Status-Q

“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.

One of the things I love about the Mac is the way that applications are usually self-contained on your disk. They don’t dump miscellaneous files into system folders, for example, like Windows apps do, thus requiring an uninstall procedure. For most Mac apps, the uninstall procedure is ‘drag to the Trash’. Similarly, backing up and restoring your programs is easy.

Of course, this tidiness also makes this sort of thing easy!

Andrew Sullivan’s very interesting Blogger Manifesto:

“…the nascent Napster of the journalism industry”

I’m a bit behind the times, posting a link to this. He wrote it about four days ago. Which illustrates something or other about the world we live in.

W3C retreats from royalty policy. The standards body backs away from a proposal that would have allowed companies to demand royalties for technologies used in its standards. [CNET News.com] So there is some sanity out there after all.

Last summer Rose and I took up a new hobby: horse-riding. I’d sat on a horse many times in the past, but always as a passenger rather than a driver! We got hooked, and we’ve been going once a week ever since. I wish we could ride more often.

I was trying to work out quite why I enjoy it so much, and I think it’s largely that it’s so different from anything else I do. Much of my time I spend working with machines, which generally behave in a fairly predictable and repeatable way. My car isn’t sluggish about changing into third gear just because it didn’t get a good night’s sleep. But on the other hand, it doesn’t rub affectionately against me either.

Another factor is that I spend so much time trying to predict, invent and plan for the future that it’s fun to pursue an activity which is shamelessly wallowing in the past. Good for preserving one’s sense of balance (in more ways than one).

Recommended for geeks everywhere.

A bit more hacking, and this page now displays the number of comments to each message (for those that have any). It also emails me when a new comment is posted. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually expect many people will want to write anything here; I’m doing this because integrating the client-based Radio and the server-based PHP is quite a fun experiment.