Status-Q

These little movies have been doing the rounds recently. Great fun.

things1.mpg (approx 640K)
things2.mpg (approx 320K) (my favourite)
things3.mpg (approx 720K)

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together.

From an NYT review of David Rockefellers memoirs, quoting his description of arguments with an an arch-rival at Chase:

“If the disagreement was strong enough, we could end up pretty close to the borderline of incivility.”

[Original Link] BBC article on the dramatic steps taken by the Korean government to ensure wholesale broadband deployment.

It was understandable really. I’d been lulled into a false sense of security. But after goodness knows how many years in the computer industry I should never have forgotten the cardinal rule for survival: “Don’t ever do what Microsoft suggests unless you absolutely have to!”

It happened like this: My wife Rose uses her elderly PC heavily every day, for word-processing, email, and the web. That’s it. Nothing very fancy, and it’s worked reliably ever since we installed Windows 2000 some time ago. So reliably in fact, that I was starting to think quite highly of the operating system.
I, in the meantime, had switched to a Mac and had installed several different operating system versions without incident.

However, the large number of security holes found in Microsoft’s software recently made me think that I ought to run ‘Windows Update’ to get the latest patches. I’ll just quickly do it over breakfast, I thought. It suggested I install Service Pack 3, and after an hour or two (it’s only a 300MHz Pentium, after all), the installation was finished. I rebooted and everything came up just fine. Except for the network card. The device manager said it couldn’t find enough resources (IRQs, I/O ports etc) to install it. Suddenly, by trying to bring myself right up to date, I had thrown myself back into the bad old days of interrupt clashes.

I will spare you the details of the hours I spent downloading new drivers, trying new CMOS settings, removing other peripherals. Having to use a machine with Internet Explorer on because Microsoft’s support site requires it and doesn’t work with other browsers, when the machine with Internet Explorer on had just been killed by something I downloaded from that site. And so on…

Suffice it to say that in the end I fixed it. I found a page somewhere on the web which told me that some similar cards needed a registry patch to work. In particular, one had to set
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\Pcmcia\Parameters\DisableIsaToPciRouting
to zero. This had been fixed in recent service packs. It had certainly been ‘fixed’ in mine, and so I guessed that perhaps all I had to do was to unfix it by setting it to 1. I rebooted and it worked! Obvious really. I then just had to rebuild the machine.

Rose’s next “Service Pack” will have an Apple logo on the box, I think.

[Original Link] For anyone who wants to know more about Lessig’s background and his upcoming Supreme Court case. A very nice bit of writing by Steven Levy.
“For Microsoft, the proceedings were just business, as Tony Soprano says.”

[Original Link] I was looking at some old steam-powered boats recently and noticed how many of them incorporated a little hot-water urn to allow passengers to make nice hot cups of tea.

Perhaps, in contrast, these very neat air-powered cars could also make nice cold fizzy drinks?

[Original Link] “3G is too little too soon, with none of the attributes of a real generational shift. It is still voice-centric at a time when data usage is gaining fast, a conversion that 3G can nowhere near fully accommodate.”

[Original Link] Lawrence Lessig is pretty good now at coming up with sound-bites himself, but Steve Mallet is running a fun competition: “Can you summarise his main message in three seconds or less?”

Some of the responses:

“Freedom is more valuable than the right to profit”

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it”

“IP. To boldly restrict where no man has gone before.”

More info on the authors of these, and other examples, can be found here.

[Original Link] I have a nice row of almost unused function keys on my Apple keyboard. I wanted to map them to do some of my regular tasks, so that F1, for example, would open Palm Desktop and prompt me to search for an address.
Keyboard Maestro allowed me to do this easily and has lots of other cute features which you can use if wanted and disable if not.

This is also a very nicely tailored use of shareware. The free version does enough for many people without nagging, but you can pay $20 if you want that little bit more. Recommended.