Too busy to…

MacInTouch has an interesting review of Amazon’s electronic book reader, the Kindle. The review is based on long term usage of the device rather than the initial “test drive” articles which appear when a product is first released.

When the Kindle was launched, the Internet was alive with speculation as to whether this was an ipod-style revolution, or the sainted Amazon’s first mis-step. Since the release I have seen little press coverage, although as I learned from the review, the fact that the initial manufacturing run sold out in five hours and it has taken six months to come back into stock may have had something to do with it.

• BBC, Thursday — “financial crisis”
• Schneier, Friday — “…may close”
• Techworld, Friday — “The press has been a little over dramatic“.

Sadly the weather Gods decided not to smile on our trip to Dublin and
and the uniform grey backdrop did not inspire many photos except for a few snaps of the pretty parts of TCD:

Fortunately, the Guinness always tastes good in Ireland and we found some lovely pubs in which to shelter from the downpours.

• O’Neills is a huge sprawling labyrinth of a bar which meant that while it was buzzing with atmosphere, it was still possible to find a table.
• The Bank pub on College Green: Splendid 19th Century banking hall now turned into a classy bar and eatery. The food was good, the staff friendly, and the decor superlative; it also reminded me a lot The Treasury in Melbourne.
• The Stag’s Head: A cosy traditional pub that is just difficult enough to find that it’s not rammed with tourists. Too good to share.

TIm Bray observes that several previously stable technologies are currently in a state of flux, with many of them on the cusp of potentially changing the way that applications will be engineered in the future.

It’s a great survey of what’s hot right now, but I don’t think that this is a particularly unique situation within IT—there are always new technologies pushing the boundaries of current thinking—what makes this moment different is that several core technologies are moving simultaneously. What potential for a confluence?

Flying ten hours to a ski resort when there are so many within a couple of hours seems like a bit of an odd thing to do, but Whistler has something of a reputation for being superior to the best Europe can offer and I was keen to find out what all the fuss was about.

So was it worth the flight time? Undoubtedly the answer is “yes”, for many, many reasons. The first thing that strikes you that everything is incredibly well organised—from the hotel shuttle buses, to the lift queuing systems which all have dedicated lines for ski schools and single riders to ensure no seats go unused during busy times. The next thing you notice is that while the resort is pleasantly small—everything you need is within easy walking distance—the ski area is huge with nearly 200 varied trails including tree runs and glaciers. The runs are divided between two mountains (Whistler and Blackcomb) but both are accessible from Whistler village so transferring between the two is quick and easy; next year there will also be a gondola linking the two mountains.

Other highlights include the general friendliness and welcoming nature of everyone we met (although the majority of the resort staff seemed to be British or Australian, Canadians were a minority!), the free mountain tours (really useful given the sheer number of pistes!) and those of us taking lessons universally agreed that the ski instruction was superb. Although the brochure indicated that groups could be as big as 10 people during busy times, we were lucky enough to never be in a group of more than five, all of very similar ability. Highly recommended.

The National Theatre is one of those buildings on the South Bank which was erected in the 1960’s by people who though concrete was an attractive building material. The name also suggests a rather high-brow entertainment-offering, and consequently I have never really paid much attention to it. However I have learned that this ugly building hides in fact not one but three theatres, making an enquiry about returned tickets at its box office the ideal way to end a spontaneous afternoon visit to the South Bank.

My prejudice about boring and/or expensive “high brow” content was also allayed last night when I saw a new play called Happy Now, a black but razor-sharp comedy about modern life in the vein of Ayekbourn’s Absurd Person Singular. I thoroughly recommend it.

(Incidentally, the play’s haunting title music is Michelle Branch’s, Are you happy now? [itunes link].)

I recently picked up a Netgear DG834Gv3 wireless router and modem on ebay for a very reasonable price. In order to make iChat video conferences work seamlessly (i.e. without having to configure port forwarding) I had to:

1. Upgrade it to the latest firmware (V4.01.30).
2. Toggle UPnP off and on (twice according to some forums).
3. Disable port scan and DOS protection (Advanced WAN Setup).
4. Disable SIP ALG (Advanced WAN Setup).

Although my Macbook was now very happy, the Ubuntu box would not connect to the wireless network using WPA encryption: SoftMAC authentication would complete, but the wireless NIC could not see any packets. The web suggests that PS3 owners have also experienced problems after upgrading to 4.01.30 and the only answer is to downgrade, 4.01.20 being the last known “good” version. Sadly Netgear have removed all but the new broken and a very old versions of the firmware from their support page, but the source code is still available and the tar.bz2 contains a pre-built image so you don’t even need to compile it.

At this point I am back to square one since iChat will no longer receive incoming video requests from people behind NAT devices unless I use manual port forwarding.

London is a city of spectacles: the impressive buildings, changing of the guard, Speakers’ Corner and now pancake races!

(Yes, tomorrow is “pancake day”–hope you hadn’t forgotten!)

Leopard is the product name for the fifth release of Apple’s OS X operating system. I was pretty happy with the previous release, so apart from the automatic backup feature known as “Time Machine”, I was unsure as to how much benefit I would derive from the upgrade but it turns out that the little things really do make a difference:

• The visual appearance has been subtly modernised, keeping OS X at the forefront of sexy computing.
• The Front Row app, combined with the remote control supplied with new Macs, provides a simple and easy interface to view movies or show off photos. You can do the same with iPhoto and iTunes separately, but Front Row just seems less fiddly… (especially if you install the awesome Perian package so that FR can play additional codecs such as Windows .avi files).
• Mail now has this awesome feature called data detectors which makes turning emails into calendar events or phone numbers to address book cards a one-click process: click on the phrase “let’s meet Thursday 12th at 1pm” and the little drop down menu can either create a new iCal event pre-filled with the contents of the email, or just show you your calendar for that time.
• In a similar vein, QuickLook (the ability to rapidly preview files just by hitting the space bar) is the sort of time saving feature that you really miss when using lesser operating systems.
• There is an ssh-agent included—no more third-party apps required to manage my ssh keys!
• From reading Mac websites there is this perception that “.0″ releases are not for the faint hearted and non-techies should always wait for “.1″ before upgrading. I had always regarded this attitude as a little paranoid, but it has to be said that in the three weeks I was running 10.5.0, the Mail application crashed on me twice and once the window manager became completely wedged. Happily 10.5.1 has been a return to form and I have had no problems since.

Of the headline features, Time Machine and screen sharing within iChat are probably the most impressive and a key driver for those of us who are called upon to do Mac tech support. When it works, the implementation of the screen sharing is impressive, but iChat struggles when both computers are behind NAT devices. Similarly, Time Machine mostly “just works” but the default configuration has the caveat of trying to backup everything not included in OS, thus requiring a hard disk at least as big as the one you are backing up. If I trim the configuration to only backup my home directory then I seem to be able to get a couple of months of snapshots onto a partition that is just double the size of my data. Disappointingly, backing up over a network is requires an unsupported hack so hopefully a future update will enable this; it’s probably also worth noting that while backup and restore over the air worked, it was incredibly slow so doing the initial transfer via wired ethernet is a good idea.

Buried in the changelog of the latest NetNewsWire release:

Sleep
Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

Which is interesting because for some time now my macbook has not been putting itself to sleep after the correct period of idleness (although a manual command to “sleep” worked fine). After shutting down NetNewsWire and leaving my machine idle for 5 minutes, it promptly went to sleep of it own accord. It would be interesting to know the technical details of this one.

I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the BBC iPlayer but after catching the last 5 minutes of “Top Gear: Polar Challenge” I decided it might be fun to watch the beginning. The quality of the flash video is surprisingly good—in fact, good enough for full screen on my 13″ macbook—although it is a shame that you can only watch programmes online.

I have often wondered why BBC content is not available (for sale) in iTunes, but since Apple seem to be about to announce time-limited offerings, making BBC iPlayer content available via iTunes would be a “killer app”, and provide a big sales driver for the much-maligned Apple TV.

I’ve been very lucky this year to take two business trips, one to India and a second to the beautiful city of Budapest. The office I was visiting is a just outside central Budapest which gives me the opportunity to see the “real” city; although my initial attempt to interact with the public transport system was something of a failure, in part due to some “creative” route-finding by one of my colleagues, but also because this Gordian route involved the metro as well as a tram and I didn’t know the Hungarian word for “transfer ticket”…

Budapest really is a city of two “halves” being originally two settlements called “Buda” and “Pest”. Buda has an impressive castle (completely rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII) which completely dominates the river skyline, but also a warren of quaint streets made for strolling. Also on the Buda side of the river is the amazing Gellert Spa: a rambling complex of 19th Century corridors leading outside to sun-drenched terraces, or inside to intricately decorated thermal pools which reminded me of the Roman Spa in Bath. Given its evident attractiveness to tourists, it was surprisingly reasonably priced too.

Not to be outdone in the impressive buildings league, Pest features a Basillica, which would not look out of place in Rome, set within a very picturesque square. Lovers of European cafés with “atmosphere” will enjoy Café Montmartre with its great location in the shadow of the church.

Reaching the Statue Park involved another public transport adventure, but it was bizarrely fascinating and definitely not to be missed.

Finally my trip was rounded off with some wine-tasting organised by my team. Hungarian wine is very good…

It seems that on Mac OS X Leopard /usr/bin/emacs comes pre-compiled with carbon support. Great, except you still can’t start it as a graphical application without a very simple wrapper which is available for download.

• Apple provides method for Mac users to create custom ringtones on their iPhone. (Also: a tutorial)
• A website allowing the reality-TV generation to exposepublicise themselves on the web comes second to the iPhone in the 2007 Google Zeitgeist. (Facebook was third.)
• Google launches a wikipedia competitor.
• Despite having a year to ramp up production, Nintendo still cannot meet demand for the Wii.

xkcd on Python. (It’s a pity the title is hidden unless you mouse-over the graphic.)