The US/Canada edition of Rose’s latest book officially hits the shelves next week. We’re heading over to Michigan for the launch, and stopping briefly in New York on the way back.
But apparently, people who ordered it on Amazon have started receiving their copies. So I thought I’d let my transatlantic readers know, just in case… there’s a link on Rose’s site if you get the urge… 🙂
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’…
WordPress have, as is the mode du jour, released an iPhone/iTouch app which makes it easier to blog on the move. Or on the loo. If you can read this, it works. (The app, not the loo. No, don’t worry, I’m not really there!)
It’s a little flaky at the moment, but the concept is quite neat, except for the fact that you have to type on the little keyboard. Too bad it won’t rotate into landscape mode…
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.
One of the most useful components of Quicksilver is the Clipboard History feature. If you have the Clipboard plugin enabled, you can bring it up with your normal Quicksilver keystroke followed by Cmd-L, and it will show all the recent entries in your clipboard. You can choose how many entries you’d like it to store.
There are various things you can do with this: double-clicking or hitting return on one of the items will insert that entry at the current point, for example. I’m filling in some US tax forms for several past years and being able to have things like our fullnames, tax references, and our full home address just a couple of keystrokes away makes the repitition a lot less painful!
For a different way of using the Clipboard History facilities, have a look at Nick Santilli’s handy screencast.
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…
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