In the fifth part of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy, Arthur Dent makes his living among a group of stone-age settlers by utilising the one skill he had that was relevant to that world: sandwich making.
I guess we all have a special skill. But my point in this article is that if you’re a software professional, your special skill (unless you’re stranded on a stone-age planet) should be making software tools.
The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.
Back in November I wrote about my then-new Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype. At the time I was fairly pleased with the concept but less so with the actual implementation.
The phone’s hardware was fine. The unit as a whole was reasonably solid. The buttons were a bit wobbly and the screen was smaller than you might initially think, but there was nothing to complain about too much.
Reading this article by David Pogue reminded me of my own search for a reliable and easy backup solution. I came to a rather different answer so I thought it might be worth detailing a little history, the options I considered and the one I eventually chose.
Ancient History
In the olden days — i.e., going back a couple of years — I split the files into four categories:
Talking about Google’s old and new hiring practices seems to be all the rage at the moment, so I thought that I would get in on the act.
I got through two phone interviews for a technical consultant role here in the UK before being rejected. My second interviewer told me that he’d had fourteen interviews before being hired. That’s just an absurd number. How much holiday and sick leave can you take at short notice without arousing suspicion?! (They were both long enough or required Internet access that I couldn’t do them at work.)
The problem is this. To get ADSL you need to have a BT phone line. Yet, except for calling my parents, I don’t really use a land-line phone. This has made using ADSL broadband more expensive than I’d have liked as I had to pay £11 a month for a phone line I don’t make calls with1. Fast forward to last month, when I find that I can get cable broadband without phone or digital TV service.
The premise
I have become increasingly disaffected by Apple’s .Mac service, so much so that when I recently got an email congratulating me for subscribing for another year I immediately went to the website and cancelled.
The background
But before we start going into all the details, what is .Mac? Basically it’s Apple’s on-line services that are geared for Mac users but are also usable by those stuck in the Microsoft world. When I first got my iBook back in 2001 it was called iTools. It had a more limited set of features back then, but that included a something@mac.com email address.
As many of you will already know, I recently came back from a trip to Vietnam. Some will even have seen the pictures. Others, however, do not like looking at pictures on a computer screen and always insist that I get prints. This time I decided to go one better and get a book.
Those still wallowing in the PC world may not be aware of a Macintosh application called iPhoto. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Album if you’re familiar with that. It allows you to catalogue photos, categorise and label them and perform some minor edits such as red-eye removal, cropping and simple colour adjustment, although I normally use Photoshop for this kind of thing. I mention it here as one extra feature that I’ve never used before was its ability to make custom books. I normally use Photobox for my prints but this seemed like a much easier option.
When it first happened I was irritated. A few days later I was irritated that I was still irritated. It didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t a big thing and it shouldn’t have bugged me at all, much less still a few days later.
After a while I realised that my irritation was more rational than I initially thought so I started to write them down as a way of structuring them. And here they are.
I though I’d start the new year with an unusual, for me at least, positive message. The message: we’ve never had it so good technology-wise and often we forget that.
I started thinking about this when I realised what I was doing with my computer. Right now, for example, I am typing this into Emacs. In the back-ground I am scanning in some film and burning the previous scans onto CD. Only a few years ago any one of these activities would have been more than enough for a simple home computer. A joke at the time was that Emacs stood for “eight megabytes and continually swapping,” and now my iPod has thirty-two megs of memory as a convenience, basically to avoid letting the battery run down too quickly.