Category: Uncategorized

Amidst the general ruckus created by MacHeist – not least due to John ‘Tell me what to think, John!’ Gruber’s posts – I’m surprised people haven’t noted the one thing that makes sense of it all.

To recap for the unawares: MacHeist bundled together a bunch of Mac OS X apps, some of which are rather well-known, for the princely sum of $49. There’s a charity contribution involved, but there’s been a bit of a hoo-hah about whether the developers are getting a fair deal or not. While there isn’t a consensus per se, one significant perspective is that they’re being fleeced for ongoing support costs while the MacHeist organisers rake it in.

So: for whom does it make sense? Developers whose products are approaching the end of their shelf lives, that’s who. Developers like Delicious Monster, who sold oodles of Delicious Library licenses early on, will likely have seen a fall-off of late, and are waiting for Leopard to release version 2. Or like Macromates, whose editor TextMate (a.) thoroughly rocks, and (b.) is due for a major upgrade along with… er… Leopard.

These developers will already have sold the bulk of what they might make off their current versions. Take a lump sum in exchange for getting word out to users who might otherwise not know about their application? Sounds like a deal, and potentially a very astute one on their part.

Me? I bought the bundle. RapidWeaver is probably useful to me, I should technically have a second TextMate license, Delicious Library I’ll likely use, and DEVONThink Personal I’d like to play with more before I decide between it and Yojimbo!. Pangea Arcade is plain fun; the rest I can live without, but might just use. It wasn’t a shoe-in, but worthwhile overall.

Well actually, I’m pretty sure it is, thanks, given that the owner of said number called me only an hour ago demanding to know where his script for tomorrow was. But now that it’s on its way back to him, I seem to be living in a weird little telecoms black hole, wherein no phones work. It’s just about possible that Ireland’s phone system has entirely crashed, but I suspect something more bizarre. My (UK, roaming) mobile won’t talk to anyone in Ireland… though will call the UK just fine, thanks. The landline here doesn’t seem to work either. Clearwire ‘broadband’ [cough] is about as rapid as ever, meaning that the 5k/sec it seems able to sustain is woefully inadequate for Skype.

Thus, I find myself unable to call poor Joe to tell him to check his email. And yet, I can evidently blog about this. Thus, potentially, the whole world can know of the situation… except the one person who actually matters.

How… thoroughly crap.

Harrumph.

On the subject of the Christmas Lectures, there’s precious little up on the web about them yet. Five’s site lists only the press release announcing mathematician Marcus de Sautoy as the lecturer; the RI’s site has booking information (they’re fully-booked, natch), and the official christmas lectures site currently redirects to the pages for Sir John Kreb’s lectures from last year.

The RI does, however, have a note giving transmission times: 7:15, from Christmas Day. Excellent.

It occurred to me, the other day, that this time last year I was sleeping under my desk at the Royal Institution, frantically trying to keep abreast of rewrites of the Christmas Lectures scripts. I still haven’t really told that story here – perhaps over Christmas – but suffice it to say that while I’d love to work on the lectures again someday, I’m currently rather relieved not to be part of the circus.

But anyway, I dropped an email to a couple of people, wishing them well, and this afternoon received a response from the exec:

Two down – three to go – and so far everything is going alarmingly well…

apart from vision mixer desk blowing up yesterday!

Yikes. And to think, they normally worry about the stuff Andy’s doing on the lecture bench. Plus: bet they’re glad they’re not live, this year.

Coming to Five, on Christmas Day, I believe.

Colin, in Skype chat just now:

It’s what sundays are for. On the 7th day God looked at the scripts and decided they were good.. but needed just a little polishing.

Oooh, nice. A Dashboard calculator that works like calculators should, rather than emulating a twenty year-old electronic calculator or pissing around keeping nutty HP-loving reverse-Polish holdouts happy: PEMDAS. That it’s beautiful to look at is merely the icing on the cake – this has instantly displaced the Calculator widget from my Dashboard.

For reasons too subtle (read: ‘dull’) to go into, I’m reading last week’s Observer magazine. Page 81, if you must know, featuring Lucy Siegle‘s ‘Ethical Living’ column. Which is rather interesting about eggs: when I’m finally back in the UK, I really must get more serious about recognising all the various food labeling schemes. The same author’s feature on fish (ibid, page 24) makes much of the Marine Stewardship Coucil’s branding, of which I’ll confess to never having heard.

Back to page 81, however, where I find the ‘Green Gauge’ (ho ho) column, listing things going up vs. things going down. Hey, it’s a Sunday colour sup, they’re still allowed such clichés.

Listed as ‘going down’:

The term ‘experimental’ when applied to ‘reactor’ – as in the new $12.8bn international thermonuclear experimental reactor to be built in southern France – is always disconcerting.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s not a fission reactor taking big n’ heavy Uranium and firing neutrons at it to make other shit that’s horribly hot, it’s a deuterium-tritium fusion device. And ITER (Wikipedia) is no longer an acronym, precisely to avoid this sort of knee-jerk stupidity… though one could say that as PR people, the physicists should stick to physics.

Sure, there are problems with fusion in general, and with ITER in particular, but saying ‘it’s nuclear therefore I’m against it’ – aren’t we past that sort of naïvely-simplistic nonsense?

I forgot to mention the other day – Flossie texted to say that David Tennant was at her workplace, as the Doctor. Which was, we concluded, more impressive than somebody who might have been Matt Lucas sitting on the wall outside her house the same evening. That turned out to be just a props guy – Lucas was sitting across the road.

Apparently all BBC TV shows are being made in South Wales, presumably as a cost-cutting measure.

Modern Life is Rubbish has a lovely post on the fonts used by Web 2.0-ish companies. A ground-up rebuild of The Daily Grind is long overdue, but one thing that’s rather likely to stay is the use of a serif face for my blatherings. All that stuff about sans-serifs being more legible on screens is as out-of-date as that nonsense about using two spaces after full stops.

For those of you not on Macs, by the way: the body face here is Baskerville, which arrives with Mac OS X and is much under-used. Besides, I love the story of its origin. However, I’ve never quite got the sizes right, with my blockquotes in particular being somewhat hard to read. When time permits, I shall enjoy a merry weekend playing with the glorious new CSSEdit 2.

Wikipedia lists six expansions of the acronym ‘KBS,’ tragically none of which are the one I seek. Anyone happen to know the etymology?

Just curious.