Things I’ve Seen

The first time I remember seeing dolphins was at a beach in the north of New South Wales. It was early in the evening, and out in the surf were perhaps a dozen sleek grey shapes. The more I watched, the more certain I became that they were surfing: whenever a bigger than usual wave came along, the dolphins would ride it, just below the surface of the water, often twisting around as they did so.

It seems that playing games is a normal part of dolphin life…

When Stan Kuczaj and Lauren Highfill were snorkeling among some rough-toothed dolphins off the coast of Honduras last year, they saw an intriguing game among the animals.

Two adults and a youngster were passing a plastic bag back and forth, as in a game of catch

…When the adults passed it to the youth, they did so more carefully than to each other, releasing it just in front of the youth’s mouth, as if to make it easier to catch.

Paul Schmidinger - Screendesign and Webprogramming has a whole collection of great Java based visual toys.

This is a great collection of “Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes“

Shelly, at Shelly’s Book Shelf has a monthly book-themed meme. For November it is on Storing Books…

1. How do you store your books?

Mostly shelved, although there are always some lying by the bed as well.

2. If you keep them, what order are they in?

The main bulk are sorted by category (on different bookcases) and then alphabetically by author. Except when they get resorted by height by third parties who think that is helpful…

3. Where are they?

We’re lucky enough to have a ‘parent’s retreat’ which is a sort of study-cum-library, so the majority are there. A subset live on a bookcase in the bedroom, and all of Jeyanth’s books are in his room (or wherever else he has distributed them…)

So, after six years spent entirely in the Windows universe, I am now the very proud owner of a 12″ G4 iBook. So far my experience has been almost universally good: in almost every respect, the iBook has ‘just worked’ - instantly connecting to my home 802.11b network, allowing me to trivially locate the W2k and WXP machines on the same network and import my photo collection across into iPhoto and my music collection into iTunes. I like Safari enough that I haven’t yet downloaded Opera - and, if the gestures plugin works as advertised, probably never will. A three button USB mouse also just worked, and I’ve been able to find free software to do almost everything I want (I’ll probably end up buying an office suite - iWork or Microsoft Office - sometime soon).

It’s probably a heresy for someone moving to a Mac to say, but there really isn’t anything about Windows XP that annoys me. I have no problems keeping it virus free, there are plenty of alternatives to Internet Explorer, and cygwin provides a great terminal environment. I just wanted something small, light, and (let’s be honest) good looking.

Things so far that I really, really like include the two finger drag on the trackpad to scroll windows, a terminal window to take me into the heart of the system (with Ruby, Python etc. all built in), the built in network tools, expose, the dock and the dashboard. And, of course, the fact that the things just looks so good.

One negative - and I knew about this before I bought - is the lack of a microphone input. If someone feels like buying me one of these microphones for Christmas, that would be perfect for my LibriVox recording. And one really minor whinge: the backspace key is labelled ‘delete’. I’m used to ‘delete’ deleting the character after the cursor and backspace deleting the character before it, so I’ve made a few typos. But that’s hardly something to write home (or even blog) about.

Any of my Mac reading users out there with hot tips for a returning switcher, please comment!

So, I’ve just uploaded my first solo reading for LibriVox: The Raven.

There’s also a copy here if you can’t access archive.org (thanks, Secure Computing Smart Filter).

The first time, I was eager. Nervous, but keen, I’d heard a lot about it. The build up was tantalizing, the promise of rewards beyond my dreams soon to be fulfilled. I had the protection, I’d made the moves and I was ready.

Alas, my fumblings … were not to be consummated.

Read on… you know you want to.

Mark Russinovich describes his adventures with Sony Digital Rights Management software. The article is pretty technical, but the conclusion couldn’t be clearer:

Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.

In the comments, there are also extracts from various laws suggesting that Sony’s actions may be illegal in the UK, the US and Australia.

Bottom Line: Do not purchase any CDs from Sony if you wish to use them on your PC.

[update: see also Washington Post Blog]