May 2008 – Page 3

Tom Raftery tries out WWT

Darth Vader said: “Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends. Yes, your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong.” Tom Raftery, on the other hand, recently converted to the Mac and tried out Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope which was released this week: This is, … Continue reading “Tom Raftery tries out WWT”

Darth Vader said:

“Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends. Yes, your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong.”

Tom Raftery, on the other hand, recently converted to the Mac and tried out Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope which was released this week:

This is, unfortunately, typical Microsoft software behaviour. Launch bloated, Windows only, error-prone software with the minimum of QA or testing. Let the unsuspecting public be your free testing department and hopefully get the software right by the third revision.

WorldWideTelescope, if you recall, was the thing that made Scoble cry. I guess he must have been using DirectX 10 (again from Tom’s comments)

“Tried installing in Vista Ultimate – the Directx 9 install came up, which I cancelled since 10 is already installed – and it crashes upon opening!

Does this program not recognize DirectX 10?? Who does the hiring at Microsoft?! UFB!”

I must add that I’ve been pleasantly Microsoft free for over a year now. I do have Windows around but that’s for support work at $BIG_COMPANY and only that. I don’t use Microsoft products on my Mac at all and it’s made my life easier. There are some web sites that have faults but a quick email to the webmasters have sorted things out (certainly in the case of Argos/HomeBase).

It’s certainly a different climate to a few years ago where any mention of the Mac was met with scorn. Anyone that doesn’t see the change in the weather is deluding themselves.

Move on…

People are cranky not because of their personality or temperament (like me!) but because they feel The Squeeze, daily, moment-by-moment. They have had their ability to enjoy life drained away from them. They can feel that theyâ€™re all on a treadmill they never chose â€” or expected â€” and one false move can mean losing … Continue reading “Move on…”

People are cranky not because of their personality or temperament (like me!) but because they feel The Squeeze, daily, moment-by-moment. They have had their ability to enjoy life drained away from them. They can feel that theyâ€™re all on a treadmill they never chose â€” or expected â€” and one false move can mean losing everything.

I read Mike Cane every day. He’s the most prolific blogger on my blogroll which means he produces more stuff than TUAW or Daring Fireball and while I may not agree with all of his politics and I also don’t see things as ‘unsustainable’ (because we’ll learn to put up with any old shit), I do enjoy the headlines.

That said, he’s right that we’re heading for a takedown in terms of the economy. The UK at least has the benefit of being several months behind the US in this but will we take action or are we actually too mired in their economy to be able to act? How can we tell? The property market here has utterly frozen with houses remaining ‘AGREED’ for months and house sales falling through even after months of waiting. I’m almost in disbelief that we managed to buy this year when so many others have failed to buy and sell.

But yeah, I want to dodge the rat race. I’m failing abysmally at it, of course, because what I’m looking for is a way to do the things I want to do and, like it or not, I’m vocal enough on here that a lot of bosses would get intimidated by me. I sat through a compulsory ‘Communications’ course last year and it involved a role-play where we had to deal with an employee who was not happy with his annual review. When it came to be my turn to play the aggrieved employee, the people playing the ‘manager’ and the ‘observer’ were alarmed because I went at the role-play with some gusto and they claimed to pity my manager when it came to real review time. Well, review time came and went and ‘due to the current climate’, we got a 4% pay decrease despite achieving or exceeding all set objectives. So bollocks to that and bollocks to me for putting up with it.

I applied for two jobs this week – one of them an outbound sales role which, although not my cup of tea, involves technology that I’m really keen on – because I’m loathing this situation. The job is meant to be managing a Level 2 support function but as we haemorrhage staff and don’t get the go-ahead to replace them, it means that the ‘leadership’ responsibilities are shifting upwards. The job was never as advertised anyway and I’m tired of wading through broken promises while they give millions in handshakes to senior executives and produce verbose ‘vision plans’ which could be succinctly communicated in about a paragraph.

If you stay where you are, you’ll put up with more and more shit and then wonder who you are at some point in the future.

Move on.

Kicking RIM’s ass

The big news about iPhone OS 2.0, due this summer, will be how much time Apple has been distracted from ‘making the best phone ever’ to ‘kicking RIM’s ass’. The stuff we know about iPhone OS 2.0 is that it supports VPNs (PPTP, L2TP/IPSec), SecureID and it’s going to do Exchange email, calendars and contacts … Continue reading “Kicking RIM’s ass”

The big news about iPhone OS 2.0, due this summer, will be how much time Apple has been distracted from ‘making the best phone ever’ to ‘kicking RIM’s ass’.

The stuff we know about iPhone OS 2.0 is that it supports VPNs (PPTP, L2TP/IPSec), SecureID and it’s going to do Exchange email, calendars and contacts which means there’s no reason to send your email to Blackberry’s Canadian servers for redistribution to your mobile clients. My own experience with Blackberry on the O2 network was not anything to write

RIM’s response to Apple’s upcoming software revision (likely with attendant hardware revision) is to release the Blackberry Bold, an iPhone-themed Blackberry with 3G. The problem being that the cellphone/PDA companies are doing exactly what the PC industry tried to do:

It’s stupid to compete on features.

The iPod didn’t win the industry because it was the best music player out there based on features, something that utterly frustrated Creative, Sandisk and Microsoft. It won because it did a few average features in the right way. It wasn’t the first hard disk player but it did it right. They even managed to release an MP3 player without a screen – something that would have been considered a real turkey by the mainstream – and became an overnight success.

Adding 3G to Blackberry won’t make it win. Like Microsoft, they have a commanding market share and the only way is down.

MSN Music no longer “PlaysForSure”

Microsoft is turning the store off. Your files will be locked to the machines you have registered. That’s what you get for trusting Redmond. From The Times Imagine if you had a bedroom full of CDs and decided to buy a new player one day, only to discover that none of your albums would play … Continue reading “MSN Music no longer “PlaysForSure””

Microsoft is turning the store off. Your files will be locked to the machines you have registered.

That’s what you get for trusting Redmond.

From The Times

Imagine if you had a bedroom full of CDs and decided to buy a new player one day, only to discover that none of your albums would play on the new system. That is more or less what has happened to people in America who bought music downloads from Microsoft. Last month the company announced that from August 31 this year songs bought from MSN Music, its online music shop, would no longer be transferable to machines other than the ones the files were registered to.

This means that, come September, if you want to transfer songs from your main PC to a laptop or a new computer you havenâ€™t registered, you wonâ€™t be able to. If your computer dies, your painstakingly assembled music collection dies with it.

Who’s sorry now?

Wireless on the Choo-choo?

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”? …getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has … Continue reading “Wireless on the Choo-choo?”

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”?

…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.

Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.

Why?

Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.

IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!

The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.

Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?

I would love this job…

Or I would have loved it when I was younger! From IceCreamIreland weâ€™re looking for a production assistant for the summer, with the possibility of the position becoming permanent. …Baking or other food background helpful, and love of ice cream a must! Ah, to be young! Related posts: Coming Out Holidays in England Future of … Continue reading “I would love this job…”

Or I would have loved it when I was younger!

From IceCreamIreland

weâ€™re looking for a production assistant for the summer, with the possibility of the position becoming permanent.
…Baking or other food background helpful, and love of ice cream a must!

Ah, to be young!

Keeping ‘Pro’ tools off the Mac

Microsoft has always treated the Mac as a second class citizen and the bugs in Office 2008 are just added icing on the cake. Back when I started using the Mac, there was Word. It wasn’t known as Microsoft Word to me, it was just Word, it was the word processor on the Mac. It … Continue reading “Keeping ‘Pro’ tools off the Mac”

Microsoft has always treated the Mac as a second class citizen and the bugs in Office 2008 are just added icing on the cake.

Back when I started using the Mac, there was Word. It wasn’t known as Microsoft Word to me, it was just Word, it was the word processor on the Mac. It was a slim and elegant piece of software and I wrote my degree thesis on it. We had Excel 4 as well but I had no real use for it and a copy of Project was kicking about as well.

Not long afterwards they release Microsoft Office for Macintosh which included Word 6, Excel 5 and Powerpoint 4 as well as a little tool which put a Microsoft app menu in your top menu bar. And it had to be the worst piece of software that I have ever had the misfortune to use. It caused crashes, it permitted the spreading of Word macro viruses (though the Mac itself was unaffected). And they didn’t update Project which, in their words, was okay because they didn’t see a market for it.

Fast forward a few years and we’ve enjoyed a relative peace regarding Microsoft. They’ve cleaned up for act with Office 98, Office 2001, Office X, Office 2004 and though they never updated Project, we’ve not really cared due to there being decent alternatives. But this omission prevented the use of a Mac in many businesses that needed compatibility with Project. For a good while a lot of people could see that Office for Mac was actually better than Office for Windows in terms of features.

So, earlier this year they release Office 2008 which is the first Intel version and we start to see the feature parity between Office for Windows and Office for the Mac increase again. They got rid of VBA on the Mac version which has killed macros programmed in VBA which again, is perhaps not a big deal but hurt the Mac in institutions which used VBA heavily – again these were large businesses for the most part. The list of Excel 2007 for Windows features that are missing on Excel 2008 for Mac is extensive. This cements Windows into big business.

But Microsoft, after being beaten relentlessly by Google, Nintendo and Apple on the internet, in digital music and players, in smartphones, in desktop operating software and in gaming consoles. Apple is seeing a huge surge in sales quarter over quarter which means Microsoft is losing market share (using the logic that in a monopoly situation like the desktop OS market, the monopolist can only lose market share – and people buying Macs are less likely to be buying their first computer these days). So, like a good monopolist, Microsoft decides to NOT release a brand new web application development toolkit for the Mac, hoping that it will force web designers to stay with Windows. Their solution for web developers? Stay with Windows or if you MUST use a Mac, run their web development tools in a Virtual Machine.

Conor Moves On

Though he’s been exceedingly coy with where he’s moved to, he leaves us with the story that he has, indeed, moved on. His blog post about his reasons is absolutely tragic and highlights some of the issues faced by individuals working in large companies. I can’t comment on some of his gripes as they’re very … Continue reading “Conor Moves On”

Though he’s been exceedingly coy with where he’s moved to, he leaves us with the story that he has, indeed, moved on.

His blog post about his reasons is absolutely tragic and highlights some of the issues faced by individuals working in large companies. I can’t comment on some of his gripes as they’re very specific to his circumstance but I guess it’s a warning to everyone.

“Most of all I have learned that I am happiest when I am coding and being creative.”

Amen and Good Luck.

Code for Pizza

Man, I have a bee in my bonnet about this. There is nothing I’d rather do than give up this day job with $BIG_COMPANY and survive on my writing while I whiled away the days trying to learn to code to maybe build an app that I want. Apparently (according to a thread on Twitter) … Continue reading “Code for Pizza”

Man, I have a bee in my bonnet about this.

There is nothing I’d rather do than give up this day job with $BIG_COMPANY and survive on my writing while I whiled away the days trying to learn to code to maybe build an app that I want. Apparently (according to a thread on Twitter) startup businesses require passion and if you’re not willing to code for pizza then you’re not showing passion. And not showing any balls.

That’s shite.

I can’t do this because I have responsibilities. I have a mortgage, kids to feed, a house to run. It’s just not an option. And the answer I get? Rent! WTF? Have you seen the prices of rental properties these days? You might as well pay a mortgage because at least then you have a long term gain in equity.

Five years ago this month I was in the unenviable position of finding out that the directors of the company I was working for were in cahoots and were embezzling. I’d been hired to run the technical department which, in the end, turned out to be the only pat of the business that actually made any money – everything else just made loss after loss which is how you burn through half a million pounds worth of debt in six months. They got off scot free (typically) and disappeared to their other business in England (where, for a annual fee you can get substandard techno-luddite telephone support for your Mac). I had a couple of weeks to act and there were livelihoods to take into account. I had a young child and one on the way so I had responsibilities but the choice was to go find another job or stick my neck out. I convinced Apple’s UK MD to take a chance with us, took my savings and started Mac-Sys. During the next year I would realise that business and friendship are not compatible – and as a result I lost some friends who wouldn’t work. I would discover that the only people who truly believe in you are your children – and god bless them for that (and they’ll grow out of it soon enough). And I would find that I’m not as hard nosed in business as I should be but I’m enough of a cvnt to make something work. These were not lessons that came easily.

For the last two years I’ve been trying to start a software company. Iteration 1 was when Aidan took on SyncBridge. He worked his ass off and produced some real miracles but a shaky API and Apple undercutting us with Calendar Server put paid to our dreams. As it would happen we were a year ahead of the competition, a market for syncing that is now over-run with competitors. For Iteration 2, we hired Steve into Mac-Sys and he wrote the first rendition of ‘macserv’, a web application designed to make the running of an AASP easier. To Steve’s credit, he had a job herding cats to get the processes defined but he managed it. And this only stopped because I recruited him into $BIG_COMPANY (which had been my way of escape). For Iteration 3, we tried again with Aidan, Steve, Philip and Jordan on board but everyone is pulled in different directions. It was always our ‘other job’ and frequently lost out to family, the fact that the day job killed my enthusiasm for things and everyone had priorities. I’m left wondering what to do next.

You see. The first and third Iterations were all done ‘for pizza’. There was a promise of rewards but there were a lot of steps to bypass between now and then. Both ended up falling over because, end of the day, if it’s not putting the bread on the table, it’s not a priority. The second Iteration worked because we had someone working on it and yeah, perhaps we need to look at that again.

I don’t want to ask anyone to code for pizza again.

Work in progress

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it … Continue reading “Work in progress”

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it at lunchtime when I’m away from the oppression at $BIG_COMPANY (where music players have now been banned because they’re ‘not professional’ – it’s fun working through a problem when there are people talking loudly in every direction – really aids the concentration.)

Anyway, the SDK release.

This is, to be honest, much sooner than I expected and I think there must be quite a few happy people around who are loading apps onto their phones and enjoying the novelty. I’ve been fighting for some time at lunch just to try Interface Builder but something has always come up for the last 7 days. It’s frustrating and when I mention the frustration, the helpful response is ‘Well, if it mattered to you, you’d find time.” Brilliant.

I don’t know what sample code will work on the iPhone with the latest beta and I don’t know whether or not it’s safe to load my iPhone with the beta firmware and still want to use it as a phone. And there’s no way to check because Apple still have an NDA on all discussion on the technical aspects of the SDK and firmware.

As this is very much still a learning experience for me, it’s slow and boring. I’ve kinda decided to strike out and work on something else in order to maybe build some momentum. I would like a cashflow-type application for the iPhone.

As you can see, it’s a work in progress.