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Tiger gave me another pleasant surprise today. I’ve got an external Iomega SuperDrive CD/DVD-RW at work, but due to a slight glitch in communication with the person who bought it for me, I ended up with a USB2 unit rather than a Firewire one. Under Panther, the drive wasn’t recognised by the system, so I couldn’t use iDVD or the Finder to burn discs. There were ways around it, so I didn’t return the drive, but it was irritating.

Today, I had to burn some footage to a DVD and switched the burner on. To my surprise, Tiger fully supports the drive now, so I could use iDVD to burn the disc without any problems. It’s great to see more hardware being supported by Mac OS X.

[Apologies are due to Mr. W. Blake for abusing his poem in pursuit of a Sun-style punning headline. Sorry, William.]

Here’s one for the academic geeks… After many years of using Endnote, I’ve finally switched to using BibDesk to organise my references. This will probably make me sound prehistoric, but when I did my PhD I used 3 x 5 index cards in a box to file my references. This had certain advantages—-you could pop down to the library with a stack of blank cards and fill the details in as you did your reading—-but they were hell to search. Things were fine if you could remember the first author, but if you only knew one of the authors, or part of the title, you were sunk. And then there was the whole dropping the entire box on the floor and having to resort the references thing—-not a good use of time.

So, when I switched to Endnote, it felt like a huge step up. There has always been a bit of a reference manager divide between the Physical Sciences and the Biosciences. Physicists, mathematicians and engineers tend to use LaTeX to write their papers (because of the all the equations, for one thing), so naturally use BibTeX to organise their references. Biologists tend to use Word (ack), and so use Endnote. I wish that this wasn’t the case, because BibTeX has a lot to recommend it. The files are just structured plain text, so there’s no fear that years of research will be locked into a corrupted, proprietary format. For the same reason, it’s easy to send colleagues snippets of text that can just be pasted into their *.bib files, already in the right format.

I’m writing in LaTeX much more now, so I felt that the time was right to switch. Endnote has felt more and more elderly, bloated and unloved over the years, and I’m happy to see the back of it. BibDesk is Open Source, and has great Applescript support, so even if you’re not using LaTeX, you can fairly easily knock up a script to print out your reference list nicely.

While I’m on the subject of references, I’ve also really got in to using CiteULike. It’s similar to del.icio.us, but geared towards academic references. It has tags, and the social nature of the system means that you often pick up interesting references by surfing other people’s tags. We have a reading group at work, and it’s really handy to list and tag the papers we’re going to read on CiteULike, so that everyone has the full information. As a bonus, it’s really easy to import or export references as BibTeX (or Endnote, but I haven’t tested that).

Merlin has—-as ever—-some great tips for getting those stubborn, been-there-forever tasks off your list. As well as containing the glorious phrase “plane some cringe off of your hated tasks”, which would look great on a T-shirt, he suggests identifying the tasks that make you cringe then trying to work out why.

I’ve had an embarrassing number of those kinds of tasks that manage to linger on the list for ages, which was the main motivation for planning a feature in Tracks to flag them up. It’s weird but I often find that when I do eventually get around to doing those ‘cringe items’ they turn out to be easy and trivial, and I don’t have a clue why I was hung up on them for so long.

On a semi-related note, there was a great Dilbert cartoon today about the work-life balance.

I spent a bit of time at the weekend finishing the main work of updating Tracks to use Ajax to edit, create and delete items. For those of you who don’t know what Ajax is, it’s basically some clever Javascript that allows you to make changes to the database and show those changes ‘live’ without having to refresh the whole page. It makes the whole thing much more like a normal application, rather than a web application.

For those of you keeping up with Tracks development, I’ve put a couple of silly movies showing me editing projects in the new interface here. You can have a good laugh at my typos—-typing while recording live is surprisingly tricky.

On a side note, I’m using Snapz Pro to make the movies. It’s incredibly good, and while I’m just using a demo version at the moment, I think I’ll pony up for a licence.

You might have noticed the white band at the top right of the page, linking to Make Poverty History. It’s a very worthy cause, so pay them a visit and do what you can.

I love Futurama. We got given a box set of Season 3 at Christmas, and we’re slowly working our way through the episodes, helpless with laughter. In many ways, I prefer it to The Simpsons. I’ve just watched A Pharaoh to Remember, in which Bender has a bit of a hissy fit because he thinks no-one will remember him. His friends try to cheer him up by organising a surprise funeral for him, but he criticises all the eulogies from his coffin (“Loud-er and sad-der”), and eventually storms off (“This is the worst funeral ever!”). They all get captured and forced into slavery when delivering a block of sandstone to Osiris 4. While they are in the slave ship, in chains, Fry complains to Leela,

Fry: You know the worse thing about being a slave? They make you work, but they don’t pay you or let you go.

Leela: That’s the only thing about being a slave.

Priceless.

It’s the craze that’s sweeping the planet. Today I’ve been passed the musical baton by fellow TextDriver Justin French, and by Alnisa Allgood so here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer?

PowerBook: 5.5 GB, 1168 songs, 3.4 days of playing time, but that’s just for my elderly iPod. The real stuff is on the iMac (15.9 GB).

The last CD I bought was?

I bought a batch of three last time (whadda ya mean, that’s cheating?): Disraeli Gears by Cream, Talkin’ Honky Blues by Buck 65 and Guero by Beck.

Song playing right now?

‘Tabula Rasa’ by the composer Arvo Pärt from the album Tabula Rasa

Five songs I listen to a lot/mean a lot to me?

Five? You’re kidding, right? Well, I’ll do my best to restrict it to five, but I’m not promising anything. In no particular order,

1. ‘Intoxicated’ from the album Night Song by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook. Nusrat had such an incredible voice, and on this album he and Michael Brook bridge the hemispheres. This is velvet and sweet and bitter, and his voice soars away ecstatically. I listen to this a lot.
2. ‘Wild Nights’ from the album Harmonium by the composer John Adams. The words come from an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name, and this is a wild ride. It starts very softly, with the chorus making almost wordless sounds that appear from nothingness, peaks with a huge, dramatic and orgasmic crescendo, and then slides back down to serenity and peace again. If this doesn’t make your heart thump, you’re officially dead.
3. ‘Plastic Factory’ from the album Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. This has a stomping, hob-nailed beat with The Captain growling out “Factory’s no place for me/Boss Man leave me be” in his lupine howl. Even if you don’t work in a factory (or for that matter, have a ‘Boss Man’), play this on the way home from work and your mood will improve exponentially.
4. ‘Song of Solomon’ from the album The Red Shoes by Kate Bush. Kate Bush has produced so much high quality music over the years that I find it almost impossible to pick just one song. She may not be fashionable, young or ‘street’, but I keep coming back to her music time and time again. That must mean something—-possibly that I’m not fashionable, young or street. I love the mixture of words from the Book of Solomon and the astounding backing by the Trio Bulgarka. There’s a slight pause around the middle of the track before both Kate and the Trio come soaring in, and it’s then that every single hair on my body stands on end. Every time.
5. ‘Revelator’ from the album Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch. I haven’t had this very long, but I already know that it will stand the test of time. Beautiful acoustic guitar playing accompanied by lovely harmonies. It’s beautifully melancholic.

I’m passing on the baton to…

Let’s see… How about David from fuddland, Pliable from On An Overgrown Path, Sarah from not you, the other one, Lyle from D4D and Mr. D. from Aprosexic.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been trying out Backpack. It’s rather difficult to describe exactly what it does, and the best way to learn is by trying it yourself (you can sign up for a limited free account). However, by just saying “Go and try it”, I feel that I’m failing in my duty to the geek community, and being pretty lazy into the bargain. So here’s a slightly more informative discussion.

Backpack allows you to create and link together a number of web pages, which can contain text, check lists, notes (blog-like entries with a title and a date stamp), links to other pages and tags (like del.icio.us tags). In addition, if you have any of the account plans other than the free one, you can also upload images and files. Backpack uses Ajax extensively to handle creation, deletion and editing of elements, so it feels very snappy and smooth to use as you rarely have to refresh the page to see your changes.

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I can’t tell you what a delight it is to finally have a real garden especially now that summer is on the way. I spent a while today just sitting in the sunshine outside and letting the warmth seep into my bones. One of the things I love about living in a drizzly, temperate country is the sheer joy you experience the first time you feel real warmth and sunlight after the winter. Warmth and sunshine all year round would be nice, but it wouldn’t be anything special. It’s part of my philosophy of life that—-no matter how unpleasant it is—-you have to experience the ‘downs’ to really appreciate the ‘ups’.

Anyway, sitting outside today—-looking at my newly planted flowers, watching the butterflies chasing one another around, the blue tits visiting my bird feeder and enjoying the smell of growth—-was definitely one of the ‘ups’.

We got a mysterious cardboard package in the post from The Guardian newspaper today. it looked a bit like an Amazon package, and we were trying to remember if either of us had ordered any books or CDs from the paper. On opening it up, were were amazed and baffled to find—-carefully shrouded in bubble wrap—-a sheet of lasagne (uncooked) printed with the following text:

THE ESSENTIAL ITALIAN INGREDIENT

The new book, River Café Two Easy20 pages of gourmet Italian recipes exclusively revealed this Saturday

The Guardian

And—-just in case any of the lucky recipients suddenly thought, “Oh, I’ll make a very minimalist lasagne tonight!”—-the bubble wrap was printed with the warning, “For promotional use only and strictly not for consumption”.

I’ll concede that it’s probably the most unusual junk mail I’ve ever received, but how much must it have cost to send carefully wrapped sheets of pasta out to thousands of households, not to mention the waste of cardboard, plastic and fuel? It was certainly unsolicited, unless we failed to uncheck an obscure box somewhere which read:

Please send me promotional but functionally useless Italian comestibles.

The world gets weirder by the day.

Yesterday night I was making a comment and found that I’d been blacklisted as a spammer—-on my own blog! I un-blacklisted myself, but it was clear that Spam Karma (the plugin I use to stem the flow of comment spam) was having some issues. I took a look at the Spam Karma page, and it confirmed that I needed to upgrade to version 2.0, which I’ve now done.

I found a few of legitimate posts that were in the digest (and Phil emailed to let me know his comment had been swallowed), so I’ve tried to manually enter the ones I’ve found. However, there may be others which have already disappeared into the black hole—-if so, I can only apologise. Let me know if you have any more problems leaving comments, but it should be back to normal now.