The key to tea on t: a cautionary tale

Yesterday morning I was desperately finishing a piece for the London Evening Standard. Just as I wrote the last sentence (and my mobile phone rang — call from the Features Editor wondering where the hell was my copy), the dreaded warning about coming to the end of my iBook’s battery charge appeared. Desperate to ensure that my machine kept going, I reached over to find the power lead — and upset a cup of cold tea onto the machine.

A feeling of utter panic ensued, but I had sufficient presence of mind to e-mail the article before shutting down the machine. Then a frantic period of wiping and drying and praying. Switched the machine on and it refused to boot, displaying instead something that looked like a screensaver from the nuclear industry. Booted OS X from the cd-rom (one of the lovely things you can do with Macs and not with PCs) and found that I still had my beloved machine and its data. Phew! But then discovered that I couldn’t access email and other programs because my password was continually rejected.

On closer examination, it turned out that the offending passwords all contain the letter ‘t’ and this was not registering when I hit the key. Confirmed this by opening Text Edit and trying to type some text — came out as “rying o ype some ex.

Hmmm. The tea must have damaged the keyboard, despite my remedial efforts. Phoned supplier: did they have a spare in stock that I could try? Nope: but as the machine was still under warranty I could phone Apple tech support and they could ship me a ‘customer installable part’.

Phoned Apple and had series of charming conversations with my fellow countrymen in Cork. Described problem and then had long and fruitless diagnostic conversation with support guy who was clearly trying to determine whether my missing ‘t’ was due to a hardware fault. In the end I ran out of time (life has to go on, iBook or no iBook) and rang off.

Brooded on problem all day and then phoned my friend and Lead Superuser Quentin. He immediately recognised my curious radioactive-warning, boot-refusing screensaver as a sign that the machine was convinced it was a Firewire drive — which is something you engineer by holding down the ‘t’ key. Ergo there must be some liquid residue under the key which was convincing the system that the key was being continually depressed. Got a fine watercolour brush, dipped it in filtered water, and gingerly washed the underside of the key. Replaced the kepboard and pressed the ‘on’ button, heart in mouth. Bingo! What a thing it is to have ingenious and knowledgeable friends.

But how did Q know about this? I’ve just ransacked OS X — the missing manual and can find no mention of this vital snippet of information. Just goes to show, I suppose, that computing is, at heart, a craft industry.

NY Times: Royalties Proposal Casts Shadow Over Webcasters. The proposed royalties, which the copyright office has until May 21 to revise or approve, have radically dimmed the prospects for the legions of entrepreneurs and hobbyists whose radio stations have for the last two years provided free access to a startlingly wide range of music. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Philosopher, heal thyself!

Karl Popper has always been one of my heroes. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik was similarly awestruck by this great liberal thinker — so much so that he once made a pilgrimage to Popper’s home in deepest Buckinghamshire to interview the sage. In a fascinating article he reveals that the man who elevated the welcoming of criticism and the celebration of falsification to a philosophy of life found it virtually impossible to take criticism himself!

Gopnik’s analysis of this contradiction is brilliantly insightful.

“What really underlay the contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century’s reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a law — the Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man (James Thurber) writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitive[~]look at their living rooms![~]and literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food.”

Very thoughtful article by Victor Keegan on that most unpromising of subjects — the ‘digital divide’.

Lovely April Fool joke on The Register.

2:00 a.m. March 30, 2002 PST WASHINGTON — Sen. Patrick Leahy says a controversial proposal to embed copy protection in electronics gear will not become law this year.

Since Leahy is the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, his opposition instantly boosts the difficulty Hollywood studios will encounter in their attempts to enact sweeping copyright legislation. [more from Wired]

More on the (non) availability of broadband in rural areas

One of the banes of my life is the fact that I live in a lovely village which is only three miles from Cambridge and yet might as well be on Mars as far as BT broadband access is concerned. Interesting then to find that a software engineer living in a village outside Bedford has been experiencing the same frustration. This BBC report outlines his heroic efforts to find someone in BT who could give him an intelligent answer to his question. The answer, of course, was no.

I was asked by the Observer to write a column marking the second anniversary of the NASDAQ crash and answering the question: how can companies make money from the Net? My answer: it’s the wrong question.

George Soros, is funding an initiative to “make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet.” Needless to say, the publishers are furious .

Apropos of the previous item…Thanks to Sam Ruby for sending a pointer to the Microsoft shared source license. The patent disclaimer is at the top. “You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft’s copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.” It’s a poison pill for sure. Very clear.   [Scripting News]