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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.....

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.