Bringing order to Chaos Manor

My colleague Quentin is a terrific judge of software, so whenever he enthuses about a program I sit up and take notice. Last weekend he extolled an intriguing Mac application with the unlikely name of Delicious Library. What it does is very simple: it provides a slick way of cataloguing collections of books, records etc.

I held out until today, and then ran into the usual problem: I couldn’t locate a book I needed, despite knowing that I possessed it. I’ve been buying books all my life and now have an enormous collection. There are books everywhere in the house, some of them (I am ashamed to say) not shelved but standing in tottering piles round the place. The result is a terrific working library, but one that threatens to become unusable because I can never find stuff when I need it. Sometimes I have even bought a second copy of a book I know I have — somewhere — because the effort of looking for it is greater than the trouble of ordering another one from Amazon or going to the University Library.

This is daft. When Sue was around, she made great headway by filing everything in my study — regardless of content — alphabetically by author. But that still left everything else unfiled, and didn’t address my need to group books according to thematic categories. Sue always said that what we really needed was a decent catalogue. But we both blanched at the labour of creating one.

Anyway, today I decided to see if Quentin’s tip could help, and downloaded Delicious Library. Two hours later, I had catalogued 200 books. It is indeed a beautiful piece of software. It works by harnessing my iSight camera as a barcode scanner. The process goes like this: 1. Scan barcode to extract ISBN. 2. Connect to Amazon using the Amazon API to retrieve bibliographic data, including thumbnail of cover if available. 3. Enter record in database. That’s it!

The interface used to display and access the contents of one’s library owes a lot to iTunes. Books can be displayed by covers (as if they were on display in a shop) or as a sortable list. You can create ‘shelves’ which are analogous to playlists in iTunes. The great thing is that any book can go on multiple virtual shelves (absolutely vital if you’re someone like me who has an untidy mind and lots of overlapping interests). It’s lovely to use. There are some small glitches — I can’t move books to shelves in list view, for example. But overall, it lives up to its name — Delicious. Best $40 I’ve spent in a while. Oh — and it’s not available to Microsofties.

Workhorse of the year

Earlier this year I had some unexpected royalties and decided to blow them on a Nikon D70 digital SLR.

It has turned out to be a fantastic workhorse — the best camera I’ve used since the rangefinder Leica. I’ve taken thousands of photographs and the only failures have been mine, not the camera’s. It’s very light, but amazingly robust and fits naturally but unobtrusively into one’s hand. I take it everywhere with me. The best thing about it, though, is that it functions like a ‘real’ camera with none of the squidgy processing lag of old style digital cameras. Just press the button and hear the familiar clunk of the mirror flipping up and down — no question about whether you’ve actually taken a picture. And you look and focus through the viewfinder rather than via an LCD screen.

There are a few downsides. For example, my existing Nikon Speedlite flashgun won’t work with it: you’re supposed to purchase a special — outrageously expensive — Speedlite (I haven’t); the onboard pop-up flash is hopeless; and the range of indie lenses available is much narrower than what’s available for the Canon 300D. But even so, the D70 has been a revelation to own and use. Interesting, then, that Popular Photography has named it ‘Camera of the Year’. And, if that were not enough, I see that Ben Hammersley wants one! He has such good taste, that lad.

Rip: Mix: Burn: Sue!

If you haven’t already heard or seen it, Ed Felten’s President’s Lecture in Princeton is a must. It’s the best exegesis yet of the collision between digital technology and the copyright industries. Available in all kinds of formats from here.

Camcorders catch up with the iPod

JVC is about to launch a new generation of camcorders which record not onto ye olde videotape but onto the same kind of tiny hard drives (microdrives) used in the iPod.

You can get about an hour of MPEG2 (i.e. DVD quality) movie on a 4GB drive (the same one that’s in my mini iPod). But of course the big gain is that you can delete duff sequences and free up recording space on the fly.

Internet Explorer’s market share continues to slip

OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based company which monitors real-time web usage is reporting that Microsoft’s share of the browser market continues to slide — down 5 percent from May to 88.90 percent. Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla’s Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58 — up from effectively zero a year ago. The total usage share of the main Mozilla browser was 2.1 percent at the end of May. Nobody who uses Firefox will be surprised.

Wonder what Microsoft will do. (I’ve discussed the company’s strategic dilemma with IE before.) The thing about Firefox, you see, is that it’s open source software, so there’s no possibility of destroying it the way MS destroyed the (closed source) Netscape operation. Watch this space.

iPhotos to go!

I was given one of the new iPods as a present by some outrageously generous friends.

It’s really nice to be able to carry a whole library of digital photos around in one’s pocket. But the nicest thing of all is the special cable which enables one to hook it up to a TV and show them to other people. The appalling resolution of conventional television screens, however, reminds one of how primitive TV technology is compared to a PowerBook (or, for that matter, a Sony Vaio).

And the gadget wars continue. Not only does Quentin have a new iPod, but he’s gone out and bought a Griffin iTalk for it — which turns it into a really nifty digital recorder. So he’s ahead again. That’s the trouble with arms races — in the end they bankrupt both parties. Sigh.

Science fiction — yes, really

Various folks are getting excited by reports that a computer has been caught writing fiction. Here, for example, is a breathless piece in the New York Times:

“With little fanfare and (so far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out.”

Oh yeah? Well, let’s see what this machine turns out. Ah, here’s the beginning of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal:

“Dave Striver loved the university – its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.”

You’re right — it sounds suspiciously like the work of Jeffrey Archer. But it’s claimed to be the output of ‘Brutus.1’, a program written by Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer’s Department of Cognitive Science and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M. Bringsjord’s web page tells us that “Brutus.1 represents the first step in engineering an artificial agent that ‘appears’ to be genuinely creative. We have attempted to do that by, among other things, mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures, and then vesting Brutus.1 with these concepts. The result, Brutus.1, is the world’s most advanced story generator. We use Brutus.1 in support of our philosophy of Weak Artificial Intelligence — basically, the view that computers will never be genuinely conscious, but computers can be cleverly programmed to ‘appear’ to be, in this case, literarily creative.”

Well, if a klutz like Archer can mime creativity, then I suppose some computer code could too. But isn’t that notion of “mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures” just cute?

The Cam in winter

Bill took us out on his new boat on Saturday. It was freezing cold in the fens, but eerily still and beautiful. We saw two herons, plus innumerable coots and moorhen.

Copyright thugs mug US Congress — again

The so-called “Intellectual Property Protection Act” (IPPA) now before Congress beggars belief. It’s a ragbag of different measures all of which have the general intent of restricting what you can do with your PC or digital recording device. In its current form, the Bill makes it a criminal offence to fast-forward through ads on a recorded TV show. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the eight bills shepherded into the catch-all IPPA was originally called ‘The Family Movie Act’ (formerly H.R. 4586): This was originally intended to protect consumers’ rights to use technology to skip over and mute parts of a movie that they found objectionable. But lobbyists working for the broadcasting industry and Hollywood studios added a section to take away consumers’ rights to skip over ads in DVDs and recorded broadcasts with a TiVo like device.

There’s more. For example a provision that would criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of Apple’s iTunes; the legislation equates that act with the indiscriminate file sharing that goes on via peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Currently, with iTunes, you can opt to share a playlist with up to three computers on your network. But the IPPA doesn’t differentiate between this innocuous — and Apple-approved — practice and the unrestrained sharing of music files with millions of strangers via Kazaa or Grokster.

VHS is dead. Long live DVD!

UK High Street retailer Dixons has announced that it is to stop selling video recorders. According to the BBC report, Dixons will phase out VCRs due to the boom in DVD players, sales of which have grown seven-fold in five years.

“It ends a 26-year love affair with a gadget which changed viewing habits by allowing people to leave home without missing their favourite programmes. Dixons expects to sell its remaining stock of VCRs by Christmas.”

Sigh. End of an era. I was a TV critic for 13 years, and ran two video recorders for most of that period. But nobody who has spooled backwards and forwards through as much tape as I did would ever decline a TiVO — or even a DVD recorder.