but it's a great idea.

A signature seen on a posting today...

Update: I've posted a new, updated version of wget for OS X which you may want to try instead. If you want to grab files from the web using the command line, the wget utility is great. Recent versions of Mac OS X don't include it. They come with curl instead, which has some good features, but is also missing a great deal. Here's wget.zip, which contains wget built for Mac OS X 10.3. Hope someone finds it useful! Update: If you like this, you might also like my mtr for Mac OS X, or be interested in lots of other Apple-related stuff here.

Transmit is a fabulous FTP client for the Mac, which also does SFTP & WebDAV. I've always liked it, but the new version (3) has a couple of features which are really nice if you keep on your own machine copies of files which are on a remote machine:

• You can 'Link Folder Navigation' meaning that as you move through the tree of files on one machine, it automatically changes to the matching directory on the other.
• You can set up 'DockSend' for your favourites. If you drag a file from somewhere within your local filesystem onto the Transmit icon in the Dock, and it recognises the local origin as being within a directory that has a copy on the server, it will connect, upload the file to the appropriate place in the remote hierarchy, and disconnect again. Too cute.