Dieting for America

“The New 2004 No CARB Diet: No Cheney. No Ashcroft. No Rumsfeld. No Bush. And absolutely No Rice.”

Badge for sale at the Democratic Convention. [Spotted by the Economist.]

Steve Jobs’s bedside email to Apple corps

“Team,

I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me.

This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

The far more common form of pancreatic cancer is called adenocarcinoma, which is currently not curable and usually carries a life expectancy of around one year after diagnosis. I mention this because when one hears “pancreatic cancer” (or Googles it), one immediately encounters this far more common and deadly form, which, thank god, is not what I had.

I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September. While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.

Steve

PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.”

What a man! Even plugs his product in hospital!

IBM open sources millions of lines of its code

IBM has decided to contributute more than half a million lines of its software code, valued at $85 million, to the Apache Foundation. The move, according to the NYT, “is one of the largest transfers ever of proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the code contribution to try to help make it easier and more appealing for software developers to write applications in the Java programming language”.

The code is for the Cloudscape Java database, an integral part of IBM’s WebSphere (which competes head-on with Microsoft’s dot-Net). From now on, Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property rights to the Cloudscape code.

Hmmm… interesting.

Code Orange. Or is it pale grey?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, as a rule; in my experience, the cock-up theory of history usually provides the best explanations. But ever since it became clear from the Democratic Convention that John Kerry could conceivably win the election in November, I’ve been wondering what the Bush crowd would do to top it. Now we know — the Code Orange alert, with all the accompanying solemn warnings, armed cops everywhere, etc. It’s a reflection of how comprehensive Osama bin Laden’s victory has been that one’s first thought is not about the gravity of the alleged threat, but about whether this is just a losing Administration playing on the public’s fear much as a musician might play an organ. The journalistic coverage doesn’t help one decide: all I see are hacks solemnly intoning unsourced allegations. And the fact that the alleged ‘breakthrough’ came via Pakistani ‘Intelligence’ doesn’t exactly inspire confidence either.

And now there’s this from today’s NYT:

“Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.”

The only consolation is that the Administration’s power to ramp up the threat level to meet political needs might be a declining asset. After all, if things are this bad, the Prez can’t be doing as well as he claims in the ‘war’ against terror. Maybe a new guy would do better?

The curse of celebrity

It seems that my Prius has become a celebmobile. Harrison Ford has one. And now the great Bill Thompson, From Whom Nothing Is Hidden, tells me that Anthony Hopkins has one too. Hmmm… Maybe I should sell mine now before people start to think I read Hello! magazine?

Two AirportExpresses in the same town!

Shurely shome mishtake, as Private Eye used to say, in honour of Bill Deedes. But no: Quentin has an Airport Express too. He’s much too refined though to have his music blared out to him in the garden.

Steve Jobs has cancer op

The NYT is reporting that Jobs had a successful operation to remove a tumour. According to the Times, “Mr. Jobs, 49, said he had a form of pancreatic cancer that can be cured by surgical removal of the tumor. He said he would not have chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

‘I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year,” he wrote in the message, which Apple made public on Sunday evening, “and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was).'”

I’m glad Jobs is going to be ok. He’s a bit of a monster (I know people who have worked for him), but at least he creates great products, and saved Apple from the scrapheap of computing history. I am inescapably reminded, though, of a terrible story about Evelyn Waugh (another monster). Waugh was sitting in his London Club one afternoon when someone came in and told him that their mutual friend, Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son], had undergone a successful operation to remove a non-malignant tumour. “Ah”, said Waugh, “the wonders of medical science: to have found the only bit of Randolph that wasn’t malignant — and then to remove it!

Airport Express

My AirportExpress arrived yesterday. It’s a typically neat Mac product — elegant in appearance, simple to set up. And it will breathe life into my old HiFi system, which has a wonderful pair of Tannoy speakers but had fallen into disuse ever since I started keeping my music on my computer. In the afternoon I was sitting in the garden with the windows open and the Tannoys blasting out Bruce Springsteen and Tracy Chapman singing Chimes of Freedom!

The device has far more interesting possibilities than this particular anti-social application however. It’s basically a portable base station. So next time I’m in a broadband-enabled hotel I will no longer be chained to the wall via an Ethernet cable. From now on, the AirportExpress will go in my bag wherever I go. (Thinks… Just as well I got that Brenthaven backpack…)

Another interesting possibility is to use it as a network extender — giving a wireless network a longer range by employing AirportExpress as a relay station. And of course, it’s a way of putting any USB printer on the wireless net.

Francis Crick is dead

At the age of 88, he has succumbed to cancer of the colon after a long battle. Not many people can be said to have changed the world, but Crick and his colleague James Watson did when they discovered the double-helical structure of DNA — the molecule that determines every form of life — in 1953.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by Watson’s book, The Double Helix, and it was one of the reasons I applied to Cambridge as a student — not because I wanted to do molecular biology, but because I longed to study at a place where such things could happen. When I arrived in 1968, Crick was still working in the University (in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), and could often be seen around town.

I ran into him twice in the period before he departed for the Salk Institute in California. The first time was at the party given for E.M. Forster by the Cambridge Humanists (of which Crick was a leading light) to celebrate the writer’s 90th birthday. The second occasion was a quiet Sunday evening in the Berni Inn steak bar which used to be on Trinity Street. My wife and I were having a meal and suddenly Francis and his French wife arrived and took the adjoining table. Given that this was England, we did not of course acknowledge their existence, but I remember being torn by conflicting emotions: pride at being in the vicinity of such a great man; and a guilty amusement that Crick and his spouse spent the entire meal engaged in low-level marital bickering — just like any other boring couple!

Update:Excellent obituary in the New York Times which challenges the myth that Crick and Watson unfairly gained access to the crystallographic data of Rosalind Franklin. One of the things I hadn’t known is that Rosalind spent her last remission from the cancer which killed her in the Cricks’ home.

Prius review

We’ve had our Toyota Prius for nearly three weeks now, and I’m working spasmodically on a review — but it has to wait until I’ve finished all the more urgent things I’m doing at the moment. In the meantime, occasional reviews are showing up on the Web — like this one by Matt McGlynn. There was also a nice review by Michael Booth in the Independent. Apropos its appearance, he says: “Pondering its ungainly profile, I was reminded of the comment by one of Ferrari’s chief designers upon first seeing the original Mini: ‘If it wasn’t so ugly, I’d shoot myself,’ he said. How many other manufacturers, I wonder, have thought the same about the Prius?”