I’m not naturally an early riser, and for some time I have, inexplicably, felt slightly guilty about this. So I have developed a philosophical principle which can enable all ‘evening people’ to, well, sleep soundly at night. Here it is. Read it, learn it, tell your friends, and it will change your life:
The late worm avoids the early bird.
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…
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] Here’s a hint I found quite useful. On the Powerbook, the function keys, by default, do other things like changing the brightness of the display or turning numlock on and off. To make them operate as function keys, you have to press ‘fn’ at the same time. If, like me, you use them more as function keys (for exposé etc), you can invert this behaviour in the Keyboard section of System Preferences.
[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.
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.
[Original Link] Google is starting to list the contents of books as well as web sites.
I understand myself a lot better now, after reading this page, which can tell you all sorts of things about yourself simply based on your first name:
Although the name Quentin creates executive ambitions, we emphasize that it causes a blunt expression that alienates others. This name, when combined with the last name, can frustrate happiness, contentment, and success, as well as cause health weaknesses in the reproductive organs, and tension or accidents to the head.
Your name of Quentin gives you the desire for success and financial accumulation and the confidence and drive to go after your ambitions, regardless of obstacles. Your thinking revolves around business and ways of making money, rather than on music, art, drama, or philosophy. You start new endeavours and incorporate new ideas, but seldom if ever receive the full benefits and financial accumulation for your efforts. You tend to feel very frustrated in being unable to realize your ambitions fully. An extremely independent and self-sufficient person, you dislike taking orders or advice from anyone. You believe in speaking directly and to the point, so you are candid and abrupt.
“…health weaknesses in the reproductive organs, and tension or accidents to the head…”? Little did my parents realise how dangerous the name was. It’s good to know that we now have the internet to warn us of such things. Fortunately, they also gave me the name “James”, which seems to be more encouraging and involve fewer accidents to the head.
Groovy is a scripting language for Java, and it looks as if it’s appropriately named. A good introduction here. It has a lot of the best features of Python and Ruby, but integrates really well into the Java environment – Java code can be called from Groovy and vice versa very easily, the syntax is similar, with the Java rules relaxed a bit to suit the typically more informal nature of scripting, and Groovy code can be compiled into .class files and executed with the standard ‘java’ command. It has a neat syntax for XML/HTML generation and can be used for creating Ant scripts which are rather more readable than the standard XML.
Must find time to play with this.
[Original Link] Notational Velocity is a very simple Mac app for taking and retrieving notes. It’s getting a fair bit of attention for something which, when started, presents you with little more than a blank windows. You can find more detailed descriptions here and here, or just do a Google search for it. There’s no shortage of references.
[Original Link] It might be part of Greenland. If not now, then soon.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments