On my web site I've an informal bio that makes mention of the work I did putting together surveys of windows 95, 2000, NT adoption in UK universities.
These surveys were pretty well regarded in their time, and I know that various people in the UK HE computing community made use of them, not to mention Microsoft UK themselves for marketing purposes.
They are now clearly of historic interest only (unless, of course, you're going to offer me a job and want proof of organizational ability ;-) ).
The web pages were hosted at the University of York, my employers at the time.
Well I haven't worked for York for four years now, and no one else there, or elsewhere in the UK, has taken them over so not surprisingly York have finally sent them to /dev/nul.
If you are looking for the survey information it seems to have been archived on the wayback machine. There are a number of copies, and as not much happened to them after 2003 any of the last few copies should be accurate.
Click here for the entry point to last copy archived.
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Monday, 30 July 2007
Retro computing (again)
I've acquired an old G3 MacBook - a Wall Street according to lowendmac.
Initially I was going to put linux on it, but then it's an oldworld Mac with the closed firmware and yellow dog needs bootx to start and it's all a bit of nightmare to install, so I thought I'd try Jaguar.
Problem - no CD drive. Not going to happen. So I'm forced to start thinking what can i actually do with an OS 9 Mac. Fortunately it has some basic internet tools and stuff so it can be used as a terminal, and it still has some of the apps installed on it.
Possibly just possibly I might still have my old claris word floppies from the legit copy I bought years ago, which woud help turn it into a basic writing machine for offline blogging and the like, because whatever you say about it, it is a nice machine.
And that's it. Perfectly usable, useful if dated. Seems a shame to trash it. I'll keep you posted if I start using it for something purposeful
Initially I was going to put linux on it, but then it's an oldworld Mac with the closed firmware and yellow dog needs bootx to start and it's all a bit of nightmare to install, so I thought I'd try Jaguar.
Problem - no CD drive. Not going to happen. So I'm forced to start thinking what can i actually do with an OS 9 Mac. Fortunately it has some basic internet tools and stuff so it can be used as a terminal, and it still has some of the apps installed on it.
Possibly just possibly I might still have my old claris word floppies from the legit copy I bought years ago, which woud help turn it into a basic writing machine for offline blogging and the like, because whatever you say about it, it is a nice machine.
And that's it. Perfectly usable, useful if dated. Seems a shame to trash it. I'll keep you posted if I start using it for something purposeful
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Adding a calendar application to fluxy ...
As a final tour de force I decided to add a calendar application to my virtual low memory/ubuntu/fluxbox/icewm machine. My first thought was orage but while it installed it didn't play nicely, so I went for something rather more heavyweight. korganizer. Coupled with my orage synchronisation script from January (plus a couple of edits to get rid of the xfce/orage specific references) it worked just fine.
This begs another question - if I can get kpilot to work can I get it to sync with my old palm pilot? - I forsee fun ahead when I build up the real box
This begs another question - if I can get kpilot to work can I get it to sync with my old palm pilot? - I forsee fun ahead when I build up the real box
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Prototyping a lightweight linux box
At home, wrapped up in a plastic bag I have an old P2 400MHz machine with 64MB RAM that we used until recently as an alternate dial up machine. Has Windows 98, and somewhere I have a spare no name ethernet card that will work with it. I've also had a hankering for a linux machine at home, but even now linux is a little bloated and a lot of distros don't run comfortably in so little memory.
However in theory you could build ubuntu to run in that little memory with an alternate window manager. Well, I didn't build it on the old clunker, but using parallels I built a custom low memory vm using the alternate install cd for ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn) to build a command line only system (there's an ubuntu guide that walks you through this).
To this I added:
- window managers
- icewm - preferred
- fluxbox
- editors
- gedit
- Kwrite (my favorite) & Kate
- applications
- abiword
- firefox
- icepodder
- doobries
- xfe - file manger
- dillo - lightweight browser
- Notice - no mail client. Theory is that firefox, while a bit slow will perform well enough to work with gmail and by keeping things light the system should perform well enough. If mail is really dire there's always mutt. As a test system it seems to hang together nicely. I can edit (this is being written with kwrite on the vm), print, wordprocess, and surf the web, not to mention download podcasts, which is all I want to build the system for.
In emulation it seems fine. Next question is how well does it perform on genuine 1999 hardware?
Monday, 25 June 2007
Old trains and digital archiving ...
I like railways. Or more accurately I like the social history of railways and the changes they brought, and they were, in their time, as much a world changing technology as the internet. So while I admit to taking pictures of trains when I was twelve, I was always more interested by the station buildings, the posters, the advertising and the changes in people's lives.
It made tourism possible, at least for the middle classes. It made travel possible. One of the more bizarre moments is that John McDouall Stuart, the man who endured terrible privations surveying the route of the transcontinental telegraph line from Adelaide to the north coast of Australia, in the the 1860's, announced his return from the unexplored outback by sending a telegram from the railhead at Burra and getting the morning train back to Adelaide.
So railways were a world changing phenomenon. And their relics are all around, but rapidly disappearing as the world increasingly forgets railways. Equally their social history is also understudied, perhaps because of the unfortunate association of an interest in railways with the sad men who stand at the ends of station platforms in England with notebooks and flasks of tea, collecting engine numbers.
Now I must admit that during the time I travelled extensively by rail for business in England, I didn't pay much attention to this interest of mine. Too close to work, too many other things to do. Since moving to Australia it's become a greater interest if only because one looks at abandoned train stations and realises whoever designed them copied designs already in use in England. In fact following up on this is the sort of project I could imagine myself spending some of my declining years engaged in, after all in encompasses my interests in history, archaeology, bushwalking and in playing with computers and digital cameras. Not to mention a professional interest in digital preservation and archiving
And, I thought, there must be a wealth of material on the web, enough sad buggers who have assembled collections of source material and photographs.
There isn't. As a totally unscientific test I tried looking for pictures of Callander station on the web. Callander was a jumping off point for the Trossachs, a favourite Victorian tourist destination, and had a big white wooden station. I found exactly one picture.
This was puzzling to me at first. It was a popular destination, people must have taken pictures of it. I remember taking pictures of the derelict station sometime in the late sixties/early seventies when I was all arty and into photography the way teenage boys sometime are. Of course I don't have these photographs now, or if I do they're unclassifed and as good as lost, rather in the same way that Roman coins found by metal detectorists and stripped of their context have little historical value.
And then I realised why. The train line at Callander closed in 1965, meaning pictures of the working station must be forty years old. The station stood derelict for some time thereafter, and people other than me must have taken pictures of it, but they're probably in people's sheds and attics gently decaying, and the person who took them dead, or at least pretty old.
Now the site is a car park and there's no opportunity to reconstruct the original building.
And because no-one documented these things some of our history is being lost.
However not all is doom and gloom. In the course of checking this out I came across the website of Great North of Scotland railway association who are actively trying to archive (and by implication, catalogue) their members' holdings as a resource for future study.
Equally at the other end of the world, the State Library of Tasmania has an eHeritage initiative, working with local historical to digitally preserve historical records, documents and photographs to ensure that they don't get lost.
And that's the key. Digitisation without a preservation strategy is valueless. Preservation without archiving, ie adding context to the items preserved is valueless. Properly digitised and preserved they're a resource for future study.
They may seem mundane, but to a first century Roman clay lamps seemed mundane. Now their distribution tells us a lot about Roman trade routes. Similarly by preserving today's and yesterday's common place, it gives us a picture of how life was lived ...
It made tourism possible, at least for the middle classes. It made travel possible. One of the more bizarre moments is that John McDouall Stuart, the man who endured terrible privations surveying the route of the transcontinental telegraph line from Adelaide to the north coast of Australia, in the the 1860's, announced his return from the unexplored outback by sending a telegram from the railhead at Burra and getting the morning train back to Adelaide.
So railways were a world changing phenomenon. And their relics are all around, but rapidly disappearing as the world increasingly forgets railways. Equally their social history is also understudied, perhaps because of the unfortunate association of an interest in railways with the sad men who stand at the ends of station platforms in England with notebooks and flasks of tea, collecting engine numbers.
Now I must admit that during the time I travelled extensively by rail for business in England, I didn't pay much attention to this interest of mine. Too close to work, too many other things to do. Since moving to Australia it's become a greater interest if only because one looks at abandoned train stations and realises whoever designed them copied designs already in use in England. In fact following up on this is the sort of project I could imagine myself spending some of my declining years engaged in, after all in encompasses my interests in history, archaeology, bushwalking and in playing with computers and digital cameras. Not to mention a professional interest in digital preservation and archiving
And, I thought, there must be a wealth of material on the web, enough sad buggers who have assembled collections of source material and photographs.
There isn't. As a totally unscientific test I tried looking for pictures of Callander station on the web. Callander was a jumping off point for the Trossachs, a favourite Victorian tourist destination, and had a big white wooden station. I found exactly one picture.
This was puzzling to me at first. It was a popular destination, people must have taken pictures of it. I remember taking pictures of the derelict station sometime in the late sixties/early seventies when I was all arty and into photography the way teenage boys sometime are. Of course I don't have these photographs now, or if I do they're unclassifed and as good as lost, rather in the same way that Roman coins found by metal detectorists and stripped of their context have little historical value.
And then I realised why. The train line at Callander closed in 1965, meaning pictures of the working station must be forty years old. The station stood derelict for some time thereafter, and people other than me must have taken pictures of it, but they're probably in people's sheds and attics gently decaying, and the person who took them dead, or at least pretty old.
Now the site is a car park and there's no opportunity to reconstruct the original building.
And because no-one documented these things some of our history is being lost.
However not all is doom and gloom. In the course of checking this out I came across the website of Great North of Scotland railway association who are actively trying to archive (and by implication, catalogue) their members' holdings as a resource for future study.
Equally at the other end of the world, the State Library of Tasmania has an eHeritage initiative, working with local historical to digitally preserve historical records, documents and photographs to ensure that they don't get lost.
And that's the key. Digitisation without a preservation strategy is valueless. Preservation without archiving, ie adding context to the items preserved is valueless. Properly digitised and preserved they're a resource for future study.
They may seem mundane, but to a first century Roman clay lamps seemed mundane. Now their distribution tells us a lot about Roman trade routes. Similarly by preserving today's and yesterday's common place, it gives us a picture of how life was lived ...
Friday, 22 June 2007
DocX - the nightmare continues ...
Well whatever we feel about docx it isn't going away, especially that Microsoft have now End_of_Life'd 2003 in a move to boost the uptake of Office 2007, which means we need to be pragmatic and come up with a workable solution, which in the case of the Mac, seems to be Neo office. Microsoft's own import filter for the Mac just barfs on my machine but Neo office imports neatly, graphics and all, and lets you export the document in various useful formats.
Making 2003 EoL is of course also going to be a nightmare for multi-platorm sites as docX will start to spread through their windows fleet in a near viral manner causing mayhem to the non-Windows installed base. Sites with large numbers of windows machines will experience a similar problem due to the financial hit upgrading everyone at once will cause. Open Office as a corporate office suite? Reads all your legacy documents just fine. Only problem is that Open Office isn't really integrated into Aqua on the Mac, even though they're working on this.
So for now Neo Office is your friend if you have Macs on site. Does what Open Office does and handles docX to boot. One quirk though is Safari recognises that docx, like odf and like the good old open office format is a zip based format and helpfully unpacks the docx bundle for you. To work round this little problem I resorted to downloading the offending file using parallels and dragging the offending file from the windows desktop to the Mac desktop. Surely there's got to be something a tad more elegant ...
But this isn't a complete solution to the problem of submission to scientific journals I blogged about earlier. At least lets you edit .docx documents. Still it doesn't really handle the problem that basically the equation editor in Office 2007 doesn't use MathML or a compatible format.
And this is important as typesetting equations is hard, and computerised typsetters can have their own quirks. One of the reasons AmiPro was so popular with mathematical scientists when it appeared was that it had an equation editor that produced TeX code and yet was a proper onscreen word processor. Just as the only reason TeX has hung on is that typesetters understand it and what you put in is what you get out.
Now writing a program to parse markup isn't that hard (OK it is but it's doable), which means you can convert TeX, MathML or any markup based document to something a typesetting machine understands (SGML or whatever - one of the wierdest sights I ever so was a commercial printer that had a floor full of people in cubes editing raw SGML in vi on Macs to feed it into a typesetter and fix any conversion problems).
The other key point is that if the document is in a known, or well understood format you can always convert it to something else. docX isn't, the specification is owned by Microsoft and they can tweak it to fix problems which means that you get creep, which is a document conversion engineer's nightmare. ODF and the other open formats have specification documents which you can refer to. Adobe have published detailed specification documents for pdf to allow you to write your own pdf export utilities meaning the format is open in the sense that the knowledge on how to parse it is publically available.
All good. As the world's gone digital, lots of documents, research findings, whatever only exist in electronic form. Yes, people may have printed copies scattered round their offices, in the same way they used to have offprints, but there are no catalogued, findable, non-digital copies.
If the document is in a format that can't be read it might as well be dead, or written in linear B, maya, tokharian, or something equally obscure. If the format's known we can always access the knowledge. And fundamentally that's why docX is a problem. It doesn't follow open, described, standards so there's no guarantee of future access, or when we open a docX document created with Word 2007 we'll see exactly the same document when in 2012 we open it with word 2011
[Addendum: In this discussion I'm ignoring the very similar problems caused by Excel's new xlsx format in Office 2007, but that doesn't mean they're not out there]
Making 2003 EoL is of course also going to be a nightmare for multi-platorm sites as docX will start to spread through their windows fleet in a near viral manner causing mayhem to the non-Windows installed base. Sites with large numbers of windows machines will experience a similar problem due to the financial hit upgrading everyone at once will cause. Open Office as a corporate office suite? Reads all your legacy documents just fine. Only problem is that Open Office isn't really integrated into Aqua on the Mac, even though they're working on this.
So for now Neo Office is your friend if you have Macs on site. Does what Open Office does and handles docX to boot. One quirk though is Safari recognises that docx, like odf and like the good old open office format is a zip based format and helpfully unpacks the docx bundle for you. To work round this little problem I resorted to downloading the offending file using parallels and dragging the offending file from the windows desktop to the Mac desktop. Surely there's got to be something a tad more elegant ...
But this isn't a complete solution to the problem of submission to scientific journals I blogged about earlier. At least lets you edit .docx documents. Still it doesn't really handle the problem that basically the equation editor in Office 2007 doesn't use MathML or a compatible format.
And this is important as typesetting equations is hard, and computerised typsetters can have their own quirks. One of the reasons AmiPro was so popular with mathematical scientists when it appeared was that it had an equation editor that produced TeX code and yet was a proper onscreen word processor. Just as the only reason TeX has hung on is that typesetters understand it and what you put in is what you get out.
Now writing a program to parse markup isn't that hard (OK it is but it's doable), which means you can convert TeX, MathML or any markup based document to something a typesetting machine understands (SGML or whatever - one of the wierdest sights I ever so was a commercial printer that had a floor full of people in cubes editing raw SGML in vi on Macs to feed it into a typesetter and fix any conversion problems).
The other key point is that if the document is in a known, or well understood format you can always convert it to something else. docX isn't, the specification is owned by Microsoft and they can tweak it to fix problems which means that you get creep, which is a document conversion engineer's nightmare. ODF and the other open formats have specification documents which you can refer to. Adobe have published detailed specification documents for pdf to allow you to write your own pdf export utilities meaning the format is open in the sense that the knowledge on how to parse it is publically available.
All good. As the world's gone digital, lots of documents, research findings, whatever only exist in electronic form. Yes, people may have printed copies scattered round their offices, in the same way they used to have offprints, but there are no catalogued, findable, non-digital copies.
If the document is in a format that can't be read it might as well be dead, or written in linear B, maya, tokharian, or something equally obscure. If the format's known we can always access the knowledge. And fundamentally that's why docX is a problem. It doesn't follow open, described, standards so there's no guarantee of future access, or when we open a docX document created with Word 2007 we'll see exactly the same document when in 2012 we open it with word 2011
[Addendum: In this discussion I'm ignoring the very similar problems caused by Excel's new xlsx format in Office 2007, but that doesn't mean they're not out there]
Monday, 18 June 2007
keyboards and dishwashers ...
I eat lunch over my keyboard (one of my less appealing habits). Every so often I have to invert it and shake the crap out and I've already written off one keyboard with my unsavory habits.
So I've always been interested in ways of keeping keyboards clean especially ones in public access labs that get kind of yucky after a year's greasy fingered students have done their worst.
Most cleaning solutions include expensive products plus the employment of cleaning staff to come round and do the cleaning. So given that most of the waste in a keyboard is skin, grease and food waste I've always wondered if you could run a keyboard through a dishwasher and then dry it off with some water displacement chemical, eg WD40. Now someone at NPR's tried exactly that. And it does seem to work. Eevn if it probably invalidates the warranty and risks doing damage to the keyboard. But there seems to be all sorts of FUD about doing it. But then when a basic USB keyboard costs ten to fifteen bucks, whats the risk?
If your keybord works afterwards, you've saved $10. If it doesn't your no worse off than you were ...
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