Mixed Signals

I think I'll suggest a Java Shooting Gallery to our lords and masters. Pick a picture of your computer from a set of thumbnail sketches, pick a firearm and spray the thing with shot on screen. Wouldn't take long to code... and I bet we'd learn a lot by monitoring the statistics about which model gets chosen most often.

Slight worries about bad taste, but hey. That's never stopped me before...

Tuesday

Hey! Let's design a Palm Pilot clone, said Texas Instruments. And did, with its Avigo. It sounds as if it's almost all there - same form factor, same basic sort of interface, same sort of software. But stupidity is never very far away in this business: the company won't release a software development kit (SDK) until the product is popular enough to create a demand for it. If you want to write software for it, you can't - unlike with the Pilot.

If TI hasn't noticed, one of the reasons people buy Pilots is that there is lots of software out there on the Web, mostly written by amateur or semi-pro developers. What's more, the sort of people who care

about that are the sort who go on to sell loads of Pilots to people they know, because they're the early adopters, the technophiles, the gadget freaks who propel a product through its difficult early months. Without the SDK, there's a very good chance that the Avigo will never be popular enough to merit it...

Wednesday

A bit of browsing stumbles across digital watermarks. Digimarc Technologies will take any JPEG or GIF and add invisible information that its MarcSpider web crawler will recognise. First up with the

technology is Playboy, which from next month will protect all its pictures that way. Steal one to put on your Web site, bucko, and sooner or later alarm bells will ring at Playboy HQ followed by a gruff command to "Get 'em off!" from the lawyers.

Nice idea, huh? One thing worries me - all crawlers are supposed to honour the anti-robot protocol, where a page suitably marked will not be scanned for links by automatic Web traversers. If MarcSpider follows this protocol, then bare-breasted women can shelter from the spider: if it doesn't, it runs the risk of falling into crawler traps - pages set up to link to themselves and endlessly divert the robots. I fear that all the Digimarc stuff will do is start up an entirely fresh set of network technology battles.

Thursday

Bloody Microsoft! Not for the first time, my computer at home forgets how to get onto the Internet. The Microsoft Dial-Up Adaptor Is Not Configured For Use With The Networking Components Specified, it says. Eh? It won't work with TCP/IP? Try to check with the Microsoft Knowledge Index but -- aha! -- I can't log on. Gah!

Eventually reinstall, a process taking a good hour. I still have no idea what went wrong - my new settings are identical to the old ones - nor how to stop it in future. I've written network stacks in the past; if a grizzled old hacker like myself can't beat the damn software into submission, what chance has the average user?

Glance at unopened copy of Office 97 on my desk, next to the beta of IE 4.0 (the one with the biohazard warnings on it) and the 70Mb MS developers' toolkit, and wonder how long it will take everyone to realise that Microsoft has lost the plot...

Friday

Not well (omnes: Poor lamb!) but still hacking away gamely at my home computer. Considerably cheered by a tale of a friend who takes this week's Anorak Supreme award. Said friend's a Unix guru and Java-meister who works for one of those very successful UK software companies nobody's heard of. He also writes for a certain other computer magazine - the details need not concern us - under the pseudonym of David Evnull. That's a Unix joke.

It was his birthday last week. What do you get a man who has everything, including a complete set of Ren and Stimpy videos and a Sony Minidisc recorder? His girlfriend concocted the perfect surprise - a domain name of his very own. Not sure how he unwrapped it, but www.evnull.com is now online and proudly displayed to the world: a shining example of their love and the unanswerable argument for making Mr Evnull this week's Anorak Supreme. Congratulations!

(If you know anyone who might qualify as an Anorak Supreme, mail me with their details.)

Mars! Mars! Mars! Lovely pictures, thrilling news, absolutely clogged Web sites. In the US, Mattel's Hot Wheels Action Pack of the Pathfinder Lander and Sojourner rover sells out in hours. Over here, many happy hours talking about planetary formation and robotic exploration in the pub.

Perhaps the most poignant thing is the sheer low-tech aspect of the enterprise. That Rover runs off a 2MHz 80C85 processor -- the same as in a Tandy Model 100 notebook, and around half as powerful as the processor in a ZX Spectrum -- and talks back to the lander via a cut-down walkie talkie and a 2400bps radio modem. I could build one. You could build one. One story circulating is that the Rover design stems from the day that the scientists had the funding for a previous and much larger mission turned down: as they dejectedly sat around in the lab looking at the 1/8th scale working model on the bench one said "hey, hold on a minute."

Tuesday

Blimey. It's nice to have one's cynicism blasted by good news. Following Bill Clinton's statement that the Internet should be as lightly regulated as possible, the EU agrees that it should be a free trade area. And the FCC -- America's telecommunications regulator -- keeps coming down on the side of the Internet despite every attempt by the telephone companies to hold back the flood. What is going on? Why do these people think the same way as we do? It's not on.

Still, nothing yet from New Labour about decent unravelling of British Telecom's de facto local loop monopoly. We'll be paying a penny a minute to BT for Internet access for the foreseeable future. Hrm. Back to Mars.

Wednesday

Say what you like about Sage and its accounting packages, nobody can claim that this half-billion pound Newcastle company has let success go to its head. Director Graham Wylie, possessor of a goodly chunk of the Scouse software fortune, leads a notably unaffected life with few of the trappings of power that have destroyed many a lesser person. No yacht, no Jaguar, no mansion on the coast of Northumberland for him: a suburban house and four-year-old car suffice.

And no wonder. A tale comes to light today of practically his only indulgence on record: he attended an auction of cherished car number plates and, after furious bidding, secured WYL1E for a figure not unadjacent to £25,000. The transfer was signed on the spot and some prepared plates handed over -- with joy in his heart he rushed back home and affixed them to the family motor to await his wife's return.

She took one look and said "If you think I'm ever getting into that car again with those things on, you're sadly mistaken", and that was that. In vain he tried with new plates, this time with a healthy separation between WYL and 1E : "Nope" quoth the missus. "They go, and that's that."

And they went. People with an interest in acquiring these unique and prestigious plates should apply to rootle around in the Wyliean attic, where they reside to this day.

Thursday

Oh dear. Gil Amelio resigns as head of Apple. Jobs rumoured to be flogging blocks of shares. Nobody talking about profitability any more. Sad but inevitable, as inevitable as the company's final dissolution -- it will merge with another company in much the same way as a wounded horse merges with a school of piranha.

The saddest thing is - nobody really seems to care. I can remember seeing my first Macintosh, and playing for hours with MacPaint. Then playing for even more hours trying to copy a floppy disk. There was a period of years when I longed to advise people to buy Macintoshes instead of PCs because I knew that for most of their work, it'd be a much better machine -- if only it didn't cost quite so much.

That period ended a good four years ago. I've been unable to think of a single good reason for people to buy Macintoshes since, and it seems as if everyone else has finally run out too. The few good products, such as the clamshell Newton variant, are hideously undermarketed in the US, let alone over here.

It can't be long now.

Friday

Oooh. Fun. Last weekend, I built my first colour onomatograph and have been showing it off - loudly - in the office.

Don't try it at home.

At home today and tomorrow, on me hols. Was going to go to Glastonbury as usual, but had a sudden intimation of mortality and decided to sit in my Highgate fastness and write the Great British Science Fiction Novel. The gods rewarded me richly for this by causing all my pals (who went, and pronounced me mad for selling my ticket) to be visited by a giant river of mud. I had two hot baths a day, just because I could, and even managed to actually do some writing.

Tuesday

Friends return, muttering something about "that which does not kill us, makes us stronger". Never thought of Glasto as a Nietzscherian exercise in character building before. It's also an exercise in telecommunications these days; the site was saturated not just with soupy cow glop but optical fibres, twisted pairs and extra cellphone coverage. Gone are the days when one had to bring a pair of walkie talkies just to find your pal when he's drifted off-planet; just remember his Orange number and off you go. No public e-mail/Web kiosks, apparently, but lots of people want to do this next time.

One downside to the phones, though: when clutching a walkie-talkie, it was usually possible to walk into secure areas just by looking purposeful. Looks like it's back to blagging laminates again