Yes, yesterday I received an SMS message saying that O2 had connected my broadband that it was now safe to plug in the router. Why you can’t do it beforehand I don’t know. I just did what they told me.

After setting up the router, that is just plugging it in, I went straight to think broadband and did a speed test. 10 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up, which probably what you would expect from a 16meg line. On an 8meg line with Pipex the fastest down was just 3Mbps, but possibly I only ever tested the speed if it was really slow.

So the fun began, downloading email, news feeds and the podcasts that I’d missed over the last week. Then it was just a case of setting up the wireless connection for my Apple TV and the Dell laptop that I have for work. All connected to the O2 router fine.

I hit Send/Receive in Microshite® Outlook 2000 on the laptop and downloaded the three waiting emails. Then, for some reason, I had to send an email, no doubt to let the world know that I was back and online. The indicator kept saying that it was sending, sending, sending, failed. I hadn’t changed anything in Outlook. It had worked fine at my sisters house the other day. Try again… and again. Nothing. I phone the company tech guy and he suggests deleting the account and adding it again. I take screen shots of the settings, delete the account and add it again. Still nothing. SMTP was timing out, obviously when trying to send. I switch off the firewall in the router and try again… nothing. I delete the dial-up account that Pipex had given me that didn’t work… nothing. I change the sequence of the wireless connections, my sister’s being the top one… still nothing. But if I connect to the office I can send email fine. I install the O2 software from the disc that came with the router, just in case… nothing. I start looking at the firewall settings in the router again… nothing. Not a problem, I’ll switch to the Belkin router tomorrow.

This morning I reset the Belkin router and try to get it working with O2. You can see why O2 supply and support their own router. All this is tricky enough if know a little about how this stuff works, but if you don’t you’ll be screwed. I restored to factory settings and spent about an hour trying to get it to connect to O2 with no luck. Annoyed, very annoyed. Considering that my iMac worked fine with the O2 router and that my laptop worked fine with the O2 router… except this little problem sending email. I put the O2 router back tried to do some work. But a little problem like this just nags and nags. You think that it’s just going to be a little setting or a check-box that you’ve overlooked. So I downloaded Thunderbird. God knows why a software company should still be using Microshite® Office 2000 anyway. I set up my pop account and it sent email fine. I imported my contacts and old emails from Outlook and haven’t looked back since. It’s all working fine.

I just hate the fact that I wasted over a day trying to get something that simple to work, even if I was being paid for it. Good old Microshite®!

I have to admit that I like flickr. Since buying a pro account last year I’ve been putting more of my photos up on the site. I’ve also been subscribed to the RSS feeds for a few groups that I belong to, as well as a few people in the tech/web industry. I enjoy seeing photos from around the world, where people live and where people work. It’s interesting.

Back when Yahoo! bought flickr I think there were quite a few people who removed all their photos. They were saying that they didn’t want to be part of a large corporation that may change things that they didn’t agree with. That’s all fair enough. If you don’t like the situation then you can leave and take your photos elsewhere.

Now it looks like Microshite® are going to buy Yahoo! Both companies are struggling against the Google onslaught. If this happens then I won’t be renewing my flickr membership when it expires next year. I’ll just take all my photos down and go elsewhere.

I just can’t see anything good in Microshite® at all. Nothing. They thought they could make money in the console market and ended up having their arse handed to them by Nintendo. They thought they could compete in the MP3 player market and still aren’t selling their player in Europe.

The only thing they have done recently is this ‘Surface’ coffee table. Not available yet and when it is it’ll be $10,000, which kills any market it may have had. What they should have done is demo it at an expo somewhere and said that it’s $2,000 and available today.

If Microshite® can afford to consider buying Yahoo! for £22.4bn then why aren’t they putting more of this huge pot of cash into research and development so they can compete with Google.

Ballmer’s Head
(shown actual size)

Well, Steve still had a few surprises up his turtle-neck sleeve for this keynote. Most of which hadn’t even been mentioned on any of the rumour sites in the build up to the big event.

Leopard thankfully was the main attraction, I mean it had to be considering that it was the Worldwide Developers Conference. The brushed metal interface has finally had it’s day. Even with Tiger there wasn’t a consistent look to the OS, so Leopard will no doubt have the shaded grey look of the latest iTunes. A new 3D look to the Dock, Stacks for those people who have more than 3 desktop icons and at last a new Finder. The Finder has been due for a refresh for a while now and gets a new coverflow view. The Spaces feature I would probably use quite a bit to keep development and other things in separate areas. All the other stuff, the new iChat, Time Machine and web clips I would probably try just the once and then never use again. And I can’t/wouldn’t want to use Boot Camp.

Leopard shipping in October. Basic version, $129. Premium version, $129. Business version, $129, Enterprise version, $129. Ultimate version, $129.

You have to love the little digs at Microshite® especially when you consider the options when buying a copy of Vista. When I saw “Basic version, $129″ appear on the feed, hell he had me worried for a minute.

ONE MORE THING

Yes, the bit we’ve all been waiting for. A hardware announcement was out of the question so it had to be software related. Safari for Windows. If the stats are true, and why wouldn’t they be, it’ll be twice as fast as IE7. Now how long did it take Microshite® to get IE7 out into the world? No need to look it up because it took years and years and years. You can’t tell how long Safari for Windows has been in development but to port/write a browser to another OS and make it fast is some achievement. If it uses the same rendering engine as Safari on OSX, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t, then it will be more compliant then IE7. That’s one hell of a poke in the eye to Beastmaster Bill who seems to be loosing ground on all fronts. The only problem is the people who buy a PeeCee and just use the default browser that comes with it. Getting them to switch away from IE will be difficult because they just aren’t tech-savy enough to realise that you can do that. I’ll certainly be trying it on my work laptop.

Thanks to MacRumorsLive.com I watched the keynote via the self updating web-page.

iPod - the planets favourite

It’s like déjà vu all over again.

The most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’.Steve ‘Monkey Boy‘ Ballmer - CEO Microsoft - 4th October 2004

If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution: it’s called stealing. The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25, and there are many more songs on iPods than 25. About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends’ CDs, which is illegal. But it’s the only way to get non-copy protected, portable, interoperable music.Rob Glaser - Real Networks - 11th May 2006

vista noun.
A distant view or prospect

Microsoft’s biggest fan packed up his tent, sleeping bag, laptop and stove today when he heard the sad news that the Windows Vista operating system had been delayed until January 2007. Adrian Jones of Stockport had the coveted first position in a queue of one waiting for the software’s release. “Since I knew that the OS was going to be released this year I packed up a few of my things and decided to camp out.” His spirits had been kept high by the people going in and out of the PCWorld store located in the town. “I just want to thank all the geeks and tech-heads who have kept me going over the past month”. It was his dream that he be the first person in the town to purchase the new product upon its release. “I’ve purchased every Microsoft operating system that has been made on the first day. To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement.” Jones had been writing blog entries from his laptop on his web-site www.iheartmicrosoft.com which was receiving a massive 42 ‘hits’ per day. “I had already chosen the one that I wanted to buy out of Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.” Adrian was so saddened by this first delay that he decided to go home. “If they move the release date once then it’s possible that they could move it again. I could still be here this time next year!”

Ruby on Rails

I’ve been busy learning, or at least trying to learn, Ruby on Rails. For people who don’t know this is a new programming language/application which allows programmers, like myself, to create web applications really fast.

At work we have one of our applications written in ASP.NET and since the beginning of last year I have been the unfortunate soul who has to debug and maintain this piece of software. At first I did think that it was pretty good. Towards the end of last year I had an idea to write some web pages linking to a database so that we could store client information, contacts, which clients have what software, what platform they are using etc. Just, more or less, everything that we need to know, all in one place. I felt that this was a good idea so I started writing it. I set-up the database and the tables in SQL Server and started to code the pages having copied chunks of code from our web application. Of course it has never been finished.

Let me warn you that if you work for a software company and one of the managers, who we’ll call Scouse Boy No. 1, buys a Rolodex to store contact information then leave immediately. Just run as far and as fast as you can and don’t look back.

This year I’ve had to convert our ASP.NET application so that it works with the new version of our main software. Even after having ASP training last year it was a slow and tortuous task. The fact that one of the pages doesn’t render correctly in Firefox, that it’s all tied into Microshites® web server and probably doesn’t validate to any W3 standard makes me think that it’s not going to be a possible career path. Maybe if we had spent £500 on Visual Studio things may have been less painful.

So, Ruby on Rails, is just the kind of thing that I’ve been looking for. A development environment written by programmers to make life easier so that more time can be spent writing clean, well structured, code. I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book, downloaded the necessary software for Tiger and started to work through a great little Ruby tutorial by Chris Pine. When that was done I started on the book proper, reading through the first section before promptly coming to a grinding halt on page 57. This is when I had a MySQL database and tables created and was about to see the power of Rails for the first time. I must have spent at least 2 days, on and off, trying to figure out why the views of the table weren’t being created. I even un-installed the latest version of Xcode and and re-installed the old version from the Tiger DVD, all to no avail. It just wasn’t seeing the database for some reason. Last Saturday afternoon I found the solution. In the config/database.yml file specify the username, in the book ‘dave’, that you granted database access for. Then re-run the ruby script/generate scaffold Product admin and you should see app/views/admin pages being created. Since then I’ve been working through the Book Store application. Everything is so easy, well not exactly easy, but just a joy to use. The scaffold that is generated by Rails knows what the database table looks like so you don’t have to key in lines of HTML with the different types of input code embedded in it. You don’t have to give each field a name, as this is already done for you from the field names. Links for edit/list/show/delete are already created and all the pages behind them. With one Rails command I generated a set of table maintenance pages. This is something that would have taken me at least a few hours using ASP.NET. And all without writing SQL statements.

I think to get the most out of the book you do need to have your own application to work on yourself. It would be really easy to just blindly get the demonstration application working without understanding how the principles can be put into practice. It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just last night none of the controllers for my application would display in Safari. I found that emptying the cache and deleting any localhost cookies did the trick.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

I bought the Pirates of Silicon Valley DVD from Amazon.com and it finally arrived this week. I’d seen it advertised on the AppleInsider web-site but I don’t think that I’d heard of it before, even though it had been available on VHS, it had somehow slipped under my radar.

Before I bought my first iMac I’d read Owen Linzmayer’s book Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. so I knew about Jobs and Woz building computers in a garage and how they had seen the first GUI and mouse at Xerox back in the day. But what comes over in this ‘made-for-tv’ film is how slippery and underhand Gates and Ballmer were, and still are, after all these years. At the time they sold an operating system to IBM, which they didn’t own, then they blatantly ripped off the first GUI Mac operating system after Jobs leant them a Lisa to develop software for. Even recently Ballmer has been quoted saying that he is going to ‘kill Google’. Going one better, and using industrial strength expletives, Gates said that Microshite® had been ‘fucked’ by the Chinese government and the Chinese people. Now that is a lot of people. Ballmer has now had to go one better saying that Microshite® ‘will win the web’. What he doesn’t know is that a lot of people dislike Microshite® and would love nothing more than seeing his company sink without trace. They may still have the toy market to fall back on.

I always liked Noah Wyle when he was in ER and he does a good job(!) here playing the role of Steve Jobs. So much so that he mentions in one of the extras that Steve phoned him up to ask if he would walk onstage at the next Mac Expo. This Noah did and apparently only the first few rows could tell who it really was.

The film is interesting if you have ever used a computer or if you have more than a passing interest in Apple Computers. It may not be historically accurate but then possibly only Jobs and Woz know the truth.

Macworld UK reports that Microshite® intend to open a retail store in New York. What exactly are they going to sell? Windows XP Pro? It’s 4 years old for gods sake. Anyone who doesn’t already have it by now obviously has no intention of upgrading. Everyone else either has downloaded a copy or has been given it free with a new PC.

You would think that they might have learnt their lesson with the San Francisco store which, the article says, only lasted for 3 years.

I can’t wait to see the queue of people waiting to be the first to go in. The same queues form when a new PC World opens.