Amazon.com is showing the trailer for the forthcoming film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As is usual with such things, the trailer has a manic feel and seems to focus on special effects, but there are quite a few elements which I can’t place at all in the story. I’ll reserve judgment. (What the hell; I know I’ll go to see it, but I have an anticipatory pain in the diodes all down my left side.)
Speaking of HHGTTG, I see they’ve just published a Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition of the book. Now I think that this is a wasted opportunity. Some maker of PDAs should have taken the cue from Apple’s U2 Edition iPod, and produced a HHGTTG PDA, with preloaded multimedia Guide and Encyclopedia Galactica applications, e-books of Douglas Adams works, MP3s of the radio show, etc., etc. Naturally there would be a flip-down (peril-sensitive?) screen protector with the immortal words “Don’t Panic”. Maybe PalmOne could produce an SD card for their PDAs….
Salon on Iain Banks and "The Algebraist"
Salon‘s Andrew Leonard has a nice interview with Iain Banks today. Among other things, Banks explains why it’s taking so long to get The Algebraist published in the US – he’s switched publishers (again), and is working with a small outfit called Night Shade Books in San Francisco.
Checking their website, I see that they are also publishing Banks’ The State of the Art, including a $45 limited edition, signed by the author, with “material not in the trade edition”. Good grief! Are books going the same way as music CDs? At least I can tell exactly what the difference is between two different CDs – an extra track, or a video clip, or something. How do I know whether the added material in The State of the Art justifies replacing my existing paperback copy? I guess that a True Fan wouldn’t worry about such things….
What's on YOUR bookmarks bar?
I’ve been doing a lot of OS installations recently (Solaris, various kinds of Linux, even WinXP), and I’m gradually coming to realize that the shift from “preparing a system” to “using a system” comes after I’ve populated the Bookmarks toolbar of the browser (Safari or Firefox) with my favourite links. While there are usually a couple of system-specific things, the basic pattern is constant:
– Basics: My Yahoo, Gmail, my ISP webmail, Amazon, Sun’s internal portal
– News: BBC, Salon, National Weather Service, and the Register and Inquirer
– Blogging: my blog, its admin page, and Planet Sun
– Fun: User Friendly, Doonesbury, Dilbert
– Academic: the Tufts Blackboard portal
Obviously that lot won’t fit without some data compression; each link is just a favicon plus a couple of characters: “Y!”, “UF”, and so forth.
Book notes: Death of an Ordinary Man
During my day trip on Friday I was reading Glen Duncan’s Death of an Ordinary Man. I was drawn to it by the review in last week’s New York Times, and found it totally mesmerizing. The story is simple: the disembodied spirit of a man who has just died floats above his funeral, and follows the mourners to his wake, privy to the thoughts of (almost) all, repeatedly drawn into vortices of memory. He gradually realizes that he’s in this state in order to understand how and why he died. But to achieve this, he needs to understand how he lived. An unvarnished post-mortem examination of the minutiae of life: of relationships, family, children, love, passion, and loss. I find myself thinking back over the story: I think that I’ll have to re-read it, soon, to revisit some of the (appropriately) ambiguous passages with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Highly recommended, though not for the emotionally fragile (or the prudish).
Treo 650
As I blogged a couple of days ago, my experiment with a “back to basics” cellphone didn’t work out. 
So today I stopped by the Cingular store at Coolidge Corner to replace the Motorola V551 with a Treo 650. Herewith a few comments, observations, complaints.
- First and foremost, it’s a PalmOS device. Over the years I’ve owned various Palm Pilot and Handspring devices, but none recently. (All of my devices had Dragonball chips, which dates them.) The Treo felt instantly familiar.
- It feels like a nice phone, though I’ve only made and received a few calls; I haven’t really explored it yet. The address book only contains the few entries I’d stored on the SIM card in the V551. I haven’t yet figured out how to juggle the info in the PalmOS Contacts app and the SIM. Similarly I haven’t tried voice or speed dialling.
- Synchronization with the Mac went just fine, first with the supplied USB cable, and then via Bluetooth. The Palm Desktop is a bit prettier than I remember it, but it’s not what I’m planning to rely on. I want to sync with the OS X apps – iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, and so forth. So…
- I bought a copy of MarkSpace‘s Missing Sync, a vastly superior synchronization solution. Speaking of which…
- Missing Sync supports the mounting of the Treo’s SD card on the Mac desktop, making it easy to export a bunch of MP3 files from iTunes or grab a video clip from the Treo. SD card? What SD card? Hmmm… I had read several stories about how Palm was going to include a free 64MB SD card with every Treo 650, because of the bad publicity they got over the device’s limited storage. (They changed the memory management model, so that storage of small objects became much less efficient.) I guess their embarrassment was short-lived, because no SD card was provided with my unit. Oh well, 512MB cards are getting pretty cheap….
- Another cool feature of Missing Sync is Internet Sharing: connecting to the Internet from the PalmOS device through your computer. Of course this would bypass Cingular’s (revenue-generating) network, so I was disappointed, but not really surprised, to find that the Cingular-supplied Treo 650 was restricted: you couldn’t create an Internet Connection profile other than the predefined Cingular GPRS set-up. Shucks….
Overall, I’m delighted with the unit. It’s pretty much what I imagined as the perfect hand-held device a few years ago. I guess my expectations will always run ahead of my budget; I’d like to see more memory, 802.11, and a better camera. But the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard is really easy to work with, and the fit and finish is superb.
Exhausted
Just got back from a day trip. Up at 4, head over to Logan, fly BOS-BWI on an American Eagle RJ, get rental car, drive to office park near DC for meeting. Then drive 90 miles up I-95 to Wilmington for another meeting. Drive from Wilmington to PHL, make good time, successfully switch to an earlier flight, eat, fly PHL-BOS on a US Air A320, and home by 10.
Driving up I-95 between DC and Philadelphia, I saw at least 25-30 state troopers from three different states, busy pulling people over. What’s going on? If I saw that many Massachusetts State Police cruisers in one day, it would be because I’d driven past a police funeral…
All monocultures are dangerous
In Internetnews.com, Dan Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is quoted as saying: “Open source is not about having five different operating systems, it’s about everyone working together to create one rock-solid operating system.”
Wrong. The last “one rock solid operating system” was OS/360. Dan is suffering from a grievous lack of imagination. This is like Pamela at Groklaw, saying “The FOSS community needs to face the world with a united face”, and earlier “when [Sun] say ‘the Open Source community’… they don’t mean Linux. When I say ‘Open Source community,’ I do.”
Open source is about collaboration. It’s about groups (plural) coming together to work on stuff, and sharing the results. It’s not a cult, not a political movement, not a utopian (i.e. unrealistic) dream. Above all, it cannot be about monoculture: one technology, one group with one leader, one license, one goal. All monocultures are dangerous: Microsoft Windows, Monsanto’s ‘Terminator’ seeds, and influenza vaccine – even Linux if “true believers” have their way. I want more OSS operating systems, not fewer. I wish Palm would release BeOS to the world. (Yes, I know about OpenBeOS. I want the original.) I wish HP would post the full source of VMS for all to use. Competition is good. It’s good for engineering. It’s good for customers.
(For better coverage of these issues, check out Simon’s blog.)
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
El Reg just reported a major cross-platform flaw in 30 of Symantec’s security products, including Norton AntiVirus 2004, corporate anti-virus apps and Brightmail spam filters. Of course the root cause is a system architecture which is so broken that it requires the use of antivirus software that is so tightly integrated that it becomes a potential source of compromise.
I’ve always thought that I understood the history – or at least the mythology – of how this came about. Cutler and crew knew (from their VMS days) how to make NT secure, but chip support, backward compatibility and performance “optimizations” did them in. They could have used Win31/DOS VMs to cope with the legacy crud, but it wouldn’t have been fast enough. We’re all living with the results today (even if we don’t run Windows.)
I wonder how close this mythology is to reality….
Remedial English 101
This seems to be an accurate transcript of Bush’s recent town-hall meeting in Florida where he went to sell his “fix” for the nonexistent Social Security crisis. Please read it carefully. Don’t just glance at it, roll your eyes, and go on to the next blog. If you pay taxes in the US, this guy works for you:
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don’t really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix that problem?
BUSH: Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
— President G. W. Bush, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 4, 2005
More on cellphones
As I noted earlier, I replaced my old Nokia 3650 with a Motorola V551. I thought hoped that the inability to sync with my Mac via Bluetooth wouldn’t be a big deal. I was wrong. I tried syncing using a friend’s USB cable, and it was a hit-and-miss affair. Furthermore I couldn’t transfer photos, video clips or data between the two. I guess Motorola and Cingular want to force me to use billable air time and bandwidth to move stuff around.
The other thing I realized is that I’ve gone off flip phones. Over the years I’ve had both fixed and flip units, and I guess I forgot how inconvenient it can be to flip open a phone one-handed. If I was planning to use my headset all the time, a flip might be OK, but I’m not. Oh, well. Cingular has a 30 day no-questions return policy, so I’ll probably trade the V551 in for a Treo 650 some time in the next few days.