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Like many people who work on more than one computer at more than one location, I’ve had a perennial problem with making sure that all the files I need are on all the computers I use. My first attempt used a home-brewed set of rsync scripts to sync files up and down from Joyent’s Strongspace file server. For various reasons, I then switched to using a portable hard drive with ChronoSync. I used that successfully for quite a while, but it meant that I had to carry a fragile hard drive around, and it took a while to sync things up and down at the beginning and end of each day.

Recently, there have been a rash of services which sync your data between computers, using an online store as an intermediary. I had a trial of SugarSync and liked it a lot, but when I tried Dropbox, I was smitten. Ironically, it has fewer features than SugarSync (though many of the missing features are in development at the moment), but there’s something about the transparency of the way that it works that appealed to me. I liked it even better when — after signing up for a beta with 2 GB of free space, I was entered into a competition to win 50 GB of space for a year and won! 50 GB is more than enough to hold everything I need to sync in my home folder, and gave me the opportunity to really try it out properly.

The way it works is very simple: you install the Dropbox client, which just shows itself as a menu bar item in Mac OS X. This creates a “Dropbox” folder in your home folder, though you can relocate it if you want. Everything you put into the Dropbox is automatically synced to all other computers running Dropbox. If you put stuff in ~/Dropbox/Public it’s accessible to anyone to whom you give the URL, and a quick right-click on the file copies that URL to the clipboard.

At the moment, you can’t choose to sync existing folders outside your Dropbox, but a clever trick with symlinks allows you to make it work. In the instructions, you’re told to create a symlink in the original location to the original file in the Dropbox, but I do it the other way around (so that my files remain in their original locations), and it works perfectly. So in my Dropbox, I have a collection of symlinks to other folders, which means that everything I want to sync between computers (all of Documents, Music, Movies, Pictures, a few folders in Library and a few in Library/Application Support) get synced up.

It keeps revisions of files, so if I want to go back to a previous revision, I can, and it creates a copy if it can’t reconcile changes made concurrently. In practice, I’ve never had a problem, and it has all worked transparently. Because it’s constantly syncing changes, it takes very little time to sync the latest changes at the end of the day, so it’s much faster than my previous methods. Likewise, if I lose the network connection for a while, it’s not a serious problem, because syncing will just catch up as soon as I get back online. Also, if Dropbox went away tomorrow, all my files would be exactly where they’ve always been: on my hard drive. I’d just lose the syncing part and have to go back to one of my previous methods. I’ve also found the public box very useful when collaborating on documents with colleagues, rather than emailing attachments.

There are some interesting new features planned, the most useful of which will be the ability to specify folders to sync, without having to use symlinks, but it works so well right now, that I’m very happy with it as it is.

• PLoS Biology - PLoS Biology at 5: The Future Is Open Access
  "On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders—working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly communication… " It will be interesting to see what happens to scientific journals in the next 5 years.
  (tags: academia journal open_access)

I think we’ve more or less come to the end of the vegetables from our allotment and garden. There are one or two tomatoes left on the plants in our conservatory, but that’s it. So I’ve been looking back on our gardening year.

In some ways, we did better than last year. The allotment is more productive and better organised, and some crops that we utterly failed with last year (courgettes and tomatoes, for example) have done fairly well this year. But we were battling the weather all year. Both the garden and allotment are on heavy clay soil. It’s quite fertile, but the downside is that when it rains, it gets waterlogged very easily. And when it’s waterlogged, the slugs come out in plague-like numbers. So the incessant rain and lack of sunny conditions really hampered our horticultural efforts this summer.

One or two plants thrived in the rain. The potatoes did very well, and we got a good crop, except for a few tubers eaten by slugs underground. The courgettes also revelled in the rain, and because we sowed the seeds in pots first then planted out when they were larger, they were big enough to withstand the ravages of slugs. Courgette stems and leaves are quite spiky when they get bigger, so I think they deter slugs naturally once they get beyond a certain size. The fruits put on incredible growth in a very short time. We frequently left a small courgette on the plant, thinking it wasn’t quite big enough for picking, then came back a couple of days later to find a giant marrow.

The tomatoes outside rotted in the wet, but the ones inside did OK. We didn’t get a huge crop, but the fruits we did get were really sweet and delicious, and I felt as if they were worth all the pampering you have to give tomatoes.

The runner beans struggled a bit, but produced a reasonable crop, but our Cherokee beans — which did so well last year — were disappointing. All our other beans and the many varieties of greens (chard, pak choi, spinach greens etc.) were eaten to frilly stumps by the slugs. We did our best to control slugs, but despite trying everything (organic slug pellets, coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, plastic bottles cut into spiky protective collars, you name it) the little blighters still managed to munch on our veg.

I hope we have a sunnier, drier summer next year. While we can raise some plants in our conservatory to plant out, we can’t do that for all of them, so some have to brave the ravages of the slugs on their own. We’re trying to grow some baby leaves in the conservatory over the winter to tide us over. Today I sowed some rocket, Australian yellow leaf lettuce, black Tuscan kale and some bunching onions, so hopefully we’ll have some small but tasty home-grown greens over the winter. Meanwhile, I’ll order some seeds for next year and dream of a balmy, warm summer.

As I cycled through the park yesterday, I saw a young lad on a bike which had the unmistakable outline of a Raleigh Chopper. He was sitting back on the banana seat, hands loosely on the ape-hanger bars, sweeping graceful, joyful curves across the path in the late evening sun. He had a huge grin on his face, and it made me smile just to see how much he was enjoying his ride. I always wanted a Chopper when I was a kid, but my parents said it was an impractical bike¹ so I got a more sensible ride. This chap’s Chopper was the ‘revival’ model, of course — they stopped making the original models, with their potentially castrating top-tube mounted gear lever, long before he was born.

When he saw me riding towards him with a smile on my face, he honked his horn — a lovely, rubber bulb horn with a clownish “honk honk” sound, which made my day.

¹ Of course it was impractical and not particularly well-made, but that was half the fun of it. And it was cool. ↑

The streets around our house are often really noisy in the hours around midnight at weekends. We live directly opposite a pub, and people tend to pile out — drunk and belligerent — to bellow at their friends or enemies¹ for hours on end. If it’s not drunkards disturbing the peace, it’s youngsters on mopeds opening the throttle right up and letting the street hear all 50 cc of raw, wasp-in-a-bottle power squeezed out by their irritating machines. So when we were woken at 4 am this morning by someone yelling in the street and beeping their car horn repeatedly, we just sighed in resignation. As usual, we looked out the window to check that no-one was in danger of injury or death, and that our property and that of our neighbours was relatively safe from accidental or deliberate vandalism. We couldn’t quite work out what the bloke in the street was yelling, but he seemed OK (if angry), so we went back to bed.

When we got up in the morning, there were a couple of Police cars parked in the street. Almost as soon as we’d turned our lights on, an officer knocked on our door and asked permission for him and his large Alsatian dog to search our garden. We’re generally law-abiding people, so it isn’t every day that we watch the Police rummaging around in our herbaceous borders while we have breakfast.

It seems that the shouting-at-4am man had been robbed of his phone and iPod² by a thief, who had then disappeared in the general direction of our back gardens. So he was shouting at the thief to try to flush him out. Needless to say, the search didn’t turn up any evidence, but I doubt that they would have found him even if they’d arrived earlier, because there are so many places to hide and then sneak away. Assuming that a mobile and iPod was all that was stolen, I’m also surprised that the Police turned up in such force. I would have thought that stolen phones/iPods are two a penny, and would elicit nothing more than a resigned face and the offer of a form to fill in from the local constabulary. But perhaps I’m cynical.

¹ It’s often hard for the casual listener to determine whether the bellowees are indeed friends or enemies. ↑

² And perhaps more, but that was all we heard about. ↑

• Apple - MacBook - Design, pg. 2
  "Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one. The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop — even examining them under an electron microscope — to get it right." This is precisely why I like Apple products. When they get it right, the care and attention to detail is phenomenal. Even though they are mass produced, they feel crafted.
  (tags: apple design macbook)
• Stuff I love: Muji Chronotebook — jackcheng.com
  A great, simple idea: forget about the grids of traditional diaries or day planners and have a blank page with an analogue clock outline in the centre, on which you can mark off your appointments. Then the rest of the page is free to do whatever you want with. It acknowledges the fact that the stuff we do tends not to be evenly distributed over the day.
  (tags: design productivity notebook organization cool)

As a postscript to yesterday’s post, while I was writing it, I wasn’t sure of my spelling of Robert Burns’ gang aglae and decided to do a quick Google search to check. Google kindly asked me if I perhaps meant “gang algae”, which I found a charming notion.

Yes, those gang algae are always hanging around in their slimy green hoodies, throwing floppy gang signs and corrupting all the young, innocent liverworts and mosses in the neighbourhood. Something ought to be done!

Mr. Bsag and I planned to go to London for the day yesterday. He had some prints in the Annual Open Exhibition at the Society of Graphic Fine Art, and was awarded a Highly Commended for one of them (yay!). He had to go and take down his work at the end of the show, so it was my last chance to see his work and the other exhibits in situ. Our plan was to get a cheap train to London on the Chiltern line, have a leisurely wander around the exhibition, get a few printing supplies from Intaglio, perhaps have a nice walk by the Thames, and top it off by having a cosy pint somewhere before coming home. It didn’t quite go according to plan.

Impediment 1: We thought we’d be able to get a cheap walk-up fare which would allow us to leave any time on a Saturday as we’ve done before, but Chiltern have changed their rules, so we had to book a ticket on line. Chiltern’s own booking page and thetrainline.co.uk showed completely different timetables. According to Chiltern, there were no cheap fares available, but thetrainline showed a few, leaving fairly late in the morning. Since we didn’t have much choice, we went for the later, cheaper train.

Impediment 2: We had to pick the tickets up from the station, but we’d had problems before with the dreaded self-service ticket machines which you’re supposed to use. However, it’s a little-known fact that even though the instructions say you can only pick up your tickets at one of a handful of stations with self-service machines, you can actually ask almost any ticket office to print the tickets for you if you give them the booking reference. So we’d timed our walk the local station to leave enough time to pick the tickets up there, get a train into the city, then walk to Moor Street Station in time to catch our train. Unfortunately, when we got to the local station, the ticket office was inexplicably closed. With a train approaching, we realised that we’d have to get the first train to leave enough time to pick up our tickets at Moor Street. The ticket machine had a long queue of similarly irritated passengers, of course, so we had to get a permit to travel and leap on the train.

Impediment 3: If you pick up your ticket to London from the local station, they include the cost of the local train journey in the price, so you don’t have to pay separately. But in our hurry to get the tickets booked, I’d forgotten to set the starting station as our local one. So when we came to join another long queue to exchange our permits to travel for tickets so we would be allowed to leave New Street Station, the dour railway official stubbornly pointed to the fact that our booking receipt said that the departure station was Moor Street, and we had to pay for two single tickets to New Street.

Impediment 4: With all this queuing and faffing about, we were getting rather close to the departure of our train. My heart sank as we ran into Moor Street Station and I saw the length of the queues at the only open ticket counter. I waited in line there for a minute or so, then decided to cut my losses and brave the self-service machines which had a shorter queue. When I got to the front, I inserted my debit card and entered the handy 20 digit booking reference (or so it seemed) on the touchscreen, whereupon the display announced smugly that it couldn’t read my card. I tried again, hoping that sliding the card in and out of the slot slowly might allow the idiot, mouth-breathing software time to read all the ones and zeros on the magnetic strip. It didn’t. I joined the queue for the other machine, fidgeting impatiently and looking at my watch. When I got to the front, I went through the whole procedure again, but this time, my card was recognised. Several geological eras later, our tickets had all been dispensed into the hopper, and I snatched them up and pelted across the concourse following Mr. B. We hared up the stairs, along the bridge and down the stairs, to see our train pulling out.

Impediment 5: The next train was 20 minutes later, but it was a stopping train and so would arrive 40 minutes or so after the one we’d planned to get, eating further into our already compressed day. Worse still, it was stopping at Wembley Stadium, where thousands of football fans were going to watch England play Kazakhstan. A large proportion of those fans seemed to be travelling from Moor Street. By some miracle, we both got a seat, and even though the fans collectively drank several lakes of Carling Black label, they were good-natured and no fights broke out. Still, we got slightly drunk on the lager fumes.

Impediment 6: London Marylebone Street! We got on the Bakerloo line southbound, and settled back thinking that the worst was over. At Oxford Circus, the train started making the ominous, escaping air sounds of a busted hydraulic system. Harried engineers bustled through the carriages with the hope that they might be able to plug something back in or slap some gaffer tape on something, but it was clear that the train was going nowhere, which meant that the Bakerloo line was going to be blocked. We jumped off the train, hurriedly consulted a tube map and decided to try our luck on the Victoria line to Stockwell, then change to the Northern line to get to Borough. It was a much longer journey, and there was a lot of running through corridors and up escalators, but we got there.

By this time, we had just 20 minutes or so to see the exhibition before the artists started taking down. We divided our efforts, and Mr. Bsag went to Intaglio to get his supplies, while I swept around the Menier Gallery. It was an excellent exhibition, so I was glad to have seen it, but it was a pretty lightning visit. Mr. Bsag joined me and we got busy with the bubblewrap and tape to pack up his prints to take home. It was a lovely evening, and it would have been really nice to wander along the river for a bit, but now we were convinced that we wanted to get a train before the final whistle at Wembley. We had a quick but very pleasant drink at a pub, then walked back to Borough tube station.

Impediment 7: As we got to the station, we could see that the shutters were closed. The lifts had stopped working, so they’d closed the station. We’d have to trek to London Bridge to get on the Northern Line. We stared. Mr. Bsag said, “You’ve got to be kidding”, though he added a few more words of a four-letter nature. Off we ran again, this time encumbered by three large, framed prints.

In the end we made it back to Marylebone in time for our train, and the rest of the journey went smoothly, but we ended up only having about two hours in London, and countless hours travelling.

On those occasions when my best laid plans gang aglae, my mood tends to go in one of two directions: I either get incredibly irritated and snappy or I see the whole situation as increasingly hilarious. I went in the latter direction this time, so in a rather perverse way, I quite enjoyed it. It was almost like finding yourself in a very bad film, subject to the whims of a poor writer who doesn’t know how to construct a believable plot. After each impediment I started to look forward to what this idiot would try to pass off as a plot twist next. “Broken-down tube train? Come on, at least throw some zombies in, then it would be funny, and you could go for the RomZomCom angle, even though it’s already been done by Edgar Wright.”

Mr. Bsag, it has to be said, was not of the same frame of mind, and regarded my amused, Buddha-like detachment with frank amazement, convinced that I’d finally gone off my rocker. My outlook might have had something to do with the fact that if I hadn’t gone to London, I would have been finishing off submitting a grant — something that I did this morning instead. It’s all relative, you see: it might have been a catalogue of mishaps, but it wasn’t wrestling with font sizes and page limits, and it at least gave me a good story to tell.

• Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library
  Drool. Forget your fancy home cinemas, if I had millions of pounds to spend, I'd build a library just like this, assuming that I had a home bigger than this library, which I currently don't.
  (tags: inspiration books technology geek design)

Last week I watched Valentine Warner’s What to Eat Now seasonal cookery programme. In this episode, Valentine visited a biodynamic farmer, who explained some of the principles of biodynamic farming. The farmer — whose name I forget, but who seemed a very nice, cheery sort of chap — showed Valentine how he makes his compost heap. Since I started growing my own veg, I’ve become a bit of a compost nerd¹, and I was whistling appreciatively at the sight of the lovely ingredients the farmer had on his heap. There was lots of greenery, including nettles which contain iron and other useful minerals, cow pats, straw and other goodies. It had the makings of wonderfully rich, nutrient-packed compost. And then he pulled out a box of containers and explained that he would put into a hole made in the heap a pinch of yarrow which had been stored in a stag’s bladder for a year (it may have been some other internal organ, I forget) hung up in the air, and then buried for a year. Or something like that. I’m afraid that I’m not certain of the details, because my mind was being boggled, and I was watching carefully to see what Valentine’s response would be. He was terribly polite, but said it sounded a bit “witchy”.

Quite. My favourite fictional witches — those in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels — rarely do any actual magic. Instead, a large component of their work involves what they refer to as ‘headology’. This is the practice of getting people to believe something so strongly that it becomes real for them. Headology is cousin to the placebo in modern medicine, though rather more diverse. Some witches, like Nanny Ogg, perfect a cosy, homely persona, so that women in labour are convinced that giving birth is the easiest and most straightforward thing in the world. Others, like Granny Weatherwax maintain such a terrifying demeanour that people stop being ill out of sheer fright. Some, like Eumenides Treason, construct a mythical reputation with a collection of dribbly candles, plastic skulls and stick-on facial warts bought from Boffo’s Joke Shop. All of these elaborate practices are maintained to convince their clients to believe that a particular story is true and real. It’s fictional of course, but I’m fairly sure that aspects of it would work in the real world, just as we know that the placebo effect exists.

You probably see where I’m going with this. Headology works because people have minds, and I’m certain that it would have no perceptible effect on beetroot. The compost was responsible for his great beetroot, and the “witchy” bits were entirely optional. The only person being worked on by the yarrow-in-stag’s bladder routine is the farmer. It’s a shame really, because there are lots of very sensible and scientifically robust practices in biodynamic farming, like looking after the soil well, and making great compost. But then they go and spend a lot of time and energy on something that must have no measurable effect on the quantity or quality of the crop. Of course, I’ve had limited exposure to biodynamic methods, so it could be that the farmer featured in the program was on the far fringe of the movement.

¹ I know, along with all my other domains of nerdery… I’m a nerd of all trades and a master of none. ↑

• How I Learned to Code - PaulStamatiou.com
  As a not very well self-taught programmer (I blame the teacher!), I'm always curious about what people learn in an official CS education.
  (tags: coding development programming)

• Cocoa Is My Girlfriend » Cocoa Touch Tutorial: iPhone Application Example
  Beginners tutorial on making iPhone applications. Long live the NDA! It's great that developers can now share these kinds of tips.
  (tags: apple iphone cocoa development)

I really like Apple’s Remote application on the iPhone, which lets you use the phone like a remote control for iTunes, complete with library browsing and display of cover art. However, in the living room, I tend to listen to my music collection using my SliMP3 player, via SlimServer running on the iMac upstairs. So I was delighted to find a plugin for SlimServer, called iPeng which does the same job as Remote for my SliMP3.

It’s not actually a native iPhone application: you access it via MobileSafari using a special URL, and it shows you a very nice interface for your library, with full control over playlists and so forth. However, it’s easy to put an icon for the URL on the main screen, so in practice, you hardly notice that it’s not a native app.

I do have a standard remote control for the SliMP3, but it’s much easier searching and browsing my music collection from the iPhone, rather than fiddling about with the limited buttons on the physical remote. I love the way I keep finding additional uses for my iPhone — it’s certainly the most versatile gadget I own. Somehow, it manages to be a Jack and Master of All Trades.