Status-Q

Going to have a quick play with Sente. There are a couple of bibliographic programs on the Mac which are challenging the very long-lasting but very pricey (and reputedly rather buggy) EndNote. I've seen good reviews for both Bookends and Sente, but the latter got their advertising right:

"It's like iTunes for academic literature"

Well, how could I resist...?

There was some discussion on Mac OS X hints in recent months on how to export your Apple Address Book as comma-separated values for importing into things like Thunderbird.

I did some tweaks to Sean's AddressBookToCSV script, and have since tweaked it a bit more. You can grab my current version here: AB2CSV.zip

I've written before about one of my favourite features of Apple Mail - the ability to select multiple mailboxes at once and see a merged list of messages which you can sort, search etc. If I'm looking for all my correspondence on a particular subject or with a particular person, I'll often select all my (6) inboxes, sent mail boxes, and probably a few archives as well, and then type into the search box. I've never seen this merging of mailboxes work so well on another mail viewer; it's the main thing I miss when using the otherwise excellent Thunderbird.

Once you're working within some search query or other particular view of your mail, though, how do you get back to your normal view to make a quick check on something else without losing your current setup? It's easy, I've just realised. On the File menu there's a 'New Viewer Window' option. This gives you a duplicate of the main window in which you can work completely independently, so you can pop up a new window for a particular search, have separate windows for working in different email accounts etc.

Mac users in the UK should like this; a plug-in for Address Book that lets you pop up a map of the location using Streetmap. Much nicer, in general, than the MapQuest ones, I think.

Hey - after my post on Clerihews, Jim posted one about me! I'm honoured! I don't think anyone's written a poem with 'Quentin Stafford-Fraser' in it before. The nearest was my friend C.D. Happel, who, perhaps aware of my occasional attempts at dieting, came up with an anagram:

Feasters ain't fun for Dr Q!

And, while we're on linguistic topics, how about some Clerihews?

"Seen as part of a Toys-R-Us advertisement in the Daily Telegraph in Nov 2004: 'Pictures are for illustrative purposes only.' You don't say ..."

From Michael Quinion's wonderful World Wide Words site, which I've written about before. Well-worth browsing, or try the Surprise me! link.

S5 is 'A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System'. It uses a single HTML file to create the content for Powerpoint-type slides, and CSS & Javascript to draw them. Not highly sophisticated, but very bandwidth-efficient, and all you need is a browser. Try looking at the sample slideshow and doing 'View Source'.

Perhaps the nicest examples of what CSS formatting can do, though, are to be found at CSS Zen Garden, a whole host of web pages which all use the same HTML but are formatted with different CSS stylesheets to get very different looks.

This Inquirer article lists some of the good things coming up in OpenOffice 2.0. The most important new feature is probably the database facility. The two most critical things missing in the Open Source world, I think, have been a good alternative to Microsoft Access, and a good accounts package. It will be interesting to see how close this comes to dealing with the first one. Link from LWM

John has a nice picture of the dead Windows screen at Cambridge station. It's been like that for ages. Here's a picture I took more than two months ago using my phone. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it then, and it still hasn't been fixed:

My friend Tim Glauert jokes that they need three displays so they can display "Departures", "Arrivals" and "Please press Ctrl-Alt Del". This is why Newnham Research is going to do so well...