Keys Corner

NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua beta is now available with the regular Mac OS X Aqua interface. In other words, it now integrates completely with OS X and looks like any other Mac application. The build is based on OpenOffice.org 2.0.3, which is the latest version available.

Pay for it now and help fund the continued development of NeoOffice (My copy is downloading in the background as I write this), or wait until the end of August and download it free. (Or use NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha 4, which is also free, but based on OpenOffice.org 2.0.2.)

The Economist, not for the first time, has an article where fuel consumption is quoted in miles per gallon (mpg) and km per liter (km/l). In Germany, and as far as I know, in all other European countries fuel comsumption is measured in liters per 100 km, the same in Australia. I’m not aware of any country using km/l. So where does The Economist get the idea that quoting km/l is helpful to their readers? Which countries use it?

(To convert mpg to l/100 km you can use this calculator.)

Pandora has been mentioned in the press quite a bit recently, but until today I hadn’t got around to trying it out. Pandora is a way to find music you like. You feed it with a few artists or song names that you like, and Pandora puts together a playlist that contains tracks it thinks you will also like. It’s a great way to find artists and albums that you’ve never heard of before. If you like a suggestion, just click on the link displayed in window where it’s cover is displayed, and you can buy it online at Amazon or iTunes.

It’s free, but you need a US postcode to set up an account as they are currently only licensed to stream music in the US (with unobtrusive ads; or you can subscribe to use the service without ads), but that shouldn’t represent a major hurdle for you, should it?

(More about Pandora at Wikipedia and at FastCompany)

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has warned that war crimes may have been committed in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, and the BBC looks at whether that could be the case.

My view is that the EU countries should have been saying the same thing loudly a week ago. Shame on you, Blair, Merkel, Prodi and most of the other EU leaders. Neither Hezbollah’s taking hostage of Israeli soldiers, nor the utterly disproportionate response from Israel (causing 500 000 people to be displaced in the first week of retaliations against Lebanon) is acceptable under the Geneva conventions. Whereby Israel, in my opinion, is far and away the greater offender and it is high time that the American government ceased to blindly support them. (However, given the US policies regarding Iraq and 9/11, that looks unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch.)

If you add Linux-based network disk storage devices to your home network, for example the much loved “SLUG” (a.k.a NSLU2), you are probably going to have to find out something about how the file-naming systems in Linux work, compared to Windows or Mac OS X. Otherwise, when you copy files back and forth between your various disk drives, you may find your files are getting renamed in strange ways as they move between disks.

It used to drive me nuts when I copied my iTunes music to an NSLU2 to serve to the Roku SoundBridge in the lounge, as some mp3 files got renamed, and as I was always adding new tracks, the problem kept reappearing every now and then.

This is a good short overview to what characters to avoid if you want to avoid unplanned renaming in a mixed environment.

If you going to use “foreign” (i.e. non-english, such as ö ä ü é ç) characters in file names, then things get more interesting, as you will probably have to fiddle around with your “locale” on one or more machines, so that your character encoding is identical on all machines. This used to drive me crazy when copying iTunes music libraries between Mac and Linux servers (file names with foreign characters kept changing in the process), and I only got my problems completely fixed by replacing my NSLU2 with a secondhand Mac mini, which turned out to be an excellent move, as the Mac mini is much faster than the NSLU2 as well as fixing my character mapping problems.

Don’t let the above remarks put you off adding network storage. I wouldn’t want to do without it, as the small file servers save you firing up a PC to run a music or video server… just be aware there may be some points which need attention if you use unusual characters in file names!

Finally someone has gone to court rather than allowing themselves to be bullied by the RIAA (the body respresenting the recording industry in the USA). The RIAA likes to scare people into settling out of court by threatening to sue those they think have uploaded music into the internet for mega-massive sums of money per track – an out of court settlement is then offered for a comparably small sum of several thousand dollars. Which is a fine way to treat your customers. Most people on the receiving end of such RIAA strong-arm tactics prefer to not to take the risk of being bankrupted and settle out of court, whether they are guilty or not.

And what happened this time? The RIAA threatened someone who didn’t have a computer, didn’t know how to operate a computer, and didn’t have any money. The RIAA-victim refused to back down and settle out of court. The RIAA tried belatedly to drop the case and had to pay the defendant’s legal costs.

This is really how most large companies work… (click on the picture)
...and it is a great time-waster watching it

The Merriam-Webster dictionary has added the verb “to google” to the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary which is being published later this year. Which means Google joins the list of brand names that have become nouns or verbs replacing traditional words like “hoover” (vacuum-clean), “kleenex” (tissue) – or of course in Germany “Tempo“, “sellotape” (sticky tape, in Germany usually called “Tesafilm“).

I work for one of the larger asset management companies in Germany. Asset managers set up and run all sorts of investment funds.

Banks and asset managers are pretty twitchy about losing their data and about Information Technology Security (with capital letters). One of the last systems I worked on had to be audited by our IT Security department before it went live just because it used Microsoft server software, which was considered to represent a high security risk. However, even our IT Security people don’t use superglue to keep our data where it belongs!