Status-Q

[Original Link] From BusinessWeek:

“Those of us who have been working with computers for 20 years or more remember a time when getting PCs to communicate was a black art. I took an unwelcome trip back to those bad old days recently when I tested a flock of new devices that use Bluetooth…”

[Original Link] I’m adding this to Status-Q, using Dave Winer’s new macro. Mozilla now displays an extra toolbar with a link to the XML (RSS) version of this page. The next logical step will be for the archived pages to include “previous” and “next” links. This is what the <link> tags are often used for. I may have a look at this, but, much as I love Radio, I do find it one of the most counter-intuitive environments to program, chiefly because of the lack of organised documentation.

I’d been having some troubles uploading this site recently – the FTP driver in Radio Userland was having difficulties getting through my router/firewall/cable modem and I’d often end up with just a blank page here.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about WebDAV over the last few days. It’s a protocol which allows web servers to act much more like file servers, and it’s been around for a while. However, it’s now built in to most of the Adobe applications, it comes as standard with Apache 2.0, and Mac OS X can mount WebDAV shares just like any other network file system (albeit rather slowly). It’s still not trivial to set up on an Apache server, because you have to think rather more about permissions and authentication, but once it’s up and running, it’s rather cute.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could abandon this troublesome FTP protocol, which was never really designed for this world of proxies and firewalls, and upload my Radio-generated pages using WebDAV instead? And sure enough, Nicholas Riley has created a WebDAV upstreamer for Radio. If you can read this, it works! Many thanks, Nicholas.

[Original Link] This is being posted with Chimera – a new Mozilla-based browser for Mac OS X. It’s still only an alpha release and has crashed a couple of times for me, but it’s impressive none the less. In particular, it’s very fast, and very pretty; the latter not being something I normally associate with Mozilla. The font rendering is quite superb, making good use of OS X’s facilities. I’ve also successfully used it to check both of my online banking accounts, a test which often beats many new browsers. In the long run, I suspect Mozilla may be more important as a base on which people build custom platform-specific browsers than as an application in its own right.

[Original Link] John Naughton pointed me at this. I haven’t worked out whether it’s much use yet, but it’s quite fun.

[Update – it’s now at all4one.searchallinone.com]

[Original Link] This article is about our inability to leave work behind when we go on holiday, but I was strcuk by the assertion that “less than 30 percent of Americans have a passport”.

This struck me as shocking initially, but I suppose a fair comparison here is asking not how many people in the UK have left their country, but asking how many Europeans have left their continent. I suspect the figure might be lower.

[Original Link] This article is about our inability to leave work behind when we go on holiday, but I was strcuk by the assertion that “less than 30% of Americans have passports”.

Yesterday we went to see “The Closet”, a film with Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu. I haven’t laughed so much for quite a while. I generally enjoy French films, but because they’re stylish, bizarre, clever or unusual. I don’t usually expect them to be funny. At least, not intentionally. And certainly not this funny. Highly recommended.

[Original Link] In July last year I wrote a piece entitled How I survived the move from Palm to Windows CE. I’ve just updated it with a section on why I moved back to the Palm.

[Original Link] New York Times article. How the French must love a phrase like “using English as their lingua franca” !

I’m not a real jazz fan. I know this because, despite liking a lot of the more popular jazz music, in the end I like to hear a tune. I have occasionally heard a piece on the radio and wondered what it was, only to be told by the announcer afterwards that it was “Oh When The Saints” or something similar, rendered almost unrecognisable by the (very technically accomplished) twiddly-widdly variations on the basic theme. Don’t get me wrong; there is a plenty of very tuneful jazz, but there is also a great deal that would mean little to somebody unfamiliar with the tunes on which it is based. In that sense it is a rather derivative art form.

I’m not a real Star Wars fanatic either. I know this because my seeing the latest episode last night, on its opening day in the UK, was not dependent on my having booked it weeks in advance but on my friends suddenly having a spare ticket.

I was hesitant about watching it after the great disappointment that was The Phantom Menace. In that episode, I felt, the technical wizardry and the twiddly-widdly variations on the original ‘tune’ were not enough to make up for the lack of a simple, coherent plot and the immensely annoying Jar-Jar Binks character. In this new episode, I think they are.

There are many weak points in “Attack of the Clones”, of course. I’m not convinced about either Anakin or Amidala’s acting abilities, but perhaps that’s deliberate homage to the original. Their son Luke won’t turn out to be much of an actor either. And the critics have laid into it with great gusto. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, says: “[A] technological exercise that lacks juice and delight. The title is more appropriate than it should be.”

But nobody would really expect the critics to like a fifth-in-a-series film of this type, especially one that was likely to be popular. I thought that it was visually absolutely stunning and had some interesting, if occasionally rather heavy-handed, references to the original. It also had a few jokes which showed it wasn’t taking itself too seriously. Overall, a very enjoyable evening. But I don’t think it would mean much to somebody who didn’t know the tune already.