Status-Q

Thanks to Seb for pointing me at this rather nice optical illusion.

I'm a bit late with this one, but the new official DivX codec for the Mac came out a couple of weeks ago, and integrates nicely with QuickTime. After the trial period there's a charge if you want to create DivX-encoded movies, but the package also includes the free codec which will let you watch them indefinitely.

If you don't know why you'd need this, you probably don't! If, on the other hand, you regularly download movies created on PCs and find that they don't play, this will help with quite a lot of them. The other solution is to install the excellent VLC player, which seems to play pretty much everything, though it isn't as pretty or as easy to use as QuickTime Player.

Paul Theroux makes a comparison between Malawi and Ireland in this Sunday Times article.

You may think that a BlackBerry is only for use in the cities, for those who can't be parted from their email at any time. But today I found a good use for mine in a most unlikely environment, and it actually helped me get away from the hurly-burly of modern life...

Rose and I are on a short break in Suffolk, and we wanted to visit the town of Woodbridge. I found a web page with a description of an interesting walk around the town and the surrounding area, but in my hotel room I had no way to print it out. Then I realised that by cutting and pasting the contents into an email to myself, I would have a copy in portable form on my BlackBerry.

This worked exceedingly well, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the BlackBerry was a great deal easier to slip in and out of a pocket than a sheet of A4 paper. And believe me, in that weather, I wanted my hands in my pockets for as much of the time as possible. And secondly, the jog-wheel on the side proved to be a great way to follow a long sequence of instructions. When we reached the end of a field or a fork in the path, I'd pull the BlackBerry out of my pocket, scroll down a little to read the next bit, and put it back. It took much less time than finding my place on a map or even on a sheet of printed instructions. One rare time when a smaller screen was much better than a bigger one!

Anyway, it was a great walk, and kudos goes to the railway company for publishing their station walks, which showed us more of Woodbridge than we would ever have found otherwise. Recommended.

Update, April 2007: The 'station walks' page has moved to a new location here. I hate it when people do that. It should be part of the contract when a company moves to a new web designer that old URLs will be preserved or redirected, especially, as in this case, when it was an eminently sensible URL in the first place. It's in your best interests, too, to keep things stable where possible - it's foolish these days to assume that the majority of visitors are going to find the page they want by coming to your front page and then following your links... Another thought... I bet this doesn't work as well on the new Blackberries with trackballs as it did on the old ones with jog-wheels!

I'm not normally a listener to the Catholic Insider podcast, but I think, at Christmas, if you know anything about Apple's products, and especially if you've ever watched one of Steve Jobs' keynotes, you will enjoy God's Keynote Speech.

First heard on the MacCast.

I wrote about TextMate a couple of days ago. Giles Turnbull is also a new convert.

According to The Independent, the UK police are going to be using number-plate (license-plate)-reading software with CCTV & traffic cameras around the country (of which there are many) to allow them to track the movements of all vehicles in the country, in the interests of crime prevention. They talk about big crimes like vehicle theft, though it could also be used to detect things like road-tax evasion. If they can get their act together with the insurance companies and use it to reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the roads, that would be a major benefit, though that may require a little too much competence on the part of the organisations concerned.

Anyway, no doubt conspiracy theorists civil liberties campaigners will be up in arms about this one, but I have other things on my mind, like the interesting algorithms you could come up with to detect license-plate duplication.

I'm anticipating a renaissance of James Bond's rotating number plates, or, even better, highwaymen on horseback...

Protopage is really very impressive. With this, and Writely, and GMail, and Google Maps and so forth, the in-browser experience is becoming amazingly rich. There will be a viable Open Source desktop environment after all. And it will be called Firefox.

Interesting question... At present, more than half of the machines sold are laptops, because people are getting more and more mobile and they really want their data with them everywhere. Will we ever see a reversal of this trend, as less and less of our data is stored on our own machines and it becomes accessible from anywhere? Will we see a 'desktop PC' renaissance?

Today was my last day consulting for my old company Newnham Research. Over the last six months I've been doing some work for them, some for Exbiblio, some for Cambridge Research Systems, and one or two others. It's been fascinating, but exhausting!

In January, however, I'm going back to Ndiyo, the non-profit that my friend Martin and I started just over three years ago. Ndiyo exists to promote a model of network computing which is more environmentally friendly, more reliable and maintainable, more affordable and generally more sustainable for the world than the traditional PC network. We find that the vision really captures people's hearts and minds, and our trials show that it can really work in the real world, too.

I'm looking forward to getting back into it again.

A good post by Bill Thompson on what has been a rather interesting last few weeks for Wikipedia.