One of the side effects of getting older is that I have to take some regular daily medication (for some trifling ailments). Another is that I get more forgetful. So I appreciate the tablet packets that come marked with the days of the week.
I do sometimes suspect, though, that the manufacturers think you will take a particular pill because you remember which day of the week it is, and not, as often seems to be the case for me, the other way around…
One of the most useful sites I’ve discovered recently is called
What The Font?
If you’re wondering which typeface was used in a logo, a business card, a letterhead, you can upload an image of a few words and it will attempt to identify it for you. It works beautifully.
I was creating a DVD of a friend’s wedding and thought it would be fun to have the font in the DVD menus match that used on the order of service. So I scanned a line, uploaded it, and it turned out to be Mayflower. A quick search found a free version here. Wonderful! – it could have been a time-consuming job tracking that down.
If you don’t have an image, but you have a reasonable sample of the text, then Identifont might be able to help. Not as quick, or, in my experience, as accurate, but a good alternative none the less.
I’d love to see the out-takes…
The whole faster-than-light-neutrino thing is an absolutely wonderful example of the scientific method at work.
How many other fields of endeavour would handle this the same way?
Can you imagine a salesman saying, “We’ve come up with this product, but we’re a bit surprised to discover that it seems to do something we didn’t expect really, really well! Could you check this for us? Is it as good as we think, or have we just screwed up somewhere?” Mmm.
Substitute a politician, or, better, a religious leader: “Gosh! Errm… We think this might be a miracle… Could all of you skeptics out there check the facts for us and see if we’ve missed some rational explanation?”
You get my point…
This is exactly how science is meant to work. I think it’s wonderful, and it makes me proud to be a scientist.
In my studies of transatlantic cultural differences, I have pondered the fact that many successful American companies have been started in garages. HP, Apple, Google… It’s almost a tradition now.
The English, on the other hand, as a naturally modest race, often have more humble beginnings, and the first faltering steps of many companies here are taken in a garden shed. (Though I do have some good friends here who ran their company from a garage for quite some time, and then did very well at getting US investment… Could that have helped? Something to ponder…)
Three of my recent companies – Ndiyo, DisplayLink and Camvine – began life in the shed at the bottom of the garden of a rented house here in Cambridge. The house was used for meetings, for management, for coffee-preparation, but it was the shed where the important stuff happened. Though, to be fair, it was a very fine shed, with four desks, Velux windows and views of the college playing fields next door; it would be fairer, perhaps, to call it a studio.
About 18 months ago, Rose and I built a new shed at the bottom of our own garden. (No Velux windows in this one, though it does have three runs of Cat-5 cable going to it from the house.) We built it mostly just because we needed the space, but some friends saw this as heralding something more significant. You now how, in a movie, when a female character is suddenly sick for no apparent reason, you can tell it won’t be long before you discover she’s going to have a baby? That kind of thing.
Well, as it happens, I do have a project which I’ve been wanting to work on for some years, but haven’t had the chance. I’m not sure whether the technology is really viable, and I can’t talk about it publicly yet because if I can make it work, I may need to write some patents. But I think it’s worth trying.
And so this past week was my last full-time week at Camvine, though I’ll be doing some part-time work for them for a while to help smooth the transition, and maintaining close contact with the company whenever I can. It’s a great team, and they have my strong support and best wishes going forward.
First, I’m then going to take a couple of weeks just to potter about a bit. Other than visits to the in-laws, I think I’ve only had one holiday since I started Camvine four and half years ago, so a short break will be welcome.
But last week also marked the incorporation of my new company, Telemarq Ltd. Sounds good, eh? You know and I know, dear reader, that it means ‘Quentin trying to make new stuff work, while propping up his rapidly dwindling savings with some consulting’. But please don’t tell too many people!
You can tell them, however, that the Telemarq headquarters are in a shed.
The wires are buzzing with the news that Steve Jobs is resigning from Apple. Everyone knew it had to come, but he will be greatly missed, and the web is gradually filling with tributes of one sort or another.
The thing I have always loved about Apple was that they broke so many rules, and did so with such glorious success.
Conventional business wisdom will tell you, over and over again, that you should focus on your strengths, cast off all else that hinders, and aim to commoditise whatever complements your core business, rather than getting into it yourself. Microsoft don’t make chips, and Intel don’t make operating systems.
Apple, on the other hand, weren’t listening. They gradually grew to sell hardware, accessories, operating systems, applications, for mass markets and niche markets. They even did what many people thought was bound to be a disaster: opening their own retail outlets! But they then turned them into, per square foot, the most valuable retail space in the world. Having covered pretty much everything in conventional computing, they plunged into the notoriously difficult mobile phone market and, well, you know the story. Oh, and by the way, they sell a few books and some music, too.
When you think about it, doesn’t the fact that Ford doesn’t even sell petrol seem, well, a bit unadventurous?
To understand more about the man who made this happen, I recommend this page of quotes from Steve at the WSJ.
Or, for a bit of nostalgia, you can’t do much better than the posters from Apple’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ campaign:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Mmm. You can now download C/C++ apps to run within Google Chrome.
So the browser really is becoming an operating system. Or, at least, a sandbox. Soon, I expect, you’ll be able to download full VMs and run them in the browser, at which point the whole idea of displaying web pages will be just one service your browser provides, in much the same way that driving a graphics card is just one function of your current operating system.
The main difference between your browser and your operating system will then simply be whether they think of the network, or the disk, as being the primary filesystem…
I’ve been having fun with my new Panasonic GH2. A very nice toy.
All this and it shoots 1080p too 🙂
Geeky post to help those who might be Googling for this stuff. To anyone who saw the title and came here hoping to read about an accident-prone safari guide, my apologies.
I know people have mixed experiences with Mac OS X Lion, but for me it’s been almost all good, and I’m very happy with the upgrade.
I did, however, run into a curious problem today on one of my machines, which took a while to sort out. The Finder was crashing and rebooting repeatedly, each time asking me if I wanted to restore the windows it had been displaying before.
I tried all sorts of things: moving stuff off the desktop, deleting the Finder’s preferences file, unmounting drives, booting in safe mode… but in the end it proved to be the Trash that was causing the problem.
I started Terminal (which is always in my Dock, but you can start from Spotlight if you don’t have a Finder running) and did:
sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash
…after which my world came back to normality again. (You’ll need to type your admin password).
Hope that’s useful for someone out there!
Today’s thought-provoking quotation comes from The Knight Foundation’s John Bracken:
“Print is the new vinyl.”
I had a call from a nice lady named Celine at Comantra. She told me that they were a Microsoft support partner and the information they had about my PC suggested that there was a problem with the Windows operating system and that my machine had been compromised by malware and viruses. If I was sitting in front of my computer, their support team would be able to help me sort it out…
Now, this was not the first time I had been contacted by similar organisations, and I wanted to find out more, so I asked about the name of the company, got their phone number (08000488005), got her name…
And then I yelled at her.
Ask any of the chaps, and they’ll tell you that old Q, for all that he may be rather excitable sort of fellow sometimes, is not really given to yelling, but these scams really annoy me. They pick on the nervous and vulnerable and get them to fork out cash for a service which in all probability they do not need. Certainly, they know nothing about your computer – not one of my computers has run Windows in the last decade or so, for example – and how would they tie it to your phone number anyway? Unless they happened to be involved in the malware business themselves, perhaps… Anyway, in the past, when I’ve started asking difficult questions, they just hang up, so I wanted to play along to make sure I knew who was culpable. They know they’re guilty of misrepresentation.
If I’d had the presence of mind, I would have used the rather nice response that I heard someone on a podcast recently recommend for telemarketers of all types. He would listen patiently and then ask, “I have a question. Why don’t you get a job that makes peoples’ lives better instead of worse?”
Nice quote from Kevin Kelly on the (excellent) Triangulation podcast:
The solution to bad or stupid ideas is not to stop thinking. It’s to have better ideas.
Similarly, the solution to bad or stupid technology is not to get rid of technology. It’s to create better technology.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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