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Here’s a link. I’d like you to follow it so much, I’m going to write it out in full: http://www.apple.com/macintosh.

Would anybody – anybody – like to explain why that goes to ‘Page Not Found’?

“The Chopper Squad fly the Heli-Gimble into the heart of the swampy delta.”

Yeah, OK, get past the occasionally ridiculous commentary script, and… ruddy ‘eck, Planet Earth is magnificent. And to think people say the BBC isn’t worth the license fee – for heaven’s sake, this stuff is priceless.

Somewhere in a parallel universe, there’s a Jonathan that can be bothered to follow the argument about MashupCamp and BarCamp. That Jonathan would point out that, in the very early 90s, a similar sort of concept was held by the student section of the British Association. He knows, because he helped organise it. A fairly random group and number of people met up in a spare field near a museum of buildings (yes, there really is one), and spent a weekend doing random stuff that people turned up with. Including, but not limited to:

• Building a fabulously beautiful 9-metre-high paper sculpture. OK, so this bit was sort-of planned in advance, and it accounted for most of the weekend.
• Building a wireframe computer model of said sculpture, that moved in a spookily similar way (using a PowerBook Duo, some 3D object modeling code left over from an attendee’s surgical training simulator project, some nasty polar maths, and a guy who’s now tech head of EA Europe).
• Fire walking, sans any of the ritual claptrap
• Giant bubble blowing
• Boomerang throwing
• Extreme campfire cookery
• Geodesic structure construction
• …

We’d probably have done more computery stuff, except that this was only about a year or two after the PowerBook was invented, and the Web was still something only TBL knew about. We still managed an impromptu peer-to-peer campfire network, but I can’t for the life of me remember what we did with it. Bolo, probably.

Anyway, this parallel-universe-gives-a-fig Jonathan isn’t trying to suggest that he invented the (Mashup|Bar)Camp model. Rather, he’s suggesting that there’s nothing remotely original in such (lack of) organisation. People getting together to do things they find mutually interesting isn’t new now, and it wasn’t new then. It’s simply what people do.

Structuring such endeavours in the form of a conference, industries, and ‘work’: that’s new, and it’s taken a few thousand years for us all to feel comfortable with those social structures. But coming together to ‘do stuff’ was where we differentiated ourselves from the chimpanzees.

Mark linked to this a few days ago, but somehow I missed it: tremendously skillful three-ball juggling with a bit of a twist. Most jugglers pride themselves on smooth performance, on it being a technical form – this is quite the opposite, and all the better for it. Gob-smacking to watch, and you don’t need to be a juggler to realise just how clever it is.

As for the juggling snobs who think anything less than five balls is trivial: get over yourselves.

Playlist magazine (which I think is part of the MacWorld family) have an excellent review of Apple’s new ‘audiophile quality’ (sic) iPod HiFi speaker set. It’s an interesting read, in part because it explicitly avoids the rabid audiophile rantings – ’53Hz! That’s not a bass floor!’ etc – but does a proper listening test against similar products from Bose, Monitor Audio, Tivoli et al. There are several features noted that are classic Apple, like the volume ramping up smoothly when you drop an already-playing iPod in the HiFi’s dock, and the comparative test is useful. The HiFi is said to offer excellent bass and volume, but to lack a smidge of treble detail. Which to my mind is probably the correct compromise for people who listen to more rock/pop/hip-hop/etc than piano concertos. Plus, let’s face it, smoothing the high end should help disguise compression artifacts a little – better to blur it all a bit than reveal the flaws?

What I find really interesting is comparing today’s ‘iPod + HiFi’ model to the ‘cheap separates from Richer Sounds‘ approach we all took back when we were students. You can’t beat the convenience of the iPod set-up, and while I’m sure you can beat the sound quality for similar money – particularly if you factor in the iPod itself – the real question is whether the HiFi and similar products are ‘good enough.’ My guess: absolutely. Which would explain why the audio shop in which Matt and I were listening to amps costing more than a Mac also sells iPod-specific Tivoli and Bose kit.

If I was doing it all again, I’m not quite certain I’d bother with separates. Lugging them around between all the places I’ve lived has been a pain, and I’m now stuck with a stack of aging kit that sounds only ‘OK.’ Swapping out the speakers would help enormously, but I’ve not done that partly because my amp will only drive two of the things… and of course I’d really like to do surround-sound for movies. Which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

And that, I think, is the only real weakness of the Apple ecosystem. In picking their targets and tailoring their products oh-so-smoothly, they rather prevent the mix-and-match approach that works for people like me. It’s a conscious decision on their part, of course – hit 85% of the market with something that’s utterly wonderful for them, the remainder aren’t worth the hassle of chasing – and I rather applaud them for it.

I’ve a nagging doubt, however, which is this: to get the most out of the Apple way, one really needs to fit their profiles and market segments. Doesn’t that rather clash with the whole ‘think different’, pirate flag, renegade Mac users spirit? As the iPod dominates all, can Apple maintain their customers’ joyous free-spirit ‘alternative’ atmosphere? If Apple’s new niche is ‘all of us’, what sets them apart from everybody else?

It’s simplistic to say ‘nothing – they’re just another business.’ Of course they are, but they’re more clever than most in choosing what not to do (tablet PCs spring to mind…). They leave features out – even features their customers claim to want – if including them compromises the product in other ways, like ease of use, which is an unusually bold/principled/enlightened/stupid approach (delete as you see fit).

What interests me is that we, their customers, have given them a license to be quirky because we fitted that profile of ‘different.’ That’s fine, but it doesn’t transfer to a situation where everybody is wearing white earbuds.

(for completeness: I’d probably plump for a Tivoli iSongBook over Apple’s HiFi. Bass is less important to me than Radio 4. On the other hand, I already have a Tivoli PAL, and apart from the entire lack of stereo imaging – it’s a single speaker – I absolutely love it).

ITV’s F1 coverage is two minutes old, and already I have two observations:

1. Girls dancing with snakes? What were they thinking? Have I slipped back to the eighties without realising?
2. Steve Rider rather than Grim Rosenthal. Oh, thank heavens.

Will I actually watch the season this year? Doubtful.

When I finally get around to refreshing the template here on the The Daily Grind (noticed how the individual entry pages have weirdness? Yup, the bitrot has set in…), I must remember to use this new came-from-Firefox-now-used-by-Mozilla-and-licensed-by-Microsoft-for-IE7 icon to flag up my feeds. Hopefully some future version of Safari will swap this in for the blue RSS thingy that appears in the address bar, and then we’ll all be reading off the same page.

Personally, I got bored with the whole RSS 0.9 / RSS 1.0 / RSS 2.0 / Atom thing months back, and would much rather call all of them ‘feeds,’ and let the user’s software express a preference, if they really care.

A few linkbloggery things I couldn’t resist passing on: Somebody’s finally worked out what to do with the Nintendo DS’s touch screen, with the forthcoming Trauma Center: Under the Knife (already out in the US). Meanwhile, I briefly feared for James on reading this post on Boing Boing, linking to this Reuters article about the discovery of a new species of shark. Luckily it’s not James’ shark, which remains stubbornly unknown to science. The vaudeville can go on.

Given the ‘deluge’ posting rate from Boing Boing of late, I can’t imagine how crushing it would be to launch a new website without being linked from them. Robert Scoble, however, remains a little more circumspect, or at least less profligate. He has, however, finally linked to Gia. Isn’t that the definition of ‘A-list,’ or something?

Next up, an American company selling home installations of secret passageways behind fireplaces and bookshelves, activated by moving books or turning candlesticks. Which would be genius, only… watch the video called ‘Bookshelf,’ and tell me that doesn’t look suspiciously like an ordinary door with a bookshelf glued to the front.

Finally – cowabduction.com, which should finally put to rest that absurd notion about Americans not having a sense of humour. Watch the video. Go on, it’s priceless. And, apparently, a production of the California Milk Processor Board.

So, decisions have been made on sessions for the BIG Event this year. Muggins here has somehow roped himself into convening an hour’s panel discussion (or somesuch) on project management, which is either going to be fun or (more likely) a bit of a nightmare. But at least I didn’t go down on my own – I took poor Ben with me. He’s been volunteered (by me, mostly) to run a meet/greet/pub trick session. The idea is a combination of a show & tell and speed dating. Or something like that.

The trouble is, there are likely to be a sizable number of people present, and we’d like everyone to meet everyone else. Precisely once. In groups.

As a result, we’ve both spent hours failing to spot the pattern. I think you can do it for a population P and group size G which satisfies P = nG(G-1), where n is the number of meetings. Then you just need to permute n sets of G identifiers (red/orange/yellow/… , triangle/square/pentagon/… , biped/quadroped/arthropod/… etc), print out those sets as cards, and hand them over to people. The rounds of meetings are thus ‘colours,’ ‘Number of sides,’ ‘number of legs,’ and so on. Job done. Unfortunately, my brain dribbled out of my ears just as I formulated this hypothesis. These days I can write, but I’m very, very rusty at this sort of stuff. Pathetic, really.

However, one of the fundamental aspects of my training as a physicist that I do recall, was to utilise tools appropriate to the circumstances. In this case: a mathematician. Conor, you’re up. I expect a neatly-argued and useful solution in the comments forthwith. Sadly, no LaTeX markup allowed.

Bonus marks to anyone who submits perl/ruby/PHP/python etc to generate the identifier patterns for me, and for alternative solutions. Particularly if they actually work, which mine probably doesn’t.

[update 3rd March: In an entirely expected development, Conor has written code in a language of which nobody else has heard. Meanwhile, a bit of gentle Googling has revealed this page, which suggests that what we’re looking at here is a form of Whist tournament. Which seems promising, until one stumbles over this page, which remarks on a failed brute force search for an 80-person solution.]

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