Monthly Archives: June 2006

Digital TV takeup

Absolutely superb article in today’s Age.

The federal government wants to close down the analog TV signal. It can’t do that until enough people have digital TV receivers. People don’t particularly want to spend the time or money purchasing a digital TV set top box. So the government is going to have to spend a couple of billion dollars to continue broadcasting the analog signal for longer.

Sony have even suggested spending $200 million on consumer education, I guess to tell us why we should buy digital set-top boxes.

Alex Encel thinks we should just spend $150 million to give everyone a digital set top box for every TV they own.

What a brilliant solution! It’s not often you get to achieve your goals and also save a couple of billion dollars at the same time!

Quick look at Google Spreadsheets

Here’s what it looks like. Click it to see it bigger.

Google spreadsheet

Not bad, but looks very simple compared to Excel. This could be a good or a bad thing. Does a lot of Excel-like things. This kind of comparison is inevitable, as most users are familiar with it.

Doesn’t feel as refined as Writely. Right-click not harnessed.

Linked to your Gmail/Google logon, of course.

Exports a reasonably clean HTML table. (Certainly better than any released versions of Excel/Office.)

Watch out if you lose your connection:

Google spreadsheet lost connection

My immediate reaction is this could be useful for some things — like Writely, if you want to be able to edit from anywhere connected, and/or share the document realtime with others.

But like Scoble, I can’t see it replacing “offline” apps for individual users just yet. Hosted apps within a corporation however, that could (eventually) be another matter, especially as the technology matures.

See also: Josh and I look at Writely.

Google spreadsheet soon

It’s widely reported that Google will be releasing an online spreadsheet on the 6/6/2006 (presumably US time).

Probably limited signup initially, but keep an eye on spreadsheet.google.com, which is currently showing a 404 (rather than a “Host not found”).

Update 20:15. Sneak peak and sign-up (they’ll email you when it’s available).

Update 22:00. Now at spreadsheet.google.com I get “Server Error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.”

Captchas are just Turing Tests

The comments on Jeff’s post that Software development is basically a religion found themselves talking about Jeff’s captcha, which is the word orange. Always has been. Basically, there’s a mandatory field. Fill it in wrong, and you get no comment. But because having this mandatary, when’t a spam bot going to figure that out? You may as well have the word “orange” as text, not a graphic, and then the vision impaired can play too.

I think I’ve talked about this before.

BTW: welcome to the 6th of the 6th of the 6th. Finally Americans and the rest of the world can agree on the date.

Bored with Rubik’s cube?

So is the standard Rubik’s cube so easy that you’re bored with it? Can you solve it in 12.1 seconds?

Well, try your hand at a 4D Rubik’s cube.

Then, if your head hasn’t exploded, check out the 5D Rubik’s cube! From the site: “In the spirit of taking things too far, here is a fully functional 5-dimensional analog of Rubik’s cube.”

Sadly, 5 people have already solved the 5D cube. You can’t be first.

Back It On Up

Cameron’s recent data loss is an example of why online back up will become an integral part of home computing in the years to come. As our memories are increasingly stored in digital format (I know in the 9 months of my son’s life there has not been one film based photograph of him taken) people will be looking for a secure off site means of ensuring no harm comes to their pictures or files. Often though, like Cam, it won’t be until after a disaster has hit

I’m currently using Mozy; a free, automatic, secure back online back up system from Berkeley Data Systems. It’s simplicity itself – you download the application, tick the boxes on the predefined back up sets (such as ‘Word Documents’, ‘Music’, ‘Mo vies’,’Photographs’,’Financial Records’ etc), Mozy tracks down all your files and away it goes. You can define your own back sets if you wish and even drill down to the file level to add or remove files for a particular set.

Mozy claims to use differential backup, so it should only back up the bits of your Outlook file that have changed, but I haven’t found that to be the case in my instance. The Mozy icon lives in your system tray and behaves itself very well by only backing up when your system is idle. My only problem with this has been it back ups when I have an unattended torrent going so it can impact on your bandwidth.

You get 2G of backup for free, which covers most of my documents save for my music and video collections. There is a premium service, currently offering up to 20G for USD$39.95. If you want to try it and use my referral link https://mozy.com/ref/UTVC5L we both get an extra 256MB of back up space.

Paper popup ads

Since the Fairfax dudes (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Financial Review, etc) have probably noticed how their web sites’ popup ads don’t appear anymore because almost everybody’s got a popup blocker via Firefox, XP SP2 or the Google toolbar, would you believe they’ve started putting popup ads as stickers onto their newspapers.

Here’s one from last week, with an advert for Microsoft Office:

The Age - sticky paper popup ad for Microsoft Office

(They’re a bit like a Post-It note; they peel off quite easily.)

Tell me how to fix the problem!

It timed out, or I closed something, or something. Then I tried typing, and Writely figured out I couldn’t prove I was me anymore:
Not logged in - fine. What do I do about that?
Not logged in – fine. But you’re meant to tell me how to fix the problem, or better yet, fix it for me.

Eventually I brought up the login screen in another tab, logged in, and all became good again.

Fun with wildcards and DOS 8.3 filenames

I’ve found under some circumstances, new versions of Windows (XP and 2000, using NTFS) are still looking at the DOS 8.3 versions of filenames when using wildcards.

Real world example: a set of files such as tpo12345.xml tpo12346.xml tpo12347.xml etc. To find these, you’d use a wildcard such as tpo?????.xml

If you have a file called tpo1234567890.xml, it shouldn’t match using this wildcard, but it does, because the filename’s backward-compatible short version (in DOS 8.3 format) is something like TPO123~1.XML, which matches. It appears to only happen when the first part of the wildcard (without the suffix) is 8 characters long.

So it may be ten years since most of us said goodbye to short filenames, but it seems they’re still with us. I wonder if Windows Vista will still use them?