Science FrictionDavid Stewart's Weblog of SF, Macintosh and other interesting stuffBooxter helps organize book collections- December 31, 2003 Deep Prose Software LLC has released Booxter 1.0, a utility for Mac OS X that helps users manage their book collections. I've only just downloaded it myself so I haven't had it long but it appears to be quite good. I've dabbled with library management applications before, the last was Bookbin which was based on Filemaker Pro. However, the company behind it went to a Web model (with subscription). While Bookbin had the advantage of being available for Mac and Windows - remember it was based on...http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/12/30/booxter/?lsrc=mcrss-1203 Arise Sir Tim- December 31, 2003 Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web has been honoured with a Knighthood in the UK New Years Honours List. Well deserved. BBC News Technology UK Editionhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/technology/3357073.stm The King Returns- December 30, 2003 Just back from seeing Return of the King. In a word: fantastic. This is a triumphant conclusion to the trilogy and my advice to Peter Jackson is to retire now because whatever else he does will be judged in comparison to Lord of the Rings and will inevitably be found wanting. I won't summarise the movie here. That's not my job. But I will say that Jackson remained true to the bittersweet ending of Tolkien's books. I also watched the extended edition of The Two Towers a few nights ago so the...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118874/2003/12/30.html#a462 Word of the year- December 29, 2003 According to a story in ZDNET UK an American Website has chosen 'Embedded' as Word of the Year for 2003. Yourdictionary.com chose the word as "the best word to distil the events of an extraordinary year into eight simple letters" according to Paul J.J. Payack, President of Yourdictionary.com. Other words that typified the year include Blog and SARS. The full list of Top Ten Words of 2003 can be found here.http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39118801,00.htm Comedian Bob Monkhouse dies- December 29, 2003 The BBC reports that Bob Monkhouse has died at the age of 75. My earliest memories of Bob Monkhouse date, I think, from the late 1960s when he hosted the Golden Shot. We were living in the Republic of Ireland at the time but we regularly went to Enniskillen to visit my mother's family and I saw a few episodes of that program and I loved it. Later, with the advent of alternative comedy I tended to sneer at his jokes but a few years ago he turned up as a guest on Have I Got News For You and I saw.http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3353445.s... USB powered alarm clock- December 28, 2003 If you haven't already visited Gizmodo, then you really should give it a look. In among the new mobile phones and PDAs are some really unusual items. Who can forget the USB toothbrush for instance. This little device, however, sounds really useful. Gizmodohttp://www.gizmodo.com/archives/011362.php Microsoft aims to make spammers pay- December 26, 2003 According to this BBC story, Microsoft researchers have come up with a way to slow down spammers and make them 'pay' for e-mails. The idea is that each time someone wants to send message they have to 'pay' by solving a cryptographic puzzle. For individual mail senders that's not a problem as it only adds 10 or 20 seconds to the time needed to send a message but to people sending bulk it limits their ability to send messages. There is no mention, however, about how this affects genuine mass...http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3324883.stm The Beagle is silent- December 26, 2003 It's early on St Stephen's Day but as of yet there is no word from Beagle 2, the European Space Agency Martian lander. The probe was due to establish contact early on Christmas morning but Nasa's Mars Odyssey orbiter failed to detect a signal. While the lack of a signal means the probe could have been destroyed on impact, scientists are optimistic that the failure to establish communications could be due to other factors such as a mis-aligned antenna or the probe landing outside the expected...http://www.beagle2.com Mobilcom returns 3G licence- December 25, 2003 According to The Register, Germany's Mobilcom has returned the 3G licence it purchased three years ago for €8.5bn to the German Federal Regulator. The company had already begun building the infrastructure for its network but has now sold it to its rival e-plus. The Registerhttp://radio.weblogs.com/0118874/2003/12/25.html#a456 The Top Science Stories of 2003- December 25, 2003 Scientific American ends the year with a look back at the top science stories of 2003. In a year that began with the destruction of the Columbia space shuttle and is about to end with three - count 'em, three - probes arriving on Mars it's been quite a year for science. The magazine has identified 25 stories including the launch of China's first astronaut or taikonaut, the outbrakek of SARS, the development of a new adhesive based on the same principle a gecko uses to stick to walls and the...http://radio.weblogs.com/0118874/2003/12/25.html#a455 |