October 29, 2006
October 28, 2006
Bring back steam
More travel dissatisfaction. The weekday peak time for trains returning from London to Norwich has been extended to 3pm-7pm. That's a four hour window where the price goes from a reasonable £35 to almost £70.
In the mornings the window is 5.30 to 8.00, a more reasonable two and a half hours. But if you want to do a return trip to London outside of peak hours, with the two hour trip factored in you now get a luxurious 3 hours to do your business. Marvelous.
I should buy me a train company. Seems like a license to print money.
I wrote the above last week whilst waiting for the 7pm train. What I didn't know was that all the trains were delayed, so in the end I got home at midnight, three hours later than planned. Once again, Norwich moves further away from London. I still love traveling by train though, as being out of the office can sometimes mean being away from distractions and interruptions, and ironically it then becomes an opportunity to think and work in a more focussed manner.
October 27, 2006
Nokia N80
One of the things that surprised me at both the Cocoon GetTogether and ApacheCon US was the level of interest in my new phone, the Nokia N80. So I figure it's probably a good idea for me to share my experiences, to help others make an informed purchasing decision.
What drew me to the phone in the first place? I needed to replace my trusty 6600 which after 2 years of abuse was struggling to keep a charge for much longer than a day, and was looking decidedly battered. The 6600 was new in 2004, but looking quite dated and feeling quite limited.
The N80 seemed like a good choice: 3G, WiFi, 3MP camera, quadband, and up to 8 days' battery. Combined with a great screen and a cool sliding keypad, it had everything for the geek-about-town.
Unfortunately, the experience hasn't been all that great. Okay, so I'm a little jaded anyway thanks to the problems I've been having with Orange, but the phone itself is pretty appalling too.
First, the good things:
- 3G data connections are dramatically better than GPRS
The camera in it is great, ideal for times when I'm not lugging about my SLR. I was pleasantly surprised at how good some of the Newcastle pictures turned out, for example. - Multiple calls simultaneously seems to work, it was always unpredictable on the 6600
- Hands-free loudspeaker works much better than the 6600: the internal speaker is excellent.
- There's a cool accessibility feature that makes the phone speak the name of the person calling. This is great, as you know who's ringing while you're fumbling to get the phone out of your pocket.
Now the bad things:
- Nokia changed the size of the charging socket. Suddenly the three previous Nokia chargers I own have been rendered useless, and I can no longer plug in when visiting friends and family. This shouldn't be a problem with the advertised 8 days' battery life, but:
- Battery life is awful. I mean, worse than my two year old 6600. I don't have fancy screensavers turned on, I habitually keep bluetooth turned off, and yet I'm finding the phone runs out of juice after just one day of medium usage (like, 5 or 6 ten minute phone calls and 10 minutes of 3G data transfer).
- Blinking blue light. When the phone is on standby, a small blue LED flashes to let you know it is still alive. This is extremely distracting (particularly at night), and there's no way to turn it off.
- WiFi support is a hack. It takes quite a few minutes to configure a hotspot. You can also have the phone search for hotspots when trying to open a URL, but if you've typed the URL in and it doesn't find a hotspot - well, it just deletes the URL for you. That's buggy, but:
- The whole OS is fragile and unstable. I've had it hang maybe a dozen times since I've had it, and often had to restart it. Startup is slooooooow, so this is a real nightmare.
- Coupled with the instability, I've been having connection problems, frequently seeing "SIM card registration failed" and "Connection error" messages, meaning my phone is offline for several hours at a time unless I check it and try a test call to make sure it's still working. Orange just shipped me a new phone, so it'll be interesting to see if this works any better.
- The keylock gets cancelled too easily. The sliding keyboard slides a little too easily, and when the phone is in your pocket all too often you find it coming to life.
- Obnoxious product positioning. On the fancy new main screen, the first icon is "Photography", which takes you to Orange's Photography app, Pixota. This lovely little bundle of fun will upload your pictures somewhere, so couple that with the dodgy keylock and you can see that very quickly you could run up huge data charges. This is a fault of Orange as much as Nokia, but still...
- It's unsupported. Not just Apple iSync unsupported, I mean almost every mobile phone software package on the planet unsupported. The N80 runs a more recent version of Symbian (OS 9) than most of the other new Nokia phones, which means that no-one seems to be testing / writing for it yet.
More on the iSync problem. You have to hack the iSync supported phones list to add the N80. iSync will then bravely try it's best to sync with the phone, but sadly it regularly fails:
Friday, 27 October 2006 11:55
[SavsN80] There was an error pushing some changes to the phone. The synchronization may have been cancelled on the phone.
Device "SavsN80" synchronization failed
Not consistently, mind you. It seems that if the phone's screensaver kicks in during a sync, then the sync will abort.
The URL and resulting web page for the Nokia N80 says an awful lot about the phone as a whole: http://www.nokia.com/nseries/index.html?loc=inside,main_n80
Remember how it used to be really simple to find the right web page, because their urls were in the format http://www.nokia.com/phones/modelnumber e.g. for the 6600? Nowadays Nokia have clearly lost it, and the flash-heavy visually overwhelming web site is almost as awful and unusable as the phone itself. Style over substance, clearly.
Apparently there's a new version of the N80 due to be released - so if you really must get this phone, I'd wait for that.
October 20, 2006
Milano
I got to visit Milano for the first time this week, to work from the Italian office of Sourcesense for a couple of days. It was an interesting experience, but sadly the timetable and weather didn't allow for any sightseeing. I got to enjoy some more Italian food though - molto bene! ;-)
It's also made my plazes profile even more entertaining:
My average travel speed is 621 km/day
I wonder at what point this year I'll break the sound barrier?
October 15, 2006
Home again
I made it back home safe and sound, after a reasonably uneventful journey. The most exciting part was fighting through my hangover on the flight from Chicago whilst silently cursing a certain french gentleman who got us started on the shots in Nuno's. (Just kidding Emmanuel, it was a great evening and a pleasure to meet you!)
As expected, the journey did interesting things to my plazes:
My average travel speed is 560 km/day
Ouch.
More photos will be on the flickr ApacheCon set just as soon as I get to a faster network. There's a load from various other people already there under the apacheconus2006 tag.
October 13, 2006
No party policy
You know, I have no idea what this could be referring to:
No sir, no idea at all.
October 12, 2006
Travel
So let me get this right - I can fly 4,923 miles from Austin, Texas to London Heathrow in 10 hours and 35 minutes, but the last 147 miles from Heathrow is going to take me another day?
Apparently the train service to Norwich is disrupted due to engineering works and is running a bus replacement service (given the number of times they've worked on that track, you'd expect it to be the most highly-engineered bit of rail in the world). If I'm going to end up being on a bus instead of a train, it may as well be a coach. But National Express leave just 20 minutes after my flight lands - from a different terminal. That's never going to work, and the next coach leaves four hours later. A cab is £150. Car hire is out of the question, since I don't yet have my new license after the wallet stealing incident.
I think I'll just stay here and enjoy the Texan hospitality some more until the UK gets a proper transport infrastructure.
October 11, 2006
Another year older...
... but apparently not another year wiser, judging from how my head feels this morning. I guess I'm pretty lucky to spend my birthday here in Texas with so many great people, although I must admit spending it in Rome next year seems like a good idea too.
A special happy birthday to the other wonderful folks who got older today - Gab and Stega.
October 9, 2006
Silly mistake
One thing I didn't take into account whilst packing for ApacheCon was the fact that I didn't actually need to bring any t-shirts. We're only on the first day of the hackathon and I've already picked up two (of course, for the three days of the conference I'll be wearing Sourcesense branded t-shirts).October 8, 2006
And then I screamed
I made it safely to Austin, Texas for ApacheCon US 2006. The journey was, well, not much fun. Here goes with my cathartic rant about stupid rules and stupid planes.
The journey began pretty smoothly. I crashed at Paul's place in Surrey on Friday night, so I didn't need to get up until 6.30am on Saturday in order to get my flight from Gatwick. Check-in ran smoothly, I got some breakfast, and then boarded the flight.
Last week I was joking with Arjé about plane seating, describing how anyone sat in the center seat of the center aisle is basically consigned to hell for the duration of the flight. So it was more than slightly ironic that I ended up in that seat. That'll teach me. Just to reinforce the hell meme, there was a delay in getting flight clearance so the plane sat on the runway for an extra hour, without air conditioning. Within about 10 minutes the interior was up to over 30 degrees. Toasty.
When we did eventually get into the air, the air conditioning kicked in and they kept the cabin at about -5 for the entire journey. It was quite an impressive sight, seeing row after row of people huddling under blankets to try and keep warm.
Shortly after the in-flight meal was served, we hit some interesting turbulence - enough to send the cabin crew racing back to their seats, and to get some interesting "oooh", "aahhhhh", and "ARGGHHHHH!" noises out of my fellow passengers. I was more intent on finding ways of either drinking my cup of tea or preventing the contents from taking a walk during freefall. Quite a fun game, actually.
We landed at Dallas, Texas about an hour before the boarding time for my connecting flight to Austin. I then got to enjoy the hospitable welcome of a nation determined to offend all visitors and incite terrorism, with the usual probing questions and fingerprinting at passport control. I then sprinted through to pick up my suitcase, and ran through customs and on to security, where I was told to take my suitcase as carry-on.
After 10 minutes of queuing, I was hauled aside to have all my toiletries removed from the suitcase, including an almost-empty tube of toothpaste. I was given the choice of checking my suitcase and queuing again (and missing my connecting flight) or waving goodbye to shampoo, showergel, deodorant etc. It turns out that despite the lack of signs to tell us, you are not allowed liquids on internal flights either, and the customs guy that told me to take my suitcase as carry-on was wrong to do so.
And then I screamed in anger and frustration. The only reason I checked the bag in London was because of the liquid toiletries. I lost time reclaiming it and hauling it through customs, only to get screwed at the last step? I politely told the security staff to take my dangerous liquid products, zipped my case, and sprinted for the next terminal.
I got there just in time, and collapsed sweating into my seat on the plane. I then drank from my lethal bottle of water (ignored by the security scans) and pondered the full tube of lethal toothpaste in my rucksack (ignored by the security scans). What a farce.
Anyway, I made it here, I'm safe, and hopefully this will serve as warning to the folks following me that:
- airport security is really, really dumb. We are not safer, it is hit and (mostly) miss.
- allow extra time for your onward connections to give airport security sufficient time to screw you
- international long-haul flights really suck these days
On a happier note, the PSP worked great, I watched several episodes of firefly and played Ridge Racer and Wipeout for most of the trip, and the battery didn't even get flat.
October 7, 2006
October 6, 2006
Thunderbird or Deadduck?
It's been a while now since I switched from Mail.app to Thunderbird, so it's probably time I did a review of the situation. Short summary: Thunderbird is mostly ok, but there are a few things that really annoy me about it - maybe enough for me to look for another mail client. Read on to hear the story.I've known for a while now that Thunderbird's offline support was somewhat flakey. Firstly, you have to specifically tell Thunderbird to go offline and to synchronise with the server. In Mail.app, there's a simple preference to keep copies of downloaded mail, and when you disconnect it's all there for you. So one morning, knowing I'd be on the road without a net connection but still needing my mail archive for reference, I did the "Download/Sync now" dance and then toggled the "Work offline" menu option. Firing up the laptop on the train I was just a little irritated (irritated in the sense of "screaming fits of rage") to see the following message:
The body of this message has not been downloaded from the server for reading offline. To read this message, you must reconnect to the network, choose Offline from the File menu and then select Work Online.In the future, you can select which messages or folders to read offline. To do this, choose Offline from the file menu and then select Synchronize. You can adjust the Disk Space preference to prevent the downloading of large messages.
What's that all about?! It's a killer bug, and renders Thunderbird almost useless in any environment with intermittent network access. I'm not sure if this is a Mac-specific problem, or a problem with syncing my admittedly substantial mailbox - but either way, there should at least be some warning if syncing is not possible. Never mind the fact that selecting "synchronize" and then "work offline" seems decidedly old-school: can't Thunderbird check to see if the network is there and then do the right thing if it isn't?
Next up in my list of problems with Thunderbird: poor handling of connectivity issues. I swap networks a lot (for example when moving from work to home, or switching from wireless to wired). Thunderbird seems to hate this, and will hang and eventually display a "connection refused" error - or even worse, misbehave so much whenever I try to view some folders that the only solution is to restart it.
The columns in the message list pane don't appear to be configurable: there's no way to get rid of the 'junk status' column, and more than once I've accidentally marked emails as junk, only to find suddenly all incoming mail is being junked too. This column is dangerous.
On the subject of junk mail, I've found Thunderbird's junk mail detection to be a little suspicious: too many false positives in comparison to Mail.app, so I've now turned it off.
Message filters: it would be nice to be able to duplicate and then edit filters, particularly the complex ones, rather than having to recreate them from scratch each time.
Threading: it's nice to have decent threading of emails, but if a reply to an old thread crops up, it usually takes serious scrolling to find it, as I have my mailbox sorted by date. Why can't the entire thread be made visible with emails from today? I think Thunderbird tries to open the message list pane at the right place, but it rarely seems to work, so sorting threads in date order by "most recent post to thread" seems like a better idea.
Address Book synchronisation: I'll be happy if/when this works for me (Torsten reports it works, but I wasn't able to duplicate his experiences). Right now I'm using Plaxo, which does the job and has some fringe benefits like auto-updating when others change their details. It's just a shame it requires a conscious decision to synchronise - it would be nice if I could tell Address Book and Thunderbird to do a Plaxo sync once a day.
It's a shame that mail messages do not show up in Spotlight searches, but the search functionality in Thunderbird is pretty good so I can cope with that.
Ok, that's enough complaining, what about the good things? Well, I'm happy that I now have a mail setup that I can take with me to Linux or Windows. Thunderbird doesn't seem to suffer the random hangs when downloading emails that I was getting with Mail.app. I really like how Thunderbird highlights folders with new unread mails in blue, and folders with old unread emails in bold.
It's funny that in 2006 I'm not significantly happier with my mail handling than I was in 1996. Right now I'm actively considering running a local mail server, as a way of working around Thunderbird's broken offline support. But this totally removes the benefits of being able to work from any machine (I frequently end up using Pine on a remote server when I'm on the road, for example).
I wrote most of the above over the last 2-3 months, but then today for the second time in a month, Thunderbird stopped working. Every time it starts up, it just hangs, occasionally saying "Checking mail server capabilities". This was really the last straw, and so (with hideous timing) I'm having to switch back to Mail.app. This means downloading 3gb of mail from the server, rewriting 200+ mail filtering rules, and checking all the accounts are there. It's a nightmare, particularly as I'm supposed to catch a train in a couple of hours. Thanks, Thunderbird.
PSP video
I've been trying various methods to get videos onto the PSP, so I have something to watch on the plane on the way to Dallas. I think I've got it figured out now after a lot of trial and error:
- Instant Handbrake rips the DVDs and encodes them
- iPSP copies them over to the PSP
It's not particularly fast, but the results are pretty good. For example a 45 minute episode of Firefly is about 200mb, and the quality is quite watchable on the PSP's screen (which is bigger than an iPod Video). The 2GB Memory Stick Duo Pro card was on the doormat when I got home, so I should be able to fit enough on it to keep me entertained (provided I can rip all the DVDs in time).
Cocoon GetTogether 2006
I made it back safely from the Cocoon GetTogether 2006, another enjoyable and interesting few days meeting friends old and new and talking about Cocoon. I survived my talk, and it even ran to time, which was a pleasant surprise. People seemed to enjoy it, which was a relief - it's difficult to judge whether humour will work or not.
My GetTogether 2006 photos are uploading to flickr as we speak, to add to the few that are already there from other people under the cocoongt2006 tag. I saw several people with cameras, so hopefully there'll be a few more photos there once everyone catches up after their time away.
Time to pack for ApacheCon!
October 2, 2006
Here I go again
In just a couple of hours my flight leaves for Amsterdam, and the Cocoon GetTogether where I'll be doing "6 talks on Cocoon" as well as catching up with old and new friends.
(from Cassette Generator, via plasticbag)
After that, it's a very quick stop at home to swap suitcases, and then I'm off on Saturday to Austin, Texas for ApacheCon US. Yeeeha!