Status-Q

[Original Link] David Berlind tells it like it is. Bluetooth is great when it works, but more often than not, it doesn’t. One of the follow-up comments says, “Bluetooth is destined to be the Edsel of IT…”. And another, “…at some point we have to take stock and decide whether it is worthwhile to continue investing in an architecture that has taken so long to deliver so little”. Sad, but true. It works flawlessly for me but only in one specific situation: connecting my Mac to one of the small number of Apple-approved Ericsson phones.

I’ve written about this before: I linked to an osOpinions article and also to a BusinessWeek article, among others. The BW article has now disappeared behind a pay-for-access barrier. So I’m likely to link to them in future about as often as I try linking to my Bluetooth headset.

When you update a blog, many systems have the ability to ‘ping’ another site to tell it that something has changed, typically using the weblogs.com XML-RPC interface.

I wanted to be able to receive these pings and to perform some simple operation as a result; in this case grabbing an file from the associated Movable Type blog. Here is a very simple Python CGI script which does just that, based on Jan-Klaas Kollhof’s neat little xmlrpc server module.

Update: This works with Movable Type – in your weblog config you can specify it as one of the sites to be notified by typing the CGI script’s URL into the ‘Others’ box. However, MT has a bug which gives it a tendency to misinterpret the results and think that the ping has failed when it has in fact succeeded. The call returns two values, and MT assumes that they will be in a specific order when the order is, in fact, irrelevant. To fix this, edit the lib/MT/XMLRPC.pm file and change:

  my($error, $msg) = $content =~
        m!flerror.*?<boolean>(d+).*message.*?<value>(.+?)</value>!s;

to say

    my($error) = $content =~  m!flerror.*?<boolean>(d+)</boolean>!s;
    my($msg) = $content =~  m!message.*?<value>(.+?)</value>!s;

at approx line 71.

At Ndiyo we budgeted just £50/month for software for the organisation.

We’ve used almost none of that budget.

[Original Link] Perhaps the first non-Mac I might have in the sitting room?

[Original Link] Another good NYT article. This one is about how, as Google becomes the world’s encyclopedia,

“…a high Google ranking can also have a lot of clout in the marketplace of ideas. It seems to confer “ownership” on a particular word or phrase ? deciding, in effect, who gets to define it.

…

And when it comes to more specialized topics, the rankings give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the larger public. It’s as if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.

[Original Link] One of the things I find most interesting about the introduction of new technologies is the speed at which social etiquette has to adapt to cope with them. This NY Times article includes an estimate that there are now 3 million blogs out there. Perhaps only a small proportion of them are active, but that’s still quite a number.

[Original Link] Jim Fruchterman on ‘Social Enterprise’. Jim’s organisation, Benetech, from their unassuming offices in Palo Alto, is doing some good work in difficult times.

[Original Link] I’ve always been fascinated by France’s Minitel system since first seeing a new terminal when on an ‘exchange’ trip just after it was launched in ’83. John Naughton writes:

BBC Online story. Funny how things change: once upon a time, France was the only country in the world with a serious e-commerce and online information infrastructure — via the closed but freely available Minitel system. That was in 1983, the year the Internet was switched on. Then came the Web, and with it the idea that boring old steam-age Minitel was finished. Well, maybe it was, but the Web has yet to deliver the same reliability and micro-billing capability. [Memex 1.1]

[Original Link] I thought The Matrix was really rather a good movie. Anything which can hold its own despite having the appalling Keanu Reeves as the main character must have somethng going for it.

But reading this review of the sequel makes me think I’ll give that a miss.

This is my dream for the PC of the future. First, the simple bit. It has a rewind button. Or, more precisely, a jog-dial. So you can rewind the computer to any point in the past, to a fraction of a second, and get any application, or indeed the entire system, back to exactly as it was then, right down to the mouse position.

This would require a lot of storage, but at some stage that won’t be a problem, and it would have all sorts of very cool side-effects, like eliminating the need to explicitly save your documents from time to time. We do it now as a way of saying, “these are the changes I want to keep”. But when all of your changes are kept, you can just name a document and always work on the latest version. If you don’t like your changes, just rewind.

Or how about showing your software supplier or help desk just exactly what you did just before your system crashed. Or being able to rewind to the point just before you clicked that ‘Delete Everything’ button…

Backups would consist of maintaining some copies of your full system history. No need to worry about whether they were full or incremental backups, or how often you had made them in the past, because every one would contain the history of everything you’ve done. The technology would need a quick way of doing “freeze! – duplicate entire storage! – continue!”.

I think this would be great.

Then we get to the second, more complicated part, and I haven’t worked this out properly yet. It’s fine if you just want to rewind your whole system to the day before yesterday, and look at where you were then. You could even start again from that point as if nothing further had happened.

But suppose you just want to try cancelling something you did then before fast-forwarding to the present and continuing where you left off? That’s like using a time machine to change one small bit of the past and hoping it doesn’t have awkard implications when you get back to the present. I don’t think it can be done in the general case, though the system might be built in a sufficiently compartmentalised fashion that a certain amount of this was possible.

You might, however, be able to do a ‘what-if’ scenario. “Would this application have run successfully if I hadn’t installed that service pack yesterday?” You could rewind and fork off a separate, identical copy of the PC’s state, perhaps using the backup technology described earlier, and work on that. If that world turned out to be better, you could switch to it. If necessary, you might pop back to your old universe for a moment, make copies of important stuff onto a separate system or some kind of removable storage, and then go back to your new world and import it just as if it had come from somewhere else.

Needs more thinking about…

[Original Link] An interesting new cordless interface device for your PC – one dedicated to instant messaging.