I know what you’re thinking, and that’s this post’s title seems odd, and out of place on HD911, a contemporary glance at the state of neo-napoleonic faecal art in 1930’s France.  Errr, somethign like that.

As I’ve said before, since leaving my previous position as a C#/ASP.NET minded monkey, I’ve been tooling, (or should I say battling), with the infamous choice of script kiddy and billion dollar social network empire, PHP.  It truly lives up to its meaning as the Palace of Hedonistic Pleasure, and continues to be an outstanding joy to work with, and you know i mean this in a completely non-sarcastic way.

That’s not to say its hard, it just seems to open the void between what is right and wrong a lot more than other languages I’ve worked with of late.  Think of it like riding a bike, there’s a right and wrong way to ride a bike, and once you learn, it’s usually smooth sailling.. You can either keep speed and move forward (right), or fall off (wrong).  PHP works in much the same way, but provides the stupid (me) with many many more ways to fall off.  And from what i’ve seen so far, it doesn’t take much to end up over the handlebars, face planting into a wall with the still-spinning front wheel grinding away at what little is left of your thigh, tummy or scrotum if one is that way inclined.

After an lengthy conversation discussing (bitching) how easy falling off the proverbial bike is, a colleague at work, said, “That’s the way it works, you take the good with the bad, it’s a state of PHP-ness.”

At which point I cracked up laughing, and forever more when I cringe at some of our code base, a smile will peel across my face.

p-h-p-ness  (pee-h-p-ness)

Nothings completely perfect, and there’s not enough information out there on the failings of most products, and this is no exception.  It still has no sway on my decision that at present it is the coolest phone that reasonable money can buy.

As anyone knows from my previous posts on the Nokia N95 8GB, I have an awesome amount of respect for this phone and its older brother the Vanilla N95.  It’s the perfect travel companion in regards to email, light web browsing, GPS/Mapping and a nifty little media player, in the case that a small laptop (or a pretty much immobile 17″ one for that matter) is too cumbersome to carry around.

Gman - Dark Side

But I musn’t go on, I’ve repeated myself enough already.  So on to the point of this post, you see, it has a dark side.  A few of them actually, Possibly not as major as the iPhone missing 3G support (until late July, anyway), or the NASA rocket, which was programmed for calculations in Miles, but data entered in metrics, but it has a down point.

I’ve found that no-one really talks about the N95’s points, the review sites are too concerned with the quality of the camera, or that it has thirty one and a quarter more features than the equivalent Sony Ericcson, Samsung or LG device.  And often if you search for what I would consider issues, you’ll find a small forum thread with two or three people discussing the problem, its just not heavily publicised.  So here’s my attempt to keep it real, level the playing field if you will.

The Major - Data Transfer Speed

The transfer speed to/from the N95 is nothing short of horrendous.  In this day and age of flash and other storage devices which can read up to (and in excess of), 50-100MB/s, the data transfer to the fixed flash card is a pitiful 500-600KB/s.  This wasn’t an issue when phones had 256 or 512MB free memory, as filling the device would still only take a few minutes.  Filling the full 8GB card takes the better part of three and a bit hours!

A faster data transfer medium

My 4GB iPod Nano has a file transfer speed of approximately 10-15MB/s a second, and I can fill its memory just under 10 minutes (not including the time it takes afterwards to level sound output and “determine gapless playback information”).  If Apple can get it right on a 2 year old, cheap as chips, consumer device, then why can’t Nokia achieve better than USB1 speeds on their “flagship” device?  I’ve been assured it is USB2, just not High speed (HS) ~480mbps.  Instead, we’re stuck with Full Speed (FS) which is marginally faster than the USB1 spec of 12mbps, Pitiful!

This probably wouldn’t bother most people as there might not be much of a need to be removing and replacing the data on the memory card often, but when you’re uploading movies, music and videos on a nightly basis this becomes a real pain.  This is the one thing I can see that might make the original N95 a better choice, as it has a removable memory card, so you can put it any old card reader in the hope that it may read/write faster.

Other

The rest of the bad points come as a direct result of comparing the N95 to the Apple iPhone.  That’s usability, and design, and interestingly enough battery life.  It really is just too complicated, sometimes just the easiest tasks can require 10-15 key presses.  Considering the keypad (not including the numeric keypad) consists of over 20 keys, you’d think there would be easy, fuid ways to accompolish simple tasks.

Nokia have included a lot of features in the phone that promote its use out in the open, such as using the web browser on a train, or walking/travelling with the GPS Maps app/Sports Tracker open.  In any form of glare or sunlight, this is a difficult task, often to the point where it gets too difficult and I’ll just give up.

Battery life has improved a lot since i did the latest firmware upgrade (I assume a permanently running process has been removed?!), but I still find on days of moderate to heavy use the phone can be dead before I get home to charge it!

A worthy competitor??

Considering the iPhone has a larger, more vibrant screen, and it still boasts almost double usable battery life and media playback/talk time, this is definitely something that might need a look in, in later models.

But as I said, nothings perfect, and trawling around the web shows that pretty much any product has its ups and downs, and the techy in me loves (almost) everything about this phone.  So no, I still wouldn’t trade it in for an iPhone, HTC (Windows Mobile) phone, Blackberry, or Cheeseburger phone despite their positives.  I just can’t help but think that it may have been a bad business decision letting these fundamental features slip, when they’re elsewhere in the market for a much cheaper price.

Remember the days of Winamp, that funky, light (~v2 anyway) little MP3 player? It was the ultimate accessory on every geeks tools belt, along with ICQ, mIRC, Netscape and possibly Eudora (though I never cared for it).  I remember it, very fondly, it was in my opinion responsible for bringing MP3 music to the masses, or at least to those geeky enough to have gone out looking for it.  It did, what every good music player should, and what many of todays media players faily miserably at (especially a certain Media Player that’s at ver 11).  Simplicity is what it did well, and at the time it worked fantastically.

Winamp v2 - Basic, like a crappy car stereo

Sonique media player was a funky upstart that was in development about the same time, which had a completely different approach to to the MP3 and media playing application.  It went outside the box, of what a normal application looked like with funky designs and skins that didn’t fit into the shape of a normal window, and if I remember correctly came standard with a host of plugins, visualisation and other addons.

Sonqiue’s interesting style

Now, to the point of my post!

I was talking to one of the guys at the office the other day, and it turns out he was one of the lead developers on the Sonique application and some of the plugins that came with it to produce oh so clear crystal sound.  He spoke of the hype surrounding the application, and the chance at millions when bought out by Lycos (I think??!), and subsequent downfall as the other competitors tried different/more successful things.

This proves basically nothing except that once again, the world is a tiny place, but oh well, I still think Winamp was the better player!

Off topic, but I still happen to have the original set of MP3’s I first managed to download all those years ago (digitally copied many times of course), but the tracks have managed to stay (embarrisingly) in the collection all these years and have kept their original script kiddie style filenames.  These include such greats as:

• John Denver’s, Thank God, I’m a country boy (aptly name Denv-ThankGod.mp3)
• various Smashing Pumpkins songs
• Paul Simon, You can call me Al
• Pink Floyd
• Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin

and many more! Random!

It’s been a whlie since I posted an article on the N95, and thats not to say it’s falled out of favor, or I’m bored of it.  To tell you the truth, this truly amazing piece of portable technology, continues to enlighten me, and still I’m finding new things out every day.  A couple of months ago, in my previous post, I mentioned Nokia Sports Tracker, which at the time, was a buggy, horrible example of beta software.

That’s all changed though, Sports Tracker is now a powerful, bug-free (at least from what I’ve seen), exercise accompanyment which is a damn load of fun to use at the same time.  Broken down, it:

• use GPS to map speed/distance travelled on a map;
• allows you to set routes for commonly travelled paths, and records times for previous workouts so you can beat previous routes;
• includes a Step counter to approximate work done and energy consumed;
• updates progress, and live workout status online, updating the users profile (ala Facebook).

Nokia Sports Tracker Online

I’ve now completed the 3.5 mile walk from the office to Waterloo Station 10 times, and got my time down to 24 minutes, though I’m sure this could be a lot better if I wasn’t walking through peak hour traffic to get there.  And best of all, the GPS/live part still works jammed in my pocket.

I remember a few months ago, I thought to myself, it’s nice to have everything in a rythym (spelling?!).  The money was coming in, and more was being saved than I’d managed to the previous 24 years of my life, I was embarking on some exciting new work prospects, and I was writing on this page over twice a week.

What the hell happened?

Falling into a rythym, out of rythym

As I said, for a period (probably a lot shorter than I actually remember), I felt like I was getting things done, and working towards some goals.  The last 2 months has shattered this, and I’ve now managed to fall into a new rythym or being completely out of the previous beat I was following.  I shouldn’t blame myself too much, there’s been a lot of time consuming, money draining things going:

• the Wedding (enough said),
• the quasi HoneyMoon,
• the 3 different visits of different groups of family and friends, spanning now over the past 6 weeks; and
• the 4 holidays (of various lengths coming up to Paris, Southern England and of course Russia)

With all the interruptions, I’ve managed to lose a fantastic work oppurtunity (don’t ask, big project, stake in company, yada, yada….), eat and drink (badly) constantly and quite frankly waste a metric f$#kload of money.  And with things not paid for, such as the holidays I mentioned above, I can’t see any easy way out of immediate debt.

Planning…

So here I am, preaching to Google crawl bot (possibly this posts only audience, given its less than exciting nature), and getting my thoughts down on paper (we’ll call it, the interscroll), to come to a quick as possible solution to the problem.

I’ve spent the last hour updating the C&S Income/Expenditure budget (yet another thing, I’ve lost track of), and whilst things ain’t as glum as I thought they might be, it seems something has to give:

• stop on the spot purchases (easy, I’ll stop scouring internet shops in downtime at work)
• cut back on drinking/going out (should be fine, now that the visitors have moved on)
• borrow more money (read debt) from the bank, not a good idea.  The way things are going at the moment, I’m probably one of their favourite small-time customers.
• cut back on one of the holidays (kind of hard as it was booked months in advance (not with our money, at the time).

I find myself in the money pickle again, something I’m no stranger to.  I’m comfortable enough that I know I can be clear and mostly debt free again by say… September, but its the now that I can’t handle.

Completely off topic, but the book I’m reading at the moment, Tripwire (my 6th novel since April!), starts with a CEO of a faltering U.S electronics business going to a loan shark for a large loan.  In borrowing 1.1 million dollars, he falls into the trap of paying back a high interest rate, and giving a rather large proportion of his fledgling companies shares to the shark who sells them all instantly for nothing causing the banks to freak and dump his enourmous loans off on a large mortgage recovery operation (ftonted in the Cayman islands, by the loan shark himself).  This has nothing to do with my situation at all, but geez, show’s what debt and stupidity can do in times of desperation.

Recoupling on the rail to success….

I’ve got a 7 point plan to rectify this little situation of mine, firstly:

• enjoy the holiday to Russia, no point in stressing about that
• get all debts on the way to be being repaid by September 2008, this includes costs for the wedding, the previous personal loan, and credit card debt
• write at least two posts a week to HD911, content is the key
• continue reading novels, but branch out into some different authors, 4 books by one author (Lee Child) and 2 by another (Harlen Coben) is proving a little too much
• continue good things at the office
• get off my ass and get this work started and flowing again; and
• and keep exercising as much as possible, the 15 mile week (counted 4 trips from the office to Waterloo station (3.5miles) and smaller trips between work and Trafalgar Square) was a step in the right direction.

Let’s do this thing…. Yea!

You can ask anyone, I’m not usually one to pick up a book, and it’s even more unlikely that I’d be caught reading one.  In fact over the last year, apart from daily reads of websites (which often contain relatively large stories/articles), and various tech (read: geek) books, the only books I’ve read are:

• Tucker Max - I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell…
• Maddox - The Alphabet of Manliness

In the last ten days I’ve doubled this, and now I’m onto my third book.  This is amazing because, as we’ve already estabilished, I don’t read, so it takes something unusual to break the literary drought.  And I’ve definitely that something I think.  Lee Child’s alter ego Jack Reacher is just about the most interesting character I’ve ever read about, which tells me a) Child write’s f*&king good books, or b) I’m uncultured and haven’t read anywhere near enough books.  I’ll go with option a, because I know how cultured and cool I am.

So far, I’ve read too of Child’s books, One Shot, and Bad Luck and Trouble, which kept me glued from start to finish.  The former is about a seemingly random mass murder in Indiana by a trained sniper where the crime is completely faked and made to look like it was a retired army Marine who did the shooting, and the victim’s weren’t all completely random (shock horror).  The latter involves half of Reacher’s old Army group getting killed for uncovering a plot to ship new U.S missile technology to terrorists and Reacher meets up with the remaining four members of the group to bring justice to those taken down.  As usual, weapons, money and a whole lot of violence is involved.

One thing I really liked about the first book (that I didn’t notice as much in the second) is that the whole book plays out almost exactly like a Law and Order episode.  I’m a Law and Order nut, if its on I’ll watch it, and even episodes I’ve seen before rate pretty high on the re-watchability scale (as long as they’re not watched in close succession).  Apart from the abomination that was Trial By Jury, or Justice By Jury (something like that), I’ve liked pretty much every episode that I’ve watched in the past 18 series the original show has been running.  And I appreciated that about One Shot.  It plays out like any cop/military drama, and it keeps interest the whole time.

I’d had Lee Child recommended to me recently, and by coincidence, the newspaper The Evening Standard happened to have a free copy if you bought a copy of the paper.  So I guess advertising works, as I’ll now probably continue and buy the rest of his books, starting from the first of the series of course.

Anybody want to recommend me some good reading?

My new Laptop, a Dell Vostro 1700 arrived on Tuesday, and its more than a worthy replacement for my ageing Latitude.  I might even go as far as to say its the perfect notebook, for the person who doesn’t need to take their machine to work with them every day.  The only reason I say that is because its big, and really heavy as well (I’d estimate 4kg).

But for a round-the-house desktop replacement, media and occasional gaming machine, its perfect, and cheap too!

I got:

• Core2Duo 9500 (2.5Ghz)
• 4GB RAM
• nVidia 8600GM
• 2×200GB 7200RPM HDD’s
• Intel Wireless Draft-n card
• 17″ 1920×1200 WUXGA+ Monitor

Plus all the throw in options (Vista, MS Office, Bluetooth Headset, etc etc)

For £895!

Once again, I put it to anyone to find a similar spec’d machine for anywhere near this price because Dell definitely seems to have the upper hand in these stakes.

I came home the other night to a partially dead laptop.  The power adapter (brick) refused to react to being plugged into the power (the light wasn’t turning on and it was emitting a rather funny smell), so I’d think it was a power surge.  The only problem was, I got a replacement charger/battery and the problems didn’t stop there.  The screen (whilst displaying a perfect picture) flickers and can’t draw the screen fast enough, so whilst I can still type on it (like now) and use it for email, it’s pretty much useless for any other task.

The screen looks like an old 40’s reel-tape movie/video with the flicker every second or so and what looks like dust flecks in the corners, like an old, pre World War II Donald Duck Cartoon:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG3R3rMu12E[/youtube]

I’m sure there was an older pre-war video somewhere

But seriously, I’m now confronted by the situation where I can pay to get this laptop repaired, which I’d estimate at about £150, or order a new laptop on Higher Purchase via Dell, both of which I really shouldn’t be considering as money is tight at the moment with everything coming up!  But whats a little more debt on top of the pile?

A couple of years ago when I was looking for my last laptop, the choice was fairly clear as to what was the best options.  Basically for the price, I didn’t think there was anything worthy but an optioned up Dell Latitude.  Dell is still (of course) by far the best bang for the buck, nothing comes close price/specs wise but I’ve looked at:

• Dell Latitude again (over priced business use)
• Dell Vostro (Cheap completely customisable Business series)
• Dell Inspiron (Consumer, very little difference to the Vostro’s)
• Dell XPS (Dell’s Cream of the crop, great mix of everything)
• Dell Precision (Over priced, performance Business Model)
• Alienware (True performance, but I thought with ageing hardware & very expensive)
• Apple Macbook Pro (I’d love one of these, not worth twice the price of the equivalent Dell machine though); and
• a range of Gaming Acer, Asus, HP/Compaq, Lenovo and Sony models which were either under performers or largely over priced

Once again, the Dell range offer the best money to nuts ratio, and quite often offer the newest (and thus best) hardware out of all the major players, so Macbook boasting aside, Dell gets my vote.

On second look, the Vostro looks like the best option, it can be optioned up to the max, and comes with a lot of extras that would otherwise cost money on the Inspiron range, so the clear winner for the time being is the Dell Vostro 1700.

Now why didn’t I pay the extra $100AUD for 3 years international warranty, when I last had the chance?

I’m afraid, I think I’ve been duped by April Fool’s Day again, and its not the first time.

One of my favourite sites back home is Whirlpool, for well over a decade now it’s provided a relatively unbiased view of the broadband situation in Australian, form the humble and mediocre beginnings of one way satellite, ISDN and others as a form of broadband medium right through to current technologies such as ADSL2+, WiMAX and Fibre technologies.  It’s owner, Simon Wright, has always stood heavily on neutral ground, and has a strong policy against defamation and vendor verdicts, despite the fact I’m sure there could be a lot of money in subtley pointing what is now “8.6 million people visit ninemsn each month, representing 73 per cent of active Australian Internet users” toward one of Australia’s bigger telco’s.

So when I logged on half an hour ago and read the front page, entitled “ninemsn acquires leading online discussion site” , I was appalled at the thought that Simon may have finally sold out.  So appalled that I wrote a reply to the discussion on the topic believing while I was writing it I was the first to reply as the the reply counter had been artificially set to 0.  That is, of course until I pressed post, and I’d realised I’d joined the masses, one of several hundred who’d logged on almost simulataneously to express their deep regret over this sad occasion.

The Dead Giveaway

Who’s the patsy now though?  I am…… again.

I can remember being fooled by April Fools Jokes on Websites on at least five occasions now, two of which I knew clearly it was April Fools Day and I was still so convinced by the writeup I’d instantly believed it.  One year comes to mind when the writer of a similarly sized Australian forum informed everyone that as of the start of May, all forum subscriptions would attract a monthly fee and a fee per message sent.  As you can imagine (like a cell full of stupids) this provoked uproar, aggression and upset an awful lot of people, especially once they’d realised they’d fallen one of the most obvious tricks.  Many were shamed due to their responses.

April Fools Day does seem to be a big event on the net though, with sites from all over the globe, large and small, making obsurd claims that people fall for year after year.  Some notable examples are:

• The Google Search Tool that can see into the future
• Googles TISP, providing mega broadband to the masses, via peoples Toilet and plumbing
• Google’s Paper - providing a free priting service to print all your incoming email onto hardcopy paper.. cheap.
• (see a trend happening here)?

As laid back, easy going and carefree that I am (most of the time, I’m realising more and more that I really like routine.  I like looking forward to an event in the future when I know the exact day in which it will occur.  Like Christmas, or a Birthday, I know exactly when it will occur, but I don’t always know what to expect at the date in which that event occurs.  And much like getting socks when you were hoping for tickets to the Superbowl (err, no), the ritual release of Ubuntu can bring both joy and/or dissapointment.

But unlike a Birthday, Ubuntu’s release cycle is biannual, so it’s twice the fun, if of course that’s the kind of thing that floats your boat.

Wind back 6 months to my previous posts on the last release, Gutsy Gibbon, I can remember being especially excited about the new release due to the hype surrounding the major release at the time, and I was by no means dissapointed.  It was incredibly nice to use a system in which everything just worked, no stuffing around with device drivers or compiling kernel hacks to get hardware working.  It really impressed.

Hardy Heron should be no different, though admittedly I haven’t heard near as much hype about its release which is surprising seeing as it’s an LTS (Long Term Support) release, in which a major release (once every 18 months) has long term support from the developers, three years on the desktop and five for the server release.  When Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released it included a lot of features which had been added, such as 3d/Compiz Desktop features, adding something significant to the user experience.

With the next release however (8.04), efforts have been made to make the system itself as solid as possible, obviously to make the job of supporting it easier over the next 3-5 years.  There does seem to be some changes to look forward to however:

• A new theme (yes, Human is finally getting a face-lift)
• Better support for compiz desktop effects
• A complete redesign/refactor of the restricted drivers profile
• Far better support/integration for dual monitors

My excitement got the better of me though, and I jumped the gun and updated my installation to the pre-release beta, and I felt like I’d taken a full step back. About 1 or 2 years back, that is.  Unfortunately my wireless card was unrecognised and I couldn’t even boot into GDM as my display settings (which worked only minutes before) didn’t work at all.  It took the better part of an hour to get things back to normal, but oh well thats what I get for installing pre-release software.  The new theme is far easier on the eye though, thank goodness.

Look out for this release!