Status-Q

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…

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.” – Robert Frost [from Adam Curry’s Weblog]

Protesting with style. Splendid story in the Telegraph about a group who go around secretly replacing the few new ‘illegal’ metric roadsigns in the UK with their imperial equivalents.

I don’t have strong feelings about metrication, but I do admire the very British way in which they’re doing this. “We make sure the imperial signs are every bit as professional as the ones they replace”. A lesser organisation would just have spray-painted them.

There’s a C.S.Lewis essay entitled “On the Reading of Old Books”, the thrust of which is that, with so much reading matter to choose from these days, a good basis for selecting which books to read is whether or not they have stood the test of time. Since reading that, I have tried to alternate. Roughly speaking, for every book I read which was written in my lifetime, I read one which was not.

Now have a look at Stuart Husband on the joys of having a Late Adoptive Personality. As my friends and family would tell you, this is totally unlike me. But you see, I’m just being balanced once again. For every technology I use which has not been trendy in the last 6 months, I try to use one which has!

The number of hosts on the Gnutella network is booming. This started with the effective end of Napster, but has been driven in the last few days by the problems that Morpheus and similar FastTrack-based clients have been experiencing. Lots of interesting conspiracy theories about the problems here, all of which go to emphasise the fact that an open protocol is better than a closed, proprietary one, even when the closed one is technically superior.

Brainstorming next year’s PC. They want more stylish computers, built-in wireless networking, fast serially-connected peripherals. Doesn’t look like it takes much brainstorming to me. They’re just following Apple’s lead.

I’ve just been to an interesting talk about Dr Osamu Morikawa’s HyperMirror system. How do you allow for richer interaction over video conferences? Make the participants believe they are all in one room, but looking in a mirror. Wonderfully simple idea, which seems to work very well. There are short video clips on the web site.

It reminds me of the MIT ALIVE project, where you saw yourself in a mirror view of an artificial world, with which you could interact. HyperMirror is much simpler and more useful for most people, because it’s about communicating with other people rather than machines. (It doesn’t even need a computer for a simple implementation.)

This is a noticable trend in the progress towards ‘ubiquitous computing‘. Technologies which simplify communication between people thrive. Those which simplify communication with machines are mostly just a stepping stone.