Category: technology-and-computing

So at long last I got it and have used it quite a bit. But I really got to try it out at a political blogging lecture I attended just recently. The complains I heard from other users about the keyboard timing out after a minute or even less didnt seem to happen to me. Generally my ipaq would turn off before the keyboard would. It is a bit of a pain having to reconnect when the ipaq has switched off but even that only takes 2secs and only requires you to press a key. None of that bluetooth bonding each time, which was a relief to discover.
I was not able to bond my 3G Phone with the keyboard of course but unexpectly my tablet would not pair with the keyboard. After a browse through the Stowaway forums and Microsofts FAQs, it seems the Toshiba bluetooth drivers are utter crap and they dont support the HID profile along with others like the Audio profiles. So I attempted to remove the toshiba bluetooth drivers and force the service pack 2 ones into action. However its going to take more work as none of them working now.

Generally the Bluetooth keyboard is pretty great and I highly recommend it. I just cant wait to make proper use of the keyboard when at a conference or decent lecture. My thoughts of using the bluetooth keyboard as a interface for most of my machines may have been a little forward thinking on my part. Oh well at least I'm half way there.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource provides information about open source projects from the BBC. It lists projects developed by the BBC where the source code has been released as open source.

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they've funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn't get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

Well, backstage.bbc.co.uk and the creative archive now include bbc.co.uk/opensource to the amazing line up…

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Nizam dropped me a im to say, my Bluetooth Keyboard has arrived I just need to pick it up and pay. I'm glad its the ThinkOutside keyboard because Mobileburn just reviewed the top 3 bluetooth keyboards and it came out top. Lets just hope its at least compatable with my tablet and pocketpc. If it works with my mobile phone I will be truely amazed.

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An anonymous reader writes “CPU magazine has written a very straight-to-the-point editorial on the lack of quality and innovation in software for the mainstream OS. They compare it to the Mac, which is found in a much different light. Where has all the innovation gone?” From the article: “There's too much coal and not enough diamonds within the sphere of downloads. The greatest pieces of software are plagued by unintelligent design, and very few rise to the level of ubiquity. Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging; there's no user community rallying around the platform. We use the computer, certainly, or is the computer using us?”

You are damm right! I dont totally agree with the article but generally most of the newer software out there are just that, ugly, boring and uninspiring. Some examples…

Blogging applications: Show me a really good blogging application for Windows which was not a port of one on the mac platform? The best one I've seen and used is Ecto which was for the mac and then got ported over the pc later. Wbloggar is good, stable and works but wheres the Atom api support? Yes I know Atom is still in that unstable state but come on! Wbloggar is also a pain to use if you got multiple blogs and blog alot. I actually use Blojsom's bookmarklet because wbloggar is a pain when inserting trackbacks and technorati tags. Its good for quickly bashing out thoughts or a post but nothing else really. Compare it to Ecto and you got something very different.

Ok taking things up a notch, wheres the innovation in this area? Yes you guessed right on the mac side. Flow which Miles showed me a while ago seems to be one example of this innovation on the mac platform. Not only is it a well thought-out application but its not bad looking either (dont have a mac to try it out sorry). The nearest thing to Flow is Blogwave which is far too complex and somewhat ugly compared to Flow, but to be fair there not quite the same. Blogbridge seems to be the only cross platform aggregator which does much more than just read news.

Look at the instant messenger client field, I wasnt exactly impressed with iChat then iChatAV came out and I was unimpressed with the unknown protocal used for video and audio. But saying that, iChatAV, Proteus and Adium all work well and look good. Compare it to GAIM which Adium is actually based upon. PSI which works well but looks pretty poor (interestingly works on the mac too). Only Pandion and Neos MT looks good. However I'm starting to use Grush which I'm sure I will write more about soon.

The other area where the windows platform is so far behind is in the widget area. Konfabulator has been out for ages and the widgets on the site are pretty good and useful till Apple launched Dashboard in OSX 10.4. Now look at the differences between Dashboard widgets and Konfabulator widgets. For example, a search for google map on konfabulator and dashboard returns 1 for konfabulator and 9 for dashboard. A search for flickr returns 1 for konfabulator and 5 for dashboard. Do you see a pattern emerging here? I still wonder how hard it would be to convert between konfabulator and dashboard widgets. But honestly at this very moment Dashboard widgets are way better than Konfabulator widgets and the innovation in them are amazing when compared. I'm sure Konfabulator can do the same but konfabulator widgets are smply uninspired.

So generally Chris is so right about Windows, I dont know how this can be fixed but it seems a lot more software is going cross platform now.

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Is it safe to say Jabber support in OSX 10.4 (Tiger) is not all its cracked up to be? Apple did a good thing embedding Jabber support in not only the client (iChatAV) but also the OSX 10.4 server. But according this article it certainly sounds like it.

Apple chose to leave a few other pieces of Jabber functionality out of its client as well: Though it's able to use them if they've already been set up on another Jabber client, there's no option within iChat to do the service discovery needed to access Jabber gateways.

Off the back of this, iChat users have been sharing hacks around the gateway problem.

Whether iChat offers the ability to register with Jabber gateways or not, iChat users have been busy figuring out how to use third party clients to sign on to public servers, register with those gateways, then return to using iChat.

It was also noted by developer Missig, that iChat diverges from the XHTML-IM specification. Apple are using some kind of rich text which will need to be hacked or reverse engineered to allow for compatable applications elsewhere.

Yes before people start, most of these things are nitty picking and yes if Microsoft even dared to do anything like this it would likely be so far removed from the standard. Not that Jabber will ever come to the core of Windows ever, specially with Microsoft fully behind the Sip/Simple specification.

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After installing it and playing with the new version for a matter of minutes, I have noticed an increase in general speed and performance. But anyhow, here's the official list of whats new…

Whats New in Konfabulator 2.0 for users
Multi-Pane Preferences dialogs for Widgets
New Widgets
Improved Proxy support for web resources (AutoProxy)

Whats New in Konfabulator 2.0 for authors
COM support
Inter-Widget messaging
Image Tiling/Scaling
ClipRects on Images
vAlign on images and text areas
Colorization (colorize, hsl adjustment, hsl tinting)
Context menu addition support
filesystem.read/writeFile (utf-8 only)
filesystem.volumes array of currently mounted volumes
filesystem.move/copy
filesystem.getFileInfo
filesystem.getDisplayName
chooseFile/chooseFolder dialog functions
saveAs dialog function
chooseColor dialog function
Trash/Recycle Bin open/empty
Multiple Window support
Multi-Click handling
New Timer object

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Hot on the news that Opera 8 will have support for SVG Tiny, the Firefox team have confirmed support for SVG. This is pretty awesome news, I have to say thank you very much to the Mozilla team. SVG will be disabled as default but can be enabled from the preferences now. Beats building a new version just for SVG support.

In an update, SVG will be turned on as default and can be turned off from the preference if the person wants to use a SVG plugin or turn off SVG. Even better! I also wanted to take this chance to explain the difference between Native and Plugin. Plugin's are usually invoked by embedding the media object in the page, as in the case of Flash. However Native SVG means you can write SVG directly into XHTML code and the browser will know what to do with it (aka it does not just hand it off to a plugin). This is another huge advantage SVG has over Flash, however some would disagree and say because Flash is bundled with most of the browsers out there that its pretty much native anyway. Anyway before a Flash vs SVG debate breaks out, heres a list to consider.

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I made the mistake of letting SUN install Solaris 10 on my laptop on Tuesday afternoon. The guy did say it would take about 15mins over the network because obviously my TabletPC has no CD Rom. I had to rush off before 6pm and to be fair I didnt turn up till 5pm, so I was always pushing it. And as you'd expect there was problems, solaris wouldnt detect my network card which is essential when your network booting over PXE! By about 5:30pm it was starting to install but the solaris server must have choose to transfer data at 10BaseT instead of 100BaseT. So it was going so slow that I had to switch off half way through the transfer and go. To be fair the Sun guy gave me a DVD of the Solaris 10 with wireless drivers and also instructions and contact details if I get stuck.
I didnt know my TabletPC was screwed till the day after when I switched it on and was given a cryptic message about the Master boot record. Yep, I thought – My tablet is screwed again!

A couple of good things did come out of this mistake. I now know my Sanyo 3G Camera phone supports EXIF metadata unlike a lot of the camera phones on the market which is pretty cool to know. And I also learned how to boot my TabletPC off a compact flash card. Roman swears you can boot the Tablet off a USB key chain but I tried and tried and gave up. But lets step back a second, how on earth do you create a bootable disc in Windows 2000 anyway? I remember in Windows NT and 98 you could click bootable when you format a drive, but theres no option in windows 2000.
In the end I reliased I could fake a PCMCIA CD Rom by using a Compact Flash card and PCMCIA card adapter. I then built a Custom bootable CF card using this nice HP application and this bundle of DOS tools. I then stuck the DOS version of Partition Magic 6 on the same CF card and was able to boot in to DOS by using selecting the PCMCIA CDROM and load up PMagic 6 for DOS. Where it fixed the MBR problem and set the Windows Partition to Active. Then I was sorted! The URL which helped me through all this was this tutorial – Tip: Boot from USB Key Addendum. But the key for TabletPC's is using the CF as the booter not a USB key.

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I reinstalled my tabletPC and have installed the usual software. And finally come back to reality, I dont need a mac at all. That plus the fact I can only get 400 pounds maximum for my tabletPC while a brand new Mac is 1000 pounds. And yes I could get a discount but even 800 pounds isnt enough to make me buy. And i'm not going to sell my tabletpc for a bloody mini mac. I got 3 desktop machines already thank you. So all you mad mac heads drop it.

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