Month: October 2004

For a few years I’ve been idly hawking a series I really wanted somebody else to make. Not me – it was hardly within my realm of experience – but I was dead keen to see the show. It was, in summary, “Be James Bond for a weekend.” Or, if you like, Splinter Cell played as a live-action TV game show. It’s a crazy idea, but it might just have worked.

Unfortunately, it was never properly pitched, and I suspect the idea’s effectively dead thanks to the BBC’s deceptively not-similar-at-all series Spy. This showed up earlier in the year on digital channel BBC Three, which my TV can receive but my aerial can’t, so I didn’t see it until last night’s terrestrial debut on BBC2 – it’s being stripped all week in the odd (graveyard?) slot of 6:45pm.

Oh. My. Heavens. It’s not often I lose patience with a show, but with this I lasted all of seven minutes. How is it possible that the entire production should take itself so utterly seriously? I watched, mouth agape, as the candidates explained earnestly why they wanted to be spies – only, of course, they weren’t going to become spies, they were being filmed for a TV show. Sure, the exercise was made as realistic as possible, and I’m sure the producers were delighted when one of their ex-spy trainers insisted on appearing in a bad wig to conceal her true identity, but at that point they should have been hearing alarms bells blaring right next to their heads.

Espionage, you see, is a deadly serious business. Punters playing at being spies, on the other hand, is on the faintly camp end of patently ridiculous. So far as I can tell, however, the producers managed to deceive themselves into believing they were making a deadly serious documentary about the life of the field agent. But if that had been the case they should surely have centred on the genuine spies and used the punters as, more-or-less, actors in a reconstruction. That could have been interesting and genuinely illuminating. But focussing on the punters while being utterly po-faced makes it neither documentary nor game show. Terrible.

I’ll likely steel myself later in the week for another attempt to view the ill-conceived monster, in case I’m wrong, but for the moment all I can taste are the ashes of a series that could have been genuinely fun.

Now: does anyone have a clue how to turn the buggy and generally flawed but nevertheless magnificent game Evil Genius into a TV show? I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in a series where your ultimate goal is sixties-style world domination with giant lasers and earthquake machines and secret underground lairs?

Ooh, pretty! Ever since a weird payment snafu with Objective Development’s web store, I’ve forsaken the glory that is LaunchBar for the similarly wonderful and even more beautiful masterpiece that is Quicksilver. If you’re like me and constantly running a couple of dozen applications at once, the quick keyboard access provided by these things is a blessed relief. That Quicksilver works with such panache is no mere window-dressing; the visual fluidity reinforces the flow of one’s work, and the style entices one to use appropriate tools appropriately. For me, at least.

Quicksilver is, however, one of those applications that seems in permanent beta, and there are occasional quirks. Searching the support forums for a solution to one I encountered recently, I came across reference to another piece of the ongoing puzzle that is the perfect desktop environment.

iTunes is all well and good, you see, but while the full version of its control window is capable, it’s also thoroughly massive. The minimised version, however, carries altogether too little information. Not to worry, it can be controlled remotely, and there are any number of Dock, menubar, Konfabulator and application widgets to do just that. I’ve played with most, and rather like Clutter, which actively attempts to emulate the unruly heap of record sleeves one’s real-world collection adopts over time. You know, where there’s no initially discernible organisation but nevertheless a serendipitous madness to the way the CD cases have slid and grouped. Well, maybe you don’t know, if your brain isn’t wired that way, but hey – if it is, Clutter’s worth a look.

For straightforward play/pause control and track information, however, I’ve struggled. The iTunes Companion was a favourite for a while, but I’ve drifted away from Konfabulator of late (too many weird bugs, too many sucked CPU cycles, just a bit too fiddly in practice).

Behold my latest obsession: Sofa. A neat player bar with autohiding mouse-over animations and transparency goodness, shortcuts to most of the stuff I really want, and a ridiculously cute animating album cover doobrie. All skinnable, with more preferences than you can shake a stick at but an attention to detail that makes it all worthwhile.

Highly recommended. Weird icon, though.

Wil Shipley and Mike Matas, two of the leading lights of arch Mac OS X developer OmniGroup, left early in the year to found Delicious Monster Software. We’ve known for a while they’ve been planning a library/cataloguing application: now we know more. Worth a look if only because the website’s really rather cool, but one suspects the software will be too.

Can anyone tell me why it’s more secure for me to key in a four-digit PIN – an easy action to crib over my shoulder – rather than to sign my name – an action that requires considerable practice to imitate convincingly?

I’m just asking.

Surely it can’t have anything to do with the little stack of petrol station chits I collect which I appear to have mistakenly signed ‘Abraham Lincoln.’

On the other hand, there is a simplification involved in the payment process, thanks to all of this; we’ve gone from a system nobody remembered to check, to one nobody remembers. Well, do you know all your cards’ PINs?

Many of the interfaces I use in daily life now feature soft buttons – the kind that’s unlabeled but adjacent to a display screen. At some point, a label pops up next to the button: ‘OK’, or ‘Cancel,’ or whatever. Cashpoints (uh… ATMs, for those who don’t read English) do this, for example. My car has something similar but rather more complex, in the manner of aircraft navigation screens only, sadly, not offering anything by way of navigational data. But anyway, you’ll have seen the sort of button I mean.

This morning, I made my first so-called ‘chip&pin’ purchase; the ‘new’ bank card with the chip that’s been present for years (and that stores data I’m not allowed access to, nor indeed will my bank tell me what kind of data anyway) is jammed into a slot above a little keypad, into which you enter your pin number. A screen next to the keypad offers instructions, and beside it are a row of dinky little buttons that get neatly labeled ‘Enter’ and ‘Cancel’ when appropriate.

Only, they don’t work. No, one is supposed to press not the button next to the text ‘Enter’, but the large green ‘Enter’ key. The little button doesn’t do anything. Arrrghh! Haven’t these people read Donald Norman?

This blog will, at some point in the not-too-distant future, move. It’s been clear for some time that I should have something like the traditional ‘About’ section, and I’ve eventually realised that the way to do it is to demote the blog and throw up another set of pages at the root of quernstone.com. My personal blatherings are all well and good, and I won’t stop (you can’t make me!), but I should make at least a token effort to present a more professional face.

What I’ll try to do, with my rad new mod_rewrite skillz, is arrange matters such that all links to archives and old entries on this blog are redirected to their new locations. Which would be really very smart. But heaven help me trying to make that work…

A little advance warning, anyway. If you’re reading this through NetNewsWire or another aggregator (and if you’re not, why not, for heaven’s sake?), and the feed suddenly disappears, this is what happened, OK?

It could still take me weeks to sort it all out, mind.

My iPod, bless its silicon innards, seems to be playing an awful lot of Bjork these days. Which is odd, since I put very little Bjork on it. It’s also playing altogether too much Unkle, and seems to have a penchant for a track called ‘Dancing Drums’ by Ananda Shankar. It’s completely ignoring Jools Holland, U2, and The Cure, however, so I probably shouldn’t question its tastes too closely, lest it develop opinions more like mine. Which would be disastrous.

Heaven knows where it got the Peter Gabriel from, though. I don’t own any Peter Gabriel! I’d know if I did, and I don’t! So where did it come from, eh?

(all of which is a roundabout way of saying: I lean towards the ‘they have a mind of their own‘ position, too.)

Rutan’s won the X Prize. BBC story, X-Prize home page, Scaled Composites.

Rock on.

Bull racing. Blimey. Then polo at 12,000 ft.

What a world. And this, incidentally, is what one suspects the BBC is for.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that the train is now running at its maximum speed of a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, and is operating in tilting mode. I’m less pleased to report that due to a shortage of catering staff the shop can serve only tea and coffee, and the boiler’s broken so right now it’s not even doing that. On behalf of Virgin Trains I’d like to apologise for living up your expectations.”

Actually, the journey was very pleasant. The trains are quiet and smooth, and Virgin’s staff notably human. For my money, however, the only advantage of First over Standard is the power socket in the table. Yes, the seats are spaced more widely, but they also recline at a ludicrous angle which proves distinctly uncomfortable after six hours. And thanks to a fancy lighting system, headroom is down to only 6′, too. Bizarre.

Back in Glasgow, anyway. London a hoot; meetings useful if not directly productive; friends amusing; etc etc.