February 28, 2007
Yes
Jim, on mobile phone operators:
Are lock-in, restricted functionality, and price-gouging the best they can offer?
Yes. Show me their incentive to improve.
February 24, 2007
Fantastic
In a bipolar switch to rampant advocacy, anyone new to the Mac (hello, new reader!) might want to revisit my delicious recommended mac software list, some of which is unapologetically geeky but some also that are life-savers on a daily basis. Oh, and I Use This is quite handy too.Fontastic
Damn, this is annoying.
For some reason my Macbook is incapable of correctly storing the password for my FON access point. If I add it in System Preferences as a preferred network, it doesn't connect correctly and looking at the console I see:
2007-02-24 12:56:31.789 AirPortCfgTool[8785] Error: SecKeychainFindGenericPassword err= -25294 ( =0xffff9d32, secErrStr=The specified keychain could not be found. ) (current= MyPlace)
and
Feb 24 13:03:32 Behemoth /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport: Error: WirelessAssociate2() = 88001008 for network MyPlace. The connection failed due to a wrong password.
... but if I select "Other..." from the drop-down Airport menu and enter the details there, it works just fine.
Some screwed up config file somewhere?
In the end I worked round it by renaming the Access Point in the Fon router's configuration.
And it's not just the Fon router, by the way. I've been seeing similar problems with connections to the office network recently. You can bet I know the 10 digit pass keys off by heart by now.
This is yet another time when I wish I could slap Apple for all their "it just works" gloating. This is the level of tedious muppetry that I'd expect from a Windows box.
February 23, 2007
links for 2007-02-23
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This one's for every time I'm at the wrong end of the entrepreneurial pendulum of mood swings.
February 22, 2007
A better way? A week in the life ...
Here's the two forms, with all the correct signatures (a total of 12 signatures, I believe). Please check everything is in order and go ahead with setting up the account. It should only take a day, yes?
... and then they said "we need that guy to be identified, tell him to take two pieces of ID with his name and address on to his local branch". Yes, yes, he's been on our records for the last seven years, but he doesn't hold an account with us, see? He could be anyone by now.
So I asked him to go ID himself at his local branch. And he did. Except they said not that piece of ID, thank you very much. Utility bills are fine, official documents from government agencies are not. Procedures, eh? Not our fault, got to follow them.
Oh, but wait. The local branch can do a search on the electoral roll, and fax through the ID to us and we're good to go. No, of course we can't do the search at this end. It has to be done with him stood in front of us. Just get him to pop back into the local branch. They'll fax it through, and we'll get everything set up lickety-split, don't you worry.
Oh, except the fax was illegible, we can't read the address and we certainly can't call our colleagues at the local branch and ask them to recite it. We have to see it ourselves. So now we're waiting for the original photocopy to arrive, should be here some time tomorrow, sorry and all, but procedures eh?
Oh, and we're now waiting for an official document from Companies House. Well your accountant may have been successful providing notarised photocopies for every other customer account they've ever set up, but not for us. Hey, procedures. We don't make 'em, we just follow 'em.
Oh, and we need to wait for the results of our own search with Companies House too. What? There's a website? Well, sure, we could look on there and sort everything out in minutes, but that's not what the rules say. We need an official printed report sent via mail. Procedures, eh?
Oh, that document your accountant provided? Turns out it would be fine, but they've written some "we certify" yadayada all over it - any chance you could fax through a fresh copy? Yes, we know we gave you back the photocopy you provided us with at the start of the week, silly us, eh?
Oh, but wait. We see your colleague has multiple surnames, used interchangeably. We're oh-so-very English here, don't you know, so we don't quite understand how that can happen. No Johnny Smith Browns here, thank you very much. Johnny has to pick between Smith and Brown. We need you to make sure they are all consistent. So please fill out this form and fax it back to us, then we'll be all set. Yes, we know he held an account with us for many years and we've personally met him dozens of times, but them's the rules. Procedures, eh?
So can you just fax back this document, and then we'll open the account. Oh, no, we can't do any transactions on the day it opens, we have to wait a day.
You want to transfer funds? Without a mandate and a waiver? Good grief! You'd better come into the branch then, hadn't you. It could be anyone on the other end of the phone, you know. We can't just trust any old fax we receive either, heaven only knows who could be sending them. Well yes, we've done the same thing for you for years and years, but this is a different account, see?
Procedures, eh? We don't make 'em, we just follow 'em.
February 21, 2007
Contractors, developers, employees, oh my!
Ryan Carson is in line for the "most controversial blog post of Sunday evening" award with his entry on why you need to get rid of your freelance developer ASAP. One thing's very clear from reading the comments: most people disagree with him. It's particularly interesting to see someone like Ryan come up with a statement like this - or perhaps it's exceptional marketing. Carson Systems certainly seem good at generating buzz and a name.
What do I think?
I've been fortunate enough over the years to work with a wide range of people in a wide range of contexts. Insourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, contract, permanent, full time, part time, any time. I've worked with incredibly talented architects, designers and developers from America, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and of course the UK. Some of them I've never met. Some of them I trained. Some of them have been training me ever since! Some of them have been paid by the hour, some by the day, some for projects, some for bug fixes, some were salaried, many were contract.
And guess what? There's no one solution that works without fail in every context. What I can tell you is that you can make significant savings by leveraging costs and exchange rates between different economies and markets. But you can also make significant losses and expensive mistakes. Just as there are significant advantages to retaining expertise in-house, there are also massive cost advantages to exploring outsourcing and offshoring.
I guess what it boils down to is that "get rid of your freelance developer ASAP" is glib and dangerous advice. There's no simple answer. Be sure to consider all your options, and to keep an eye on the long-term value as well as the short-term savings. And certainly don't just take mine or Ryan's word for it: do the math yourself.
February 20, 2007
Travel trouble
Yesterday, I enjoyed two delayed trains and delays on the tube, so I decided that today's trip to Leicester for the OSS Watch advisory board meeting would be by car instead. In theory it would take 3 hours 20 minutes by train, but once you factor in getting to and from the stations and potential delays, the car should have been better.
The RAC website reckons 112 miles and 2 hours 58 minutes for the trip along the A47. Unfortunately, the RAC website did not mention the multiple sets of roadworks along the route, and of course it couldn't predict the crash that left me sitting stationary for over an hour. In the end the journey took me more than four hours - a staggering average speed of about 25mph. Those that have witnessed my driving will know that this was a bit frustrating for me. By the end of the journey I was literally frothing at the mouth, cursing route planners and roadworks.
After kicking the RAC site for a bit, I ignored it and took the route I would normally have travelled for my return journey - the A6, A14 and A11. A massive difference - just over 2 hours of travel, with an average speed closer to 60mph. And the new dual carriageway stretch of the A11 is now open - which makes the single carriageway mess that is the A47 look awful in comparison.
So my lesson for today is don't trust the computers, ignore the route planners and take the route that seems most sensible, even if the raw miles are higher.
February 18, 2007
Jumping on the bandwagon
This looks interesting - iTunes music library backup to Amazon S3. I'm curious to know how it works, and I'd already like to see it extended to backup my Aperture library too.
The website is pretty sparse, so it's not clear how this will be charged. A price for the software? A monthly subscription? A markup on S3 transfer costs? According to macdevcenter, it'll be $69 a year ... I guess they are hoping the majority of users don't have much music to back up. My collection is 35gb and rising daily thanks to allofmp3.com, so I'm curious to see how the economics work for them.
In an interesting attempt to generate buzz they are giving out free accounts to bloggers. Heck, I'll cheerfully give them a free plug in return for securing my music collection for a year. Though I can't help thinking this would be more effective if they had more content on their site for people to read...
Fon not so much fun
So my free Fon wireless router arrived on Friday, and I've just got round to trying it out. It's been something of a mixed experience, and not the smooth and simple setup I was hoping for by a long shot.
From a hardware perspective, La Fonera is pretty cool. Sleek and white and smaller than any other similar device (though with an external power supply, so overall not quite as elegant as the Airport Express). You can see comparison pictures in the Fon flickr set.
According to the instructions, the first step is to plug it in and connect to the public FON_AP access point. Since I was toying with ways of setting up the network, I shared my Powerbook's internet connection and plugged the Fon into that. Unfortunately, I couldn't see the public access point (the private one was visible though). I tried plugging the fon directly into the cable modem, but still couldn't see the access point.
After many minutes of troubleshooting, it seems there are two problems: the FON_AP access point is only visible when the Fon is happy it has an external connection, and the cable modem is really sluggish in handing out DHCP leases. Once the Fon finally got a connection, I was able to visit the Fon router registration page.
Sadly, the Fon router registration page was crawling at a snail's pace. I managed to fight my way through the molasses to register, and was told I'd receive an email to confirm the registration - but as that hasn't arrived yet, I assume their mail server is having the same problems as the web server.
The next step should have been to connect to the private access point, but I could not get the Macbook to connect. Every time I entered the WPA password I would get the incorrect password error message. Out of curiosity, I tried it on the Powerbook, which worked first time. This at least allowed me to do some Googling to discover others had this problem (fon blog, Oliver Thylmann's Thoughts). The workaround of forcing the Macbook to use WEP didn't work, but connecting to http://192.168.10.1/ and manually changing the Private WiFi settings to use WEP and to specify a key seemed to do the trick.
So now I'm connected via the Fon, and it seems to be working ok. All in all, it wasn't the happy simple experience I was hoping for, and if I had this much difficulty, I can't really see masses of people rushing out to install Fons. But then, I'm renowned for being the bug finder from hell, so perhaps others have a much better experience than me.
I'm looking forward to being able to access all the other Fon hotspots around the world for free.
February 17, 2007
February 16, 2007
QOTD
Remixing (misquoting) Matt Asay's words on Open Source companies:
"Anyone can build a proprietary software company. We have to completely redefine the value proposition for a customer."
So true.
February 15, 2007
February 12, 2007
Future proof
Here's an interesting (frustrating) lesson in future proofing. The office has a linksys wireless router, which has served us well since it was bought toward the end of 2002. Occasionally (but not enough to justify replacing) it will forget all the settings, and I'll need to go back in to the admin web page and update it.
This isn't such a big deal, except the admin web page has never been that happy with Safari - it usually fails to load for some inexplicable reason. My fallback has always been using firefox, but I discovered this morning that Firefox 2 is a little stricter on validating javascript, and the onClick-laden form submit buttons no longer work.
So my fallback fallback was to fire up Parallels (in coherence mode of course), and to use Internet Explorer to change the settings. It worked, but it did make me wonder about the built-in obsolescence of devices that play loose with specifications and that have buggy, inaccessible user interfaces.
As we see more devices containing embedded web servers for configuration, are we going to see a corresponding rise in devices becoming obsolete because they no longer work in modern browsers? In the Web 2.0 AJAXish world, it's more important than ever to write good, clean code that closely follows the standards and degrades gracefully. Otherwise you might find you can't use your hifi, fridge or oven in a few years' time.
February 11, 2007
Wind
According to el Reg, the UK has become only the seventh nation with more than two GigaWatts of electricity generated by wind farms. Right, time to take some wind farm pictures then. I went out to Caister-on-Sea, then drove up to Cromer, stopping off at a couple of places to grab some fresh air. The full coast set is on flickr, as usual.
February 8, 2007
February 7, 2007
February 5, 2007
DIY update
Never mind the lounge, I'm now having 'fun' with the kitchen. After problems with a hosepipe on Sunday that led to a tap that sent more water sideways than into the sink, something clearly had to be done.
That something began just as DIY stores closed today. Which leads us to Andrew's First Rule of DIY:
Do not start DIY unless DIY stores are open for a clear 8 hours ahead, or you have enough spare parts to rebuild whatever you're working on twice over.
Thankfully B&Q opens at 7am tomorrow, at which point I shall avail myself of some bendy pipes etc. (or at least sufficient caps to block the pipes so I can turn the mains back on).
The temptation to try my hand at welding is rather strong though...
February 4, 2007
NTL blocking web sites?
Maybe this is coincidence ... maybe not. It seems that NTL are blocking access to thepiratebay.org.
The symptoms? HTTP connections simply timeout:
telnet thepiratebay.org 80
Trying 83.140.176.146...
Connected to thepiratebay.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Connection closed by foreign host.
I've confirmed the site itself is not down from two separate machines on totally different networks. And indeed proxying requests via those machines works just fine. I've no other examples of web sites that don't work direct from NTL.
I'm sure it's purely coincidence that NTL provide the broadband network behind BitTorrent Inc.'s so-called legal video download service. Perhaps someone needs to educate NTL that not all content shared through thepiratebay is illegal, and that arbitrarily blocking parts of the internet just because they don't like it is not how it works.
Anyone else on NTL having these problems?
Meanwhile, go tell the BBC how to run an on-demand service. The BBC Trust On-demand Services' consultation is a great place to gently and politely suggest that DRM-free cross-platform unlimited access to BBC content is a good idea (via MJR).
February 2, 2007
Atlassian User Group redux
Cool - Lloyd has posted more videos from the Atlassian User Group in London, including an interview with yours truly. Okay, you may remember I was there back in December. Okay, I'm relieved to see my "uhh... uhhh" speech pattern is not as bad as exhibited in my "Simplifying Cocoon" talk at the Cocoon GetTogether 2005. Okay, but see if you can guess which word has replaced it, okay?
Meanwhile, I'm quite excited to see myself on Youtube. Yes, I should get out more!
February 1, 2007
links for 2007-02-01
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This works for drives shared via Apple filesharing protocol as well as Samba.