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There’s a really cracking documentary about photography on BBC Four at the moment, called Genius of Photography. The first programme looked at the historical origins of different photographic methods, and the social and artistic changes that it brought about. Like all good documentaries, it told me some things I didn’t know before, and made me think about photography in a slightly different way.

For example, they explained the process of making daguerreotypes, and showed some examples, both from the 19th Century and contemporary images. I knew the name, but had never really considered how they were made. You have to expose a mirror-polished silver plate coated with a layer of silver halide to light, and then you exhibit the original plate after developing and fixing the image. Daguerreotypes are really the antithesis of modern, digital photography. The equipment is expensive and cumbersome, the developing and fixing process is labour intensive, not to mention the fact that it involves mercury vapour, for added peril. It requires a lot of skill, and to cap it all, you can’t reproduce the image: the plate is the image, and cannot be duplicated or printed. But boy, are they beautiful.

I’d only ever seen still images of daguerreotypes, but watching film of people holding them, and seeing the images from different angles, you get a much better impression of their almost three-dimensional appearance than you do from a still reproduction. They also showed some contemporary daguerreotypes (you can see some lovely examples by Jerry Spagnoli here) which were really stunning, with a beautiful tonal range and an odd feeling of intimacy. Perhaps it’s partly their rarity, uniqueness and the craft that has to go into making them that makes them feel so special.

Thanks to pre-ordering Leopard (it was delivered on Friday), I now have Leopard installed. The installation went very smoothly, thanks in no small part to reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control book, Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard before I attempted it. Joe is a friend, but I’d be recommending his book even if he wasn’t. It’s very detailed, thoroughly researched, and a great confidence-booster if you’re unsure about which of the installation options are best for you. I had a mess of poorly installed Unix applications in /usr/local and /opt which I was beginning to find difficult to keep straight, so I decided to go for a clean slate with the Erase and Install option. I’d made a bootable backup with SuperDuper!, so I was able to use Leopard’s file transfer facility to move all my applications and user files back from the bootable backup. I’m happy to say that it worked beautifully. All I had to reinstall was the TeX distribution and MySQL (more on that later), and I had a clean and fast system.

A lot has been written about the headline features of Leopard, so I won’t repeat what you can read elsewhere, but Leopard is generally wonderful. I’ve been waiting for Spaces for ages, and love it, and Quick Look is addictive once you start using it. For example, I discovered today that it’s perfect for quickly scanning the README files included with installation packages. Time Machine is also beautifully implemented, and makes keeping incremental archives effortless. The whole operating system seems much more consistent and integrated, both functionally and visually. There are more links between applications, like the todos which you can create or view in Mail or iCal, and the data detectors which link together information in Mail messages with Address Book information or events in iCal. Even better, as Matt Gemmell observed, Mac OS X is now an even more superb development platform.

As I mentioned earlier, I used to have a mess of stuff installed in /usr/local, mostly because the versions of Ruby, SQLite3 and so on that came installed with Tiger were rather old. But Leopard comes with fairly up to date versions of Ruby and SQLite3, and even has ruby-gems and lots of useful gems (including Rails, naturally) pre-installed (the full details are available here). That’s why I was able to get away with just reinstalling MySQL and TeX — everything else I needed was already installed. The RubyCocoa frameworks are also installed by default, and integrated with XCode. These allow you to create full-blown native Mac OS X applications (taking advantage of all the native APIs) written mostly in Ruby rather than Cocoa/Objective-C. I’d been curious about it for a while, so I decided to give it a try. I used an example from the Ruby Cookbook to build a stopwatch application in XCode and Interface Builder, and was amazed by how easy it was. That’s pretty exciting, at least to me: if someone with no knowledge of Cocoa, a basic knowledge of Ruby and a few pointers from the documentation can build a proper Mac OS X application in a couple of hours, using only tools built into the operating system, that’s quite impressive.

In our house, we have our bedroom at the front. Generally, this is fine, because we both prefer the rooms we spend more time in (the kitchen, Mr. Bsag’s studio, my office) to be at the back of the house, with a nicer view. However, there are two drawbacks to the location of the bedroom. One is that there is a pub opposite, so we sometimes get disturbed late at night by drunk people reeling away from a night spent imbibing as many lagers and/or alcopops as is humanly possible. The second is that there is a street lamp just outside our house. While it’s handy as a free security light for the front of our house, it does make our bedroom rather light.

I can sleep through noise once I’m asleep — I’m infamous in my family for sleeping through the Great Storm of 1987, while chaos raged all around — but light invariably wakes me up. Over the year that we’ve lived here, I’ve more or less got used to the light levels in the room at night, but last night the wretched light decided to start randomly turning itself on and off as frequently as once every 20 seconds. It woke me up at 1am, and it was like being in a really tragic disco, with one white light randomly flashing away to the deafening sound of silence. I could see the change in light levels even with my eyes shut, so I was lying awake, waiting for it to turn on or off again, which nearly drove me crazy.

I think that it’s about time we actually got our act together and got some light-proof material to line the curtains with. Otherwise I’m going to have to tie a bandanna around my eyes and blindfold myself before I go to bed.

Nearly a year ago, we watched a film called Capote (IMDB page), which we both enjoyed a lot. Last week, we watched another very similar film about Truman Capote, called Infamous. It made for an interesting comparison. While both films are based on different books (‘Capote’ is based on a book by Gerald Clarke, and ‘Infamous’ on one by George Plimpton), they both document the same event: the research that Capote did for his book ‘In Cold Blood’ about the murder of a family in Kansas.

Both feature excellent leads and supporting actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman in ‘Capote’ and Toby Jones in ‘Infamous’), but the feel and tone of both films is quite different. ‘Capote’ was quite dark, leaving you with the predominant feeling that Truman was a cold manipulator, consuming the story of the two killers to build his literary reputation. In contrast, in ‘Infamous’, Capote came across as a much warmer, more charming and witty person, damaged by his upbringing and finding something of a soulmate in Perry Smith (Daniel Craig). You got glimpses of his coldness every now and then, but those references were much more ambiguous. In ‘Infamous’, Perry becomes enraged after pouring his heart out to Capote, when he finds out he plans to title his book ‘In Cold Blood’, seeing it as a betrayal. Capote tries to persuade him that the title refers in equal measure to the coldness of the authorities, preparing the execute the men in a pre-meditated way that he feels is almost worse than the original crime. But in ‘Capote’, it could equally apply to Truman’s own enterprise of writing about the details of the crime.

‘Infamous’ was released about a year after ‘Capote’, and I can imagine that none of the people involved with it were too pleased about the timing. However, both films work rather well together, showing subtly different aspects of an inherently ambiguous story.

I like the equinoxes. Winter and summer I can take or leave (though I’m fond of bright, cold, crisp winter days and cool but sunny summer days), but I love spring and autumn. After the literal washout of a summer that we experienced this year, the autumn is proving to be a real gem. The autumn foliage colours have been stunning, and have been shown off at their best by the bright, low sun. Riding to work has been a joy. In the morning, I’ve passed through veils of low-lying mist, just caressing the ground and the river, making even the football pitch look romantic — quite an achievement in my opinion. In the evening, the low sun has set fire to the leaves at the red end of the spectrum, turning them into glowing jewels on a backdrop of emerald green. One tree had dropped many of its leaves on the ground, and they were such a bright yellow that from a distance I thought there was a pool of sunlight under the tree. I was so impressed that I wrote a bad Twitter haiku about it.

Crowning the magical feel of the past few weeks, I saw the electric blue flash of a kingfisher on Friday — an amazing but improbable sight on an urban, rubbish strewn stream. I’m going to try to make the most of this amazing season while it lasts, and before the nights start closing in.

I suppose this is something of a LazyWeb request: for various reasons that I’ll explain below, I want an easy way to record, log and report on my activity at work. Before I write something myself, does anyone know of a good tool for doing this? I’d consider a standard Mac application, Unix command line utility, or even an online application at a pinch.

There are loads of invoicing or billing applications out there, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. My time isn’t billable (unfortunately), nor do I have clients as such (unless I get all management-speaky about the students and other ‘stakeholders’, which I hope I’ll never do). What I’d like is a very simple and quick way to record a description of what I’m currently working on, and whether it’s admin, research or teaching related, then hit a ‘record time’ button to record how long I work on it. Ideally, I’d also like to record activities after the event, if I have a lecture or a meeting that I’m not able to record actively. I’d like to be able to view and export a simple report of my activity each week, showing total hours and the percentage of time spent on each of my 3 categories of activity. In needs to be very quick and easy to use, and unobtrusive when I want it to be, otherwise I’m never going to use it, and cheap or free because I’m a poor academic.

So, why am I interested in doing such a crazy thing? There are a couple of reasons:

1. I’m not required to log my time in detail at all, but funding bodies now use the concept of Full Economic Costing (FEC¹) when funding grants. As a consequence, we’re supposed to record the percentage of time each year that we spend on different categories of research, teaching, admin and so on. We just try to guesstimate it, but I’m a scientist and I’d like to have some actual data to base my guess on.
2. I’m curious. Juggling teaching and research (not to mention the administrative load of each) is very tricky, so it would be interesting to know just how much time I spend on each. I also feel that recording my time would help me focus without getting distracted, and also provide a bit of positive feedback at the end of the day. I’m feeling very swamped at the moment, so anything that might help seems worth trying. It’s very easy to have a madly busy day and feel at the end of it that you haven’t accomplished anything, when you’ve actually got quite a bit done. Alternatively, it could end up totally depressing me — frankly, it could go either way.

So, do any of you know of any great software that I’ve missed?

¹ See ‘Father Ted’ for pronunciation. ↑

Back in April, I wrote about trying to sync two computers via a server. It actually worked pretty well for quite a long time, but for a number of reasons, I’ve recently changed how I sync them. By coincidence, Merlin Mann issued a Geek Throwdown to ask people how they manage to sync two or more Macs, so I thought I’d write about my new method.

The old way involved using a self-written script to rsync files in ~/sync to my Strongspace online file space. This served as an intermediary, so that I would sync up my files to Strongspace before leaving work, then sync them down to my home computer on reaching home, reversing the process when leaving home again. As I said, it worked well, but had a few drawbacks.

1. The obvious one is that it requires working Internet connection, and for Strongspace to be operational. This wasn’t a practical problem for almost all of the time, but I’ve had a couple of instances (when I’m about to start work or leave for home, of course) when I lost the network or Strongspace went down.
2. The more pressing problem was that synching various files from ~/Library required an elaborate system of symlinks, and I had to keep my documents folder in ~/sync/Documents. This got rather tiresome to maintain, partly because quite a few applications dump files like templates into ~/Documents, without allowing you to change the location.
3. I wanted to start syncing my Movies and Pictures folders as well, but that was going to strain bandwidth and storage space on Strongspace, and would require yet more symlinking jiggery-pokery.
4. By using rsync, I tended to lose the metadata associated with files (like Finder labels). This wasn’t a huge deal, but it was annoying.

So now I do what I probably should have done in the first place, and use a 2.5 inch external hard drive to sync more or less the whole of my home folder using ChronoSync. ChronoSync has quite useful and easy to understand rules for including or excluding items, so I can easily tell it to exclude all of ~/Library/Preferences except for the Mail preferences for example. Otherwise, I include everything in home except for my .ssh directory and one or two other config files, my Preferences folder (because I have a lot of preferences set differently on the two computers), Logs and Caches. I’ve also stopped using .Mac sync, and now sync my Mail mailboxes and settings, Keychains, bookmarks (and history) and so on using ChronoSync. ChronoSync is very quick, and there’s a ‘Trial Sync’ feature showing what is going to get copied in each direction, which is reassuring, particularly when you start using it. Deleted files get put in an ‘_Archived Items’ folder, so if something does go wrong with the odd file, you can just drag it back to its rightful place.

It’s pretty easy in practice. You have to remember to quit applications that might hang on to a database (like Address Book) before you sync, but the ‘bi-directional sync’ does a very good job of working out what needs to be updated in which direction. I sync up before I leave for work to the drive, connect the drive to my work Mac, sync again, then once again before I leave for home. It does mean that I have to carry the drive around, but it’s pretty light and small, so that’s not a huge problem. It also means that I miss out on having a current copy of my files genuinely offsite on Strongspace, but I suppose I could mirror my files once a day to Strongspace anyway.

I’m pretty happy with the way it’s working. When I get home, I can open Safari, use the ‘Reopen all windows from last session’ command (I’m using the Safari 3 beta), and have all the pages I was looking at while at work open up, as well as the associated history. I’ve also changed the way I access my email, which I’ll talk about in a later article.

It’s the 50 year anniversary of the disastrous fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor, and there was an excellent documentary on BBC Two on Monday. I knew the basic story of the fire, but not the details, which — it has to be said — were fairly terrifying. It could easily have turned into a far more serious situation, but for the actions of staff at the site.

As they said in the documentary, because it was Britain’s first nuclear reactor, they had no idea what to do when the fire broke out. The deputy general manager, Tom Tuohy, described climbing up on top of the pile, opening an inspection hatch and seeing a raging inferno inside the graphite core. I can’t remember his exact words in the documentary, but he grinned and said something like, “I remember thinking, Blimey! What a mess.” Classic British understatement strikes again… They took the brave step of running water through the pile, without knowing at the time whether it would put the fire out or cause a massive explosion. In the end, it did neither; the fire still burned because of the air blown through the pile which was also supposed to cool the uranium cartridges. Again, they had another terrible decision to make about whether to leave the fans running and risk spreading and feeding the fire, or turn them off and risk further overheating. They chose to turn the fans off, and luckily the fire went out.

The whole situation seemed to have been exacerbated by corners which were cut in the Government’s rush to manufacture enough material to produce a H-bomb and convince the Americans that Britain was a genuine nuclear power, worthy of sharing their nuclear secrets. Parts of the aluminium cooling casings surrounding each uranium rod were trimmed to try to increase the output of plutonium, which probably contributed to the overheating problem. The safety measures also seemed laughable — the workers were poking the cartridges out with old scaffolding poles at one point (reminiscent of something Homer Simpson would try to pull off), and they were only protected by flimsy looking plastic suits and rudimentary breathing apparatus. Macmillan’s report covered up the poor decisions and pressure imposed by the Government, and blamed the fire on an “error of judgement”, which was grossly unfair on all those who risked their lives to try to get the fire under control.

I read an excellent article by Paul Graham a while ago about the perils of accumulating possessions, and the way that they can weigh you down as you subconsciously worry about them. It’s not a novel observation, of course, but he sets out the problem very clearly.

I also worry about how much ‘stuff’ I have, even though I’m not (by current standards) a particularly materialistic or acquisitive person. Even so, it’s horribly easy to acquire a mountain of possessions, which becomes startlingly (and expensively) apparent when you move house. I hate buying clothes, but because of that, I don’t throw away old clothes until they are literally falling apart. So even a very modest rate of acquisition of new clothes means that the storage starts to burst at the seams. You can imagine how bad the situation is for things that I enjoy buying, like music, books and electronics.

I’ve been trying to wean myself off the accumulation habit. My motivation is partly to do with reducing my spending, partly out of a wish to reduce my environmental impact, but also just to step off the consumer treadmill and have less stuff. Now that we have a library so conveniently close to our house, I don’t buy books unless it’s a reference book that will be useful for many years, or a particularly treasured novel that I’ll read again many times. We rent DVDs from LOVEFiLM for general viewing, and only buy DVDs when we know it’s something we’ll watch many times (like The Big Lebowski or Firefly). I’ve also instituted a kind of self-imposed ‘cooling-off period’ for other non-essential purposes. If what I’m thinking of buying isn’t replacing something broken, I make myself wait a month before buying it. I think about it, price up alternatives and so on, but I just don’t buy it for a month. If I still want it at the end of that time, I go ahead, but often I find that the urge has worn off as I find that my life has miraculously gone along unhindered, despite the lack of that thing I thought was so important to my happiness. Don’t get me wrong — I like a lot of my stuff, and I’m not about to sit cross-legged in an empty white cube any time soon. I just want to whittle things down a set of items that actually enhance my life.

I also read a piece by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian about the rise in popularity of services which allow rental of goods, rather than ownership. His point was that this was symptomatic of ‘commitment phobia’, but I actually think that renting rather than owning things is good thing (with the exception of the pet rental service mentioned - that’s an appalling idea). It’s an anti-materialistic feeling, and it’s probably better for the environment: why own a car or bike or expensive clothes that you’ll only use occasionally, when you can rent it and share the usage of one item with others?

I always laugh when I property shows on TV, where couples without children want a four or five bedroom house. Really, what are they going to do with all that space? Why do they need it? If they both work at home, they might need a couple of extra rooms to turn into offices, but after that, it’s hard to see why all that space is necessary. The problem is a circular one — as Paul Graham mentioned, the more stuff you have, the more space you need to house it all. But when you get a bigger place, you need more stuff to kit out the rooms as well (TVs, audio equipment, decorative items). Before you know it, you need a six bedroom house, even though there are only two of you. It’s craziness, and I want to get out of it.

I saw a van belonging to a local bathroom fitting company today — a company which has the word Classique in its name. Now, what does that word bring to your mind when applied to bathroom fittings? What logo would would say Classique to you?

• Luxurious Roman baths, decked out with fine mosaics?
• Basins with Doric columns supporting them?
• A Victorian claw-foot bath?
• Something redolent of ancient Greek temples?

Evidently, that wasn’t what the graphic designer had in mind. The van featured a large logo depicting a stick man sitting on the toilet, reading a newspaper. Classy.