Status-Q

About two weeks ago, I was staying with Rose’s aunt in Los Angeles, and she was having some problems with her wireless network, so I offered to take a look. Well, I’ll spare you the details of the problem, but I fooled around with her Linksys router basestation and the range-extender box she’d bought, but without much success. I’m too embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realise what was up.

Her network was using the network name ‘linksys’, which is the default configuration for their boxes. It was only when I started running proper snooping tools on my laptop that I realised that there were three routers using that name which were visible from the study where her PC was located. Two of her neighbours had the same boxes and had also not reconfigured them. I come from a land of brick buildings where the problem is usually one of not even getting a strong signal from your own network, rather than seeing too many. Anyway, for some months she had unwittingly been using her neighbours’ broadband connection while her own lay idle. And for some hours I had been reconfiguring their routers by accident, because they still had the default login and password as well.

I switched the wireless off on my laptop and plugged in directly to her router using ethernet to make sure I knew which one I was talking to, gave the wireless network a new name and suddenly things started to make sense. My normal practice, by the way, is to name the network with something which makes its location obvious (mine’s “20MarloweRd”) so that if anybody else has problems with my signal, they know where it’s coming from.

The next version of Microsoft Office is going to be the first which uses ‘open’ file formats by default. There’s a video here where Robert Scoble interviews Brian Jones, a program manager on the Word team, about the new formats, which are ZIP files containing XML. Brian has also started a blog talking about this.

This is definitely a good move, and a brave one, by Microsoft, though I imagine they have largely been forced into it and may not have had too much choice. The secret binary formats have been reverse-engineered now to such a degree that several other packages, most notably OpenOffice and Apple iLife, do a good, though not perfect job, of reading them, so there’s less to be gained form keeping them secret. And having moved both my email and my blogs between many different systems recently, a key question for me is always how easily I can get my data out of any particular system. This announcement will make me more likely, rather than less likely, to use Microsoft products in future.

The sad thing, for me, was to hear the excitement and enthusiasm in Scoble’s voice about what a fabulous new idea this was, when he should have been asking, “Isn’t this exactly what OpenOffice has been doing for years, right down to the choice of the basic format?”

When was the last time anything really novel came out of Microsoft? It’s a rhetorical question, really. What Microsoft have traditionally been good at is now so commoditized that it’s like asking when the last time something really novel came out of Dell. That’s not really their job any more.

A great thing about the web, and search engines in particular, is that you can use tiny fragments of information from the dark recesses of your memory to recover substantial quantities of information. I’ve done this quite a lot, for example, with songs that I heard in my early childhood. For thirty-odd years I would hum fragments to myself in the shower but had no knowledge of whence they came, until one day it would occur to me to type the words into Google and discover that I had been sharing my shower with the Osmonds all these years, or some such embarassing revelation.

Anyway, the thing I typed this morning was ‘ITA’. In the sixties, the British government sponsored an experiment in the use of the ‘Initial Teaching Alphabet’, a 40-character phonetic alphabet designed by Sir James Pitman. The idea was that it’s tough enough for young children to learn the concepts of reading and writing without having to cope with the irregularities of English spelling and pronunciation. Italian and Spanish children, who have a much more phonetically -consistent language, progress much faster in the early years. The irregularities of normal English are best left until the ages of six or seven when the children are more confident about their abilities with the mechanics of reading and writing.

Well, that’s the way I learned, and it worked very well for me. Others, I gather, had different experiences, but my mother says that on one Very Important Day I went to school using ITA and came back using grown-up spelling, and never read an ITA book again. In fact, I had almost no memory of the alphabet I used for the first year or two of my education. Until this morning, that is, when I realised I could read all about it again.

It’s amazing what you can find on the web. I was looking for something completely different when I came across this rather wonderful description of Boy’s Vaulting Poles from an 1896 book by Daniel Carter Beard.

Lots more in this vein at Daniel Carter Beard’s Online Books

Do you remember when computers and software used to come with manuals?

Not any more

I’ve been updating Statuq-Q to use WordPress 1.5 and making a few changes along the way.. a few more yet to come.

One is that I’m going to start using ‘categories’ on my posts so that people interested in
gadgets & toys or
Apple & Macs or
photos can see them in more concentrated form. (There are links on the right of the page, too). Other categories may follow.

With over 600 posts now, I may take some time to apply these retrospectively. But if I don’t start now, the job will only get harder in future.

I like ’em both. Nice photos from both John and Pete Naughton.

Actually, John has provided me with a good reason to start using categories in WordPress. You can view the recent postings in his Photography category for a visually-pleasing little browse. I haven’t felt the need to categorise my blog posts until now, but I might follow his example. It’s also time to upgrade my copy of WordPress…