N airplanes, I frequently get assigned the seat that is adjacent to the emergency door. I don’t know if it’s merely a coincidence, or perhaps they ‘pre-allocate’ particular people whom they trust (shameless flattery, pat self on back). Either way, I always wonder what mechanism/s they have to ensure that suicidal individuals cannot open that door in during flights. The news from Australis give a bit of a clue.

A 34-year-old French woman, who tried to open the emergency door of a plane so she could have a cigarette, has appeared in the Brisbane Magistrates Court.

[...]

Today she pleaded guilty to a charge of endangering safety on an aircraft.

When your data is only readable to a program

EVERAL weeks back, I came across concerned Palm users in the forums. They were uncertain and confused with regards to their Palm data formats. Some were wishing to migrate their data, while some just wanted to rest assured that they were not susceptible to vendor lock-ins or needed to jump through hoops to make a transition, shall it ever be required.

Palm’s software certainly offers data export facilities, yet these are not flexible enough. The range of supported formats simply does not cut it. It appears to adhere to legacy formats from the previous decade, which is probably the cause for many other limitations, which make older Palm models compatible with some of the latest.

On the other hand, Palm’s compact formats make data access and writing quick, which is crucial for low-end mobile devices with weak CPU‘s. The formats are rather compact, although not easily compressible. As always, there is a trade-off between openness and performance. OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are just one example of that. At present, Palm appear to have learned nothing from the former. Until they learn that lesson, the observations below are worth making.

Looking more closely at a variety of PIM data files, I quickly discovered that they could be classified as “proprietary”. They were rather opaque too. These files comprised a mishmash of binary and text, which means that knowledge as to how to interpret such files laid in closed source code from Palm. It was not easily recoverable, although programs like JPilot and KPilot are able to import all data apart from the calendar (DateBook), which is the most complex among all. Likewise, there are Palm to HTML convertors that run under Windows, but they can only handle AddressBook and MemoPad data, in line with relevant, unofficial documentation.

I could not help feeling disappointed by that discovery, which means that personal information is cumbersome to access. As the Web guru Jeff Veen recently said, “Give me my data” is the quote that immediately sprung to mind. Therein Jeff talks about heart rate monitors, but here we speak of calendaring data, including extensive archives and PIM, which puts a barrier in front of its actual owner. Palm should have stuck with a more canonical form such as “vCalendar/iCalendar, which is already mutually supported across multiple platforms. This type of Move to iCal or vCal (vCalendar, iCalendar), or even comma-sparated list was discussed many years ago.

Alternatively, why not use something standardised and generic such as XML, which can be easily parsed and manipulated? Is it not a foreseeable option, especially to Palm who combat a king of proprietary, thus misunderstood formats? As I continue to look at my Palm archives on my computer, I am filled with despair. I relveal that my records are interpretable to no calendaring software other than that which comes from Palm themselves. I would definitely recommend that Palm consider re-working their formats as it can become a major selling point.

Nowadays, More and more people (and even governments) come to discover that their old mail is often meaningless and inaccessible due to formats that are vendor-specific. Berlin, Paris and Massachusetts are only few among the loud protesters against undisclosed data formats and mockery of standards. It is only today that we hear of promises (as of yet doubtful) from Microsoft, according to which Office formats will become open.

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.

Let us wait until those fine prints become legible.

Cited by: PalmAddict

The famous E=mc^² equation finally see its centenary.

Physicists are celebrating the centenary of Albert Einstein’s best known equation: E=mc².

[...]

It seems so simple: three letters standing for energy, mass, and the speed of light, brought together with the tightness of a soundbite.

Related item: Einstein Manuscript Archives

ARNING: this item is unhealthy to self-proclaimed and avid Windows users. To me, it sometimes seems as though Windows is much like smoking. It takes a lot of your money and as the addiction grows (dependency on software), it requires you to assign a decent proportion of your wage to it. Eventually, in return, it punishes you despite its high cost.

The fact that a majority people stick to Windows does not bother me. They insist on using it and I respect that decision. Being told what is good for you is probably the toughest challenge. I continue to see my colleagues spending a great deal of their time doing things which are by all means unnecessary, e.g. filesystem maintenance and virus checks. There is also a perpetual penalty due to, e.g. trial version of software with disabled features, O/S collapses and so forth.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, some people are able to get their work done without worrying at all about these man-made problems, which inherently are inexistent in computing. Finally, returning to my point above, Windows users often punish themselves, but no deliberately so. The least we can do is offer redemption from the habit and prove that better ways exist.

OU can help yourself to a quick glance at Google’s complex at London, which is going to be accommodated with hundreds of engineers fairly soon. Be warned that the ZDNet server, which is flooded by Slashdotters at the moment, is extremely unresponsive. It must be suffering from the ‘Slashdot effect’. In fact, it was only hours ago that ZDNet engineers got mentioned here at the datacentre in Manchester Computing (where I am at the moment). I am not sure what the reason was, but I saw the memo on the desk and wondered if ZDNet plan to upgrade or migrate. I would like to believe that.

Back when I was in touch with Google’s recruiters, only the headquarters in Zurich and Dublin were in question. I wonder why London was not even mentioned at the time. Perhaps it is a newly-erected branch for their future operations, which are said to take advantage of dark fibre and mobile machines with 3.5 perabyte (3,500,000 GB) of storage.

“We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

am not entirely sure how long Google Print (renamed Book Search) has actually been up for. I have just carried out a standard Google search and was suddenly advised to use Google Print to search among books. This was apparently an arbitrary promotion of their new shiny service.

Below are my first impressions and impulsive observations (primarily complaints):

• The top inch of two of each page in each book initially gets displayed as a scan (-)
• The search pages incorporate the option to purchase the book (+)
• Users are encouraged to open an account with Google Print. I am not too fond of this. Registration opens the door to dependencies, much like the signup with Google Sitemaps, which is a pre-requisite to taking advantage of Google Analytics (-)
• The interface is light-weight, clean and navigation is intuitive (+)

All in all, Google Print does not appear as bad as I anticipated. I said a few things against it and a few things in favour. Nonetheless, having so many books scanned and available for viewing per subscription raises a brow or two. It somehow gives Google ownership over the books and will discourage crowds from going to the public libraries. On-line music sales had similar impact on record stores.

A new study contends that, in contrast to the widely-held view, search engines give a chance to new businesses and sites. Traffic tends to be centralised in the ‘high-status arena’, so the study offers a rare contradiction.

A paper questions whether search engines make popular sites more so

THE winner takes all, it is widely supposed in computing circles. Indeed, geeks have coined a word, “Googlearchy”, for the way in which search engines encourage web traffic towards the most popular sites. The belief that search engines make popular websites ever more popular, at the expense of other pages, is now being challenged by research.