Technology

I admit it. I left one cult to join another. That’s right, much to the displeasure of one particular friend, who hates Apple like Dawkins hates religion, I love all things Mac and most things Apple.

Today is the closest Macophiles get to Christmas in our cult. Steve Jobs delivers a keynote speech (more popularly known as the “stevenote“) at 10am PST, today, the first day of the WWDC - a developers’ event in which Jobs typically announces several products, including at least one magical new product which Macophiles know as “One More Thing”.

We speculate, but we just don’t know. We think it might be a 3G iPhone with more memory, GPS and location aware software, delivered to Regent Street in padlocked-until-Monday boxes, but we really have no idea.

What I know is this: Whatever I hear in the stevenote, I will probably want it with an intensity of desire that isn’t matched by that for any other product. It is marketing genius and doesn’t happen by accident.

You mightn’t be aware of the excitement these events generate. Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, conspire to bring down Twitter and other services that struggle to deliver blow-by-blow accounts from the hall in which Jobs delivers his stevenote. Queues form outside Apple stores days before the event. Speculation reaches fever pitch. It’s amazing.

This kind of fervour isn’t reserved for WWDC either. In a show of commitment that makes queues for new game consoles look no more impressive than the disgruntled throng of teenagers outside an Indian “two schoolchildren at a time” corner shop, I was staggered recently to see a queue that encircled the entire block outside the Apple Store in Regent Street for the release of Apple’s OS X Leopard release. It was the longest London queue I’d ever seen. The only time I’d seen more people stand in line for the same thing was when over a million of us walked through London against the war in Iraq that the Crusader Blair had already committed to going into on behalf of his master George Bush.

It is one of life’s continuing ironies that the country that shoots up copies of the Qur’an, gangrapes Muslim girls whilst torching their families and defends apartheid whilst shouting “democracy” Orwell-style can also inspire such love and passion. That’s empire for you.

Go Steve! You know your customers. And you know that practically anything you announce tonight, I will crave beyond reason.

I’m on Bluehost after experiencing a lot of downtime with Midphase.

Sadly, despite the excellent telephone customer service (they appear to know what they’re talking about), the server is not that great. All my sites are experiencing frequent slowdown. (Can you call slowdown frequent?)

I’m also having problems with memset, which is supposedly PC Pro’s readers’ choice. They are pretty reliable, but not particularly helpful (they can’t be, they’re not a fully managed service) and recently I’ve experienced really slow page loading.

You tell them about the 30KB/s download speed you’re getting trying to recover 5GB backups and they tell you to buy more bandwidth! You tell them you’re on unmetered 5Mbps and they tell you that it’s contended 40:1! You ask them if they are fully contended all the time and they say “we don’t have those figures, buy some more bandwidth!”

You tell them that their support is not great and they ask you to buy more support. You buy a support package and they can’t cover everything, so you pay extra for that too.

I can forgive all of the above (they’re a British company, they’re bound to be worse than an American company when it comes to the Internet) except the bandwidth throttling. Sometimes, pages with barely 100K on them were taking 7 seconds to load. Unacceptable.

Which brings me back to Bluehost. Can I really expect anything much at all from a provider I’m only paying £4 per month to? For that £4, I get unlimited hosts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and more SQL databases than I could use in a lifetime.

Won’t someone just take a bit more of my money and give me some peace of mind?

My sister’s Macbook hard drive went a few months ago, so I finally got around to taking it to the Apple Store in Brent Cross today.

Whilst there, I marvelled at the beautiful Macbook Air. There is something quite special about an Apple product launch. They don’t often release a product that won’t immediately rouse gadget-lust in not just the geek like me, but the masses.

I looked around and felt giddy in a landscape of utter coolness. I moved towards the Macbook Air, which I hadn’t yet touched. Today I did. I need to have one. And I need to have one very quickly indeed.

The funniest write-up I’ve seen on the Macbook Air can be found here.

I have been trying to return my phone to T-Mobile for some time. It’s one of those MDA Vario II things with the slidey-outy-keyboard. Since last January, it’s made it possible for me to type out SMS without having to discard my quarter-century worth of typing experience in favour of a stupid teenager-oriented system. It also makes multi-part SMS and email a whole lot easier.

I’m not writing a commercial for this expensive toy, I’m writing about why I can’t return it. It has faults. The phone is awful. I fail to get signal in Oxford Circus and Bond Street. Can you imagine my facial expression right now? Ugly, isn’t it?

I can’t get 3G signal, or any kind of data connection sitting still in Grosvenor Square. You might ask why a Suspect Paki would be doing trying to get a 3G signal near the American Embassy. I was actually trying to work out the quickest walking route to the nearest mosque (the one in Mayfair) using Google Maps Mobile Edition. (I’m not really making this sound less incriminating, am I?)

The scroll-wheel jumps in the opposite direction randomly, intermittently and in varying amounts, which makes it about as useful as a heart surgeon with delirium tremens. The vibration feature sometimes takes a holiday without letting the boss know (I’m the boss) - and the latest joy, the keyboard doesn’t always listen to me, which is really rather insulting. I can understand why people don’t listen to me, but when devices play dumb (hold on…they are dumb) I get really cross.

These problems have been mounting and recently finally came to a head today, when I bit the bullet and decided to call the OTT cheery-by-script people at T-Mobile, who practically insist on calling you by your first name, even when they can’t pronounce it.

Having done absolutely nothing other than verify my number (it’s the one I’m calling from, the one you see on your screen, the one with the account allocated against it active for 14 years, shit-for-brains), they finally take two minutes to say goodbye, wishing you a wonderful life, a Happy New Year, a successful marriage and bon voyage. Just hang up the bloody phone already!

So I want to return the device.

Only I can’t. I made the rather dumb decision of insisting on synchronisation of my Windows Pocket PC phone with my Mac. Apple say it’s possible, pointing me to Mark/Space who sold me the software to do it. Only, it doesn’t sync everything. Most importantly, it doesn’t sync my SMS messages.

At this point, people around the world are losing their connection with me and falling asleep through a complete lack of empathy. That’s because most people don’t keep their texts. Not the way I do any way. You might be wondering why I don’t save the important ones to my SIM card? I do, but with around 6000+ of them, a lot of them multi-part, I run out of SIM space rather quickly.

6000+ text messages. Why? Well I love to keep all the texts my eldest sends. There are thousands. Even her missed call texts I keep. My kids are my life. Older readers know what I’m talking about. Let’s leave it at that for now.

Mark/Space promised that their Missing Sync software would do the job for me with version 4. I upgraded and paid them what they wanted for the second time

It didn’t work. I tried maybe half a dozen or more beta versions of their software after upgrading to version 4, simply for this single feature. I wasted my money and my time. It has never worked and I doubt it will ever work. I finally ran out of patience. Many ran out of patience far sooner than me.

If you have a Mac, please do yourself a favour and avoid using a Windows Pocket PC or Smartphone device if you’re going to let the Missing Sync software anywhere near it. It freezes a lot, can’t be bothered to sync half the time and most annoyingly, doesn’t do SMS properly. When it works, it does a good job of the contacts, address book, diary and other such simple stuff. It pretended to to music and photo, but never was reliable enough or flexible enough.

Having finally lost my patience, I also lost my integrity. I sold myself to the dark side. Opening a quarantined browser window, just in case, the hunt for PC backup software began. (Cue Psycho violin stabs)

I came across Sprite Backup and for once, the demo version of some seemingly useful software appeared not to be crippled. I read everything I could on it and even dropped the guys at Sprite an email. (They had been attempting to steer my down a web-based contact form, which employed a pet hate of mine - the insistence on user account creation before you are allowed to even contact them. There is nothing about this crime in shari`ah, but I would propose the same punishment as for theft.)

I took the chance and made a couple of backups. It appeared to make a full backup of the phone’s memory. The next step was to restore. This seemed to freeze half way through. I panicked because my phone was now empty, everything had gone and I was already imagining the type of swearing I would employ in my email to Sprite. I calmed down and realised that it hadn’t crashed, it was just taking its sweet time.

On the third attempt (I cancelled the first two), I let it continue. Three hours later, there was a perfectly restored phone.

Tomorrow, my phone goes back to T-Mobile. Thanks to the people at Sprite in New Zealand, I will be able to get my phone fixed, safe in the knowledge that on the replacement, I will still have the messages my beloved daughters sent me.

The brief overview of Flock is coming soon, for now I will just say that I’m using it more than half of the time, with Safari close behind and Firefox barely getting a look-in beyond subjecting my occasional web work to a cursory cross-browser compatibility check.

This post comes to you courtesy of Flock’s in-browser posting, which is of limited benefit when the blog runs on Wordpress, which offers a ccommand-centre-style approach, but browser-based posting is still marginally quicker.

Flock makes a pretty good attempt at organising one’s on-line media accounts, but please do wait for the fuller review. (I’m also looking forward to proper Facebook integration, the only thing missing from its already quite comprehensive coverage, which currently includes Flickr, YouTube and many of the blogging engines)

I have been listening to the advice of a few trusted photographers and am now almost exclusively using a fixed Canon 50mm lens that opens up to a birth-canalesque f1.8. I could shoot in deep space and I’m sure this lens would still manage to pass through a stray photon or two. Room-level lighting has never been so forgiving.

I was assured that this is one of the best kept secrets (and bargains) in digital photography. The advice was sound. I have found it has made two major differences. The first is that laziness with zoom cannot save you. Composition now becomes something you have to work for and laziness is no longer an option. The second is that the quality is so good, especially at larger apertures, that everything seems to look so much more vivid. When taking pictures of my beautiful children, they almost seem alive. It is hard to describe, but it is the difference between seeing somebody through glass and seeing them in the flesh.

I also ran out of memory for the first time on my 2GB CF card in a single day, having taken 110 photos. After removing the blue tint from my snaps with the useful Aperture, I was quite pleased with the results and am now shopping for a couple of spare 4GB cards.

Talking of memory, I upgrade my Mac to 2GB for around ?44 recently, inclusive of VAT and delivery and recalled that my friends bought 16KByte ram packs for their ZX81s back in 1982. My back-of-the-envelope calculation told me that memory has become over 128,000 times cheaper in 25 years. I chatted to some old-school games developers recently, who now run a very large British studio, and they said they’d looked at Moore’s law and mapped it to consoles and found it had been very roughly true since it was first openly discussed. When I reminded them that the doubling in Moore’s law happened every 18 months and not annually (much like modern mobile ‘phone contracts in fact), we realised with some surprise that actually, we have been experiencing growth faster than Moore predicted.

It seems that even I was wrong, as this quote from WickedPropgandia suggests:

In 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling “every 18 months.” However, an Intel colleague had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.

Finally, to my Muslim brothers and sisters, and for the curious, I am now getting my Salah times from Salah Times - a site I recommend highly as it includes options to display prayer times in different British cities, down to your locale in a city through a mapping function - and it allows the reading of prayer times according to different schools. The RSS feed is broken, but other than that, it’s a useful resource.

If you don’t read Famous for 15 Megapixels and you live in Britain, your quality of life and understanding is not really where it could be.

My friend who is responsible for the inspired Minority Report alerted me to a video that Stef had posted about, which reminded me of my Oyster card(s).

I recall that I have two, both unregistered of course. Not that it really matters.

If you register your Oyster Card, the police can, without your knowledge, determine the extent of all your London Transport wanderings. (Am I the only one bemused and irritated about “London Transport” becoming “Transport for London”? Why add an extra word? Why change the word order? Was it to make it sound more cuddly? Did some agency get paid to come up with the new name? Was there a tender? Did someone get bribed? Why????)

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