Category: technology

iPhone this iphone that

So I'm in Toronto and theres no iphones. But theres a stupid amount of coverage online including unboxings and taking apart the iphone. Here's some interesting things I've found while browsing around my aggregator.

LG Prada vs Apple iPhone
Bear in mind the LG Prada came first and was announced long before the iPhone.

iPhone touch typing.
Just as I thought, it was going to be bad but seriously its worst that I'd actually imagined. I thought if worst comes to worst you could use a stylus type thing but nope its made for thumbs and a little pressure. I have heard reports that it can be used in landscape mode while browsing the web but still. I know I can easily type faster on my stylus. Theres also some kind of bug with caps lock?

Engadget first hands on in HD
This one covers the keyboard a lot better.

iPhone Live Disassembly
How to take the iphone to pieces. Theres some interesting facts in this too like memory sizes and sim cards.

3G iPhone for Europe to be announced Monday?

Apple is set to announce a four-way deal: Vodafone and T-Mobile on the carrier front with Carphone Warehouse out in front as the MVNO. Hmmm, well, this kind of deal would certainly provide Apple's upstart mobile phone with far broader coverage than a Vodafone exclusive could muster while providing a solid brick-and-mortar base on a continent (mostly) void of Apple stores. Best of all for Europeans, the announcement expected on Monday will be 3G. That's right, while you're queuing up for EDGE data, Europeans might be unwrapping an HSDPA iPhone in a 4-way press release. Here's the rub, bub: do you really think Apple will provide Europe a 3G iPhone before the end of the year and not release it in the US at the same time? Now the tough choice: stand in line for your 2.5G iPhone or wait and see what happens on Monday with this rumor (and we repeat, it's just rumor at this point).

If this is true, I'll be quite shocked for those who bought the EDGE phones. EDGE is ok but yes no match for 3G speeds.

Generally, the iphone seems to working as expected but I've not seen much information about 3rd party applications in Safari. The landscape mode doesn't always work but hardware H.264 playback is good. Also heard little about battery life.

Its simply a expensive beast. If it comes to Europe with a price tag of 350+ pounds and 2 year contract of 35 pounds or more a month. Its not going to go down well. Get the price down to 200 with a 25 pounds a month contract and Vodafone and Tmobile will sell them like hot cakes. I won't be switching to a iphone when it comes here.

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Wetherspoon’s free wifi with your pint

wifi logo

Only found this thanks to Dave, now I know where I'll be drinking from now on.

Thanks to a partnership with ItBox, all customers with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop will be able to connect to hi-speed Internet – free –for 30 minutes.

It really couldn’t be simpler, power up the laptop, order your drink or food from the bar and ask for a Wi-Fi voucher; this contains an access code for your computer. You will then connect to a network free for 30 minutes – order another drink and go on line for another 30 minutes.

Wetherspoon’s head of purchasing, Paul Hine, explains why the scheme has been introduced: “We really are in a mobile environment at the moment, with more and more people using the Internet for business and pleasure – 24/7.” “We felt that our pubs offer comfortable and private surroundings, to come to enjoy a drink or a meal and also connect to the Web.”

The service is available throughout the day at all Wetherspoon pubs and Lloyds No.1 bars. Leaflets detailing the new service are available at the bar.

meta-technorati-tags=wifi, weatherspoons, wireless, free

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iTunes support comes to the Nokia N series phones

Sam points out that Nokia have just released a beta application which connects to iTunes. Great for Nokia owners and about 1 year ago I might have said wheres the Windows mobile version. But with the obvious support from Windows mobile and the recent support in Winamp 5 I can finally say nice stuff but I don't really care (in a nice way). But I'm most of my friends care…

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Orange’s unlimited (1gig limit) data only 5 pound per month

Orange are insane. After charging me a stupid amount of money for using mobile data while roaming in New York. They fail to mention the fact that they now have a reasonable flat-rate mobile data plan.

5 pounds a month for all you can eat (1gig limit a month) off-peak mobile data. How did I find out? Well I went into a Orange shop and complained that Tmobiles data plans were much better and after a while he mentioned it.

It seems this has been in place since the June 1st. 

Orange UK has followed the other major operators in simplifying its data charging tariffs, and opened up unmetered data access to non-panthers as well as those on pre-paid contracts.

The new bundles include free evening and weekend browsing for £5 a month, or £8 to be able to browse during the day too. Pre-paid customers can pay £5 for seven days unlimited browsing. The new tariffs come in on 1 June.

Since I have a work phone for daytime use, the off-peak one will work for me. There is a clause about not using it for VoIP and other stuff.

Orange is very careful to say that the service is “browsing” and not “internet access”, leaving it plenty of room to block services it doesn't like the look of.

Its previous unmetered data terms and conditions were pretty clear on what services were frowned upon. “To ensure the fair allocation of network resources for all customers the offer may not be used for: modem access for computers, internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant mssaging, peer to peer file sharing and non Orange internet based video.”

But, unlike Vodafone, Orange seems to accept the impossibility of enforcing such restrictions: “We would discourage any customer from using VoIP through the mobile internet due to the quality of service they may experience. We are looking to launch our own high quality IM service in the next few months which will deliver a far superior customer experience to currently available services

I'll be using mine for im (twitter and jabber), Googlemaps, Email and RSS reading.

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iPhone hype is getting tiresome

iPhone

Apple heads! give me a break…

Since Apple and Cingular announced the date of the apple iphone (29th June) and the rumour there will only be 4 million made this year. All I hear about now is the iphone. At the girl geekdinner the women from google who presented made a joke about the iphone which clarified in my mind that the hype is getting stupid.

Slashdot lead today with some good news that the iphone will allow 3rd party developers to build on it.

In an exciting shift from previous statements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed at the D Conference that 3rd-party development will be supported on the iPhone. Questions remain as to whether the opening of the platform, slated for later this year, will be through Dashboard-like widgets or a separate SDK.”

 

 

But what gets me is the silly comments afterwards. People were suggesting Skype on a phone would be good, another person a wifi detector and then finally wrote this.

Cellular networks are fragile. Much more fragile than the larger internet. They tend toward monoculture and proprietary systems, and haven’t had the shakedown that standard internet network hardware and protocols have had. So Jobs’ quote about him ‘not wanting third-party apps bringing Cingular’s network down’ actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past). And

Bullshit. Utter crap. Why is there this paranoia about the iPhone, when Symbian, Windows CE/Mobile have allowed this for years? There is no way an application on a device should or could bring down a base station, let alone a cell network.

Oh, and as for this gem:

bringing Cingular’s network down’ actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past)

Cite. Go on. I would so so love to see a citation of any evidence of this. Any, whatsoever.

 

 

Thankfully someone with some sense.

What kills me is there are some great phones on the market including the Nokia N95 and of course my phone the SPV M700. Both have GPS, 3G, Wireless b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and mass storage via flash memory. They both play music and video very well and this is the best part don't cost a bomb to get on contract. We know for a fact this isn't true of the iphone, which looks like the price of a ipod plus a expensive 24month contract.

I could rant on about the iphone all day but I just want to point out that if you avoid the plain old phones and look into the smartphone market you will find phones which can do everything the iphone does. Symbian and now Windows Mobile developers are very good at creating and hacking around with these phones now. Theres huge catalogues of software which have been developed which also makes these phones rich too. I think Apples SDK will be messy and full of holes. I'm not saying the others are any better but there SDKs have been out for a long time and there quite public.

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Liberating my machines with Ubuntu

Ubuntu Version 

I saw this Ubuntu Propaganda sticker via Digg and it made me think, I need to do a update on my Linux switch over.

I'm having problems with Azureus on Ubuntu, a couple of the profile files keep screwing up after a restart (not that Ubuntu really needs that many restarts). So currently I have a duplicate profile folder which I use when Azureus borks. I can't work out what has caused the problem, except maybe my upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04 fiesty. The upgrade also caused some confusion when I found out ipodder was no longer supported. In the end I found icepodder which is exactly the same but has a couple more features and a different name.

I have still not found a audio player I'm totally happy with yet. Currently I'm using XMMS for playing podcasts. Icepodder has a nice view where it shows you the recently downloaded podcasts and you can just click and play that podcast. This is the opposite of my windows setup where ipodder would just download the files and winamp would create a recently downloaded smart playlist. So for now this works ok, but yep it would be great to organise my music and podcasts with something like winamp. Reminds me I need add last.fm plugin to xmms.

I still have Windows XP on my Dell laptop. I was talking to George and keeps wondering why I don't just upgrade to Ubuntu on my laptop too. I've been looking through my start menu trying to work out what I would miss if I upgraded. Heres a small list.

  • Winamp, like it or not winamp 5 is awesome and the amount of plugins and themes is insane
  • Launchy, recently installed and wow I love it. Its starting to change my default behavior now
  • Particls, no linux support yet
  • Decent RSS screensaver (useful for life feeds)

    • Keepass

  • Hamachi, I have it installed but for some reason linux can't communicate to windows and reverse
  • Outlook 2007 with Plaxo and Activesync, I know about evolution which supports ical but what about my windows mobile phone?
  • Greatnews RSS reader, I've gone through many of them and Greatnews is light, handles 400+ feeds really well and supports tags. Although I am watching the RSSOWL 2.0 alphas which will run on Linux.
  • Virtual DJ, although I have yet to try out Terminator X or Mixxx
  • Experiemental applications like Joost, Proto, Sailing clicker, Twingly, RSSbus, Google Gears, etc

I know its a little unfair, but the fact is that most experimental applications are build for windows first. How to get my Windows Mobile phone working with Linux is still up in the air. If that could be solved I would gladly drop Outlook 2007. Although I would miss the Plaxo support.

There's a side to linux which I'm starting to dabble with now. The home server setup. It started when I tried to install Windows Home server on a old box up in my loft but saw the system requirements. 1ghz processor minimum! Why? Its a bloody home server, the most taxing thing it will do is server media. Anyway, it got me thinking why don't I just add the core functionality I wanted in windows home server into my current ubuntu box? So I got Samba working correctly now, I just need to add more hard drive space and add some kind of network backup service.

I found Bacula which looks really good because it has support for everything I use but I couldn't get Bacula working from the package selector in Ubuntu. So it looks like I'm going to need to install it manually. Amanda was another option but doesn't seem to as simple.

So generally, I'm quite happy with Ubuntu on the desktop but I don't have the time to invest in getting my laptop converted quite yet.

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Interview with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons of Google

Google Developer Day 2007

While at Google Developer Day, I caught some time with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons from Google. Chris is well known in the Open source and Free software worlds for his work on Google summer of code and the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Recently he's (sometimes) hosts a great podcast with Leo Laporte called FLOSS weekly. Its hardly weekly but worth subscribing to anyway. Ed on the hand was the key man at the Ordnance Survey and tried to kick start the mapping craze well before Google maps hit the net. It made sense for Google to poach some a key man such as Ed.

Anyway, the interviews are up on Blip.TV as usual, and filmed with my Sanyo camera.

A couple of new things came out of the Google Developer Day. Google Mapplets, Google Mashup Editor and Google Gears.

First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.

An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.

Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.

Mapplets is interesting but what makes me excited is the Mashup Editor which somewhat fits in area of Flow* and Gears, which seems to be the final step in the move towards the Google Operating System. I would usually say who cares but Google Gears will be a open source project and they already have Adobe, Opera and Mozilla on board.

Generally Google once again made it clear there commitment to open-source and developers. I look forward to hacking about with this stuff really soon.

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My current development setup

I was asked today, what kind of setup I use for developing web applications. I tried to explain but failed because of the lack of common development tools and services. So I thought I'd try and blog it instead.

On my desktop I run,

  • XMLSpy 2005 Home Edition (discontinued the free version I think. Might switch to Oxygen XML soon)
  • Notepad++
  • WinSCP
  • Putty

On the server I run,

I tend to do lots of stuff in Cocoon and am slowly starting to use ZK for my front end display. Cocoon is perfect for the plumbing and ZK means I don't need to screw around with Javascript and DOM scripting. If I was deeply into the Ajax stuff, I might not need ZK but frankly I don't have the time.

 Yeah its very odd but it works for me.

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The best and worst of Hotel Wifi

Lloyd hotel from the north view

Hotelchatter posted up a list of its best and worst wifi enabled hotels. Its mainly American centric but there is a international version here.

Number one in the international version is the Lloydhotel.

Amsterdam: Lloyd Hotel. Free WiFi. Worked so fast in this large hotel. So fast we downloaded an entire season of The Office on iTunes within two hours.

Even 2 years ago it was flipping fast and effect-less. Every 4 rooms shared a wireless point and there was more that enough through-out the rest of the hotel to get wireless outside, the lobby and beyond. I think the only place you don't get wireless is in the lifts. I also got upgraded to the D level penthouse on the weekend, so I'm a little bias generally towards a simply awesome hotel.

Since joining Backstage, I've spent a lot of time in hotels and always try to pick hotels with Free Wireless. Usually the problem I get is that the wireless is in the lobby not the rooms or its not actually free its pay wireless by someone like Tmobile, BT or much worst Eurospot. The other issue is that most hotels don't care or have no one who actually knows the difference. When trying to book a hotel in Newcastle I phoned up about 12 hotels and at one point had to describe the BT open zone, Tmobile logos over the phone because the reception couldn't tell the difference between free and pay wifi. No lie!

So yes the situation in the UK is pretty dire once you get out there. I'm certainly thinking about submitting some of the hotels I've been to on the international hotelchatter site. I remember a hotel I stayed in during my last trip to Manchester, it costs equivalent to 10p a minute for internet access through a wired connection (there were no bundles or offers available) I believe it was operated by swissport or europort. And thats the biggest problem, you can read the website and find it does have internet access but what kind is unknown by even the staff or management.

On the upside, GNER trains have wireless through-out the trains and although it costs about 10 pounds for 24hours, its certainly worth it for a 6 hour journey to Scotland. Recently I heard the Cloud have covered the City of London (business square mile) in rich wifi. I don't think its free but at 11.99 per month for unlimited (yes what does unlimited really mean) data its not a bad deal if your wanting wireless in the UK. The cloud has also been pretty good about inter-operating with BT and I think you can even interop with Tmobile hotspots. There's no douht where ever you go now in London at least, there is some kind of wireless and its usually operated by one of the big 3. Sometimes I do see Orange hotspots, but I can't seem to get Orange to just add it to my existing mobile bill.

Generally its all a big mess but soon I'm sure like the Marriot adverts I keep seeing, hotels will wise up and start highlighting the fact they have free wireless (although I'm sure it will just get added into the room bill).

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Unlimited broadband does not exist?

Glyn sent me this while I was away.

ISPA to members: play fair on fair use

Internet providers' trade association ISPA has told its members to stop advertising “unlimited” broadband unless they are explicit and transparent about their fair use policies. Over recent months public calls have grown louder for action against ISPs who hawk “unlimited” services, without monthly download limits or bandwidth throttling, only to threaten cut-off when unpublished limits are breached.

At long last something starting to happen. My experience with Demon drove me away from them and I'm now a customer of UK Free Software Network. However I'm disappointed OFCOM have not stepped in here…

Action against ISPs has not been taken by Ofcom or the Advertising Standards Authority, which says “unlimited” advertising is OK as long as the small print says there is a fair use policy. The details of the fair use policy do not have to be published, however, as Pipex customers recently dicovered when they were told they would be cut off if they didn't rein in their broadband use.

What good is a fair use policy if you can't see whats in it!!! Once again sign the epetition if you think OFCOM and the ASA should publish there fair use policy amounts for all to see.

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Switching to Ubuntu on Desktop for real this time

The other day I was installing some new wireless points around the house. My very 1st generation Linksys 802.11b access point had pretty much had enough and needed to be put out of its pain. And the pocket Asus wireless point (smaller that a Airport express) wasn't really made for constant use.

Anyhow, I happen to flip the switch on the Belkin 10 way power supply under my desk. Off went the Desktop machine. Thought damm it, and switched the 10 way back on. Well Windows was screwed, so screwed that I had to reinstall it again. Only this time when I reinstalled it, it kept getting upset about the hardware and would restart its self.In the end I got so pissed off with the whole thing, that I threw the Windows CD across the room and went looking for my Ubuntu CD.

Within a few hours I had Ubuntu 6.10 dapper installed (had to do some data shifting with partition magic) and before you knew it all the applications I needed, thanks very much to Nat's guide to Ubuntu she sent me over Twitter. I had a few problems on the way including writing to NTFS partitions and getting Azureus to run correctly. However this evening I got all those working without too much work. Now I just need to clean things up, get Hamachi running and sort out the Samba shares.

So far, its all god…

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Little Big Planet

I watched the demo of this recently and was wowed by the level of graphics and parciptation in and outside the game. Its on Playstation 3 only which is a shame but really shows off the power of the PS3 better that anything else I've seen to date. Theres also a level creator like you have never seen before and of course the levels are sharable. If they could make the PS3 a bit more affordable, that would be great. Right now, I'm still considering a Wii because its simply great to play and much more friendly to non-gamers.

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Cubicgarden.com issues recently

So if you've not noticed already, cubicgarden.com has been up and down like a yoyo on a broken string. This was not the fault of Hub.org, actually Apache 2.x has been running flawlessly through-out the troubles. Thats why you could see the 503 error and not a 404.

Without boring everyone to death, I'm running on a virtual server FreeBSD (thats right Marc?) in which I'm running Resin 3.x and Apache 2.x together connected via jk or something like that. I then use Apache for static files and Resin the Java container for dynamic applications. Currently I have Blojsom, Cocoon and ZK installed in the Java container.

So what was actually happening? Well Resin was running out of memory every few hours. But why? It seems there was a problem with the crazy amount of spam I getting on my pipeline blog and so Blojsom was trying to load most of them into memory for analysis or something. So I have deleted all comments and trackbacks from Flow currently and made it a read only place for now. I was going to use Akismet on it too but decided actually it was better as read only for now. Those really interested will email me and spammers can just die.

Hopefully now cubicgarden.com and all the other blogs hosted on the same install of blojsom will be more reliable and I won't get the floods of emails saying your site is down again. Thanks to everyone who did write. Honestly I would have done this much earlier if I was in my regular timezone.

In the long run, I'm considering putting geekdinner.co.uk on the same blojsom install, but I'm worried this will screw up the other geekdinners around the country. And geez, everyone just can't get enough of WordPress. By the way Photomatt is a very cool, down to earth guy and well worth talking to if you get a chance.

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When Unlimited does not mean unlimited

When your a UK ISP like Demon advertising to the public. The advert above for 8meg business enabled broadband at 24.99 pounds a month is exactly what I have had for the last 3 plus years. When Broadband first came out, Demon offered only one option of 512k broadband at 24.99, then has upgrades came along they split the line up into a cheaper 19.99 a month one which had no access to things like Newsgroups or static IPs. Fine I thought, Home Office is good for me, I don't mind pay extra for some of the above. However, when 8meg Broadband came along Demon changed the AUP. There was no mention of a limit on Broadband download use or anything till they changed it. Now it reads.

The THUS FUP* applies to Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 Broadband and variants of these products Customers only.

It is in place to ensure that THUS can continue to provide an acceptable standard of service in terms of download speeds, to the vast majority of our customers.

THUS will continually measure the performance of our broadband network and take steps to restrict the download speeds of very heavy users during peak periods, should their activities significantly contribute towards the risk of reduced speeds being experienced by the majority of our broadband customers. The peak period is 9am to 10pm .

All users will be monitored on a continuous basis. Only customers that consistently download exceptionally large amounts of data over a rolling 30 day period will be affected by the THUS FUP. THUS expects that less than 1% of its Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 customers will be affected by the THUS FUP. Any Customers who are affected will be notified if their speed is being restricted.

Speed restrictions will only apply during peak periods. Should a Customer's usage return to acceptable levels, adjudged on a rolling 30 day period, speed restrictions will be removed.

Now bearing in mind I've been with Demon for 13 years in some kind of form, you can understand why I'm pretty pissed off. Also you don't get a warning letter, they just do it and send out a letter. The letter which I don't have right now but keep meaning to type out (although we did read it out on geek and geekhag podcast number 6). In the letter they say the limits which are not specified in the above AUP are 50gig for home users and 60gig for home office users. I went over by 4.85gig at 64.85gig last month. So the upshot of all of this is that me and Sarah have been restricted to 128k broadband between 9am – 10pm every night. This wasn't so bad at the start because it only applied to weekdays. But then it changed to weekends too. I asked Demon many times to prove what they were saying by giving me a breakdown of the traffic but they never did (I'm going to leave out the many nasty stories of talking to Demon Customer Services – I hope to record them one day soon, when i get back from the states) So in the end I got the number for Demon Customer Care Support (yes there different and UK based) from the ADSL guide forums (you need to be logged on) which is 08000279190 for anyone who actually wants to cancel there account with Demon and get the MAC code so they can move somewhere.

But this is the problem, almost every ISP now has a AUP but their not being upfront about the actual limits and they still advertising as unlimited. Two ISPs which I was considering are pretty upfront about everything is Zen Internet and UK Freesoftware network.

So anyway, I'm obviously not the only person to have this trouble. Glyn pointed me to a register post about the same issue and a nice link to an e-petition about ISPs using the word unlimited in all advertising.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Insist that OFCOM and the ASA stop Broadband Providers  advertising 'unlimited' services that are in fact limited in the small print or by un-defined fair use policies

So far 2,427 people have signed up including myself. The petition is open till June 10th, so I would get signing soon. As for now, when I get back from the states, I'll be switching to UK Free software network which don't packetshape or restrict beyond whats been described up front on the site. Now if only others would do the same.

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So busy and tired recently…

I have not blogged for quite a while. This is down to a few things.

  1. Ecto is simply doing my head in, as it keeps loosing draft entries and screwing up on the spellchecker. I paid for the software and I'm back to using W.blogger again.
  2. I have been out and about across the England and Scotland recently. I have actually been to more places up north that ever before. My Flickr account is full of pictures from different places. I also need to find the time to sort out all my pictures.
  3. Wireless has been patchy in some places and after a day of working and night of socialising, I actually do need to grab some sleep.
  4. When I'm at home, i've been preparing to go somewhere else the next day or so and the broadband has simply been a nightmare due to Demon's restrictions (more about this later).
  5. Last of all, when I do find the time to blog, the blog is down because Resin has shut its self down on the server. I then spend a little bit of time trying to work out what the problem is instead of blogging. This has been a real pain and I know your as pissed off as myself about this. I'm totally lost why after months of perfect service, why this has just started happening.

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