Currently:
2003-07-31»
you commendo»
It's been ten years since CD-ROM drives became affordable (prices dropped
from $700 to $200 in 1993), and I've been asked to write a piece about the
rise (and fall) (and rise) of the CD-ROM as a medium. As part of this, I'm
doing a little retrospective of the best CD-ROMs of the decade.
It feels a bit odd to hive-off CD-ROM as a category. There's something very
1996 about doing that. It does mean something, though: a package that depends
on permanent storage rather than pulling data off the Net; whose form is
melded around slow-access times, and perhaps nodding to that "digital book"
ideal.
I'm guess I'm looking for apps that exploited the CD-ROM form well, and
perhaps lived up to that all-to-brief moment of being the forefront of
"interactive multimedia", but have still managed to survive the test of
time.
Me, I have a soft-spot for Voyager's Spinal Tap, which
not only set the standard for video CD-ROM, but I think defined how DVD bonus
material would be executed. And I think I'll include the original Myst (even though I'm
a bit loathe to include every game too big to fit on floppies), because its
rendered gameplay was such a ingenious exploitation of the large size of
CD-ROMs, rather than clever programming. And then there's the You Don't Know Jack, spin-offs of
which I still see for sale.
What are your favourites? All suggestions ungratefully purloined.
Discuss!
2003-07-30»
the london underground in cartesian triplets»
Nigel Rantor is collecting datapoints to build an open 3D
map of the London Underground, and is looking for suggestions as to
what to do with it. Geowankers,
assemble!
2003-07-29»
blog activity»
Oh, shut up, yes, it's another blog entry about blogs. I'm interested,
all right?
Maciej's team have done the first number-crunching I could think of with
his Blog Census stats. How many blogs are
actively updated? Roughly two-thirds, it seems -65%. The rest are
either abandoned (where the blogger says he's quitting - 4%), no longer
updated (no posts in two months - 16%), sites that just contain test posts
(8%), 404ing, or otherwise inaccessible.
2003-07-28»
The European Enforcement Directive»
RIAA-style revealing of subscriber identities without even sub poenas? And
worse? What fresh
hell is this?
2003-07-27»
transcribing phone interviews»
I'm spending the day listening to my own cackling voice asking dumb
questions of smart people. They're all very quiet people, too, and I foolishly
left the laptop recording with the noisy mains plugged-in, so all I can hear
is my booming idiocy and then them speaking as though through a lawnmower,
darkly.
That said, this piece is going better than most. My expectations of what my
interviewees would say have not been so undermined that I'll have to rejig the
entire skeleton structure I originally had in mind. But I've still been
sufficiently surprised by what they have to say that I know I'm not just
imposing my naive pre-story belief onto the facts.
Plus, I'm getting to write about new RFCs in a mainstream publication,
which is always to the good.
2003-07-26»
dj adams on getting started with dashboard»
DJ Adams has written up how to
get dashboard up and running. This is, bar endless fooling around, how
I did it. I'm using Debian - currently the development Debian packages for
mono and gtk-sharp aren't recent enough to compile or run
dashboard.
2003-07-25»
argh so close»
Spent the evening recreationally pulling mono , gtk-sharp and dashboard out of cvs and
manhandling them into compiling. Everything works, except for one goddamn line
in dashboard, where it calls GTK.Html.BeginContent() - which the compiler
confident tells me doesn't exist. But I can see it, Computer! I can
see it in the API XML spec!
time passes...
Well. I felt so defeated by writing that last blog entry, that I went off
and had another go. My general approach in these situations is to randomly
futz with the source until I can't remember what it looked like pre-futz, then
flamboyantly delete it all in frustration and despair. I got as far as futzing
- I replaced BeginContent() with Begin(), which was the function above it in
the API list - and it all magically worked.
There's not much to see yet, unfortunately, because I don't use any
programs that have a dashboard frontend (that's to say, that passively spit
dashboard clues about what I'm currently looking at/typing). But it managed my
blog entry about itself when I asked it outright. And that makes me strangely
happy.
2003-07-24»
vim and the kitchen sink»
This vimspell module is really very good. I now have
Word-style on-the-fly spell-checking. In vi.
I should look at the source and see if I can finally implement my "tell me
the word count in the status bar if I idle for more than 0.5 sec" dream
feature.
(It messed up a bit in HTML mode, but there's an answer in the FAQ about
that. The clue is in the screenshot.)
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
