![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
One big social network
Jul. 9th, 2009 04:35 pmBack when I was with Heise, I signed up with Digg and Reddit which I'd only previously been reading, so that I could promote Heise stories there occasionally.
But recently, I noticed an interesting new feature on Digg: Facebook Connect. For a laugh, I enabled it, and as a result, it automatically populated my Digg profile with all the relevant bits of info from my FB one: name, photo, age, sex, location, stuff like that. This saved me a lot of work.
Over the years, I have got really tired of filling in all my contact info on multiple different websites. I must have put in my contact info approaching a thousand times. This is a distinct step in the right direction, I think. But still, I need lots of accounts.
I have accounts on things like Blogger which I created solely for commenting to others' posts; I don't keep a blog there and don't plan to. That itself is getting less necessary, though, because more and more blogs accept things like a LJ ID or a Google ID or an OpenID to let you comment as yourself.
(Although recently I had my first OpenID error - I tried to use my LJ, which has hitherto been my primary OpenID, and the site rejected it, saying it was a v1.0 ID and I needed a v2 one. Great. A return to the PITA that was RSS 1 vs. RSS 2 vs. Atom and all that nonsense.)
One of the last times I re-entered all my info was to create a Google Profile. Mine is here. To my disappointment, it doesn't seem to show up in Google results.
But now, there are mutterings that Google will make all Gmail/Google Docs accounts OpenIDs, meaning millions of new ones. I wonder if this will also include automatically populating profile info from your Google Profile?
This is quite exciting stuff. It could mean you could roam from any social networking type site to any other using a single profile which would follow you everywhere. If you are not one of the poor deluded types who thinks that calling yourself GreenSquirrel on Lj means you've hidden your identity, then this could be terrific. A massive timesaver and a step toward linking all the different sites and accounts in the world together. I love the idea.
I bet there are going to be screams and howls of protest, though...
But recently, I noticed an interesting new feature on Digg: Facebook Connect. For a laugh, I enabled it, and as a result, it automatically populated my Digg profile with all the relevant bits of info from my FB one: name, photo, age, sex, location, stuff like that. This saved me a lot of work.
Over the years, I have got really tired of filling in all my contact info on multiple different websites. I must have put in my contact info approaching a thousand times. This is a distinct step in the right direction, I think. But still, I need lots of accounts.
I have accounts on things like Blogger which I created solely for commenting to others' posts; I don't keep a blog there and don't plan to. That itself is getting less necessary, though, because more and more blogs accept things like a LJ ID or a Google ID or an OpenID to let you comment as yourself.
(Although recently I had my first OpenID error - I tried to use my LJ, which has hitherto been my primary OpenID, and the site rejected it, saying it was a v1.0 ID and I needed a v2 one. Great. A return to the PITA that was RSS 1 vs. RSS 2 vs. Atom and all that nonsense.)
One of the last times I re-entered all my info was to create a Google Profile. Mine is here. To my disappointment, it doesn't seem to show up in Google results.
But now, there are mutterings that Google will make all Gmail/Google Docs accounts OpenIDs, meaning millions of new ones. I wonder if this will also include automatically populating profile info from your Google Profile?
This is quite exciting stuff. It could mean you could roam from any social networking type site to any other using a single profile which would follow you everywhere. If you are not one of the poor deluded types who thinks that calling yourself GreenSquirrel on Lj means you've hidden your identity, then this could be terrific. A massive timesaver and a step toward linking all the different sites and accounts in the world together. I love the idea.
I bet there are going to be screams and howls of protest, though...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Apr. 6th, 2009 08:41 pmLast weekend, I gave away an old Digital Audio Mac G4. Yesterday, after weeks of missing one another, a lady from Freecycle took away an old Gateway Pentium/150 which I'd done up. Another chap came round and collected an old AMD motherboard and an AthlonXP 2200+ CPU I had lying around, and I delivered ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jamesb's old PC, restored, refurbished and installed with Linux Mint to armchairanalyst. Which is all good.
But today, with the wonderful transport assistance of my next-door neighbour Dave, a chap in Docklands took no less than ten old PCs off my hands. He's building a Linux cluster. I've pointed out to him that a cluster of 486s and Pentium 1s will have a lot less CPU performance than a single 5y old PC, let alone anything modern, but hey, it sounds like a fun project and I'm going to help him with it if I can. No idea what he wants to run on it, but I think I've just quadrupled the size of his cluster. He's happy, I'm happy.
I've also got my Birdy back from Bikefix, after nine months. They were having a hell of a time finding a new dynamo for it, but it seems there was just a communications breakdown. They couldn't find my bike at first, but then another engineer stepped in. Although the boss had heard nothing about it when I last spoke to him, they'd managed to "bodge" (their words) a new dynamo onto it and it's apparently been ready for ages - I'd just not got any of their messages.
Nice one, Bikefix, and thanks!
So my garage is moving back towards its rightful state of being full of bikes instead of old computers. There's still a pile of old Macs for me to do up & dispose of, though. Anyone fancy a classic 680x0-based Macintosh, kitted out, maxed out with upgrades & all ready to go?
The 1st one up for grabs is a Performa 630 with TV card. Lovely little machine. I've added 10base-T Ethernet & about 36MB RAM; it runs MacOS 8.1, Word 5.1 and a handful of other apps. All geared up with IE 4 and Netscape 4, the latest it can run. The last ever 68040 Mac, I believe. I can offer 14" or 17" monitors for it, and naturally it comes with a mouse and keyboard (your choice, curvy or boxy mouse, compact or Extended II keyboard).
It also comes with the Apple remote control, so you can use it as a remote-controlled TV set or CD player. Has MP3 playback software installed but it doesn't really have the horsepower to cope with MP3s, let alone digital video. You can surf the web at a somewhat... majestic pace, though.
Also comes with a StyleWriter 2500, and for the ambitious, if you want to go for the PowerPC uprade option that the LowEndMac page I link to above mentions, I can give throw in Performa 6200 as well... I might even be able to raise the DOS compatibility card from somewhere!
jamesb's old PC, restored, refurbished and installed with Linux Mint to armchairanalyst. Which is all good.But today, with the wonderful transport assistance of my next-door neighbour Dave, a chap in Docklands took no less than ten old PCs off my hands. He's building a Linux cluster. I've pointed out to him that a cluster of 486s and Pentium 1s will have a lot less CPU performance than a single 5y old PC, let alone anything modern, but hey, it sounds like a fun project and I'm going to help him with it if I can. No idea what he wants to run on it, but I think I've just quadrupled the size of his cluster. He's happy, I'm happy.
I've also got my Birdy back from Bikefix, after nine months. They were having a hell of a time finding a new dynamo for it, but it seems there was just a communications breakdown. They couldn't find my bike at first, but then another engineer stepped in. Although the boss had heard nothing about it when I last spoke to him, they'd managed to "bodge" (their words) a new dynamo onto it and it's apparently been ready for ages - I'd just not got any of their messages.
Nice one, Bikefix, and thanks!
So my garage is moving back towards its rightful state of being full of bikes instead of old computers. There's still a pile of old Macs for me to do up & dispose of, though. Anyone fancy a classic 680x0-based Macintosh, kitted out, maxed out with upgrades & all ready to go?
The 1st one up for grabs is a Performa 630 with TV card. Lovely little machine. I've added 10base-T Ethernet & about 36MB RAM; it runs MacOS 8.1, Word 5.1 and a handful of other apps. All geared up with IE 4 and Netscape 4, the latest it can run. The last ever 68040 Mac, I believe. I can offer 14" or 17" monitors for it, and naturally it comes with a mouse and keyboard (your choice, curvy or boxy mouse, compact or Extended II keyboard).
It also comes with the Apple remote control, so you can use it as a remote-controlled TV set or CD player. Has MP3 playback software installed but it doesn't really have the horsepower to cope with MP3s, let alone digital video. You can surf the web at a somewhat... majestic pace, though.
Also comes with a StyleWriter 2500, and for the ambitious, if you want to go for the PowerPC uprade option that the LowEndMac page I link to above mentions, I can give throw in Performa 6200 as well... I might even be able to raise the DOS compatibility card from somewhere!
Curious MemoryStick problem - help!
Jan. 29th, 2009 02:29 pmAnyone familiar with these little Sony Flash storage cards?
My current phone - pending an OS update for my Nokia Communicator E90 - is an elderly SonyEricsson P910i. This takes MemoryStick Pro Duo cards; it came with a 32MB one.
As it happens, I also currently have a Sony CyberShot DSC-W115 camera, which takes the same cards.
A while ago, I bought on eBay a bigger card for my phone - a 2GB Sony card. Googling suggested that this was the biggest the phone could handle and it was only about £10. Snag is, I couldn't get it to work. The phone just says "card corrupt". I thought maybe 2G was too much for this pre-3G pre-Wifi smartphone, but since I now have the camera to try, I've dug it out again.
The phone reads the camera's 1GB card fine. The cards are identical, except the camera's is a Mark2 card, meaning it can also support faster operation. Both are Sony-branded, whereas the little blue one that came with the phone is a SanDisk unit.
Now I discover that the camera can't read my card either. It says "reinsert card" about 3 times, then next time "error formatting card" - and repeats this cycle endlessly.
For my laptop, I have an external multiformat reader. This can take both the SD-card sized MS Duo cards and orIginal Sony Memory Stick cards, the size of a strip of chewing gum. The reader copes with the 32MB and 1GB cards natively, but doesn't respond at all to my 2GB card. Neither Windows nor Linux can see anything there.
Unless I insert the 2G stick into my Duo-to-original convertor, which is an empty shell in full stick-of-gum size. Then the card mounts and reads fine.
WTF is going on? How come I can't read the card except through a convertor? That shouldn't be possible, should it?
Just in case it was a partitioning problem, I've removed the partitions on the card with Linux - but now, even through the convertor, I can't create new ones. Or at least, it creates them, but then can't see the ones I've created. I have another, MS-only cardreader somewhere. I shall dig that out and try again.
I am beginning to suspect I have bought a duff card here.
My current phone - pending an OS update for my Nokia Communicator E90 - is an elderly SonyEricsson P910i. This takes MemoryStick Pro Duo cards; it came with a 32MB one.
As it happens, I also currently have a Sony CyberShot DSC-W115 camera, which takes the same cards.
A while ago, I bought on eBay a bigger card for my phone - a 2GB Sony card. Googling suggested that this was the biggest the phone could handle and it was only about £10. Snag is, I couldn't get it to work. The phone just says "card corrupt". I thought maybe 2G was too much for this pre-3G pre-Wifi smartphone, but since I now have the camera to try, I've dug it out again.
The phone reads the camera's 1GB card fine. The cards are identical, except the camera's is a Mark2 card, meaning it can also support faster operation. Both are Sony-branded, whereas the little blue one that came with the phone is a SanDisk unit.
Now I discover that the camera can't read my card either. It says "reinsert card" about 3 times, then next time "error formatting card" - and repeats this cycle endlessly.
For my laptop, I have an external multiformat reader. This can take both the SD-card sized MS Duo cards and orIginal Sony Memory Stick cards, the size of a strip of chewing gum. The reader copes with the 32MB and 1GB cards natively, but doesn't respond at all to my 2GB card. Neither Windows nor Linux can see anything there.
Unless I insert the 2G stick into my Duo-to-original convertor, which is an empty shell in full stick-of-gum size. Then the card mounts and reads fine.
WTF is going on? How come I can't read the card except through a convertor? That shouldn't be possible, should it?
Just in case it was a partitioning problem, I've removed the partitions on the card with Linux - but now, even through the convertor, I can't create new ones. Or at least, it creates them, but then can't see the ones I've created. I have another, MS-only cardreader somewhere. I shall dig that out and try again.
I am beginning to suspect I have bought a duff card here.
Windows 7 - O RLY?
The version of Windows that follows Vista (which internally calls itself Windows 6.0) is to be called Windows 7 - but that version number doesn't quite tally up with the history of the product...
(Can't believe I got away with that title...)
The version of Windows that follows Vista (which internally calls itself Windows 6.0) is to be called Windows 7 - but that version number doesn't quite tally up with the history of the product...
(Can't believe I got away with that title...)
Actual original article on Heise. Do please feel free to Slashdot it or whatever. :-)
Intel's new six-core CPUs highlight Windows' limitations
Modern PC specifications are starting to hit some of the fundamental limits of current operating systems – both architectural and licensing-imposed.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/features/111574
Intel's new six-core CPUs highlight Windows' limitations
Modern PC specifications are starting to hit some of the fundamental limits of current operating systems – both architectural and licensing-imposed.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/features/111574
Be a knock-off Nigel
Aug. 14th, 2008 04:17 amIn recent weeks, I've been experimenting with a nifty little "product". It's TinyXP: a sort of Windows distribution, a hand-rolled version of Windows XP that you can download via Bittorrent, burn onto CD and bung on your PC.
It's XP with almost every optional component removed, all the latest patches and bugfixes pre-loaded, including SP3, and optionally, even Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player stripped out too. There's an optional pack of drivers and so on that you can choose, and a "bare" version with nothing that's not absolutely necessary.
It's pretty good. Illegal as all hell, of course, yes, but not the sort of crime you're ever going to get done for. It passes "Windows Genuine Authentication" and so on, so you can install things like Windows Defender on it, or IE7. It's smaller than normal XP, faster to install, faster to boot and takes significantly less memory - in fact, its default footprint is even smaller than Windows 2000.
I've always meant to build something like this myself, but though I have a custom XP build with a lot of the crap removed, I've never even looked at things like breaking Windows Activation.
TinyXP is pretty handy, though - I've put it on a couple of PCs I've given away on Freecycle recently. With a small fast version of XP, there's not a lot of reason to put Windows 2000 on low-spec PCs any more.
But I've also been looking for a copy of Vista to play with. I had a suspicion that in the same way that I can cut a few hundred meg of the install-disk size of XP, 50MB or so off its memory footprint and 10-15min off the install time, that I might be able to cut the crap from Vista and get it down to a civilized size.
Well, a couple of days ago, it occurred to me to look, and sure enough, the same "eXPer1ence" hacker that produced TinyXP has also produced TinyVista. It's Vista, complete with Aero, but with no background search, no sidebar, no superfetch, almost no bundled apps, but plenty of drivers (excluding printers - they've all gone.)
So I've downloaded it and in a quiet moment this evening put it on my Thinkpad, alongside the kosher IBM copy of XP.
And it's not half bad. It recognised most of the hardware in my X31, and between my folder of IBM drivers and Windows Update, everything is working. It idles at 345MB of RAM, a bit more than XP, but not too bad on a PC with 1GB. It's taking up a bit over 2GB of disk.
I can't see a lot of reason to recommend it over XP, but if all you have is a Vista licence and you hate the bloat, this is an option worth exploring. If, of course, you don't mind stealing from Microsoft. But then, Bill Gates is still the 2nd richest man in the world, and he achieved that position through theft himself, so personally, I can live with that.
I can't point directly to download links. Go to IsoHunt or some other Torrent index (e.g. The Pirate Bay or MiniNova), type in "tinyxp" or "tinyvista", and look for a recent release with lots of trackers and seeds. Download the minute Torrent file, open it in a Bittorrent client (I use Transmission myself, but Windows types might try μTorrent)... And wait a couple of days. Then burn it to a blank CD - use the "burn image" option in CD Burner XP or some other CD-burning app.
Boot the recipient PC, tell it what partition to use and enjoy. There are no keys to enter, no usernames or any of that, and it all happens rather quickly.
It's XP with almost every optional component removed, all the latest patches and bugfixes pre-loaded, including SP3, and optionally, even Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player stripped out too. There's an optional pack of drivers and so on that you can choose, and a "bare" version with nothing that's not absolutely necessary.
It's pretty good. Illegal as all hell, of course, yes, but not the sort of crime you're ever going to get done for. It passes "Windows Genuine Authentication" and so on, so you can install things like Windows Defender on it, or IE7. It's smaller than normal XP, faster to install, faster to boot and takes significantly less memory - in fact, its default footprint is even smaller than Windows 2000.
I've always meant to build something like this myself, but though I have a custom XP build with a lot of the crap removed, I've never even looked at things like breaking Windows Activation.
TinyXP is pretty handy, though - I've put it on a couple of PCs I've given away on Freecycle recently. With a small fast version of XP, there's not a lot of reason to put Windows 2000 on low-spec PCs any more.
But I've also been looking for a copy of Vista to play with. I had a suspicion that in the same way that I can cut a few hundred meg of the install-disk size of XP, 50MB or so off its memory footprint and 10-15min off the install time, that I might be able to cut the crap from Vista and get it down to a civilized size.
Well, a couple of days ago, it occurred to me to look, and sure enough, the same "eXPer1ence" hacker that produced TinyXP has also produced TinyVista. It's Vista, complete with Aero, but with no background search, no sidebar, no superfetch, almost no bundled apps, but plenty of drivers (excluding printers - they've all gone.)
So I've downloaded it and in a quiet moment this evening put it on my Thinkpad, alongside the kosher IBM copy of XP.
And it's not half bad. It recognised most of the hardware in my X31, and between my folder of IBM drivers and Windows Update, everything is working. It idles at 345MB of RAM, a bit more than XP, but not too bad on a PC with 1GB. It's taking up a bit over 2GB of disk.
I can't see a lot of reason to recommend it over XP, but if all you have is a Vista licence and you hate the bloat, this is an option worth exploring. If, of course, you don't mind stealing from Microsoft. But then, Bill Gates is still the 2nd richest man in the world, and he achieved that position through theft himself, so personally, I can live with that.
I can't point directly to download links. Go to IsoHunt or some other Torrent index (e.g. The Pirate Bay or MiniNova), type in "tinyxp" or "tinyvista", and look for a recent release with lots of trackers and seeds. Download the minute Torrent file, open it in a Bittorrent client (I use Transmission myself, but Windows types might try μTorrent)... And wait a couple of days. Then burn it to a blank CD - use the "burn image" option in CD Burner XP or some other CD-burning app.
Boot the recipient PC, tell it what partition to use and enjoy. There are no keys to enter, no usernames or any of that, and it all happens rather quickly.
Save Bletchley!
Jul. 28th, 2008 06:35 amOne for any British readers with an interest in the history of computers and Britain's part in their early development.
Bletchley Park is the site of the main British efforts in WW2 to, for instance, decrypt the Nazi's Enigma codes and it is now the home of a museum to these efforts.
However, it's lamentably underfunded and is struggling to survive.
You can perhaps help in a small way to persuade the government to save Bletchley by signing the petition to the Prime Minister.
Go on. Even Prince Charles is supporting it.
In related news, Swindon's Museum of Computing has problems too. It's lost its venue and is currently closed down with all the kit in storage. An expanded Bletchley would be the ideal home for it, but its curators live in Swindon and don't fancy Milton Keynes much. (Personally, I can't see much to recommend either. :¬) )
I must confess, I've never been to Bletchley Park myself, even though I have friends who live in the town of Bletchley who I have visited and even stayed with. I've long wanted to. Anyone fancy joining me on a day-trip up there?
Bletchley Park is the site of the main British efforts in WW2 to, for instance, decrypt the Nazi's Enigma codes and it is now the home of a museum to these efforts.
However, it's lamentably underfunded and is struggling to survive.
You can perhaps help in a small way to persuade the government to save Bletchley by signing the petition to the Prime Minister.
Go on. Even Prince Charles is supporting it.
In related news, Swindon's Museum of Computing has problems too. It's lost its venue and is currently closed down with all the kit in storage. An expanded Bletchley would be the ideal home for it, but its curators live in Swindon and don't fancy Milton Keynes much. (Personally, I can't see much to recommend either. :¬) )
I must confess, I've never been to Bletchley Park myself, even though I have friends who live in the town of Bletchley who I have visited and even stayed with. I've long wanted to. Anyone fancy joining me on a day-trip up there?
Superconductors Enter Commercial Utility Service by Monica Heger
American Superconductor and Long Island Power Authority commission the grid's first transmission cable
2 July 2008—Last Wednesday, American Superconductor officially commissioned the world's first high-temperature superconductor power-transmission cable system to be used in a commercial power grid. Superconductors can supply lots of energy quickly, efficiently, and unobtrusively. They conduct 150 times the electricity of similarly sized copper wires. However, because of technological difficulties, the commercial development of superconductor power-cable systems has been slow. [...]
American Superconductor and Long Island Power Authority commission the grid's first transmission cable
2 July 2008—Last Wednesday, American Superconductor officially commissioned the world's first high-temperature superconductor power-transmission cable system to be used in a commercial power grid. Superconductors can supply lots of energy quickly, efficiently, and unobtrusively. They conduct 150 times the electricity of similarly sized copper wires. However, because of technological difficulties, the commercial development of superconductor power-cable systems has been slow. [...]
Or, PC World Australia's James Turner doesn't know his arse from his elbow.
Linux examined: OpenSUSE 11.0
This latest edition has some updates and improvements, but is not for the faint-of-heart
Apparently, Red Hat's Fedora is based on Novell's OpenSUSE rather than, say, Red Hat's own Red Hat Linux. Who knew?
(No "upside down down under" jokes, please. The error is risible enough on its own.)
Linux examined: OpenSUSE 11.0
This latest edition has some updates and improvements, but is not for the faint-of-heart
Apparently, Red Hat's Fedora is based on Novell's OpenSUSE rather than, say, Red Hat's own Red Hat Linux. Who knew?
(No "upside down down under" jokes, please. The error is risible enough on its own.)
Enlightenment
May. 30th, 2008 09:13 amJourneyman programmers, seekers after wisdom, may study at the feet of Mel, the Real Programmer. They might ponder the AI Koans.
But true enlightenment is only achieved when one has mastered the Tao of Programming.
(Incidentally, apart from the Olde Style Unicks mismatched opening and closing quotes, I think this is one of the most attractively-formatted web pages I've seen in a long time.)
(Also, I think I really ought to go to bed before my knees fall off.)
But true enlightenment is only achieved when one has mastered the Tao of Programming.
(Incidentally, apart from the Olde Style Unicks mismatched opening and closing quotes, I think this is one of the most attractively-formatted web pages I've seen in a long time.)
(Also, I think I really ought to go to bed before my knees fall off.)
"Lost arts"
Apr. 14th, 2008 01:30 amStill reading up on the aformentioned obscure old computers. Slightly saddened that nobody's even come close to guessing yet, so here are a couple more clues. And no trying to cheat by looking at the "what links here" page, mm'kay? It's at least one link away from them.
But in a more general sense, I'm wondering if any of those "senior geeks" - if you're over 40, you're probably in that category - feel as I increasingly do. That no matter how wonderful and splendid modern PCs are, when even a very modest PC lets me watch film clips, chat live with people half way across the world while manipulating files of hundreds of meg, all at once, that still, there were things that older machines, decades ago, did better in various ways.
The sorts of thing I'm thinking of are quite various.
- There seems to be nothing today to compare to the simplicity of a VAXcluster, for instance, where you didn't even need to know which machine of a group you were connecting to.
- 1980s network protocols needed a lot less configuring than TCP/IP does. OK, so I didn't have Ping or Traceroute, but on NetBEUI and IPX/SPX and DECnet and AppleTalk, I didn't have to muck around with addresses and subnet masks and name servers and gateways and all that. You plugged it in, it worked.
- Everything is in C now, so buffer overflows and memory leaks are a constant concern. Whatever happened to Smalltalk and so on, the dynamic languages which sorted all that out for you and let you edit live, running code?
- Everything is so slow these days. The last time I used a computer that felt really fast, it was running BeOS. No modern OS seems to let you feel the raw power; it's all being soaked up by layers of abstraction and hundreds of meg of supporting libraries. Where are the low-end OSs for legacy kit or thin clients that don't give you everything from fax to IPv6, that just do the necessary and no more? Even my Symbian smartphone feels lardy and sluggish compared to a 200MHz ARM running RISC OS!
- How come they're all so expensive? Where are the cheap-as-chips home computers for kids or the poor, so they can get in too? The EEE is all very well, but £250 is a fair wodge and it's a colour laptop, FFS. Where is today's Spectrum? The dead-basic, no-frills device for beginners?
- Complexity is a problem. For instance, look at the fall of Netware. V1 ran on proprietary kit; v2 ran on 286s and did much better. It could cold-boot itself and run non-dedicated. V3 couldn't do either, but it was still fairly simple. You installed it, bunged some disks into an array, made some user accounts and that's it, people could log in and start sharing. Netware 4 brought in directory trees and all that complexity and baggage, and the fall of Novell started. Great for enterprises, sh1te for small businesses, but every enterprise started as a small business once. NW3 you could work out for yourself; NW4 you needed study and training. Where are today's Netware 3s? I don't mean bally MS Small Business Server, which may be easy to get going but is vastly complex underneath and limited in various ways.
- Modularity. When things were put together from bits, you could take them apart as well. On NT3 & 4, and indeed Win9x, you could uninstall networking. This was great if you managed to bugger it up; you could remove the lot and start from a clean slate. Not any more. Now, you get a hundred free extras, but they're mandatory; you can't get rid of them if you want. I can't even remove Evolution from my Ubuntu machine without breaking the metapackage and suffering unspecified consequences.
- - - - -
So, what do you miss from the computers of decades gone by? What features are gone that you would like to see back on modern machines?
But in a more general sense, I'm wondering if any of those "senior geeks" - if you're over 40, you're probably in that category - feel as I increasingly do. That no matter how wonderful and splendid modern PCs are, when even a very modest PC lets me watch film clips, chat live with people half way across the world while manipulating files of hundreds of meg, all at once, that still, there were things that older machines, decades ago, did better in various ways.
The sorts of thing I'm thinking of are quite various.
- There seems to be nothing today to compare to the simplicity of a VAXcluster, for instance, where you didn't even need to know which machine of a group you were connecting to.
- 1980s network protocols needed a lot less configuring than TCP/IP does. OK, so I didn't have Ping or Traceroute, but on NetBEUI and IPX/SPX and DECnet and AppleTalk, I didn't have to muck around with addresses and subnet masks and name servers and gateways and all that. You plugged it in, it worked.
- Everything is in C now, so buffer overflows and memory leaks are a constant concern. Whatever happened to Smalltalk and so on, the dynamic languages which sorted all that out for you and let you edit live, running code?
- Everything is so slow these days. The last time I used a computer that felt really fast, it was running BeOS. No modern OS seems to let you feel the raw power; it's all being soaked up by layers of abstraction and hundreds of meg of supporting libraries. Where are the low-end OSs for legacy kit or thin clients that don't give you everything from fax to IPv6, that just do the necessary and no more? Even my Symbian smartphone feels lardy and sluggish compared to a 200MHz ARM running RISC OS!
- How come they're all so expensive? Where are the cheap-as-chips home computers for kids or the poor, so they can get in too? The EEE is all very well, but £250 is a fair wodge and it's a colour laptop, FFS. Where is today's Spectrum? The dead-basic, no-frills device for beginners?
- Complexity is a problem. For instance, look at the fall of Netware. V1 ran on proprietary kit; v2 ran on 286s and did much better. It could cold-boot itself and run non-dedicated. V3 couldn't do either, but it was still fairly simple. You installed it, bunged some disks into an array, made some user accounts and that's it, people could log in and start sharing. Netware 4 brought in directory trees and all that complexity and baggage, and the fall of Novell started. Great for enterprises, sh1te for small businesses, but every enterprise started as a small business once. NW3 you could work out for yourself; NW4 you needed study and training. Where are today's Netware 3s? I don't mean bally MS Small Business Server, which may be easy to get going but is vastly complex underneath and limited in various ways.
- Modularity. When things were put together from bits, you could take them apart as well. On NT3 & 4, and indeed Win9x, you could uninstall networking. This was great if you managed to bugger it up; you could remove the lot and start from a clean slate. Not any more. Now, you get a hundred free extras, but they're mandatory; you can't get rid of them if you want. I can't even remove Evolution from my Ubuntu machine without breaking the metapackage and suffering unspecified consequences.
- - - - -
So, what do you miss from the computers of decades gone by? What features are gone that you would like to see back on modern machines?
Scary maths
Apr. 12th, 2008 01:33 amSo I've been following up an idea of mine concerning "lost arts" in computer design, and as a result I've been reading up on a few largely-forgotten types of personal computer. (For a fairly generous definition of "personal computer". It was a digital computer, screen, keyboard etc., and you sat and worked at it.)
But one of my sources had some terms in it I didn't recognise. So I looked them up. And then I looked up the words I didn't know in the definition, and the next thing I know, I'm confronted with this.
And then my head did the 'splodey thing again.
Special prize for anyone who works out what specific kind of computer I was reading up on.
But one of my sources had some terms in it I didn't recognise. So I looked them up. And then I looked up the words I didn't know in the definition, and the next thing I know, I'm confronted with this.
And then my head did the 'splodey thing again.
Special prize for anyone who works out what specific kind of computer I was reading up on.
The Unix Haters' Handbook
Apr. 5th, 2008 10:42 pm(One for the geeks.)
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now, it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it. Get it, read it. It's funny, interesting, fun and free.)
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now, but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through flaming hoops.
A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on.
The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems, lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now, obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively svelte.
If you don't already know it, give it a read.
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be really interested to know the thoughts of modern Linux gurus on how much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now, it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it. Get it, read it. It's funny, interesting, fun and free.)
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now, but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through flaming hoops.
A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on.
The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems, lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now, obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively svelte.
If you don't already know it, give it a read.
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be really interested to know the thoughts of modern Linux gurus on how much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
It's Saturday and it's fairly quiet, so I am sitting here with my battered old Thinkpad, which runs W2K Pro 'cos it can't run Linux properly. (It has ACPI issues. Serious ones. And it's a damn sight quicker with W2K than XP. Even does Bluetooth and WLANs and stuff. Slightly shameful to be running a Micros~1 OS on it, but it's actually damned handy to have at least one Windows machine, and this is mine.) It's on the Internet via the shiny new phone and a USB cable.
(I am starting to think of this as the mini-Monolith. It's black, shiny, full of concealed high technology, its dimensions approximate to 1x4x9, and as I peer at it with dim eyes and poke at it with my big hairy fingers, it takes long enough to learn to appreciate its subtle mysteries that I sometimes feel positively Australopithecine.)
Said old Stinkpad is also concurrently connected to my not-quite-so-battered old P910i (with its Chinese firmware, acquired in the process of unlocking it from Orange in a little place I know in Chinatown, which isn't called Bona Phones but possibly should be) via its USB cradle. The fact that both work at once, and that I can move data on & off the monolith while connected to the Internet through it, both surprises and pleases me.
My number should port across on Monday, meaning that the monolith will become my primary phone, and the P910i will become a paperweight. (Except that actually it won't, as I shall stick an old PAYG SIM in it.)
So I decided it was time to try to get the data off it. Now, I have something of a dislike of Outlook, which grows ever stronger as I now use it every day at work. So I wasn't prepared to sync it into that.
Instead, out came my pre-Millennial copy of Organizer 6.0, installed and swiftly updated via a copy of 6.1 that was washed up by a passing torrent.
And lo, after really very little fiddling at all, honestly, all the data from the P910 is in the PC, and swiftly transferred thence into the monolith. Which now knows all my contacts, my appointments and everything. The new phone's good to go and I have a backup. Triffic. And it was all astoundingly easy. No, really.
Now I must learn if I can also sync the Nokia to Google Calendar or something like that, so I can get at it when the phone is not around. I also, far more importantly, need to extract the data from my Psion 7Book and get that into the monolith as well.
Sometimes, I am still surprised at how easy things are these days which were once really very hard.
What, alas, doesn't surprise me any more is that lovely, simple, elegant products likeThreadz Lotus Organizer disappear into history while clunky junkers like Outlook are used by millions. [Sigh]
(I am starting to think of this as the mini-Monolith. It's black, shiny, full of concealed high technology, its dimensions approximate to 1x4x9, and as I peer at it with dim eyes and poke at it with my big hairy fingers, it takes long enough to learn to appreciate its subtle mysteries that I sometimes feel positively Australopithecine.)
Said old Stinkpad is also concurrently connected to my not-quite-so-battered old P910i (with its Chinese firmware, acquired in the process of unlocking it from Orange in a little place I know in Chinatown, which isn't called Bona Phones but possibly should be) via its USB cradle. The fact that both work at once, and that I can move data on & off the monolith while connected to the Internet through it, both surprises and pleases me.
My number should port across on Monday, meaning that the monolith will become my primary phone, and the P910i will become a paperweight. (Except that actually it won't, as I shall stick an old PAYG SIM in it.)
So I decided it was time to try to get the data off it. Now, I have something of a dislike of Outlook, which grows ever stronger as I now use it every day at work. So I wasn't prepared to sync it into that.
Instead, out came my pre-Millennial copy of Organizer 6.0, installed and swiftly updated via a copy of 6.1 that was washed up by a passing torrent.
And lo, after really very little fiddling at all, honestly, all the data from the P910 is in the PC, and swiftly transferred thence into the monolith. Which now knows all my contacts, my appointments and everything. The new phone's good to go and I have a backup. Triffic. And it was all astoundingly easy. No, really.
Now I must learn if I can also sync the Nokia to Google Calendar or something like that, so I can get at it when the phone is not around. I also, far more importantly, need to extract the data from my Psion 7Book and get that into the monolith as well.
Sometimes, I am still surprised at how easy things are these days which were once really very hard.
What, alas, doesn't surprise me any more is that lovely, simple, elegant products like
Small objects of desire
Mar. 8th, 2008 06:57 pmIf I remember correctly, it's the 30th anniversary of the first broadcast of the original radio series of The Hitch hikers' Guide to the Galaxy today. I believe there was a ZZ9 slouch in Islington to celebrate this. Me, I have been at work all day, and spent all morning running around fixing broken computers.
Now, I no longer think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, but I retain the ability to get inordinately excited by certain expensive small black bits of electronics. Odd, really. The novelty ought to have worn off by now.
So it is with considerable pleasure that I have spent much of this afternoon playing with the minute matt black metallic cuboid of a new Nokia E90, which the nice people at O2 have given me, gratis, just for promising to stay with them for 18mth. They threw in unlimited free web access, too, which is nifty as it's a 3.5G phone and I can plug it into my laptop's USB port and use it as a mobile broadband connection.
(Which I've been doing all afternoon and it doesn't half nuke the battery.)
Vodafone couldn't be bothered to tell me when they came into stock and wanted me to pay £250 or so for one on top of signing up for another 18mth. When I threatened to leave, they still wanted over £100 for the handset, and that's with no Net access thrown in, either.
Initial impressions:
- Very sleek, fairly fast, excellent mobile Web experience and copes with things like PDF and DOC pretty well too. Sluggish at desktopy-type stuff but it's all there. Flash, Java, whatever. I don't know how anyone lives with a Web-capable smart phone with a 320*240 screen: it's like a postage stamp. On the internal eight hundred and mumble by three hundred and mumble screen, the Web's actually quite usable and quick.
- Also, having online help in a complex smartphone is a good thing.
- MicroSD cards really are stupidly small. Drop it in shagpile, never see it again. Or watch the cat swallow £60's worth of storage thinking it's a small cornflake.
- I am not sure that I need an Eee or a Nokia N800 any more with this thing. N800s seem to be getting very cheap on eBay, like £50-£100 or so, but this thing delivers most of the functionality and although it talks Wifi I don't need to find an access point. A lightweight subnotebook - like a sub-£200 Thinkpad X30 - and one of these and you're sorted.
- If I can get my data onto it, my Psion 7Book has just been obsoleted, too, except as a mobile writing machine. And if I can get the folding Bluetooth keyboard I bought for my 7710 working with the E90, it might do well enough for that, too.
- The onboard software is functionally very limited, but after this, I expected that. I'm hoping I can supplement it with 3rd party extras to make it do what I need.
- There's about 2-3cm of fascia wasted on decorative trim or blank spots when they could have put 2mm or so gaps between the buttons, enhancing its usability, especially when operating by feel alone. This is amazingly daft. However, overall, the design's pretty good. The rocker button thing on the inside is meant for right-handers, but I can cope. I used to have a Qtek 9000 (dougs lent me the old one he bought from autopope and I went and got it nicked going to the Slimelight), AKA HTC Universal, AKA XDA Pro or something. Great spec, great functionality, horrible design, and cursed with the affliction that is Windows Mobile. This thing, with Symbian 9 and S60 GUI, is a marvel of sleek elegance by comparison.
Summary: nice toy. Nice price. So far, we like. May do proper writeup once I've got to know it; watch this space for a link to the Inq. ;¬)
Oh yes. Concluding thought. This is the ultimate pre-iPhone smartphone. Bags of functionality, dozens and dozens of tiny buttons, two screens, insanely complex. Compare & contrast to the stripped-down elegance of Apple's offering. I'm a geek: I enjoy learning to use complex tech. It's fun for me. But I would not inflict an E90 on anyone who wasn't a hardcore geek, whereas I reckon my mum would do fine with an iPhone. Again, Orlowski put it very well:
What amuses me so far is that everyone else in this biz has signally totally failed to get the point of the iPhone. Look at toys like the Viewty. The clever thing about the iPhone is not that it's all touchscreen, that it's sleek and minimalist, that it's heavily multimedia-oriented. The clever things about the iPhone are:
- multitouch;
- that it runs a ported, cut-down version of a proper grown-up OS, not some allegedly "lightweight" thing meant for low-function low-power devices;
- multitouch;
- a honed-down, super-heavily user-focussed, very easy user interface, not a nightmare of options to twiddle;
- multitouch;
- an almost complete lack of options and ports and slots and things to play with. It has what it needs and no more. You don't need to change batteries; usually, you just replace the phone. Given enough memory, you don't need to insert stupid tiny expansion cards;
- multitouch.
I like the iPhone. I didn't buy one, though. I want buttons to dial with; I want a keyboard to type on. I want to be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard. I want to be able to use it as a modem on my PC. I want Flash and Java. I want to be able to install my own apps. And I want it all for free. So I got an E90, and so far, I'm happy. But give me an iPhone Pro with number keys down the sides of the screen and a slide-out keyboard and the missing functionality added back in and I'd think about it. Offer me it for free and I'd take your arm off.
There are lessons here both for Apple and for everyone else.
Enough. Gone 7. Pub now.
Now, I no longer think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, but I retain the ability to get inordinately excited by certain expensive small black bits of electronics. Odd, really. The novelty ought to have worn off by now.
So it is with considerable pleasure that I have spent much of this afternoon playing with the minute matt black metallic cuboid of a new Nokia E90, which the nice people at O2 have given me, gratis, just for promising to stay with them for 18mth. They threw in unlimited free web access, too, which is nifty as it's a 3.5G phone and I can plug it into my laptop's USB port and use it as a mobile broadband connection.
(Which I've been doing all afternoon and it doesn't half nuke the battery.)
Vodafone couldn't be bothered to tell me when they came into stock and wanted me to pay £250 or so for one on top of signing up for another 18mth. When I threatened to leave, they still wanted over £100 for the handset, and that's with no Net access thrown in, either.
Initial impressions:
- Very sleek, fairly fast, excellent mobile Web experience and copes with things like PDF and DOC pretty well too. Sluggish at desktopy-type stuff but it's all there. Flash, Java, whatever. I don't know how anyone lives with a Web-capable smart phone with a 320*240 screen: it's like a postage stamp. On the internal eight hundred and mumble by three hundred and mumble screen, the Web's actually quite usable and quick.
- Also, having online help in a complex smartphone is a good thing.
- MicroSD cards really are stupidly small. Drop it in shagpile, never see it again. Or watch the cat swallow £60's worth of storage thinking it's a small cornflake.
- I am not sure that I need an Eee or a Nokia N800 any more with this thing. N800s seem to be getting very cheap on eBay, like £50-£100 or so, but this thing delivers most of the functionality and although it talks Wifi I don't need to find an access point. A lightweight subnotebook - like a sub-£200 Thinkpad X30 - and one of these and you're sorted.
- If I can get my data onto it, my Psion 7Book has just been obsoleted, too, except as a mobile writing machine. And if I can get the folding Bluetooth keyboard I bought for my 7710 working with the E90, it might do well enough for that, too.
- The onboard software is functionally very limited, but after this, I expected that. I'm hoping I can supplement it with 3rd party extras to make it do what I need.
- There's about 2-3cm of fascia wasted on decorative trim or blank spots when they could have put 2mm or so gaps between the buttons, enhancing its usability, especially when operating by feel alone. This is amazingly daft. However, overall, the design's pretty good. The rocker button thing on the inside is meant for right-handers, but I can cope. I used to have a Qtek 9000 (
dougs lent me the old one he bought from autopope and I went and got it nicked going to the Slimelight), AKA HTC Universal, AKA XDA Pro or something. Great spec, great functionality, horrible design, and cursed with the affliction that is Windows Mobile. This thing, with Symbian 9 and S60 GUI, is a marvel of sleek elegance by comparison. Summary: nice toy. Nice price. So far, we like. May do proper writeup once I've got to know it; watch this space for a link to the Inq. ;¬)
Oh yes. Concluding thought. This is the ultimate pre-iPhone smartphone. Bags of functionality, dozens and dozens of tiny buttons, two screens, insanely complex. Compare & contrast to the stripped-down elegance of Apple's offering. I'm a geek: I enjoy learning to use complex tech. It's fun for me. But I would not inflict an E90 on anyone who wasn't a hardcore geek, whereas I reckon my mum would do fine with an iPhone. Again, Orlowski put it very well:
Steve Jobs' justifiably calls MultiTouch the biggest Apple innovation since the first Macintosh. Although hyperbole billows out of Jobs like smoke from an out-of-control dry ice machine, I think he's fully justified in being proud of the implementation. Not since the days of Psion have we seen such an example of "extreme engineering" in a consumer product - where the capabilities far outstrip the competition, in a product that costs less to manufacture. This is the reward for investing in great engineers - and ensuring they meet really strict goals.The iPhone really is years ahead of devices like the E90.
What amuses me so far is that everyone else in this biz has signally totally failed to get the point of the iPhone. Look at toys like the Viewty. The clever thing about the iPhone is not that it's all touchscreen, that it's sleek and minimalist, that it's heavily multimedia-oriented. The clever things about the iPhone are:
- multitouch;
- that it runs a ported, cut-down version of a proper grown-up OS, not some allegedly "lightweight" thing meant for low-function low-power devices;
- multitouch;
- a honed-down, super-heavily user-focussed, very easy user interface, not a nightmare of options to twiddle;
- multitouch;
- an almost complete lack of options and ports and slots and things to play with. It has what it needs and no more. You don't need to change batteries; usually, you just replace the phone. Given enough memory, you don't need to insert stupid tiny expansion cards;
- multitouch.
I like the iPhone. I didn't buy one, though. I want buttons to dial with; I want a keyboard to type on. I want to be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard. I want to be able to use it as a modem on my PC. I want Flash and Java. I want to be able to install my own apps. And I want it all for free. So I got an E90, and so far, I'm happy. But give me an iPhone Pro with number keys down the sides of the screen and a slide-out keyboard and the missing functionality added back in and I'd think about it. Offer me it for free and I'd take your arm off.
There are lessons here both for Apple and for everyone else.
Enough. Gone 7. Pub now.
Oh 'eck, ma script isnae workin'
Dec. 14th, 2007 04:16 pmMy fondness for Nemi comics is by now, I am sure, well-known. So on Tuesday I was enthused to read in Metro that the first Nemi "album" in English is coming out. ("Album" is what they call it in Scandiwegian - Titan are just calling it a "book", which seems a lot duller. I have the Swedish and Norwegian ones already.)
But, better still, Metro was running a competition to win one of a couple of dozen copies, signed by authoress and artist Lise Myhre. However, it closed at midnight and I was going to be at Skeptics in the Pub all evening, getting home too late to enter.
Now, I have a whizzy smartphone again these days, courtesy of a friend - it's a Sony-Ericsson P910i, the to my mind classic example of the P-series. It has a Web browser, but I'd never set up data connectivity on it. A shame, really - it would've been very handy atdarth_tigger's birthday drinkie in Nottingham, as birthday girl Jess & I were the first to turn up to the pub and she instantly gathered a pair of the sort of drunken loonies you always devoutly hope won't sit next to you on the bus. The male part, loud, dogmatic and very dim, amongst many other things including randomly speaking in a rotten Polish accent, insisted for some reason that Yellowstone was in Canada. I knew it wasn't, but couldn't remember where it was. He wanted me to look it up on Google and I would have been glad to in the hope that proving it wasn't anywhere near Canada would have caused him to stomp off in a huff. Even in a minute and a huff.
But I'd not set up connectivity on it, and doing so on Vodafone is significantly harder than it was a few years ago on T-Mobile.
But as I was - gasp! - early for Skeptics, I sat on the office steps opposite the pub and called Vodafone for help. The tech support bod, Elizabeth, was initially not at all confident about supporting a non-Vodafone device, but she sent me a couple of magic text messages, the phone happily imported the settings therein and lo, I was online. Remarkably quickly and easily.
So off I went to http://www.metro.co.uk - Only to find that the wretched Symbian web browser doesn't support Javascript. It just pops up a little notification saying "Javascript page". Incredibly frustrating.
What is the point, in this day and age, of a browser that doesn't do Javascript and Flash and so on? It's like offering an expensive premium ticket to the cinema, only when you get there, all you're allowed to see are a selection of tiny stills from the film, whereas everyone else gets the moving image on a big screen.
So, no chance of a signed Nemi album for me. :¬( It makes me even more annoyed with myself that a few years back in Stockholm, when visitingsuaveswede, I missed the chance to meet Lise when she did a signing at SF Bokhandeln. Why? 'Cos I didn't get up early enough. I was probably hungover. [Sigh]
But, better still, Metro was running a competition to win one of a couple of dozen copies, signed by authoress and artist Lise Myhre. However, it closed at midnight and I was going to be at Skeptics in the Pub all evening, getting home too late to enter.
Now, I have a whizzy smartphone again these days, courtesy of a friend - it's a Sony-Ericsson P910i, the to my mind classic example of the P-series. It has a Web browser, but I'd never set up data connectivity on it. A shame, really - it would've been very handy at
darth_tigger's birthday drinkie in Nottingham, as birthday girl Jess & I were the first to turn up to the pub and she instantly gathered a pair of the sort of drunken loonies you always devoutly hope won't sit next to you on the bus. The male part, loud, dogmatic and very dim, amongst many other things including randomly speaking in a rotten Polish accent, insisted for some reason that Yellowstone was in Canada. I knew it wasn't, but couldn't remember where it was. He wanted me to look it up on Google and I would have been glad to in the hope that proving it wasn't anywhere near Canada would have caused him to stomp off in a huff. Even in a minute and a huff.But I'd not set up connectivity on it, and doing so on Vodafone is significantly harder than it was a few years ago on T-Mobile.
But as I was - gasp! - early for Skeptics, I sat on the office steps opposite the pub and called Vodafone for help. The tech support bod, Elizabeth, was initially not at all confident about supporting a non-Vodafone device, but she sent me a couple of magic text messages, the phone happily imported the settings therein and lo, I was online. Remarkably quickly and easily.
So off I went to http://www.metro.co.uk - Only to find that the wretched Symbian web browser doesn't support Javascript. It just pops up a little notification saying "Javascript page". Incredibly frustrating.
What is the point, in this day and age, of a browser that doesn't do Javascript and Flash and so on? It's like offering an expensive premium ticket to the cinema, only when you get there, all you're allowed to see are a selection of tiny stills from the film, whereas everyone else gets the moving image on a big screen.
So, no chance of a signed Nemi album for me. :¬( It makes me even more annoyed with myself that a few years back in Stockholm, when visiting
suaveswede, I missed the chance to meet Lise when she did a signing at SF Bokhandeln. Why? 'Cos I didn't get up early enough. I was probably hungover. [Sigh]Chapter 1 - Welcome to WinEDLIN!
Thank you for purchasing Microsoft's EDLIN for Windows, the first line editor for Windows. With this release, we hope to promote the new image of some of the older Microsoft tools. Unlike its predecessor, EDLIN for DOS, this version supports a full graphic interface with 256 colors, has complete OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) support for use with other Microsoft applications, and supports all TrueType (tm) fonts. We hope you find WinEDLIN a useful and helpful product, and look into our full line of redesigned Microsoft applications, such as WinBASICA, WinEXE2BIN, and WinMORE.
http://writeonlymemory.net/winedlin.html
Thank you for purchasing Microsoft's EDLIN for Windows, the first line editor for Windows. With this release, we hope to promote the new image of some of the older Microsoft tools. Unlike its predecessor, EDLIN for DOS, this version supports a full graphic interface with 256 colors, has complete OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) support for use with other Microsoft applications, and supports all TrueType (tm) fonts. We hope you find WinEDLIN a useful and helpful product, and look into our full line of redesigned Microsoft applications, such as WinBASICA, WinEXE2BIN, and WinMORE.
http://writeonlymemory.net/winedlin.html
