vendredi 29 août 2003

How does your computer smell today? France Télécom, in its infinite wisdom, has taken those old scratch and sniff cards they used occasionally to hand out for certain not very good comedies at the cinema to a whole new level. FT R&D has brought to fruition a project to deliver smells over the internet. Of late, 200 French households have been savouring the delights of Burgundy wines and a range of well-known perfumes as a trial run for marketing the scheme, the September issue of 'Univers MacWorld' reports. The ideas behind the Exhalia (Fr) project took shape three years ago when the R&D people at FT went into partnership with l'Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l'Aromatique Alimentaire (ISIPCA; Fr, English pages "under development) and a couple of industrial firms, Ruetz Scent Systems et AC2i®. How the smells waft into the house is explained, but only in French again, in a new FT press release which also contains pretty pictures. Commercial applications, they assert, could lie in interactive sniff TV, online perfume promotion, the public health sector (they're welcome to some samples of my Condition), virtual wine "tasting" ... and computer stink games. You could even get a smelly CD-ROM... I see no mention of this country's rich cheese industry, but there is an "innovation gallery" Flash site where French-speakers can read and hear about all this (without the odours). zzz The tip-off from Univers MacWorld was easy to follow up with the public beta, out on Wednesday, of DEVONagent, shown in action here. I've had an eye on Devon Technologies and been waiting for this one since I found and favourably reviewed their flexible notepad, database and classifier, DEVONthink, in mid-August. With seamless integration into Mac OS X and its services menus, this multi-search engine cum research tool cum browser rockets the developers into the "killer apps" category. It took me all of 30 minutes to realise that this one will become indispensable. DEVONagent informed me, incidentally, that this log is currently valued at $5,734.59. First I knew about that! It seems Blogshares has been keeping an eye on me since March 13 (along with countless others). So the least I could do was stake my claim to the place once I'd discovered that. What this "fantasy market" is about, I'll find out some other time. The workings of the stock exchange, virtual or not, have always been beyond my grasp. 11:28:41 PM  link   your views? [] Interrupted service Like the temperature which has plummeted, I've been subdued lately, what with more -- minor -- medical probing and an excess of chores and shopping trips. I won't bother with Lara Croft's latest race around the world, having reassured Tony that the nipples were intact but he didn't miss anything. 'Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life' was OK fun, but came nowhere near to dethroning 'Pirates of the Caribbean' as my silly adventure movie of the summer. As Brian Webster wrote of 'TR2': "inspiration is in short supply here. It’s only when Lara and Terry [Butler: the male lead, busted by Angelina from a Kazakhstan prison to help in the hunt for Pandora's Box, no less] are up close and personal that you get the sense that anybody was really all that interested in making this film. And even then, it’s just the contrast of those decent scenes with the drudgery of the rest of the movie that makes them stand out. Butler is charismatic and able to stand up to Jolie’s over-inflated persona here. But that hardly makes the film worthwhile on its own." (Apollo Movie Guide) No more than 4.5/10 in my book. zzz Something else that kept me offline was one of the most stupid thing I've done this year. In a moment of sublime inattention, as I cleared my Mac's partitions of many excess MBs acquired over the past few months, I managed completely to trash the 'Documents' folder on OS X, containing several years' worth of material. This would have been a disaster had I not, by luck, backed it up a couple of days earlier. Henceforth, my backups will be daily again; I was getting lax and I'm almost glad it happened with Marianne here to see for herself the truth of that old chestnut, that if it's never happened to you, it will. zzz Then my ISP went down today after a storm, not for the first time. This swiftly made the Kid cross, initially because she thought it was her fault our internet connection disappeared and then because it put paid to what she was getting up to with mlMac (abyssoft; donationware), which she rates as the best Kazaa client around for Macs. I've not tried it myself, but the racket noise next door would indicate that that it's efficient if you're into heavy metal. At the Canteen, netwiz François confirmed that his Noos cable connection up the road was also dead. After a 'phone call to the ISP, it miraculously returned, but the woman made me hold for so long while she contacted the techies that I suspect they hadn't realised it was down in the first place. Unkinder still, when I called the Canteen to tell François I'd managed to get through to Noos, he said: "I don't believe what they told you" before I'd even given him any details. On the whole, I've few complaints about Noos, but it's one of the few ISPs I'm aware of which has its very own active and often disgrunted consumers' association. LUCCAS (Fr) is a long-serving group which derives its acronym from the days before Noos muscled in to take over Cybercable and promptly capped the connection speed for clients of the time. 8:59:05 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.