I just installed more iBook RAM (bought it from the US for half the Apple preinstall price) and managed not to break the machine (thanks to Apple’s commendably detailed instructions).

P.S. If you don’t know what 31337 meant check out “The Jargon Lexicon”:http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=elite and browse around…

If you are an academic – particularly one in my field – please check out the Media @ LSE Group Weblog, follow the link to my thesis proposal then return to the groupblog and let me know your thoughts.

• On the good side – it looks lovely (both the hardware and the OS) and was really straightforward to set up – particularly the networking bits. However…
• Providing the iBook with a base 256Mb of RAM is ridiculous – it isn’t enough to do any real multitasking. Running Firefox, Fire (for instant messaging), OpenOffice and “Blinkx”:http://www.blinkx.com/content/mac.php (a new hard disk indexing program) slows the machine to a crawl. It surely wouldn’t have added that much to the cost to ship with 512Mb as standard, especially since there is only one spare memory slot.
• OpenOffice for the Mac is a dog – and to be fair the OO team almost admit as much. Unfortunately progress towards a proper OSX version appears to have “slowed dramatically”:http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/.
• AppleWorks is similarly irritating. It is at least MacOS look and feel compliant but if you want to use it to work with Office files you have to open AppleWorks, change the open file dialogue to allow you to open non-Appleworks files, then work on the file and “save as” back into the file’s original format – every single time. And I don’t trust it not to mess up my formatting.
• If I can mount an FTP server and I give myself full rights why does the Apple network software insist that the server be read-only? Is there any way around this? For some reason I can’t mount my Windows PC using the normal Windows file and print sharing.
• Whose bright idea was it not to include a “forward” delete key on Mac notebooks?

I don’t want to leave things on a sour note – I am pretty hopeful that once I receive the additional 512Mb of RAM I ordered and I get ahold of MS Office my user experience will improve dramatically…

My new iBook arrived around 13:00 – it is already up and running and connected to the Internet and I’ve installed and configured all the apps I need for the moment. The whole process has been pretty painless (as one might expect from an Apple product).

I can hardly wait to bring it in to the LSE and show it off…

When I ordered my iBook I am sure I ticked the ‘home’ delivery box. Nonetheless I found out that TNT tried to deliver it (finally) at mid-day yesterday (13 days after my order) when I was out of the house. No card was even put through my door – I only found out when I checked the website. So I made sure that I was home as much as possible today and… TNT didn’t even try to deliver. Now I have to wait until Monday. Grr! Oh well – all good things come to he who waits.

I feel like “Mark”:http://home.btconnect.com/glottalstop/blog/2004/11/shanghai-not-that-im-going-on-too-much.html as I wait increasingly impatiently for my iBook to arrive (especially after reading Mark’s “glowing review”:http://home.btconnect.com/glottalstop/blog/2004/12/powerbook-i-thought-id-give-quick.html of his Powerbook. I know my machine has this morning arrived in Holland from the Far East – I hope it hops the channel soon – I’ve been waiting since forever (well since the 14th anyway).

You should try listening to Federico Mompou. I saw a CD of music of his by chance in the home of a musical friend over Christmas and noticed that it had won the editor’s choice from Gramophone so I made a note to find some Mompou when I got back. The music turns out to be delightful (if a little lacking in variety after a while).

I found myself asking, characteristically, whether there is any way I could have found out about his work through some kind of automated Internet tool (rather than just participating in a “classical music related forum”:http://www.good-music-guide.com/forum/). Doing a Google Set search with the names of the two composers he’s closest to just gave me a “list of other famous composers”:http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=debussy&q2=satie&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set, not of others who were similar. The excellent “All Music Database”:http://www.allmusic.com does provide “see also” information for Debussy and Satie but neither entry mentions Mompou (even though he’s in their database).

If you want to find some Mompou to listen to without resorting to peer to peer piracy, “here”:http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/search?last_query=mompou&query=mompou&x=62&y=14&adult_results=&a_submit=1&aw=1&sfor=a&dur=1&fmp3=1&freal=1&fwin=1&fqt=1&cmus=1&rpp=20&persist=1&a_eml_search=1&email_type=2 are 67 entries of at least a minute’s length from the SingingFish audio and video search engine. Altavista “only finds 14”:http://www.altavista.com/audio/results?q=mompou&maf=mp3&maf=wav&maf=msmedia&maf=realmedia&maf=aiff&maf=other&mad=long (and only lets you specify more or less than 1minute length) and “Lycos finds 63”:http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?tab=multi&adf=&query=mompou&submit.x=21&submit.y=9&submit=Search&cat=audio&loc=searchbox&agree=1 but doesn’t let you specify a minimum length.

P.S. Can anyone help with a query about anti-Chomsky media scholarship over at the Media@LSE blog?

Ethan Zuckerman has written thoughtfully about Wikipedia in response to a recent “article”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html (by a former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) suggesting it is impressive but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Zuckerman points out that Wikipedia is great if you are looking for in-depth coverage of (say) how “GSM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM works but, ‘when I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst.’

Danah Boyd notes usefully that one of the benefits of signed, scholarly resources over community ones like Wikipedia is that “scholars have something to lose”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/01/08/on_a_vetted_wikipedia_reflexivity_and_investment_in_quality_aka_more_responses_to_clay.html when they get things wrong.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the debate about the quality of Wikipedia has spread fairly widely across the Internet punditsphere. It now even has its own “wiki page”:http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/WikipediaQualityControlDebate which attempts to summarise the debate (and if you use a blog search tool like “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html you’ll find 83 more sites with something to say on the subject).

P.S. Sorry if this is coming to the debate rather late – I am not doing as much blogging as I used to to free up time for writing my PhD about it instead – and where I am blogging I tend to do it on the “Media@LSE Group Weblog at get.to/lseblog”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php I set up. In the last few weeks I have blogged about “Korea leading the world in numbers of bloggers”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=39, a “database of predictions about the Internet”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=28 “Santa Studies”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=23, “Online transcription services”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=22, “The Economics of Search”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=15 and the “global broadband digital divide”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=20 (and my colleagues in the LSE’s PhD programme have also had several interesting things to post). Pleas come and take a look (at least if you want to hear about the academic side of my life).

It is hard to complain these days given the kind of “horrors others have had to bear recently”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2004/asia_quake_disaster/default.stm but I confess to being a little disgruntled when after returning from holiday with my family we had to face:

Human: The Definitive Guide to Our Species

…is a 512 page, lavishly illustrated coffee table encyclopedia from Dorling Kindersley which attempts nothing less than a comprehensive overview of all aspects of being human:

• Our origins
• The body
• The mind
• The life cycle from birth to death
• Society
• Culture
• Nations … and some speculation about
• The Future

As you might expect with a book taking on a subject this large you can inevitably pick holes in any of the entries if you really know the subject but you can use the introductory text as a taster, and the pictures are often interesting. And it weighs about 2.5 kg so if you don’t like it you can keep it under the bed to throw at burglars…

Best of all, right in the middle of the “Culture” section (pp. 316-17) you’ll find a particularly insightful spread on the mass media. Which I wrote 😉 I don’t get a penny from any sales however.

As a side note, I am impressed that the economics of publishing have changed to the point that DK can print a hardcover book with more than 500 large pages with spot colour, photos and illustrations on every page, sell it for £18 (Amazon’s price which is admittedly 40% off retail) and still make a profit.

P.S. It’s $57.33 list price in the US but Amazon US which sells it for $36.12 can’t now ship in time for Xmas.