My attempt to be artistically enigmatic. Er, in reality it’s a belt which happened to be lying on a duvet cover. Must take a course in pretentiousness sometime and get myself a New York agent.
What will you do when your hard disk fails?
Note: “when”, not “if”. This morning’s Observer column. Excerpt:
Until recently, hard drive failure was a catastrophe only for really heavy users of computing, or for those running network servers – which is why both those categories of user have always been paranoid about backing up their data. But most ordinary users didn’t keep that much stuff, and in general much of what they did keep consisted of documents that could easily be backed up onto removable disks or filed in paper form.
But about three years ago, millions of such ‘ordinary’ users began buying digital still- and video-cameras and MP3 players. And all of a sudden, their hard drives began filling up with images, movies and music that really mattered to their owners because they documented their lives.
Microsoft to catch up with Apple Real Soon Now
Well, well. From BBC online…
Microsoft’s next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will make it easier for people to keep automatically aware of website updates.
IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed on a site.
Users can click on a “plus” button to subscribe to the site’s feed, as they would with a bookmark.
What’s funny about this? Nothing. It’s just that I’m using Safari (the browser that comes with Mac OS X) and it has exactly this feature built in. Now.
.
Still, full marks for effort to Redmond.
Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Shuttleworth came to see us at Ndiyo yesterday. He was like a breath of fresh air — smart, informed, insightful and (unusual in very rich people) a very good listener. He gave a terrific lecture the previous evening at the Judge Institute. We were keen to talk to him about some of the stuff funded by his Foundation — including the Ubuntu Linux distribution we’re using for Ndiyo, and the amazing tuxLab project. I came away with several good ideas arising from our conversation. And we never even got around to discussing his third career as an astronaut! The photograph shows him talking to Quentin (on the right) over an Ndiyo ‘Internet cafe in a box’ we had set up in the Ndiyo house as a demo.
Still life, with candles
Debris of an evening spent sitting in the garden, talking. One upside of global warming.
Isn’t capitalism wonderful
For every demand, a supply.
Let us now praise famous er, men
Tomorrow, Cambridge University will give an honorary degree to Carl Djerassi, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, and one of the few people alive to whom the description of polymath might properly be applied — see here if you have any doubts. He’s the guy who invented the contraceptive pill, and could thus be said to have changed millions of lives, and indeed whole societies. I particularly liked his account of how he came to have an Austrian postal stamp dedicated to him.
Another honorary degree will go to David Crystal, one of the world’s leading experts on language (and also one of the most depressingly prolific authors in any language). There was a dinner in my college tonight in his honour, and to my delight I wound up sitting next to him at dessert where we had an intense discussion about Blogging and its significance. It turns out that he’s done a second edition of his book, Language and the Internet, to catch up on what has happened, linguistically speaking, on the Net in the years since the first edition came out in 2001. (Just think: when he was writing the first edition, ‘google’ wasn’t a verb!) I look forward to seeing the new version.
eBay and St. Bob
This morning’s Observer column on how eBay management can cope with anything — except an ageing, foulmouthed Irish rock star.
Take a break
Exhausted by concern over the G8 Summit, I thought I would take a break in the Gleneagles Hotel, where the great event is to be held. Sadly, the hotel was unable to offer me accommodation between July 3 and 9, but I could make a reservation for the 10th. Nice range of choice, too — all the way from a ‘Classic Double’ (soon to be known as a Blair-Brown) @ £340 per night for B&B, to the Royal Lochnagar Suite @£1600 per night. I’m sure all those poor folks in Africa will be touched by the thought of the Lords of the Universe communing on their behalf in such modest surroundings.
My good friend, the late Charles Alan Wright, used to stay at Gleneagles — in a suite. I knew Charlie was rich (he was Richard Nixon’s lawyer for a time), but I didn’t know he was that rich.
The big lie
The root cause of Tony Blair’s credibility problem is that he took Britain to war on a false prospectus. But the really interesting question is how he got into the mess in the first place. The answer is, in essence, simple. The Bush administration had decided soon after the 9/11 attacks (or perhaps even before that) to attack Iraq. Blair, for reasons still unclear, had decided that whatever the US did, the UK would support. From that single decision, everything then followed. But since there was no rational justification for Bush’s deteremination to oust Saddam, Blair had to thrash around for a justification he could sell to the British parliament, and the British people.
What I hadn’t realised, until I read this remarkable piece by Mark Danner, is how early the decision to go with the Yanks was being discussed in Whitehall.
Danner’s piece is based round a leaked minute of a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July 2002 (yep — 2002) in which the entire thing was discussed. Here’s an extract which gives the flavour of the discussion:
C [Sir Richard Dearlove, Head of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
(Emphasis added.)