Status-Q

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.

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A great story on CNN.

Faith, a 4-year-old Rottweiler, phoned 911 when [her owner] fell out of her wheelchair and barked urgently into the receiver until a dispatcher sent help. Then the service dog unlocked the front door for the police officer.

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The Telegraph, of course, revels in the end of the Guardian’s “Write to a Clark County voter” campaign. This follows an earlier article rejoicing in how it had backfired. The Guardian is saying that it was only shut down early because somebody hacked into the site and downloaded 20,000 personal addresses (which is deemed to be worse than 20,000 people downloading one address each).

The original Guardian article turns out to have been rather insightful:

It’s worth considering at the outset how counterproductive this might all be, especially if approached undiplomatically. Anybody might be justifiably angered by the idea of a foreigner trying to interfere in their democratic process.

And while the Guardian’s Albert Scardino is describing the project as “an overwhelming triumph”, I think the original piece may also prove to have been right when describing it as “a unique experiment”.

Ah, I’d forgotten what fun it was maintaining a Windows machine. Looking today at a friend’s computer which was running rather slowly, I went to defragment the hard disk. “You last defragmented this disk 1417 days ago”, said the dialog box…

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It’s not often that I’m ashamed to be British, but this is one of those times. The Guardian newspaper has the names of many thousand supposedly undecided American voters which it will give out to those Brits who sign up to send them a letter telling them which way to vote. They stopped short of actually saying that you should tell them to vote for Kerry, but nobody who knoows the Guardian would assume otherwise.

They no doubt had good intentions here. It is important for every country, and particularly America, to be aware of what the rest of the world thinks and to take that into account when voting. But such initiatives should be invited from within the country and should not be proposed from outside. As Rose said, can you imagine the uproar in the UK if it were the other way around, and large numbers of Americans started writing to individuals suggesting how they should vote?

[Original Link] A nice commentary on BBC Radio 4. The RealPlayer stream is here, but in case that link doesn’t last, you could also try this.

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OK, I’m starting to see what the fuss is about. I finally got around to playing with Konfabulator, and it’s really cute. Possibly even useful. I can see why Apple decided shamelessly to rip it off for Tiger.

Basically, Konfabulator lets you install ‘widgets’ – small chunks of functionality – on your desktop or as floating, possibly translucent, windows. They’re typically clocks, calculators, wifi-signal-strength-meters etc. Some of them talk to the net, and keep you updated with share prices, or the image from your favourite webcams etc.

Well that’s nice, you may be thinking, but it’s hardly revolutionary. And you’d be right. What’s revolutionary is just how easy it is to create these widgets for anyone with any familiarity with programming. Basically, a widget is a directory containing an XML file describing the layout – put this image here and this text box there – and the functionality – do this when the mouse moves over the image. The functionality is written in Javascript and there are lots of helpful predefined commands to open a URL in your browser, for example, or to play an audio file. So you need a bit of XML knowledge, but not much, a bit of JavaScript know-how, but not much, and a certain amount of Photoshop expertise if you want it to look pretty! This is simple enough that there’s a huge and growing collection of third-party widgets available from the Konfabulator web site.

Anyway, I put together a ‘Status-Q’ widget. (Shown below with the rather nice standard Weather widget). It has two buttons which bring up my browser ready to read statusq.org or to post new articles. I predict that something like Konfabulator will be the new AppleScript before too long. And about time too.

[Original Link] Searching is definitely The Big Thing at present. On the desktop, Apple’s Tiger will have it before Microsoft’s Longhorn. Google’s preempted them both, though I think you probably need a bit more operating system support than Google’s application will provide.