Category: Uncategorized

But… I never worked on The Scoop, let alone as a Director. Weird.

I phoned in to the office the other day, and had the following exchange:

Colin: …oh, and Nikki’s very upset, because you haven’t seen her zombie skin.
[pause]
Jonathan: Is that an item, or an ailment?

We get paid to do this. Really.

France and Germany might be making softly-softly noises, but reading around the US weblog community, I keep stumbling across posts that are either blatantly belligerent, or implicitly so. I don’t know how indicative this is of American public opinion, but the blog world is not known for being dramatically right-wing. Combine that with the impending spring/summer (when weapons designed for the European theatre can reasonably be expected to pack up in the desert), and one suspects the trigger in Bush’s finger is of the hair variety. How nice.

One of the things that interests me is just why we Europeans are (a.) more circumspect about the whole affair / (b.) yellow-bellied shirkers (delete depending on your point of view). Perhaps it’s because most of our countries have done the imperial thing, we’ve had our empires rise and fall, and we’ve seen just how easy it is to utterly screw it all up. Crucially, we’ve seen the mess that’s left behind. Iraq being, of course, a case in point. Former imperial power? Britain. Oops. Sorry about that.

So call me old-fashioned, but I do think it would be somewhat good form to produce a little actual evidence, before attempting to drive tanks into Baghdad. Whether I trust Bush or not is surprisingly irrelevant – thus far, there are only assertions of guilt, and assertions do not constitute evidence. Is that too much to ask?

Meanwhile, I can only hope that the whole thing is a huge great bluff-call – ship enough materiel and troops out there and the guy has to cave, right? Please?

Actually, Sherlock is pretty handy for searching the AppleCare KnowledgeBase, but in the UK that’s about it. Until now.

Search a whole raft of UK online suppliers for DVDs. Click this Sherlock link, and subscribe when prompted. Windows users: forget it.

Two things have caught my eye today. The first is an article in the Telegraph about a company in Russia selling corporate entertainment packages with a difference (free registration required). The clients are Moscow’s super-rich elite, bored of the excess. The packages include a monthly begging trip, complete with radish-stained clothing; another shindig saw the clients playing soldier with army tanks. The latter is more like the sort of thing that goes on in the West, but in a peculiarly Russian twist the day included (a.) live firing, and (b.) caviar for the squaddies, but combat rations for the clients to ‘add to the authenticity.’

The second piece is this parent’s perspective on anorexia from Salon. A decade ago, I saw freshers torn apart by the pressure and unfamiliarity of Cambridge, unable to cope with (comprehend?) all that goes along with the transition from being the brightest kid in the neighbourhood, to being a below-average student. Chuck in social pressures they’ve no framework for understanding, and you’ve a recipe for disaster.

I saw peers reduced to gibbering wrecks, and while I helped when I could, I had no perspective myself that allowed me to judge where the firmer ground was, that I could stand on. One very close friend changed so much, I essentially never saw her again. However, Cambridge’s dropout rate is reassuringly low, and indeed most students eventually regain an even keel, chalk one up to experience, and get on with their lives. The article’s quoted 15% mortality for anorexia patients is far more terrifying.

I never saw anorexia, but I’m unlikely to have understood it then and am barely more likely to do so now. I hope everything works out for the writer of the Salon piece, and particularly for his daughter. Meanwhile, this is simple but very personal journalism of the highest order, for which I’m eternally grateful.

…to Linux. Why?

Because David Hyatt’s weblog has recently confirmed that (a.) they’ve got XML ‘limping along’ in Safari, and that (b.) the intention is to eventually wrap WebCore into a WebKit framework that implements another flavour of NSView. This is a problem because it makes the process of building webby XMLish Cocoa apps pretty much drag&drop in Interface Builder.

It’s a problem for me because for months I’ve been toying with the idea of building an integrated TV series production/scripting system, dubbed ‘ShowFlow,’ since Word is simply the wrong tool for the job. By my reckoning, I’ll run out of excuses for not at least lashing together a test mockup around about June.

One of the components I badly needed has recently been done, in the form of BitFlux, an open-source WYSIWYG XML editor. Hopefully it won’t work in Safari, otherwise I’m going to have to switch to Mandrake. With a bit of luck they’ll go under, leaving me an OS orphan on a platform I’m never going to get my head around programming. Cool.

Brian Sewell ranting about the dreadful imposition of having to travel to see an exhibition he fancies, because it’s showing in the wastelands of the North. As one Today listener comments:

Brian Sewell demonstrates the vapid, unquestioning and utterly selfish Londo-centrism which has, for centuries, maintained the artistic superiority of London through the cultural impoverishment of the provinces.

Let me get this right. My Newton is very nearly five years old, which in handheld computing years is beyond merely ‘geriatric.’ Yet, it currently acts as a webserver over ethernet (lovely example here), and I can still sync it to my Mac. When I get around to it, it should do all this wirelessly using the WaveLAN card I borrowed from my chum Martin. And now there’s an XML-RPC thingy and a Blogging app that talks to Moveable Type?

You have to be kidding me. Also, remind me again why I want Apple to make a tablet Mac? And why in tarnation would I want a Palm thingy?