Status-Q

Gutenkarte takes texts from Project Gutenberg and links them to map data from Metacarta - the idea being that as you're reading The Odyssey, for example, you can easily find the places on a map. I think this is a great idea.

Unfortunately, the parser can be a little over-enthusiastic. I doubt that the Court of Chancery referred to in Around the World in 80 Days actually took place in Chancery, France. And even Phileas Fogg, when talking about the West End, probably wasn't referring to West End, Alabama.

Similarly, when the Martians in War of the Worlds emit their haunting cry, "Ulla, ulla, ulla!", it hadn't occurred to me that they were in fact pining for a small town in Southern Ireland.

I think this needs some community-based human editing à la Wikipedia - and that is in their plans.

The interface is a little strange, too - you have to start with the map and work back to the text, where I would have thought the other way around was more natural.

But it's a cool concept...

I wrote a few days ago about Mojopac, and whether we might get something similar on the Mac. Steven Talbott pointed me at this interesting patent that Apple was granted yesterday which covers, very approximately, keeping your home directory on an iPod and being able to log in to a machine using that account when you plug the iPod in.

I think this article is a fascinating and enjoyable read. It's a few years old, but I hadn't come across it before.

An Indian physycist, Sugata Mitra, installed a PC with a fast internet connection in the wall of a building in New Delhi. He just left it there, with no explanation, to see what the kids growing up in the slums would make of it. What do you call a mouse pointer, for example, if you don't even know that the thing you're using is called a mouse?

David Linhardt, a notorious Chicago-based spammer, is suing the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus for nearly $12M in lost earnings.

This is ridiculous enough, but his suit is made more complicated by the fact that Spamhaus is based in the UK. Hurrah!

Now, however, thwarted by the fact that the UK seems to be outside the jurisdiction of the Illinois courts, it seems that Linhardt is trying a new tactic. Mmm. How to win friends and influence people in the 21st century...

In the corner of my home office, there sits an HP OfficeJet 3330. I'm rather fond of this beast - it has provided us with a copier, scanner, fax and laser printer (albeit b&w) at home for a very reasonable price, and has never given us any trouble. There's a JetDirect box stuck to the back so that it's on the network and we can print to it from any machine in the house.

As an aside - I never realised just how useful having a copier at home could be until I got one. Here's an example: I occasionally like going for longish walks around the Cambridgeshire countryside on Sunday afternoons. I used to stuff a guide book in one pocket and an Ordnance Survey map in another. Now, I just photocopy a couple of pages and the relevant bit of the map. Much easier to deal with in rain or a high wind...

Anyway - the HP software is laughably bad, but we normally only need the printer driver which works just fine. Occasionally, though, I need to scan things. I forget whether there was no HP Mac software which worked with networked scanners, or whether it was so bad that I abandoned it, but for years I've been using the web interface to do any scanning. Not very flexible or convenient, but it worked.

Today, however, Dave Hill showed me a much better way, albeit rather more complex to set up. Those who are unlikely to want to try this should probably move on to John's blog at this point!

Can you do this and keep sane?

Basically, you use the Open Source SANE project, which supports a wide range of scanners connected in a variety of ways, and you combine it with Mattias Ellert's excellent TWAIN SANE Interface for Mac OS X, which can make SANE-connected scanners appear as TWAIN devices - the standard that most programs expect when talking to scanners.

You can do this all on the Mac itself, though I followed Dave's setup and used a Linux machine to provide the SANE service, which then allowed software on the Linux machines as well as on the Macs to make use of the scanner. I won't go into full details here - you can find out more from the links above - but the basics for my system are:

• The Linux machine connects to the OfficeJet over the network using the hpoj driver

  Install sane and saned on the Linux box. In the unlikely event that your Linux distribution doesn't include it or offer a convenient package to install it, you can try the SANE project site. Make sure that hpoj is listed in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf. If that's the only scanner you want to contact, you can comment out everything else. You'll need to do something to register your particular scanner device; on my Ubuntu machine this involved running /etc/init.d/hpoj setup and entering the IP address. The scanner should now be available to Linux software; try running scanimage -L and you should see it listed. The HPLIP project may provide an alternative to HPOJ if wanted.

• The Linux machine shares it on the network using the SANE daemon saned.

  Edit /etc/sane.d/saned.conf and specify that machines on your network will be allowed to connect via SANE - the easiest way is just to put in a line containg a plus (+), which allows everybody. You need to make sure saned is running, typically by starting it from inetd as described in the man page for saned.

• The Mac SANE backend is configured to connect to the Linux machine, where it can discover the shared scanners.

  Mattias has a page where you can download the SANE backend for the Mac and the TWAIN SANE interface as convenient packages. You need to edit dll.conf here as you did on the Linux box to tell the Mac where to look for scanners - of you're using Mattias's packages, it lives in /usr/local/etc. In this case the only line you need to have uncommented is 'net'. Edit net.conf and put in the name or IP address of your Linux box.

  You may also need to make sure that saned can be automatically run by editing /etc/services and /etc/inetd.conf, as you did on the Linux box..
• The TWAIN SANE interface makes this available to Photoshop, Image Capture, Acrobat etc.

This sounds pretty convoluted, but it's not too hard, and it all works fine. You can also use the Linux box to share non-networked USB or parallel port scanners, and convert them into networked ones. If you want to do it all on the Mac without an intervening Linux machine, you'll need to find (or compile) a copy of the HPOJ driver for the Mac.

If you're a Mac user and a Blackberry user, you might like to know that there's an update to the free PocketMac software which syncs the two. You can get it from the Blackberry.com site.

This is still far from perfect - in particular, it corrupted my Mac address book the first time I ran it, perhaps because the Blackberry went to sleep in the middle - I'm not sure. I strongly suggest you backup your Address Book and iCal before trying it for the first time - they both have easy backup options in their menus. I restored them, and did a one-way synchronisation, overwriting the Blackberry, which took a phenomenally long time.

Since then, it's been fine, if not speedy, and it has a lot of features not in the earlier version. Most important for me is the ability to have just a subset of your calendars on the Blackberry - vital if you subscribe to many calendars belonging to your friends and family.

I've decided to sell my old Canon EOS 600 on eBay. I'll be sad to see it go. Much as I love digital photography, you'd have to spend a real fortune now to get something as solidly engineered as this.

If you're interested, you can bid for it, together with a nice Canon lens which is compatible with Canon DSLRs, here.

I'm sure you also won't want to miss:

• A nice set of photographic filters
• A cool recumbent bicycle
• A collection of 70 Ladybird books from my childhood - now collector's items

To follow up on my recent posting where I mentioned the SCO/Linux fiasco, Eben Moglen, in a recent episode of the FLOSS Weekly podcast, estimated the overall costs of SCOs unsuccessful action as between $100-150M! And he's pretty well qualified to make a good estimate.

So if you're thinking of investing in a company because they've suddenly discovered they have a great IP claim, as many people appear to have done with SCO, just remember where most of that money will be going... Unfortunately, SCO wasn't the only one paying.

One of the best things about the UK legal system, I think, is that if you bring an action against somebody which is unsuccessful, you are generally liable for their legal costs as well as your own. It's one of the best barriers against an over-litigious society. May we never lose it...

It's quite bizarre, I think, the whole world of anti-virus and security software. Fixing the failings in Microsoft's products has become such a huge business for the likes of Symantec and McAfee that they are complaining bitterly about Microsoft's attempt to fix the failings itself.

This is because Microsoft is getting into this business itself, and charging for software which is supposed to fix its own security holes - another slightly bizarre concept, but not, I suppose, much worse than a car dealer charging for repairs on a car he sold you, if you subscribe to the concept of 'normal wear and tear' being applied to software. It's interesting, but Windows does seem to degrade over time in a way that other software doesn't, so perhaps this model is valid! I've often wondered how many new PCs are sold because the old one is "getting very slow", and the process of wiping the hard disk and starting again from a fresh install is just too scary...

Anyway, competitors worry that they won't be able to compete with the official car dealerships because they won't have the tools, and the same is true in the software world.

I worry about what incentives Microsoft will have to make a secure system, when they directly profit from its insecurities. Especially when some of the insecurities will only be fixable by them.

It's about as far from the Linux model as you can get...

Jon Lech Johansen, best known for breaking the encryption on DVDs so that Linux users could also watch them, is now creating encryption. Well, sort of...

He has reverse-engineered Apple's Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple's devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he's already done), Jon has replicated it...

(from GigaOM) This lets media-producers use Apple's DRM without having to talk to Apple. (Of course, it's worth remembering that Apple's system will also play non-DRMed material). It's not a long-term business strategy, I shouldn't think, because Apple owns the whole chain at the moment and so can change Fairplay to an incompatible system in future without affecting their users too much. That would, however, involve re-encoding the media that currently works, so it's probably something they wouldn't want to do...