Status-Q

My current favourite utility for Mac OS X is LaunchBar, which allows you to start apps, open web pages, send emails, with just an abbreviation of a few keystrokes. Particularly handy if you're on a laptop, where the mouse-based routes for opening things may not be quite so convenient. The clever thing about LaunchBar is that you don't need to set up the abbreviations in advance; it learns which keystrokes you'd like to use as you go along.

I'm not normally a huge fan of alternative launchers - the Dock has always worked fine for me. But I forced myself to learn and use LaunchBar for a few days and I got hooked. It's very clever, and saves a lot of time, while using almost no screen space. Recommended. Good to see genuine innovation is still alive in the utilities world.

Wow - I haven't posted here for nearly a week! It's been a quiet few days.

Spent a large chunk of this afternoon helping extract some data from a friend's elderly Macintosh LC. His mouse interface no longer works, and on most versions of Mac OS, there ain't much you can do when that happens, so he had been unable to get at his data for several months.

I opened it up, extracted the 40M SCSI hard drive (which required me to undo one screw - I love Apple hardware) and inserted it into a PowerMac G3. (No screws at all. Progress.) We booted up Mac OS X and sure enough, there was his disk on the desktop, with all the files inside laid out as he left them. We could even run Word 5.1 and his 1988 copy of Tetris straight from the disk with a simple double click, despite the fact that my machine was now running a version of Unix and that the windows which were optimised for his LC screen looked rather small in the corner of mine. He thought it was magic.

He was a bit less amused when we discovered that his PhD thesis, numerous letters, articles and other writings accumulated over several years amounted to about 6 Mbytes in MacWord 5.1 format. I burned them onto a CD for him, leaving it 99% empty.

Does anyone else think it's amusing that when Internet Explorer 6 connects to a web server it still announces itself primarily as "Mozilla 4.0 (compatible...)"?

A year ago today: "Yes, XML can be used to represent web pages, but assuming that it's limited to that is like assuming that ASCII is limited to email." (Expanded this later in The Importance of XML). Sorry - today's entries are a bit self-referential. If there's one thing worse than a blog which only talks about other blogs, it's a blog which talks about itself. Forgive me - I've been waiting eagerly for the site to be old enough to have a 'one year ago today' link so I'm posting it anyway!

Just under a year ago, my name was on the front pages of both the London Times and the Washington Post within a week, when it was announced that the Trojan Room Coffepot was being closed down. If you're anything like me, when you read newspaper articles, the names quoted in passing go in one eye and out of the other, but it's sad to think that I'm unlikely to be involved in anything which gets such media coverage again.

Still, having my blog mentioned on Dave Winer's Scripting News three times in quick succession must come a close second :-) The first thing you notice is the number of hits that your website gets. The next is that a little army of search engine robots follow closely behind. John Hiler is quite right.

Dave has always been influential because of his writing, but that may be secondary compared to his power to influence weblogs. Many people would pay a lot of money for that. Will this power eventually corrupt? We're watching you carefully, Dave... (and, by the way, what's your favourite bottle of wine?)

For Radio hackers: Mmm. My cunning scheme which showed the number of comments attached to each posting here was causing a few complications in my Radio setup. The PHP/MySQL back end ran perfectly and was a fun experiment but as I had suspected, nobody, including me, really wanted to leave comments here, so I've decided to discard the facility for now in the interests of simplicity. You can always email me...

John Naughton's column in the Observer is particularly good this week. "How is it possible to make money from the internet?'. It's the wrong question, because it's based on a fundamental misconception."

Expensive Bytes. There's a new marketplace in cyberspace. Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money (NY Times)

osOpinion: "Bluetooth has been touted as 'the next big thing' for three years now and has consistently failed to live up to its hype. More accurately, it has consistently failed to live, period. ...802.11b wireless networking... has already taken any corporate role Bluetooth aimed at, relegating it to road warriors and tech-toy junkies. "

John Naughton - "Why shouldn't ministers change their minds? ...The really stupid people are those who refuse to countenance changing their minds, no matter what happens. " Agreed. My father says he'll vote for the first politician who says, "I'm sorry - we made a mistake. We'll try and get it right next time."