“The rapidly evolving world of digital books is presenting new
challenges” – http://ping.fm/ytGdn
Authors ready to throw the book at online pirates
Published June 8, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentThere are things I do fairly often, but not often enough to actually remember how. One such is sorting a file with tab-delimited fields. I always expect to be able to do this:
sort -t"\t" -k3 ...
but that doesn’t work. The shell does not recognise “\t” as tab.
For future reference, a workaround is to use a perl wrapper:
perl -we 'print `sort -t"\t" -k3 ...`'
which works because perl substitutes a tab for \t
Late for work
overslept
rush rush rush
breakfast fast
guzzle tea
check email
in the shower
out the door
in the car
rush rush rush
traffic bad
slow. slow. slow.
carpark now
dark and cold
down the stairs
lift too slow
cross the road
campus crowds
down the steps
in the door
wave to staff
computer on
coffee brewing
feet up, rest.
Earlier today I heard someone asking, “why, with interest rates so low, is it so hard to get credit?”
Perhaps I’m stupid … certainly I am no economist … but the answer to this seems self evident.
Lending is about risk, and balancing this risk against returns. So, if interest rates are very low, as now, then the returns to the lender will be low also. And given the uncertain economic times, the risks are perceived to be higher. So you have lower returns and higher risk. Which together will make the lender more cautious when approving loans. Which means credit will be harder to get.
So, it seems to me that, in lowering interest rates so much, the Reserve Bank has actually made it harder for people, and business, to get credit, and thereby contributed to the economic downturn.
Everyone assumes that lower interest rates will be better for us, and they certainly are good news for those with existing loans, but buisiness generally runs on new rather than existing credit, so lowering interest rates so far may, for business, have just made a bad situation worse.
Facebook are introducing a new format for Pages, giving them a similar format to personal profile pages. (In fact, in the scattered “documentation” they refer to “Public Profiles”, which indicates the direction they are taking.)
This was a surprise to me, and probably to everyone else — have not seen a prior announcement of this change. But that seems to be the Facebook way. Right now, Page managers have to make the new format public, but they’re saying this will happen anyway, some time soon. The change is happening whether we like it or want it.
Conceptually, I can see why this is happening, and that there is a lot to be said for providing the same Wall experience that we have with personal profiles.
Unfortunately, various things seem to be borked as a result. Some third-party apps which I’ve been using — specifically Extended Infor and My Html — don’t seem to function well in the new layout. (Suprising given that these were created for personal profiles.
Extended Info can sit in the Boxes tab, or in it’s own tab, which gets calle “Extended Info”. Except that the tab title is truncated, so you get “Extended I…” instead. Logically, you’d want to add Extended Info under the Info tab, but that’s not allowed. The real problem there is that the basic Info tab is so limiting. You can only get headings that Facebork deems relevant to that category of page. You don’t get to choose. If they’d remove that ridiculous limitation, then we wouldn’t need Extended Info in the first place.
My Html has similar issues. only in Boxes or in its own tab. And it would be great if the tab title could be changed to something intelligent, but … no. It’s the name of the app. no choice.
While I’ve been tinkering with all this — some time between breakfast and lunch today, a new tab, Stream appeared on the left. Which suggests FB are still working this out too. Anyway, there are now 3 default tabs, Stream, Wall and Info, which cannot be changed or moved.
Stream collects your posts and photos into one place — but since we can have separate Links and Photos tabs, I don’t see the point of this tab. The Wall includes notes, but only those created locally within FB. I use RSS to feed my blog into notes, but these don’t show up on the Wall. I can create a separate Notes tab, which then shows the RSS feeds as well as local notes, but again, it makes for confusion. And I cannot see any way to remove local notes from the Wall.
So right now, what could be a useful advance looks more like a tragic mess.
[Also, I've looked in vain for any way to contact Faccebook about this. They seem to have closed off just about all avenues of feedback!]
** Update (ten minutes later!) The Stream tab has disappeared, and RSS notes are now appearing in the Wall. I think I’ll give it a couple of days before I do anything else.
** Update 2: Aha! Under the Wall tab, click on settings, and there’s an option, “Default Landing Tab for Fans”, which seems to default to “Posts”. Change this to Wall and viola! The Stream tab is gone, and the Wall tab includes your notes and Posts. Very intuitive, not!
Something we get a lot of in the social network world is what I call “meme games”. A common one is to write “X random things about me” and then “tag” a number of friends to get them to do the same. All good fun, and one day I’ll do mine, I promise!
Similar are games to play with iTunes, or Youtube or Google, searching for specific keywords and writing down the first ten things that come up. This one that I saw today is fun: Google “<your name> needs” and write down the first 10 things from the results. Here’s mine:
- Steve needs to find a squirrel hitman.
- Steve needs a leg transplant.
- Steve needs sleep.
- Steve needs a new song.
- Steve Needs A Bad Ass Tee.
- Steve Needs The Money.
- Steve needs to get away for a while.
- Steve needs new friends – friends to get him out from behind his camera.
- Steve needs advice or help.
- Steve needs to be able to access his data when it is convenient for him.
He he! Good fun. What’s yours?
Here’s a nifty idea for your Firefox toolbar. (Well, I think so!)
If you visit a site regularly, you can drag the URL from the location bar to the bookmarks toolbar. But in the normal case, you’ll quickly fill the space if you have more than a few such sites.
But, since most sites now use a unique icon (favicon), what I’ve found is that you can delete the name of the bookmark and leave just the icon showing. Like this:
which means you can then fit many more sites into the toolbar.
After copying a link to the toolbar, right-click on the bookmark and choose Properties, then delete the name, as shown here:
Cool, huh?
She on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.
Well, no. As a rule, I don’t spend time at work reading, even though I do work in a library (on of the biggest research libraries in Australia) and have the fiction collection just outside my door.
But one of the things I work on — when not managing Library Systems, or organising collection spaces, or actually programming — is our eBooks collection. This is kind of an unofficial project, with official sanction, if that makes sense. (It means there’s no funding, and I do it largely in my own time, but the Chief approves of it.)
And today, I put the final polish onto the latest title in the collection, “She”, by H. Rider Haggard, scanning a couple of plates from a print edition from our print collection.
Online reading is not to everyone’s taste, but I get thank-you emails from all over the world, so I know many people benefit from my efforts. And (strangely) I enjoy it. 
