John Topley's Weblog
September 2003 Article Archivejohn.returnFromHoliday();Tuesday, 30 September 2003I've just returned from a week's holiday in the beautiful town of Alghero in Sardinia. Alghero is in the north west of the island and dates back to the twelfth century. It consists of a walled old town and there is a marina and a labyrinth of cobbled old streets and squares, with a few churches dotted about. There is also a sprawl of modern apartment blocks developing to the east.
We stayed in the splendid four star Carlos V hotel, about ten minutes walk away from the old town and well served by the punctual local buses. The temperature was just right for me, which means high seventies/low eighties Fahrenheit. I even managed to acquire a nice suntan!
There are lots of good places to eat in Alghero, varying from the rather upmarket to the more affordable choices offered by the pizzerias. Our favourite was a place we found in the old town, with a fantastic view over the defensive wall and out to sea. The week was a reminder of how nice it is being able to sit outside in reasonable weather and have a beer followed by good food. The highlight of the holiday was on the Wednesday, when we sailed around some of the coastline on the good ship Punta Giglio. Our—enthusiastic and slightly unpredictable—local skipper and his chef provided a hearty meal of bread, cheese, spaghetti, seafood, fruit and local wine, all rounded off with a glass of the local speciality, the name of which escapes me. We ended up dining with two Italian gentlemen but unfortunately we'd forgotten to take the phrase book with us that day, so the conversation was a bit limited. We did manage to establish that they were from Milan and I was given a lesson in spaghetti twirling! They also said something about Manchester United, which seems to be a conversational fallback the world over.
In the afternoon we moored off the small bay of Cala Dragunara and spent a wonderful few hours sunbathing and getting our feet wet in the Mediterranean Sea. We were back on dry land by five thirty and the whole excursion was excellent value for money. There were rather too many British roaming Alghero for my liking, which unfortunately meant that the English language never seemed far away. The town itself is unspoilt, for although there is the inevitable McDonalds there, the culture is Italian with a Catalan influence.
I had a wonderful relaxing holiday and ideally would have liked a few days longer there (why are ten day breaks so hard to find now?) because a week never seems enough, but unfortunately it was not to be and we had to come home. If you get the chance to go to Alghero, then don't think twice about going—you won't regret it. Windows Into The PastFriday, 19 September 2003I have a slightly seedy secret. That's not easy to say or admit to. The secret is this: I'm fascinated by the development and history of Microsoft Windows. There. It's out in the open, a secret no more. I can't get enough of tales such as why OLE guru Kraig Brockschmidt was for years credited by name as the creator of the Windows Calculator accessory, or trivia like why the Taskbar is at the bottom of the screen and not the top. Or why you have to click the Start button to shut down. Or what the story is behind the word “Burgermaster” buried deep in the heart of Windows. Or how the Freecell game came about because one of the developers working on Windows NT security was burnt out. Or how the heart of Windows from Windows/386 in 1987 through to Windows Me in 2000 was based on virtual machine research done by IBM in the early 1970s. It seems that there's a story waiting to be told behind every facet or oddity of Windows. I get the impression that Microsoft doesn't enjoy acknowledging how old Windows really is. You might be forgiven for thinking that the first version was Windows 3.0 from 1990. In many ways that's true—by all accounts it was certainly the first usable version. However, Windows was first announced twenty years ago and the first release emerged blinking into the light in 1985. Windows 2.0 (with overlapping windows!) came out in 1987. These early versions—of what must be the world's best-selling software program—ran from floppies and ran in Real Mode. This meant that like the MS-DOS operating system they depended on, they were limited to just one megabyte of memory. By contrast, Windows XP won't even get out of bed for less than 128 times that amount.
Now information on Windows before version 3.0 is hard to come by. So imagine my deep joy when I came across a website yesterday, that not only features copious screen shots from Old Windows, but also offers for download the original accessory programs from Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0! Obviously I had to try them out, purely in the interests of investigating just how Microsoft's backwards compatibility claims stack up, you understand. Actually, the accessories have had parts of their innards hacked so that they can run on New Windows. It's something of an archaeological experience running seventeen year old bits of Windows under Windows XP. In contrast to Microsoft's attitude towards their third–time lucky Windows, Borland proudly curate an online museum, where you can freely download the original TurboPascal for DOS (Delphi minus seven?) as well as other versions of that product and Borland's C++ compilers too, if you're that way disposed. But I haven't done so, because much as I love Delphi and am interested in Borland and its heritage…well, it just isn't Windows, is it? RSS Feeds UpgradedWednesday, 17 September 2003I've upgraded all of the RSS feeds on this site to RSS 2.0 format. I've done this because I had a few comments that my posts were doubling up in some news aggregators after I edited a post after publishing it. Talking of news aggregators, I've been using the beta version of Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon, which even at this stage, looks like being as rounded and phenomenal a product as his TopStyle CSS editor. Nick reminds us of how great traditional Windows desktop applications can be. If I still had the time to develop applications using Delphi then I'd aspire to emulate what Nick does. Happy Birthday Google!Sunday, 14 September 2003Google celebrated its fifth birthday a few days ago. Google is the World Wide Web's killer application, just as the World Wide Web is the Internet's killer app. It's the only killer application I can think of that is a means of getting to somewhere else. The very unobtrusiveness of Google is a measure of its success—it's just there, always available when you need it. Google's leading position stems from its innovative PageRank™ technology, which essentially measures the value of a page based on the number of links to it. Pages that are themselves high-ranking, correspondingly add more to the ranking of pages they link to. It's such a sensible idea that it's surprising no one thought of it before. Google runs on a vast network of commodity Linux PCs (some 15,000 last time I heard), achieving not only power, but reliability through redundancy of whole computers rather than components within a computer. Another aspect of their success is the fact that search results are served quickly and with the minimum of fuss and distraction. I remember that when I first had access to the Internet in about 1996, AltaVista was then the search engine of choice or perhaps Yahoo! Everybody thought that the search engine sector was saturated and pretty much sewn up. Google blew their competitors out of the water to the extent that nowadays it's almost inconceivable that the majority of people would want to use anything else. The phenomenon of computer users replacing their Web browser's bookmarks with a reliance on the consistency of Google's search results is well known. People are now so used to being able to find what they want quickly and easily, that search technology will be a key part of Windows “Longhorn” (the successor to Windows XP). Apart from its high-quality search results, one of the things that I like about Google is that there seems a sense of fun about the company. I can imagine that it's a great place to work. I enjoy seeing the customised versions of the Google logo during public holidays and anniversaries. So, happy birthday Google and here's to the next five years of being the de facto gateway to the Web. Don't take your eye off the ball! The Joy Of ProgrammingSunday, 07 September 2003I visited the Design Museum in London recently because there were two exhibitions that I wanted to see, both of which subsequently reminded me of why I enjoy computer programming. As an aside, don't visit the Design Museum website that I just linked to, unless you want a lesson in how not to design a website! The first exhibition was a retrospective of the work of the graphic designer Peter Saville, who includes in his portfolio many seminal record sleeve designs, most famously for Joy Division and New Order. It was an interesting show, with lots of original source material on display. If you're in the area, I'd recommend that you catch it before it ends in seven days.
The second exhibition, entitled “When Flaminio Drove To France” was about the work of Italian car designer Flaminio Bertoni for Citroën. Bertoni apparently designed the bodywork for the 1934 Traction Avant—the first front wheel drive car and the first car with a monocoque chassis—in a single night and then went on to style the utilitarian 2CV and the legendary Citroën DS, which was almost certainly the most modern car ever conceived and which hasn't dated as much as you'd expect for a 48 year old design. It seems to exist outside of time. I originally wanted to be a car designer when I grew up, inspired by my first trip to a motor show in October 1982. That was the British launch of the Ford Sierra, a car which was groundbreaking at the time (hard to believe now, I know) and which defined the aerodynamic look for family cars during the 1980s. Even though I was a wide-eyed child and swallowed the Ford hype about the car totally, the effect of the design—both on the industry and on me—was undeniable. I remember that people used to stop, stare and point upon coming across a new Sierra. When did that ever happen with a Mondeo? As I got older, my interest in all matters of design and engineering broadened from cars to product design and to a lesser extent, graphic design. At the same time, I was also dabbling with computer programming. When I started coding for the PC using Borland Delphi in about 1996, I realised that much of what I enjoyed about design also applied to programming but obviously in an abstract way, since all I was doing was manipulating bits in a computer. For me, one of the joys of programming is that it offers the chance to experience many disciplines during the development activity. For example, aesthetics and ergonomics whilst designing user interfaces. There is pleasure to be had in architecting how all the pieces of a program are going to fit together and applying experience and ingenuity, just as there is in designing a car and knowing how the moving parts will come together to form the whole. The programmer can take pride in what he or she has created and in its use by others, in the same way that a craftsman can. The very process of building something is enjoyable, of starting with nothing and creating something and fashioning it over time until it is done. The satisfaction I get from programming is the same as I used to get when designing things at school. It doesn't matter to me that the results can only exist in a computer. Good design is good design, regardless of how it manifests itself. |
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