Category Archives: General

Time machine and parallel universes

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece describing my ideal backup system. It was essentially a jog-shuttle wheel allowing you to scroll back to any point in your computer’s past.

Just a few minutes ago, Steve Jobs announced the backup system that’s going to be built into Leopard, the upcoming operating system for the Mac. It’s called Time Machine, and – hey! – it lets you scroll back into your computer’s past, on a coarse granularity at least. Of course, it also looks very pretty!

Can’t wait to see how well it works in reality. How do you look at the contents of a folder that’s no longer present, for example? How much work is it for application developers to incorporate this? And what’s the underlying storage mechanism?

It looks as if there’s lots of other good stuff on its way in Leopard too – calendars which multiple users can edit, sharing of presentations and slideshows, and desktops, through iChat, full 64-bit support, and so on… We have to be patient, though. The release date is Spring 2007.

Update: Steve’s keynote is now online.

The Two Towers

The Two Towers

Sunshine in Seattle a couple of days ago. Stifling heat in Detroit last night. Am now in Toronto and it’s raining…

MacBook Pro battery recall

About a week ago I wrote that “I may take any ‘battery recall’ notices a little more seriously in future”.

And today I read that Apple is recalling batteries for some of the 15″ MacBook Pros, including mine.

New Mac Project Management software

I’ve often looked at the various project-management offerings on the Mac, and never found quite what I wanted. I’ve wondered about trying to do my own system using Excel or, more likely, OmniOutliner.

So I’m pleased to see that there’s a new option available – OmniPlan – from the people who brought you the wonderful OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. Looks very nice at first glance.

How to silence cellphones in your meeting room?

Paint the room with this.

Dell laptop explodes

I’m a bit late in posting this, but the pictures are worth seeing if you haven’t already.

It looks as if we haven’t quite nailed down all the potential issues with batteries yet!

This isn’t the first time Dell has had this problem, though, to be fair, they have such market coverage that if anything goes wrong with any machine, it’s likely to be a Dell, through simple statistics.

I may take any ‘battery recall’ notices a little more seriously in future.

Ingo Gunther’s globes

Mountains of debt

Ingo Gunther makes globes. About a thousand of them so far, showing all sorts of different views of the world. The one above is called Mountains of Debt, but others show satellite coverage, population, pollution, gold deposits…

You can see many of them here and listen to him talking about them on IT Conversations.

Heartbeat

I was in our local hospital today for a minor checkup – nothing serious – and in fact I’d never been there as a patient before so it took me a while to find the right department.

“Are you here to see Sister Ruth?”, asked the receptionist, and I said that I wasn’t quite sure, but it sounded plausible. I took a seat and waited for the matronly figure in a white coat to appear.

“Mr Stafford-Fraser? I’m Ruth.”, said a voice, and I looked up to see an exceedingly pretty and… ahem… curvaceous young blonde in a tight, brightly-coloured top, short skirt and high-heeled shoes.

“Now”, she said, leaning over me. “I’m just going to take your pulse and measure your blood pressure”.

And are you also running a control experiment?, I wondered…

Visit to Exbiblio

Hugh Fraser of Blog Relations has been visiting my friends at Exbiblio. I think he captures the spirit nicely.

The importance of friendship

Humphrey Carpenter is a great writer of biographies, and I’m currently enjoying The Inklings, a sort of ‘group biography’ of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends. I liked this quote from Williams:

Much was possible to a man in solitude, but some things were only possible to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.

Net Neutrality

If you think you’re confused about the Net Neutrality issue, you should read what Senator Ted Stevens had to say.

Or you can listen to him. No need to listen to the whole thing. I’m sure you can gain enlightenment by scrolling around and listening to a few snippets…

The Seven Screens

I was over at my old company, Newnham, today, and they were setting up a cool demo.

7 screens

What’s particularly cool about this, for those of you not familiar with Newnham, is that the machine driving all these displays is just an ordinary PC with a regular single-output graphics card in it. It could have been a laptop.

7 screens

If you’re used to dragging your windows around a screen, it’s much more fun being able to drag them around the room!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser