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I’ve never been much of a fan of Proportional Representation. I’ve always assumed it leads to weak coalition governments.

But I’m starting to think that it might be a good idea. The election we’ve just had was decided by a million or so voters in marginal constituencies. I live in a very safe Labour seat. No-one knocked on my door, no-one campaigned here so as you’d notice. No-one even sat outside my polling station asking to see my polling card – as they did when one seat was up for grabs in a local council by-election.

If we had PR, every vote would count and maybe some candidates would have knocked on my door and asked me what I thought.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first thing to be placed in the first bin liner of a new roll is the paper the new roll of bin liners were wrapped in.

And in other news, I went mad and ripped the CD writer module out of my terribly expensive Lacie firewire CD writer, and put it in my frighteningly cheap Firewire and USB caddy.

And now I can burn CDs over USB on my old 233mHz RevA iMac!

I really should have my own page on Lowendmac, you know…

I just got one of these.

It’s a �20 Firewire and USB enclosure for a 5.25″ hard disk, CD writer or DVD writer.

Amazingly it comes with two different kinds of Firewire leads and a USB lead, plus a screwdriver. You don’t even get a USB lead with some printers costing 4 or 5 times as much.

I put my RevA iMac’s old hard drive in the enclosure, screwed it together, powered it up and plugged it in to the iMac’s own USB 1.0 socket – it’s running OS 10.3 – and my old iMac’s hard drive appeared on the desktop, so I can get any data off that I forgot to transfer.

It’s a bit noisy (so’s my expensive Lacie FW hard drive) and a bit ugly, but for �30 all in, who cares?!

We’ve been trying to think of names – and I’ve been also thinking of the great song ‘The Name Game’ by Shirley Ellis (1965, apparently).

When I was about 10 or 11 I was inordinately fond of that song, and I remember going as far as writing out the logic (if not actually writing the code) for a computer program that would play the Name Game for any name you typed in.

For those of you who don’t know the song, here’s a sample:

Shirley!

Shirley, Shirley, Bo Birley
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Firley
Fee, Fy, Mo Mirley
Shirley

Now here in 2005 I thought that The Name Game would make a grand RealBasic project.

But someone’s already done it in JavaScript!

All togther now…

Henry!

Henry, Henry, Bo Benry
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Fenry
Fee, Fy, Mo Menry
Henry!

Okay then, how about this:

William!

William, William, Bo Billiam
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Filliam
Fee, Fy, Mo Milliam
William!

Curses, is there no catching them out?!

Perpetua!

Perpetua, Perpetua, Bo Berpetua
Bonana, Fanna, Fo Ferpetua
Fee, Fy, Mo Merpetua
Perpetua!

Apparently not.

Well installing OS 10.3 on my half-dead RevA iMac was someting of a breeze.

First, remember, I’d installed a bigger hard drive – I really don’t think that the 4 gig drive that shipped with the original iMac is going to be enough for running OS X and having much useful software, let alone any actual data. So Jon Ward very kindly gave me an old 20 gig iMac hard drive he had replaced for a bigger one for someone else. But hey, 20 gigs is five times bigger than what I had before, and twice what my 2001 iBook has. Even in OS 9 I noticed the machine ran faster and quieter (possibly because the disk was less fragmented).

Then I partitioned the new drive in OS 9. making sure that the 1st partition was smaller than 8 gigs – this is essential on early iMacs due to some weird limitation in the IDE interface.

I then checked my iMac’s firmware was up-to-date. This is essential – installing OS X on a machine with the wrong firmware can, I believe, be terminal. Firmware up-to-date, off we go, installing OS 10.3 on the small 8 gig partition.

And here I am, typing this in Safari running on a RevA 233 mHz iMac. OS X seems really quite snappy – I’ve not fired up any serious applications yet, but the Finder works better than it did in OS 10.0 on my 500mHz iBook. My cruddy old Elonex VGA monitor is happy with 800×600 at 60Hz – 800×600 is the lowest resultion you can practically use OS X at. Believe me. I’ve tried it at 640×480 and you can’t even see the bottom of many dialogue boxes in Sytem Preferences.

Using an old Apple microphone Vlod gave me years ago, I’ve even fired up Skype, with mixed results. Only spoken to our Estonian friend Echo123 so far, and it was very choppy. Perhaps 233mHz isn’t enough for Skype, and I know I won’t be doing any video editing on this machine. But here are some things I can do:

- develop and serve web pages using Apache

- run MacMAME games (I hope!)

- Henry can paint using TuxPaint

- If I install X11 I can run free software like Gimp

- Browse the web using Safari and Firefox

- Print on my Samsung laser printer

- Use my HP scanner – at last!

- Sync my phone and my Palm using iSync

- ooooh just oodles more stuff