How do you interact with a screen on a device without putting finger-marks on it?
You make the frame touch-sensitive, according to a recent Apple patent.
Many people are speculating that the diagrams give a good idea of what the next iPod might look like…
For a few years now, the majority of computers sold have been laptops. It’s not surprising; I’m not sure what I’d do without mine.
But one downside is that laptop-sized hard disks are much less robust than their desktop equivalents. The manufacturers often quote an expected life of just a small number of years. And as more and more people are storing very valuable data – like the family photos – on these little devices, the potential for heartbreak is getting ever larger.
This is why I always have at least two complete recent backups on external hard disks, and why I make sure that they’re full-size desktop drives. I don’t carry them around with me, either, which probably increases their lifespan dramatically! If you’re a Mac user, treat yourself to a copy of the excellent SuperDuper software and £100-worth of external firewire hard disk, and you won’t regret it.
But if all else fails and you have a failing laptop disk and you really need to get your data off it, you might be able to help it along with a little reorientation…
Perhaps you need a Clocky…
Rose pointed me at a nice article about some kids in Humberside trying to bring back some water voles that were relocated to Devon when building work threatened their habitat.
Keisha, 10, said: “I’m worried the water voles will be extinct in Goole because if they move to Devon they might die because they won’t know their way round.”
The building developers have apparently relented and are returning the voles to Humberside, to the satisfaction of all concerned. Except, I rather suspect, the voles themselves…
Guy Kawasaki is a fun and interesting guy, and I enjoyed the recent interview with him on the excellent Venture Voice podcast. Excerpt:
When you see a company, what do you look for? Is it the entrepreneur, the market analysis?
Well, this is the question that every VC gets asked and every VC answers consistently by saying, “We’re looking for a proven team, with proven technology, and with a proven business model”.
And that’s a load of crap.
Because, frankly, if you look at the huge successes, I would say for those three parameters, usually the huge successes are zero-for-three. Maybe one-for-three.
And I would say that about Apple, I would say that about Google, about Cisco, and Yahoo. They were not three-for-three there.
So I could more easily build a case that you should look for an unproven team with unproven technology in an unproven market, cause that’s the billion dollar deal!
We watched “The Spanish Prisoner” last night. I’ve been a fan of David Mamet’s since seeing, buying and watching several times his version of The Winslow Boy. The Spanish Prisoner comes halfway between that and The Usual Suspects! Both recommended, if you don’t know them.
Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, stars in both films, with a somewhat less flattering coiffure than shown here. Her acting style (or perhaps it’s more his directing style) is a little unusual, but I think she’s great.
My Nokia E61 has a keyboard and a little joystick thingy. It doesn’t have a touchscreen. This can be restricting for some applications but it has a major advantage, as Steve Litchfield points out: Screens without a touchscreen in front of them are much more readable in sunlight. He has some photos to illustrate this.
Product placement is getting more subtle, and you can do it yourself.
A company called PayPerPost will pay bloggers to write articles about particular topics and link to particular advertisers’ sites.
I hereby promise that Status-Q will never stoop so low!
Toni Schneider signed up and reported back. Extract:
I opened an account, scanned their offers from advertisers and picked one more or less at random. It was from a site called WeddingStrategies. They offered me $10 for writing a blog post about them with at least 300 words. Their instructions included “title needs to include keyword wedding or weddings, PR3 please, no business blogs, no mention of PayPerPost.” That last bit certainly was revealing.
‘PR3’, in case you don’t know (I didn’t) is a measure of your popularity on Google’s Page Rank algorithm. You can check it here. This blog is PR6, I gather – perhaps I should be trying to profit from that!
Firefox 2 is out. Can’t say I really notice much difference, but I thought 1.5 was just fine, so I’m not upset.
On the Mac, though, it still doesn’t deal with RSS feeds as nicely as Safari, so it won’t quite displace my default browser yet.
To the London LinuxWorld today, which seemed miniscule after the San Francisco one only a few weeks ago. I was surprised at just how small it was, given the importance of Linux to the UK, and the importance of the UK to Linux, but it was still interesting.
On the train I was listening to podcasts, as I often do now while travelling. That has been the biggest impact of the iPod for me personally: the fact that I no longer consider waiting time and travelling time as wasted time, even if I’m driving or walking and couldn’t easily read a book. I spend much more time on my iPod listening to speech than I do to music…
Anyway, one of the interviews I listened to was with Jeremy Allison, a key developer of Samba. For those who don’t know, Samba is free software which shares files and printers over a network using Microsoft’s protocols, meaning that Windows machines can communicate with Macs, Linux & Unix boxes and a variety of other devices that use Samba under the hood. It’s a very important piece of software, and I’ve been using it for about 11 years.
Of course, Microsoft don’t publish the details of their protocols. If they had their way, then Windows machines would only be able to talk to other Windows machines. So Andrew Tridgell, the creator of Samba, has to work out what they’re doing through a variety of cunning techniques. He wrote a nice article about how he does it. I particularly liked his description of what he calls ‘The French Cafe Technique’:
Imagine you wanted to learn French, and there were no books, courses etc
available to teach you. You might decide to learn by flying to France and
sitting in a French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you.
You take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what food
arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for “bread”, “coffee”
etc.We use the same technique to learn about protocol additions that Microsoft
makes. We use a network sniffer to listen in on conversations between
Microsoft clients and servers and over time we learn the “words” for “file
size”, “datestamp” as we observe what is sent for each query.Now one problem with the “French Cafe” technique is that you can only learn
words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other words? Say for
example you want to learn to swear in French? You would try ordering something
at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe or poking him in the eye when he
gives you your order. As you are being kicked out you take copious notes on
the words he uses.The equivalent of “swear words” in a network protocol are “error packets”.
When implementing Samba we need to know how to respond to error conditions. To
work this out we write a program that deliberately accesses a file that
doesn’t exist, or uses a buffer that is too small or accesses a file we don’t
own. Then we watch what error code is returned for each condition, and take
notes.
Here’s a neat utility I’ve just discovered which fixes one of the few things which bug me about the Mac user interface: WindowDragon.
It lets you assign mouse/key combinations to drag and resize windows without having to make your way to the title bar or the bottom right corner.
On my setup, for example, Ctrl-Alt-drag anywhere in the window will drag the window around. (Linux GNOME users, BTW, can also do this with Alt-drag). It’s so much easier than normal, and so much more like moving bits of paper on a desktop. Try moving some things around on your real physical desk, only allowing yourself to grasp them by the top edge, and see whether you think it’s a good interface…
I’ve also set Ctrl-Alt-right-drag to resize, and yes, you can do it from any corner or edge, or even anywhere vaguely in the vicinity of the corner or edge. Very handy, but I’m going to have to find a different combination when I’m using my one-button trackpad…
I thought this might be a good use of the squeezy side-buttons on my Mighty Mouse; you can use them if you set the mouse to treat them as ‘Button 4’. I like the idea of ‘grabbing’ the window like that and moving it around, but I’ve never really been able to grip those buttons and use my mouse easily – they’re just not quite in the right place.
You can disable WindowDragon for particular apps if you need the key assignments for something else.
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