Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Checking page reads... -- Comment()
Have to close up for the night. I noticed that there is a ranking list of Radio sites. Universal Rule is now in the top 10. However with only 742 page reads this site I way behind the 3441 reads of the leading site.

Feedback to postings with Radio? -- Comment()
Perhaps there should be some sort of feedback possibility after each post here. How else can I get readers to respond? One reason for starting the blog thing was to get some contacts and feedback about my ramblings. Have to check if this is possible with Radio. At least I already have a link (

) for feedback, courtesy of Radio.

But I have still about 27 days of the trial period left, so there is lots of time to decide moving elsewhere, if Radio doesn't fit the bill after all. Or to stop blogging altogether.

-- Comment()
There is now a link to my CV (PDF format) on these pages. I (of course) noticed that the CV is out of date. There are several articles, new editions of books, and one child, which have appeared since the last update. So, it is at least a couple of months since I updated it. However, perhaps CV update once a year is enough?

Busy reviewing -- Comment()
MacCentral writes: Jaguar Shows Its Teeth. This is a busy week, first I got Matlab (see Review of Matlab 6.5 for Mac OS X: Installation and first impressions) and now arrives Mac OS X 10.2. I have already promised a couple of magazines that I'll write them reviews of Jaguar. And deadline is at the end of this month.

-- Comment()
Yet another salvo by Lawrence Lessig. This is getting interesting, and perhaps close to accomplishing something. But I'm not optimistic. The digital world is too abstract for most people. It takes imagination and effort to worry about this kind of thing. Most people have too much trouble with the "real world" to worry about the digital stuff.

There is nothing to be scared about, at least I don't see any car trying to run over me. Crash!

Getting Mac OS X, finally -- Comment()
The Apple representative answered today my e-mail question about Jaguar. Apparently I'm getting a review copy soon, but of course I can't post any comments until the official release on August 24th. It seems that quite a few people have gotten a permission to post their experiences. But I'll keep quiet. And busy after laying hands on the copy of Mac OS X 10.2.

Should I move in? -- Comment()
This is the third day I'm using Radio, and I'm still debating whether I should post some of my writings (magazine articles, columns etc.) here.

What kind of neighborhood is this? Are the natives friendly? Is the place safe? What kind of stuff is available here for processing with the grey matter? Perhaps I'll move my CV here and put links to it somewhere. Then I would be at least staying here for a while.

Lessig in discussion -- Comment()
Lawrence Lessig responds to Dave Wiener in a lengthy piece. (Thanks to the Radio news aggregator for spotting this. I'll stop these thanks now.)

Some time ago I wrote a book review (in Finnish) of the book "The Future of Ideas". Now I think that the review was more about my own reservations and fears of the digital age than about Lessig's ideas. Now I would hesitate to write a review of that book. I have so many open questions I'm not sure I want to have answered. Fear the darkness...

Too many news tools -- Comment()
Blogroots: "The natural voice and frequent updates of an engaging personal weblog are the same components found in a successful business blog." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

What I'm actually doing is trying out the Radio news aggregator, which makes it easy to post comments about weblog postings elsewhere.

I'm currently using many tools to follow the RSS news feeds. Currently I have Watson with the Meerkat channel, NetNewsWire Lite, and now Radio. Some of these tools have to go.

Doc Searls and Nativity -- Comment()
I have been reading Doc Searls Weblog for some time. Today he wrote about nativity, or how to think about software: is is like publishing, or like music?

Perhaps all you have to do is to be careful with metaphors. Sometimes a metaphor may sound plausible, until you start to think about it. Or you try to apply the metaphor to a practical situation, and it doesn't work. Cows don't fly. There aren't that many people reading (or listening to) software.

Bioinformatics software for Mac OS X? -- Comment()
Browsed through the Apple software catalog for bioinformatics software. There were some nice tools, but nothing you could describe as a full solution for the basic bioinformatics needs. The tools should offer an easy (non-web) interface to databases, visualization and browsing capabilities, and powerful access to databases using SQL and other search mechanisms.

Is there something like Watson for bioinformatics? Google didn't give any better results.

I wish there were is site collecting information about bioinformatics tools for Mac OS X.

Does Apple move into science, engineering markets? -- Comment()
The Macintosh News Network writes that Apple moves into science, engineering markets. Perhaps this is so, but my experience points to the opposite direction.

Perhaps the current success of Apple depends on the research topic of the users. At least for serious CAD users there is not too much available on Mac OS X. If there are no applications, there are no users. This applies to chemistry, Earth sciences, structural analysis etc.

What about biosciences, where there has traditionally been a strong Mac userbase? I'm not too sure about the applications in this area. But maybe I'm mistaken.

.Mac extension to Sept. 30, 2003 -- Comment()
The .Mac service is extended to September 30, 2003. This is good news for those early birds that didn't read the license terms carefully. I mailed a complaint among many other (angry?) customers, and this might have helped.

In any case, some parts of the .Mac service are good (backup works most of the time now), some of it is bad (the difficulty of Virex virus updates), and some of it is ugly (the non-obvious user interface on the web pages).

Eager beginner at blogging -- Comment()
This reminds of the time almost 10 years ago when I started up a web server on mathematics. There were lots of things to learn, and lots of experimentation with the web system. Nowadays that server is slowly dying, for the lack of enthusiasm on my part, and also because of the supply of other servers.

Probably something similar will happen with the weblogs.

Further problems with Radio -- Comment()
Had some problems with Radio. First, the date format of postings obeys the date format on the Radio machine, in my case Finnish. So, I had to switch the date format to US on my iBook, and force an update. I wish there were a separate option in Radio for the date format.

There were also some problems with upstreaming GIF figures. Two figures just stuck on this machine, and didn't get copied over till I renamed them and put them again into the upstream folder.