Status-Q

In early January, we’re launching version 2.0 of our CODA platform, and Michael’s done a short screencast which shows the fabulous new user interface that he, Thomas and Garry have been working on for the last few months. (We’ve also got a short video clip that’ll show you the basics if you aren’t familiar with CODA.)

The screencasts are really intended to show the new interface to our existing users rather than to sell it to new ones, but I know several of you are following what’s happening with CODA, so I thought they’d be worth posting.

Can’t wait to get version 2 out there…

Why not teach your squirrel to water-ski?

I last bought a DVD player at about the time the Java programming language was invented. Finally it gave up the ghost so I’ve just got another – and this one runs Java. How times change.

When I got my first one, I paid quite a lot for the vendor to do some soldering to make it region-free, and that was so long ago that I’d almost forgotten the ridiculous DVD region system. But back then, when I started buying DVDs, they were more plentiful and noticeably cheaper in the States, so I have a few region 1 discs.

Fortunately, it turns out that there’s a relatively straightforward hack for the Sony BDP-S350 to disable the region checking. So, to help make sure the details remain widely available, here’s a copy of what worked for me.
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One thing that has shocked me in the last couple of months – since we registered as an exhibitor at a major trade show – has been the number of calls we’ve had from trade publications and websites. These are typically called something like ‘Enterprise Technology Management’, and their salespeople can talk for half an hour without taking a breath about the merits of their publications, how all of their writers are drawn from ‘the analyst community’, and how influential they are in whichever world they claim to serve.

As they wind down, they tell you that they have a special opportunity in this quarter’s issue for an editorial/whitepaper/article/review focusing on your company – they would love to ‘work with you’ on this and it will typically cost you somewhere from £3000-6000. Oh, and it would be very helpful if you could make the decision now because the editor is waiting by their desk.

Now, I wouldn’t mind if a publication that I had actually heard of had called up, said they had advertising space, told me their circulation numbers, and asked if I wanted to buy half a page. And I’ve always known that reviewers of products – for example in HiFi magazines – are offered luxury skiing holidays and suchlike by the vendors of those products. But in my naïvety I hadn’t realised just how blatantly editorial inches were offered for sale, especially in the trade press. This has happened to us several times now.

So, gentle reader, in the unlikely event that you should be as innocent as I was, please don’t trust anything in any magazine or trade publication that might drop through your door. At least, don’t take it at face value. If you are unlucky enough to have to read these things, don’t assume that because an article doesn’t say ‘advertisement feature’ in the corner, that somebody hasn’t paid for it to be there. It could have been me.

I keep most of my email, except for spam and obviously temporary stuff. And I’m fairly careful about removing myself from mailing lists whenever possible.

But I notice that my IMAP server is currently storing just under 57,000 of my past messages. That’s over 9 years, so the average is only 17 per day that I’ve kept. It still seems like a big number, though!

I’ve been thinking about and experimenting with various backup options recently, seeking the One True Backup Solution. In my search for enlightenment I came across a rather nice site called The Tao of Backup.

Many of my readers, I know, have been good enough to read Rose’s novel, The Blackstone Key, and I suppose it would be terribly churlish to suggest that it might make a good Christmas present for somebody, so I shall avoid doing so.

I have had fun revamping Rose’s web site over the last few weekends, though, and those of you who enjoyed the story might be interested in the first batch of historical facts that we’ve added to the site, which give a little more background to the novel – you can find them on the left hand side of the book’s page under ‘The world of The Blackstone Key‘. More to come…

You might also be interested to know that the sequel, The Counterfeit Guest, will hit UK shelves three months from today (at about the same time as the paperback of the first book). Both are available to pre-order from Amazon.

My friend David MacKay gave a splendid lecture this evening to mark the publication of his book, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.

Many years in the making, this is a masterpiece: beautifully produced, thoroughly researched, and intelligently presented. I suspect it will become required reading for anyone really interested in the topic of sustainable energy: how to generate it, and how to use less of it. And yet it lives up to its name, being delightfully un-stuffy.

David is more interested in spreading sense than in making money, and you can download the book for free if wanted from withouthotair.com. Almost all of the materials are under a Creative Commons licence and he’s made high-resolution versions of most of the figures available on the web site.

But I recommend buying it: the book itself is very aesthetically pleasing, and could make a good Christmas present.

Rose and I are off to Paris for a short break in a few weeks’ time, an easier trip these days since the Eurostar train now departs from St Pancras station.

And this led me to wonder who this Pancras chap actually was? Well, the story goes that he was beheaded by the Romans at the age of 14 for refusing to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Pictures like this one show a rather mature 14-year-old, I think, and the story has been embellished over the centuries, with later versions having him thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. But none the less, he lost his head, and various other bits of him are supposed, eventually, to have made their way to England, which is why we have various things named after him, like a railway… errm… terminal.

I was amused by the line in the Wikipedia article that said:

Pancras is normally invoked against cramp, false witness, headache, and perjury.

Why cramp, I wonder?

That he found a cure for headaches, though, that I can believe.