Oblomovka

2003-07-31»

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!

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2003-07-30»

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!

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2003-07-29»

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 The rest are either abandoned (where the blogger says he’s quitting – 4%), no longer updated (no posts in two months – 16%), sites that just contain test posts (8%), 404ing, or otherwise inaccessible.

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2003-07-27»

RIAA-style revealing of subscriber identities without even sub poenas? And worse? What fresh hell is this?

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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.

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2003-07-26»

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.

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2003-07-25»

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.

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2003-07-24»

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.)

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2003-07-23»

My friend Louise is like one of those brilliant cold-sell salesmen, only the other way around. If she buys something and it turns out to be a bit rubbish, she harasses the company into doing anything she wants. Here’s how she got a free replacement part for her Dyson vacuum even when it was outside the guarantee.

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Coinage I’d not heard before, but will now overuse: ad hominid

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