Deep Litter

2011-11-01T20:53:00.000+11:00

.....And we're back!

The last few months have been ridiculously busy for me, and I haven't updated this blog since late May. However, things have settled down a little, and I'm going to try get back into the habit of blogging (also of exercising, and few other things that I've been a bit slack about lately).

The key events, and things that took up the time:

Editing a book: The First Donegore Story, by Donald Alexander, is out and available from Lulu. I'm really pleased with the result, and the finished book looks good - if you have never used Lulu, I'd recommend them. The final bit of work was the cover.

This was constructed using images from the book, the cover of an ancient dictionary that I have in my study, some old paper from a handwritten recipe book that belonged to my grandmother, a scanner and extensive Photoshopping. I'm sure a professional graphic artist could have done better, but I was satisfied with it as my first foray into the field. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a few things doing it, particularly about handling very large documents in Microsoft Word, and about Photoshop.
The official launch of the book is next Tuesday: if you happen to be in Donegore, the details are here.

I changed jobs: I now work for NetApp. Starting this job has been a bit like coming home: the office is right across the road from the building that I worked in while I was with Sun Microsystems, and many people who I worked with at Sun now work for NetApp.

Steve and I also had a three week holiday, two weeks of which we spent in Japan and Singapore. We had organised the trip to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and we had a fantastic time. The weather was good (mostly, better than we had expected), the hotels were lovely, the people were nice, and we saw (and took photos) of all sorts of things, from Himeji Castle to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore (Steve wants to stay there next time). A small selection of our photos is on Flickr: Japan here and Singapore here.

American Express made all the travel arrangements, and they appear to have told all the hotels that the trip was for our wedding anniversary: all three hotels (Park Hyatt in Tokyo, Hyatt Regency in Kyoto and Mandarin Oriental in Singapore) made a special effort to help us celebrate. Flowers, special deserts, personal greetings (and wine!) from hotel managers: it was great, and made the whole holiday extra special. We went to Chateau Restaurant Joël Robuchon for our anniversary dinner (which was fantastic); the Park Hyatt sent a photographer to our room to take our photo before we went: then they presented us with the mounted photo as a memento the next day. On the morning that we left Singapore to fly home, the restaurant staff served us champagne with our breakfast. All nice touches and lovely memories.

However, we are now back at work, and on the run up to Christmas. I'm establishing a routine in my new job, and preparing to get started on my next personal project: the creation of a map of Sydney "underground", using the floor plans of all the interconnected shopping centres and arcades. If you spend a lot of time in the city, you work this out from personal experience, but for people who only visit occasionally all the convenient short cuts are a mystery. I've drawn enough maps for imaginary cities in FRP campaigns, I should be able to draw one for Sydney.

2011-05-22T10:52:00.003+10:00

Count down.....

Finally, after years of rumours and delays, June Hemmons Hiatt's "Principles of Knitting" will be reissued in November. It's available for preorder at Amazon, and at The Book Depository (and probably other places). TBD says there are 163 days to go, so I must mark my calendar.

Second hand copies of this revered work have traded at frankly absurd prices for years, if they are available at all - I've never even seen one. The existence of the book is like a cherished myth, passed from knitter to knitter in yarn shops and at craft fairs. Apparently the new edition is a complete rewrite, to cater for modern fibres. I hope it's worth the wait.

2011-05-20T21:33:00.001+10:00

So much to do, so little time....

I've had a busy few months, but this evening my wonderful husband is cooking dinner, and I have time enough to blog.

I have once again over committed myself. I have not yet completed the project to scan all my back numbers of Omni magazine (though the end is in sight), and despite that I took on another large project. I am editing (and designing) a book about the history of a Presbyterian church in Northern Ireland. I am also knitting, with yarn backed up waiting for the needles to be free so I can start the next project, trying to read several books at once, and trying to change jobs. I need more hours in the day, or days in the week.

The history book was an unexpected opportunity. I've been researching the history of my late father's family (family history - there's another sink hole for time), which is extraordinarily badly documented. In the course of dredging through the online resources, I stumbled across the First Donegore Presbyterian Church website. One of the church members kindly sent me their baptismal records: hundreds of pages of photographs of hand written records stretching back to 1806. As soon as I saw the first pages, I knew that I would have to do something to make the records more accessible: finding anything in them in their raw state would be extremely challenging. So I said "I'll get the whole lot converted to a spreadsheet", and they kindly sent me a draft of their church history as well. I had a look at the document, and it brought back fond memories of cataloging family history for the National Library of Australia: erratically formatted documents with amateur-hour illustrations and no indexes. We used to get scores of these things, under Legal Deposit requirements, and their sole virtue in my eyes was that I could catalogue half a dozen in an afternoon (the subject headings and Dewey numbers would be almost identical for every one, leaving only physical cataloguing, which isn't that time consuming) and keep my daily averages up. We aimed to complete 8 books a day: cataloguing takes a lot of time, and we were still doing hand written coding onto data entry sheets when I was at the NLA.

So I outsourced the baptismal records to Freelancer, and got stuck into the book itself. I've thoroughly enjoyed it - it is actually much more interesting than it sounds. Social history, about people rather than war or politics, has always interested me, and I hope that the lecturers who taught me history at university would approve of my efforts. I actually read Irish History in my third year, and I still have some of my text books, which has proved useful. We hope to publish in August.

Then there is knitting. I'm part way through an interesting cowl, and then I saw the Mr Fox stole in an issue of Yarn Forward. Even my husband, who is normally immune to knitting patterns, concedes that this one looks like fun. And I still have a bag of Noro yarn (and a pattern for same) from my Christmas trip. I need to knit faster.

And I need to change jobs. This is by mutual consent with my bosses. Things didn't go as we expected: while there is plenty of work, it is not work that I am particularly good at, so it is everyone's best interests that I move on. And now is the time: the amount of work out there is staggering! I've got a couple of interviews lined up next week, but as word of my availability spreads, I'm getting calls from people who I have worked with in the past who would like to work with me again. This is really nice: it is not that easy to explain what I do on a standard resume, but the people who are calling me have seen me at my best - what one former colleague was pleased to describe as "charging $2,000 a day to fix things you know nothing about". And that is essentially what I have done for many years. I have a career based on saying "OK, I'll have a look at it, come back in a couple of hours and I'll have something for you". I am "the third engineer": if two people have already tried to get something working and failed, I'll come out and fix whatever it is. This not because I know a huge amount about anything - it's because I know a bit about everything, and I'm prepared to take calculated risks.

So I have opportunities with a couple of systems integrators and couple of top tier vendors, and more coming in. Every time I get a call I have to re-evaluate what I want to do next : interesting work versus commute problems versus financial stability versus employer stability etc. Interesting times.....

2011-01-26T17:52:00.004+11:00

Audrey Blooms

Audrey bloomed last night.

Here she is at about 6:45PM

And about 9PM:

The flower has gone a bit limp now, though may open again tonight. The flowers are usually not as good on the second evening.

2011-01-23T18:15:00.003+11:00

Audrey's Progress

It's been seven days since I took a picture of Audrey. Here she is this evening:

Quite a change for seven days. Here's a shot with a ruler, so you can get some idea of the size of the bud:

Getting a well-focused picture is proving to be tricky, because the garden is fairly breezy - we are near the top of a hill - and I have to wait for a calm moment in order to get a shot where Audrey isn't jigging about. An additional challenge, revealed by the telephoto lens, is the ambient cat hair in the environment. My first shots this evening were compromised by the presence of white cat fluff, courtesy of Percy (AKA Fernslayer).

2011-01-16T19:25:00.005+11:00

Meet Audrey

So this is Audrey

Audrey lives in my back garden

That's her, in the pot. And she is just gearing up to flower. Over the next few weeks, that small bud will get much larger - and if we are lucky there will be more than one. Last year, Audrey produced three flowers, each lasting only one single night. I'm planning to take pictures several times each week, and hopefully get multiple pictures on the critical "flowering night".

Audrey is the product of my mother's dreadful habit of souveniring cuttings out of other people's gardens (I just cringe, and pretend that she is nothing to do with me). When she first handed me the rather unprepossessing bit of stalk and leaf, I had my doubts. It didn't look like anything that I wanted to cultivate, and my gardener said "stick it in a pot: then if you don't like it, it's easy to get rid of it". The plant still doesn't look like much: it's primitive and rather straggly. But the flowers are worth the effort.

2010-11-30T14:30:00.005+11:00

What is this?

I took this picture through the window of a plane, flying from Japan to London in March 2004.

I'm guessing that we were somewhere over east Russia.

Update: I asked Reddit, and the answer is: a river with Oxbow lakes. What we call a billabong in Australia. Thanks to utexaspunk for providing the answer.

2010-11-22T06:05:00.001+11:00

Drip feed network

Did you ever here the old saying "the cobbler's wife goes barefoot and the doctor's wife dies young"? Well in my house, the person who gives other people advice on keeping their infrastructure up to date has failed to keep her own infrastructure up to date. Specifically, I have failed to maintain our household internet connection in line with our usage. As a consequence, we are on rationed internet usage for the rest of this month.

I blame Steve Jobs for this, because I am pretty certain that it was downloads from iTunes that maxed out our quota, though it is not entirely his fault. Our current (note that word) ISP is Optus, the local minion of the larger Singtel group. Some time in 2002 I had an Optus cable modem installed, and the data plan in place today is what Optus is pleased to call 'Unlimited Pro'. This plan is in no way, shape, or form unlimited: what it actually provides is 20GB per month of peak hours data, and 20GB per month off peak (where peak is noon to midnight). When it first went in, this was fine: the service was fast, and the possibility of an iTunes store in Australia was but a glint in the Jobsian eye - and I didn't even have a Mac in 2002. However, the years have passed, Mac have proliferated all over my house, there is an Apple TV in my family room, my husband (who is still in thrall to Microsoft) has also discovered iTunes, and online gaming and online shopping, and our data usage has gone through the roof. Meanwhile, more people are now using the Optus cable service, and on some days it is so slow that it is next to unusable. What I think happened in this instance is that one of us (probably me) kicked off a download from iTunes in the off peak period, and it took so long to complete that it slid into the peak period. So I checked our usage last week, and discovered that we have less than 1GB of peak data left between now and the end of November. If we use more than that, Optus throttles our link to 64kbps for the rest of the month. We have experienced this before, and it is not fun.

And I can't upgrade the plan - this is the best that Optus can offer - and I can't just give them money to make the problem go away.

So right now, we have Internet access in the mornings - we still have plenty of off peak data available. In addition, I have bought a Pocket Wifi from Vodaphone: it came with 3GB of data, and it works beautifully, so I can get online in the afternoon if I really need to do so, and of course I have my iPad and its 3G connection. And I am taking steps to get rid of Optus, and to replace them with an ISP who offers more flexible data plans. My choice is iiNet, and I'm hoping that they live up to their reputation for competence and good customer service. The first thing I need is a new standard phone line: that is supposed to be installed tomorrow.

I had intended to deal with this earlier. I had actually ordered a new firewall - which is now languishing on the dining room table, because I don't want to waste our limited bandwidth setting it up. I just didn't act quickly enough.

Still, I wasted less time on random browsing this weekend.

2010-11-01T15:59:00.001+11:00

The Other Project

I've had some complaints lately about the infrequency of updates. I know things have been a bit quiet, and this is because I have been working on something else. In fact, on a completely different web site.

Do you remember Omni Magazine? It was published between 1978 and 1995 - so you have to be of a certain age to have encountered it - and it featured wonderful artwork, groundbreaking fiction and a rather variable level of commentary and reporting. Quite serious science reporting was intermingled with hilarious nonsense and crack pot theories. Viewed today, it provides an interesting commentary on a period in history - there are far more tobacco ads than you would see in any current American publication . You can trace the diamond industry's carefully orchestrated campaign to convince people that two month's salary is a reasonable amount to spend on an engagement ring. There was a wonderful series of ads from the International Paper Company, called "The Power of the Printed Word", each ad a two page spread on a subject such as "How to read faster" or "How to use a library". The fiction published in Omni included William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic", Harlan Ellison's "Mefisto in Onyx" and stories by Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card and many, many other notable authors.

I don't recall when I first encountered Omni - I know that I bought it regularly for much of its life, because many the copies I have still have the newsagent's reservation stickers on them, the early ones with my maiden name written on them, the later ones with my married name. However, some numbers I acquired second hand, to fill the gaps: all the early numbers seem to have come from a university fund raising book fair.

I have a full set now (I filled the last few gaps from eBay), but the paper is beginning to degrade. The company that originally published Omni is long gone, and whatever copyright still exists appears to reside with either the original authors of the material, or with Friendfinder Networks. I can't envision any way in which Omni could be reprinted, so eventually it will probably disappear. This seems a pity: if some entity like Zinio could get the rights, they could reissue Omni to an enthusiastic audience. Omni has many fan sites, and its own Facebook page. But I don't see this happening, because of the copyright issues involved. So a friend and I are scanning the whole lot, as well as we can, so at least there will be a soft copy that we can refer to when the paper copies become unreadable.

Scanning magazines is time consuming, and as a side activity, I am developing a comprehensive index. The fiction component has been indexed in the past, but not the whole contents. If you check the Facebook page, you will find many people who can remember something that they believe that they read in Omni, and which they want to find again. Searching 200 issues is impractical, and lot of requests could be satisfied by a decent index. However, manual indexing is labour intensive, and I'm being hampered by the fact that some of the artwork is not credited. So a lot of my free time has been going into scanning, indexing, and creating a web site where I can store the basic tables of contents and author indices. The detailed content indices will take months to complete (an issue takes about 3 or 4 hours to completely index). If you want to have a look at what has been done so far, the site is The Complete Index of Omni Magazine.

2010-10-31T14:49:00.001+11:00

Vendor Swag

Last week I had the pleasure of spending two days at VMware's vForum 2010 at Darling Harbour. It was a great event, particularly since I was there as a conference attendee, and not as a company representative. If you have never had to man a booth at a trade show, let me assure you that is very hard work. You try staying on your feet for two days, while being upbeat no matter who you have to deal with, and see how you feel.

I met a huge number of old friends, which is always fun: you get to compare career paths, and since I changed jobs last May, a lot of people were keen to know where I had moved to and why. And the catering was excellent.

However, right now all the "stuff" that I was given to me by various vendors in the course of the event is stacked on my dining room table, and looking through it makes me question the sanity of some company's marketing departments. So what did I get?

First, from the conference itself, a shoulder bag. Nominally a laptop bag, and it would do in a pinch. I used it yesterday to carry my camera and accessories to the city, to shop for a new camera bag. Today, it's on it's way to the attic to join all the other spare bags in the house. I may never use it again, so as brand name placement it's a bit of a dud.

A coffee mug. I have coffee mugs from companies that don't even exist any more. They get used either when I have tradesmen on site, and need to provide hot drinks; or for large social gatherings, when I don't have enough cups. The only vendor mugs that I use regularly are some steel ones that APC gave me a few years ago: they are really nice, and I'm happy to put them on the table. The new one is a mundane white china thing with a logo: it's going into storage in the attic.

A squashy foam ball. Unremarkable, but it will wind up on my desk in my customer-site office, because if you are a naturally fidgety person (such as me) you need things to fidget with while you are thinking.

An object made of a similar squashy foam, and intended to represent a telephone - the office type, with many buttons. Of the vendor who gave me this I can only ask "why"? What were you thinking when you ordered this stupid thing to be printed with your logo? What do you expect the recipient to do with it? I'm either going to chuck it in the toy box that I keep for visiting children, or add it to the pile of missiles that I keep handy to throw at Percy when he is clawing the rug or biting Mungo.

Pad of sticky notes, printed with logo. Always useful, and will go to my main office.

Quite a decent pen, but I have scores of vendor pens: my Mum will probably get this one, since she does a lot of crosswords and loses pens regularly.

A screw-top "test tube" full of red jelly beans. This could have worked, but it doesn't have a logo on it at all. The tube will probably end up in my knitting bag - it looks to be the right size to hold buttons and small tools.

A key ring, the fob of which combines a tape measure and a flash light. I wouldn't use this as a key ring, it's too bulky, but a tape measure is always handy in the office, and a flash light can be very handy in a data centre - some of them are quite dimly lit. I recall once, working in El Segundo, and having to go to the nearest Fry's to buy a flash light, so that we could read the asset tags on the equipment.

A 4GB USB flash drive. Always useful, but this one has a cap that is going to get lost easily, and the rep who gave it to me told me that his marketing people had only provided a couple of hundred (this for a conference attended by 4,000 people), because they cost $20 each. You must be kidding me! A 4GB flash drive, even with three colour logo printing, should not cost more than $15, and half that for larger quantities.

A box of three Lindt chocolates. Nice, but again, there is no logo (other than Lindt's). I don't even recall which vendor gave me this.

A collapsible "frisbee" type flying disk. These always go down well with the folks on the help desk.

The purpose of this type of marketing material is both to lure the prospective customer to your stand for a conversation, and to keep your name before their eyes for days, weeks, and if you are lucky, months to come. Given the amount of money that is spent on conference give aways, I'm astounded at how poorly they are targeted.

2010-10-26T19:30:00.003+11:00

The iPad, 5 months on

It's now late October, and the iPad has been part of my daily life for almost exactly 5 months. It has turned out to be a perfect fit for me, for a number of reasons:

I work as a consultant, and I spend a lot of time on the premises of large banks. Banks, quite justifiably, will not allow wandering consultants to plug just any old laptop into the corporate LAN. In fact, the bank where I am working at the moment has kindly issued me with a corporate IBM ThinkPad, running the bank's preferred standard operating environment. Unfortunately, their SOE is based on Windows XP and IE6, which is like being summarily dumped back into the last century. One of the (many) reasons that Microsoft has no hope of ever being "cool" is that for a large number of people, their daily experience of Microsoft is not Windows 7, or even Vista: it is Windows XP, and it is old hat. The bank also (quite reasonably) blocks access to some website from within the corporate LAN - for example, Dropbox. However, my iPad does not need to connect to the bank's network, and I can use it to access anything that I need, without hindrance.

I have acquired a few new apps since I first acquired my iPad: Quickoffice, Zinio, Nebulous Notes, Airsketch, Flipboard, Wordflick HD, the Google mobile app and Soulver. All of these are good, solid apps.

However, considering what I use most frequently, I would have to say the following, in no particular order:

The built-in mail app

Atomic Web browser

Zinio

Goodreader

Soulver

Pages

Instapaper

1Password

Dropbox

Evernote

Amazon Kindle

CSV Touch

I do use all the other apps that I have installed, but not as consistently. I take meeting notes directly into Pages. I use Goodreader constantly, to read and manage files. Evernote is installed on every device that I use regularly, as is Dropbox, and I cannot imagine life without either of them. The Atomic Web browser, particularly when combined with Safari Online (see previous post), has simplified my life enormously, because I now have ready access to technical manuals whenever I need them, without have to purchase the physical books. By my reckoning this has already saved me more that the cost of the Safari subscription already, and it has also saved me from buying several books that were not as good as their initial, optimistic, reviews. Instapaper, Zinio and Flipboard always give me something to read, so that queuing time is never wasted.

I took the iPad to Melbourne last month (a brief holiday, to celebrate a wedding anniversary), and it was so much easier than lugging a laptop. I spent today at a conference (vForum 2010), and the iPad didn't weigh down my shoulder bag, but it did do everything I needed. Anyone releasing a device in this category will have to go a long way to surpass the iPad.

2010-09-07T19:51:00.001+10:00

How do we remember things?

In the mid to late 1990's I had a job that required me to work most of the time on a help desk. Generally I provided second and third level support for technology resellers and integrators, with the occasional exception where I would actually have to speak to an end user. And from time to time I would stand down from the help desk, and go and work for my employer's training department. During these periods I would generally teach for two straight weeks, starting with the general introduction to Unix, and moving on through Unix system administration, TCP/IP, serial communications and shell programming. Two weeks was enough to do the full cycle, and I quite enjoyed teaching. According to my class feedback forms, I was pretty good at it. And there is nothing like teaching a subject to really clarify it in your own mind. I knew my subjects, knew them well. All those obscure Unix command line arguments, the vi editor, the tips and tricks that make all the difference between coping with an operating system and actually managing it were second nature to me.

Years passed (cue falling calendar pages or whatever), and I moved into consulting and then into presales. I dallied with other operating systems. I learned other technologies. And somewhere along the way, I began to forget my old skills.

I've now gone back to consulting (rather joyfully, I don't think I have any great talent for presales work), and a few months ago I began to learn Python. Python is rather a fun language, and I needed to learn it to satisfy the requirements of a customer. I got that job done, having learned enough Python to perform the task at hand but not much more. So I looked around for something else that needed coding: I can't learn a language unless I have something to do with it. Working through the exercises in books bores me to tears: I need a practical task to which the language can be applied.

I found a suitable task fairly easily. A while back there was a reminiscent post on Boing Boing about the old Omni magazine. Now I have a complete collection of Omni, from 1978 to 1995, about 180 or 200 issues. I hadn't looked at them in years - they were in journal boxes in my non-fiction room (shown on the house plans as Bed 4, actually full of book shelves). So I dug them out and had a look. I had forgotten what fun they were. A bit of online research showed that many people recall Omni fondly - there is even a Facebook page - and that it has never been properly indexed. There is a fiction index, but no comprehensive index of the whole thing. There have been some abortive attempts, which appear to have foundered because someone attempted to type every citation in manually, and got bored after the first half dozen issues.

Here's a job worth doing, and actually not that hard. I can scan the contents pages, put them through an OCR process and then write some scripts to reorganize and reformat the output, and to construct an index. Ideal for extending my Python knowledge, and good practice at getting back to the command line, a place that I haven’t spent much time recently.

Now anyone who has ever made much use of OCR knows that it is far from perfect. Particularly on old or degraded print, the recognition can be spotty, to say the least. So as each chunk of text is rendered, I open it up in vi and do some basic cleanup manually. The first few times that I did this, I struggled: I couldn't remember the vi commands to get things done quickly. I was actually trying to learn Python, so I didn't want to have to keep stopping and looking up the vi MAN pages. And then, quite suddenly, it all began to come back. But it wasn't as if I had remembered the keystrokes that I needed - it was if my fingers had remembered. Quite strange. Once I'd entered a command, my brain could analyse it and go "oh yes, I remember that syntax now, and it works like this". Since vi has a very regular command structure, once I got a few commands back into my brain, I could get most of the rest by extrapolation.

There is a scene in Robert Heinlein's novel "I will fear no evil" (if you've never read it, synopsis: extremely wealthy elderly man - Johann Smith - arranges to have his brain transplanted into a donor body. He recovers consciousness to discover that not only has the operation worked, but that previous occupant of the body has not entirely moved out, and furthermore was female -Eunice Branca), in which Johann Smith attempts to play the piano, a skill that he used to have. He can't do it, his new body won't cooperate. Then the "ghost" of Eunice takes over and operates a complicated piece of office machinery that Johann has never used. It works perfectly, because as Eunice says "the body remembers".

I've heard similar things from someone I know who had to learn to walk again after suffering brain damage. His brain knew how to walk, but his body had to relearn the skill (which his said was astonishingly difficult, for something that we take so much for granted).

Anyway, my fingers seems to have remembered all the vi short cuts that my brain forgot, and the Omni index is progressing nicely. I have it on line over here, if you want a look, and I'm hoping for some help with the proof reading.

2010-07-31T17:40:00.001+10:00

My Latest Apple Gadget....

Is not an iPhone 4. I walked down George Street yesterday, and there were literally hundreds of people queuing outside the Apple store, and more large crowds outside each of the various telco outlets between my car park and my office. Some of those people must have spent most of the day queuing. Good lord, some of them had set up camp on Thursday, with sleeping bags and chairs! Don't they have jobs? How on earth does someone with nothing better to do with their time than wait in the street to buy a mobile phone afford a mobile phone in the first place?

Any way, I have already have mobile phone, an iPhone 3G, which is running iOS 4.0.1 perfectly well (perhaps the display of SMS messages is a shade slower since the upgrade, but I have had no other issues/crashes/complaints, and I completely fail to understand all the gum flapping in the press about "iOS 4 rendering iPhone 3G's unusable". Poppycock, etc.). I'm sticking with my existing iPhone until (a) the furor dies down, and I can just walk into a store a get an iPhone 4 without having to queue; and (b) I have enough time to deal with changing phones and telcos (note to Optus: you're dumped). Yes, I know that iTunes will sync all my data and apps from the old phone to the new phone, but I'll still have to negotiating getting off Optus and onto Telstra (my current employer's preferred supplier) without losing my existing mobile number, and then I have to get the new phone re-paired with my car and blue tooth headset, and established as a sync client for various apps. No, it is not going to be a five minute job, and I have a proof of concept kicking off next week, and several other streams of activity that need my attention for at least two weeks. So later for the iPhone upgrade.

The new gadget is one that I bought on Thursday (when it was still safe to go into the Apple store): the new Apple Magic Trackpad.

First, I hate the name. Someone in Apple's marketing department has "magic" on the brain at the moment. Perchance too much exposure to Disney children's classics has induced some sort of overload in the fairy dust department? Whatever, the device itself is really working for me. I've hardly touched a mouse since I got it (well, them actually, there's one in my office as well), which is good, because I still have this wretched tendonitis in my right arm, and using a mouse isn't good for tendonitis. The action of using the Trackpad is quite different, because you don't have to "hold" anything. Just holding a mouse causes the muscles in your arm to tense slightly, and moving the mouse works both muscles and tendons quite a lot. Using the Trackpad requires much less movement, and it's a different movement to mouse movement. Yesterday was a completely mouse-free day, and my arm was better for it.

The Trackpad (I refuse to using the 'M' word) does take a little getting used to, but I've adjusted quite quickly. The only thing that I've had trouble with it is using the Marquee tool in Photoshop for large selections; a Wacom tablet will still be better in Photoshop, no question. Everything else - scrolling, clicking, right clicking, dragging - works perfectly. I do have to be careful not to rest my fingers against the pad by accident, because it does interpret a very light touch as a direct order, and does it's level best to act on that order. The result is usually annoying.

Right now, and until I can get the tendonitis fixed, this Trackpad is the perfect pointing device for me. I think I may find it difficult to go back to a mouse in the long run.

2010-07-25T16:40:00.001+10:00

Pictures for the DIY iPad Stylus

My apologies for the delay in getting these pictures up: actually taking the pictures turned out to be trickier than I had expected, and in the end I had to borrow the portable photo booth that my husband uses to take pictures of his model tanks (thank you, darling!).

However, here we are:

Get your piece of conductive foam:

And your Q-tip:

And your mechanical pencil:

Trim the Q-tip stem:

Glue the foam to the end of the plastic tube, and trim to shape:

Insert into jaws of mechanical pencil, and you're done:

I've managed to get hold of some Sugru, and I want to see if I can improve on this stylus by capping the end of the tube with a blob of Sugru before adding the foam. If that works, I'll post about it.

2010-06-20T21:14:00.001+10:00

Living with the iPad

I've had my iPad for 3 weeks now, and I'm using it more every day.

For taking notes in meetings, including diagrams, it is perfect. I can use OmniGraffle, of if I just want to sketch freehand, Adobe Ideas (which is free) works beautifully. I have made myself a basic stylus (see note for instructions), simply because it feels more natural to draw with something pen shaped, and there is no practical difference that I can detect in drawing on the iPad and drawing on paper, at least in terms of output. And I don't need to haul a laptop around with me - the iPad slips neatly into my handbag, and when I need it, it's on instantaneously.

For the first time in my life, I see a reason to have a subscription to the Safari Online book service. I can read a book as easily on the iPad as I can on paper, and for technical books, Safari is great. I have a lot of hard copy books that I have had to buy in the past, and in many cases I have read less than half the content before I have learned what I needed, after which the book has gone onto my already overloaded shelves. Now I can "rent" a book from Safari, read the bit I need, and not have the trouble and waste of storing the volume afterwards. A Safari subscription costs less than 3 average technical manuals, while giving me access to thousands.

To make this work gracefully, you need the Atomic Web Browser for iPad, which can identify itself to a server as anything from Mobile Safari to Firefox 3 (even IE6, should you be so inclined, though if you are, you probably need help). If you try to use the Safari mobile service using the built-in Apple Safari web browser (now isn't that confusing, guess no one got the trademark on the word "safari"), you will get frequent and annoying interruptions from O'Reilly, protecting their content by making you complete Captchas every few minutes. I wouldn't mind one now and then, but every three screens is excessive. Atomic fakes them out neatly, and this pointless nonsense goes away. O'Reilly folks: get over it, and move on.

In fact, I've written this post on my iPad, while sitting in my favourite easy chair and not at my desk. This is a double blessing, because I have a serious case of tendonitis in my right elbow, and I'm not supposed to use a mouse at the moment. An iPad is tendonitis friendly, which is an enormous help right now. If you have never had "tennis elbow", be grateful: it hurts, a lot.

I have not, so far, lamented the absence of a USB port, or any other sort of port. I have Dropbox, Google Docs, email and as a last resort, cable-based sync. File transfer is not a problem.

The only thing with which I am not entirely happy is Apple's iPad case. I don't mind the design itself: it is light weight, robust and practical. But it shows scuffs. I've had to go over it vigorously with a stiff clothes brush, to return the surface to a tidy condition. However, I can find no other case that I prefer, so I will stick with it for now.

Note: how to make a stylus. First, find, an old-style mechanical drafting pencil, the kind that takes a 2mm lead. Make sure that it has a metal finger grip. I'm using a Staedtler Mars Technico, which you can get from any decent art shop (try Eckersleys, if you are in Sydney). Get a piece of conductive foam (Jaycar, about $AU10 for far more than you need) and a piece of fine plastic tubing. I am using the tubing out of a Swisspers cosmetic applicator, try the pharmacy, or if your significant other is female, ask her. What you are about to do will not damage the pencil in any way.

Take your piece of foam, and cut a slice about 2cm long and about 1cm wide. Make a pin hole in it, and then work your piece plastic tube in about 0.5 cm. Put a small drop of some convenient, thin, fast drying glue to the end of the plastic tube, and push it into the foam. Wait (do email or something) while it dries. Cut the plastic tubing so that there is about 0.7cm or less of exposed tubing sticking out of the foam, and insert that into the lead holder. The conductive foam must touch the metal finger grip for this to work. Trim the end of the foam with scissors, to achieve a shape that works for you, but which does not expose the tubing. You are done now. Hold the pencil barrel so that your fingers touch the metal grip. Your stylus will now conduct the tiny current needed, and it will work on the iPad.

2010-05-30T17:40:00.001+10:00

What can I do with my iPad?

Sydney finally got the iPad on Friday May 28th. I will omit here any description of media beat ups, long queues of people standing in the rain, etc. Suffice it to say that I am surprised that neither Apple's website nor their chosen courier company's website melted down under the onslaught of frenzied geeks repeatedly refreshing their screens in an effort to work out when they would receive their iPads. I got mine just on 10AM, and after a check to see that it was OK, and a chance for my co-workers to have a look at it too, I stuck in my brief case and got on with my work.

I've spent most of my free time on the weekend installing apps, setting things up to suit my proposed work flow and syncing data. Apps that I have installed are:

CSV Touch
Do androids dream of electric sheep: Dust to Dust #1
Dropbox
Evernote
Goodreader for iPad
iBooks
Instapaper Pro
1Password Pro
Numbers
OmniFocus
OmniGraffle
Pages
Penultimate
Sudoku HD for iPad
The elements for iPad
Weatherzone
WIRED Magazine

And I have configured Contacts, Mail and Maps, loaded some music and photos and arranged things to suit myself.

From the iPad I can now access my email and contacts (built in apps) and my to do list (OmniFocus). I can use Pages for word processing, and OmniGraffle for diagrams, so:

Which is perfectly satisfactory for capturing something that a customer is describing to me, and will be even better when I take the time to read the OmniGraffle manual.

Penultimate looks OK, but I think I am going to need to investigate a stylus to get good results with it. And it will never compensate for the simple fact that I can't draw (sigh). I think I am likely to use Pages for taking meeting notes - I don't find the on-screen keyboard a problem, probably because (a) I'm a girl, my hands are a bit smaller; and (b) I've spent years typing on various portable Palm Pilot keyboards, until my last Palm (LifeDrive) refused to hold a charge any longer.

Dropbox, Evernote and 1Password Pro I use constantly, and I'm pleased to see that they work well on the iPad. Goodreader promises to be a real boon: I've already synced half a dozen large manuals in PDF format.

iBooks will probably be more useful when the local iBooks store launches properly. Instapaper Pro is even nicer on the iPad than it is on the iPhone (if you haven't tried this app, I do recommend it).

"The Elements" is just amazing, and I'm sure I shall read all of it, which may fill some gaps in my rather patchy education.

Sudoku HD works well, but could use an option to clear a game and start over.

"Do androids dream" and WIRED are exactly what I hoped to see: the future of publishing, slick, attractive and clever. Other publications, please take note.

CSV Touch is a little flaky, and the dev is looking into the problem.

So tomorrow the iPad goes to work with me, and I find out if if can replace a paper notebook. I rather think it can, and it is going to save me many hours (and the world many trees). The iPad is lighter than my Eee PC, and does more.

Verdict: A++

2010-05-20T17:46:00.001+10:00

Between jobs

I left Alphawest on Tuesday, and I must say it was a wrench. It's the first time I have ever left a job that I really didn't want to leave. On almost all previous occasions I have left my old job because I could not stand it any more: either the work or the management was driving me to distraction, usually both. A couple of moves have simply been about money, but usually I've moved to avoid impossible workloads and delusional managers. Leaving a job where the work was fine and where I liked and respected my boss is a first. However, as stated previously, I'm not prepared to spend hours in commute time, and I know that many of my former colleagues feel the same. So it was not so much a case of leaving the team as of getting out before the rush for the exits starts.

I usually don't get much of a break between jobs - sometime no more than a weekend - but this time I got three whole days. I intended to use the time to square away some domestic matters, so that I have a fairly clear first month, with the minimum of external interruptions. However, the people making my bedroom furniture are running about 3 weeks behind schedule, due to some problem with getting wood of the correct type and quality. And the people making shutters for my kitchen hatchway have had some sort of accident with a glass panel during the glass toughening process, and they are having to remake the panel. I am guessing that both parties will declare themselves "ready" next week, when I am too busy to deal with them.

And I'm looking forward to starting work, because the eerie quiet of "not working" unsettles me. The first time that I really noticed this effect was when I left Sun Professional Services in 2005. I quit, and suddenly the torrent of email that I dealt with normally dried to a trickle. Instead of opening my inbox every morning to see 50 or 60 new messages, 75% of which were important enough to require a response, I'd open my inbox to see 5 or 6 messages, of which perhaps 1 would merit attention. It was the sense of connectedness that I missed, and I was surprised at just how much I missed it. No other job has ever produced quite that volume of email for me, probably because Sun is the only major multinational that I have worked for since email became really commonplace. If you work for a company which really has a global presence, someone, somewhere, is likely to be generating work for you 24 hours a day.

What I am missing this time is the constant ping and buzz of my iPhone. This is the first job where I have had a smart phone connected to the company email system, bringing the background noise of email and meeting invitation sound effects to my side all day long. When I deleted my Exchange account from my iPhone, things went quiet. It feels strange.

I've synced the iPhone to TestLogistics' Google Apps mail and calendar, but until I start on Monday, there is not going to be much traffic. Most of the email that I am getting at the moment is either routine vendor spam, or from recruiters who don't realise that it is too late to offer me yet another "unique position".

2010-05-09T17:32:00.001+10:00

Endings and Beginnings

Tomorrow is the beginning of my last full week with Alphawest - I'm working up until the 18th, a Tuesday. Soon will come the "last" events, the last Monday, the last team meeting, the last lunch from my favourite local salad bar. I've already removed a lot of my personal effects from my cubical - some stuff transferred to my new office, some to my home. I already have my new business cards, and I'm aiming to hit the ground running. Happily TestLogistics (my new employer) is not in thrall to Microsoft, and they do not use Exchange: they use Google's commercial mail offering, which means that I can use any mail client I choose. In fact, no one is going to enforce a Standard Operating Environment, or expect me to comply with one. The great advantage of working with a team almost all of whom are "technical" is that there is an expectation that we can all take care of our own environments in a responsible manner.

This doesn't work in larger companies, because as soon as you have a significant contingent of clerical staff, you need to take steps to prevent them bringing malware inside the perimeter, unless you can prevent them using Microsoft products, and those seem to be the default choice for most companies. I can't think why - Microsoft makes ugly, expensive software, every bit of which can be replaced with something cheaper if you just bother to check the options. IT managers protest that using Microsoft is cheaper, while they pay exorbitant licensing costs, and waste hours of staff overtime patching, fixing things that patching broke, and dealing with outbreaks of malware. What they really mean is "the Microsoft certification exam was easy, and managing this stuff gives me a job for life".

I plan to enjoy the freedom to select my own tools to enable me to work more efficiently. I've set up OmniFocus for task management - I live by my to do list these days - and I hope to reduce Windows to something that I only need to run Visio. And only I plan to use that when a customer insists - Omnigraffle should meet my day to day diagramming needs. The thought of a working environment that is not bogged down with Managesoft, Active Directory, and never ending antivirus scanning routines is very appealing.

Roll on the 18th

2010-04-24T18:00:00.003+10:00

Moving on

It is amazing what changes the passing of a few days can bring. When I went to work on April 12th I little thought that I would be looking for a new job by the end of the day, or that I would be resigning from my old job in less than two weeks.

On April 12th we were assembled for a "company update" and informed that our office was being moved from the current Sydney CBD location to an unspecified building in Macquarie Park. The news was greeted with something less than enthusiasm - in fact it went down like the proverbial lead balloon - and I went home, did a fast update on my resume, and sent it to a couple of recruiters.

If you have ever spent much time in Sydney, the problem with the proposed office relocation will be obvious, but if you haven't, it goes like this. The Sydney central business district is at the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Macquarie Park is well north of the bridge. The bridge is a major traffic bottle neck on good days. On bad days, it's a car park. I used to work in North Sydney (just north of the bridge) when I worked for Sun, and when I quit that job I vowed that in the future I would avoid any position that required me to commute across the Harbour Bridge. I am just not prepared to waste hours every week stuck in traffic. Forget public transport: the New South Wales state governments for the last few decades have completely failed to provide Sydney with anything even vaguely resembling efficient public transport. This has nothing to do with politics, just the fact that our state governments tend to talk a lot about infrastructure, but they deliver next to nothing. A sane person might well question why the hell we have state governments: they seem to be an expensive but quite impractical luxury. We also have local and federal governments, so why the useless layer of state-based parasites? However, I digress.

When I first heard rumours that we might be relocated I did the necessary analysis - which took about 5 seconds - and I had already made up my mind that I was not going to work at Macquarie Park. I have to go up there occasionally to work on the Optus campus, and I already know how horrible it is. So I sent out my resume, did a couple of interviews, and I got a letter of offer on Thursday. I resigned yesterday morning, and I have received a stream of emails, phone calls and LinkedIn comments from colleagues past and present, friends and vendor representatives, variously protesting my decision, congratulating me on the new job, or asking "can I come too?". I imagine that there will be more next week, when people get back to work after the Anzac Day long weekend.

My new employer will be TestLogistics, and several of my former colleagues from Sun already work there, so it should be fun. It's a small company, unburdened by excessive bureaucracy (no one has asked for my resume, and I've seen no sign of an HR department). They try only to hire people that someone already in the company knows and recommends; and they believe that, if they hire clever people, then they can solve anything. I'm honoured by their faith in me.

What the job actually is, at a detailed level, I'll find out on May 24th.

2010-04-20T19:12:00.000+10:00

New desk

My new desk has been delivered, fresh from the workshop of John Gallagher from Piece Furniture. The new desk replaces an ancient table and a couple of small. cheap computer desks, which made the rather small room extremely cluttered. John took my original design (done in Google Sketchup):

And added a slide out shelf on the right for my scanner and other small devices. The result:

I've spent half the weekend rearranging things and getting the cabling right. Because the room is so small, I can't take a really good picture, but take my word for it: this is a great desk. John has done his usual sensational job - he has made several cupboards for me in the past - and just walking into my study is a pleasure now.

2010-03-21T12:15:00.001+11:00

Who designs hotel rooms?

In the second week of March we went down to Canberra to see the Masterpieces from Paris art exhibition, which was stupendous, but thank goodness I managed to get early access tickets, or we would have had to wait for hours to get in (think queues of people stretching out into the street and down the road). We stayed in the Hotel Realm, which is possibly the quietest hotel I have ever stayed in in my life - I usually have trouble sleeping in hotels, because every little noise wakes me - but the Realm was virtually silent despite the fact that there was a wedding on in the hotel. The room was nice, the staff we dealt with were pleasant, and the Konoba restaurant served us a great dinner. I would definitely stay at the Realm again.

However, there was one failing, and it is a failing that is common to almost every hotel I have ever stayed in, in any country: no mirror suitable for applying makeup.

Not that there were no mirrors - there were several - but a make up mirror needs to be appropriately lit and you need to be able to get really close to it if you are trying to apply mascara with confidence. Or pluck your eyebrows (if you have never plucked your own eyebrows, take my word on this one: you need a very clear and close view if you don't want to wind up looking weird).

I have lost track of the number of hotels I have stayed in over the the years: they have ranged from ghastly little shoe boxes in London, through to an extremely nasty place outside Boston which reminded me of a rabbit hutch. I 've stayed in serviced apartments in Los Angeles and boutique hotels in Hobart. There was the place in Columbia , Maryland, where the hotel restaurant played the same Harry Connick CD every night that I was there, and the food was so horrible that my German colleagues relocated to another hotel; there they found that the food was just as bad, and they finally believed the rest of us (a group of Sun employees, there for a two week training course) when we said that what they were experiencing was normal American food. I dealt with it in my usual way, back having the hotel driver take me somewhere that I could buy fresh fruit and basic supplies.

There was the place that I stayed during a conference in New Orleans, where all delegates were given a map of the surrounding area and told not to stray from the marked zones unless we wanted to be mugged. There was the Hilton where Steve and I stayed in Perth (Western Australia, not Scotland) , where the interior decorator had perhaps been given too free a hand:

I've no idea what impression or message was supposed to conveyed by these objects. The room was clean and pleasant, but it would have been improved considerably by removing the tasteless tat on the walls.

Then there was the Sebel in Melbourne, which seemed to have become confused about whether it was a hotel or a bridal reception centre: the restaurant appeared to be permanently reserved for wedding receptions, and on the one occasion when I managed to get a drink at the bar, I was served a martini with a straw in it. My advice on that establishment is to avoid it like the plague: the bathroom looked grubby, the service was careless and there are many better hotels in Melbourne.

Of all these and dozens of others, exactly one had a proper make up mirror: the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, on Maui, where we stayed in 2002. If you go to their photo tour page, and look at the Guest bathroom picture under the Accommodation tab, you will see what I mean. An illuminated make up/shaving mirror on an extendable arm.

Now I will concede that the Ritz-Carlton is a very expensive hotel - I didn't pay to stay there, the trip was an all expenses paid prize, for winning an award from my then-employer, Sun Microsystems. But surely it should be possible for any hotel room to have one mirror which is reasonably well lit, and which a person can get close to - a mirror behind the vanity unit is too far away. I now carry a small, magnifying mirror with its own build in LED and little suction cups on the back when I travel. I can usually stick this somewhere reasonably convenient - often the shower screen - so that I can see what I am doing. But I can’t be the only woman who has this problem, and surely there are women working in hotel room design who must wear mascara themselves - have they never looked at a hotel bathroom and thought "how would I manage my normal grooming routine in this facility?"

2010-01-09T18:52:00.000+11:00

The litter is too deep

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I work on the principal that if something needs doing, it should be started promptly. However, this year a resolution has sort of crept up on me, as follows.

One of my tasks over the holiday break was to tidy up my study, and I did make a start, but there is a long way to go. Now my study is not a big room - it's actually rather small, and resembles pretty much what Rands in Repose calls a Nerd Cave. My cave is green, not red, but otherwise, pretty similar. One wall is fitted bookshelves with cupboards underneath. One wall is mostly windows (heavily curtained against the afternoon sun). One wall is my desk and a small unit which holds my scanner and printer. One wall is almost entirely filled with a set of bi-fold doors, and the last wall has a large Ikea drawer unit on wheels, which is filled with a mix of craft materials and computer parts. Yes, five walls.

The trouble is that every surface is full, often full to over flowing. Books, journals, boxes of CDs, piles of paper, stray tools, odd cables and various knick knacks. Such as the foam Linux penguin, the Matchbox Mercedes car that my husband bought me while we were still courting, and stuff like that.

The books need to be weeded, and the stuff that I don't need frequently relocated to shelves upstairs. Tools and cables need to be sorted, and either stored in the attic or the garage. The CDs are mostly software, and mostly ancient, and mostly heading for the bin. The real problem is the paper. I have a bad habit of saving bits of paper: cuttings, recipes, cartoons, quotes, all things that I might want to refer to again. The trouble is, it would take me weeks to find the one I want, even if I remember that I have it. I have therefore decided that the entire collection has to be converted to digital format. I went through a great pile of yellowing newsprint over the new year break, and was delighted to find that many articles were still on line. What I couldn't find, I scanned. I'm dumping everything to EagleFiler databases, tagging as I go. I think our paper recycling bin will be overloaded next week, and there is still a very long way to go, but it is getting better.

I've also had a mammoth business card scanning session, and every last business card that has been lying around on a desk either at home or in the office is now in the address book on my Mac, nicely synced via MobileMe.

Cartoons have proved to be the greatest challenge. Do you remember the days before email? I do. Today, if someone comes across something funny, chances are that they email it to a few dozen friends. But in those long ago days, funny things circulated via fax machine. Person A would photocopy something amusing, and fax it to Person B, who would fax it to their friends, who would fax it to their friends, and so on and so on, the image losing quality each time it passed through a fax machine. Sometimes someone would get a pen and manually darken the images before sending it on to someone else, so you would get a combination of lossy transfer and amateur graphics.

Cartoons are hard to Google without some attribution information. I've found a few, where I could identify the cartoonist, but some are very old, and have zero citation data, so that I cannot find the originals. So I'm going to post a few here, and see if anyone can provide a reference, or an artist's name.

I've known cats like this.

The style is familiar, but I can't place this one.

OK, I have a low sense of humour.

Clues, anyone?

2009-12-31T17:45:00.000+11:00

Cat Update

For those who have expressed an interest in the health and happiness of my felines. Percy was OK with his stitches until about the 15th: then he started pulling on them, and we had to fit him with one of those plastic cones that attaches to a collar, and stops the wearer reaching his/her flanks. He put up with this with a better grace than I had expected, but he kept hanging up on things - door frames, chairs and such, when the edge of the cone turned out to be a bit wider than he had expected. However, he was pretty manoeuvrable, and even managed to jump the back fence with the cone on his head, in order to fertilise our neighbour's garden - he got back safely, and our neighbours don't mind him, fortunately.

We finally got the stitches out, and the cone off, on December 23rd. Percy is now a much happier cat, and life has gone back to normal. Mungo has also made a good recovery from his vet experience, and my credit cards will recover eventually.

2009-12-13T18:53:00.001+11:00

Four-footed Hostages to Fortune

In the 17th century Francis Bacon observed "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." (Essays, 1625). Well to that add pets. Once you have them, you have assumed a responsibility and all the associated costs.

Last week my cats, Mungo and Percy had their annual trip to the vet for a check up and their vaccinations. Mungo is 12 and Percy is 11, so they count as senior felines, and they need a bit of extra attention. However, Percy has had a benign cyst on his side for a couple of years, and the vet has drained this cyst in the past. Last year the cyst came back really quickly, and got much bigger, so last weekend the vet announced that both cats needed their teeth cleaned (no surprise there, I had had a look at their gums myself, and I thought they needed attention), and that Percy's cyst should be removed, lest it rupture and ulcerate.

So on Wednesday afternoon I hauled Mungo (10.85 kilos of ginger cat plus a 2 kilo carry cage) to the vet. I picked him up on Thursday afternoon, and dropped Percy off at the same time. I got Percy back on Friday afternoon. Both cats recovered well from the anaesthetic (thank goodness that anaesthesia for cats has improved over the years, it used to be quite chancy), apart from Mungo needing time to get his paws back under control while the anaesthetic wore off. Both are eating and drinking, and seem unconcerned, but grateful to be home. I put my back out (probably moving Mungo), and had to see the chiropractor on Saturday to get it straightened out (thank goodness for Chirosports Coogee).

However, the bill was over $AU2,000, which included vaccinations, dental work, anaesthesia, intravenous fluids and shaving Mungo's rather daggy nethers. We have an excellent vet, and $2K is less than I charge for a day's work, but Mungo and Percy came from the pound: they are rescue cats, not pedigree. Still, I adopted them, so my responsibility.

And Percy now has this big shaved square on this side, and looks as though someone has fitted him with a zipper:

So the next drama will be getting the stitches out in a couple of weeks.

2009-10-25T16:40:00.002+11:00

Renovations

My husband Steve and I designed and built our house, into which we moved in 1997. We hadn't intended to build it as owner-builders, but when the builder we had retained went bankrupt (owing us quite a lot of money) we had no choice. Fortunately Steve is in civil construction, and his knowledge and contacts got the house built, though it took longer than planned. On the day we moved in there were no skirting boards, few internal doors and an enormous pile of builder's rubble in the corner of the family room. The main bathroom was a shell, without even lining boards on the walls. The floors were bare concrete, which we sealed with paving paint as soon as we could, to control the dust. At that point in time our only goal was to get moved into the house, as soon as we could get a certificate of occupancy: we were paying rent on the place we were living in, the mortgage on the place we were building, and monthly storage charges because many of our personal effects (read: books) were in a rented storage facility. Our finances were strained, to say the very least.

The local council's criteria for occupancy were that we had a working bathroom and a working kitchen. A working kitchen was defined as having a working cooker and a working sink. Getting the ensuite bathroom fitted was not a problem, because I had bought a bath months before (floor stock from a local supplier), and I had got most of the other fittings at "mate's rates" through contacts at work. However, by the time we got to the kitchen, money was running out.

Now it so happened that I was doing some work for a government agency who would probably prefer not to be named, and while working on the premises of this agency it was forbidden to have a mobile phone switched on - and a junior agency person was detailed to follow me about, and ensure that I complied with this rule. Further more, I couldn't plug my laptop into their network. So I spent a lot of time hanging around their operations room, waiting for computers to load patches or whatever, with nothing to do. I looked around for something to read, and found a copy of "The Trading Post" a local rag dedicated to connecting buyers and sellers, which someone had left lying around. In this paper were adverts from a business selling factory second sinks, and a kitchen manufacturer who was going out of business.

So the next weekend I went out and bought a factory second sink (a returned order, I think, there was nothing wrong with it and it was a good brand), and 1.8 metres of floor stock kitchen cupboards, plus a pantry. The cupboards had no bench top attached, and they had been used to demonstrate different finishes: one cupboard door was blue, one was green, and the other was white. The drawer fronts were cream, with a wood trim. The pantry was white, and I acquired a section of grey laminated benchtop from somewhere else. The overall effect was awful, and the carpenter who installed it all did so on the proviso that we never tell anyone that he was responsible.

I never intended to keep the original kitchen for long, but in the end it stayed until late 2006, when I had it torn out and replaced with the kitchen of my dreams. And this year the original ensuite bathroom, which has seen about 12 years of service, finally had to be renovated.

The trigger was an event in March this year. The shower drain in the ensuite blocked, the shower stall overflowed, the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor failed to cope (an inadequately glue joint between two sections of pipe failed), and water began to pour through the ceiling of the room below. The room below is my study: I was just about to leave the house to go to work, when I heard an odd tap-tap-tap noise coming from the study: I thought that one of my machines was doing something strange, and turned the light on to see what was happening. What was happening was that water, following the path of least resistance, was trickling through the light fitting and onto the side desk where I normally keep my MacBook Pro.

I turned the light off, quickly, shoved the desk out of the way - it's on wheels - and fetched a bucket to put under the drip. Fortunately my laptop was safely in it's carry bag, protected from incontinent light fittings.

The end result of that little episode was a statement from the emergency plumbers that the grout around the shower stall was failing and no longer water tight. They fixed the leaking pipe (by making a large hole in the ceiling of my study to get at the problem joint). They also recommended replacing the light fitting.

Now it is October, and for the last couple of weeks there have been tradesmen around the house most days: since they are here, I'm getting a lot of other things fixed at the same time. The old ensuite has been gutted, re-rendered, re-water-proofed, re-tiled and new taps and other fittings installed (I kept the heated towel rail, the shower screen and the bath). We are now waiting for the vanity unit to be made - about 3 weeks - and installed. The painter should be here on Tuesday, to repaint the bathroom. I'm going to get the kitchen and the front hall repainted, too.

It will be great when it is done, but getting up early every morning is getting seriously tedious. Why do all tradesmen want to start at 7AM?

2009-10-03T16:31:00.000+10:00

Darkness Falls

So I arrived at the office on a Tuesday morning, put my Mac Book Pro on my desk, opened the lid and hit the space bar and nothing happened. It took a few seconds for me to register the nothing, because it was so totally unexpected; I felt the first twinge of alarm as I forced the machine to reboot, and still got a blank, black screen. A few minutes of emergency troubleshooting procedures, including removing and replacing the battery, and I knew I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that the machine was powering up, but the screen was dead. Plugging in my external monitor didn't help: the external monitor announced that it was not getting a signal, and went back to sleep.

And of course it was a busy morning, I was due in meetings, and I really didn't have time for a technology meltdown. Fortunately I had cleared all email requiring an urgent response earlier that morning, while I having my first cup of coffee. I could access email from my iPhone, but many of the documents that I needed were stuck in the corporate document management system, which is built on Interwoven, and can only be accessed via Outlook or Internet Explorer. So I logged a call with our Internal Support people. and got on with the meetings.

A meeting or so later, Internal Support handed me a loan laptop, a revolting piece of junk (I won't name the brand) running Windows XP at the speed of an arthritic snail. I struggled through a few more hours, my stress levels rising every time some absurd piece of Microsoft nonsense got between me and getting things done. Finally I got a break, and called the Apple support line. A pleasant young woman walked me through the inevitable diagnostic procedures, and confirmed what I already suspected: the dreaded nVidia 8600 bug had finally struck down my machine. I had known it was possible, but the reports were so long ago that I hoped I had been spared.

I wrote down my case number, and walked down to the Apple Store. I had already checked, and the Genius Bar was booked out until Friday, but I was due to go to Melbourne for a few days break on Saturday, I had no intention of going without a Mac. The Genius Bar people wait listed me, and happily I ran into an old friend, so I had someone to chat to while I waited. The wait was only about 20 minutes, and the resident genius confirmed the diagnosis: dead nVidia processor. At least 5 days wait for a repair. Arrrggghhh!!

So I did what any DINK with an Amex card does: I left the Genius Bar, went down the retail level, and bought a new 15.4" Mac Book Pro. Fortunately my friend was there to provide input, since I was a bit stressed, and would have overlooked the Mini DP to VGA adapter that I needed.

I then went back to the office, wrapped up the working day, and headed home to start reconstructing my electronic life. I had been planning to buy a new Mac Book, but I had really hoped to wait until Oracle finalises the purchase of Sun, and pays out my shares. I had intended to take the money (whatever there is of it) and put it towards new Mac, which would have given me a nice sense of closure. What I hadn't planned was having to conduct an emergency rebuild. Fortunately I had done a Time Machine backup on the preceding Sunday night, but I didn't just want to restore from that. I really wanted a clean install of Snow Leopard. So I started by booting of the Snow Leopard DVD, and getting the install running while I did some planning.

The first thing I load, always, is Synium's Cleanapp. Then Camino, EagleFiler, 1Password, Vmware Fusion, Curio, Evernote. I recovered bookmarks, restored my essential data from Time Machine, and by the next day I could work. I still have a fair bit of clean up to do, and I need to take a cold, hard look at some of my old data and convince myself that it really needs to be on my laptop, rather than archived on an external disk where I can get it if I really need it. But that can happen over the next few days, while I am on leave, because I getting renovations done and need to be at home. But apart from the unexpected expense, to really wasn't that bad.

2009-08-21T06:28:00.001+10:00

Objects of desire

Unless you live in cave, you are probably at least vaguely aware that speculation is rife that Apple is about to release, or at least announce, some sort of tablet device. Such a device has been rumoured for many years, but this time the rumours appear to have more substance. The wonderful folks at MacLife have gone so far as to do a detailed workup, with quite drool-worth graphics, of what such a device might look like, and what functions it might offer.

Now let me be quite open about this: I don't care if they call it an iTablet, an iPad (seems unlikely, too much like iPod) or an iBiscuit (iLibris, anyone?). I want it. But only if it will do the following:

Allow me to write, squiggle, doodle and otherwise draw upon the screen, and save my scratchings in some convenient format (JPG will do just fine). As someone who constantly jots things down, my life is absolutely littered with note pads of various descriptions: I can see 4 from where I sit, without turning around to check the shelves behind me. My chances of finding the one that contains the notes I need approach zero. Every conference or vendor event seems to give me another block of dead tree slices to write upon, and create notes that I can't find: there must be a better way.

Read newspapers, specifically the Sydney Morning Herald and the Weekend Australian. I do read newspapers online now, but I like to read a newspaper while eating my breakfast. I eat my breakfast in the family room (large room at the south end of the house, with no computers). Eating breakfast in my study is impractical because a). there isn't space on my desk to put down a bowl of muesli; and b). my white cat Percy expects to be able to sit on my lap while I'm in my study, but he knows that he can’t sit on me while I'm sitting at the table in the family room. It's about the only thing that the little idiot has ever managed to learn, and I'd hate to waste it.

Having access to newspapers on a tablet style device would have numerous advantages, for me and for the environment. Right now, when a newspaper arrives in my house, half of it immediately gets tossed into the recycling basket: I do not read the sports section or the real estate section, and I rarely read the enclosed advertising material (Dell, please note: sending me a flyer every day will not make me any more likely to purchase your products).

This is always assuming that my newsagent manages to deliver the paper: my local newsagent is a half wit, and I have the agency on speed dial, because they screw up so often. Any technology that would spare me having to deal with this particular business would be welcomed with open arms.

Then, when I've finished with the paper and my husband has done the suduko, the whole thing gets tossed into the recycling. Kilos of used newprint leave this house every week, much of it unread. We subscribe to the Sydney Morning Herald, so on Sundays the Sun Herald is delivered to us. The SMH is a OK as a newspaper, but the Sun Herald is the type of rag that you wouldn't used to line a hamster cage, for fear of upsetting the hamster. Shoddy journalism, verging on gutter press, it usually goes straight to recycling.

All this could be stopped, which would reduce the burden on the local council's recycling activities, and keep my house tidier.

If the new device would also allow me to read ebooks, and watch the occasional DVD, so much the better. But for me, note taking and newspapers are the big, must have features.

2009-08-16T19:37:00.002+10:00

Of books and truffles

My husband Steve and I have a tendency to plan our holidays around food and what might be broadly defined as "cultural pursuits". We've just come back from a trip to Western Australia, which was planned around the Mundaring Truffle Festival (think underground fungus, not chocolate here). The Truffle Gala Dinner at the Loose Box Restaurant was sensational, and definitely something I would attend again, given a chance. The festival itself was a lot of fun, and I'm glad we went early, because a huge number of people turned out for it. And as usual, we ordered wine (which will probably get delivered to my office next week), and as usual we came back with half a suitcase full of books. Neither of us can resist a bookshop.

Next month we are going to Melbourne for a few days, to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum and the Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. These two exhibitions are conveniently running in the same city at the same time, and we can combine seeing them with celebrating our twenty third wedding anniversary, which we shall do with dinner at a good restaurant. Steve wants to go to Grossi Florentino, so I've asked Amex to see if they can get us a table; if I didn't have American Express to do the organizing, I don't think we would get holidays.

We have more or less unpacked from the last trip, and the coffee table in the lounge is covered in new books, again. I've got more than 3200 titles loaded into Library Thing - all the new ones we just bought, and I've finished the doing the books in my study. I still have a very long way to go in other rooms, but I've made some interesting discoveries, and some observations. I have some wonderful books, many of which I intended to read long ago; and I've almost stopped reading for pleasure in the last few years: all I seem to read is technical manuals and journals.

So this is going to stop. I'm going to make time to read the books I want to read, and the technical manuals can wait. I joke about buying books to read when I retire, but given the sheer number of volumes in the house, I think I'd better make a start.

2009-06-20T17:25:00.000+10:00

LibraryThing
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I'm sure most of you have already heard about LibraryThing - it seems to have been written up a quite a few places - but somehow I'd missed out. If you haven't heard of it, LibraryThing is an online service for organising your books. Because I have a lot of books, many rather indifferently organised, this was immediately appealing to me.

I chanced to be Googling about, looking for the name of a bookshop in Brisbane, and Google sent me to a page where a group of Australians were comparing notes on Australian bookshops. They mentioned the name of the one I was looking for (which has slipped my memory, because I haven't had to go to Brisbane since 2005,) so I made a note of it and then decided to check what site I had landed on. Behold, LibraryThing: the page I had been reading was a thread in their Talk area.

So I had a poke about, and registered a free account to try it out. LibraryThing will let you load 200 book records for free, so I extracted a chunk of my nonfiction list, re-organised it to suit LibraryThing's bulk upload system (which is pretty simple), and waited while the file got digested by the loader. It actually created 217 records before it quit, and the quality of the records retrieved was pretty good. LibraryThing searches library and online booksellers all over the world - you can configure which sources you want searched - and retrieves records which you can edit to suit your needs and add to you collection.

However, the stuff in my existing nonfiction records was mostly quite recent (within the last five years). I decided to test a bit more rigorously. So I registered another free account, for testing, and went upstairs to select some books. I settled on Nancy Mitford's "Wigs on the Green", which has been out of print for decades; a four-volume edition of Alexander Pope's "Poetical Works", dated 1853; and a privately printed edition of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, also 19th century. LibraryThing found them all (OK, we had to dig a bit for the correct edition of the Pope, but we got it).

Impressed, I registered a paid account (unlimited books), and ordered one of their "CueCat" barcode scanners. Then I went back upstairs to the room which is labelled "Bedroom 4" on my house plans, but which is, in fact, full of proper steel library shelving, most of it double stacked with books. I got an armful of old Penguins and Everyman editions from the middle aisle, and started loading books into LibraryThing: most of the old books I own don't have a barcode or an ISBN number, so searching for author, title and edition is going to be the only way to load them. Later I uploaded my entire author/title fiction list.

Some observations: LibraryThing works best if you tag your books, at least roughly, at the time of loading. At least tag for fiction or nonfiction. If you are doing bulk uploads, do not chuck a couple of thousand records on the load queue in one lump. First, you will probably cause the queue to hang. Second, you will have no way to easily check what loaded. Split your load into batches of about 50, and tag them by batch number. Then you can easily call up a batch by tag name, and compare it to the file of data you uploaded. This makes it much easier to identify records that don't get a hit, or records that retrieve bad data. I got a couple of very strange books added to my LibraryThing collection, caused by corrupted ISBN numbers in the load file, and it took me a while to track down which records had caused the error. If you can easily spot which entries in your load file have produced a suboptimal result, corrections become much quicker. LibraryThing has a Power Edit mode that enables you to quickly add, remove and replace tags, so it is easy to get rid of your dummy tags when you are done.

If you are tagging books, and working on a Mac (as I do), Typinator is a great help: you can establish abbreviations for frequently used tags, and save many keystrokes (if you are using Windows, this won't help you).

Of course, now that I am loading old books into the system, I'm finding a lot that need cleaning or repairing, so my dining room table is covered in piles of books that need help. And I'm finding so many forgotten gems on the shelves.

The CueCat scanner arrived on Friday, and it works as advertised. I've tried it on my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and it does what it says it does. You do get a dialog box as the Mac recognises what it thinks is a keyboard, but you can just close that and move on. Give the CueCat about 15 seconds to get its act together when you first plug it on. Actual scanning technique seems to be the only issue, and I imagine that that will improve as I scan more books. What is scanned is, as the instructions say, gibberish:

.C3nZC3nZC3n2CNDXDhD7DxnY.cGen.ENr7C3D7DxfZChb2DG.

that's the scanned barcode for Martin Gardner's "Mathematics, magic and mystery". Feed it into LibraryThing, and it returns the book's details, right down to the correct cover art.

You should be able to see a link to my LibraryThing collection on the left hand side of this page: I've loaded 2,798 books so far, and I have a long way to go....

2009-06-06T17:41:00.000+10:00

The Joy of Books

Books (well, printed matter in all forms, but let's concentrate on books for a moment) flow into my house in a constant stream. Quite apart from the ones my husband buys (which are mostly about military modeling at the moment, and come from all over the planet), I buy books regularly. And irregularly. I buy books in shopping centres, in dedicated book shops, in air ports. If I land in a new city, the first thing I look for in the hotel room is a yellow pages, so I can see if there are any book shops nearby. And, of course, I watch out for book fairs. The University of New South Wales has a book fair most years, and I always come away with a box of books.

As you might expect, we have a lot of bookshelves (we designed our house to accommodate books, including reinforcing the first floor slab to carry additional vertical load), and they are all over flowing. And still the books come, from Amazon, from the English Good Book Guide, from second hand shops, from Kinokuniya, from Abbeys. Craft books, cookery books, programming, philosophy, almanacs, fiction, history, biography: I have no resistance. My husband claims that, when he married me, he didn't get a dowry, he got a library. I don't actually know how many books are in the house, because I know that some of the older volumes are not on my shelf lists, but I'd guess somewhere around the 4,000 mark. Perhaps more.

When a book enters the house, I try to avoid opening it at once. As far as is possible, all paperbacks and any hardcover with a loose dust jacket gets covered with self adhesive plastic ( I favour a brand called Alkor) before it gets much handling, to preserve its original condition. Once covered, the title is then entered into my shelf lists, which are large Excel spreadsheets for Fiction A-M, Fiction N-Z and Non-fiction; these are exported as CSV files, and uploaded to the CSV Touch application on my iPhone.

But this takes time, and sometimes a lot of books arrive all at once. So unprocessed books gather on the coffee table in the sitting room, to the consternation of my housekeeper, where they may stay for weeks until I can catch up.

I've just been entering a big batch into the shelf list - the catch from a trip to Melbourne, a foray into Borders, the aforementioned UNSW book fair, an order Steves placed on a specialist military bookshop in England and a couple of strays that somehow got into the general community without getting covered. I'm still behind on covering, but at least the shelf list is up to date (after a fashion, I know that most of the non-fiction I bought before about 1990 isn't listed).

I do an abbreviated form of physical cataloguing, sufficient to record author or editor names, title, publisher's name and location, year of publication and ISBN. Modern books are fairly straightforward, one can expect the publisher's details to be either on the verso of the title page, or in a colophon at the end of the book, and most volumes now have one if not two ISBN numbers. But with older books, it can be trickier. For example, one of the volumes I have just processed is a Viking Portable Library edition of Dorothy Parker's short stories and poems. It has no ISBN number - it does have statement that says "This edition is produced in full compliance with all War Production Board conservation orders", which says something about the constraints that World War Two puts on anyone trying to publish a book in 1944. But the publication details are rather scant. The cover is cloth, and there is a little foxing in a few places. The fly leaf has a signature, "Eileen Langdon", and in a different hand, at the bottom of the same page, the words 'from Leo Packer", but the binding is quite firm for a 65 year old book, and I doubt it has ever been read. I wonder who Eileen and Leo were?

Covering the books takes time, and before they can be covered, I need to remove all sticky labels (the adhesive will break down and discolour rapidl), and any grubby marks. Old books may need repairs, torn dust jackets will have to be reassembled and patched carefully. Stray book marks - which may be anything from an old bus ticket to a proper book mark - have to be found and extracted. In one case, long ago, I found myself in possession of a novel with a missing page, and wound up having to borrow the book from the library, type out the missing material, and add it to my book.

But I have the satisfaction of knowing that I can find a book on almost any subject somewhere in this house. If I look for long enough.

2009-05-31T18:34:00.001+10:00

Significant Events

Quick as you can, think of some experience or event that changed your life. Some "fork in the road moment" that had a lasting effect on the direction your life took. It's possible (particularly if you are relatively young) that you haven't had such a moment yet, but if you have, did you recognize its significance at the time? And if you haven't had such an experience, how do you think you would recognize one if you did?

I've been thinking about this lately, because over the last few weeks I've been doing the Storage Networking Industry Association's Management and Administration course, and the ITIL version 2 course, and the related exams. I reckon that the two activities have consumed about 10 days in training courses, additional study and the exams themselves (I passed both). However, for all the effort, I don't really expect either one to change my life noticeably.

An event that did change my life happened in about five minutes early in 1981, and at the time I barely noticed it.

In 1981 I was working as a library assistant for the Community and Child Health Services branch of the Public Health Department of Western Australia. One of my duties was to take care of journal circulation, the extremely manual process by which periodical publications were circulated among staff who had asked to see them. This meant dealing with hundreds of people and thousands of individual issues of everything from the British Medical Journal to Nursing Times. There was no Internet, and the only way for the medical staff to stay up to date with current information in their field was to read the printed word. So every day scores of periodicals would cross my desk, and I would try to at least glance at the contents page of the new ones, and if anything looked interesting I might put it aside to read during lunch.

On this particular day, the November 1980 issue of Psychology Today hit my desk, having already made the rounds at head office, and during lunch I skimmed through it. There was an article by an American physician called John Eric Holmes, entitled "Confessions of a Dungeon Master". It was about the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, told from the perspective of Dungeon Master of a long running game. It probably took me less than five minutes to read it, and I thought it sounded like fun. I was looking for a new hobby, principally because I wanted to find a way to extend my social circle, most of whom at that time were either other librarians or nursing students (read: very few men). I knew that there was shop in Perth that sold the paraphernalia for D&D, because they also sold military simulation games, which I had tried previously. So, when opportunity permitted, I stopped by the shop and asked the owner if he knew of a group that I could join. He said he did, and gave me the name and phone number of someone who ran a gaming club the the Gooseberry Hill area.

I called the number, and spoke to the club organizer, Stephen Neal. And as Miss Bronte has it in "Jane Eyre", "reader, I married him". Not at once (not until 1986), but my husband and I met because I read an article in a magazine. A chain of events started that otherwise could not have happened. When I was offered work in Canberra, my prospective employer (the National Library) would not pay my relocation costs, but Steve was just graduating from his degree and starting to look for work, so we decided to drive across Australia together. I started work in Canberra, and Steve went on to Sydney and found a job there. I got a transfer to Sydney in 1985, and we married in 1986, just in time for me to get retrenched and accidently join the IT industry.

And I can think of at least two other people whose lives I significantly affected, by helping them get out of poorly paid public service jobs and into better paid (but much more stressful) private sector jobs. All sort of things could not have happened if I had stayed in Perth, and I couldn't get out of Perth without Steve. If we had not met, I would probably still be a librarian, and he would probably work in heavy construction on some mine site. Our directions changed because of a five minute event that I barely noticed at the time. I did work it out later, and while I was still at the National Library, I located that issue of Psychology Today and photocopied the article. I have it beside me now, faded but readable, with a proper citation scrawled on the first page in my hand, giving volume, issue and page number detail.

The important events are not always the obvious ones.

If anyone happens to know Doctor Holmes, say "Hi" for me.

2009-04-21T19:16:00.000+10:00

Noise Pollution

I see that some well meaning but misguided boffins at Lotus are talking about building systems to add sound effects to electric cars. The justification for this is supposed to be two fold: to allow the driver to judge by ear how fast they are going, and to alert pedestrians to the approach of the vehicle, so that they don't step out in front of it. Now I will admit that it took me a couple of weeks to adjust to my Prius, and not being able to judge speed by sound (which I hadn't fully realised that I did, until it stopped working). But I'm adaptable, and I learned, fortunately before I got a speeding ticket.

But I see absolutely no reason to add to the noise pollution of this planet to alert pedestrians to the approach of cars. If a pedestrian is about to step into the street, they should assume that there may be a car approaching and check. Most of the people I have to dodge in the city have the ear pieces of some electronic device in their ears, anyway, and probably wouldn't hear it if my car made a noise like a jet taking off. Bicycles can be silent, so are we going to add noise makers to them, as well?

The average human being does not pay nearly enough attention to what is going on around them as it is. If we could just reintroduce some large carnivore to our communities - I'm thinking a sabre toothed tiger or similar - people would become a damn sight more alert to their surrounding, and less inclined to wander about in a daze, expecting others to avoid them. This might lead to a general improvement in manners and general standards of behaviour.

I can dream.

2009-04-19T18:20:00.000+10:00

The sky is not falling

I am one of the people for whom the recession (or whatever you choose to call the current financial maelstrom) is something that is happening to other people. I have a secure, well paid job. So does my husband. We have no debt apart from our mortgage, which we are well ahead on, and we are gaining ground as the interest rates fall. I am conscious of how fortunate we are, and I'm being careful resist the urge that seems to have struck a large part of the community to reduce their spending. If your financial position is in any way unsteady, by all means review your discretionary spending and make appropriate cuts. But if you are not in trouble, why panic? I'm deliberately maintaining my normal spending pattern: supporting the same charities and cultural organizations, buying the same magazines, and the same groceries. It wouldn't occur to me to cancel my gardener's contract, or my housekeeper's. Because if I reduce my spending, all the people who rely on my business for part of their cash flow suffer.

I have two principle problems in implementing this approach: stores that decide to "rationalize" their inventory, and stop carrying the products that I want to buy. And the entire fashion and clothing industry, which seems to be stuck in some strange alternate reality.

Several stores have done the inventory rationalization thing to me in the last few weeks, apparently under the delusion that if they stop carrying product A, I will just buy product B from them instead. This is not what happens: if I want product A, I'm going to get product A from someone. All you are achieving is to cause me to shop in other places. Last weekend I conducted my normal grocery shopping at Coles. Coles seems to have stopped carrying several products that I use routinely, so I made a side trip to Woolworths. Woolworths had what I wanted, so I may very well do my whole shop in Woolworths next weekend. Some products I am now sourcing from on-line stores. I will not have my shopping habits dictated by a grocer.

Clothes have been a headache for me for years. I'm fussy about clothes, and I'm not prepared to wear whatever has been declared fashionable just because it's fashionable. I do not read any magazines which feature fashion - in fact the only magazines I read which are principally targeted at a female audience are those dedicated to knitting. And I'm not a standard size (is anyone a standard size?). I have a waist, and I expect to be able to put a belt around it, to support my mobile phone and various sundries. I do not want anything low waisted: this is a look that really only suits girls who have a rather androgynous figure, which a lot of young women have these days. I blame this on BPA leaching from plastic bottles, which I avoid like the plague.

However, the clothing manufacturers seems to think that every woman will be happy to wear whatever tasteless tat they are showing this year. Consequently I normally have to shop in one of the few stores that has worked out that there is a market for clothes for women who can tell the difference between good taste and fashion, or I have to employ a dressmaker or tailor. I happen to be between dressmakers at the moment (my regular lady went off to become a mother), so I am about to start the search for a new one. Using a dressmaker can be a little more time consuming, and doesn't provide the "instant gratification" of shopping in a store, but you do get to choose your own material and buttons, you know your clothes were made by someone paid a decent wage, and as long as your weight is stable and you stick to classic styles, you can wear the same garments for years. And no one ever has the same outfit that you do.

2009-04-10T18:43:00.001+10:00

I do not believe it is April. What happened to December, January, February and March? I am certain that time goes faster as you get older, or perhaps I'm just getting busier. Certainly the last few months have been extremely busy for me, hence the lack of regular blogging. I was promoted to Team Leader a little while ago, and am now coming to grips with the extra duties required of a "people manager". And I am now properly engaged in my job, which means that I always have plenty to do, and then some. However, today is a public holiday, and I have some free time.

At the beginning of this week, the local Sun office started its current round of local redundancies. Monday and Tuesday I got a lot of calls, SMSs and emails from former colleagues to tell me either that they had survived, or that they were now ex-Sun employees. Everyone knew that this was coming, and I was deeply grateful last weekend that I no longer worked for Sun, and I didn't have to worry personally. When I quit in July 2005, I calculated that Sun would survive for between 3 and 5 years, based on observed performance, and that I probably had no more than 3 years to broaden my skill set to something beyond just Sun if I wanted to remain employable. Of course that was before the entire world caught the financial flu, and I would no longer bet on Sun to survive until July 2010: if the Sun management team have not figured out to make the company consistently profitable in the last 4 years, they are unlikely to suddenly work it out now. While I still believe that Sun has wonderful products, and some of the most brilliant technical people I have ever worked with, all the technical excellence in the world will not generate a profit if badly managed.

I feel deeply sorry for those who have been laid off (in Sun jargon, RIFed. RIF stands for Reduction in Force). Being made redundant is seldom a nice experience - I do know one or two people who deliberately went after redundancy - but if it is unexpected it is a horrible shock. I was made redundant by the Australian Public Service in 1986, and I can still remember the sense of disbelief and of shame. In 1986 I was still working as a librarian. The government of the day (Labour, left wing) announced an across the board cut in public service staff numbers. I don't think I paid much attention: I had mountains of work to get through, and I was just about to be married.

I returned from a brief honeymoon (all we could afford, since neither of us earned much in those days), and on the first day back in the office, I was told that I was being made redundant. I was horrified: Steve and I were saving stringently to get a deposit on a house, and now I had lost my job. I couldn't believe that my work was so unimportant that it could just be stopped (as it turned out, it couldn't: services had to be cut). Where I came from in those days, you only lost your job if you had done it badly. I was shattered.

I was lucky: I found another job within days, and in fact left my old job much sooner that the Public Service had planned - they had some scheme whereby they could make someone redundant, place them on the unattached list, but still keep employing them for some months while they looked for another position within the Service. This satisfied the politicians, while not immediately disrupting anything. The department that made me redundant expected me to be there for at least another six months; in fact, I was out in a matter of weeks, and starting in a new career in IT. But that is another story.

In the ensuing years I have lived through many, many rounds of cost cutting and redundancies a various places. Perhaps the most terrifying was the place that brought in a new manager just to handle the lay offs. You would come into the office in the morning, and desks would be suddenly empty, as if something had come in the night and expunged the existence of the previous occupant. Nothing was said: people just vanished. Morale, predictably, plummeted. I got out as soon as I found another place: I do not like working under such circumstances.

The first round of lay offs at Sun were targeted at allegedly low performing staff members, though I would question how the rating was done, since some very good people were made redundant, and some complete idiots were retained. Subsequent lay offs seems to have been variable - some targeting senior staff, who were paid more, some targeting particular areas of the business. None really effective, because they caused the company to lose talent and experience, while reducing the proportion of people who generated revenue and increasing the proportion of people who performed non-revenue generating duties. When I joined Sun in 1998, the organizational structure was relatively flat: there were people in the Sydney office who were only one or two "steps" from Scott McNealy. Year on year we got more layers of management, and it got worse after I left.

So if you have been laid off, my sympathies. Remember that it is unlikely that you could have done anything to prevent this happening, because it is not about you, or your performance. It is about someone who probably doesn’t understand what you do trying to save money. If you got a pay out of some sort, use it carefully, because in this climate it may have to last a while. Some companies are still hiring (my employer is, see here), but many are not, and many are conducting stupid lay offs, because they think they should because everyone else is. This will hurt them later, but doesn't help you.

If you have time on your hands, study something new, and consider doing a few hours volunteer work each week, to keep yourself engaged and remind yourself that you are useful. A lot of people have major problems when they lose their jobs simply because the structure of their days disappears. They wind up sitting in front of the television while the days drift by. Don't do that: set up a schedule and stick to it. If you have spent the last 10 years in front of a computer, take the opportunity to get some exercise. If you haven't had your hair restyled in the last decade, get that fixed before you hit the interview circuit - an old hairstyle dates you instantly.

And please spell check your resume.

2008-11-12T17:20:00.001+11:00

The Coming of the iPhone

I finally got an iPhone 3G in August, and after some initial difficulties getting rid of my previous Blackberry service (entirely procedural, nothing technical) I have connectivity with my employer's mail system and all is good. I'm finding the phone much better than the Blackberry (it was a Pearl): the call quality is better and the screen easier to read. And of course the applications available for the iPhone make it so much more than just a phone.

When I got it, the first thing I wanted to sort out was my old "Portable databases" problem. How to move three simple databases (Fiction, Non-fictions and DVDs) off my Palm Pilot and onto the iPhone. Answer: CSV Touch, from Ozymandias Software. This app takes a comma delimited file, and presents it as a database. I had some initial problems, mostly to do with cleaning up the data files. Exporting out of my old HanDbase application produced a CSV file, but it had some blank lines, no end of file marker and all the line endings were CTRL-M (sure sign of something with a nasty DOS heritage). However, one of the many joys of Mac OS X is a terminal window, and access to the vi and sed editors. A few minutes of work to sort out the file formats, and the data imported cleanly. The databases work fine, and I have been able to ditch HanDbase.

Next, portable passwords. I've used the old Cryptinfo Palm application from NormSoft for many years, but I've been moving to 1Password on my Mac, and behold, the lovely people from Agile Web Solutions have released an iPhone app of their product. Again, some tooing and froing to get data off the Palm and into the new repository, but no real dramas.

What else is on the Palm Pilot? Well, a lot of word processing documents that I use for reference and various notes and aides memoir. Answer: DataCase from Veiosoft. DataCase has taken all my old Word docs, and PDFs of things like the Handbook for Justices of the Peace in New South Wales (which I need rapid access to routinely), and works like a charm.

By the time I had moved that lot, the Palm Pilot was almost unnecessary. A subnet calculator and a Checklist app were really all I lacked, and there are lots of those in the App Store. OK, I have a copy Bejewelled on the Palm Pilot, and the game is available in the App store, but I'm afraid I refused to shell out $12.99 for another copy of an application that I already have licensed on Palm and Mac.

I've also loaded Stanza, the ebook reader, which is fantastic, and some wonderful person has created an app to allow you to view the Roads and Traffic Authority's web cams on the iPhone. The is a jewel beyond price, as anyone who has to navigate Sydney's all too easily gridlocked roads will tell you. Measures, a unit conversion app, helps me convert imperial measurements to metric (essential when all American equipment is specified in inches and everything local is specified in centimeters).

The Palm Pilot has been relegated to running Solitaire and Bejewelled, which is just as well, because I think its screen is beginning to fail.

So I no longer have to carry the Palm Pilot, which has allowed me to reorganize my handbag. The Palm Lifedrive is a chunky object, and I don't miss its added bulk one bit. I'm not a small-handbag person at the best of times: my notion of the bare essentials takes up quite a lot of space, and I'm always looking for ways to rationalize, minimize and organize my handbag. I hate not being able to lay my hand instantly on whatever I want - keys, purse, glasses, whatever - and I hate bags that are nothing more than a sack on a strap. Everything gets tangled up at the bottom, and there is nothing more pathetic than a woman removing articles from her bag one after the other in the search for the one thing she can't find.

And then there is the "changing handbags" issue: if you are not very careful, you miss transferring something from bag A to bag B, and trouble follows. If you have bags with a lot of pockets, it's easy to miss something. Like your house keys. Or your security pass.

Enter the Borne Naked handbag liner, answer to a maiden's prayer. A clear plastic liner with multiple pockets, it keeps the contents of my bag clean, organized and accessible. I can change bags in seconds, and be sure I haven't missed anything. The liner is very well made, all edges bound neatly, with a good quality zip. Guys note: it doesn't look girly, and would work well in a brief case, too.

2008-11-11T17:56:00.000+11:00

Dear America - what did you just do?

Before I begin, I should probably declare my personal position: I was raised a Baptist, and was baptized into my church as an adult, by my own conviction and choice. While the ensuing years have soured me on organized religion in almost any form, I am still indelibly marked by those formative experiences. I have read the bible in its entirety (King James version), and I used to be a Sunday School teacher. Politically, I lean right, and normally vote the straight conservative ticket.

However, I tend to the view that most people would do well to mind their own business, that abortion is a matter of personal choice (anyone who doubts this has never had to work in a clinical environment that cared for babies who had drawn the very shortest of genetic straws), and that as long as the gay community pays their taxes and doesn't trouble their neighbours, they should enjoy the same rights and liberties as the rest of us. Please don't bother me with "but the Bible says" arguments. The Bible, while a remarkable book, was not written in English. While large sections of it are translated in very similar ways by all denominations, many areas are distinctly vague. If you want to explore this, go get a copy of the Bible as used by the Catholic church (I would suggest the Knox translation), and compare it to the King James translation, or the New English Bible. All translations were made by people who sincerely believed that they were doing an accurate job. But still the subtle shading and variations are marked. Therefore, anyone who uses "the Bible says" as an excuse to turn off their brain is an idiot in my book. There's nothing in any version of the Bible that says "you are absolved of responsibility for the outcome of your choices if you just sign here".

Unfortunately, some people seem to have read such a statement, and to have failed to read the injunction about removing the beam from one's own eye before trying to help one's brother. Most of these people seem to be on the extreme far right of the political spectrum, and many of them are of limited education. The two almost go hand in hand. The result seems to be a person who thinks that if they make enough fuss about other people's perceived sins, their own will be less noticeable to God. In consequence they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying trying to regulate other people's behaviour.

Back in June, I blogged a rather grumpy item about the Presidential election. At the time I wrote that piece, the situation to my eye looked dire. I assumed that Hilary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination, and that the electoral process would then devolve into an ugly gutter fight, with innuendo, insult and accusation the ammunition of choice. This is not meant as a criticism of Hilary Clinton or John McCain, but it is a criticism of their respective supporters: that is the way they appeared to be heading to me. Hilary Clinton's supporters seemed illogically partisan in many ways, determined to support her either because she was female, or because they felt that she was in some odd way entitled to the presidency, because it was "her turn". John McCain's supporters have, regrettably, demonstrated their sound grasp of the ancient legal advice "when you have no case, abuse the plaintiff". Faced with an electorate rightly dissatisfied with the performance of the Republicans in government, the best they could come up with was feeble attempts to link their opposition with anti-American activists.

But, to my astonishment, Barack Obama got the Democratic nomination. There was a good deal of silly nittering from people who "loved Hilary". Please: the electoral process is not about fair goes, anyone's turn, or affection for someone you have not met personally. Hilary Clinton gave it her best shot, and lost. She then got herself sorted out, and weighed back in for the good of her country and her party. Certainly an element of self interest may have inspired that position, but she has done her job in a thoroughly professional manner (and a sight better than her husband in some cases).

Meanwhile, the McCain camp was completely losing the plot. Sarah Palin appeared on the stage, and I couldn't help feeling that I knew her. My hackles rose. I've never met the woman, but I know the type. It took me while to work it out, but I recognized her in the end: she's the girl in school who never did any work, because she was focused on being popular. Blessed with a good brain, good looks, and personal charm, she skated through school with the least possible study, and the help of more diligent "friends" who let her copy their work.

I've met a couple of women like this, and they drive me to distraction: they've taken the short cuts wherever they can, trading on their looks and charm to substitute for knowledge and hard work. Few of them make it through tertiary education, because that is a much tougher playing field than high school. But they tend to bob up in low level clerical and "people skills" roles if given a chance: they bring nothing to their positions but enough math to make change, a tendency to take reality TV seriously, and an approach to life based on scheming and manipulation, because it is all they have. My question here has to be not so much "how did Sarah Palin get onto the Republican ticket?" as "how did this ignoramus get elected governor of anywhere?". Good heavens, she's never even completed a college education. If the Republican party seriously expects her to stand in 2012, they should hire a couple of remedial tutors now, and try to fill in the vast gaps in her education. There's a long way to go, people, better start soon.

Sarah Palin seems to have had a negative effect on most voters: for every one who was comforted by the notion that she was "one of us", there were at least two who didn't want "one of us" running the store in an emergency. I think most people have the wits to realize that running a country is difficult, complicated work, and that the people who are entrusted with the task should have appropriate skills and knowledge. We want our leaders to be better than we are: this is why we are so unforgiving when they prove to be merely human after all. The choice of Sarah Palin was utterly disastrous for John McCain's campaign, not only because it called his personal judgement into question, but because Mrs Palin acted like a magnet for every extreme right wing nut job in the Republican movement. She drew them together, in large and noisy blobs, and gave the rest of the electorate a good look at the really unattractive face of intolerance, ignorance and vulgarity found in people who want the calendar reset to about 1910, if not earlier. Sensible, educated, moderate Republicans probably out number these loons by at least 5 to 1, but the people who made the most noise at various events where Sarah Palin was speaking seemed to be the type who represent everything the electorate and the world in general has had more than enough of in the last eight years.

Unfortunately, these people seem to have a disproportionate influence in the Republican Party. Thought and logic seem to have been overwhelmed by a cabal which is more interested in ideology than in outcomes. Any deviation from the "correct" ideology is seen as evil, even when adherence to the ideology is producing unwanted results. The ideology that demands that children be taught abstinence only sex education is a case in point: it does not work. Places where this ideology is implemented have a higher rate of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases than places where proper birth control is taught. But still the proponents of abstinence based sex education insist that their way is right. I believe that this is known as the "Tinkerbell Fallacy" in some circles: you know, the bit in Disney's 'Peter Pan' where the audience is asked to clap if they really believe in fairies, and bring Tinkerbell back to life? There seems to be tendency in some people (regardless of politics) to think that if they believe in an ideology hard enough, it will work. In the last few years, the American government seems to have been less and less interested in outcomes, and more and more interested in ideology. They have disconnected cause and effect in their minds. The results speak for themselves.

I have to say, I did not initially think that Barack Obama stood a snow flake's chance in hell of winning the presidency. It just seemed too improbable that America would elect a leftward leaning, conspicuously educated and literate person who was not of strictly Anglo Saxon heritage in preference to a conservative, white, ex-military type. Surely an electorate that returned George W. Bush for a second term would not contemplate any candidate so radically different.

I missed the point: the Obama campaign team was working, and had been working for months, to change the electorate. They were working on motivating people to register as voters, and getting them sufficiently engaged that they would turn out and vote. I haven't seen any detailed reporting, but I would bet that if you did an analysis of the people who voted in the last election and the people who voted at this one, you would find that this year's voters were overall younger and better educated. They were more likely to relate to a man aged 47 than to a man who has already clocked up his "three score years and ten". They were less likely to consider a man's racial origins to be relevant to his ability to govern. And they were more likely to get their news from the Internet than from the conventional media.

The Obama campaign used technology, and used it brilliantly, to reach and engage a very wide audience. There is an interesting post about this over at oreilly.com, an interview with Silona Bonewald. She makes some interesting observations: "I think the thing that's most significant actually about Barack is that it's not so much the always knowing the newest on the technology, but he's smart enough to let a lot of us do our thing, you know, get out of the way kind of thing. That's what speaks really well about him. I watch him doing that not just in the technical arena but in a lot of others -- like how all of the issues were done. I know that he has a troop of experts that basically helped write each one of those sections on the website.

There's a lot of input that he gets in from a lot of different groups. He's definitely got this huge mass of experts that he taps into on a regular basis, not just technical, which impresses me highly."

I seem to recall that some of the generally accepted qualities of a good leader are the ability to inspire others, to recruit talented people to their team, and to delegate effectively. Anecdotal evidence indicates that Barack Obama can do this. I think that is what the world at large finds so inspiring: not just the man, but the team work. There is this amazing sense of a nation pulling together, in a way that we have not seen America do convincingly in a very long time.

The election was called just after 3PM Sydney time. I had gone up to the Optus campus in North Ryde for a meeting. I arrived early, sat down in reception which was busy as always, and caught up with the email that I had received in the half our it took to get there from the city. Optus' reception has a couple a large TV screens tuned to Sky News, and the count was Obama 207. Never having watched the count before, I had no idea how long it was going to take, so I went to the reception person to locate the person I was meeting. When I turned back to the screen it said "President-elect Barack Obama". People were standing around, gazing at the screens, and we all tried to decide what, if anything, this meant to us.

The next day I heard the counter staff in the post office talking about Barack Obama's election. I don't believe that the world at large has ever been so interested and engaged in an American election. I think this stems from two sources: first, we are all heartily sick of the way America (the country, as expressed by its government) has been behaving in the last few years (Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wire tapping, TSA goons at airports, etc, etc, etc); second, the Obama machine has done its work so well that we can't help but be engaged. The Obama campaign has reached us all - I've even seen Obama '08 stickers on local vehicles.

So what happens now? Will Barack Obama make a good president? Only time will tell: he may get to the Oval Office and be crushed by the load. He may do something really dumb, and shatter people's trust in him with one stroke. He may turn out to be merely mediocre in the long run. Or he may be able to harness the talents that made his campaign so effective, and turn them to the service of the country. If the ability to recruit good people and let them get on with their jobs can be carried into government, great things become possible.

But whatever happens, Barack Obama has changed America in very significant ways already: the next electoral campaign will probably make even more use of technology than the last one. And the electorate is likely to remain engaged in a way they have never been before: it will be harder, may be impossible, for government to conceal its doings from the voters.

If we are lucky, the Republican Party will take a look at how it got to where it is, and find its way back to a more central position. Every country needs a viable opposition party.

America now has the opportunity to hang out the "Under New Management" sign, and wash its collective hands of some of the mistakes of the last few years. There will inevitably be people who want to see America fail, or who want to see Barack Obama fail. There will always be bigots, people who hate any sort of change, and common or garden sore losers. Hopefully those people can read the words of Mike Huckabee, and at least give the new government a chance before they condemn it.

2008-10-16T19:36:00.000+11:00

Restoration of Service

And that absurdly long break was caused by me taking on too many things, both in serial and parallel, and getting so busy that only essential commitments got met. I have seen several comments come in, and apologize for not responding sooner. I have one more project to get off my list, and then things should settle back to normal. I'm in the throes of getting my garage fitted out: an electrician has been here half the day, doing prep work with the wiring. The installation team should arrive on Monday, to put in new wall panelling, ceilings, and storage fittings. Right now the contents of my garage are stacked in my family room and dining room. My cats wander among the piles sniffing at things, puzzled by the disorder. But soon all will be neat and tidy, and I shall be able to focus on other things. My new iPhone, the apps I am using, improvements in the desktop apps I have written about before. The Wii Fit. Many things to blog about.

Back soon

rgds

Melodie

2008-07-16T15:00:00.001+10:00

Tuesday in Melbourne

Morning: Melbourne Aquarium

Lunch: Southbank, Bistro Vite

Afternoon: Fitzroy Gardens

Dinner: Vue de Monde for a stupendous 10 course degustation menu:

Bisque with tartare of jamon and poached quail's egg in lettuce leaf
Mushroom risotto with shaved West Australian truffles
Salmon, presented smoked, mousse and as "salmon jerky", with German caviar
Soup (prepared at the table as an infusion done in a 1950's style coffee maker, using stock, herbs and mirepoix), poured over tartare of King Fish covered in a veil of buffalo mozzarella cheese
Carpaccio of fois gras with baby pear and fennel
Slow cooked pork belly with a pork rillette pancake and stuffed baby apple, dried green apple strip and apple puree
Medallion of New Zealand venison with a mille feuille of saffron mousseline and leg meat
Goat's cheese served a curd and ice cream, with rose petal and rose jelly
Frozen golden kiwi fruit "lollipops" dipped in mint jelly and served with raspberry jelly (we think)
Smoked Valrhona chocolate cigar

And matched wines. I need to walk a lot for the next few days.

2008-07-14T17:09:00.000+10:00

The Doll's House, Web 2.0

When I was a little girl, I had a doll's house. This was a long time ago, the late 1960's I suppose, so the doll's house was not the sort of plastic arrangement that 21st century little girls have. It was made of wood, probably by someone with a turn for woodwork, rather coming from a factory. The walls were covered with pieces of wall paper, and I had a collection of pieces of furniture for it (some of which I still have in a storage box somewhere). Around the same time my brother and I had a big box of Lego blocks and menageries of plastic animals. There weren't many human figures, and I was never really a doll-positive child, but we enjoyed constructing complex buildings and getting everything "just so" (I'm going somewhere with this, trust me).

Roll forward to the mid-1980's, and I was living in Canberra and working for the National Library of Australia (as a librarian). Canberra, the capital city of Australia is a rather odd artificial city, laid out by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin. Canberra is an interesting place to navigate: the shortest distance between two points is very seldom a straight line by road. Anyway, the years I was there, Canberra had (apart from a lot of politicians) a miniature village village called Cockington Green, which still appears to thrive.

Whence springs the human desire to model the real world in toys and miniatures? The precise, to-scale construction of objects, buildings and people seems to be a recurring human activity. It's even made it to the Internet.

Back in late May, one of my colleagues had the happy notion that my employer should develop a presence on Second Life. He secured the approval of the marketing department (the money to do this had to come from somewhere), and then made his way to my area of the company offices, where the hands-on technical types reside, seeking someone to do the work necessary to realize his plan. The first person he tried declined the opportunity firmly, and I wandered into the vicinity just in time to catch the end of the rejection, and to say something like "what is it that you want done?" And in short, I agreed to do it. At this point I had no interest in Second Life - I was aware of it, I had looked at it over the shoulder of someone who already participated. I knew that IBM, Cisco, Sun and various other vendor organisations had "presence" in the virtual world. I figured that I was as well placed as anyone to get the thing going - I've played Dungeons and Dragon and similar FRPs for more that 2 decades, and I've designed everything from exhibitions for the National Library to pieces of needlework, jewelry and a significant part of the house my husband and I built. And Second Life has been implemented by a business which wants to make a profit from a user community many of whom do not have a strong technical background: I was prepared to bet that it would be s straight forward exercise, from a technical perspective.

Second Life has occupied a good deal of my spare time over the last couple of months (my manager agreed to me taking on the project on the condition that it did not delay billing work), hence the sudden cessation in blogging activities. However, I am on leave now, in Melbourne for a few days, with only my little Asus Eee PC and a Huawei modem to connect to the Internet. I haven't even attempted to install Second Life, though I believe it will work on this platform. I am supposed to be on leave, and my husband is likely to become grumpy if I appear to be working.

So, a few observations about the experience. The initial brief was to purchase a piece of virtual land, and "erect" a building, and get to the point where a few simple things could be demonstrated to the person providing the funding, so that she could decide if she wanted to proceed.

My first mistake was in not registering for a premium account for my first avatar immediately: I delayed a few days, while I experimented with the system and did background reading. Because I have been doing this on behalf of my employer, and I need to be able to put the costs through with my expenses, it was necessary to acquire land outright, rather than by rental (the last thing I need is a recurring cost on my Amex card). My initial intention was to purchase land through the Second Life Linden dollar auction site. However, to do this, an avatar has to be 14 days old (I imagine that this is to cut down on the number of users who dabble, and then never log on again, and also to cut down on fraud and money laundering). I did not notice that stricture (it's buried in the Auction FAQs), and consequently it was about three weeks before I could really get started. And in the end a suitable piece of land came up on the in-world land sales, and I bought that, 1024 square meters of PG rated land in Yucca, with a water view. I wanted PG land, to avoid the possibility of exposing project sponsors or other management types to some of things one can encounter in Mature rated areas, which might get the project killed stone dead on the spot.

So I got my piece of land, leveled it, got hold of a pre-built low prim beach house (which I think I picked up on Orientation Island), modified some of its textures, so it looked more like an office building, added some signage with my employer's logo, and installed a mock up of a plasma TV that could play one of our parent company's commercials. A reception desk, a couple of chairs and tables, and it was fit to demonstrate. And the demo was well received, but the project sponsor wanted to see some more interactivity.

Now as anyone who has built anything in Second Life knows, on small parcels of land, you run out of prims really fast. Every object requires at last one prim, complex objects require a lot, and you never seem to have enough to do all that you want.

So I deleted the office building, and started again (I'd learned a fair amount about building by now), and I constructed something a bit more fanciful, but prim-efficient. Then I set out to demonstrate the bells and whistles that you can build into Second Life: a waving Australian flag, revolving sign, sliding doors (with sound effects), email to and from the real world, automated Notecard distribution, and so on, and so forth. I installed scripted teleportation stands, for moving between the levels of my new building. I tinkered with the textures, so that I could put vertical blinds on some windows.

And just when I thought I had it all done, someone bought up all the land around my parcel, altered the land levels and deleted some of the features that I had been relying on for background, so I had to shuffle things around. I finally got it to the point where I could make a little movie of it just before I went on leave, and I have left the movie with the person who started all this. I'll see what he wants to do next when I get back.

Now I have to say that I don't intend to stay in Second Life. I have a very busy first life, and my second life is currently as a first level ranger in a newish D&D campaign. So Second Life is really my third life. But I have found the experience interesting - I have spent almost no time interacting with other avatars - but it is possible to spend hours trying to get a door handle to look just right, to get the fabric on a chair to look believable, or to get the walls of a garden properly aligned. The more time I spend on it, the more it reminds me of the old doll's house.

2008-06-03T19:03:00.001+10:00

Dear America

For the first time in my life I am paying attention to your electoral antics (I'm sorry, there is no better word). In years past you have done what ever it is you have done, and I have taken note at the end of the procedure, when you have vomited onto the world stage a creature that no lady in her right mind would admit into her living room, and declared the thing President. Your last few excursions have been so uniformly catastrophic in their outcome that one rather dreads what may come next.

I have spoken to American educated people, in the hope of understanding what it is that you are trying to achieve, but to no avail. Some years ago, in California, I asked someone to explained to me what "GOP" meant, and got a blank look (Google, fortunately, explained). You people have been blessed with democracy, but I do not think that you understand it. You certainly do not understand the intent of the men who framed your constitution and laws, and perhaps that is just as well. I have had it explained to me that what your current system is intended to provide is a system of "check and balances" (this sounded like a lecture in basic high school political theory). So let us look at your system....

You conduct an enormously expensive circus, which occupies people and resources for months. The candidates in this farce attempt to demonstrate their patriotism (whatever that means), religious conviction (for whatever value that may have), purity, honour and general all-round worthiness. At the end of this disgusting freak show, you appoint the most convincing freak to the highest office that your country recognizes. And the rest of us are lumbered with your choice. This is becoming less important as you flush your culture and all its achievements into the cloaca of ignorance and isolationism that your popular press portrays as "news", but it is still annoying.

What you seem to have failed to understand is the underlying purpose of the democratic process: change. It does not matter whether the current encumbent overlord is liberal, labour, tory, new labour, democrat or republican, or any of the other flavours espoused by the political machines that battle in the electoral arena. What matters is change: that no idea become the only idea, because most people can't encompass complex enough ideas to be useful in the real world.

In most cases the people who put themselves forward for election mean well. They genuinely believe that they have something to offer the electorate, and that they are better suited to hold authority than their rivals. And most of them are genuine and honest in their beliefs: very few human beings are capable of doing something that they know to be wrong in the face of that wrongness. They will try to rationalize their actions and positions as "right", and in the best interests of the electorate. Some of them may have to lie to themselves and their advisors to achieve this intellectual flexibility, but they can do it, and feel entirely worthy and justified in their actions.

So it is that all the candidates for your next election firmly believe that they, and they alone, can safely guide America into the future. And if this is the case, then by logical corollary, all of their opponents must be evil.

People, wake up and smell the tribal warfare: the world is now much more confusing than it was when we had to deal with a few thousand people and their needs. You now have to deal with millions, and their needs and wants are a widespread, contradictory minefield: you cannot please them all, So just because you and your candidate do not get your own way, it does not mean that you have been sabotaged, or that you have been treated unfairly: you are dealing with a large enough statistical sample that the math of "the wisdom of crowds", and the ebb and flow of rumour and innuendo come into play. Individuals are predictable, but the response of crowds varies with the weather, air pressure, and what they saw last on the news. Forget logic.

The critcal thing, the only thing that democracy achieves consistently (if properly practiced, such as not in Zimbabwe) is change. No set of ideas can hold sway for too long, which is good. Most professional politicians have ideas formed by study groups and committees and theory: they lack the perspective of the human being trying to buy a loaf of bread. Democracy cranks them through fast enough that any idea gets a chance, and the really stupid ones get aborted promptly. It takes any newly elected functionary at least 6 months to figure out the functional structure (which is never what it appears to be on paper), and another 6 months to learn to play it usefully. If you are too thick to acknowledge the structure in the first place, you will never be a player: the machinery will encase you up in a bubble, and keep you harmlessly occupied until you are flushed out with the trash at the end of your term. I used to be a public servant, I've seen this done.

Much of what I have read in your popular press recently is down right silly, and would certainly result in defamation proceedings under normal circumstances. Mrs Clinton is prepared to destroy the Democratic Party to get her own way. Mr Obama is accused of everything from being a Muslim to committing murder (the accusers seem uncertain which troubles them more). Mr McCain is at death's door.

For pity's sake people, stop and think. Unless you know the candidates personally, how can you claim to know what is in their hearts or minds? And why do you assume the best about your preferred candidate and the worst about everyone else? Have you never heard of positive confirmation bias? Scientific American had a nice article on that a while back, you should read it. And think about why you believe what you believe.

Try and look at the candidates as human beings: flawed, capable of error, perhaps no better than you or me. But look at their commitment: what a strain these last months must have been, and how tired they all must be. Certainly ambition must be one of the things that drives them, but I doubt it can be the only thing. They all believe that they can make America, and by extension, the world a better place.

So try to separate yourself from tribal loyalties, and look at the big picture. No angels, no demons, just people. Which one is strong enough to stand four years of one of the toughest jobs imaginable, and which can do the most good. Given where 8 years of the Bush administration has taken you, you could elect a stray dog and get a better result.

2008-06-01T19:10:00.002+10:00

Back on track

OK, so my disease wasn't whooping cough (yay!), I have what the medical profession is pleased to call post-virus asthma. My doctor has prescribed Ventolin, which seems to help. I've been frantically busy for the last few weeks, working on a long report on two factor authentication for a bank. However, the backlog fog is now clearing, and normal service will resume.

2008-05-10T18:53:00.001+10:00

Dreadful Lurgy

I've been as sick as the proverbial dog since the beginning of April. I started with the usual sore throat that presages a cold or flu, but it didn't seem to be severe, so I ignored it (well, I got some Strepsils and some Codral), and went on with my normal activities. I tried to work from home for a few days, to minimize the chances that I would contaminate my co-workers. And then I flew down to Melbourne, for a vendor conference (where the hotel air conditioning didn't help my respiratory system one bit), and generally tried to pretend that I wasn't ill. I'm really not good with sickness, it annoys me, it bores me. I don't want to be involved and, despite a good working background in medicine, I subconsciously believe that if I ignore it, it will go away. This has put me in hospital before now, but fortunately I now have a husband, who takes care of me. His position - which can only be described as enlightened self-interest - was articulated as "if anything happens to you, I'm screwed. Go see the doctor." Steve works 70-80 hours most weeks, sometimes more. I run the house, mostly by subcontracting the work I can't deal with, and things function pretty well. Steve is never bothered with laundry, gardening or "handy man" duties. He very rarely needs to assist with house cleaning (he may have to change a litter tray for the boys on occasion, or empty the dishwasher), he is not obliged to help with the grocery shopping, and he cooks when he feels like it (he likes to cook, but it is his call). I should note here that he makes me a cup of coffee every morning, before he goes to work, and he packs his own lunch every day: few men do as much.

But if I fall off my twig, he doesn't know how things work. I think he has met our housekeeper, but he probably couldn't name the agency that supplies her. He has no idea how the gardening and general maintenance get done. He doesn't know how to contact the cat nanny, who cares for the boys when we are away. I have explained Internet Banking to him, but that was about four years ago, and he may not remember. So he really needs me, to keep things going. I've lived with "staff" all my life, so organizing the little army doesn't bother me: my mother taught me how, long ago. I have a housekeeper, a landscape gardener, a cat nanny, a cabinet maker, a plumber, an electrician and a general handy man, all regular suppliers of services that I need. They know me, they know the house, they know I pay their bills promptly, everybody's happy.

So I went to the doctor, at about the three week mark, and she told me to go home and rest for a couple of days (which I sort of did, you can't ignore phone calls and email). But things were not much improved by last Thursday, so I went again, and this time got the new, keen, young GP, who has recently joined the practice that I use. She is testing me for Whooping Cough! I said "but I was vaccinated years ago", and she said "Oh, that wears off after about 12 years". Nobody ever told me that adults could contract Whooping Cough! I get the results Monday.

2008-03-30T18:25:00.001+11:00

What to do when you can't actually help

Many of you will have seen the news that the author Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. The news was posted on the Discworld News site last December, in Terry's inimitable style. If you have never read one of Terry's books, I urge you go to your nearest bookstore, and rectify the situation. I'd suggest that you start with "The Colour of Magic", but they are all hilarious. With the state of the world today, anything that generates a genuine laugh should be cherished: I've read most of Terry Pratchett's books, and they have given me hours of enjoyment, cheered me up when I was down, and reminded me that there are many intelligent, useful people in the world (there are days when I have doubts).

However, good things can come from bad: Terry has made a large donation to the Alzheimer's Trust, and they have gained a vocal advocate. Research into Alzheimer's disease is not well funded, and it is a condition that many of us will have to deal with in the future, either because we contract it ourselves, or because someone we know contracts it: the incidence of the condition is rising. Increased funding for research will give us all a better chance in the future, and with that in mind, I've decided to make a donation to Alzheimer's Australia. If you've ever read and enjoyed a Terry Pratchett book (or even if you just dislike the thought of losing your mind) I'd like to ask you to make a donation to your local Alzheimer's support organisation or trust.

I decided to count the number of Terry Pratchett books in the house (39, and I know I am behind on his newer works, so say 40) and I'm going to donate one dollar per book per month. I can afford it, and I'm going to feel like a complete idiot if I get this thing in 10 years time (I'm about 10 years younger than Terry), and I have to look back and know that I didn't do something when I had the chance. It may take decades to find a cure, and research has to be funded, so let's all do what we can. If you can afford it, please donate: every little helps.

I'm also adding a social bookmarking button to this page. I don't normally do this, because I figure that people will submit links to Reddit/Digg/Furl/delicious or whatever as the mood takes them, and it's not my business to push. However, this is a special case: PLEASE Link, Bookmark or Share this post: the Add This button is on the left.

2008-03-24T17:09:00.001+11:00

Small, but perfectly formed....

Sorry for the long silence, I've been in a training course, which has another week to run. Back to normal (such as that ever is) in about 10 days, assuming I pass the exam.

A couple of weeks back I picked up an Asus Eee laptop on the way home from work. If you haven't seen this nice little gadget yet, I urge you to check it out at your first opportunity. I've bought the 4G model, which has a 7 inch (diagonal measurement) screen, 512MB of RAM and a 4GB solid state hard drive. Plus 3 USB ports, and SD card slot, modem port, ethernet port, built in wireless networking, a webcam and built in speakers. All of that, and it weighs 920 grams. The power supply is quite small, like the plug on a phone charger (I was expecting a big power brick, to compensate for the small form factor of the machine, so I was pleasantly surprised). The machine comes with a black nylon slip case, and I got a thin lens cleaning cloth from my optometrist, to use as a screen protector when the machine is closed. I've bought a Pacsafe Metrosafe 200 bag, which I can use when I only want to carry the Eee: it will fit in the same bag as my MacBook Pro, but it tends to rattle around if it's in there on it own. And my whole purpose for buying such a small machine was to minimize the amount of stuff that I carry around with me.

The Eee ships with Xandros, a fork of the Debian linux distro, and out of the box is configured in "Easy Mode", which presents a set of brightly coloured icons for basic tasks. This is probably good if the machine is going to be handed to an end user, but not much use for anyone technically literate, who wants to add more software or get at a command line, so the first thing to do is to reconfigure the machine into "Advanced Mode". The instructions are on the eeeuser wiki and the result is a full desktop (KDE).

I plugged in my Huawei E220 modem, and got it working in seconds (much easier than it was on my Mac!). I've installed the Opera web browser - Firefox comes pre-installed, but I've been meaning to try Opera seriously, and it's supposed to be a better choice for small screens.

But left in "Easy Mode", this computer would be perfectly usable by anyone with basic keyboard skills and the ability to drive a browser. It's Linux, without the hard parts. Linux for your grandmother. And this appears to be worrying some people, such as Mike Abary from Sony, who told cNet "If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That's just a race to the bottom". I think he's right to be worried: you can load Windows XP onto an Eee (this seems a daft idea to me, but it can be done), but Microsoft seems hell-bent on terminating XP on June 30th, in the face gross customer dissatisfaction with Vista, a petition for the continued availability of XP and against the advice of the analysts. The game is changing as they watch, and Microsoft isn't ready for it.

All big companies tend to get blinded by their own success, and they forget that the purpose of their marketing department is to convince the consumers, not to act as some sort of reality distortion field for their management. Someone from Microsoft really should review the history of Novell, which in about 1994-95 was the undisputed king of the hill, with a huge install base. Novell fell from power effectively in a matter of months, because their management (among many other stupid mistakes) assumed that a huge install base made them invincible. I was still working in technical support at the time: when I joined that team, there were about 30 people on the tech support team, 4 of whom could support Unix, while everyone did Netware support. I can remember being told by one of the Netware engineers that there was no point in working with Unix, because it was doomed: Netware was too big to be beaten. Within a year, Netware was no longer cool, and I was teaching Unix skills to my colleagues. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is forever in IT. When the life expectancy of a mobile phone is under a year (how many in your bottom drawer), when desktop machines are written off after about 3 years (less, if you're a gamer), change can come very quickly.

As more apps become available over the web, the need to have a big powerful machine on the desk diminishes. Have you seen these?

SlideRocket presentation software

Aviary image editing

GetDropBox storage and synchronization

Clarizen project management

and of course Google apps, Google docs, etc, etc. OK, the idea of trusting someone I've never met with my data, with no SLA's and no notion of what their security posture might be is worrying. But these things will mature: my employer sells customers access to a big shared HDS SAN to store their data, and many commercial vendors have some sort of "by the gigabyte" storage offering, run on who-knows-what hardware. SLAs and commercial arrangements are in place, and everyone is happy.

As applications move onto the web, and virtualization drags traditional desktops back into the data centre, the age of the "thin client" may well be upon us - Wyse, Sun, HP, IBM and many others all have offerings in that space, and they are well received at corporate level, by CIOs and CEOs tired of constant hardware upgrade costs and software licensing agreements with a price tag the size of the national debt of a small country. More and more gamers are moving to dedicated consoles, instead of PCs, and the demands of computer games have driven the direction of the PC hardware industry for many years. If you no longer run games on your PC, what do you still use it for, and how much hardware do you really need to complete those tasks? If you can do everything you want to using a web browser and services delivered over the Internet, you probably don't need much at all. Perhaps just enough to fit in your handbag?

I think "the race to the bottom" has already started.

2008-02-28T11:08:00.000+11:00

The Only Mac in the Office

My boss is a sensible and understanding man, and a week or so back he gave me permission to stop using my company-issue Windows XP laptop, and move all my working activities to my MacBook Pro. I have the only Mac in the office: every other computer runs some sort of Windows. We have Exchange and Sharepoint, and all those other applications that make you wonder why so much "technological progress" produces such a sad result: slow, ugly and inefficient. Of course, I used to work for Sun, where we had much better email systems, so I am biased. However, I see occasional questions in the press questions about whether a Mac can work effectively in an office environment, and I'm here to tell you: it can.

Now the IT department has not gone out of their way to help me (for which I don't blame them: I've done that job, and if you once modify your systems to suit one user, you set a precedent that makes it hard to refuse other changes, and the next thing you know, you have unstable systems and major administration headaches). They haven't blocked my access, and my VMware Fusion virtual Windows XP machine can authenticate to the network, and I can access everything I need, either natively through Mac OS X, or through the Windows VM. My biggest problem is that I have to remember when to hit CTRL-c to copy, and when to hit CMD-c. I have so far resisted the temptation to remap anything, because this really isn't a big issue, and I don't want to program myself, by establishing a habit, in such a way that I have trouble with a normal keyboard layout on either system.

So what does this get me? Well first, I don't have to waste time waiting for the Windows machine to boot and login every morning (we have to lock our machines up at night, for security reasons). Why does Windows take so long to start up? And it's alleged "sleep function" never seems to work properly, so you have to boot up from cold anyway, and even when the thing gets to the login prompt, it'll take a few more minutes to complete login tasks. Every Windows machine I have ever had or used demonstrates this behaviour, regardless of manufacturer, and in most cases the configuration of the machine seems to make little difference. It's not the hardware, it's the operating system: how can anything that slow be considered normal? I can take my Mac out of my bag, and have it running in seconds. I'm guessing that it saves me a good half hour every day, just in time I don't have to spend waiting for Windows to start or stop, run it virus checkers, and do all the other things that it does so slowly. Of course, I should be grateful: it might be Vista. I've seen that, and I'm sorry: life is too short to use bad software.

I also have access to all my favourite tools - EagleFiler, Curio, DevonThink, Omnigraffle. I am happy, and happy people are more productive.

And the really big bonus: I am no longer exposed to Microsoft's well-developed ability to devastate a system with a single poorly tested patch. I've had experiences in the past where I have loaded Microsoft's recommended patches onto a system, and suffered serious problems as a result. And Windows suffers badly from "bit rot": the longer you use it, the worse it performs. Eventually, you have to do a reinstall to clean up the mess. But if you run Windows in a virtual machine, you can avoid all this pain. For example....

This morning, I ran Microsoft Update on the Windows XP. So far, it seems OK. But if it develops a problem, I have a simple and quick way out: Time Machine. My Time Machine backups have a copy of the VM pre-patching. If I need to, I can delete the "live" VM, and pull a known-good, working copy from backup in minutes. No time wasting reinstalls: I can roll back any time I like.

To make this as painless as possible, it is VITAL that you do not store working files (Word documents, spreadsheets, anything) inside the VM. All "data" files should be stored in a shared directory in the Mac's "real" file system: treat it as you would a shared drive on a network. Store nothing on the local machine (in this case, the VM): keep everything in the share. Then if the VM dies, you still have your data.

2008-02-28T10:11:00.001+11:00

Standards Compatible Browsers

You may have noticed some fiddling about with the layout of this blog recently, without any new content appearing. The lack of new content is a by product of me being very busy at the moment, and the fiddling with the layout is by product of someone I know complaining that my blog didn't display properly in Internet Explorer.

Now to be perfectly honest, I don't think that anyone who would voluntarily use Internet Explorer would find much of interest in this blog. If you are trapped in a place where there is a mandatory standard operating environment which includes IE, then you have my deepest sympathies, but most people have a choice. Why anyone would choose IE, other than ignorance that there were alternatives, or just being too lazy to install something else, is incomprehensible to me. IE is a nasty piece of software. It is slow, it is insecure, and compared with the features offered in other browsers, it is roughly comparable to a Trabant.

I can't be bothered wasting any more time on this: I have worked out why my friend was having a problem (a combination of the defects in IE and a Windows security product) and I am not interested in messing with the layout of my blog to accommodate such foolishness. The foulness of IE is explained very clearly here, and I have nothing of significance to add. How to deal with the problem is explained by Stephen Fry here; there are other ways, but that will get you started. If you want to compare how different browsers render a web page, Browsershots is for you.

Seriously, the only thing IE is fit for is running Microsoft's vile "Windows Update". If you or your employer run a web site that is only tested for Internet Explorer, you might want to give some thought to the many people who use something else, and the business you may be losing if your site is not standards compliant.

2008-02-06T18:24:00.000+11:00

Technology Refresh

Greetings! I blog to you today from my brand new 20" iMac. I've spent the last couple of weekends moving my digital life onto this machine, and having a general tidy up and consolidate. The old Dell, with its plethora of cables, is in a temporary location in the family room: I still need it to read a few old zip drive cartridges, and when I'm sure I've got them all, I can decommission the machine, and send it to charity. I've also installed a 1.5TB Western Digital My Book Pro II, to act as a Time Machine disk for the iMac, and to provide some shared storage. I'm consolidating all my small external hard drives (to my shame, there are 4 of these of differing sizes, and 4 copies of some files), and cleaning up files going back to 1996. My desk is now much less cluttered - that Dell was a messy thing, cables everywhere - and a pleasant sense of order is developing.

One of the things that always worries me about decommissioning a machine is the chance that I will either omit to archive some data, or that I will loose access data because it is in some old or proprietary format. This has happened to me before - I have a CD that contains my old Lotus Notes mail box from a job I had about 12 years ago: I can no longer read that data, because the I no longer own a machine that runs the old Notes client. I junked it a couple of years back, knowing that I was losing access to the data.

But this time, I've used VMware to insure myself against possible problems. I've converted the entire operating system on the old Dell to a virtual machine, and loaded it onto the Mac, where I can used VMware Fusion to access it. I downloaded the VMware Converter (which is free) and installed it on a Windows XP machine, did the P2V, copied the files it created onto the Mac, installed the VMware tools, and it works fine. And Windows 2000 starts a whole lot faster on the Mac than it did on the Dell!

2008-01-24T12:30:00.000+11:00

Domestic Thrift

This post has nothing to do with computers or software. It was triggered by an incident in my house last week, when a visitor dropped a drinking glass on the kitchen floor. Now my kitchen floor is concrete, sealed with paving paint. I've lived with this floor for over a decade, and I hate it: it's cold, hard on the feet and unforgiving to dropped objects. I believe that there was a fad a while back for polished concrete floors: trust me on this one, the only place where concrete floors are good is warehouses and car parks. In homes, they're horrible. My new vinyl floor should be installed in the next week or so, but right now I still have the horrid concrete. And someone dropped a glass on it. And the glass bounced. The visitor said "I thought for sure that would break", and I wound up explaining how to purchase durable plates and glasses cheaply. She seemed impressed, so I thought I would pass the idea to a wider audience. I don't mind spending money, but I'd prefer to spend it on books and gadgets rather than china. And if you're on a tight budget, this is a tip that will definitely help you.

Did you ever wonder where bars and restaurants buy their crockery and tableware? I don't mean the Michelin starred establishments, who can afford Villeroy & Boch and Wedgeweood. I mean your favourite bistro, the bar you go to on a Friday night after work. Places where plates and glasses have a hard life, with a lot of handling and trips through the dish washer. The answer is that they mostly buy from specialist catering suppliers, and if you can locate one of these places, they're generally quite happy to sell to anyone who walks in off the street.

Catering suppliers tend to be big warehouses, and they don't sell 24 piece dinner services that include a milk jug and sugar bowl that no one will ever use (like the sets you see in department stores). Catering suppliers sell everything loose. So you can buy 1 plate, if that is all you need. Or three glasses. There's almost no packaging, usually just a bit of wrapping paper. Most of the glasses they sell will be toughened glass (like the one my visitor dropped), and rugged enough to survive in a busy bar. But everything they sell is still "nice enough" to be put on the table in a restaurant. The china tends to be plain white, in simple designs, and if you come back next year and need another plate, they will still have the same design. So if you are a poor student, and you only need one plate and one cup, you can buy them now, and then in a year or two when you can afford more, you can add to your collection.

And catering suppliers keep things that you never see in department stores: proper tapas dishes; those little round dishes that restaurants use to serve a pat of butter (these are really handy if you are doing a big buffet); serving platters in several sizes. OK, not every home needs a salad washer with a 20 kilo capacity, but if you need a really big saucepan, or a bulk supply of serviettes or cocktail sticks, a catering supplier will be cheaper than a department store.

I patronize the Hospitality Store in Camperdown (which only helps you if you live in Sydney, but there will be something similar in most cities).

2008-01-23T13:15:00.000+11:00

It works!

Yesterday I started to uncable my 9900F scanner, with the intention of hauling it upstairs, so I could connect it to the old PC that I keep on the gallery. The scanner sits on top of an Ikea PC desk that has a sort of string bag arrangement at the back, to keep cables tidy. I fished the scanner's power supply out of the bag, and noticed the original USB cable that shipped with the scanner. So I thought, "let's have one last go at getting this thing going under Fusion", extracted the cable, resumed the VM, and plugged in the scanner. Viola! The VM of XP recognized the scanner immediately. I went "What the...?", put a greeting card that was handy on the platen and did a test scan. It worked. I unplugged the USB cable: it is completely unremarkable. I tried one of the USB cables that I was working with over the weekend, and it worked, as well! I do not understand how or why, but the scanner now appears to work perfectly under a VMware Fusion VM of Windows XP on top of Leopard.

I hate transient faults: they were one of the nightmares of my life when I still worked in technical support. If something suddenly starts working, and you don't know why, when it stops working again, you still have no idea how to fix it. I should have my new iMac by the weekend, and I plan to conduct some tests to see if I can reproduce the original fault. However, right now, it works. So I don't have to replace my scanner any time soon - I would like one that works natively under Leopard, but I can now wait until the various manufacturers sort themselves out (which they seem to be very slow to do. It looks as though they all updated their printer drivers for 10.5, and sort of overlooked scanners). I should point out that I require a flat bed scanner: many of the documents that I need to scan are old and fragile, and not suitable for running through a page feed. So until someone brings out a decent, reliable, flat bed scanner that is supported under Leopard, I shall wait. As Robert Heinlein wrote, "Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds".

And if you've got a scanner that won't work under Leopard, a license of Fusion may be a cheap way to keep it going until updated drivers are available.

2008-01-17T18:14:00.000+11:00

Irritation

There can be few things quite so irritating as reading the morning paper, and finding that one of the more popular actors of the day has apparently borrowed your hairstyle. I don't wear my hair quite that long, and my white forelock isn't quite that large, but mine is a family thing - my brother has it, too. Mr Depp's forelock is makeup for a character, and not a very nice one at that. The film opens next week: I wait to see if anyone I know is foolish enough to comment.

I sat the Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate exam (JNO-341) last week, and passed (100%, all the study paid off), so I can think about something other than routers for a while.

What I'm thinking about at the moment is which Mac to buy next. To be honest, the MacWorld announcements were not all I was hoping for: I love the look of the MacBook Air, but the spec is just too low for me. I bought a MacBook Pro last year (I'm using it now), and I can't justify spending such a large amount of money for a machine with a slower processor and half the RAM. If I was still working for Sun (thank God I'm not!), with a lot of travel for work, I'd probably be more enthused by the thought of an ultra lightweight Mac. But I only carry my laptop bag from the house to the car, and from the car park to the office; if I need to carry a lot of additional tools or equipment, I have a laptop bag with wheels. So, much as I desire to possess those slim, shiny curves, I have to decline at this point. So I think my next purchase had better be an iMac, to replace my ancient Dell PC.

The Dell is definitely on its last legs: still running Windows 2000, getting very slow, and I think the hard disk is going to fail soon. So I'm going to replace it with an iMac, and run VMware Fusion for access to other operating systems. But the one problem that I cannot get past is my scanner - a Canoscan 9900F. Canon evidently don't intend to update the drivers: they will only support Leopard on a range of their newer models, and I can't get the drivers to install in my VM of Windows XP. So I suppose I shall have to buy a new scanner. Somehow I don't think I shall be buying another Canon!

I believe that Adobe are releasing or have released their new Mac product, but I don't think I shall be buying it. I've come across Pixelmator, which seems to do everything that I want to do at a bargain price. Furthermore, right now you can get Pixelmator and a bundle of other goodies from MacHeist, for the princely sum of $US49, 25% of which goes to charity. The bundle includes 12 applications, but it's only available for about 6 more days, so don't delay.

2008-01-07T19:14:00.000+11:00

Back to work - 2008

Apologies for the lack of posting - I've been on leave, with family visiting from interstate, and disappearing into one's study to blog is not really acceptable hostess behaviour. But my visitors have gone back home, and I went back to work this morning, so normal service will be restored as soon as I get my backlog caught up a bit. I'm guessing that a few of you are also just getting back to "normal", because comments started up again a few days ago, and I owe a few of you a response. I'm going to respond here, rather than in the comments section, because (I'm pleased to say) some of my older posts are still finding an audience, and generating comments; but not everyone wants to dredge through old comment threads to follow conversations, so let's chat here.

There is a question from Sherman, about PDA/PIM software on the Mac: he's looking for "the ultimate", and I have to say that I'm not finding more than "mediocre". In my experience, integration between PDA/PIM devices and Mac OS X is poor; I've dwelt on this problem, and I think I understand why it is so. Many of the currently shipping PDA's run some sort of Microsoft operating system. They are designed to play well with other Microsoft software, and I imagine that most Mac developers react to them by recoiling in horror and disgust. Microsoft has that section of the market well sewn up, so there is no incentive for developers from the Mac camp to waste their time writing software for that platform. Palm, on the other hand, runs Palm OS. You would think that would be a better platform for Mac integration: no Microsoft to compete with, or to mess with underlying document formats and cause things to break. Trouble is, Palm has been looking less and less clever for a few years now, and if they have a direction it looks like "down" to me. Project cancellations, product confusion, failure to deal with the rise of Blackberry. I see fewer and fewer Palm Pilots in meetings, and more and more competing products. Developers have to eat: if the target market is not big enough, they are not going to expend their efforts on writing code for it.

And the reported trends for countries like Japan are falling PC sales and rising mobile phone sales. Demand is for the small, portable, integrated gadget that does it all, from browsing the web to reading your mail and playing music. There are problems with that, particularly for the corporate user: companies like "end-point control", for security's sake. My Blackberry is administered from a central server, with settings pushed down to the handset. I cannot install any application I wish. This is quite reasonable - the company owns the phone, it has access to the company network, they have both a right and an obligation to secure the device appropriately (anyone interested in an extended diatribe on end-point security, drop me a line).

So is all doom and gloom on the PDA front? Perhaps not: check this prediction from Andy Ihnatko, at Macworld.com (you may have to scroll down a bit). He's gazing into his crystal ball and seeing a whole new kind of device. I can't judge how well tuned his crystal ball is, but I like his thinking: here's hoping he's right! I can't imagine that Steve Jobs will announce such a device next week - I'm hanging out for the the rumoured sub-notebook - but perhaps later in the year? There's no denying that we are moving into the always-online, instant-access era (many of us are already there), but I think the trend has further to go - perhaps not to the SciFi predictions of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Oath of Fealty (there's no company in existence whose kit I would trust inside my brain!) - but further than we are now.

I see a comment from Dana, who found Delicious Library disappointing, because the barcode scanning would not work. I also had problems with this initially, until I figured out what was wrong. To get a good shot of a barcode, the camera (built in or external iSight) needs very good light. This is particularly true if the background colour is not plain white, or if the code is faded. I have a powerful halogen lamp above my desk, and if I want to scan things into DL, I turn it on and make sure that the area around the camera is really well illuminated. I find this helps enormously. I do agree that Delicious Library has room to improve, but version 2 is just around the corner, and the previews are getting good press. Here's hoping!

Finally, there is a comment from Michael Bywater, who must have recently found my posts from last May, about the Art of Storing Things. First, thank you for your kind words - my university lecturers would be pleased that their efforts were not wasted. I'm glad you found the post useful. I do agree with you that every student should get at least a basic grounding in classification and information retrieval theory: these are becoming critical life skills, not something that should be confined to knowledge management consultants and librarians. If you have ever had the experience of having to use to locate something for someone else, you will know how hard this is for some people. I used to get asked to do this a lot while I still worked for Sun Microsystems: I was told when I joined that about 1 in 5 machines on the Sun network were web servers (and I believe that number may have been pessimistic, and 1 in 3 more likely). The amount of information is huge, and often difficult to navigate. Colleagues would turn up at my desk, and ask something such as "I know there is a document that describes this procedure, can you find it for me?", and I would do a couple of searches, and find whatever it was, and the other person would go "I've been looking for that for hours!"

Perhaps what I need to do is write something on how to search, and how to relate the way things are stored to various search strategies - let me think about that.

Anyway, my husband just got home, so I must end here for today. A Happy 2008 to you all, and culturally appropriate seasonal greetings.

2007-12-31T17:43:00.000+11:00

DIY Databases

Just before Christmas, while I was tidying up my study (read: moving piles from one place to another), I came upon a small box, which contained a stack of slips of paper. Each slip contains a single quotation, with the appropriate citation and, in some cases, additional notes. Type-written. This is a very old box, and the contents date to the long-ago days when I still worked as a librarian, and there was no Internet. Computers were very large, and programming was done on punch cards: end users who wanted to compile collections of quotations either wrote them out by hand, or typed them. So this little box has moved house with me several times, and I have intended to convert the contents to some convenient electronic format for some years now.

So I looked at the box, sifted through the bits of paper and thought "surely I have enough software to deal with this now, and then I can chuck out the paper, which would be a fine thing given the amount of "stuff" packed into my rather small study".

My first thought was Bento, and I quickly constructed a suitable database: no problem. Database design is very easy in Bento, and I input half a dozen records to try it out. Data entry was easy, I adjusted the input form to suit my requirements. Then I started looking at output, and there I hit a problem. Bento's facilities for outputting a formatted report are pretty primitive: I can't find a way to get it to fit multiple records on a page.

So I fossicked around, and turned up iList Data, which looked promising. Database set up was straight forward, though I suspect that iList Data is a whole lot more database than I really need. But the Report Design features are pretty limited - a bit better than Bento, in that I can get multiple records on a page, but nothing like the control I'm looking for in a report generation tool.

It has taken me a while to work out what it is that I am looking for, but I think I have figured it out. The whole problem that I am having with database applications goes back to the period between 1988 and 1990, when I was working with a product called BRS/Search. BRS was a remarkable piece of software: it was a full text indexing database, but it was not relational. It had straightforward design tools (well, I thought they were easy to use), that would let you define the fields that you wanted in your database and design an input form. Then you loaded whatever the data was into the database, and it indexed it using a reverse index method: it built a table (I'm working from memory here) that listed each word precisely once, and then recorded the "coordinates" for each instance of that word in the data. So if the word "car" appeared, it would be referenced as appearing in Record N, Field F, Line L and Word W or whatever. If the word appeared again, another coordinate record would be added to the "car" entry. This gave it a very fast search engine, and made the construction of complex Boolean searches very easy.

And BRS had a report generation language which was, as I recall, effectively a 4GL scripting language. You could control the layout of reports quite closely, displaying part or all of fields, and positioning them where you wanted on screen or paper.

The company I worked for at that time sold BRS to all sorts of customers. Lawyers used it for litigation support. Advertising companies used it to handle campaign details. It was used to catalogue music and index contracts. It ran on various flavours of Unix, and it appears to have been swallowed up by some larger company, and I don't believe that it exists as a separate product anymore, certainly not in the way it did 20 years ago.

I think that is what I am looking for now: I don't need a relational database, I just need something to index chunks of text, with flexible input and output. Any suggestions?

2007-12-08T18:54:00.000+11:00

Exams, Leap, Weather etc.

If someone had come to me on the day I graduated University, and said "when you are 48 you will still be studying and sitting exams", I think I would have assumed that they were crazy. However, this morning I sat the Prometric exam for the Hitachi Data Systems "Storage Foundation Modular" course (HH0120), and I'm studying for a couple of Juniper router exams that I need to get out of the way before the end of the year. I passed the HDS exam, but the Juniper exams promise to be tougher, so I'm spending my "free" time - such as that is - studying. Hence the silence for the last week. However, I need a break: my head is a whirling mass of acronyms and vendor jargon.

In the last 45 minutes we've had one of the big sub-tropical storms that make Sydney's climate so interesting. Thunder, lightening, thick black clouds and torrential rain. I unplugged my machines and went and read a manual until the storm passed, and from the sound of it, it is now moving East and out to sea. Mungo, who doesn't approve of weather with sound effects, went and hid under the dining room table. Percy, who knows that the safest place in the world is my lap, came and sat on me. Percy loves a lap, which is fine in winter, but not entirely comfortable on hot, humid days. I should probably be grateful that Mungo rarely wants to sit on me - no human lap is big enough, and he tends to cut off the circulation to your legs if he sits on you for long. However, as a general rule, if Mungo wants to sit on you, you are either in his chair, or he feels unwell and needs a hug.

I notice that the folks from Furl have finally fixed their export facility. Now I just need time to munge my Furl archive into EagleFiler - suggestions, anyone? I've never needed to do a bulk import before.

Someone asked me to look at Leap a while back. I did look, and while it is a nice application, I'm afraid it may be one whose time has already passed. If Leap had come to market a year ago, before Leopard, I think there would have been general rejoicing. But the improvements to the Finder in Leopard are such that I'm having trouble seeing what functionality Leap gives me that I can't get from the operating system. For example: when I went to book my Prometric exam, the call centre person asked if I already had a Candidate ID number. As far as I can recall, the last time I did this type of exam was in about 1997, and the system was being administered by a company who was subsequently merged/bought out/consumed with or by Prometric. I said I might have an ID in the old scheme, so he looked up my name, and sure enough, he found a match. But he needed the street address and phone number that I had when I last used the ID, to confirm that it was me and not some other person called Melodie Neal. So I said "that was 10 years ago, the company I was working for is gone, I don't recall the street address (I could drive there, but that doesn't help), and I certainly don't know the phone number. Give me a minute". I went to Finder, ran a search on my old employer's name, filtered on Kind=Document and Last Modified=Before 1/12/1997, and easily found an old contract with the required information embedded in it.

Quicklook and Coverflow allow me to glance at documents without launching their normal handling applications. So I'm afraid I don't quite see why I would need Leap. If I've missed something here, could someone please point it out to me? Note: any further grumpy exchanges between developers arguing the merits of their particular preferred language/architecture/whatever should be conducted elsewhere. I tolerated the last one, but you guys need to understand that most of us ARE NOT INTERESTED. We care about the end result, not how you got there. If this seems odd to you, please consider that for me, as an infrastructure engineer (the person who racks the kit, runs the cables, configures the firewalls and writes the operations manuals), some of the worst problems I have ever had to deal with have been caused by developers. Developers who assumed that the infrastructure could run their software (you never said you needed a proxy server!), or that the firewalls would pass their packets (you have got to be kidding: you can't use ftp to transfer medical records to another country!). You assume the plumbing will work, I assume the software will work. The details are your problem or mine, depending on our specialities.

Later

There was a break there, because Steve (my husband) came home from work, and we started our normal end of day routine. We have a sherry, debrief on the day's activities, and start dinner (he cooked, bless him). It's now Saturday night.

Now, before I forget: volume 2 of Blue Mountains Music is out. Do yourself a a favour and go here.

Also out is an update to the Bento beta. On brief inspection I can see no changes, so I assume it's mostly bug fixes.

I've no significant response to my previous post on Mac-compatible, PDA-portable databases (other than comments from other folks who would like the same thing). This is a bit sad: here is a clear requirement for a product, and we have people trying to write replacements for things already provided natively in the OS. Sigh.

2007-12-02T19:44:00.000+11:00

The Annual Trip to the Vet

Every year, around the beginning of December, our cats have to pay a visit to the Vet to get their shots and have sundry routine cat-maintenance tasks performed. This is always traumatic, and today was the day, so we are now in recovery mode, collectively.

The experience starts with a quick trip to the attic, to retrieve the cat carrying cages: a big plastic one for Mungo, and a smaller (but tougher) metal and plastic one for Percy. We always cage Percy first because, if he works out what is going on, he goes to ground and becomes impossible to catch. So we stuff the protesting white cat into the cage and slam the lid, while trying to make sure that all the madly thrashing limbs are inside the cage (also the tail). Cage cat, place in front hall. Go and fetch Mungo, who by now knows that something is up (because Percy is yelling his head off, he doesn't like being in the cage). However, Mungo is too big to hide effectively, so he just has to be lugged to his cage and put into it: it's the sort where the top half comes off completely, and is refastened with tabs around the edge, so it's sort of like constructing a giant cat sandwich, with a rather unwilling cat. But we manage to get him into the cage, and all the tabs done up. Now we have two unhappy cats in boxes.

We haul Mungo to the Prius, and put him in the back seat with the seat belt around his cage. And Steve gets into the front seat with Percy on his lap. with a towel over the cage. Sometimes having the towel to hide under calms Percy down a bit, but today isn't one of those days. Percy continues yelling, and Mungo starts up as well. Mungo seldom makes a fuss about going to the Vet, he just does the dumb misery routine, but today he is in fine voice and we drive to the Vet with a duet of "help, murder, save me!" coming from the cat cages. Fortunately, the drive is only about 10 minutes.

Our Vet is next to a big Greek Orthodox church, and Greek Orthodox people either can't read, or are too selfish to care: all the Vet's parking spaces are full, despite being clearly labelled as being for the use of the Vet's customers only. We have to park a long way away, and carry the still-protesting cats to the surgery. Not fun on a hot day, and we elect to leave Percy's towel in the car, since it doesn't seem to be helping. The Vet's nurse says that all the parking places were full when they arrived to open up, and a parade of fat people dressed in black in passing the surgery windows on the way to the church: I've unfortunately timed our visit to coincide with morning service. Bad move.

In consequence of the delay, we miss our appointment, and the Vet starts the next patient, so we have to wait. Both cats grizzle unhappily. We put Mungo, cage and all onto the big scales in the waiting room. We have the weight of the cages written on them, so we can do a subtraction and get the weight of the cat. Mungo weighs 11.66 kilos. He's been fatter, and he has lost some weight, but not enough. Percy weighs about 5.5 kilos, which is normal. Percy now decides that he needs to hide, and in the absence of his towel. he rakes up the newspaper in the bottom of his cage, and manages to get it on top of him. We should have brought the towel.

The Vet on duty hasn't seen our cats before, so he has to read their extensive histories and ask questions before we can get down to business. Then both cats get their shots, blood samples taken for routine testing (they're older cats, and we figure their ailments will be cheaper to treat if diagnosed early), and worming pills administered. We get Percy done first, because he needs less doing, and then he goes back in his cage (no struggle this time), and gets back under his piece of newspaper. Finally, Mungo is carried out the back of the surgery, so that the staff can shave his bottom. Mungo is ridiculously fluffy, and while he likes being brushed, he won't let anyone brush his nethers, so he gets tangly. We have him clipped appropriately once a year, for the sake of hygiene. Otherwise we tend to get a phenomenon known in the family as "Clingons" when Mungo uses his litter tray.

Mungo, freshly shaved, is brought back to us and crawls back into his cage at once, since the cage is now the safest place in the room. We are used to this routine from previous years: getting the boys into their cages at the surgery is always easy. We chat to the Vet for a couple of minutes, and then go to reception to pay for all this, and a sack of the special diet cat biscuits that Mungo needs to keep his bladder healthy. The bill is the thick end of $AU500, and I can see why they reckon veterinary science is one of the best paid professions. Fortunately Steve and I both earn professional salaries!

By now, church is over, and hordes of fat people dressed in black are heading for their cars. I go a fetch our car, and manage to park near the surgery. We load the boys back in, and head home. There is no yelling on the way home, just the occasional grumble. We get the cages into the house, and open them. Both cats bolt for the family room, and wash furiously. Mungo goes to his biscuit plate, and has a consoling snack. Percy goes outside and sits on the barbeque, in the sun. Steve and I collapse exhausted.

What a way to spend Sunday morning.

2007-11-19T19:25:00.000+11:00

Dear Mac Application Software Developers....

I know you are out there, and I know that on occasion you track blogs like this one - and I'm hoping you will happen by and read this post. I have a problem, and I'm sure one of you can solve it.

For a very long time (more years than I can recall), I've had a Palm Pilot. The exact model has changed over the years, and the current instance is a LifeDrive. This device serves several critical functions, and I do not leave the house without it. The function that I am interested in today is a set of three databases: DVDs, Fiction and NonFiction. Those databases hold what you might expect: the shelf lists of the thousands of books and hundreds of DVDs in my house. With publisher details. And ISBN numbers. Since bookshops hold a magnetic attraction for me, and I tend to buy faster than I read, I need to keep a list of what is already on my overloaded shelves.

I use a database called HanDBase3, from DDH Software. The integration between Mac OS X and the HanDBase desktop is pathetic, and to be frank, and the software is flaky. If you want to see a really ugly bit of software that claims to be for a Mac, go look at this. I have also started using the Delicious Library software, which is nice, but only exports to an iPod as Notes. Less than ideal if you are dealing with thousands of items.

What I really want is a database structure that I can define, and which I can access in some way either from my Palm Pilot, or from an iPhone or iPod Touch. I don't need to edit anything on the handheld, I just need to be able to search and view fairly simple records. I don't particularly want to use my Blackberry for this because it is not really mine - it is my employer's. I may not have it in my next job, and my current employer has security concerns about content on company owned devices (I don't blame them).

Recently, the FileMaker people released the beta of their Bento product. It looks OK, though it needs work, but you can't expect miracles from beta software. I could easily construct the sort of databases I need in Bento, but there is no way to export the data as anything but CSV. I'm guessing that the iPhone and iPod Touch will require XML.

So there's my challenge: a user defined database that can be searched on a Palm Pilot, an iPhone or an iPod Touch (just one will do, I don't need all three). Something stable, and with decent Mac integration.

Is that so hard? More detailed spec available on request.....

2007-11-19T18:57:00.000+11:00

EagleFiler Update

In case you missed it, update 1.2.7 for EagleFiler is now available, and it includes a few bug fixes, and several improvements, including:

"Combined the three system services into one, which detects whether it was invoke with a file, text, or URL(s). The keyboard shortcut can now be configured using System Preferences rather than a separate utility."

Which I love, thank you, thank you.

2007-11-14T20:42:00.000+11:00

Things that make me happy

I have a feeling that one of the tests of "real happiness" is to be aware that you are happy, rather than just "feeling OK". For the last few weeks I have been particularly aware that I am happy, and that things are going well for me (as opposed to last year, which was quite nasty). I am getting good feed back from customers and colleagues (they like my work), and I'm past that point in my new job when I don't feel properly engaged. I've finally found floor covering for my kitchen that accords with the vision I had in my head, and I should be able to get it installed soon. My cabinet maker's sketches for my new sideboard are just what I wanted, and he thinks he can have it finished before Christmas. All good.

And Stephen Fry has started to write a blog and someone has had the happy thought of getting him to write a column for The Guardian (and if you don't know who Stephen Fry is, I can do no better than to refer you to his performances in productions such as Jeeves and Wooster and Cold Comfort Farm). To find that he is a geek in the very best sense, and verily a Mac person as well - what can I say? It's like a very large, gift wrapped, completely undeserved present!

Closer to home, the lovely folks at Zengobi have issued forth version 4.1 of Curio, which includes the plugin necessary to make Curio documents visible in Leopard's CoverFlow and QuickLook, and numerous other enhancements. Love your work, people!

On a slightly downward note, I've been told that the LookSmart people are selling some of their assets to CNET, and that appears to include Furl. As my friend Alec Muffet says Back-Up Your Furl Databases, ASAP !!! (and his blog has the instructions). Unfortunately, Furl appears to be broken, and will not let me download the zip file of my saved content. Furl is aware of the problem, and one can only hope that there is someone there who can fix the system - they've laid off 25% of their staff in the last quarter, and in my experience engineers always get shafted long before managers.

2007-11-13T20:49:00.000+11:00

On the slow corruption of the English language

I've been meaning to have a little whinge about this subject for a while, and since I have 10 spare minutes. here it comes. First let me state that I am English by birth and Australian by naturalization. I lived in England until I was nearly 12, when my family emigrated to Australia, so I did part of my education in each country. I've always loved the written word in almost any form, which is why I originally became a librarian. However, the years have passed, I somehow drifted into IT, and now I seem to read more words on computer screens than I do on paper.

The general standard of written English is not improving, it is getting steadily worse, and I do not understand this. Computer are particularly intolerant of errors in both spelling and grammar. Anyone who has ever mistyped a variable name, or made a syntax error in a bit of code will know that this is true, and not likely to change any time soon. I was once called out to a site to diagnose a problem with a Unix system. Some piece of software that the system administration folks were using to automate account creation was refusing to load on this machine, and things had reached the finger pointing stage between the operating system vendor and the application vendor. I poked about for a few minutes, and realized that some fool had edited the /etc/password file and changed a colon (:), the normal field delimiter for that file to a semi-colon (;). The application software was reading the file, and choking on the unexpected character. These things matter to computers.

So if we all work with these machines, strict enforcers of specific rules for spelling and grammar, why is the increasing sloppiness of the written word as we use it to communicate with one another tolerated? Written language matters, people: it is a communications protocol that we use to make sense of one another, and heaven knows that can be hard enough without having to cope with protocol errors.

And don't tell me you use a spell checker! A spell checker is worthless unless it is used intelligently, and by someone who understands their own language well enough to know when the program is wrong. I used to work for a senior manager who had the unfortunate habit of spell checking his written communications, and just accepting whatever the program suggested: this frequently resulted in hilariously nonsensical sentences, and the need for clarifications.

My current pet hate is the confusion that seems to have arisen around the words troll and trawl. Try this: go to Google, and search this phrase "troll through my archives". About 60 hits on this combination, and there are variations on this theme: try "trolling through my archives", for another 77.

Let us get this straight once and for all: if you are hunting through an archive, you are searching. You could say dredging, or hunting or trawling. These are all fine and appropriate words, which convey the sense of sifting through a collection of objects. What you are not doing is trolling. Trolling (which seems to have come down as a corruption from either Middle English or High German) means either to fish with a baited line - which is hardly comparable to a thorough search - or to stroll about. Trawling is a fishing activity, typically involving large nets which collect everything in their path, and the word has acquired the additional meaning of thorough searching.

Unfortunately the word "troll" already has a well established meaning across the Internet - those pathetic souls who derive personal gratification from stirring up flame wars by posting deliberately inflammatory comments online. And since most of the planet has apparently seen Peter Jackson's version of the Lord of the Rings, you would think that most people would have a mental image of a troll that did not include a capacity for patient searching as part of the feature set. This usage of the word "troll" derives from Norse mythology, and refers to something ugly that that lives in a cave, and seems quite apt for the sort of person whose most effective method of gaining personal attention is to annoy strangers.

I realize that all living languages evolve and mutate: one has only to look at the new words that have entered the dictionary in the last few years to understand that (spyware, ringtone, biodiesel - all recent additions). But the very richness and flexibility of the English language can only be maintained if we keep plenty of distinctive words in use. If we manage to collapse "troll" and "trawl", a little bit of colour and vitality drains away.

So let's keep our cave dwellers and our fishing nets separated, shall we?

2007-11-11T21:33:00.000+11:00

VMware Fusion: OS virtualization for Mac OS X

One of the biggest buzzes in IT at the moment is around virtualization. Server virtualization works like this: most computers in data centers are not really very busy: many of them are actually less than 15% utilized most of the time. There are many reasons for this. In the past, as a company started a new project, it was common to buy a complete set of new equipment for that project: a new web server, new application server, new database server, and in some cases two or more of each for redundancy. Plus firewalls and load balancers and such. I've built lots of these set ups and they are sold like this for three main reasons:

1. because it allows the purchaser to attribute all blame for anything that goes wrong to the vendor who sold "the solution"; this is known as "the one-throat-to-choke principal".

2. because whoever is funding the project wants to "own" the kit, and not share with anyone else; this is common in environments that aren't mature enough to have figured out how to bill for compute time and facilities as a service. We call this phenomenon "server hugging".

3. often no one has a clear idea of how the new environment will perform, what sort of load it will carry, or even if the service it provides will be popular enough to pay for the deployment. There is a desire to protect the known, stable part of the infrastructure from the new project, in case something goes wrong during the course of the build. This is warranted - I recall several new deployments that had unforeseen and regrettable impacts on the existing systems in the data center. If you don't have a good test environment, the only mitigation of this risk is physical separation.

So new systems go into production, and sit there at perhaps 15% utilization, often much less, consuming electricity and generating heat 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is a huge waste of money, and environmentally irresponsible. It's been common in the past because in the majority of companies, the IT department does not pay for electricity: power and cooling comes out of another budget, so IT has no incentive to do anything about it. It's not even terribly obvious if your servers are collocated in someone else's data center: there, you are typically charged for rack space, and sometime per CPU, and the data center owners will have factored power and cooling into their charges. But business owners are beginning to be aware of these details, and the accountants are sharpening their knives. If green computing can save money, they are all for it.

So if you take 4 machines that are only 15% utilized, and merge their workloads together onto one machine, that one machine will be a lot busier, but it will occupy less rack space, consume less electricity and produce less heat. When IT vendors wax lyrical about "green computing", this is generally part of what they are talking about.

Of course not all applications are suitable for virtualization: anything with very high I/O requirements should be tested carefully. Some applications just do not play well in a shared environment, and you need to consider what your security policies say about the separation of various services and components before you start consolidating things. Consider also that if you are going to put a lot of eggs into a single basket, it should be a very good quality basket, not some nameless beige box that you got cheap from a friend of a friend. But with sensible planning, testing and resourcing, server virtualization can save a great deal of money.

The leading vendor in this field is VMware, who produce the VMware Server products. There are other players, including Xen, IBM, Red Hat and Sun, but VMware (to the annoyance of their competitors) was first to market with a robust solution, and they have both market and mind share that others only can dream about. Their products are good, their support excellent, and as a vendor they are a joy to deal with. So when I found that their VMware Fusion product, VMware for Mac OS X, was about to be released, I was curious to see what it had to offer. I'd been dimly aware of the beta, but never looked at it, and the final release is an Intel binary, so when my new MacBook arrived in August I downloaded the demo and gave it a whirl.

Now I must confess to having followed standard engineering practice for installing this software

1. Download software
2. Glance at the first page of the vendor's doco, conclude that it looks simple, toss doco aside.
3. Install software by following the prompts and doing what seems obvious.
4. Reach the point where it prompts for a Windows installation CD.
5. Go round to the IT department and borrow media and software keys from those enormous folders of CDs that Microsoft ships people who take its products seriously.
6. Stick Windows XP disk into MacBook's DVD drive while thinking "what am I doing?"
7. Go through the usual messy and disgusting procedure of installing XP, Office, Project and Visio, and applying enough patches to choke a horse. I had to refer to the doco briefly at this point, to work out how to have the Mac send CTRL+ALT+DEL to the Windows virtual machine.
8. Watch XP boot in a window on my Mac desktop and realize with horror that I have loaded a petri dish onto my beautiful Mac.
9. Scrabble hastily for a distro of our preferred anti virus software, and get it going before something bad happens.
10. Tinker for a few minutes, to get the virtual machine to authenticate to Active Directory, and get a print queue and some file shares.
11. Build another virtual machine (VM), this one running Solaris 10 (you'll need the X86 media, not Sparc).
12. Download a pre-built VM of Ubuntu Linux from the VMware appliance site.
13. Start all three VMs simultaneously in different windows.
14. Try to engage the enthusiasm of the person at the next desk in how utterly cool this is.
15. Conclude that I shouldn't have tried step 14 on a business development manager.

Now you may well ask "why would I do this?", or "why not use Parallels or Boot Camp or whatever?" Taking those questions in reverse order:

Boot Camp gives you a dual boot machine: you have to stop one operating system to start the other one. Life is too short.

Parallels only supports 32 bit guest operating systems, it's a notorious resource hog, and I have heard horror stories about its stability, or lack thereof. Fusion is highly configurable, doesn't bog my machine down, and is stable. Also, and Parallels doesn't have very many pre-built virtual appliances available. VMware has hundreds, many of them free, including VMs of all sorts of operating systems and networking kit. This gives me the opportunity to tinker with things that I might otherwise never get to try.

Furthermore, VMware is a large and successful company: they have recently completed their IPO, and are going from strength the strength. The other players in this space have interesting products, but big businesses like to buy software from other big businesses: it gives them a cosy feeling that there will be ongoing support, if they need it. And since I have a lot of customers who use VMware in their production environments, it's handy for me to use some of the software myself: helps me stay current on the products.

For me the ability to run multiple operating systems on the Mac is wonderful. For example, I'm in the throes of updated a training course that I wrote years ago, 'The General Introduction to Unix', which I am generalising (it was originally written for SCO Unix and Solaris in the late 90's) to cover Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X. I need to check every bit of syntax, update screen shots, and in some cases remind myself how things work in different operating systems. Not having to power up the old Ultra 10 in my study to look at Solaris saves time and electricity.

Then there are the cases where you need to run some piece of software that will only run on Windows. To be honest, the only thing I really need on Windows is Visio. Anything else either runs natively on a Mac, or there is a better alternative on a Mac. Visio however I do use, and it is pretty much the standard diagramming package used across the industry - you even see it as a required skill set in job descriptions. I use OmniGraffle on my Mac, but until Omnigraffle can give me a Size and Position dialog like Visio's, I will never be able to get the level of precise control that I need. Also, customers frequently send me Visio diagrams and just assume that everyone can read them, because Visio is "the standard". And it is a good piece of software (I note that Microsoft bought the product, they did not create it).

Furthermore, running Windows in a VM on my Mac allows me to get past a problem that has annoyed me since the day I started this job: the local IT folk refuse to add my Mac to Active Directory, so I have never been able to map a file share or print (and yes, I have tried direct IP printing; we have particularly nasty brand of printers that do not support direct IP printing from Macs; the vendors published "work around" is "do not print from Mac". I kid you not). But as soon as the VM of Windows booted, AD recognized it, and allowed me to map drives and set up a print queue. The VM looks just like a PC to AD, and it treats it as such.

And it just works. A few weeks back, I took my Mac to a training course, and when I got it out, the instructor's face fell. The software we were supposed to be learning had a client interface that ran on Windows, and he didn't think it would work on a Mac. So I started my Windows VM, loaded the client, and it worked perfectly (and the other people on the course were jealous, because they had the usual Windows based laptops: slow, ugly and flaky). I had to allocate a bit more memory to the Windows VM for the duration of the course (the client software was a real hog), but once I had done that, my virtual Windows box could easily keep up with their physical ones.

Fusion allows you to emulate all sorts of things, which is handy if you need to do demonstrations. I recently attended a presales demo by an antivirus vendor. The customer wanted to buy antivirus software for their fleet of Microsoft machines. The antivirus presales guy turned up to the demo with a Mac, started up a hoard of Microsoft VMs, and demonstrated his products using them. It worked brilliantly - he had a demo lab in a box, something that it would have taken days to build physically (and he closed the sale, against stiff competition).

The arrival of Leopard has made using Fusion even easier, because I can park the VMs in a Spaces pane until I need them, and they don't even clutter up my desktop. If you haven't tried Fusion, there is a 30 day evaluation version available from the VMware website: give it a try, I think you'll like it.

2007-10-30T21:46:00.000+11:00

Happy Leoparday

I got my copy of Leopard on Friday, and spent much of the weekend upgrading and testing my old 15" Powerbook and my new 15" MacBook Pro. I started on the Powerbook, because I wanted some confidence that my critical apps would work, and retain their data, before I hosed my MacBook: that's my "production" machine, and if it doesn't work, neither do I.

And I wanted to do a clean install, rather than an upgrade, because I was pretty sure that I had some old and ugly kernel level stuff (from some work I did last year) that had migrated from the Powerbook to the MacBook when I transitioned a few months back. I had some problems with drivers for my Huawei wireless modem, and there were some apps installed via Fink, and a shattered copy of Nmap that never compiled cleanly, and caused the Mac to lock solid. I wanted a fresh start, so I started by doing a full backup of the MacBook to an external drive, and while that was running, I sat down with the Powerbook and made sure that there was nothing on it that I didn't have backed up somewhere. I made notes of some config settings (not enough, as it turned out). Then I put the disk in the drive, and did a fresh install.

Leopard installed without problems. I logged in, resisted the urge to play with it (well, mostly), and started installing test apps. The Powerbook spends most of its life in a drawer - it had zero battery charge when I got it out - and I would only use it now if the MacBook died (perish the thought!) or I had to test something requiring two Macs; I'm afraid I don't even keep the machines in sync. The things I cared most about were DevonThink and EagleFiler: as long as I could install them, and restore their data, I knew I could proceed safely. Neither app had a problem, I restored their data from backups, and everything worked.

I moved on to installing a few other things, Firefox, Thunderbird and so on. Then I loaded iWork'08 and iLife'08 (family pack licenses, I'm legal). Everything worked, except iMovie, which said the Powerbook's processor was too slow, and refused to install.

Once the MacBook had finished backing up, I installed Leopard on it, and started doing a proper restore of everything I use every day, starting with CleanApp: I wanted a good understanding of where every package had put every file on the disk. I loaded DevonThink and EagleFiler, and restored their data. I loaded Microsoft Office, iWork and iLife, and OpenOffice. I loaded Firefox and Thunderbird and Curio. I loaded VMware fusion, and restored my virtual machines (they work fine). I imported my iPhoto library, and a whole bunch of other photos that were lying about the place. I spent a long time waiting for iTunes to grind through all my music. In fact I spent a lot of the weekend waiting for data to move from one disk to another, to import or reindex or whatever. I got quite a bit of house cleaning done while I was waiting.

Things that didn't work: iMovie flatly refused to launch on the MacBook, and I was just sitting there thinking "well that seems a bit sad" when Software Update woke up and offered me a bunch of patches: I loaded them, and they sorted iMovie out. Launch2Net, which is what I use to manage the Huawei modem is not quite ready for Leopard, but the nice people at Nova Media have a beta of their next version available, and it seems pretty stable. This is where I found out that I had forgotten to note down how I had got the modem going in the first place. For reasons that elude me, Optus ship this wireless modem to customers and they only support it under Windows. Vodaphone ship the same unit with Mac support. I work for a subsidiary of Optus (and we use these modems for remote access).It's taken me a while to get it going under Mac OS X, and the final answer was to install it on a Windows machine, look at the configuration it used there, get the name of the Optus APN, and then put that into the Launch2Net config on the Mac. Tiresome, but it works.

It looks like I may have problems with the drivers for my CanoScan 9900F. Canon's Mac support is pathetic. I haven't attempted to install the software, I'm going to wait a few days, and see if anyone else has anything to report. The VueScan folks don't seem to be quite ready, either, but I shall compose myself in patience for now. This scanner, its software and I have never entirely got along, so its days may be numbered.

Adobe have not covered themselves in glory, either. I have a copy of Acrobat 6.0 Standard, which includes both the Mac and Windows versions. Acrobat 8 standard is Windows only, so if I want to upgrade, I have to go to Acrobat 8 Professional. Not happy, and haven't decided what to do yet. Adobe reckons that Photoshop Elements 3.0 isn't supported on Leopard, but it seems to work for me - I only need basic functions most of the time.

I haven't had time to test everything, or even try somethings, yet. However, the machine seems faster, I love the new Spaces feature, Spotlight is much better - boolean searching! - and Cover Flow is great. Time Machine is absolutely awesome. Many people have complained about the new transparent dock. I'm reserving judgement for now. I'm not keen on the transparent menu bar and I absolutely hate, loathe and abominate the semi transparency of right click pop up menus. The person who thought this up should be forced to do Windows installs for a few months, and who ever approved the idea and let it into the final product should be compelled to do level 1 Windows technical support for a couple of years. Semi transparent menus are beyond stupid, they are twee: cute for the sake of cuteness, while meaningfully degrading the user experience. If I open a menu, it's because I want to see what is on it, which I cannot do if the text is tangled up with the image behind it. Wrong, bad, inexcusably stupid: how did this feature survive beta testing? Did you do user acceptance testing, and if so, who wrote the test plan? Were they sober when they did it? If there is a way to disable this ridiculously pretentious bit of business, please tell me. My eyeballs are approaching their half century, and I need nice clear type (and new glasses).

But over all, fantastic. There are so many new things to look at that I hardly know where to start. When I've had a chance to try things out (and I'm on a training course for the next two days), I will try to report in more detail.

2007-10-18T19:17:00.000+10:00

More feedback

A couple more questions have come in. Nick says "I'm curious to know why don't you use Curio for filing as well. It seems to me that it can keep track of files and docs as well or better than Eagle Filer (which I have tried at least four times in the past 6 months and found to be too buggy)."

First of all, Nick, what bugs are you seeing? I run EagleFiler constantly, and I haven't had a single problem - is there some subtle thing that I am missing? Now, to answer your question: Curio is not designed as a "filing" application, but as a visual thinking environment. Certainly you could use it to organize files, but in my mind the Curio metaphor is a bit like pinning documents to a cork board, rather than placing them in a filing cabinet, which is the way I think of Eaglefiler. Further more, Curio does not lend itself to creating simple text documents on the fly - it needs to create a whole idea space every time. I use Curio to capture bulk information (I'm in a training course now, and Curio has my morning's notes in it), but if I just need to scribble down a URL or a password, it goes to EagleFiler. I think what I am trying to say is that EagleFiler suits the way my brain works when it comes to litter sorting. Your mileage may vary.

TheWolf asks "What I'm wondering is why you gave up using DevonThink Pro, because all the other software you reviewed was discussed more, but because Devon was your older software, it didn't seem to be mentioned much. What makes EagleFiler so much better than DevonThink? I'm trying to decide if I should try DevonThink or not. It seems to have a learning curve."

In answer: I haven't stopped using DevonThink Pro, but I use it in slightly different ways. I think I am using DT less, now that I have EagleFiler, but DevonThink still provides me great functionality for specific purposes. I find DT slower to start up than EagleFiler, but that is probably because I use DT to store and manage really big documents, mostly technical manuals in PDF format. The problem I had with DevonThink (apart from its learning curve, which is steeper than EagleFiler's) is that it doesn't always let you get a document back out in quite the same format that it went in. I just retested this, by importing and then exporting a fairly simple Word document. DevonThink preserved the text pretty well, but ate the footers. This was a show stopper for me. I've also had a couple of incidents where the database corrupted, and I had to restore from backups.

I'm happy to expand on this if anyone needs more detail. If you want to chat offline, look me up on LinkedIn, and you should be able to work out my email address.

2007-10-14T10:24:00.000+10:00

How small is this planet???

I lived in Perth, in Western Australia from 1971 to 1984. I completed high school and an undergraduate degree, got my first job, and in 1984 I moved to Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. In 1985 I moved to Sydney, in New South Wales. I've been back to Perth a few time, usually for work, but I have made no attempt to stay in touch with the people I went to school with.

There are currently around 20 million people living in Australia.

So I'm in Western Australia, for an all too brief holiday, and we've detoured to the Capel Vale Winery, to taste and buy wine, and to get lunch in their (excellent) restaurant. It's a lovely place, you can see part of it on the right of this picture - the restaurant overlooks part of the vineyard:

When we've finished eating, someone at another table calls out to me. It's Gillian Mills - we went to high school together. I wouldn't have recognized her, though she says I haven't changed a bit (in 31 years? Hmm.....). She's in Capel Vale as part of a book club event, she doesn't live locally - we're 3 or 4 hours drive south of Perth.

Anyone care to calculate the odds on meeting up like that?

2007-10-07T18:45:00.000+10:00

Feedback

The last post generated a few comments, and I have time to answer those now. It's Sunday evening, I've just finished prepping our tax paperwork, to go our accountant tomorrow and somewhere outside I just heard a kookaburra "laughing" maniacally. It's probably hunting in the twilight, and I wish it well - I think there is a mouse living in my compost bin!

First, thank you all for your feedback - it's nice to know that I'm not talking to myself!

There is a question from Brab, who asks how I use Curio beyond note taking, and how I decide whether to start a document in Curio or EagleFiler. The first thing I "drew" in Curio, almost the first time I used it, was a 3 page layout of how I thought a web site should look. It was extremely basic, just boxes and text, with a bit of coloured fill. I PDF'd the result and sent it to the man who owned the budget that was supposed to pay for a particular marketing campaign. Next thing knew, I'd been asked to attend a meeting with the marketing people, who seemed astounded to find an engineer who they could talk to; I'm still working with them, and so far as I'm concerned, that 3 page layout paid for Curio right then and there. I'd only been in my current job a few weeks, and I was still in that odd phase that you get at the beginning of a new job, where most of your coworkers know nothing about you, other than what they read in the welcome email that your manager broadcast: nobody is quite sure what your skill set is, or how to engage with you usefully. I needed to demonstrate a general willingness to do whatever needed doing, which I find is the secret to success in most jobs, and to raise my profile within the organization. Curio helped me do that, getting me introductions to people who I otherwise might not have met for months..

I also use Curio when I need to "collage" something together, so I can see all the related bits. And if it happens to be open when I take a phone call, I'll take notes directly into it, or jot down phone numbers, though they will probably get moved somewhere else pretty quickly.

In 2005, I had to study for the CISSP exam, which is a 5 hour marathon and not something I want to repeat (see www.isc2.org for details, basically CISSP is a well thought of security qualification). To get the huge amount of information requiredto pass the exam to stay in my brain, I drew a series of mind maps, on large pieces of paper, with markers and coloured pencils. It must have worked, because I passed the exam (to my great relief, my then employer had mandated that the entire security practice had to pass this exam, so it was a bit public, and I'm not good with personal failure). However, the mind maps (which I am reluctant to destroy) are a nuisance to store, so I am converting them to Curio documents.

Finished Curio documents get stored in EagleFiler, and Curio gets used to bring documents from EagleFiler together on one page. Not many documents get started in EagleFiler, with the exception of login credentials, which I store as text files. Generally, if I am starting a document, I start in Word if I only expect to need text and I will need to send the results to a colleague; in Notebook if I am drafting a blog or an email; or in Curio if I expect to need diagrams or graphics. I should state that mine is currently the only Mac on the corporate network, so I have to use applications that give me some degree of portability with the PC users around me (though I do believe that some of my co-workers may be considering a change of platform).

For me, EagleFiler is the giant filing drawer where web pages, receipts, passwords, cartoons, Office documents and PDFs get dumped. My main database contains everything from knitting patterns to technical documents.

Dana asked what I draw with. Because my work is technical, much of what I need to draw lends itself to simple boxes and lines: flow charts and network diagrams for the most part. Those can easily be drawn with Curio's shape and line tools. If I need to mark up a graphic, I can usually manage with my mouse and the highlighter tool. If I want to draw "properly", I have a Wacom Graphire 4 pad. I'm teaching myself to use this, but because I am not burdened with any talent for drawing, it's up hill work.

I also see a note from Greg at Zengobi in the comments. He has answered Dana's questions about Curio versions Thanks Greg, love your work!

Next week I am on leave, and my husband and I are going to Western Australia for a few days. I haven't been to Perth since 1998, and I am told that it is much changed So look out for some pictures of WA next week.

2007-10-01T16:25:00.000+10:00

EagleFiler and Curio: 6 month update

And it's the Labour Day long weekend here in Sydney, so I have time to catch up a bit on this blog. Outside in the garden, Spring is springing: everything seems to be flowering or putting out new shoots. The macadamia tree at the front of the house has flowered profusely, bringing bees from far and wide. The flowers are now fading (and dropping all over my Prius), and soon the nuts will begin to set. From where I sit, I can see the big magenta and orange flower that one of my bromeliads has produced this week, and beyond that, Percy's pink and white ears sticking up from the long grass under the lilli pilli tree. Now Mungo has turned up to give Percy a wash: shortly there will be inter-cat biffage.

It's now been 6 months since I started using EagleFiler and Curio regularly, and I seem to recall at least one person requesting an update on how I found the products as I became more familiar with them. I have to say that I am still delighted with both. I do have to have a regular filing session for EagleFiler, where I sit down and categorize and tag all the things that have been tossed in randomly, and this is an ideal background task for conference calls and unproductive meetings. But even if documents are still sitting in the Unfiled bucket, they are still locatable. EagleFiler has proved stable: several updates have been released (now on 1.2.5), though I haven't noticed any bugs myself. Verdict: no regrets, I'd buy it again.

Curio has probably made more of an impact on my life. EagleFiler has helped me enforce order, but Curio has actually changed the way I work. I use it constantly, more every day as I find new ways to harness its power. I have stopped taking a notebook to meetings - now I take my Mac with Curio open. It is fantastic for taking notes, because you can draw little diagrams as you go, without needing to open a separate app. A few days back, I was sitting in a training session at HDS. The purpose of the session was for a senior HDS storage engineer to brief a group of us, all consutants working for distributors, on the features and application of a new piece of hardware. I took my notes direct into Curio, copying the diagrams off the white board using Curio's drawing tools. The engineer on my right, using a Windows machine, had to stop and get Visio started to copy the diagrams.

And Curio diagrams look nice: I was at a meeting on Friday, with several senior people from my company, and I was using a Curio diagram to explain the data flows for a particular solutions. They all asked for a copy of the diagram before the end of the meeting. Last week I spent three days in a training course for the ArcSight Enterprise Security Management product (this is of no interest to anyone except the people who have to take care of security in big network - it costs a great deal of money to implement - so I will not be blogging about it). Again, I took my notes straight into Curio, illustrated with screen shots. Being able to "draw" on the screen shots with the pen tool is really helpful for explaining how something on a complex interface is supposed to work.

I have one simple Curio tip to offer: set the idea space to show pages breaks (View -> Show Page Breaks) if you want to be able to print things easily, other wise you may have to move things around to get them within page boundaries.

Verdict: I love it, and I would buy it again.

2007-09-19T18:50:00.000+10:00

Personal Brain

First, my thanks to Stan Hoffman for bringing this most interesting piece of software to my attention. Personal Brain is produced by The Brain , and is their personal/home office offering. It runs on both Mac OS X and Windows, and combines mind mapping with document organization. The basic version, which does mind mapping but does not allow you to store attachments, is free. This is amazingly generous, because it is a beautiful and extremely useful piece of software. The Core version, which allows you to attach files and folders to your "thoughts", and has a host of other features is $US149.95. The Pro version, with yet more features and the right to run the software on 2 machines, is $US249.95. See the FAQ for the full description. There is a 30 day demo version, and I am currently running it on my Mac Book Pro and on my office Windows XP laptop.

When I first loaded this software, I was pretty sure that I would buy it before the end of the trial, but after a month I'm afraid it has not managed to win me over. I don't think that that reflects any problems with the software - it's a great product - but says more about the way I work. I've used mind mapping techniques for years, having learned them from Tony Buzan's books. If you haven't seen these, look for either "How to Mind Map" or "The Mind Map Book" as a starting point; or for instant gratification, go to James Cook University's JCU Study Skills Online. I believe I've said this before: if you don't "get" mind mapping on paper, I don't think you will like it in software. Try a low tech, paper and pencil, approach before investing in software. I find mind maps useful for some things, such as helping me memorize large chunks of theory for exams, or for organizing disparate bits of information if I'm writing something complicated, like an operations manual. But I don't find the technique useful for day-to-day life.

Furthermore, when I draw a mind map it always has little pictures and symbols, not just boxes. Buzan recommends the use of colour and pictures, and I'm used to working that way, so I find Personal Brain a bit limiting: you can't draw in it in the way you can in Curio.

Other problems: Personal Brain can only index the contents of documents if it imports them, and on import it moves the document into a subdirectory in its own directory. It doesn't change the name or format of the document, but it does relocate it, which means that the only simple way to access the document henceforth is through Personal Brain. Personal Brain's directory structure is part of its internal organization, and not intended to be accessed by humans:

Which is going to annoy me, it's another layer of abstraction I can do without. EagleFiler works for me because, while the contents are held in a dedicated directory structure, the structure uses my folder names as directory names, so I can browse it raw on the disk if I need to; this also means that I can easily access the files for use in Curio (of which more, later). Personal Brain can't index Open Office documents - it's a PC application that has been ported to Mac, and while the port is good (it seems faster on the Mac than on a Windows machine), the heritage shows a bit.

And worst of all: no workflow. No way to save documents from the web directly to the Brain, everything has to be saved to disk and imported or linked to the Brain. Personal Brain is not meant to be a litter sorter, so the developers have not included any workflow for litter "collection".

I like Personal Brain. But I can't find a place for it in my working life. Your mileage may vary: I can commend the product for stability on both platforms, and it's certainly worth a look.

2007-09-19T18:33:00.000+10:00

Another long silence

Apologies for the long delay in posting, things have been a bit frantic lately. In the last 3 weeks I have been to an IBM Partner Conference in Surfers Paradise (it rained), 2 days of training on the Juniper DX Application Acceleration box (very cool), the Symantec Vision 2007 Conference (where I met many former colleagues from previous jobs) and 2 days of training on the Hitachi Content Archiving Platform (which you need to look at if you the least bit interested in content archiving and compliance). I must have seen thousands of PowerPoint slides, and I've eaten far too much, they do cater these things well. Real work has been fitted around all this education/networking/whatever, which means sorting through a backlog of emails every evening - somethings just cannot be dealt with using a Blackberry.

Tomorrow I have the Red Hat Virtualization briefing, and a long, long meeting with a customer who wants to talk about security. And it is my 21st wedding anniversary. So I am taking Friday off, to celebrate, and I will try to catch up. There are a few things I want to blog about, including, but not limited to: VMware, Personal Brain, knitting, and why so many people on the internet cannot differentiate between the words "troll" and "trawl".

Until later...

2007-08-07T15:22:00.000+10:00

Joy of New MacBook Pro

Well my new MacBook finally arrived last week (delays caused by "constrained supply", which I interpret as "we can't build 'em fast enough"), and I moved my working environment from my trusty Powerbook to the new machine over the weekend. Yesterday (Monday) was the new machine's first day of work, and it worked like a dream. So I'd like to say a few words of thanks to the people whose software helped me clean up the mess on the old system, and achieve a quick and orderly transition.

CleanApp

Cleanup ($US10) comes from the lovely people at Synium Software . You install it, enable its logging mode, and it watches everything you install, and tracks the files that get touched. When you want to uninstall something, you drag it to the CleanApp windows, and it gives you a list of all the files involved with that package (including files that you would never have located without CleanApp, because they have no obvious connection with the application you are trying to delete). CleanApp gives you option to delete the files, move them to the trash or create an archive. Obviously you need to be careful - don't just delete files that you don't understand. But used carefully, CleanApp can help you recover a lot of disk space. If you didn't have CleanApp installed when you first installed something that you now want to get rid of, just reinstall the offending app, so that CleanApp can get a look at it, and then use CleanApp to wipe the files off your disk.

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning comes from SmithMicro Software . I haven't tried all of it many features, but the two utilities that I have used worked well, and helped me clean up a mess caused by years of lackadaisical file management on my part. In the past, new laptops have generally been handed to me by someone from internal IT, and I've usually had to move my environment in haste, because I've been in the middle of some big infrastructure deployment project, with very little spare time, and the IT person has had an urgent need to reclaim my old laptop, to be reloaded and given to someone else. [There is a sort of hierarchy of laptop allocation in a lot of places: the engineers and the project managers tend to get the newest and best machines, and admin staff get cast offs]. So every time I've created a directory on the new machine, called something like "Old Laptop", and copied the files I needed to keep from the old machine to the new machine, each time promising myself that I would clean up as soon as my current project finishes.

Cleanups never happened, and after a few generations of laptops, going from Windows to Linux to Windows to Mac (depending on my employer and the capabilities of the hardware), the nested directories had got quite deep, and the number of duplicated files was very large.

Spring Cleaning's Duplicate Finder helped me get rid of a lot of unneeded files, and the Quick Compare utility allowed me to identify the differences between directories full of files, and synchronize them easily. I would strongly recommend making a backup copy of your data before you start using Spring Cleaning - the application can't protect you from synchronizing old over new files, if you make a mistake, but used thoughtfully and with care, this is a great set of software.

So, having recovered gigabytes of space, and achieved a level of order that I had never thought to achieve, I moved everything to the new machine in an afternoon. Nothing needed reinstalling, and only a couple of things needed their license strings reloaded.

2007-06-10T16:16:00.000+10:00

Mac Paraphernalia

I note that the new 15" MacBook Pro has been released, the one with the LED screen. I've been hanging out for this, because I badly need a new machine, so I was reviewing mentally what accessories might need updating. I've nittered on about software quite a bit, so I thought that in this post, for a change, I'd list some of the gadgets and add ons that I use with my Mac. If you've found something that you think is better, let me know. I want light, functional, robust products (and I love gadgets).

I have an iLap stand, which I find very useful (using it now).

Cool feet. I got a set of these a few weeks ago, and they are fantastic. Love 'em. The improved angle of the laptop keyboard is worth the price, and better temperature control is a nice bonus.

ScreenSavrz - I've used these for years, and they certainly keep the screens of my machines in better condition. I use a lot of hand cream, which is good for hands, not so good for screens. ScreensSavrz protect the screen from oil (and hand cream) getting transferred from the keyboard when the machine is closed.

Wildeepz display cushions. I have a set for each laptop, and I'm going to need another soon for the new machine. My laptops have to move around a lot, and I don't want the display unlatching while the machine is in my briefcase (or worse yet, in the over head locker on some plane!).

Dimp Gel single pads. These are little round wrist rests - I have one on either side of the track pad on my lap top (which caused one of my more humorous managers to inquire "why does that laptop have nipples?"). Seriously, I've used these for years and I would not be without them.

Koss SparkPlug Earbuds. I use these in the office: they are light, block enough noise to be useful without making me oblivious to my co-workers, and the sound quality is good enough for me. And they're cheap.

To keep the SparkPlug's cable tidy, I use a Sumajin SmartWrap. I've tried various cable managers, and this one suits me best.

On planes, I like the Sennheiser noise canceling headphones - I have the PCX250. These have done a lot of traveling with me, and they are wonderful. They seriously improve the quality of the music on my iPod - I can hear things with these headphones that are lost with lesser headsets. If you fly a lot, I can't recommend noise canceling headphones too highly, and as a back up go to the chemist (pharmacist is you're in the US), and look for noise reduction earplugs. They are usually made of either dense foam, or a sort of malleable waxy material: seek those with the highest decibel rating. They block out the background noise of a plane - a good set will take the edge off the racket of squabbling children and give you a chance of sleeping. If you work in data centres, use earplugs there as well, and preserve your hearing (if you have never been in a data centre, take my word it: they are not quiet places).

I use a MacAlly Optigo mini retractable optical USB mouse, which I think may be discontinued. I've tried using Bluetooth mice with rechargeable batteries, and they are a pain when you are traveling. The weight of spare batteries, the charger, no, just no.

To keep the bits and pieces together, I use an Eagle Creek Quarter Cube, and the whole lot gets moved around in a Victorinox wheeled case.

2007-06-09T18:05:00.000+10:00

So much to do, so little time.....

OK, things are now officially back to normal. After nearly 2 years (basically since I left Sun in 2005) of having enough time to do most of what I wanted, when I wanted, over the last couple of months the old status quo has re-established, and I now have too much to do. I have a simple way of determining when I have reached that point, and it happened today. I looked at my backlog - all the people who have been waiting 48 hours or more for me to answer a question or an email, all the tasks with a deadline that falls within the next 72 hours - and realised that I couldn't afford to spend 90 minutes at the hairdresser's just knitting (which is what I usually do to pass the time). So I reluctantly packed up my PowerBook, and my iLap, and went to the hairdresser's and worked. Fortunately my hairdresser, the wonderful Victoria, is used to me bringing a laptop to the salon (if you live in the Randwick area and your hair needs attention, look for Gino's Hairstylist in Avoca Street, near the corner of Alison Road), so I type while she works her magic. The things that make this work are the iLap, which I actually bought in Amsterdam last year, and a good pair of noise occluding headphones from the lovely folks at Koss. I use a pair of ear buds that block out the normal parrot house chatter of the salon, and make it possible to think. Combined with an ocean waves sound track, the Koss buds block out the salon radio, the traffic on Avoca Street, and everything else quite effectively. I have that 20 minute MP3 of surf sounds (scroll down a bit on the web page) in my iTunes library, and honestly, the Sonic Waves folk should charge for it. I have a playlist which is just that track, repeated, which I use to provide thinking space in noisy environments. I'm one of those people who can't concentrate properly with music in the background - music ties up too much of my brain (OK, I am more likely to listen to Vivaldi or Bach than some modern stuff, most of which is, in my opinion, content free and does not engage the brain in any way).

So I knocked off a bunch of memos and emails while Victoria did my hair, and I'm sort of back on top, for now. The problem in the last couple of weeks has been the number of vendor training courses and events running. Last week I did a half day certification with Quantum, spent Thursday on my company's stand at a Cisco trade show, and then the whole of Friday doing a new products training thing at Sun (under NDA, I can't tell you anything). Real work gets fitted around this.

And of course this is the Queens' Birthday long weekend (Monday off!), Tuesday I have a long meeting in Parramatta with a government customer, Wednesday and Thursday I am on an APC certification course, and Friday I am taking a day of annual leave to go to the Good Food Show - I go every year, and the Friday is always less crowded than the weekends. I booked the day's leave months ago, before all the training stuff got onto my calendar. So getting real work (you know, solving customer problems, things like that) done is going to be tricky. Still, my management regards the vendor stuff as work - the state of our certifications affects our product buy price - so it must be done.

Certifications are a sort of oblation to the vendors: they prove your love. The whole thing is rather tragically negotiable and, in the case of the Sun courses, utterly farcical. Most of the Sun courseware has not been updated since around 2003-2004, which is as I recall about the point where the Sun "reduction in force" initiative reached the technical writing people. However, Sun has to have a hoop through which vendors can be made to jump, to prove their commitment, and they have been forced to construct the hoop out of superceded junk. It is seriously annoying to have to listen to some (really rotten) actor enthuse madly over equipment that is no longer on the price list.

Sunday

Here in Sydney it is raining, the sort of rain that we haven't had for a couple of years, with high winds and massive sea swells . A lot of New South Wales is drought declared, and the dam levels are very low. Our brilliant state government, after doing nothing useful for years, has finally panicked, and decided to build a desalination plant so that we don't run out of water (this was beginning to look like a very real possibility). New South Wales actually has plenty of water, its just very badly managed. We don't recycle water. Our water infrastructure is old and leaky, so a lot of water is just wasted. Our dams are in places with relatively low rainfall - millions of litres falls on Sydney proper every year, and just flows into storm water drains and runs out to sea, while the dams get no rain for months on end.

But this week it has rained, and shows no signs of letting up for a while: there have been devastating flash floods in some areas, some towns may have to be evacuated, roads have been washed away and people killed. We are fortunately to live near the top of the coastal ridge: if the water gets this high, somebody had better build an ark! I've just been outside to drain the water from all the plant pots around my garden, so the plants in them don't drown. The wind has knocked all the cherry tomatoes that were close to ripe off the bush, and my basil plant is suffering in the wind. And the long range forecast is for more of the same!

2007-05-14T15:40:00.000+10:00

The Fine Art of Storing Things So That They Can Be Found

Part 2: Tagging Effectively

"When I use a word" Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less"

from Lewis Carroll's "Through the looking glass", Chapter 6

I speak English. I have a little Latin, which comes from spending too much time around doctors and lawyers early in my career, and the trivial amount of French you can get from unenthusiastic attendance at three years of high school French classes. But I'm interested in language generally, how it works and where it comes from, and I have numerous books on the subject. Modern languages are constantly evolving, with new words being added, old words falling into disuse, and some words acquiring new meanings. English, as a language, is a particular mine field, because it attaches more than one meaning to many words. Take for example the word "heat": are we talking about temperature, or a single bout in a sporting event? There are thousands of examples, and the situation becomes more complicated year by year as various industries spew clouds of new acronyms into the public vocabulary, and as their marketing departments attempt to redefine indifferent design and sloppy production as "innovation", black as white and rampant greed as "customer service". And don't start me on the state of modern education, and how English is taught!

However, most people are a bit like Humpty Dumpty: they know what they mean when they use a particular word or acronym (the dictionary may not agree with them), and they will use words pretty consistently. If you have ever had to proof read another person's writing, you rapidly spot their little verbal tics: the words they can't spell, the turns of phrase, the grammatical abominations and the critical failures of punctuation that that they repeat. We do seem to have reached the point where most of the allegedly literate population cannot tell the difference between a colon and a semi-colon, and avoids using both in consequence.

What has this to do with tagging you ask (as I turn down the rant dial)? Well, habits are good. If you can be consistent about how you use words, you can tag effectively. The goal of effective tagging is really the creation of a personal language, to allow you, the user, to attach meaning to items that you will want to retrieve later. The tag words will mean what you want them to mean, and they do not have to mean anything to anyone else.

Now, before we go any further, did you read the post before this one, Part 1? If you didn't, some of this post may not make sense. Sorry if you found the last one rather heavy going: few people are excited by cataloguing, but I needed to get the background established.

Part 1 was about the use of folders, labels and tags to create structure. This post will attempt to address the question of how to choose good tags.

In the last post, I suggested that you round up all the tags that you are using at the moment, and have a look at them as a set. I did this myself, collating folder and tag names from del.icio.us, Furl and my EagleFiler databases. I found I had been pretty consistent, but there were a couple of annoying discrepancies (which I promptly fixed). I was interested to note that the problems were all in del.icio.us, which probably reflects the fact that I have used it longest, and refined my tagging techniques unconsciously while using it. So let's have a look at the lists (no need to read these in detail):

The folder structure for EagleFiler is as follows

Admin
Licenses
Passwords
Receipts
Bookmarks
CISSP
Consulting
Craft
Beading
Crochet
Knitting
Exercise
Graphics
Humour
Ideas
ITIL
Learning
Organisation
Personal
Personal Development
Project Management
Security
Six Sigma
Society
Technology
Mac OS
Microsoft
Networking
Performance
Shells
Software
Solaris
SQL
Tech Support
Unix
Travel
Work
Xref

(Note that I spell in English English most of the time). Because EagleFiler supports a nested folder structure, I am using it to apply two levels of classification to the stuff I store. Tagging then give me a third (coming back to this in a moment).

Tags from EagleFiler

blogging
blogs
bluetooth
books
cats
CISSP
classics
consulting
encryption
environment
gadgets
how_to
lace
librarianship
libraries_
licence
mac
math
motivation
mp3
museum
networking
news
ntp
palm
political_correctness
politics
privacy
programming
puzzles
receipts
sales
security
solaris
spam
sql
tcpip
technology
tools
travel
xref

Note the tag "libraries_" with the trailing underscore, to tell me not to use this tag (see previous post for explanation). You can see that there is some double up between folder names and tags, I will explain in a while.

Tags from del.icio.us

blackberry
blogs
books
changemgt
comics
community
cooking
craft
culture
daily
datacentre
design
dr/bcp
economics
education
employment
firefox
fixes
food
gadgets
galley
gaming
hardware
howto
humanity
humour
informix
it_industry
language
ldap
learning
legislation
lifehacks
linux
lists
logins
mac/win
macos
magazines
management
manuals
math
museums
music
networking
news
ntp
osource
palm
performance
perl
philosophy
photography
podcasts
presentations
productivity
programming
projmgt
puzzles
radio
rants
recycling
reference
science
search
security
services
sf
shopping
skepticism
soa
sql
stupidity
sun
sunint
support
technology
testing
thinking
tips
tools
training
travel
trivia
unix
usability
webdesign
wiki
world
writing
xml

I rely utterly on del.icio.us when I am away from my own systems, and I rarely bookmark anything locally. There will be a couple of mysteries in that list, explanation follows.

And finally, tags from Furl

Advice
age
Craft
Customer satisfaction
Development
economics
Education
Finance
Food
Heinlein
History
humour
Informix
Learning
Linux
Management
marriage
Microsoft
Misinformation
Network research
Networking
People
Perception
Performance
photoshop
Projects
psychiatry
Reference
Self improvement
SQL
Startups
Stress management
stupidity
Sun
Tips
Traffic
unix
Writing

Now here you will see a bit of inconsistency, because Furl supports proper alphabetical sorting, rather than ASCII sorting, so I haven't capitalised consistently. I use Furl to store pages that I shall want again, actual content rather than bookmarks. Stuff from Furl generally gets transferred to EagleFiler at a later date, but sometimes I need Furl to find things when I don't have my Mac handy.

You can see some variations. EagleFiler and del.icio.us don't support tags with spaces, while Furl does, and I am using the programs in slightly different ways. Notice the tags osource and sunint in the del.icio.us list: these are examples of personal tags. "osource" to me means "open source". del.icio.us doesn't support spaces in tags, so I made a contraction. Same with sunint, which is used to store URLs that will only work if I am logged into a particular vendor's partner network. This is what I mean by personal language: you can make it up, as long as you can be consistent.

But how to actually choose names and tags?

One of the greatest contributors to the field of modern librarianship and classification theory was a man called S.R. Ranganathan. He propounded the theory of colon classification, and illuminated it with his "Wall-Picture" principle (sometime called the cow-calf principle). Be warned before you go off and Google those names and terms: absolute reams have been written about this subject, and much of it is of a highly soporific nature. I'll try to keep this short.

The theory of Colon Classification states that for every object (for object in this context read "book"), there are five aspects or facets that can be used to describe the subject:

Personality—what the object is primarily “about.” This is considered the “main facet.”
Matter—the material of the object, what it is made from
Energy—the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object, how it is used etc.
Space—where the object happens or exists, typically geographic location
Time—when the object occurs, typically a time period rather than a specific date

Colon classification (the aspects are separated by colons) was supposed to allow you to use as many facets as you needed in the appropriate order to describe the object you were dealing with. It was flexible. It's not what we need for tagging, but it embodies a useful idea: every subject has different facets, which are simpler than the overall subject, and therefore easier to encapsulate in a tag.

The Wall-Picture principle is also helpful in tagging. It states that if concept A makes concept B understandable, then A must be listed first. As I recall this being explained to me in class (many moons ago), if you look at a picture of a boat hanging on a wall, the image of the boat depends on the picture, which depends on the wall. So Wall precedes Picture which precedes Boat in order of importance.

Now, hoping fervently that you are with me so far, let's try and apply that to tagging. Select a document/article/web page, and consider it: what are its five facets? Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time (librarians remember this as PMEST). You don't have to use all five facets, and I'm finding that for most of my material, three is enough. Your mileage may vary. Let's try some examples. First, Slate's review of "Pirates of the Caribbean III". Your first instinct might be to use "pirates" as a tag, but stop and think about the facets, and the Wall-Picture method. The primary tag should be "Film", because without the film there would be no pirates, in this case. Matter in this case isn't much use to us - by the time I get around to this, it will be a DVD. Energy is "Review" - remember, this is a review of a film about pirates. The subject of the film is pirates, the "energy" of the article is a review of the film. I would skip Space in this case, and for Time I would put 2007. Sticking to a pirate theme, consider this review of a production of the Pirates of Penzance. Here, I would make the primary tag "Operetta", the next tag "Review" and the third tag 2004. If I were collecting information about a particular actor, I might add a fourth tag using his/her surname.

Another example: this page is about the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For the Personality tag I would probably choose "Art". I would skip Material (too complex to be useful in this case). Energy is "Painting". Space would be "Vatican" - "Sistine Chapel" is too specific for me, though it might suit some dedicated scholars better; apply your "personal language" appropriately here". Time is 16th Century. If I were collecting a lot of material about art, I would probably add a tag for the artist's name, as well.

Try this one, an article from the Slow Leadership blog about delegation. What the "Personality" facet here? For me, it is "Management". The Material facet isn't useful in this case, skip it. The Energy facet is "delegation". Space and Time don't mean much in the context of this article. Why did I pick "Management" as the Personality facet? Well, I could have used "Leadership", but that is a little too generic for the content of the article: leadership could refer to military leadership. I track articles about good management (having been exposed to so much bad management over the years, I'm making a study of what to avoid in future), so "Management" to me has meaning.

Some articles will give you a clue: this one has a nice hint right there at the top: "Human Behavior". However, that is a bit long, so I use "People" instead. I mean "Human Behavior", but People is sufficient for me. I wouldn't apply any other tag to that page.

Going back to the folder and tag lists above, you may now be able to see what I am doing. In some cases, the same word appears as both a Folder name and a tag (example: networking). If the main focus of an article is networking (for me that means something involving computers, not people), then it goes in the Networking folder. But an article about troubleshooting computers might have some information about networking, which could be considered as the "Energy" facet: so I use the word twice, in two slightly different ways. Also, in EagleFiler, I am using the nested folders to describe some subjects in more detail, using the Wall-Picture principle. For example, Craft has subfolders for Beading, Crochet and Knitting.

I do hope that this makes some sort of sense, to someone other than me. Look for the five facets (Personality, Material, Energy, Space, Time). Apply the Wall-Picture principle, so you don't pick too narrow a topic. Develop your own personal tagging language. I'd suggest reviewing your tags regularly, to help reinforce consistency of use.

I'm hoping for some feed back on this one - did it help? Did it give you a headache? Any suggestions for a better approach? Drop me a line or leave a comment.

For those who have enquired, yes the jigsaw is now finished. Slightly more regular blogging will now resume - thank you for your patience!

2007-04-18T16:41:00.000+10:00

Delay in posting

If you are wondering why this blog has gone a bit quiet, the problem is a 3000 piece jigsaw of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which is occupying a large part of my living room and my spare time. Normal blogging service will be restored soon.......

2007-04-08T18:14:00.000+10:00

The Fine Art of Storing Things So That They Can Be Found

Part 1

One of the advantages that Web 2.0 is supposed to bring us is the ability to organize information to suit ourselves, using mechanisms such as tagging. This is all well and good in theory, because it empowers the user, theoretically freeing them from the artificial constraints of formal classification theory. In reality, what appears to happen is that the user applies some combination of folders, tags, flags and labels to their documents/URLs/emails/whatever, and then discovers when they attempt to retrieve something that they have used "Spade" as a tag on one day and "Shovel" on another, and that they have created their own personal implementation of chaos.

I am not suggesting for one moment that the standards used to organize books (for which also read journals, newspapers, film and anything else that a library may hold) should be applied to personal electronic document storage. Having spent many years working with both the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (and similar tools), I have no desire to introduce either into my own or anyone else's daily work flow. There is a place for such formal tools and methods, and my hard disk is not it. However, there are some concepts that can be drawn from library cataloging practice, and these can be usefully applied without serious pain. That is what I want to explore here.

The process known as "cataloguing" in most libraries is actual three different activities, with different outputs. The first is what is called descriptive or physical cataloguing. The output of that process is a physical description of the item catalogued. For example, a book will be described as hard cover or paperback, the number of pages will be noted, and so on. If the item is a DVD or a microfiche, that will be noted. And in most libraries, physical format has implications for storage location, and we'll come back to that in a moment.

Then there is classification. This is the activity that determines the Dewey Decimal number (or whatever call number system is used) that is put onto the item. Classification attempts to say "the primary subject of this book is, for example, "Russian History", therefore we will stamp 947 on the spine, and it will be shelved with all the other books about Russian History, which also have 947 on the spine.

And then there is subject cataloguing, which puts an entry into the subject catalogue under Russian History, but adds some other subject entries for other topics that our book covers, perhaps "Russian Art", or "Climatology, Russian", or whatever. The book can only be in one place, physically, so the subject entries attempt to draw the potential reader to the work from other subjects that they might be interested in exploring.

So our theoretical book is placed on the shelf. If you look up the author or title (these will be in the descriptive cataloguing record), you will be directed to the 947 area of the library. But if you look up the subject catalogue under "Climatology, Russian", there will be a entry for this book which is mainly about Russian History, so you might want to check it out.

And the subject catalogue contains two other types of entry. One is the "SEE" entry. A SEE entry says "the term you looked up is not the one we are using, use this one instead". So if you look up "Russian Climatology", you might find an entry that says "Russian Climatology SEE Climatology, Russian". The second is the SEE ALSO entry, which attempts to suggest related terms that you might not have thought of yourself. So you look up "Russian History" and find an entry that says "Russian History SEE ALSO Russian Mythology".

Now let's go back to storage locations. A library has specific areas for different types of media, partly because some things need special handling, and partly to make the most efficient use of shelf space. For example, very large format books are normally stored on a different, taller, shelf to standard paperbacks, even though they may be about the same subject. Film will be stored in a different area to magazines, and so on. There is a well understood (well, at least by the librarians) system for determining what goes where, so that items returning to the shelves always go back to exactly where they came from, and it is vital that the system is followed consistently: in a large library, a book shelved in the wrong place might as well be lost.

Now you and I, dear reader, need to work out a similarly predictable system for managing the stuff we are storing. Our system only has to suit us, and we don't have to justify it anyone else, but if we don't enforce a few basic rules on how we do things we shall have a mess. A moment of distraction, being too tired or under the weather, and we won't be able to find what we are looking for next week.

I am working with EagleFiler: if you are working with a different application, you will need to draw some parallels here. If you can't make sense of this, mail me and I'll try to clarify things. Let's start with a walk through the levels of organization that we have to play with.

In EagleFiler, at the highest level we have the Library (database). Below that we have folders and subfolders. Then there are tags, labels and flags. The different EagleFiler Libraries roughly correspond to different branches of a real library. I used to work for the Public Health Department of Western Australia, which had a central library in the head office, that kept a wide range of medical books; then there was a branch library for Community and Child Health Services, which stored material on early childhood, childbirth and such; another branch was associated with the State X-ray Laboratory, and so on. The materials were stored as close as was practical to the people likely to need them, according to speciality.

I have set up one main library database, which is the dumping ground for all sorts of ephemera, trivia, web pages, notes, receipts and so on. It is my in tray: stuff with no better home gets parked here. I have set up a second library to store recipes. If I decide to use EagleFiler to manage documents related to client projects, I shall set up one library per customer. So the Library division I am using is partly about subject matter (food or non-food), but also about function: working projects separated from the random litter.

Then we have folders. Folders in my mind roughly equate to the classification of a piece of material, the main topic. Unless I want to keep two copies of an item, each item can only exist in one folder. So folder will normally relate to subject, except when it relates to format. If I am creating folders for project documentation, I keep diagrams in one folder and reports in another, and the reason for this is simple: I name my reports and diagrams according a scheme which includes the date, in YYYYMMDD format, followed by a revision number. I want to be able to see them all together, so I can spot the latest, and that will be harder to do if diagrams are mixed with reports. But note that this only works if I am completely consistent about naming files.

Then we come to tags, flags and labels. In EagleFiler, there is only one flag. This is if limited informational utility, and I can only imagine using it for functional purposes, as a visual reminder to deal with something promptly. EagleFiler has access to 7 labels, but they are not implemented in the application itself: they are the same labels that you use in Finder. Label something in Finder, and the label will appear in EagleFiler. Seven labels is not enough to be informationally useful. Functionally, you might choose to use them for the days of the week, if your workflow is very time oriented. Or you might use them to mark items for particular purposes, for example: mark all this year's receipts green, to you know that they are for this tax year. Or mark particular content with a red label, so you know it is not suitable for work, and should not be displayed in the office. I do have another suggestion for the use of labels, but I want to cover tags first.

Tags are your subject headings, your pointers to one document from many different places. For tagging to be effective, it is important that it be consistent. Let's say that you are collecting material on vehicles and transport in general. You have a folder called vehicles, containing subfolders called "cars", "trains", "bikes" and "boats". You acquire a nice picture of a Porsche Boxster, but in moment of vagueness (we all all have them), you tag the graphic "boxster" instead of "porsche". You file the image in the "cars" folder. Next week you search the "cars" folder for all documents tagged "porsche" and wonder why that nice picture you know you saved recently does not appear. Because the thing is a graphic, full text searching won't help you, unless the file name contains the word "porsche". You will have to sift through the whole "cars" folder to find the picture. A forced example, but you get the idea: if you tag using the first word that pops into your head, you are unlikely to get a consistent result.

To make the best of tagging, you need to train yourself to be consistent, and this will be easiest if you can establish some personal "rules" before you start applying tags. But even if you already have a few hundred (thousand?) tagged documents, you can still achieve order and control. To do this you need two things. The first is the hard one: you need to make a personal "definition of terms". You need to decide what particular words mean to you. We'll come back to that one, because I suspect that it warrants a whole separate post. Believe me that this is do-able, and if you can get that particular skill, you will have learned something that you can apply in many different aspects of your life. The second is a little tricky, but equally achievable (at least in EagleFiler, I can't warrant your app.): you need to establish some pointers inside the application, to help you choose the right tag consistently. To do that, we will go back to the library's idea of SEE and SEE ALSO references. You can set up a similar mechanism using a combination of tags, labels and special purpose documents.

First, if you already have a repository of tagged material somewhere (EagleFiler, Furl or whatever), have a look at the tags you have already used. See any that conflict or overlap? Pick the term that you prefer, the one you want to use consistently in future. Let's say that you have a tag "managers" and a tag "management", and that you prefer to use "management" in future. To get things consistent you need to start by assigning the tag 'management" to all the items that have the tag "managers", and getting rid of the "managers' tag. In EagleFiler this is easy: find all the items tagged "managers", and drag them to the tag "management" in the Source pane on the left of the screen. That assigns the tag. Now delete the tag "managers". That will unassign the tag from all the items in your library. Now, to remind yourself not to use the "managers" tag again, recreate it, but this time put an underscore at the end of the word: managers_ . The next time you go to assign a tag, check that the one you are choosing does not end in an underscore.

For some people this will be enough, but you can take it further if you like. Add a document to you library, and call it "managers". The content of the document should say:

SEE: management

you may want to tag the document with your "managers_" tag. Do what makes sense to you, personally. Then change the label on the document, and set it to a colour, perhaps orange. Every time you create one of these SEE documents, to point yourself to a different tag, colour it orange. You can also set up a SEE ALSO structure in the same way: create a document called "management" and put in it a list of all the other tags that are related, for example "staff development"; you might want to add a definition of terms, for your own future reference. Change the label and colour the document to suit your tastes, and tag it appropriately. In future, these special purpose documents will turn up when you search, and their colouration will remind you of what they are, and prompt you to check other tags.

You may notice that I'm specifying all tags in lower case letters. This is because I've noticed that EagleFiler is sorting tags according to the ASCII character set, so it is presenting tags beginning with capital letters before tags beginning with lower case letters, for example "Librarianship" before "lace". I want tags to present in strictly alphabetical order, so I'm keeping everything in lower case.

You will need to experiment with these suggestions, and decide what works for you. If the labour of setting this up outweighs the benefits you get from it, don't bother. Do as much or as little as you need to make things work efficiently for you.

Next post: identifying the appropriate tags for a document.

2007-04-01T17:30:00.000+10:00

Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software

Part 6: decision

Finally, after many weeks and much research, I have made a decision on which application to purchase. As I expected, my choice is based on a compromise: none of the applications that I have tested have completely satisfied all my requirements (as stated in the first part of this series). For those of you who just want to see the final result, it is:

EagleFiler

I must admit that when I started this exercise, I thought that my final choice would be Yojimbo, and I still think that Yojimbo is a fine product. But EagleFiler has some major advantages for me, personally. Your experience may vary, and I do urge you to examine both products carefully before making your own final decision. However, the critical factors for me were:

The EagleFiler Drop Pad is better behaved than the Yojimbo Drop Dock. The Drop Dock tends to "jam" when the laptop sleeps, the Drop Pad seems to remain responsive regardless of the laptop sleeping and waking.

EagleFiler supports sub folders. I cannot possibly over emphasize how important this is: I cannot live with everything dumped into large, coarsely sorted, buckets. For example, I require a folder called "Craft", and that folder must subdivide into crochet, beading and knitting. Tagging is needed to relate information from different folders, but I must have adequate folder granularity in the first place. If I have time next week I'll do a post on classification theory, to try and make this clearer.

While EagleFiler does not now support encryption, it is under consideration for an upcoming release. Further, on attempting to move my passwords into a laptop based application, I found that I still needed access in other situations: I don't always have my laptop with me. I shall have to continue to store password data on my Palm Pilot, or consider moving it to my Blackberry. I would still like encryption in my litter sorter app, but the requirement is less urgent than I had first thought.

And finally, the most important factor: EagleFiler uses a flat file storage structure, where Yojimbo uses an SQL database. I was always a little uneasy about having to run an additional database engine, with all the possibilities of corruption and loss. The flat file structure is easy to backup, to replicate, to reuse. And that last bit is important. Because my requirements changed.

I thought that I had my requirements pretty well worked out when I started this, but that was before I discovered Curio. I think that Curio will change the way I work, because it opens a range of possible ways of arranging data. "What does this have to do with EagleFiler?" I hear you ask. Simple: because EagleFiler is flat file, I can drag an item from the Eaglefiler "Records List" window straight into the Curio "Idea Space", and because Curio uses links to files in the underlying file system (unless you specifically tell it to import its own copy of a file), Curio references the same physical instance of the item as EagleFiler. This gives me EagleFiler as the "filing cabinet full of folders of stuff", and Curio as the work space for aggregating bits and pieces into a greater whole. It also gives me simple data exchange between the two applications, without keeping duplicate copies of documents, and wasting disk space.

For example, I can use Curio's Presentation Mode to do full screen presentations of material stored in EagleFiler, nicely laid out and with hand drawn annotations if I want (I got a Wacom Graphire4 tablet earlier in the week). And I can use Curio's Dossier function to track the what and why of a project. A Curio Dossier is a form you fill in to define a project's scope and goals. Curio has templates for various purposes, or you can create your own. Here's an example:

I shall probably have another rave about Curio at a later date. But for now, all that remains is to clean up my hard disk, purging all the applications that didn't make the cut (I think the next review will probably be about Mac uninstaller software), load all the subdirectories of "litter" into their new home, and get used to my new work flow. Oh, and license EagleFiler and Curio.

Until next time....

2007-03-31T17:39:00.000+10:00

Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software

Part 5

OK folks, here we go with part five, and I have to bring this to a conclusion soon: I urgently need to make a final selection so that I can get some work done. My currently preferred app has expired its demo period, and I am having to use a less satisfactory product until I get to the end of my reviews. No candidate application has so far met all my requirements (see Part 1), but there are still a few applications to consider. On the list we now have:

TAO
Notae
Sidenote
Scrivener
JournalX
Dossier
Process 2

TAO version 1.8 costs $US30, and describes itself as an outliner rather than a document management system. Specifically, it calls itself "T Advanced Outliner", and I have to say that this bold claim is well supported by the product quality. TAO comes with a little learning curve, but with good documentation, which is supplied as a TAO document. The interface is spartan in its simplicity, but yet all the features you might want are just waiting to be enabled. So you can go from this:

to this:

and more. TAO has a lot of features, including the ability handle outlined multi dimensional data, and if I were looking for an outliner, I would give it very serious consideration. If the developer were to turn his hand to the creation of organizer software, I would be most interested to see the results. Alas, the current product does not meet my needs, but it certainly deserves more attention.

Notae version 2.0.3 costs $US29, and it shows promise but lets itself down on the details. The basic interface is fairly plain:

The scrunched up columns on the left are ugly and with the Tag Browser open, it becomes a bit messy.

I think applications that implement their Tag Browsers as floating panes or pop out trays achieve a more appealing look.

Notae can import PDFs, Word documents, web archives, weblocs and various graphics. Excel, Open Office and other "foreign" file formats it doesn't handles usefully: you see a file icon, but you can't launch the application to open the file from inside Notae. Notae stores its content in an SQL database, and I'm assuming that it copies the foreign files into that database. However, you can't get them back out again. The preview of files is rather slow.

Sorry, this is not going to work for me.

Sidenote 1.7.2 is donationware. It's a nice little app, and while it only handles text, graphics and PDFs, for some people that will be enough. Sidenote lurks at the side of the screen, and pops out when you move the mouse near it. It doesn't resize big graphics, which is a nuisance, but the interface is clean and simple:

and here's a text note:

I would consider this more as a parking lot for stuff that you need to capture quickly and sort later. Not what I'm looking for, but Sidenote may suit you.

Scrivener version 1.02 costs $US34.99, and bills itself as a project management tool for writers. It imports images, Quicktime files, PDF, web archives, Word documents and text files. Unfortunately it converts Word documents to RTFD, so formatting may be lost. However, the HTML rendering on web archives is good. It isn't the application that I am looking for, but it does have some nice features. The interface is innovative (I mean that word in a positive sense, not in the silly way used by IT marketing people). There are several views. The corkboard view shows you a synopsis of each item, apparently pinned to a corkboard:

The outliner view looks like this:

and in either view you can right click on an item and select "Reveal in Binder", which will show you where the item is in the panel on the left. A full screen view looks like this:

Scrivener also has a floating scratch pad:

There a a lot of other handy features, such as the ability to take a "snap shot" of a Scrivener project before you make changes, and to roll back to that snap shot if your changes don't work out. Scrivener is designed to let you sort and reshuffle a large number of small pieces of information, and to collate them into larger documents. Scrivener isn't for me, but if you are a writer it may be for you.

JournalX version 2.2.9 costs 23€ (23 Euros, about $US30 according to Xe.com). It supports many file formats, including: QuickTime movie QuickTime audio support, most Text formats (pdf, txt, rtf, rtfd, doc, html graphics (jpg, pict, bmp, gif), PostScript (eps, ps), web archives and weblocs. All this and still no support for Pages or Open Office. I shall rant separately upon the subject of file format support.

The interface is simple, and not very flexible:

The pane at the left is the "Subject" area, and you import documents into Subjects. Unfortunately, attempting to import a Pages document called cover_letter resulted in a Subject called cover_letter, containing documents called Contents, index.xml and thumbs. There is no tagging, and no subfolders, though you can encrypt a database (but no record level encryption).

JournalX also has a floating "Subject Panel":

drag a file onto it, and it opens to reveal the current list if subjects. Drop your file on the subject of your choice:

The wide range of input formats is good, and because JournalX stores its contents in a flat file structure, you can get things back out in the same format that they went in (except that Pages document, which has been converted to something unusable!) but JournalX doesn't provide several features that I cannot do without, particularly tagging and subfolders, and there is no encryption support.

Dossier version 2.3.1 costs $US25. Having tinkered with Dossier for about 20 minutes, I have to say that the developers need to spend some quality time with average Mac users, and find out how people expect software to behave. The Dossier folk appear not to have heard of (or perhaps have not understood) the Principle of Least Surprise, which I seem to think was expounded in E.S. Raymond's 'Art of Unix Programming'. This is a general principle, which can be applied almost any sort of design, and the bottom line is: "do the thing that will surprise the user least". So if I am working in a Dossier database called TestDossier2, and I select File->Import, when I select files to import, I expect them to be imported into the active database. I absolutely do not expect to be prompted for a new database name, which is what happens. Dossier then proceeds to import the files into the new database. This not helpful. Furthermore, if I import a file through the File->Import workflow or by dragging a file into the document pane, I expect the results to look the same. They do not. Here is the File->Import version of a document:

and here is the dragged version of the same document:

The documentation is sparce, there is no support for tagging or sub folders, and the whole application is just too basic and unfinished for serious consideration.

Process 2 version 2.0.2 costs $US39 and the developers describe it as "Your sublime outlining application". Their web site seems to have been afflicted with a marketing graduate, but if we ignore the "inner child" and "imaginative play" falderal, the product itself is quite interesting. It's somewhere between an outliner, a project management tool and a collaboration system. Multiple users on the same network can work on the same project (using Bonjour). The documentation is not long, but it's adequate because things work the way you expect them to work (see previous comment on Principle of Least Surprise). The interface is straightforward:

seen here with the Information panel popped out on the right. I have added a fairly complex Word document as a "Process Source", and the field codes have not been handled gracefully, but the content is readable. Adding a "foreign" document as a Source is handled sensibly:

and Process knows which external application to launch to open a file for editing. Unfortunately, Process links to files in their original locations, and its ability to handle multiple file formats is a bit limited. Process can import OPML, OmniOutliner and Process 1 Data files. Process is able to export to OPML, HTML, OmniOutliner, RTF and TXT. It can link to other file formats, and it can preview some, such as Word and Photoshop. There is no support for tagging or encryption, and the screen refresh can be a little sluggish. Process doesn't meet my needs, but it has a lot to offer, particularly if you need a collaborative environment.

And that, I believe, is that: end of the list of applications. My Powerbook's hard disk is littered with discarded software and test documents and databases. I'm going to have a quick Google about, to see if I have missed any significant contender, and then I am going to make my final decision.

Forth coming posts will include:

My choice of litter organizer: what and why.

A rant on file format support in Mac applications (I can feel it building up).

A general chat on other useful software and web sites that I have found as I have trawled the Internet looking for organizer software.

2007-03-22T14:29:00.000+11:00

Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software

Part 4

Welcome to part four of my reviews of Mac Litter Sorters. If you've only just started reading, please read part one, so that you are familiar with the opening statement of requirements. Having re-read this post, prior to hitting the "Publish" button, I notice a few rather partisan remarks. I should probably make a clear declaration that I am not now, nor I have I ever been, in any way, shape or form affiliated with any of the authors of the software that I am reviewing. Nor am I associated with their employers or other commercial connections. These are my personal opinions, and mine alone (my employer isn't involved, either).

I seem to be getting nearer the bottom of my original list of candidate applications. However, I'm going to add a few more:

Boswell
Caboodle
iOrganize
Curio

Going on with the original list we reach SOHO Notes from Chronos, which is the successor to the Sticky Brain application. A license costs $US39.99, and to be blunt, the application is not that impressive. The interface is unremarkable:

but I could have done without the clutter of preconfigured icons down the left (you can delete most of them). SOHO Notes can import folders of documents, though it can't detect duplicate documents. There is support for subfolders, and folders can be renamed. SOHO Notes can preview PDFs and Word documents, but not Excel spreadsheets, OmniGraffle diagrams of Open Office files. Previews of large graphics don't work well: you see the top left hand corner of the picture, though there are both horizontal and vertical scroll bars. HTML rendering is good.

But there is no tagging! Also, no encryption or AppleScript automation. And the application is slow, much slower than Yojimbo or EagleFiler with the same content. Sorry, too many missing features, on to the next application.

Boswell version 4.0.1 has the unmistakable look of an application ported from Mac OS 9 by someone who is not much interested in interface design:

The price is $US99.95 per license, which for the feature set offered is ambitious to the point of delusion. Boswell manages text, but the vast majority of the information I have to deal with is not in text format, and I very much doubt that anyone else lives in an all-text world. Boswell cannot store anything but text, and it doesn't even handle the formatting of that particularly well. Not even close to the requirements. Next.

Tinderbox version 3.6.2 costs $US198. Yes, you read that correctly, $198. However, this is an application not quite like any other I've so far reviewed. Tinderbox is more like a cross between an outliner and a mind mapping application, rather than a litter sorter. It comes with a 238 page user manual and a steep learning curve. Here is one view of the Tinderbox interface (many others are available):

If you are not familiar with mind mapping, may I make a couple of suggestions? First, do a little research on the concept of mind mapping. The nice people at James Cook University have thoughtfully made some online study resources available here. Next, get hold of a copy of one of Tony Buzan's books, either "How to Mind Map" or "The Mind Map Book" (he's written others, but I'd start with those two), which should be available in almost any good bookshop. Get a few large sheets of paper, and a selection of coloured pencils or pens, and try a few manual mind maps. If mind mapping doesn't work for you on paper, I don't think it will work for you in software.

If I were going to write a book, I would probably be glad of something like Tinderbox to help me organize my content. Tinderbox is designed to organize notes, and make links from notes to other objects (document, URLs, other notes). It supports AppleScript, and I doubt that anyone could get full value out of it without knowing AppleScript reasonably well. But is not suitable to manage the ephemera of the life electronic. It makes links to files, rather than storing its own copies, and it can't import most formats directly. What it does is very clever, and if I had a week to learn to use it, I think I would find it useful, but not for the task at hand.

Caboodle version 1.1 costs $US14.95 for an individual license, which is certainly at the reasonable end of the price scale. It is a little too limited for my purposes, which is a pity because it has some nice features. The interface is straightforward:

and it supports nested objects - Caboodle doesn't do folders as such, but the nested objects certainly behave like sub folders. It also has the nifty feature of allowing you to add extra fields to its default objects. If you look at the graphic above, you can see buttons to the right of the fields at the top of the form. Click on a plus button, and you get an extra field:

you can change the default field label. Caboodle doesn't support tagging, but you could use the customizable fields to achieve a similar effect. Unfortunately, Caboodle doesn't resize large images on preview, and there is no horizontal scroll bar. It can import HTML, plain text, rich text (RTF), and Word documents, and it can preview those formats, but it can't preview a Web Archive, though it will store a copy. The same goes for Open Office documents, OmniGraffle diagrams and Excel spreadsheets: they can be stored, but not previewed. Caboodle supports record level encryption (and if they can do it in a $15 product, some of you guys in the $40 range could lift your game on this one). There doesn't appear to be any automation support, and the workflow is primitive (not even a print to PDF input). Still, for a budget product it's pretty good.

iOrganize 6.2.1 costs $US19.95. According to the testimonials on the developer's web site, this is the best note organizer on the market. I cannot begin to imagine what the author of that comment was thinking when they wrote it; possibly they were comparing iOrganize to some piece of Microsoft software. iOrganize is rather basic, poorly documented, slow and flaky. Caboodle is better, and costs less.

The iOrganize interface is the predictable three pane layout:

To add a PDF, you need to create a new Note, and then drag the PDF to the Note content pane. OK, that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that if you change the Note title, and then drag the PDF, the PDF does not get saved. You have to create the new Note, drag the PDF, and then adjust the title. This is not documented, you have to work it out for yourself.

Importing a Web Archive is slow (I thought the app had crashed, it took so long), and the HTML rendering is poor:

compare that with the Yojimbo version of the same page:

No tagging, can't import folders of documents, non-existent workflow, no automation. I wouldn't pay for this.

Curio version 3.2.2 is such an amazing piece of software that I am probably going to buy a copy, even though it is not what I started out looking for in the first place. Curio is one of those wonderful applications that you didn't know you needed until you found it. It has all the promise of Tinderbox, without the learning curve, and it's prettier. It is also more flexible in several ways. It's even cheaper (a bit), with licenses ranging from $US39 - $US129 depending on the feature set. I'm testing Curio Professional, the top of the line, $129 version.

The interface is sensible, and adjustable: here's a basic view:

showing the Organizer pane on the left and the "Ideas" space on the right. There is also a Library pane, which appears at the bottom, and a floating Inspector panel. Here is a view with everything open:

The red arrows to the left of the items in the Library pane mean that Curio has links to those items, but they are still in their original location in the file system. You can also embed an item into a Curio project, in which case it is copied into the project file, and the original link is severed. Once an item has become a Curio "Asset", it can be referenced by as many Ideas spaces or project as you like. Curio can preview a PDF, JPEG (and other graphics), or a Photoshop .psd. It can preview part of a Web Archive, but if you want to see the whole thing, it will open in Safari. Curio can't preview a Word document, or Open Office, Excel or OmniGraffle files. It can link to those formats, but Curio isn't designed to store files, it's designed to support visual thinking. Consider this screen shot:

The graphic on the left (the one with the triangles) is a Photoshop .psd, dragged into the the Ideas pane. The green octagon next to it is a shape drawn in Curio itself, with text cut from Circus Ponies Notebook and pasted into the shape. The text to the right of that is a cut and paste from a Word document (note: I could not cut and paste from an Open Office document), and the image below that block of text is a Web Archive, also dragged into the pane. The thick blue line around the bottom right hand triangle was drawn using the Curio paint brush tool. You can drag objects around in the pane, and resize them on the fly:

Note that the blue line stayed put when I resized the Photoshop graphic. You can use Curio to scribble on documents, without actually touching the document. The list to the right of the graphic was created with Curio's list tool. There is a tool in Curio to draw almost anything you want (and it supports graphics tablets: I don't own one, but I feel the need coming on), and to reformat anything from fonts to Ideas space backgrounds. You can also create new documents from within Curio, and it will call the appropriate application for you - Word, Pages, Excel, OmniGraffle, etc. Curio supports tagging, includes a search mechanism and has so many other features that I can't begin to cover them all (and I suspect I may be starting to rave a bit here). Curio does not meet the requirements listed in the first part of this series of posts, and I wish it had better integration with Firefox, but I am still deeply impressed with this piece of software. Curio has a 15 day demo, and I shall be giving it a work out for the next two weeks. I will post a separate assessment of Curio later, but this is feeling very much like love at first sight.

It is Sunday night here in Sydney, and I shall be on a training course (Sun Virtualization Technologies) for the next two days, and then working on a proof of concept on Wednesday. It may be next weekend before I can continue this series of reviews, and I still have a few applications to test. I'd like to wrap this up soon, so if anyone has any more applications to suggest, tell me ASAP. Next on the list: TAO....

2007-03-15T16:41:00.000+11:00

Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software

Part 3

I'm currently sitting in the Sun Microsystems Solution Centre in North Sydney, waiting for a backup to restore. Ah, how much of an IT engineer's life is spent waiting for a computer to do something! However, I can at least improve the shining hour by going on with my survey of information organizers for Mac OS X.

There's nothing like trying to explain something to someone else to make you think about the subject seriously and thoroughly yourself, and I've been thinking a lot about the sort of documents I'm trying to organize. I've come to the conclusion that much I what I want to store in my perfect organizer is what is called "ephemera" in library circles. Ephemera, to a librarian, is the scrap paper of the book world: flimsy pamphlets, flyers, brochures and such. If you work in the archives area of a library, ephemera includes things like ticket stubs and hand written notes. All are small, designed to be transient, and therefore difficult to store long term. For example, theatre programs are often produced on low quality paper, which deteriorates quickly. Preserving such documents for posterity is technically challenging. But these are the very documents that can illuminate the social history of a culture for future generations.

Libraries usually have special arrangements for storing ephemera, which are usually too fragile to stand on a shelf next to hard bound books; these arrangements include things like acid free envelopes, special binders and dedicated shelf space. And the application that I am looking for is to store the ephemeral scraps that I collect, safe from getting lost among the bigger items, but findable when I want them.

The next application on my list is MacJournal . The current version is 4.1, available for download at $US34.95. This product is really aimed at the person who want to keep a diary, and needs blogging and podcasting tools as well. The interface is quite pleasant:

and it certainly has a flexible tool bar:

For document management, it's about at the same level as Mori: it doesn't render HTML at all well, and it can't preview spreadsheets or Open Office documents (.xls or .sxw). MacJournal can import and preview Photoshop files (.psd), but I couldn't find a way to resize an image in the window, so for a big picture you only see the top left hand corner. There is a vertical scroll bar, but no horizontal scroll.

MacJournal has some of the nicest documentation I have seen, and the application is stable (no crashes during testing). But it is not the application for which I am looking.

Eaglefiler looks very promising. The tested version is 1.1.6, selling for $US40. The interface is uncluttered:

and Eaglefiler has a couple of other windows. One is the Error window, which I like a lot. When I started testing, I loaded a few documents individually as a sanity check. Then I pointed Eaglefiler at a folder of about 450 files, and left it to import. When I came back to check, the error window told me what had failed and why:

an application with the smarts to avoid loading duplicate files will be very helpful. Eaglefiler also has a "drop pad", to which you can drag and drop files that you want imported to the application. Eaglefiler allows you to have multiple "libraries", and you can choose which library you want to drop a document into:

Eaglefiler rendered HTML perfectly on every page I tried. The handling of an Omnigraffle diagram was less perfect: the preview showed me the raw XML, which was not at all what I had expected. A Word document was displayed correctly, but Open Office (.sxw) and Excel (.xls) documents could not be previewed at all (Eaglefiler called the external to open the documents).

Eaglefiler stores files individually, in dedicated folders, and uses an SQL database to manage files and their contents. This meets my criteria for separate storage, and ensures that I can get files out of the application in the same format that they went in, because Eaglefiler does not alter the formats. Eaglefiler also supports AppleScript, sub folders, and tagging. The one thing it lacks is any support for encryption. EagleFiler is very, very close to what I am looking for: can any thing else get closer?

Yojimbo version 1.4.2 costs $US39 for a single user license, which gives one user the right to use the software on multiple machines. The Yojimbo interface is straight forward:

and there are numerous ways of getting information into the app. One is the Drop Dock, which appears as a tab at the side of the screen, and pops out when a file is dragged to it:

The Drop Dock allows you to frop files into the main "Library" or into individual folders, which is handy. However, I've noticed that the Drop Dock has a tendency to get "stuck", so that it no longer pops out when you drg something to it. This seems to happen if the machine has been asleep, which my laptop is at least once every day. The only way to wake the dock up seems to be to restart Yojimbo.

Yojimbo also has a "Quick Input Panel", which can be brought up by pressing F8. So you select a URL, copy it and hit F8, and Yojimbo realises that you are saving a bookmark, and presents you with:

And it can detect if you are copying a chunk of text, in which case it will present you with a note template instead. Yojimbo also comes with two bookmarklets for your browser (Safari, Camino, FireFox or OmniWeb), one to create a bookmark in Yojimbo, and the other to create a web archive. You can drag files into Yojimbo, or import them, and there is also AppleScript support. Getting information into Yojimbo is a breeze, until you try to bring in an image. Images can only be stored if you first create a Note, and then drag the image to the Note. The nice folks at Bare Bones Software tell me that this rather odd oversight will be addressed in a future release.

Yojimbo supports encryption at record level, which is a big plus for me. It supports tagging and folders (called Collections). It can import and preview a wide range of document formats, including Word, PDF, Web Archive, Text, JPEG, and TIFF. The HTML rendering is good. It imported an OmniGraffle diagram, but previewed it as raw XML, and it could not preview either Open Office or an Excel Spreadsheet.

Yojimbo stores its information in an SQL database; documents appear to be exported consistently, but I can foresee problems if the database gets corrupted. However, the application is easy to use, the documentation is good, and I like it a lot, except for a few annoying details....

Yojimbo does not support sub-folders. This seems very strange for an application that is in every other respect so flexible. Nor can it import entire folders of documents, which can make the initial import phase a tad annoying. Yojimbo cannot detect duplicated documents. There is no facility for multiple "Libraries": everything is stored in one database.

Like EagleFiler, Yojimbo is very, very close to what I am looking for, and if the two apps could just merge their feature sets I think I would be happy. In reality, I may finish this exercise by having to make a decision about which features are most important to me....

More reviews in a few days, and again, many thanks to all who have sent in suggestions.

tags technorati : applications, mac, organizers