Tools for thought

For as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of computing (at least for me) has been to find tools that actually help in making one a better, more efficient or more creative writer. And I’m not talking about word-processing but something that can do for authors what, say, the spreadsheet did for accountants and planners. The word processor is, well, just that — a tool that processes words. But where do the words come from? And can computing help in stimulating or generating the ideas that are expressed in words? So far, the answer seems to be “not much”.

It’s not that there aren’t lots of programs out there which help one store, index, organise and retrieve information, create ‘mindmaps’, even do brainstorming, etc. But none of these tools maps naturally onto the way one thinks — or at least the way I think. So there’s a tradeoff: given that I have to change the way I work in order to accommodate the software, do the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs? So far, the answer has usually been ‘”no”.

Enter Steven Johnson, a writer I admire. He’s produced several really interesting, stimulating, thoughtful books — notably Interface Culture. So when he published an essay in Sunday’s New York Times about a software tool he swears by, I sat up and took notice. The software in question is called DEVONthink. Johnson has given a much fuller explanation on his Blog of how he uses it. I was sufficiently intrigued to download the software and get it to index all the documents, web pages, images, etc. on my hard drive. It’s a very interesting tool with a fairly steep learning curve. And to get the most out of it one would (as usual) have to adjust one’s working methods to fit in with its underlying metaphors. Nevertheless, Johnson has persuaded me that it’s worth exploring it in more depth.

Oh — bad news for Windows users: DEVONthink is for Mac OS X only.

Skype now available for Linux

Yep!. Yippee! The only downside is that the kids will demand another headset. Sigh.

Dog bites man. And Google doing well. That’s news for you

Today’s NYT reports:

“Google … surprised Wall Street yesterday by announcing that its sales and profit margins grew much faster than expected in the fourth quarter.

The results were a sharp contrast to the company’s warnings in November that its revenue for the quarter would probably decline because of increased competition and an inevitable slowing as a result of its growth.

Google’s shares surged in after-hours trading, rising nearly 10 percent to more than $210, a record for the company, which sold shares in its initial offering in August for $85 each.

‘More humans around the world are using Google and they are spending more time with Google per human,’ the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said last night in an interview.”

Hah! Note the use of the word “human”. Those rumours that Google is developing a search engine aimed at dogs are true!

Our borrowing culture

One of the things that most exasperates me about the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything is how self-defeating it would be if it is allowed to go unchecked. Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture. Why can’t people see this? It’s not as though it’s a difficult idea. (I tried to express it in my rant to the Westminster Media Forum.)

I found a lovely phrase in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (one of my favourite books), which expresses the same idea beautifully. “Masterpieces”, she writes, “are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

So where’s the spittoon?

Macintosh for dental hygeniests.

Click here if you’re daft enough to want one. You’ll be taken to a clueless website which omits to mention the only interesting thing about this upholstered absurdity — the price.

Regrets

From the Blog of someone whose server was comprehensively hacked…

“Okay, so how did the guy get in? No idea. The logs were gone. My best guess is a PHP CLI script I had running which allowed a Flash IRC app to re-route through my server to the freenode IRC servers. It was probably running as root and hackable as hell. I’ve also been playing with Apache and PHP 5 lately, so that was running on port 8080, and I really hadn’t made any effort to secure it. Or it could have been any number of exploits out there that I never bothered to patch, or it could’ve been a bad password. We’ll never know. Whatever it was, it was my fault for not maintaining my site better.”

Nigerian widows celebrate first anniversary of US anti-spam act

This headline from Good Morning, Silicon Valley reminds me that it’s a year since the US anti-spam act came into force. And guess what? Spam has increased substantially since its passage. “Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.”

To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.”

How to have your Abstract rejected

Hilarious — and very sound — advice from Xerox PARC. Sample:

“Submit incorrectly. The device of sending abstracts to the local arrangements chairman is overused. Try something fresher. Send your abstract to last year’s program chairman. Send it to this year’s in care of the school where he did his undergraduate work or, better yet, to the school that turned him down for tenure. Send it to someone whose name sounds a little like his. Under any circumstances, be sure to send it postage due.”

New body, old glass

One of the downsides of digital technology is the speed of obsolescence. The great thing about having a Nikon D70 is that it enables me to combine being digital without abandoning the collection of old Nikon lenses I’ve built up over the years. I have, for example, an 85mm f2 AI-Nikkor which is a terrific portrait lens; and an f1.2 50mm (shown here) which provides the nearest thing to night vision one can get on a camera. (Well…, I think Leica do an f1 Summilux, but it costs more than the GNP of Ecuador.) Of course the effective focal lengths are different with the digital body (I’ve been multiplying by 1.5 as an approximation), but the great thing is that the old lenses work fine. Just switch the camera over to manual operation, clip on the lens and bingo! — you have a digital camera with really good glassware. I’m sure purists will point out that they’re not optimised for the new system, but the results look pretty good to me.

En passant, it’s funny the way the photo-retail industry concentrates on resolution as the defining characteristic of digital cameras. Pricing seems to be entirely driven by sensor resolution. Until recently, nobody paid much attention to the quality of the lenses. Maybe that was because with a 3 megapixel camera you couldn’t tell the difference between the results given by a plastic zoom and those produced by a proper lens. But as the industry matures, manufacturers are beginning to pay serious attention to lenses. Some Panasonic digital cameras, for example, now come with Leica glassware. And the high-end Sony cameras have used Zeiss Vario-Sonnars for quite a while.

Visual memories

Karlin Lillington has written a memorable piece about the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation set up by Steven Spielberg after he made Schindler’s List.