Etymology and the spread of language

Some years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a newsletter on the etymology of english words. I get an email once a week with a fantastic investigation into the growth of the english language and the way in which words become archaic and forgotten. Its a great read and I often discover interesting things about books and current affairs, simply keeping abreast of an evolving language. Head on over to Michael Quinon’s website and sign-up for the newsletter, or simply have a browse around the site to pick up some interesting tidbits that you can throw into conversation over your christmas dinner!

Two wrongs apparently make a right.

The search engine blogosphere is all abuzz this morning. Jeremy Zawodny, of Yahoo, has posted an article on how Google has blatantly copied Yahoo’s web page advertising their new IE7 toolbar. Of course, this could not go uncommented by Matt Cutts, the friendly face of Google, who with a lame apology on behalf of Google immediately goes out of his way to point out how Yahoo sponsored adverts have copied Google’s sponsored adverts. Popular blogger and ex-Microsoft employee, Robert Scoble, picked up on the post taking Matt’s side on the issue. One of the comments on Scoble’s blog points out that there is something of a difference in copying a well-thought-out UI and copying the actual artwork for a design. And, in a sense I have to agree, although Matt’s post does point out that the UI has been copied down to the choice of pastel shading as well. Which is perhaps a little beyond the scope of just capturing the usability of a good design.

Stealing design seems commonplace for the corporate giants. Yesterday, Mac advocate, John Gruber posted an article showing how Microsoft had lifted a Macintosh icon for their Vista Workgroup Manager application. And last year, it looked like Quark had stolen the Scottish Art Council’s logo. Quark eventually threw in the towel in the first quarter of this year, and managed to save face by redesigning their logo.

Of course, all of this is very irrelevant to the rare book trade, but these things are interesting nonetheless. And I must admit that I am amused when the furor around these sorts of events reaches a fervor that allows for distinguished representatives of the great monolithic corporations of our time to enter into a bitch-slapping contest that boils down to a “two wrongs make a right” sort of argument.

Questionable Content at the Library

I enjoy reading the occassional online comic. And there are a lot of great artists out there that publish their stuff up on the net for free. One of my regular reads (in fact I get it as an RSS feed every morning) is Questionable Content by J.Jacques. The comic is actually about a bunch of young people and is centred around a coffee shop that they are responsible for running. Some of the characters keep pet robots that are generally intelligent enough to be almost human. The main robot character is named Pintsize. Pintsize’s owner, Marty, is currently working at a college library. I found today’s comic, set at the library, amusing.

Also, if you don’t really read the comments on these posts, you might miss my bit of advice on portable printers. Ian Kahn was asking for some advice on which portable printer to buy to take to fairs for invoicing. My general recommendation is to go with a Canon printer.

A few interesting links

Ian Kahn, kindly added me to his blogroll on Lux Mentis, which is one of the blogs that I keep a keen eye on. Ian has exceptional commentary on things happening in the trade and is outspoken about things that he feels strongly about. Of course, I noticed the trackback to his site and discovered a few new links for myself. And as is the nature of the web, these led me on to a few others that were just a little more obscure, so I’m gonna list them here briefly for your own amusement:

Firstly, Ian pointed out Hugh’s Blog, which seems like an excellent resource for information and which has now been added to my own list o’ links. Hugh is currently in the process of compiling a list of links that prove to be useful resources for people in the rare book trade. So head on over to his site and help him out with some suggestions of your own.

Billy Guffey’s Biblio-Technician blog has also been given special mention on Lux Mentis, and I must admit that I had only recently discovered it and was still just browsing through some of his posts. But Mr Guffey has also ventured into an interesting project, where he has set up a separate blog to stick up photographs of the interior and exterior of various bookshops as well as providing location and contact detail. I’m sure that this will be a pleasure to keep track of and will be a great bit of free advertising for shops all over the world. Thanks Bill.

I’ve also recently discovered Rare Book Spot, which is dedicated to reviewing (so far) modern first editions with a view to helping out new collectors. Unfortunately updates have been taking place monthly and I have not seen much activity since September, so I hope this isn’t going to be a dead end.

Other than that, not much more news from me. I will be off on leave pretty soon, so I may only get around to doing further updates next year. Thanks for all your support, and once again, thanks to Ian for the honorable mention.

Misdirection and the politics of the Internet

This post is a little bit off topic when it comes to the general theme of my blog, but it has captured my interest from a general cataloguing point of view. Some time back I came across a blog where the Title of the post that I was reading had absolutely nothing to do with the content that followed. The article was far from spam, but I believe the author was attempting to make a statement about the nature of popular link titles and methods of improving ranking. At the time I was mostly interested simply from an SEO perspective.  But recently I have noticed that the same methodology is being employed as a means to carry out political attacks on the Net.

My recent favourite attack is a ‘feminist’ attack on the proliferation of pornographic images on the Net. In particular, the internet has been aflutter with a group of photographs that were taken of Britney Spears’ crotch that revealed that she did not wear underwear to a variety of functions. A group of feminists who take offense at the objectification of female genitalia on the Internet are fighting back.

A similar technique was employed some time back by the recording industry in an attempt to combat pirates who were keen to illegally download Madonna’s latest album. Madonna flooded filesharing networks with fake tracks from her album that simply consisted of her actually telling off pirates who were trying to download the album. The attack on piracy reached the mainstream media, but in the end it seemed that while it had discouraged a number of small number of users, the album continued to be downloaded regardless. The approach has since been carried much further with Macrovision attempting to do fake p2p flooding on a grander scale, in an effort to protect music and software from piracy.

In a way, a lot of this activity ties into a ‘meme/counter-meme‘ war. Mike Godwin, an attorney who was on the Usenet in the 1990′s created his own counter-meme in an effort to combat the nazi-comparison meme that was prolific on newsgroups of the time. His counter-meme took off and was ultimately referred to as Godwin’s Law. A number of corollaries were invented to follow. And eventually each reference to ‘nazi-like behaviour’ on the Usenet was faced with the rebuttal of Godwin’s Law.

So, what am I really getting at with this post? Well, I’m intrigued as to what all of this activity is slowly doing to our ability to find particular information on the Internet. And to how it documents social responses to particular events in time. In essence, it is taking the methods that people use to search and turning them against the people that are doing the searching. What that means is that we already understand how important titles and links are on the Internet. Matt Cutts, at Google, demonstrates how important titles, headings and naming are to improving visibility when it comes to search. But if we are slowly working out ways to reverse-engineer search methodology and we are using that knowledge to counter the productivity of search to a specific end, will we ever be able to undo the mess that we are making?

Technically, what the feminist group mentioned earlier in this post is trying to achieve is a method of saturating the Pornography shelves of the Internet library with Feminist literature. When really, their posts should appear on shelves that deal with Feminism/Commentary on Pornography. I’m not saying that there is a moral leaning either way in this sort of activity, but it is eventually going to have a major impact on our ability to categorise information on the Internet. In essence, a search engine is not wrong in presenting these articles to anybody that searches for ‘Britney’s crotch’ online, because these articles are relevant commentary on exactly that. However, in all likelihood the results returned will rarely be relevant to the searcher.

All in all, misdirection is commonplace on the Internet, and has been used for years. It is at the heart of most malware, and is common in the political sphere. But from the perspective of any librarian or cataloguer or search specialist, it seems that memes themselves threaten the very possibility of the Net ever becoming an easily searched resource for information.

DabbleDB – your Web based database application

Now this is one of the most promising web application I have seen in a long long time. If you have a few minutes to kill, head on over to DabbleDB and watch their demo video. With a little bit of work, you could probably build quite a complex online application in DabbleDB to handle a basic stock database, perform CRM tasks and quite possibly deal with all of your invoicing requirements.

If you could get your whole business database running in this sort of environment, you could quite likely do away with any need for VPN software etc. Unfortunately, as its hosted by the DabbleDB group themselves, you have no control over downtime or backups. But, for small businesses that can’t afford to administer servers, buy expensive database systems and need to have remote access to their data, this looks like a radical solution. Pricing could work out pretty steep in the long run, but if you’re not having to deal with the overhead of running your own server you’ll probably do quite well out of an option like this.

Tabbed browsing circa 1588

I love this. Appearing on popular social bookmarking site Reddit, today, was this link with the same subject as this post. For antiquarians and technophiles alike, the post is an interesting and amusing read.

Enjoy

Miss Potter stirs an interest in the world of Rare Books

With the release of Chris Noonan’s film Miss Potter, due to be screened in England in January next year, there have been gentle stirrings in the rare book world as people remember how much Beatrix Potter shaped children’s illustrated literature for generations to come. Indeed, Beatrix Potter has such a strong following that there is an international society dedicated entirely to her works.

Certainly the launch of the film has already had a noticeable effect on tourism in the Lake District, with fans flocking to visit the home country of Peter Rabbit and friends. But how is the film likely to affect book collectors? Rare Book Review has run an article on Beatrix Potter and one of her most avid collectors Mr Cotsen. Even Sotheby’s London is in on the act, with a number of Potter items on sale for Thursday. Their prize item is sitting with an estimate of up to £7,000. Sotheby’s New York is following up with two more items on sale on the 12th December. One of these has an estimate of $5,000. And finally, Bauman’s is showcasing a Peter Rabbit priced at $7,500 on the front page of their website.

Beatrix Potter has always been a popular collectors item. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact a film like this can have on the rare book trade.

Thief strikes at Maggs

The above pictures are of a man who was spotted in one of the Maggs Bros basement stock rooms at approximately 14:05 today. When escorted to the ground floor and challenged he fled and refused to stop in the street when challenged again. It is almost certain that he removed two volumes from the shelves in the basement while he was there. The books were concealed in a carrier bag which was holding his briefcase on entering the building but which contained two volumes when he left (the briefcase was carried openly at that time).

The theft has been reported and Maggs is waiting for a case number. Meanwhile, if you recognise this man and are able to provide further details about him, please contact Maggs as soon as possible.

Why I don’t like HP Laserjet Printers

Some time back, I made a decision not to buy any more HP Laserjet Printers. There were a number of reasons for this, some of which I will try to cover in this post and which will hopefully encourage other people to think carefully about the alternatives out there. A couple of days ago, one of our users insisted that their old HP Laserjet printer (which admittedly had provided excellent service for a number of years) be replaced with a newer HP model as the printer had been jamming frequently and one of the rollers was pretty badly damaged.

The new printer arrived today and I quickly went about setting it up. The printer looked swish and as it was networkable, I would have to install drivers on a number of computers around the building. Usually, I choose to do a minimum install as I’m only interested in getting the drivers installed and the printer up and running. I’m not after all of the other bells and whistles that come along with many devices. In the end, most users don’t even use the extra tools that come with these products. All they want is a functional printer.

I inserted the CD-ROM that came with the printer and was assaulted with a tutorial on how to remove the printer from its packaging. Fair enough, maybe some people need help with this stuff. Nonetheless, when you’re in more of an enterprise environment, you don’t need to waste time with this stuff. So I finally work out how to skip the tutorial and move onto installing the software. Instantly I get a message telling me not to power on the printer or connect the USB cable until the driver has been installed. Get real! There are 10 users that I’m installing this for, distributed around the building. I’m not running backward and forward to keep powering down the printer. And the printer is networkable… I’m never going to use the USB cable (which isn’t provided anyway). So I leave the printer on and leave it networked. Not a bad idea, because it doesn’t bother the installer a jot.

I click through the licence agreement and a bunch of other Next buttons, until I can choose the install type: Minimal… 18 MB! Are HP off their heads? Its just a driver I want. Not half an operating system!!! Anyway, we’ll live with it. So off we go with the install. It takes 15 minutes on the first computer to do the install. Crikey. I remember when installing a printer just required you to right click on an INF file and click Install. It used to take less than a minute. Ah well, technology is getting more complex and sure, you need to go through a couple of configuration steps to find the printer on the network etc. I’ll live with that.

But here comes the real cracker… You need to REBOOT to finish installing the printer. No option to Cancel, or Reboot Later or anything. You have to do this now or your computer is going to explode and the Internet will corrupt and  fire will come down from heaven. And this is what really pisses me off. I usually try to time my installs and stuff for when users are not at their desks. Unfortunately, users also tend to leave open documents that they’re working on, emails that are half-composed, cataloguing entries in the database that are incomplete. Now, I’m faced with a dilemma. Do I just leave this software sitting there on someone’s computer, half installed and insisting on a Reboot, for when they return from their lunch break? Or do I make a whole bunch of assumptions about what needs to be saved and where to? Sod it, I’m just doing my job. Save everything to wherever and reboot.

Finally, the computer is up after about 20 minutes of messing around, and then I am confronted with the Register This Printer screen with a whole bunch of pretty images (that rest assured, are sitting in a bunch of uninvited files all over my users hard disks). I cancel my way out of that. Only to discover that for some reason on the first computer I install this on, the Print Spooler has crashed. I restart it and voila! we have one installation of the printer on the network, after nearly 25 minutes.

Okay, so the Print Spooler didn’t crash on every machine. But the most horrifying thing about the software is that it is far from a minimal install. Instead, each machine now has a bunch of PDF files describing how the printer works. A whole bunch of extra software, like HP Updates and Registration software. In the end, I have a collosal install of a bunch of stuff that I really didn’t want. I just wanted a driver.  I ended up installing the printer on 4 of the PCs and decided that I had wasted enough time on this project today. I’ll have to get back to it tomorrow.

Here are some reasons I don’t like HP Laserjet Printers:

• They are frequently more expensive than competing brands
• For some newer models it is difficult to find drivers for Linux systems
• The software is often more bloated than it needs to be, and NO printer driver should require a system reboot (restart the Print Spooler, sure. That should do it.)
• A full install includes a Tomcat JSP application server, and I think an Apache instance on a basic Workstation. Man, talk about overkill. Put your junky web application onto your network adapter like other manufacturers, HP. Then I can check my Printer status with software already on my computer, and save myself some CPU cycles.
• Want to print both sides of a page? Most HP printers will require that you buy an additional component to achieve Full Duplex printing. Hey, guess what? Brother builds that functionality into nearly all of their workgroup printers, and even into some of their Desktop printers.

So to finish my rant, I’m just going to do a quick promo for Brother:

• Brother’s pricing is not hugely competitive with HP, but they certainly make better printers. If you’ve got a really small workgroup, you could do fine with a networkable desktop like this  or this (and you’ll get Full Duplex printing built in )
• Brother actively supports development and distribution of Linux drivers, they’re included on the Installer CDs, and they’re downloadable of their website. They also indicate Linux support for each printer on their site and on the packaging of the printer. That gives me a warm cozy feeling.
• The software is pretty slim, and a minimal install pretty much gives you what it says! I usually manage to do an install for a Brother printer on the network in around 5 minutes.
• Want a full run down of your printer configuration and status? You don’t need extra software for that, open up your browser and point it at the IP address that your printer has been assigned. In fact, not only that, the Web friendly interface on a Brother printer will also allow you to check the status of other printers on your network, including HP Printers. At a quick glance at the web interface on one of my Brother printers,  I can see that one of the HP Printers on the network needs a cartridge replacement.
• And Brother Printers are energy efficient. They sleep when they have not been in use for a while. Sure, this means that when you send a print job to the printer it might take a little longer to respond. But once its going its swift as anything and you’re doing your bit for the environment (and your electricity bill).

Now HP are well respected for their printers, and I’m sure a lot of people will have a lot to say about my opinion of HP and their printer software lately, but when it comes down to it, I’m glad I’ve taken up the alternative. So check out your options before you buy.