My Digital Life

I was just going through my RSS feeds and spotted a post from Laughing Squid about a video IBM commissioned in 1968 as a glossary of computer terms.

I was going to send it as a joke to a mate of mine who’s doing something similar, but having watched it I was surprised that it’s all still more or less accurate.  Not sure why it surprised me, after all the basic principles are all still the same.  I guess I still think of this stuff as being modern!  It’s easy to forget that we’re not really doing anything new… we’re just doing in differently.  Hell, before computers people managed and organised data and information quite happily for centuries.

Oh… and there’s a nice bit of early DeepZooming in there too!

A computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

A few months ago I decided to rebuild my home laptop, once I installed Vista and all the drivers and stuff, it came to the point that I’d usually install McAfee AV… and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

Now I’m sure McAfee does a great job detecting Viruses, but without exception every computer I use it on seems to grind to a halt afterwards.  Whether this is the software or something I’m doing I don’t know… but either way I decided to look for an alternative.

It was then I remembered an email I’d received about a OneCare beta program, so I went off the the MS site, signed up and installed the app.  It wasn’t until I got the notification that the beta program was ending that I remembered that I’d installed it.  In one way that’s bad as I didn’t provide any feedback to the dev team, but actually the fact I didn’t have to is pretty encouraging. 

Once installed OneCare just sat there and did its thing.  I can’t say that I noticed any performance hit at all, and with the laptop being quite old and slow I probably would have noticed - I certainly did with McAfee. 

So what’s the point of this post?  Well really just to give some credit where credit is due.  I like OneCare (as much as you can like some security/AV software anyway!) it does a good job and offers some useful functionality (I won’t go into details as they’re all on the web).  In fact I signed up for a year and get cover for three PC’s included in the cost. 

Apple have just released the new configuration utilities for the new iPhones.  As I covered a few weeks ago, these will allow enterprises to develop specific configuration files for iPhones within their infrastructures.  It’s a very welcome move, like many businesses I’ve certainly seen a number of business requests for iPhones and the prospect of managing another platform could have been quite daunting.

iPhone Web Configuration Utility for Mac
iPhone Web Configuration Utility for Windows
iPhone Configuration Utility 1.0 Mac OS X

Each of these tools will allow you to create xml configuration files that can be either emailed to the devices or opened from the web browser.  The Configuration Utility 1.0 however can also track and install provisioning profiles and authorized applications, and capture device information including console logs.

After having a fantastic drive to work this morning, I thought I would dig out an old route for a ‘run’ I’ve done with the Lotus guys in the past.  It’s based around the country roads in Surrey and Sussex and starts fairly close to my office finishing not too far from home.  With the sun still shining I’ll probably take the long way home later - it’ll take an hour extra but it’s worth it :)

Now I’ve found the file I thought I’d post it up here.  The original authors are (I think) lost in time so I can’t credit them, but it’s a great drive.