Status-Q

Nicholas Petreley always writes pretty good stuff, and his recent articles about the dangers of .NET (part1, part2) are particularly good. He's started a web site at www.varlinux.org which should be worth watching for anyone interested in Linux.

Remember how hands-free kits for mobile phones were meant to reduce the radiation going into your brain, but were then discovered to be just as dangerous as holding the phone to your ear, if not more so?

Drs James Luck and Ata Khalid have come up with a solution which is definitely from the "Now why didn't I think of that?" department. For some reason I have more admiration for inventions which are rather obvious, but which nobody else considered. They show greater lateral thinking on the part of the inventors. Perhaps I find Edison's famous statement about genius being 1% inpiration and 99% perspiration a little depressing, so I feel cheerier when an invention appears which helps to redress the balance!

There are some benefits to having an unusual name. If I type 'quentin' into Google, I'm on the first page! I come a little below Quentin Tarantino and Quentin Crisp, though. I know my place.

Embeddded Linux goes from strength to strength. An article pointing out that one thing giving it the edge over some other operating systems is its support for IPv6, soon to be very important in devices like phones and home appliances.

It's always interesting to think back on the feudal economies of the past and wonder what sort of a wealthy landowner one would have been. Would my tenants have cursed me each year when the hard winters set in, or would they have loved and respected their master, and cheerily doffed their caps in recognition as I rode by?

Sadly, there's a new feudal system now, and Nick Tredennick's article, An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists, makes me feel that I'm really much closer to being one of the peasants.

Today's interesting trivia: Where does the phrase 'hat-trick' come from? Apparently, it was an old cricketing tradition that a bowler who took three wickets in three successive balls was entitled to a new hat, to be purchased by his club.

So now you know.

The next version of the Radio Userland package which I use to publish this weblog will apparently be "priced competitively with Groove". It's very competitive at present, being free! It sounds as if that won't be true in future, which is a pity - I would have it was worth having it widely distributed as an introduction to Userland's more powerful Frontier application.

But the comparison with Groove is an interesting one which had occurred to me before. On the surface they are very different applications, but they are both built on underlying platforms which are much more flexible and more powerful than the casual user might realise, and which have a certain amount in common. Groove promises quite a bit more, at present, but Radio delivers more reliably, in my experience. It will be interesting to see the next version, which will also - goody! - be available on Mac OS X.

Fidelity Investments has apparently made a huge move of its corporate infrastructure to XML. Story at ComputerWorld.

Small but encouraging discoveries today. I imported a large and very complex Powerpoint poster into OpenOffice, and, while it didn't render perfectly, it was pretty darn close. I then discovered that OpenOffice was in some respects rather better than Powerpoint, because it has a concept of 'styles', much as in a word-processor. When you've formatted one text box as yellow text on a blue background with a red border, you can create a style from that and apply it to any other boxes. Modify the style, and all of the boxes change. Obvious stuff, really, but nice none the less, and not available in Powerpoint.

I explored a bit more and found another cute feature. When you create styles you normally make them dependent on other styles. A 'block quote' style, for example, is typically based on a normal paragraph but with larger left and right margins. In OpenOffice, you can view the list of styles as a hierarchical tree, so you can see exactly which ones are dependent on which other ones. Lovely.

The final discovery was that I could export my slide as SVG - a completely non-proprietary and open standard for scalable graphics - which I could then view using, for example, a browser with the Adobe SVG viewer plugin.

This is all exciting stuff.

Mac OS X 10.1 is out this weekend in the U.S. and by all accounts it fixes most of the remaining issues with the existing version. Current users can just walk into an Apple reseller for an upgrade CD. Steve Jobs, in his announcement at Seybold, carelessly neglected to mention how people in the UK can get hold of it, so I called our local supplier first thing this morning. There was a delay getting through, and the person I spoke to apologised for it, "We have about 5 lines all ringing at the moment!"

"Ah", I said, "they probably want to know the same thing as me. I'm interested in OS X version..."

"Monday!", she interrupted, with a laugh.