BBC Radio Tivo

Ben Hammersley’s phrase rather than mine, but oh, isn’t this a really really good idea. And it’s also a Mac-only thing. Which makes me gnash my teeth in frustration ‘cos I haven’t got (and don’t have much prospect of getting unless Santa is going to be really generous this year) a Mac, as well as making me wonder if there isn’t something brewing at the moment.

All the really innovative stuff at the moment seems to be either Mac-based, or open-source (or both). Time was that I used to think of Macs as “nice to look at, but what would I do for software?” - now it’s starting to look like it’s actually the other way around. There seems to be less and less reason for running Micro$oft platforms at the back-end, and less and less reason for running Windows as a front-end, if you’re prepared to accept the switch-hassle. While the tradeoff between Wintel and Mac was always loaded the Windows way, it’s starting to change - there’s only really Outlook that’s keeping me as an Office user, and everything else that I’m running on my laptop is available either open-source or as a Mac version. The time to switch could be upon me - and if it’s upon me, how many others are thinking the same way?

Yet more elf sex

This being an old-numbered year, we’re off to the inlaws this Christmas. The highlight of the fortnight (for the kids at least) will be the latest evacuation of hobbity tosh that is Lord of the Rings on Christmas Eve - so this expose of “What Tolkein Really Said About Elf Sex” is topical. This is exactly the kind of reason why Tolkein is unsuitable for anyone over the age of 12, or in possession of more than one item of computing equipment.

End of the affair

Yesterday was the MBA graduation, so I spent the afternoon dressed in robes that made me look like an extra from the Hogwarts set prior to climbing onto the stage to get my certificate from the Vice-Chancellor. All of which means I’m now a graduate rather than a graduand, and it’s the end of the line as far as the MBA is concerned - that’s it, game over, finished, over and done with. It’s a bit bizarre to think of it like that - this has been such a major part of life for the last 15 months or so, and now it’s all over. And the only tangible sign is an A4 certificate and a photo of me dressed up.

Oh, the irony

Received this morning:

Hello,
This program worked for me. If you hate Spam like I do,
you owe it to your self to try this program, and forward
this email to all of your friends which also hate Spam or
as many people possible. Together lets help clear the
Internet of Spam!

STOP SPAM IN ITS TRACKS!

Needless to say, it was spam…

WTF?

Hmm, Moveable Type seems to be complaining about pound signs. “Application failed during request deserialization”, so it says…

Let’s try again, this time without the pound…

Cumbria wifi

The thought of the two upcoming weeks in V90-land was getting me twitchy (hey, I’ve got work to do!) so purely out of a sense of “not a hope in hell” I googled for wifi and Whitehaven. To my utter amazement, there’s not one but two hotspots. Both in pubs, both operated by The Cloud - slightly dodgy name, so it remains to be seen if they actually exist, but maybe the 21st century isn’t passing the town by at all. At GBP6 an hour (plus beer) it’ll be an extravagance, but then you get the impression that the prices are aimed at the desperate.

World of wifi

An interesting piece on Mobitopia about the now-ubiquitousness of wifi. As the piece said, it’s one of those things that I’m starting to take for granted - it just works. I’m sat here at the dining table with a 54g card blazing away, which has completely liberated the place I choose to work. Two years ago I’d be hiding in the back room, because that’s where the ethernet is.

But I’ve not really been concious of wandering around in an electromagnetic soup until fairly recently - while I was setting up the wap for the incubator, there was half-a-dozen or so signals I picked up while I was wandering around the hallways with Netstumbler, but even though we were living in an apartment block in the centre of Leeds, there was never even so much as a sniff of any other signals. Now we’re in York, next door have obviously just bought an access point, because I was cursing the settings having picked up a strange IP address when I suddenly realised that it wasn’t my access point I was locking on to.

Presumably anyone sitting on the bench in the park outside would also be able to pick up both of our signals - part of me says quick, bolt it down, but then the other half says help yourself. It could come in useful next summer, assuming we’re still here - I quite fancy the idea of working out on the balcony once the weather gets warmer…

Coding

Another day spent tweaking (and that is the right word, pixel by bloody pixel) the new website layout for getcompany. While it’s a pain in the arse that we decided to junk the previous design after a fortnight of building it, the new look is worth the time invested in my opinion. Clean, simple, no frilly bits, and it downloads like the wind. All I need now is to figure out a way of getting the bloody tables to behave themselves, and I’ll be happy. Why IE should unilaterally decide to add 50% to a cell’s width when the coded width and the width of the image inside are exactly the same, god only knows. But it’s a right pain in the arse trying to get it to work.

Downtime

I was halfway through pushing out an installation of VNC to a remote machine this evening when BT decided to turn off the Internet. From the symptoms, it looks like somone unplugged the Radius server at BT’s end, but the net result (’scuse the pun) was a distinct lack of DSL. And given my twitching, fidgeting, don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself state of mind between then and it coming back on again a couple of minutes ago, the up and coming two weeks in the Lakes is going to be dial-up hell. How easy it is to get addicted to always-on…

Email - the Next Generation

A really interesting (and ever-so-slightly nerdy) article on the IBM Watson Research Centre site about their work on a next-generation email client. This got my attention for two reasons - one because Outlook is probably the only reason why I’m still sat in front of Windows if I’m completely honest (OK, maybe lack of Apple hardware budget is the other reason); and secondly because IBM is responsible for what is undoubtedly the worst interface ever to be developed. I could rant for a very long time on just how foul Notes is, but then there’s no real need because the Interface Hall of Shame got there first.

Much as I’d love to be able to dump Outlook and move to something open-source like Chandler, it’s the application I spend half my life in, more so now I’m running Newsgator. Which is the original definition of killer application as far as I’m concerned - it’s responsible for the first significant change in the way I use the net since I first opened a browser.