Status-Q

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The Delicious Library application is out for the Mac, and it’s appropriately named. I have never really felt the desire to catalog my books and CDs. I certainly never felt like putting in the time and effort to do so. But on the other hand, I tried this software and almost immediately registered it.

Why? Well, in a bizarre way, almost because I wanted to reward the creators and because it was something beautiful that I wanted to own. It’s very rare that a bit of software does that to me! I was going to write a longish piece about it, but I came across the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa and it says it all. Anyone involved in software development should read this, or at least the first couple of pages. Anyone who wonders why we Mac enthusiasts become Mac enthusiast should at least read page 2, which asks some serious questions about the nature of the software & platform experience.

This is an example of the best kind of peer pressure. There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

In the meantime – a couple of screen shots:
Part of my library:

How did I get this information in to my machine? By scanning barcodes with my iSight:

[Original Link] A scary Newsweek article about Nathan Myrhold’s company Intellectual Ventures.

Quentin’s helpful hint for the day. Remember audio cassettes? You know those cassette-head cleaning kits? They would cost a few quid and come with a little bottle of cleaner which you’d drip onto Q-tips or some special device which would clean your cassette heads so that everything would sound nice and crisp and you could turn Dolby back on again?

Well, that cleaning fluid is basically Isopropyl Alcohol, and it’s jolly useful stuff for cleaning all sort of things. About 14 years ago, I went into Boots, our local big chemist, and asked if they could sell me some because I was fed up with paying three or four pounds for a tiny little plastic bottle of cassette head cleaner. Sure enough, for 85p, they provided me with a cute little 50ml glass bottle.

Well, I only use this stuff in small quantities, but recently, the level in the bottle has been getting a little low, so I went back yesterday and asked for some more. Sadly, they no longer keep the stuff. I presumed this was on the grounds of public health or something, but thought it was worth trying again, so I went to the nasty new Superdrug around the corner. And sure enough, I was able to purchase a pint of isopropyl alcohol, which at my rate of usage should keep me going sometime into the next millennium.

And it still only cost me three or four pounds. But I like the old bottle better.

[Original Link] John Naughton on the subject of Coarse Phishing.

[Original Link] If you’re a Mac OS X user and you do any programming in Python, you should check out the Wiki at PythonMac.org. If, like me, you miss the proper readline editing support when using it interactively, grab Jack Jansen’s add-ons which make it really easy to install readline and various other handy things.

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Following my last entry about the absence of the BBC this morning, Dave pointed me at this site. There was a fire at the Peterborough transmitter last night, apparently, and the mast collapsed, and great, I imagine, was the fall of it.

(Click image for more photos)

It’ll take them a while to get that back up.

That site has some interesting links, actually. I like Frequncy Finder, which will tell any UK readers about their local stations and where they’re coming from, or alternatively, tell you about a particular frequency and how it’s used around the country.

Update: This is what that mast looks like now, apparently:

I woke this morning to find a situation almost unknown in (my) living memory. I turned on the radio, as is my wont, to listen to BBC Radio 4, and it wasn’t there! Nor were any of the other national BBC stations. All our local transmitters are offline, which must have left hundreds of thousands of people, at least, offline. The Beeb don’t seem to be doing a good job telling people about it – it’s not obvious anywhere on the web site, for example.

Fortunately, the BBC website is in all other respects excellent – they have all of their content on line, including the live broadcast streams. And ‘wireless’ is a term we now use more about in-house networking than national networking. So I can simply take my laptop anywhere in the house instead of the radio. (And while listening, I could IM my friend Dave, who lives an hour’s drive away, to find out that his radio was dead too).

This is, to a large extent, the future of radio, though the device won’t always look like a laptop.

Update, 20 mins later: I spoke too soon. The BBC website is now down as well, no doubt swamped by the number of people trying to find out what’s happened! Perhaps there’s something to be said for broadcast technologies after all!

Another update: Actually, I think it was the DNS rather than the website which had a problem – I managed to get the site back almost immediately by finding an IP address for www.bbc.co.uk and putting it in my /etc/hosts, though this wasn’t needed for long. The main thing is that the online BBC came back before the broadcast version.