Today is annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. If you get frustrated with the occasional problems on your computer, spare a thought for the guy who has to spend his life fixing those problems for other people’s benefit, while absorbing their frustration! The problems are not normally of his making…
So hug a sysadmin today….
[well, ok, that may be too much… but at least buy him a pint]
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of iPhone software, here’s a handy hint. In the browser and in various other apps there’s a special ‘.com’ key which saves you a few keystrokes.
What’s not so obvious is that you can press and hold on that key to get some other options.
Now, if someone can work out how to add ‘.co.uk’…
A great talk by Cory Doctorow last night – he spoke for an hour but packed in more words than most people would manage in two hours, and certainly more insights.
One phrase I liked:
“Innovation happens when people can afford to fail”
This is exactly right. I’ve said a related thing before in a talk about innovation: “Redundancy pay is a wonderful thing”. For many people, especially young people, it’s the first time they get a chance to raise their heads, look around and think about options beyond the next month’s pay cheque.
Most people will not, or cannot, risk the roof over their family’s heads, or their career prospects, or their employees’ livelihoods, if that’s the price of experimenting and failing. The thing Silicon Valley got right is the understanding that a high proportion of new ideas will fail, and that’s OK, because enough of them won’t. If investors looking at proposals, or employers looking at CVs, or governments thinking about policy, understand and allow failure (in moderation, of course), then great things can happen!
Many thanks to Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software for the invitation to the talk.
Following on from my earlier post about average speed checks, Thomas Hunger pointed me at this story about in-car technology defeating an instantaneous speed check.
I do use a GPS logging device in my car; you never know, it might prove useful one day! A UK speeding ticket costs rather more than a GPS logger now.
Note that I’m not encouraging people to break the law here, just to be able to defend themselves if wrongfully accused 🙂
Dan Gillmor gives this nice piece of advice to students using Wikipedia for research:
It’s a great place to start; a terrible place to stop.
In the UK we’re getting more and more stretches of road with ‘average speed checks’. Rather than simply measuring your speed as you pass a particular camera (or a particular policeman), your time over a distance between cameras – typically a few miles – is measured and you’re fined if your average speed exceeds the limit.
I’m not very keen on this, and I have some concerns about the amount of time I then spend looking at my speedometer, but I must admit the system does seem to do its job rather well; I imagine it will become the norm on most of our roads in due course.
Now, averages are funny things, of course. If you’re stuck in traffic for half the distance between two cameras, and moving at half the speed limit, you could then go infinitely fast for the other half and still be within the appropriate average. I imagine the authorities are banking on people not realising this.
Yesterday, as I drove a long stretch of monitored road, I was thinking about creating a system which would let you know what your personal real effective speed limit was at any time. It would need to know the positions of the cameras, but such a database could be built pretty quickly.
And then I realised that my car already has a partial solution built in: a ‘trip’ facility which can tell me the average speed over the length of the trip.
I just needed to press the trip-reset button as I went under a camera, and then I had a nice simple way to keep my average speed within limits until I reached the next one.
So until my next company, Below Average Inc., builds the full all-singing, all-dancing speed management product, this is very handy!
Any idea what this is?
It’s a punt pole, with my camera attached to the end using a Gorillapod. Look, here’s a close-up:
And why, you might ask, would you want to do this?
Well, when my pal Bill Thompson organised this year’s geek punting picnic, PuntCon, I felt I needed to find a suitably geeky way to take a photo of the gathering. So I put my camera on a timer and raised the pole. It’s a bit tricky to aim, but here is at least a part of the group:
Many thanks to Bill (and everyone else) for a most enjoyable afternoon.
My friend and colleague Ray Gordon has a new blog. Ray is a very good electronic engineer and a very successful businessman; if he takes to this new medium it should be interesting.
Anyway, in his very first post, he released some of his software into the public domain. It allows a Microchip PIC to emulate a USB Mass-storage device. Esoteric stuff, but trust me, there are people out there who will be most grateful for this – it’s a great start!
You probably know TinyURL, which takes nasty long URLs like this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=edale,+derbyshire&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.25371,60.46875&ie=UTF8&ll=53.360285,-1.816006&spn=0.065462,0.118103&t=h&z=13&iwloc=addr
and gives you a nice shorthand version like this:
which does the same thing, and is much easier to put in emails, or read over the phone.
Well, a new service has just launched called Bit.ly (no doubt starting a new craze in Libyan domain names) which does much the same kind of thing, and a whole lot more. Bit.ly links look much the same:
but for more information about why it’s different, see this post. It looks good.
But TinyURL has been around for ever and has proved very reliable; it’ll be interesting to see if this new pretender can usurp it…
Oh, and talking of trying old classics in new media… Kevan Davis has made George Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody available as a blog at diaryofanobody.net. Nicely done.
I wonder if Pooter would have approved.
Mmm. A classic American public radio show – Car Talk – is making its way onto television, in a new series using animated versions of its hosts, the Magliozzi brothers. I’m quite a fan, though only an occasional listener, but I really wonder about its viability in that medium.
Still, I wish them all the best… after thirty years of making people laugh, they deserve all the success they can get.
CNN has the story. Those of us in other parts of the world can hear the radio show on the Car Talk site.
OK – apologies for the rant… Is it just me, or have light bulbs really gone downhill in recent years? It seems as if scarcely a week goes by without me having to replace one.
I’m sure it wasn’t like that in my childhood. I don’t think we have more in our house than my parents had in theirs, or that we use them more. Perhaps we have a higher proportion of ‘strange’ ones – spotlights, candles, globes… and these varieties haven’t evolved to the same degree as the common-or-garden species?
The worst ones seem to be Philips, but most of the places we shop don’t seem to sell anybody else’s any more. The Philips spotlight bulb I’ve just replaced after a couple of months claimed to have a one year lifetime (based on 3 hours’ use per day). Even if it had managed that, it doesn’t seem like a great achievement, in this day and age.
The low-energy ones often do rather better, as they should, given their cost, but I’m too fond of dimmer switches to be able to change to those in any wholehearted way, and I’m still rather dubious about whether the true environmental benefits over their lifetime, if any, justify the cost and inconvenience…
So tell me, am I just becoming old and cranky, or does somebody still make a good old 60-watter the way they used to when I were a lad?
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments