Uncategorized – Page 14

A little party…

Today I got to spend Saturday night and Sunday with just Meggan and Jacob. They both wanted to have a birthday party with me (for me) so we got a cake (Carrot cake), chocolate fingers, some other treats and after they ate a normal dinner, we dished out the goodies and sang some songs. Beautiful … Continue reading “A little party…”

Beautiful end to the weekend.

(and only slightly overshadowed by the inability of some network engineers to roll out a DNS software upgrade which ended up bringing down a global network. Spent half the birthday party singing along from my workstation!)

Idiot

Tinyfish has a whine because “My Post At Apple Forum Got Removed…” Wah! Title of the post: â€œAll Hope is GONE All Ineligible Customers Are Doomed Apple Changed Policy!!â€ Apple has a policy of removing posts from their Technical Support forums which contain: Speculation or Rumors Discussion of Apple Policies, Procedures, or Decisions Off-topic or … Continue reading “Idiot”

Tinyfish has a whine because “My Post At Apple Forum Got Removed…”

Wah!

Title of the post:

â€œAll Hope is GONE All Ineligible Customers Are Doomed Apple Changed Policy!!â€

Apple has a policy of removing posts from their Technical Support forums which contain:

Speculation or Rumors
Discussion of Apple Policies, Procedures, or Decisions
Off-topic or Non-Technical Posts
Non-Constructive Rants or Complaints

Everyone knows that if you want to do the above you should just put them on your blog. Tinyfish wins this weeks award for being an entitlementard.

Being paid to be wrong must be easier…

…than being paid to be right. Al Sacco writes for ITBusiness.ca Apple made some progress on the iPhone security/management front, but it has a looooooong way to go before truly satisfying enterprise concerns – or becoming a suitable alternative to BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, for that matter. This is the thing about being a pundit. … Continue reading “Being paid to be wrong must be easier…”

…than being paid to be right.

Al Sacco writes for ITBusiness.ca

Apple made some progress on the iPhone security/management front, but it has a looooooong way to go before truly satisfying enterprise concerns – or becoming a suitable alternative to BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, for that matter.

This is the thing about being a pundit.

If you throw your support behind something and it succeeds, no-one really cares.
If you throw your support behind something and it fails, you never live it down.
If you ridicule something in the face of conflicting evidence, you don’t win or lose.

Therefore, for a pundit, it’s safer to just be blindly sceptical. You don’t need to watch Keynotes, read specifications, talk to the company, do any research or actually admit you’re wrong. It’s a perfect job for the journalist who can’t talk with authority on anything.

The company really didn’t mention anything about how administrators will remotely troubleshoot and resolve individual iPhone users’ hardware or software issues. And who will iPhone administrators call for support when they encounter an Exchange issue they can’t solve on their own?

This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how technology works – Al is obviously an end user and not actually involved in IT support. You escalate to vendors where required. If I have an iPhone or a BlackBerry and it runs into an Exchange sync problem, I can pretty quickly decide who to call. If the problem is connectivity, call the carrier after testing on WiFi. If the problem is software based, call the vendor. Try a different handset with the same account details. This is IT Support 101 and it’s no secret.

How the iPhone integrates with your internal services is going to depend on a few things. The main one is if you actually hired decent web application developers. If your web app only works with Internet Explorer or your stupid entrenched IT department only supports IE6 and FF2 (yeah, you know who you are) then no, the iPhone is not a good fit. To be honest, you should fire your IT department. And if you are the IT department, shame on you.

Having spent the bulk of a year working on Windows and having to deal with IT services which only work on IE6 (not even on Firefox), I’m thoroughly tired of poorly built web applications. I was recently shown a web site which worked with IE6, worked poorly with Firefox and didn’t work at all with Safari. Considering the standards-compliance of those web browsers it’s like the web application developers created a site designed to frustrate – it was all ordered so that it would work worse the more standards-compliant your web browser was? And they got paid for this work?

It’s not about whether the iPhone will be great or not. It’s about the attitude of journalists who see it as a safe bet to junk something before it appears because there’s no recourse. Welcome to junk journalism.

Humans and computers: fundamentally incompatible

John Griffin writes on Macintouch: “Just a word of caution: I set up my email address for sending and receiving .me emails. When I had finished and found that it was not working properly, I erased the .me account and kept the .mac account. Bad move! All my .mac email evaporated!” Here’s something to remember. … Continue reading “Humans and computers: fundamentally incompatible”

John Griffin writes on Macintouch:

“Just a word of caution: I set up my email address for sending and receiving .me emails. When I had finished and found that it was not working properly, I erased the .me account and kept the .mac account. Bad move! All my .mac email evaporated!”

Here’s something to remember. Your .Mac and your me.com addresses are exactly the same account. Just the name changes. If you delete the mail in one, it depletes the other. It’s the same. Your mail does not evaporate. You deleted it.

This is why humans and computers should be kept separate.

To my friends in the United States…

In the United States, Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. You know what, even in spite of this, we’d still take you guys back. Only kidding! Enjoy the … Continue reading “To my friends in the United States…”

In the United States, Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

You know what, even in spite of this, we’d still take you guys back.

Only kidding! Enjoy the fireworks and BBQ guys! Miss you all…

QFT’s Short Shorts

From NIScreen: QFT will launch the first in a monthly showcase of the best new and local short films – Short Shots â€“ on Monday 7th July. â€œShort film is often the first step on the road to a professional film-making career. The small scale and lower budget allows film-makers to experiment and learn the … Continue reading “QFT’s Short Shorts”

From NIScreen:
QFT will launch the first in a monthly showcase of the best new and local short films – Short Shots â€“ on Monday 7th July.

â€œShort film is often the first step on the road to a professional film-making career. The small scale and lower budget allows film-makers to experiment and learn the craft of film-making, but although the format may be small, the ideas are not!â€

For further information and booking for all Queenâ€™s Film Theatre film events, please visit www.queensfilmtheatre.com, telephone the box office on 02890971097 or drop in to the QFT at 20 University Square, Belfast.

Using your mobile abroad.

SMSTextNews comes in with some timely tips considering the weather is so bad here in Nor’n Ireland and this might motivate some of us to run for the hills…or maybe the Playa del Arseholio. The tips are all about how to save money when using your mobile abroad. Of course you’re going to use your … Continue reading “Using your mobile abroad.”

They also point to an Ofcom brochure.

For my part I’m hoping to make as much use of Skype and FON as I can. That means:

activating my SkypeIn number again
making sure I bring my N800 and my charger for same. Unless Skype surprise us with an app on the App Store
making sure I can log into FON and find somewhere for my second FON router.
making sure I know where every other Free WiFi spot in 6 cities in 6 countries lies
adding O2’s 50 MB roaming bundle making data Â£1 a MB rather than Â£3-6

I travel infrequently enough at the moment that this should suffice. July-August is just going to be a bit busy in terms of travel for me.

Travesty

This is what happens when you let someone bling up an iPhone. Related posts: iPhone. 4. Developing for iPhone? iPhone 3GS Entitlementards Ten Apps I Want…

This is what happens when you let someone bling up an iPhone.

For banks, it’s still 1970.

At the start of the week, I authorised a bank transfer to send our sponsorship money down to the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ account and today we received notification that it had barfed. I’ve not had to send money to a company in another country before but I assumed as the banking systems are much the same … Continue reading “For banks, it’s still 1970.”

At the start of the week, I authorised a bank transfer to send our sponsorship money down to the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ account and today we received notification that it had barfed. I’ve not had to send money to a company in another country before but I assumed as the banking systems are much the same (and likely owned by the same company anyway) that it would be simple.

Apparently having the sort code and account number and transferring funds is not as straightforward as you’d expect and the systems the banks use don’t have the verification checking to let you know that the payment can’t be accepted. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do that verification check at data entry time? And more to the point – why the hell can’t I transfer money that way? The banks have unique numbers, the accounts have unique numbers within the banks – what’s the problem?

We’re a far cry from the digital future we dream of where commerce can flow unfettered. Even transferring money from my own bank account to another online is made more difficult if the second is in a different country. The quick solution, we’re told, is to post a cheque.

Yes, it has to be some sort of cruel joke.

We changed the concept…

There are quite a few companies who are admirable. And I’m reserving this for older companies which have weathered for years – rather than new companies which haven’t really faced adversity. You have to look at IBM for their right-angle turn into becoming a crusader for open source. Apple for making a turn away from … Continue reading “We changed the concept…”

“We changed the concept,” says ASUSTeK Chief Executive Officer Jerry Shen in a Businessweek article.

…appointed Lee Kuo-kun, a professor from a local fine arts school, to be a consultant. The two meet every month at Shih’s office for coffee, green tea, and long discussions about aesthetics, philosophy, and technology. “All of life is art,” Lee explains.

I admire Asus. They’re one of the few ‘PC’ companies which seems to be working with the philosophy of making great products. Let me qualify this – I have an Asus eee PC 701 and I don’t like it. Most of my dislike is because the keyboard is too cramped and the touchpad/button feels a little cheap and, frankly, it doesn’t run the software I need from day to day. But that’s not to say it’s not a great product.

Mini-notebooks as opposed to Sub-notebooks seem to be the area where the market is going to take off. Why would you pay over a grand for a Lenovo when you can get what you need from an Asus for two hundred? I can understand a small sector of people who are still going to lust after and buy subnotes like the Air or the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 – but there’s a lot more potential for the Asus and competing products like the Everex Cloudbook, Acer Aspire One or the MSI Wind.

They’re clunky, they’re limited, they have holes and gaps but they’re cheap, they’re functional and their limited built-in storage really encourages you to back up to your USB stick or, better still, your server in the Cloud.

Asus released news on the Eee PC 903, 904 and 905 yesterday which look a lot better than the 701 that I have in a box somewhere.

It’s going to be an interesting space to watch (and I tend to pop along to Mike Cane’s blog for the news)