Status-Q

[Original Link] A highly abridged version of this article appeared in the IEE Review, Jan 2003. Unfortunately, as a result of the editorial process, significant typos and non-sequiturs were introduced, to the extent that I do not really wish to be associated with the published result. The original, however, makes much more sense and can be downloaded as a PDF here.

[Original Link] Bad news, this. A triumph of legal confusion and commercial influence over common sense.

[Original Link] I’ve been thinking about getting a TiVo for some time. This might push me over the edge.

[Original Link] Let’s hope it won’t have the Windows 95/98 bug that stops your machine after 6 weeks. Or the one which causes your date to leap forward or back a couple of days. Or the one which changes your time when you didn’t mean to. Or…

Having just returned home after a month away, I’m reading all my mail. You know, the old-fashioned sort that doesn’t follow you around the globe. One letter is a cheery note from my insurance company telling me that my home and contents aren’t insured against the consequences of (a) war, or (b) terrorism. This doesn’t bother me nearly so much as the fact that they felt the need to write and tell me….

[Original Link] Just discovered I have my name on
U.S. Design Patent D463,389. After two and a half years I had forgotten it was even in progress. Not sure what good it is; it’s sort of like a regular patent without the claims… 🙂 And prettier pictures of the Broadband Phone can be found here.

Cicero said, “Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child”.

I guess this applies to companies as well as to people.

[Original Link] Jon Udell and the local library.

Well, yesterday I saw the second film in the Lord of The Rings series and it was, if anything, better than the first; quite an achievement. Making the middle film in any trilogy must be hard, and especially following the spectacular success of the first.

At a time when Hollywood is turning out an even higher percentage of complete rubbish than usual (as amply demonstrated by the trailers which preceded the Two Towers last night) it is encouraging that a few movies are still being made with love, care and very great skill.

If the Return of The King turns out to be as good as the first two, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, then I think one could make a good argument for this being the greatest cinematic achievement of all time. It certainly puts to shame all of the recent special-effects-only ‘blockbusters’ (Titanic & the Star Wars sequels, for example), and while other films have had more subtlety or art, I can’t think of anything that has combined them with a production of this scale.

The best way to appreciate the scale, by the way, is by watching some of the commentaries and documentaries on the extended-edition DVD of the first film, which in turn is probably the best use of that medium that I’ve yet come across.

Reading the above, by the way, might make you think that I’m something of a Tolkien fanatic. I’m not, but I’m in danger of becoming a Peter Jackson fanatic. Thank God it didn’t go to Disney or Spielberg.

[Original Link] About a week ago, Creative Commons launched the first version of their licensing project.

It’s a well-designed site. They explain the licences clearly in non-legal jargon and have a form where you can say what you want to do with your work and they suggest the appropriate licence. And all of this is just pretty icing on the exceedingly important underlying work.

I’ll be adopting one of their licences for everything on this site in the near future.

[Original Link] …and another great OS X utility. They’re coming thick and fast at the moment. Still Life is a cool and easy way to create slideshows, including that nice Mac thing of zoooming and fading from frame to frame.

[Original Link] This one is strictly for command-line hackers only…

Mac OS X comes with a variety of standard Unix tools that can be used for creating backups, mirroring directories etc, but most of them know nothing about the historical ‘features’ of the HFS+ filesystem, in particular the ‘resource forks’ traditionally associated with Mac files.

This means that backups created with tar, rsync, cpio etc will not necessarily restore all Mac files to a fully-working version. Some of the other included tools and some of the commercial alternatives also have limitations. The ditto command can handle resource forks but is pretty unsophisticated other than that.

Howard Oakley’s hfspax utility is a version of the standard pax command which knows about HFS and will back up files including their resource forks into standard cpio, tar etc archives, or into another directory. It also allows you to rename or exclude files based on regular expressions. I don’t want to back up onto my iPod anything containing ‘.Trash’ or ‘Cache’ in the filename, for example. It allows you to copy only updated files, only those on the same device, and so on. You can end up with some pretty complex command lines, but it will work, can be run from cron or anacron, and is free.

Howard doesn’t blow his own trumpet; there’s no documentation on the web site. Download the archive and look at the included docs.