Status-Q

Der Coffee Pot ist back!

OK. I’ve clicked. I’ve just started to realise quite how cool a piece of software Radio is.

I’ve been pretty impressed so far just using it for reading news and writing weblogs. It’s great for that. And I knew that under the hood there was a lot of power if you wanted to program in the macro language, and I hoped at some point I would have the time to do that.

But you don’t need to delve that deep into the internals to realise the power. It may be THE SIMPLEST way to create a web site. Once Radio is set up and running on your machine, you can just dump text files into a particular directory on your hard disk.

They are rendered into HTML using a default template (which you can customise or replace). Automatically.

They are uploaded onto your web site. Automatically.

Any images etc that you might also want to use or refer to in the pages you just drop into the same directory and they are also uploaded. Automatically.

If you want to change the text of your pages, you just open them in a text editor, edit the text, and hit ‘Save’. That’s it. Everything else happens. Automatically.

And despite all this, there’s a great deal of power and flexibility there if you want it. You can automatically upload different directories on your hard disk to different sites, for example. To start learning how to use some of these nice features, look at this page. (Oh, and another hint if you looking for something on the Radio site – almost everything beyond the absolute basics is contained within the Directory).

It’s not often that I find myself reaching for my wallet to pay so readily for a piece of software. But it just happened. Automatically.

So we now have copy-protected CDs. They don’t play on certain players, and on Windows machines. Interestingly, they may still be copyable on a Mac.

OK, I’ve updated this system to use the new Radio Userland 8.0, which should allow me to maintain it from my Mac OS X machine. Yippee!

It took me a while to get everything moved over from Windows, my FTP connection set up, and my page templates in place, but it’s now basically sorted. The new Radio looks like a very interesting piece of software, and I hope I’ll have some time to play with it more seriously.

Now, I can probably switch my home Windows machine off. It was only really there for two reasons. The first was as a Radio server until this version came along. The second was so that when members of my family call up about problems with their Microsoft software I could follow along at this end and describe the dialog boxes to them. I guess I’ll still need to turn it on for that.

Thoughts after reading a good article at The Register about the latest Windows security holes…

One of the great things about having switched most of my work to a Mac is that I don’t have to worry about these. I’m not naive enough to think, however, that this is purely due to technical superiority on the part of Mac OS X. How vulnerable, I wonder, would my Mac would turn out to be if Apple were the big monopoly? At the moment I’m fairly safe because (a) virus writers want to hit the largest population, and (b) they want to get at Microsoft.

Apple users are a small minority, and the same market realities which mean that we get fewer software packages ported to our platform also mean that we’re a less interesting target for hackers. People writing Apple viruses would also be attacking artists, writers, designers – the little guys. Microsoft viruses hit the big corporations, the banks – the people who are more amusing when they get egg on their faces.

But the other factor is that Apple has never inspired the same sort of hatred that so many reserve for Microsoft. Why? OK, Microsoft’s software often stinks, their business tactics are unethical, they provide appalling support and so on, but that’s probably true of most big companies. Is it simply because they’re so powerful? There are many people who dislike whichever government happens to be in power, just because it’s in power. Anyone with an anarchical streak will lash out against those with authority.

However, there are many Apple ‘users’ who might be more aptly described as ‘devotees’ or ‘disciples’. They really like Apple. This is a marked contrast to Microsoft. Most people I’ve met who ‘really like’ Microsoft also happen to be those whose livelihood somehow depends on promoting MS products. Perhaps Apple users are displaying the natural response of any minority: we chose somebody different, and our enthusiastic loyalty to our cause helps us feel that we made the right choice in the face of all the statistical evidence.

But perhaps (and here’s a cheery bit of Christmas optimism) they genuinely are a better, nicer company with better, nicer products?

Thought for the day. How many SMS messages have you sent recently? From a BBC article:

“Every month more than one billion text messages are now sent in the UK.

A survey of 1,000 people by mobile phone company Orange found 72% would be replacing traditional Christmas cards with a greeting via their mobile phone. ”

A billion a month!. Wow.

The origins of Hanlon’s Razor

Following on from his email explaining Hanlon’s Razor, Joe Biglen has been in touch again with the precise details.

The book I refer to is “Murphy’s Law book two: More reasons why things go
wrong!” by Arthur Bloch…

The exact quote from the book is “Never attribute to
malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” The razor appears on page 52 of the chapter entitled “Advanced Expertsmanship” The book was
printed in 1980, by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc.

That sounds about the time Bob gave me the copy. I was still in the Air Force, but was home on leave from Japan. Hopefully, the copy he gave me will surface some day.

Thanks very much for asking about the quote. I had forgotten how hysterically funny this book is. Twenty-one years later, it is just as funny, if not more so.

Many thanks, Joe.

Since I can, for the moment at least, count myself among that small elite group known as Mac Users, I have a whole new world of aesthetically desirable devices to tempt me. Chief among them at the moment is the iPod.
Stewart Alsop thinks so too.

One of my favourite quotes is known as Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Like many people, I was unaware of its origin. But today I received an email from Joe Biglen:

I did a search for Hanlon’s Razor on the internet and was surprised that no one seems to know the origin. The author was my late friend Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pa.

A number of years ago, the people that wrote the Murphy’s laws book decided to publish a second book and asked the public to contribute their own ‘laws” as part of a contest. My friend sent this in and it was accepted and printed with his name in the credits. The ‘prize’ for winning was 10 copies of the new book, one of which Bob gave me.

Bob was a very literate man with a wry sense of humor and I believe the razor “Never attribute malice to what can adequately be explained by stupidity” is his. If you would change the wording on your site to reflect this, I would appreciate it. Bob was a great man. He had a keen sense of history, but unfortunately, illness and an untimely death prevented him from being further published. I think it would be fitting and appropriate if he got the recognition he deserved for this.

Joseph E. Bigler
joeb43@yahoo.com

Agreed! Web pages appropriately modified to give credit where it’s due. Many thanks, Joe.

See also the more recent entry.

I’m reading a Nokia white paper describing how their new Multimedia Messaging Service will allow you to send images, animations, video clips etc from phone to phone. I quote:

Now, people receiving messages can be expected to genuinely react: with big surprise, laughter, tears or even with the wildest excitement.

This would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it is taken from a perfectly straight paragraph in a serious document. Who writes this stuff? How do they live with themselves?

I was walking into town today, talking on my mobile using an earpiece. On the rare occasions when I do this I wave the phone visibly in front of me just so passers-by know I’m not actually mad, in much the same way that I prominently hold up high any small items I may be carrying around stores to make it clear to any undercover security guards that I’m not about to slip them into my pocket and make a dash for it.

Despite the fact that I occasionally use these headsets myself, I still haven’t got used to others using them. I often find myself feeling benevolent towards somebody who seems to be suffering from a mild case of care in the community before realising that they’re probably high-flying executives (closing some multi-million-dollar deal) whose very batteries I am unworthy to recharge.

But the earpieces seem to be much less in vogue these days, so if you want a new way to make people think you’re mildly dotty, you might like to try this.

On Mark Pilgrim’s weblog there’s a nice page about what’s wrong with RedHat’s installer.
I agree. That isn’t to say that there aren’t things wrong with Microsoft installers too, but more people have been indoctrinated with Microsoft jargon than Linux jargon, so, especially at the earliest stages of installation, you must speak in language they understand. Apple, of course, are the long-time masters of this. They generally explain things in a way that can be understood by people who don’t know either set of jargon.