2014 — 25 March: Tuesday

The grumpy old man who totters around Technology Towers, muttering quietly, recalls moving from a range of three equally superb word-processing and DTP systems on his beloved Acorn RISC OS PCs back in 2002 or thereabouts. In fact, for use on my first WinXP PC (the tiny, rather noisy, Shuttle PC from Evesham here in Soton) I bought my own copy of Star Office1 and have subsequently moved on from that through Open Office and finally to Libre Office for the (very) few letters and documents I still produce. Mostly, of course, I "work" in HTML/SHTML. Trailing edge stuff2 that doesn't tend to give me virtual paper cuts.

I was reading about the just-announced zero-day RTF vulnerability to be found in (essentially) all currently-supported versions of Microsoft "Word" and/or "Outlook" and admit I felt a mild but delicious shiver of schadenfreude on seeing this pithy comment:

Word RTF bug

Many a true Word... and all that.

Meanwhile...

...that same grumpy old man is now supping tea having just got back from Asda, bearing goodies I was nearly over-charged3 for... (though not by the £450 that they charged a Wolverhampton shopper for a loaf of bread).

BDs and DVD

"Dusk till Dawn" is one of my guilty pleasure films. I note the BD omits the excellent "Full Tilt Boogie" documentary made about the film, so I'll be hanging on to my "special edition" DVD to keep that. "Never Let Me Go" is, at a fiver, probably what it's worth. (I get annoyed seeing people recycle relatively old SF plots without acknowledgement.) "Don Jon" has a good cast and (I'm hoping) will be a bit of a hoot. Gordon-Levitt has come a long way since "Third Rock from the Sun".

It's noon, and has been drizzling. The news about inflation I've just been fed by the BBC sits uneasily alongside this excellent analysis of growing inequalities contained within a review of a new book by Thomas Piketty.

Resuming after lunch

Odd, perhaps, that Piketty cites Fernand Braudel (whom I last mentioned in connection with that historian's connection with Mandelbrot, of all folk) because I've just read an insightful quote...

An incredible number of dice, always rolling, dominate and determine each individual existence: uncertainty, then, in the realm of individual history; but in that of collective history... simplicity and consistency. History is indeed "a poor little conjectural science" when it selects individuals as its objects... but much more rational in its procedures and results, when it examines groups and repetitions.

Fernand Braudel from L'Histoire, mesure du monde in Les écrits de Fernand Braudel, Vol II, Paris 1997


Come back, Luke Rhinehart's Dice Man! But Hari Seldon would certainly agree. Found in the opening chapter...

Book

... of the first of the Franco Moretti books I ordered on Saturday now that Mr Postie has handed it over.

Something else...

... to ponder, too. Brian tells me he's managed to turn off the NCQ that may be the cause of some of his SSD hangs on a Linux Mint system. Older SSDs have problems, it seems. Since all four SSDs in BlackBeast are modern, and all seem to operate at about Warp 10, I don't think I'm in any great hurry to go looking for trouble. Still, my Win8.1 Pro system seems happy.

Brrr!

It's gone back to being winter for a while, it seems. Also making me shiver are sound bites from the ex-boss of the Co-op Bank and the UK PM.

  

Footnotes

1  Or whatever Sun was calling it, having been subsidising that Microsoft Office spoiler for some time.
2  I began using markup languages for documents in 1981 when I began my (downward) career in IBM :-)
3  The two Blu-rays cost the same as the single DVD but "Martyn" managed to make the total £25 instead of the £20 I was prepared to pay. He compounded his error by claiming that he'd 'rung up' the DVD twice (which would have brought the total to £30) so I kept diplomatically silent until a more senior colleague cancelled, and then repeated, what seemed to me a trivial transaction — watching the necessary complex sequence of keystrokes was mildly amusing).