Pilot Capless Pen

I am now the proud owner of a Pilot Capless pen.

I have been keen to get one for a while now but a few things came together:

• My old pen leaked when I was with a client - not a major problem on that occasion, but I took it as a warning
• That pen kept drying out - I must admit that I use a laptop so much that my pens get very intermittent use ( I also got some Namiki ink to solve this problem - some people have cited Quink ink as a problem for pens which aren't used frequently)
  
• My wife allowed me to buy my own present :-)
  

Initial experiences are positive - looks great and writes smoothly. Leaking and drying up will take time to test.

I hadn't seen this article until just now, but the advantages of the pen are well put and the same on-line site Cult Pens was used: great price and very fast delivery.

More on doing GTD

A very interesting post by Venkatesh Rao.

Interesting to see how a 7-year GTD veteran deals with lifes uncertainties - and his memory! Actually that last point makes it especially valuable - hearing from from super-organised , never forget anything people is so unrealistic..... well isn't it?

Blogging from emacs with g-client

Just to add a new , weird and wonderful way of blogging, I have now
added (re-added?) Emacs as an environment. A bit of messing about
with Emacs 23 and w3m-snapshot to make it work.

New David Allen book arrives

My copy of "Making It All Work" has arrived, yet more to read
post-Xmas, but I think this will be near the top of the pile

Pocket Informant on Blackberry

One of my favourite applications on my dear old iPAQ is Pocket Informant. The iPAQ is now mainly a (rather large) music player.

I was delighted to find that PI is now available for my Blackberry

Excellent news - really looks good and has many great functions - everything seems very easy to see ( I love the Agenda view) and adding new stuff is easy. My categories etc. for GTD work just fine.

This version lacks things that I would like from the Windows version: hierarchies of tasks, links from tasks to contacts are a couple that I used to use a lot. As this is an early version on this platform I am confident there will be new features coming along regulalrly

From Bad Science:

Writing this column really scares me because I wonder whether everything else in the media is as shamelessly, venally, manipulatively, one-sidedly, selectively reported on as the things I know about. But this week the reality editing was truly without comparison.

Interesting on 2 counts: 1) the particuares of MMR and the fact it could prevent arthma, 2) another data point for the power of the media and its ability to influeunce and mislead.

Certainly, whenever I see artices in normal newspapers aboutr a subject I know well I marvel at how misleading they are.  This is usually appears to be down to the ignorance of the reporter rather than deliberate attempts to misinform.  But then most of these topics that I know well are not politics, big business etc.

Worrying - perhaps the demise of newspapers won't be such a bad thing ( so long as Bad Science maintains a blog!) 

For how much longer? Revisited

I asked "For how much longer?":

I think, with the UK pre-budget, the affordability of a lot of programmes is now in question, including education and health.

For how much longer?

Student grants at risk after botched costing | Education | The Guardian

A department spokesman said: "The government is fully committed to the expansion of higher education and can ensure finance should not be a barrier to those that want to do a degree."

My emphasis added - I suspect we are very close to the point where this statement will prove impossible to fulfill. We ran a huge deficit when times were good - now we have decreasing tax income and extra costs.

The future of Lisp is.........

Lisp50 Notes part VI: The Future of Lisp « Learning Lisp

And unlike some of the talks that were tinged with a little bitterness, a sense of loss, or a sense of nostalgia, Hickey was upbeat and forward looking. “Lisp as an idea is still vibrant, especially among young developers,” he said. “People are excited about Lisp and the idea of Lisp.” ........... After JonL was finished responding, a young developer in the back could not contain himself. “This is the best thing I’ve ever heard in any conference,” he said. “Great work.”

And that’s what the Lisp50 conference was about.

Great series of reports from Lisp50, and a great deal of excitement about Clojure.

Footnotes in Google docs

Official Google Docs Blog: Adding footnotes to your documents

Last week, we added support for footnotes. You can find footnotes in the Insert menu. When you create a footnote, it'll appear to the right of the document margin and a footnote marker (#) will appear within the actual document. You can drag and drop footnotes anywhere you'd like by clicking on the pound sign and dragging it.

But in a printed do or PDF it appears as a normal footnote; nice!!

How to think like Leonardo da Vinci

How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci

Since my childhood, I was utterly fascinated by the figure of Leonardo da Vinci and his achievements. It never ceased to puzzle and amaze me how a single person could be a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

Luciano has done a great summary of a book that I have had for years - a great book which I must look at again. In addition he has pointed to a technology I was not aware of - Freemind Flash browser.

He also has an interview with Mark Forster

Will the credit crunch affect Open Source more than Closed Source projects?

James Robertson raises an interesting point:

Open Source Directions

In the midst of all of this financial uncertainty, I'm really curious as to how various open source projects will fare. Will they suffer because the corporations backing them will pull back? Or, in the midst of layoffs, will they keep plugging away because people have nothing else to work on? Or will corporations keep investing in open source - assuming services revenues hold up?

I have no idea, to be honest - but I imagine that there's going to be an impact.

I have no idea either ( aren't bloggers useless), perhaps there is some data somewhere.  The answer depends on many things including the types of participant, license, business model etc.  For instance:

• Amateur programmers: the students and others chipping in for the fun and experience of it will continue - perhaps they will do more as their willingness to spend on movies, restaurants, bars goes down?
• Open source projects which support a pure services play
  
• Open source projects which are a foundation for other projects (e.g Eclipse) - affected by the down turn in the license sales but perhaps gaining from sharing development of the commodity components
• Combinations of the last 2 points - could be spreading the risk.

Of course, what about businesses depending on non-open source?  These will slow down for sure, but more or less than those based on Open Source?

My gut feel says that everyone will hurt, but that any business model which sidesteps a business model which makes their customers shell out large lumps of money will suffer most.  Lot's of small transactions or amateurism will win out !

Pratchgan - wonderful

Ramblings of a yarn junkie: The Pratchgan 2008 - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!!!

The Pratchgan was handed to Terry

This is just fantastic!

A good piece of philosophy and a reinforcement of GTD

Merlin Mann makes a learning point out of a minor crisis:Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts | 43 Folders

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

It reminds me that I am not diligent with my context labels; must do better, though even here contexts can be assigned when needed so there is no excuse not to know wht you can do at a particular point in time and space. For instance, I quite often scan my to-dos and can spot the context from the text - assigning contexts just makes this faster, and searchable if you use the right tool

Jython 2.5 Alpha Released!

Frank Wierzbicki's Weblog: Jython 2.5 Alpha Released!

On behalf of the Jython development team, I'm pleased to announce that
Jython 2.5a1+ is available for download. See the installation instructions.

This is great news - I am so glad to see Jython coming back to life!

What do they know?

A new site to find Freedom of Information (FoI) requests:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

Another cool emacs utility

Life Is Too Short For Bad Code: Emacs Tip #21: pabbrev (predictive abbreviation expansion)

pabbrev is a yet another package for abbreviation expansion in Emacs. Unlike dabbrev, this one analyzes the contents of the buffers during idle time, and shows potential expansions based on word frequency. This package also shows potential expansions as you are typing. For example if you were typing 'pred', this is what you would see:


p[oint]
pr[ogn]
pre[-command-hook]
pred[ictive]

Affordable Tea

The Half-Dipper: Affordable Tea

Best April Fool by far!!

Damien Katz: CouchDB Language Change

So, after a lot of heated discussion internally, I'm somewhat sad to say that Erlang will not be used in future releases of CouchDB. We are switching the whole codebase to (...drumroll..) Java.

Saving Lisp applications as SBCL images

Nice article on saving and distributing Lisp applications from SBCL:

Freezing Lisp in Time | Mikael Jansson

So, when you're done with the heavy processing and finally want to distribute your work as an application, or maybe resume work later after that RAM upgrade, here's how!

Looks nice and simple. However the image is large! Hopefully someone will chip in with a way of improving this.