June 30, 2005
June 29, 2005
June 28, 2005
iTunes Podcasts
The new version of iTunes is out with support for podcasting. This is great news. A few things feel a little "rushed" about it though:
- The processor load goes through the roof when iTunes is downloading a podcast.
- It's not really clear whether you're searching for podcasts or music store tracks depending on where you are in the GUI.
- The highlighted source on the left-hand side jumps between "Podcasts" and "Music Store" erratically (the directory is under Music Store, but the subscriptions list is under Podcasts).
- The 'subscribe' button looks a little too much like the 'buy' button.
- The "Publish Podcasts" link is disingenuous - it's really for advertising your podcast, not actually publishing. What happens if Apple decide to create a real podcast publishing service in the future? (Or buy podshow...)
- The integration between podcasts and the iTunes browser is flakey: there's no podcast genre, and the podcast categories appear under 'Artist', which is very weird and very wrong.
The good news is that the subscriptions pane is really friendly, though it looks like the mainstreaming of podcasting has knocked quite a few servers down, as I haven't successfully been able to retrieve any of my usual favourites yet.
It's interesting to see this, as it feels like Apple really rushed to get this out of the door to capitalise on the explosion of hype that is surrounding podcasting right now. In my experience over the last couple of years, most previous updates to Apple software have been clearly thought-through and thoroughly polished from a user experience point of view prior to release. I wonder why Apple felt the need to rush this one?
RSS
As I see more and more RSS icons popping up on pages all over the place, there's two things I'd like to see to make life easier.Firstly, not many people are making use of the feed:// protocol in their URLs. I guess it's early days yet, but it's so much easier to simply click on the URL and have it automatically added to your subscriptions than to go through the whole copy, new feed, paste rigamarole.
Secondly, I'd like a small application I can run that registers itself for the feed protocol (or even a Firefox plugin that keeps an eye out for RSS), which can update my NetNewsWire subscriptions without having to start up NetNewsWire itself. I love NNW, but I have so much running that I really can't spare the memory to keep it in the background.
Feel free to tell me that such an application already exists ;-)
Collaborative conferences
It seems that a strong underlying theme of this year's Institutional Web Management Workshop will be the use of various networking technologies to enhance the overall experience. It will be interesting to see how the delegates take to it. It's become pretty much expected at some of the more avant-garde/hardcore techie events, so much so that being at a conference without wireless feels like being a fish out of water.The wikalong annotation service is being used during the conference, and so I've just been trying it out in preparation. It certainly provides a useful way of adding unofficial commentary to a more formal resource, though the Firefox plugin is a little cumbersome and could be much more user-friendly, and the wikalong server seems rather sluggish.
I think wikalong is ideal for reviewing on long timescales - days, months, years. I don't think it will work for 'live' scenarios such as during a conference, however. For that, the best choice has to be collaborative text editors such as SubEthaEdit, which allow massively parallel note-taking (as seen at the Cocoon GetTogether in 2003 and 2004).
I'll also be interested to see how jabber holds up with lots of delegates using it. I use messaging clients a lot in my day-to-day work, but the experience has always degraded with more than two or three people in the room at once. I don't think IRC can be beaten for backchannel communications in conferences. It's simple, fast, and efficient, but maybe not as friendly as messaging clients and it tends to have a bit of an (unwarranted) bad name amongst academic IT services. It took quite a bit of persuading for me to be allowed to run an IRC server back in 1997, when I wanted to set one up for my university employers.
June 22, 2005
My home and work on google maps
When Paul told me last night that Google Maps now did satellite, I didn't realise he was talking about the high-resolution photos that are now available (low-res was available for a while now).
Ugo links to his home, so I'm going to link to my home and work on google maps, to illustrate how close I am to work. Looking at the photos, they are approximately 1-2 years out-of-date .... there's now almost solid housing to the left, and as I grumbled back in March, the field in the middle has been dug up.
Of course, the blue route suggested by Google is suboptimal as it's (a) for cars and (b) seems to go through a bus lane. I've therefore done a quick edit to highlight the route I take (marked in green) via bike. Mind you, going straight across steep fields is less workable by car anyway ;-)
June 20, 2005
I didn't need to hear that
Things you never want to hear over the office tannoy: "This is an important message for all staff. Due to a chemical incident, the chemical waste store will be closed until further notice."June 19, 2005
Cameras and cards
I was at my cousin's wedding yesterday, which was a thoroughly enjoyable event. It was marred only by technical hitches with my camera.
After the experience of sorting through 600+ photos from the holiday, my dad and I agreed that only one of us would take a camera to this event, so I took my Kyocera S3. Not to mention that my dad had accidentally formatted his camera's card when the battery died, so I had his card in my laptop with MediaRecover trying to undelete pictures of my nephew's birthday.
So, it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the bride looked radiant, etc etc. And then about half-way through the post-ceremony photo opportunity, my camera came up with the words: "Media corrupted". Argh!
The card in my camera is a 512mb MMC card. I used to carry around two 32mb MMC cards, but with 512mb it seemed redundant. For a moment I thought all was lost - and then I realised my mobile phone had a 32mb MMC card in it. I quickly whipped the card out of the phone, put it in the camera, and carried on shooting. When that card was full, I remembered that my sister's phone had a 128mb MMC in it, so I borrowed that and put it in my camera.
From the jaws of disaster I snatched success, and I now have a load of really entertaining photos. The excellent MediaRecover is hard at work on my corrupted card, and has found 48 more photos so far.
What have I learnt? It pays to stick with one format of media in all your devices. And it never hurts to invest in a good undelete program...
June 18, 2005
June 16, 2005
Ugo's new job
The word is out... Ugo is joining Pro-netics from next month. Congratulations, Ugo! It will be great to work closer with you, and I'm sure you'll shortly become an invaluable and indispensable member of the team over at Pro-netics. Hopefully you'll find some sort of substitute for the water cooler in our online community ;-)June 14, 2005
Talk talk
Tomorrow evening is the Cocoon Beer meet, with various Cocoon and Apache types heading to a pub in London to meet up and talk about our favourite topics.
I'll be on the road again in July, since conference season is upon us. I'll be talking at two conferences, and may well attend a couple more depending on schedules.
The first I'll be talking at is OSS Watch's "Building Open Source Communities", where I'll be chatting a bit about my experiences in the Cocoon community over the years, and giving an introduction to the layout of the Apache Software Foundation. It will be a lot of fun, particularly as the conference is in Edinburgh and coincides neatly with the G8 summit and the anti-poverty demonstrations.
Later that week I'll be at the Institutional Web Management Workshop, where I'll be leading a workshop on "Whose work is it anyway?", which will hopefully be a useful and lively discussion on outsourcing from both sides of the fence, with some handy hints and tips for all concerned as an outcome.
Later in July of course is ApacheCon Europe ... I'm still trying to decide whether to go or not and how long to go for. It would be great to catch up with the usual crowd, but the pricing is prohibitive, particularly when compared to more focused events such as the Cocoon GetTogether. Decisions, decisions ...
June 13, 2005
Municipal wifi
I hear rumours that central Norwich will shortly have an open-access public municipal wifi network. The organisations involved are currently at the point of discussing what can legally be stuck on a lamp-post.
In a project funded by (as I understand it) EU money, hotspots will be deployed in the city centre. These will be open access "whilst funding remains", after which they will revert to council-only usage. Apparently the council are in talks with various private sector organisations about maintaining a paid-for service once the initial funding runs out.
This is excellent news, as currently the only decent place for free wifi in central Norwich is Cafe Java on Surrey Street - which is however a wonderful place with great food and drink... now I need to think of another excuse to go there!
Consistent interaction
When I went to Cyprus, I had three assumptions:
- I'd be able to keep in touch via email, using GPRS
- If I couldn't keep in touch, I'd be able to moblog
- Vodafone would screw it up
Obviously the sheer weight of spam and virii knocked me offline, but what was more surprising was that I couldn't immediately get online in the first place. My laptop's connection details for GPRS access are apparently UK-specific. Although I could establish a GPRS connection in Cyprus, I could transfer no data over the link. After an SMS conversation with Paul, he provided me with the Greek GPRS connection details via Ross Barkman's GPRS info page. Note that SMS worked fine.
While I was wondering what to do with myself with no internet / GPRS access, I started trying to send moblog post emails via my mobile phone. As you can probably guess, these did not work either. My mobile phone's GPRS settings also needed country-specific details.
Throughout the trip, SMS and MMS messages continued to be delivered.
This seems crazy. How can the mobile networks set up peering arrangements but fail to negotiate location-independent connection settings? Do they really expect the average punter to know that when abroad they need to reconfigure their internet connections with new access point names, usernames, passwords, DNS and SMTP servers?
So take note: if you're vacationing and want to use data services, make a note of the GPRS connection settings required at your destination country. (You should also be aware that your tariff's inclusive data allowance rarely applies oversees, and that overseas data charges may vary from local data charges.)
It's funny that in 2005 we still seem to be a long way away from consumer-friendly mobile phone connectivity. With the artificial barriers to usage - whether it's configurations, charges, or opaque tariffs - I wonder if there's not a hidden agenda by the telcos to artificially limit the usage of 2nd-generation infrastructure to force customers to try out the next big thing with their 3g networks. Somehow though, I suspect the awful user experience will only be duplicated on the next-gen services. I can't wait for universal wifi...
June 12, 2005
Down to earth, back from Cyprus
I've just about caught up after the two weeks I was away. It took me all this week to catch my breath and get back up to speed on everything.
Cyprus was an experience. Not exactly a holiday, per se - two weeks with the whole family is a challenge! But certainly it was great to change gear, and even though it's hard work I do love being with my family. It's only really hard work because I have a comparatively quiet personal life. Switching to the total immersion in all the noise and chaos that families can bring is a bit of a shock.
In the two weeks we were there, we managed to pack a fair few things in. I was surprised - even though it was my second trip to Cyprus, I didn't feel like anything was repetitive. There were some obvious highlights - driving, diving, boating, chilling by the pool. A few disappointments - occasional blustery weather, a tourist attraction that shut 5 minutes before we got there after a long drive, and generally average food in restaurants. In all, we hit a good mix of relaxing and cultural experiences, with hundreds of photos (some of which are public on flickr under Cyprus 2005, some of the rest will appear here no doubt) and lots of good memories.
Early on we got to do my favourite holiday excursion: crazy-ass driving up insane mountains and off-roading down gravel tracks with precipitous edges. Since I don't own a car, I rarely get to drive in the UK. So combine the opportunity to drive with adrenaline-fuelled dangerous roads and staggering views, and I'm in heaven! (Even if the rest of the family were in pain from going 30+mph over endless pot-holes.) We drove up and down through the Troodos Mountains, along roads that hugged the edges and sometimes even went along the crests of the mountains. I have to say I was impressed by the Nissan Terrano, which coped with 7 passengers and tough terrain with aplomb.
I also got to go diving again (last time was in Cyprus, too). I enjoyed it far more this time, as I was more relaxed and more prepared for the whole experience. This was a full open water diver course, meaning I now need to do a 5-day course any time in the next year with PADI. The only slightly nerve-wracking part of it was that instead of wading into the sea we had to step off the back of the boat. Thankfully the waters of the blue lagoon couldn't have been more enticing. In fact, they were so nice that we hired a boat and went back there two days later, where we swam and snorkeled for quite some time.
We also spent time looking around Paphos, sampling traditional cuisine (not as good as the food in Corfu), visiting the historical sites around Paphos and at Kourion, and more importantly relaxing beside the pool. I managed to read the entire back-catalog of Dan Brown novels while I was away, as well as catch up on a lot of technical reading I'd been planning to do. It's amazing how many hours there are in the day when you don't have to filter spam!
I think it's safe to say I've seen enough of Cyprus now and I'd like to go visit some other parts of the world. Over the next year I'm hoping to make more progress on my list of unusual places to visit. But for now, while the rain beats against the window, I'm going to look over the photos and remind myself of what it feels like to have the sun on your back as you swim through beautiful clear blue seas.
June 6, 2005
Mail.app sucks
I know, I know, I keep complaining and I should just switch already. But here's a few more notes on my problems with Apple's OS X Mail app (version 1.3.11, for Panther 10.3.9), before I finally ditch it.
If you are going to be on a low bandwidth connection, you might think it's a good idea to only keep a local copy of messages you've read. Unfortunately, Mail.app will then become completely unable to search any of your mail, even complete messages that were downloaded before you changed your archival settings. Even if you have gigabytes of mail stored locally. grep is your friend.
So I gave up with downloading any Mail at all until I returned. While I was away I accrued some 4072 emails. It's taken two days and a ton of patience to get them all downloaded and sorted.
Firstly, Mail was left running overnight on an ADSL connection, and crashed some time during the night whilst trying to download. Nice.
Secondly, on a fast connection, it's taken several restarts, much clicking on the "Get New Mail" and "Synchronize" buttons to finally get all the mail stored locally.
And finally, I've had to individually select batches of email and manually click the "Apply Rules" menu option, since Mail refused to process around 3000 of the mails as they were downloaded. Selecting all the unsorted mail and clicking "Apply Rules" was insufficient as Mail failed to apply them and simply stopped after looking at (and doing nothing with) the first 500 emails. Trial and error suggests "Apply Rules" will fail with anything more than about 1000 mail messages.
I remember fondly the days when I used procmail and mutt or pine, never missing a mail and working contentedly on high and low bandwidth connections. I don't think it's just the overwhelming amount of spam these days. I'm going to try Thunderbird, and if that fails I'll go back to console-based solutions.