Status-Q

jEdit is becoming really rather a good text editor. It's a while since I've looked at it, but it now has a lot of nice features, and a large number of plugins with which you can extend it. Being Java-based, you can use it on a wide variety of platforms.

It takes some time to get into, customize, etc but I can see it might be worth persevering. Nothing worthwhile, as they say, was ever achieved without hard work. (Who said that, besides my mother? Albert Schweitzer? It's his sort of thing, but it probably predates him)

Good quote from Jamie Zawinski - "Linux is only free if your time has no value" - He's quite right. That doesn't denigrate it, but for most situations, cost is not the best reason for choosing Linux.

Apple releases a new iPod with twice the storage space, and software to allow iPods to store contact lists. I predict the next step will be calendars, and this thing will gradually evolve into a PDA. No easy route for text entry on the device, though. They'll just have to build in a microphone and use speeach recognition...

The Patent system is completely out of control. We all know this, but the frequency of foolishness is increasing. The current BT case does seem particularly silly. Is nothing sacred when it might be patentable?

On a related note Dave Winer has been very upset by the pressure on him to use Cascading Style Sheets, a technology which is a W3C web standard, and which I think he would agree is a good technology, but which he is worried is too closely tied to a Microsoft patent. (For Dave, who is normally a great standards-promoter, this is notable, but I think he went too far here. I, like many others, had almost forgotten about this patent issue. See Mark Pilgrim's more reasonable summary).

The more fundamental our reliance on anything (like the axiom that the W3C should be looked to for web standards), the more it is a target for patent-hunters and hence the less we can rely on anything. The situation is very neatly commented on by this article in The Onion.

At some point, one hopes, the whole system must collapse and be laughed out of court. It's not widely known that I actually own a patent which covers the whole patenting process, and so every patent really belongs to me...

John Casey defends Princess Margaret:

"In some ways, she was like Diana, Princess of Wales before her time. She had a weakness for some fairly trashy society - but much less than Diana had.

Her private life was conducted with much more discretion than Diana's; and she remained absolutely loyal to the Monarchy. What she lacked was Diana's mass appeal and brilliant gifts of manipulation - especially of the press."

The FCC has approved limited use of UWB (Ultra Wide-Band radio) technology. Some details here.

Sometimes the simplest games are the best. JewelToy is a cute Mac OS X game based on Bejeweled.

just testing

John's found some interesting statistics on U.S. Internet Use.

Oops! We caught a typo on the front page of CNN.com this evening:

(Click for full image)

They fixed it very shortly afterwards.