Humphrey Carpenter is a great writer of biographies, and I’m currently enjoying The Inklings, a sort of ‘group biography’ of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends. I liked this quote from Williams:
Much was possible to a man in solitude, but some things were only possible to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly.
If you think you’re confused about the Net Neutrality issue, you should read what Senator Ted Stevens had to say.
Or you can listen to him. No need to listen to the whole thing. I’m sure you can gain enlightenment by scrolling around and listening to a few snippets…
I was over at my old company, Newnham, today, and they were setting up a cool demo.
What’s particularly cool about this, for those of you not familiar with Newnham, is that the machine driving all these displays is just an ordinary PC with a regular single-output graphics card in it. It could have been a laptop.
If you’re used to dragging your windows around a screen, it’s much more fun being able to drag them around the room!
Warning: Geeky stuff ahead!
The Parallels Workstation virtual machine software for the Intel Macs has a BIOS which doesn’t support network booting.
I wanted to simulate an LTSP workstation, which would boot over the network from our Linux server. Here’s how I did it:
On the ThinStation project site, I found a link to a Universal Network Boot package – a zip file containing disk images for floppy, CD and HD.
From this I grabbed the ISO CD-ROM image eb-net.iso and set up my virtual machine to use this as the CD instead of the physical CD drive. I also configured it to boot from CD first, and, for my purposes, I removed the hard disk from the config as well.
Sure enough, it boots up just fine and I have an LTSP terminal in a window. Much easier for experimentation than rebooting my embedded device all the time.
Here’s a web service I’ve always valued: TinyURL.com.
Have you ever wanted to send a web link to somebody and discovered that it has a long and unwieldy URL like this one?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=trinity+college+cambridge
&ie=UTF8&ll=52.204329,0.115727&spn=0.003925,0.007972&t=k&om=1
It really messes up your email formatting, some email programs fragment it so it isn’t clickable, and it’s impossible to dictate to somebody over the phone or to send in a text message.
If you hop over to TinyURL.com, though, you can just paste it in and get back something like this:
which does the same thing and is much easier to hand around.
There are other services like this, but TinyURL has been around for a long time and seems to do a good, efficient and quick job.
As a Blackberry fan, I hope we do get to see some of the things they’re promising in the near future.
This is what a day looks like in seconds.
A nice hint – I certainly hadn’t seen that option.
One of the good things about having a blog based on WordPress is that people have written lots of cool plugins for it.
Alex, at the Wasabi blog, has one called Related Entries which does a search for other posts on your blog that might be relevant to the one you’re looking at. I’ve tweaked it a bit and have installed it, as an experiment, on the individual post pages here (which you can always get to by clicking on the title of a post).
If you’re looking at this entry on the summary page, for example, click on the title and it will take you to the post’s own page, and the plugin will suggest some of my other posts about WordPress and blogging. Quite sweet!
Update – the plugin has moved and can now be found here
Thought for the day…
A standard dial tone is made up of two simultaneous frequencies: 350Hz and 440Hz. As any musician will tell you, 440Hz is the A above middle C – the concert pitch standard adopted in the 1930s. 350Hz is the F just below it.
Some modern phones (such as my DECT cordless handsets) generate their own dialtone, which for some reason is at a different pitch, and mobiles, of course, don’t have one at all, but if you lift the receiver on a standard landline, you should be able to recognise the two notes.
So if you find yourself needing to tune an instrument, or set the pitch for a choir, but you don’t have a tuning fork handy, just turn to the nearest telephone!
Another good reason for using the Firefox web browser: the FlashBlock extension gets rid of most of those annoying Flash-based advertisements and shows a nice static placeholder icon on the page instead. If you actually want to see the Flash content, you can just click on it.
One click to install.
Tom Standage wrote a great article about the foolishness of the bottled water craze. It was published in the NYT and the IHT and, a year afterwards, it was blogged here. Ah well. Better late than never.
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