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Casual larceny

Posted on 16 Jun 2008 at 11:16

Steve Cassidy gets caught between bad people and good software, and laments the sad decline of a once-proud institution.

In this particular case, I'd handed over the URL to get Path Finder to this beleaguered Mac aficionado who faced a nightmarish job: making some kind of archival sense out of all the pictures stored on a server full of several years worth of photoshoots. Now photoshoots may sound wonderfully glamorous and most untechnical, but let me completely disenchant you about that: judging from my short stint on the Rue Faubourg-St Honore - in the company of a certain female Beatle descendant - I can report that they rapidly turn into a nightmare mix of long hours, fragile egos, complete enslavement to keeping tight version control, and agonising dependence on frail digital technologies, with little prospect for good quality reproduction once the finished product finally hits your doormat. Perhaps you can tell I wouldn't be best suited to write PC Pro's Digital Design column, and long may it remain the kingdom of the unassailably patient Mr Arah.

Anyway, this server full of photoshoots presented a massive exercise in deduplication. This server's directory structure had emerged from a collection of unnetworked PCs, each of which had been stuffed to the gunwales with copies of folders of photos even before they were consolidated. We quickly got over the minor problem that he was using a Mac while the server was running Windows 2003, which is no more arduous nowadays than remembering to type "smb://" in front of the server name when you hit in the Finder. Getting him over the fact that he simply couldn't see what he was doing with all those files on the screen of a Mac laptop running OS X was a much harder job: even the multicolumn view, an innovation many PC people might find useful, didn't help him with seeking duplicates, or more crucially to decide at a glance whether each file was a full-sized original or a quick thumbnail for comparison purposes. So I pointed him to Path Finder and away he went, apparently happy, even though he was one of those laptop users who are apparently happy performing 10,000 file copies and deletes by scrubbing on the trackpad of his MacBook with his fingers.

My idiot moment came a few days later when he finished this giant compare-and-tidy operation, which had been massively eased thanks to Path Finder's dual-window layout. Effusive with thanks, he told me exactly how useful the utility was in such glowing terms that a passing colleague asked him what he was going on about. "Oh," he said, "Path Finder. It's really cool. I have the download if you want it - and the crack codes, too." Happily, the colleague felt the same way that I do about such matters and declined his kind offer, but the shock of it was written all over his face. It's been my experience that people who habitually rip off software authors or other copyright holders invariably go on to display further symptoms of untrustworthiness, because it indicates a deep disrespect for the work or aspirations of others. I'd like to think that I'm capable of spotting people who behave this way and choose not to give them anything, but on this occasion I was completely wrong-footed. The miscreant has since moved on to pastures new, so rather than trying to interest any law-enforcement types in this particular instance of white-collar crime, I thought the best reparation was to give Path Finder and its author, Steve Gehrman of Cocoatech, as prominent a mention here as I could.

BT and me

It gives me no pleasure at all to write in less than favourable terms about BT, because both my uncle and my cousin were life-long senior Post Office telephone men, so I'm very familiar (if you'll pardon the pun) with the internal culture of the organisation and the remarkably high levels of loyalty and tradition of service that the modern BT has as its legacy. I'm sure that everyone reading this column can predict what's coming next: I'm certainly not the only person I know who has found that BT's service levels have dropped like a stone in just the past two years alone. This has now reached a point where I strongly believe that you have to apply a set of precautionary rules to handle a relationship with what was formerly our most precious and invisible national monopoly. Depressingly enough, it isn't even some bumptious and easily-fireable chief executive who's the root cause of the problem: the rot is there at the grass roots, too.

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