Status-Q

Computerworld: Wireless LANs gain over cellular. “A growing number of U.S. localities, including the California cities of Glendale and Oakland and counties of Orange and San Diego, have embraced Wi-Fi technology as the high-speed wireless backbone of their networks.” [Tomalak’s Realm]

Wi-Fi (802.11b) really isn’t designed for this kind of deployment but, hey, if it works, then I guess that’s already an advantage over 3G. I’m dubious about covering a county, even a very small one, with just 12 base stations, though.

I’ve installed the ‘htdig’ search engine here now, and the search box on the right will use that instead of Google. The Google link worked well, but sometimes wouldn’t index Status-Q often enough, and would discard bits from time to time. I realised that I was having trouble searching for things and I’m supposed to know roughly what’s in here. I think the new one’s a big improvement.

Hywel Williams has a fascinating site about the Disused Stations on London’s Underground.

The Tipping Blog – How Little Links can Make a Big Difference: "On the Internet, nobody cares if you’re a shy introvert."

John Hiler produces some good stuff. He wrote an interesting article a couple of weeks ago about the effect of weblogs on search engines. In this latest piece he discusses weblogs in terms of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”.

Surfing hobbits. Bizarre concept.

Excellent New Scientist feature on Open Source ideas. [from John Naughton’s weblog]. I hadn’t come across the Wikipedia before. It’s rather good. Topics for discussion in your coffee break:

• We all know that you should take everything you read on the web with a pinch of salt, but we’re used to reading things in reference works and assuming they’re fairly authoritative. Does presenting information in that form make us more likely to believe it?
• Is an encyclopedia which anybody can update more or less likely to be ‘authoritative’?

My current favourite utility for Mac OS X is LaunchBar, which allows you to start apps, open web pages, send emails, with just an abbreviation of a few keystrokes. Particularly handy if you’re on a laptop, where the mouse-based routes for opening things may not be quite so convenient. The clever thing about LaunchBar is that you don’t need to set up the abbreviations in advance; it learns which keystrokes you’d like to use as you go along.

I’m not normally a huge fan of alternative launchers – the Dock has always worked fine for me. But I forced myself to learn and use LaunchBar for a few days and I got hooked. It’s very clever, and saves a lot of time, while using almost no screen space. Recommended. Good to see genuine innovation is still alive in the utilities world.

Wow – I haven’t posted here for nearly a week! It’s been a quiet few days.

Spent a large chunk of this afternoon helping extract some data from a friend’s elderly Macintosh LC. His mouse interface no longer works, and on most versions of Mac OS, there ain’t much you can do when that happens, so he had been unable to get at his data for several months.

I opened it up, extracted the 40M SCSI hard drive (which required me to undo one screw – I love Apple hardware) and inserted it into a PowerMac G3. (No screws at all. Progress.) We booted up Mac OS X and sure enough, there was his disk on the desktop, with all the files inside laid out as he left them. We could even run Word 5.1 and his 1988 copy of Tetris straight from the disk with a simple double click, despite the fact that my machine was now running a version of Unix and that the windows which were optimised for his LC screen looked rather small in the corner of mine. He thought it was magic.

He was a bit less amused when we discovered that his PhD thesis, numerous letters, articles and other writings accumulated over several years amounted to about 6 Mbytes in MacWord 5.1 format. I burned them onto a CD for him, leaving it 99% empty.

Does anyone else think it’s amusing that when Internet Explorer 6 connects to a web server it still announces itself primarily as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible…)”?

A year ago today: “Yes, XML can be used to represent web pages, but assuming that it’s limited to that is like assuming that ASCII is limited to email.” (Expanded this later in The Importance of XML).

Sorry – today’s entries are a bit self-referential. If there’s one thing worse than a blog which only talks about other blogs, it’s a blog which talks about itself. Forgive me – I’ve been waiting eagerly for the site to be old enough to have a ‘one year ago today’ link so I’m posting it anyway!

Just under a year ago, my name was on the front pages of both the London Times and the Washington Post within a week, when it was announced that the Trojan Room Coffepot was being closed down. If you’re anything like me, when you read newspaper articles, the names quoted in passing go in one eye and out of the other, but it’s sad to think that I’m unlikely to be involved in anything which gets such media coverage again.

Still, having my blog mentioned on Dave Winer’s Scripting News three times in quick succession must come a close second 🙂 The first thing you notice is the number of hits that your website gets. The next is that a little army of search engine robots follow closely behind.
John Hiler is quite right.

Dave has always been influential because of his writing, but that may be secondary compared to his power to influence weblogs. Many people would pay a lot of money for that. Will this power eventually corrupt? We’re watching you carefully, Dave… (and, by the way, what’s your favourite bottle of wine?)

For Radio hackers: Mmm. My cunning scheme which showed the number of comments attached to each posting here was causing a few complications in my Radio setup. The PHP/MySQL back end ran perfectly and was a fun experiment but as I had suspected, nobody, including me, really wanted to leave comments here, so I’ve decided to discard the facility for now in the interests of simplicity. You can always email me…