Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Zune
The simple hardware design, the ease of use on the interface, the tight integration between the hardware and the iTunes software - these are some of the main components of what makes the iPod such a success. So it’s no surprise that Microsoft’s Zune copies each of these ideas wholesale, even going so far as to abandon their existing PlaysForSure program by creating a whole new incompatible type of DRM.
The results? Well firstly there’s no podcasting support, so already they’ve lost the support of many a tech evangelist, especially since most of them are producing podcasts themselves. Then there’s the couple of bucks they’re giving to Universal Music for every player sold, because they could potentially be used for holding pirated music. It’s not a good start to immediately brand all your customers as thieves. And as for that new type of DRM, well you just pissed off all your other partners who you’ve been selling protection systems to for the past couple of years.
So in a triple header Microsoft managed to piss off tech evangelists, freedom fighters (and those who don’t like to be called thieves) and manufacturers of other music players. It’s an almost unprecedented level of bone-headedness. But yet somehow they just went from nothing to the number two music player in North America (even if it is trailing Apple by tens of millions of units). If that’s not a sign of the might of the Microsoft, I don’t know what is.
Camera
A trip to New York wouldn’t be complete unless I took lots of photographs, but although my little Sony will easily slip into my pocket, it’ll be absolutely useless unless there’s a good light source. And in my head, New York will only really come alive at night. So I bought a new camera, a Fuji F30. I saw the reviews of the F31 which has a really cool facial recognition feature that allows it to focus in on people, but it really didn’t seem worth it when the F30 was still available for £50 less.
I’m pretty impressed so far, being able to take photographs indoors without a flash and still have them look good may not mean much to most people, but coming from a Sony compact with a tiny lense that didn’t let in enough light unless you were standing in bright sunlight - it’s a revelation.
Here’s hoping it results in some good shots.
Moore
There’s a lot of effort going into creating the $100 laptop. But the question that occurs to me is why you can’t just take older technology and produce the laptops using that.
For the kind of applications that are going to be run on it, surely there’s no reason why something with a 1Ghz processor can’t be used. I remember my 1Ghz P2 (perhaps P3) laptop. I wrote a lot of Chatbear on it, I did a lot of web-browsing. It was the only computer I used for ages. With Moore’s Law, surely nowadays you could make it for less than $100?
And it wouldn’t be green and plasticky with a stupid operating system either.
Often
I made another Chatbear deadline for myself, the end of October. But it appears as if I’ve missed that one as well. Originally this was going to be such a simple upgrade, a lick of paint for the website, a community search and a bit of a user interface update on the admin system. Instead I’ve written over 10,000 lines of code, and will have ultimately changed the whole Chatbear website, Bearkey website and re-written the administration systems of both.
This whole "release early, release often" is great, but in my head everything needs to be perfect before I’ll let loose anything.
Indenting
Here’s another one from my big book of text editor complaints - indenting.
In TextMate and TextWrangler (plus a lot of others, but this time not in skEdit) if you select a block of Perl and press tab it disappears, replaced by a single tab character.
No, no, no, NO!
My code should be indented, not replaced with a tab. Why would I want to replace it with a tab? In all my time writing code I’ve not once thought that a block of Perl was useless and would be better served by being a tab instead. Indenting on the other hand, I do all the time, and it shouldn’t require two fingers to perform the keyboard shortcut to make it happen. And you know what? When I press shift+Tab, then I’m expecting my code to be de-indented (is that a word?) by one. Then I can take whole big blocks and move them in and out quickly.
Smultron, skEdit, jEdit, they all get this right, how do the most popular editors get it oh so wrong?
I mean at least make it an option.
Tabs
I seem to complain about Perl editors on the Mac a lot, mostly because none of them seem to understand the basic functionality that they should offer.
I edit a lot of files, and can easily have upwards of 40 Perl scripts open at the same time. They can be on different servers, for different websites, for different bits of software.
In the minds of the authors of TextMate and skEdit, this is not a situation where tabs are allowed. Instead I have to open them all in separate windows.
That’s not because they don’t support tabs, they do. But only inside a project, rather than simply opening each new document in a new tab by default (you know, like would be sensible) or allowing the user something like Cmd+T. My web browser lets me open a new tab whenever I want, so why doesn’t my text editor?
Tabs are a good thing. I can see all my open documents at once. Things are even better when I can re-arrange the order of those tabs, or when I get more than one row of tabs. Giant tabs are no good, I want to be able to see 30, not 6. But heck, just allowing me to use them at all is better than nothing. Why is it considered good to see all the files in a project, but not those that are simply open?
Thank goodness for Smultron and Komodo.
Gootube
So, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. What an odd business decision.
The Tube has a better interface than Google Video of course, but you could just hire a UI designer for that. And the Tube is hipper with the kids, so has more videos, but after they’ve been sued into oblivion, Google Video would be left standing. Just because you know they have better lawyers. And more money.
YouTube doesn’t make any money either, or so they say. It’s also said they spend a million bucks a month on bandwidth. But if Google have any plans to put ads before/after those videos, it’s pretty clear most of their users would disappear pretty fast. So using it as a money making scheme seems a little, I don’t know, far fetched. Especially since a large proportion of the videos viewed are actually via an embedded player in a blog somewhere.
So what are we left with after all this? Well, two rich founders that’s for sure. But I think we’re also left with another crazy dot-com boom business choice. YouTube is great, it’s simple, it’s reasonably fast, it’s cleanly designed, it’s free. Replace it with something that doesn’t fit all those criteria, and those kids that give it that hip moniker will desert it faster than a fat man leaves a restaurant when he hears they’re out of pudding.
Copying
One other thing I did this weekend was copying all the content from a couple of the old WOPR hard disks to the new ones. I have 290 movies and over 100 television shows, which is more than a little ridiculous. If I continue to rip my DVD’s then I can push that up to easily over 400, which may be even more so.
Hard disk space is becoming increasingly cheap, there’s no doubt about it. 750GB hard disks may be out there however, but it’s 300GB that is currently the price sweet spot. This means that I’m going to have to do quite a bit of swapping out of one drive for another as sizes go up and prices come down, as there’s no other way I’m going to be able to add more space. I’ve looked at all kinds of solutions to this problem, but they’re either far too slow or far too expensive. I’m sure there’s a great market out there for home storage solutions, but no company yet seems willing to step up to the plate and offer it. Surely with wireless networking getting faster all the time, especially with things like the new N standard, some type of swappable disk array you can hide away in a cupboard can’t be too much of a pie in the sky idea.
Cooling
Tonight was about putting the last finishing touches to the WOPR hardware, by adding two new 300GB drives. I also decided that with five hard disks now in there, I was probably best to add some further cooling too, so I through in another two fans. Of course like all PC hardware building it wasn’t quite that simple, and adding both of them meant moving around the disks I already had in there and ultimately limited me to five instead of six drives within the case.
It’s all still pretty quiet, although obviously not quite as nice as it was before. Amazingly, despite 4 fans and 5 hard disks, it’s still quieter than my 360 is.
WOPR 2 is therefore now complete, with (and I’m remembering this rather than counting again) 1.3 terabytes of space.
Niggle
I used to run my own software on WOPR, but with Mark 2 I want it to replace my TiVo and my Freeview box as well as be a video server, so my original plan was to run MythTV on Linux. After reading up on it, it sounded great. So many features, from the recording of TV, to the weather forecasts and RSS support, to the downloading of meta-data of all the films from IMDB. But the more I read about it and the more I read about what hardware it would work with and how to make each section run correctly, I realised that I needed to do an awful lot of research. And if I was having to do that much research on how to make it work properly, perhaps it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
So I switched tracks, added an extra £80 onto my costs, and purchased Windows XP Media Center edition instead. And so far, I’m very pleased with it. Setup was a breeze, it detected my two tuner cards without any fuss, scanned the channels and put them all in the correct order. The interface is very smooth and I have a nice light-up official Media Center remote to go with it which brings a smile to my face every time I press a button. There’s been serious thought put into how users are going to interact with it, and searching through the guide for programmes to record or watching live TV is all very easy to do, better even than the TiVo it replaces.
My only niggle so far is in it’s handling of video. It’s designed around people having camcorder footage they want to display, rather than for those who have ripped their DVD collection. This means that there is no search, no way to show the collective contents of multiple hard disks (I have four), not even a list view - it’s always displayed as nine thumbnails per page. Looking at the version to be released with Vista, it doesn’t look although it’s going to improve any either. There are alternative media center solutions for Windows out there, but I don’t believe any of them are going to handle the TV experience quite so well, so for now I’m just going to have to stick with it.
Overhaul
I didn’t put much thought into this beforehand, I just got up today and decided to give Chatbear some lovin’. A few weeks ago I made the decision to split the Chatbear and Bearkey admin systems into two distinct parts, allowing each of them to run on their own development track and letting people get their hands on the Bearkey account upgrades that in some cases were written a year ago.
You can see a screenshot of what I’ve managed so far here. It’s still a work-in-progress, so far all I’ve done is take the existing admin and give it a visual overhaul, converting it all to using CSS and making it work within an existing Bearkey navigation framework. There’ll be further work on making communities easier to manage as well as on the design just as soon as I finalise the colour palette of the new Chatbear site.
I think you can expect the new Chatbear website, administration system and a visual overhaul of the default Chatbear board designs sometime in the next month or so. Hopefully by the end of October at least. And then the Bearkey overhaul shortly thereafter or at the same time.
Digital
A couple of parts from Scan and the rest from Overclockers and we have ourselves a new media center PC, WOPR Mark II.
I’ve been planning this for two weeks, I’ve read countless articles about what power supplies are the quietest, how to run CPU’s without fans, and since at one point I planned on running MythTV on Linux (until deciding to run Windows Media Center Edition instead because I couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle) I’ve read all about TV cards and what the pros and cons of each one is. Frankly, it’s all been dull as hell. But despite all that I still ended up ordering a dual tuner TV card today that was actually for regular broadcast television, rather than digital. It’s all sorted out thankfully, but there was a moment there where I just felt decidedly stupid.
Cereal
I’m constantly being surprised by the low cost of PC’s and PC components. Whenever I see the price of things on Overclockers, usually because I’m there buying more hard disks, I wonder how long it’s going to be before PC’s are being given away with cereal packets (although it’s obvious they’ll be giving away DVD players first).
But when it actually comes to putting together a new machine, the costs quickly mount up and all of a sudden things don’t seem so cheap anymore. For a new WOPR, my video server, which I’d also like to give PVR support to (via MythTV probably), the costs are almost up to £700. I’m not even buying the best parts available, there are far better CPU, motherboard and graphics combinations I could put in there, but it’s still far more than I expected it would be.
So don’t be fooled. PC’s may be getting cheaper, but Tony the Tiger isn’t going to be swapping his decoder rings for them any time soon.
Firmware
I almost bought a new wireless router yesterday. I say almost because what I actually did was walk into the evil that is PC World, see the silly prices they were charging for them, and walk back out again. Today I decided to check whether or not new firmware was available on the Netgear website and despite me being pretty sure I had done this before, there was. I downloaded it and ran through the installation instructions, which are essentially just uploading the file to the router via the web interface and then waiting for it to reboot. So I did that and waited. And waited. And waited. And after 15 minutes of waiting I switched the router off, and with almost no hint of surprise, it didn’t come back on again afterwards.
I started this process because my wireless connection kept dropping off all the time, so I suppose now that it didn’t work at all I’d kinda solved that problem. There was no way it was going to come and go now.
At this stage I almost just got in the car and drove to PC World to buy a new one, but first I went through all my cupboards to find my spare ADSL router so I could get onto the Netgear website again and download the fix tool. Unfortunately despite going through every box I could find, it was nowhere to be seen. I did find a universal remote though, that might come in handy later. Anyway, after a lot of scrabbling around I remembered I had my Nokia, and it had a web-browser, perhaps I could get on the Netgear website using it, download the tool and transfer it to my PC so I could run it.
Nope.
I could get online and to the Netgear website, but it just wouldn’t download it. I’d click and click and click that link, but it didn’t even start the transfer. But I wasn’t foiled yet, the E61 has bluetooth, my Mac has bluetooth… maybe something here could work. After screwing around for a bit I managed to get my Mac to dial up to a Pipex account via the E61, a Pipex dial-up account our office used almost 9 years ago that not only still works, but which I could still remember the details for. So I got onto the Netgear website and managed to download the fix, which thankfully was only around 600k, because I was doing it at 1k per second.
So then I transferred it from my Mac to the laptop and plugged the laptop directly in the router and ran it. And you know what, it still didn’t work. It just errored, some strange error about the network card. So I copied it onto my main PC, crawled around on the floor some more and ran a cable directly from it to the router. This time I was more successful and the router sprang back to life again, complete with the latest firmware.
By this point I was tired and annoyed, but that may just have been withdrawal symptoms from having no net connection for almost three hours, rather than all the crawling around.
Oh and if you’re wondering, I haven’t lost signal since.
Crossover
There’s something about Editplus that just clicks with me, which is why I find it so difficult to use anything else. Even Smultron which pretty much does everything I’d want a text editor to do is just difficult to adapt to. It does the same things, it’s just… different.
Well there’s just been a release of Codeweavers Crossover for Mac OS X, which allows you to run Windows applications without loading up a virtualisation system like Parallels or rebooting like Boot Camp. So what was a boy to do? Try out Editplus of course.
It’s almost perfect. There was a problem with font selection that I did manage to fix in the end, but what keeps it from being truly usable is that holding down shift and then trying to use the arrow keys to select text actually prints funny characters on the screen instead. I’m not sure if this is down to some sort of odd keymapping bug or something confined to Editplus, but it’s a shame to have an otherwise perfect solution ruined by something so minor.
Still sticking to Windows for now then.
Manipulate
Did you ever just have one of those programming epiphany moments where you wonder why you didn’t think of it earlier, and why you tried to over-complicate everything rather than just going for the simplest solution?
Slightly connected, but not the same, let me tell you two other things I’m coming to realise.
Firstly, data is king. Presentation less so. Users looking for a web solution such as blogs or forums or image hosting want it because they need somewhere to put their data. The average user who wants to start a blog needs a service like Blogger or Typepad because they offer a box to enter their thoughts into, and they offer a way to get those thoughts back out. The user doesn’t need to worry about what might be going on in the background and most of all, doesn’t want to. They just want a data store. What they’re less concerned with is the presentation of that data on the way in, or the way out. Users will put up with all manner of crap user interfaces with no complaints if the software actually does what it’s intended to do, so until the blogging service starts losing their data, they’ll be fine typing into a plain text box only a few rows and columns high. And when the data is displayed, as long as it’s the same words they put in, that’s fine. Some customisation options are great, people have their favourite colours after all, it makes them feel distinct, but the average user is quite happy with the defaults, hence the success of services like LiveJournal.
The lesson, concentrate on data first. Manipulate it to success.
Secondly, integrated user administration systems sound good in practice, but ultimately just create a less usable experience, creating separate administration systems with one single authentication service is better. Logging into one central place to manage options across lots of different sites and services seems like a great way to go, but the resulting system will suffer from identity crisis. Users are normally logging in to perform a single administrative task, like posting a new entry on their blog. Centralised systems clutter their screen with unrelated options, making them drill down through more areas to get to the one they want. Even systems that might try and offer the more regularly used options first fall down when the user shares their time equally between posting on their blog and running their forum.
The lesson, monolithic is bad. Let each admin system speak for itself.
Embedded
I’ve been thinking of releasing Bearscript as open-source, but at the same time I worked my ass off on it and I’d like to get some financial return on that, the two of which don’t necessarily match up.
What’s the business model for a programming language written in Perl, which is easily expandable and editable, ripe for embedding into a web-application to let users get more control than they’ve ever had before - all with the added benefit that it’ll run on any platform and is safe from them doing any damage?
I’m sure there must be websites out there that would benefit from such a system. Anything that has lots of information that users could query in some way. From a blogging system where you give the user more than just HTML customisation, to someone like Amazon who could use it to let users create their own store.
Clickable
I have a certain amount of forum experience, but I obviously spend far longer using other people’s systems than I do my own. One thing that I’m constantly amazed by, even on the systems that have features that far exceed Chatbear, are user interfaces that look something like this…
< First < 1 2 3 4 > Last >
To start off with, I question the need for First and Last links as it is, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a forum and thought that the first thing I wanted to do was jump to the last page of topics or posts (although granted if I did, I’d want to go back to the beginning again). What annoys me about this is the small size of the links I would actually want to click on, namely the next and previous page buttons. It’s basic user interface design, the common items that people are going to actually click on should be larger and more prominent than those around them, simply because the larger the clickable area is, the easier it’s going to be to use it. But almost every major forum system out there thinks that a single > symbol, likely the most clicked on element of the entire page navigation system, is a big enough element, even when right next to it is a giant link to the last page. It’s not about size either, it’s close proximity to so many other links makes it easy to accidentally click on the wrong thing, especially when forums like to make the page links appear in a 10px font.
I wonder sometimes whether these people are actually using the systems they create.
Storage
I’ve been thinking a lot about Amazon’s S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service. One of the barriers to entry in creating imagebear.com, a domain I registered a long time ago, is bandwidth and disk space. While I’m sure I’m capable of producing a far nicer image browsing experience than Flickr, the cost has been far too prohibitive to try. It’s not like forums, where the disk and bandwidth usage is low because all you’re doing is transferring text, images take serious hits to both. With the Amazon service, I could actually do it, charging users just slightly above what it costs me and make a profit along the way.
But image sharing no longer has the same attraction to me as it did a few years ago (although I still have ideas I’d like to try), so I’ve been trying to think of other things it’s possible to do with this service. There must be really interesting projects that become available once bandwidth and disks no longer become commodities, even simple things like proper integration of image uploading within Chatbear or backup solutions for servers. The flowers of these thoughts will hopefully bloom eventually.
And don’t get me started on the Mechanical Turk (and no, that’s not a robot version of a Scrubs character).
Distinctly
It’s WWDC day, or, Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Day for those not in the know. Unsurprisingly Apple announced the new Mac Pro to replace the Power Mac, with two Intel Xeon processors inside and a reasonably cheap price (in comparison to it’s competitors anyway), they’ve probably got a winner on their hands. But it’s the same case design (on the outside anyway) as before, so it seems like they’re really just releasing the product that the market dictates they should have, rather than releasing something distinctly different and exciting.
Steve (who really didn’t seem himself) also demoed the next version of OS X, Leopard. A lot of what was shown was incremental improvements more than anything else, but the kind of stuff that actually makes a difference to you on a day to day basis. Spaces looks like a good implementation of virtual desktops (a feature that I’ve never really taken to in any OS that has it), while Core Animation looks like it’ll give developers the opportunity to make their apps even flashier.
The really interesting feature was Time Machine, a backup solution with the craziest interface you’ve ever seen. Creating constant snapshots of your entire machine, when it comes time to retrieve something you’ve lost, the interface has your window flying through space (complete with swirling space dust and moving stars) until you find the file you’re looking for. Sure, it’s not like snapshots and backup software hasn’t been done before, but integrating into the OS in such a simple and entertaining way is what makes an idea truly shine, and is precisely what Apple are good at.
They promise that there are plenty of features they’re not ready to show, and it’s still seven or eight months away from release, but it looks promising, if not yet astonishing.
