Quote of the day…

Quote of the day:

…sometimes the error messages are as helpful as Vogon poetry…

Spotted in A Roadmap to Standards aka Dave Shea

Libraries out of use by 2020: nowhere for incontinent halitosis sufferers to sleep shocker

Apparently there are about 5,000 public libraries in Britain, which was a statistic that I wasn’t aware of until I saw the BBC report about the Libri report (which I’d link to, but the site is using frames, ick) saying that they’re in terminal decline. Apparently we’re staying away in droves - half the numbers of 1984, and if this trend continues the last one will close its doors in 2024.

Which all seems like good, solid, alarmist stuff from a single-issue pressure group, and was rejected by other interested parties whose links I’ve lost in the bottomless pit of electrons that is my filing system. It certainly doesn’t match with my experience of places like Leeds and York - any time I’ve been in either they’ve been heaving, and the clientele aren’t all gentlemen of a certain age with interesting views on personal hygiene.

I’m not sure I’d go along with the argument that they’re becoming irrelevant - they’re my prime source of DVDs for example, and York seems to manage a pretty eclectic selection of music CDs as well. What’s interesting is the different approaches that the two places take - if you want a vast selection of paperback fiction, then the City Central library in Leeds is the place to go, but its collection of IT-related titles is pretty dire - nothing much since 1997 on anything other than Cobol. York on the other hand is giving Borders a run for its money in terms of the IT titles that it’s got shelved there - in the past few weeks I’ve seen stuff on PHP, the latest version of Dreamweaver, Linux, Mac OS X, Win XP etc etc etc. But whoever it is in York who’s responsible for science fiction has obviously got themselves severely confused between science fiction and fantasy. If there’s a epic-quest-in-mysterious-lands-where-hero-cleaves-dragons-in-twain series written in the last twenty years, then York’s got three of ‘em, but would seem to subscribe to the view that science fiction doesn’t get much beyond C for Clarke, Arthur C.

Incidentally, is it just me, or have Leeds City Council taken this whole website accessibility thing a bit too far? Since the latest redesign it’s looking less like a website and more like a multicoloured shopping list with obfuscated URLs…

Links to tens of thousands of legal music downloads

Links to tens of thousands of legal (and RIAA-free) music downloads, courtesy of Michael Crawford (no, not that one.)

Sony still don’t get it

Sony make some extremely desirable gadgets that look nice, but that’s about as far as it goes. Their approach to the whole question of the content that makes the gadgets useful seems to be reminiscent of an anxious hostess who hovers behind you with a baseball bat during a dinner party, in case you try to pinch one of the spoons.

Take the NetJuke hifi that’s due to be launched soon. You’ve got to have a Vaio PC in order to stream music to it, and if you want to download anything, you’re tied into using a device that uses a Memory Stick (i.e. a Sony device) or a NetMD minidisc player (i.e. a Sony device). Then there’s the LIBRIe e-book that’s just been launched. Fantastic from a gadget point of view - as far as I’m aware it’s the first device to use one of the new e-ink screens - but if you were planning on building up a library of digital books, forget it. The content disappears in a puff of MagicGate DRM electronic smoke after two months.

In theory, Sony should be well-placed enough to dictate what goes on in the consumer electronic market. They’ve got a history of making innovative and highly-desirable hardware, and they’ve got a huge library of content thanks to Sony Music. But it seems that the mindset in charge is the ‘customers are thieving gits’ approach of the music business rather than that of the hardware people.

So here’s my voice crying in the wilderness, shouting in the general direction of Sony. I bought one of your Minidisc players when they were really, really new, and I loved it. I ripped huge numbers of my CDs onto Minidiscs so I could carry them around with me, and believe me, it took ages. But I’m not going to buy another one of your personal audio products until they can play any and all of the library of MP3 tracks that I’ve got, without needing to transfer them onto a Memory Stick or having them disappear into a haze of DRM after an arbitrary period of time. They’re mine. I paid for them and I’ll play them in the format of my choice on the hardware of my choice at the time of my choice - so anyone who tries to get in the way of that with crippled products is not going to get a share of my gadget budget.

Sony still don’t get it

Sony make some extremely desirable gadgets that look nice, but that’s about as far as it goes. Their approach to the whole question of the content that makes the gadgets useful seems to be reminiscent of an anxious hostess who hovers behind you with a baseball bat during a dinner party, in case you try to pinch one of the spoons.

Take the NetJuke hifi that’s due to be launched soon. You’ve got to have a Vaio PC in order to stream music to it, and if you want to download anything, you’re tied into using a device that uses a Memory Stick (i.e. a Sony device) or a NetMD minidisc player (i.e. a Sony device). Then there’s the LIBRIe e-book that’s just been launched. Fantastic from a gadget point of view - as far as I’m aware it’s the first device to use one of the new e-ink screens - but if you were planning on building up a library of digital books, forget it. The content disappears in a puff of MagicGate DRM electronic smoke after two months.

In theory, Sony should be well-placed enough to dictate what goes on in the consumer electronic market. They’ve got a history of making innovative and highly-desirable hardware, and they’ve got a huge library of content thanks to Sony Music. But it seems that the mindset in charge is the ‘customers are thieving gits’ approach of the music business rather than that of the hardware people.

So here’s my voice crying in the wilderness, shouting in the general direction of Sony. I bought one of your Minidisc players when they were really, really new, and I loved it. I ripped huge numbers of my CDs onto Minidiscs so I could carry them around with me, and believe me, it took ages. But I’m not going to buy another one of your personal audio products until they can play any and all of the library of MP3 tracks that I’ve got, without needing to transfer them onto a Memory Stick or having them disappear into a haze of DRM after an arbitrary period of time. They’re mine. I paid for them and I’ll play them in the format of my choice on the hardware of my choice at the time of my choice - so anyone who tries to get in the way of that with crippled products is not going to get a share of my gadget budget.

Anti-aliased angels dancing on the head of a pin

There’s a bit of a spat going on between Scoble The Microserf and Dudley “Haven’t Got An About Me Link On My Blog” Doe (or maybe he’s Somebody Dudley, and we’re just doing the Bloggers Thing of referring to each other by surnames only. It was months before I realised that Kottke has a first name. It’s a bit like actors calling each other “luvvie”.) The argument revolves around which anti-aliasing is better, ClearType on XP or the Mac equivalent, whatever it’s called.

Three things come to mind here.

1. This is a definitive example of a “my god is better than your god” discussion.
2. It’s irrelevant in that you can’t switch from one to the other.
3. The reason I don’t know what the Mac equivalent is called is because I’ve never had to switch it on. It’s on by default, unlike ClearType, which is part of the extensive tweaking and tuning and fiddling that one has to do post-XP install.

The IT Garage

Doc Searls has been blogging since before anyone came up with the term ‘blogging’. He’s a journalist and an author with a background in technology marketing, and is the the senior editor of Linux Journal as well as being one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the definitive guide to how the internet and networks are affecting the markets and the relationships between buyers and sellers. You may not necessarily agree with all the conclusions that he and his fellow-authors make, but it’s pretty much required reading if you want to understand how to operate in today’s markets.

As well as being perhaps the most prolific blogger out there (a dozen posts a day to his blog counts as a quiet one!) he’s also recently set up the IT Garage. The premise of this blog is that open-source software is changing the IT marketplace, and that isn’t necessarily reflected in the way that the IT marketplace is reported. The mainstream trade press is funded by-and-large by the major vendors, which inevitably skews the kind of information that’s available about what’s really going on - as Doc puts it, it’s “vendor sports coverage”. There’s an ever-increasing amount of solutions being put together using the open-source building blocks of LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP - but because there aren’t the same kind of mega-bucks marketing budgets behind the open-source and LAMP products, these are projects that we tend to hear less about. What the IT Garage is about is “do-it-yourself IT“.
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What’s a wiki and why would I want one?

Once you’ve been reading blogs for a while, you’ll come across the term ‘wiki’. What is a wiki? Where can you get one? And why would you want one? For the answers to these and other questions beginning with ‘W’, read on…

A wiki is simply a website that can be quickly and easily edited by its readers - anyone can add new pages or change ones that already exist, and you don’t need to know any HTML code to do so. At the bottom of every page, there’s a ‘Edit this page’ link, and clicking on this takes you into a simple form where you can add, change or delete the page’s text.

So what’s the big deal? Simply that anyone can do it - anyone who’s got enough knowledge to use a keyboard, mouse and browser has the skills to create and change web pages. There’s no HTML or XML or CSS or any other TLAs - just a simple form and plain text.
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Rumours of new Apple models

Never mind the rumour mills, I’ve got much more accurate way of predicting when new hardware models are about to be released. Just look at my credit card statements - if I’ve bought one in the last six weeks, you can fairly guarantee there’ll be a new model along any day now…

Spotted in today’s Observer article on legalising prostitution

Another neighbour, who lives in a £400,000, four-bedroom house, said: ‘My worry is house prices and whether they could be affected by this place being here.