Naquada

I’d like one of these, I’d like to replace our Mini Mac in the front round that we use to play DVD’s and music and videos with a nice small slim wireless N compatible Apple TV, but, and this in my opinion is a huge issue, there is no support for DVD’s.

sure before anyone shouts, I can rip the DVD into iTunes and play it from there, but I’d actually like to have my menu systems, and heavens forbid, just get a normal DVD and slide it into the system and play it direct from the shop/friend/rental place without having to wait for it to encode!

I think this is the only reason I’ve not got a Apple TV yet, and it seems like a glaring error on Apples part not to have a DVD slot in there.. There doesn’t even appear to be a breakout box supplied by anyone to get round it either..

Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleTV, DVD

This is an interesting read;

If you just want the details and features and good stuff, there’s a free beta version to play with, and you’ll find out about all kinds of cool new features:

* A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing

* Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT

* Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system

* A completely redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before

* And it’s going to be available in a completely open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved movabletype.org.

We have three tools other than Movable Type here at Six Apart: TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn’t connect to. And now that they’re all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they’ve taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.

Movable Type 4 Shared Components We started TypePad four years ago, to get a lot of the power that MT users had experienced into the hands of people who didn’t want to install software, and it’s evolved into a tool for serious bloggers, as well as great option for small businesses and even big-name publishers to get the word out without the technical requirements.

When the LiveJournal team joined Six Apart, it was a crash course in community, one that’s been challenging at times, but has also been immensely rewarding as we start to see what helps people really connect with each other at a human level. And it doesn’t hurt that the LiveJournal team invented a lot of the technology that’s helped grow not just our communities, but all of Web 2.0.

The success of all those Web 2.0 communities is something that greatly influenced our efforts in Vox, where the community lessons of LiveJournal were combined with one of the messages that our Movable Type community taught us early on: Sometimes we just want to talk privately to our friends and family, even when we’re blogging. A lot of the biggest challenges in blogging have come from not being able to direct the right conversations to the right groups of people, and so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet that need.

It’s kinda hinting at an open source version of MT and aspects of WEB 2.0…

Technorati Tags: movabletype, beta, web2.0

I’ve been get more and more annoyed with the fact that the Mac G5’s been freezing almost randomly the last month or so, I’d repaired and rebuilt the disk, changed set up of hardware, just about everything I could think of. The symptoms were that the UI of OSX would freeze, this could be at anytime, the system clock (it’s always good to have the seconds in the system clock area to check if the machines running correctly) would freeze, but the mouse would continue to move unhindered on the screen. The only solution was a reboot, and recheck of the disk, and given it could then happen immediately again, it was getting a bit tiresome.

I’d even looked at replacing the G5 with an iMac, and selling this one off as spares or ‘need repair’ on ebay, but a thought struck me the other night.. This is all graphics related, maybe the graphic card was on its way out. I opened up the case and pulled out the ATI Radeon 9800, and to my horror looked at the fan. This thing was caked in dust, it’s surprising that the thing even turned to be honest!! a little run over with the handheld Dyson (compressed air would have been more sensible but I thought that given the amount of dust lodged in the fan, I might as well go for the industrial cleaning!) resulted in a nice clean and clear fan. I put the card back into the G5, booted and kept my fingers crossed.. I seems that this was the entire issue. Obviously the fan was not providing enough cooling to the chip, and it was shutting down as it reached critical temperature, since I’ve had no freezes since.. so if in doubt and your mac is freezing.. give the innards a good hoover!!

Andy Piper also let me know the commenting on the blog was broken (thanks for that, and the congrats on the engagement!) It seems that I missed something in my auto changing comments scripts, something that I have to do to battle the constant spam I get here; basically every few days the comments.cgi script changes to something random and the site should rebuild to take advantage of the new script. Somehow it wasn’t rebuilding all the pages correctly, and hence it was giving and error when people wanted to comment; This is now fixed.. and if your not leaving spam.. comment away.. I also do need to redesign the entire blog, so I’ll need to code in that fix when I update the backend installation of MovableType.

Since I was now on a fixing and tidying mission, I attacked the office at home.. The office really is the place I spend most of my day, its my home office for IBM, and also it’s where lot of my less valuable magic books sit, my G5 Mac, my Thinkpad (obviously!) and all my technical books, and its where Ash and Willow spend most of the day when I’m at home, and to be honest.. it’s a mess..

It’s looking a lot more tidier now, and I think if I keep tidying during my lunch breaks and evenings, it might be inhabitable by the end of the week again!!!

Technorati Tags: Apple, freezes, Mac, OSX

Seems the new plazes for bloggers arrived just in time.. from the first looks there seems to be some nice new functionallity in there.. mainly the ability to add future places into plazes, ala Dopplr, and the ability to trusted and non trusted contacts..

you can also put why you are, or will be at a location. there’s is also the concept of groups meaning that you can see and collect plazes into particular areas, for instance theres a group for Reboot 9, ..best of amsterdam(!) and geek gatherings. As there’s isnt a plazer yet for mac or windows to place you into the sneek preview, I dont know how plazes can be added to groups yet from SMS or the Plazer.

This release of plazes seems to be pretty good, it’s certainly more like what I thought Dopplr was going to be.. As well as the current and future logging of plazes, you can log past plazes as well..

Looking at your plazes allows you to pick a plaze, and decide if you’re here now, or plan to be or was there as well as adding to groups, or recommending to other plazes users (and for IBM’ers there is a IBM’ers group I set up!)

Plazes also seems to have mashed up a Twitter type interface in there as well from the looks of Fiahless’s profile… This looks like a really funky release, and once the extra missing bits (plazer, sms, sharing location on a flash map again) this will be a seriously nice bit of Web 2.0.. I guess the next few days will show..

Technorati Tags: plazesforbloggers, plazes

Despite what advertising says, Mac’s DO freeze.. well they either Freeze (mouse still moves, keyboard lights works, but the applications are dead as a doornail), Hang (the beach ball of death and nothing else), or actually Crash (kernel panic, smoke, fire, universe folds in on itself). All of which are to the normal user, annoying.

My Mac sometimes hangs, or freezes, I’m not entirely sure, which, or to be honest am bothered about which actual physical end the kernel ends up in, it’s annoying. I’ve tried a number of things to fix it. I at first thought that might be heated related. The Dual Processor G5 PPC sits at about 45-50 degrees, which I thought was running a bit hot, but having checked the insides, everything seems to be running just fine fan wise and cooling wise (including the sometimes weird fan control of OSX).

The inbuilt Disk First Aid of OSX is quite good, but the other week, after one of the numerous reboots, I decided to check the disks. I’m always very uncomfortable about rebooting the machine after a hang or freeze. The standard OSX disk utility reports some errors, and then in probably a worst nightmare situation said that the ‘drive repair had failed due to the underlying disk being unable to exit the application’, whatever that meant.

This of course started alarm bells in my head.. I did a search of the net and found a alternative disk repair and maintenance application called Diskwarrior. It apparently does a much better job at repairing disks than the standard OSX disk utility. So I ordered a copy (thankfully it runs on Intel and PPC macs, so would be handy for all the Macs I have).

When I got a bootable CD copy (you require the boxed bootable version to be able to repair startup disks), I starts the Mac, held down C to select the CD boot, and eventually got the Diskwarrior interface and CD boot Mac OSX. I ran the repair on the startup disk and it reported a number of serious errors in the structure and permissions on the drive, and after a good hour of chunking, presented me with the option of replacing the selected drive with a nice new repaired and optimsed copy.

It actually reported a few errors in the drive and applications structure that ‘..could cause OS instability‘ so I hoped that would be the end of my issues. To be fair, it’s done a fantastic job, and although my drive wasn’t completed toast, it claims to be able to salvage pretty knackered disks with ease. My freezing issues are still present though (admittedly on a lesser frequency though!), and I’m at a lost to understand why..

I don’t think it’s a higher power trying to convince me that I need to buy that 24 inch iMac, I think it’s definitely software related. The freezing does seem to be more graphics related though; moving application to other monitors, the genie effect on some applications, screen savers using quartz.. but that also could be just me looking for reasons..

I could also rebuild OSX, there’s nothing on my startup drive that can’t be easily recreated.. although I’m not sure where OSX keeps my mail store when I’m using the standard Mail application (I’d quite like to keep my old none gMail mail store)..

Half of me wants the new Intel Mac so I can start running my old windows applications again, half says I really don’t need a new Mac.. It’s time to bite the bullet soon I think given the death of the PPC versions of Mac with Adobe’s release of CS3 for universal binaries..

Technorati Tags: Apple, crash, disk, disks, diskwarrior, freezes, Mac, OSX, repair

We all have multiple machines, your work laptop, your home PC, your Mac, and you end up normally having to move stuff around between them. Although I don’t tend to move much stuff from my work Thinkpad to my Mac’s the idea of being able to replicate realtime between machines has always been interesting.

In 2005 Microsoft Acquired FolderShare, a provider of emerging space file synchronisation and remote access technology. FolderShare, now part of the Windows Live Service allows you to securely keep files synchronised between your devices, share files with friends or colleagues, and remotely download your files from any web browser.

All sounds good in theory, but I’ve tried various sync utilities before, and none have ever really worked very well.. They have either only supported Windows, or Mac support’s be terrible and lagging too far behind windows versions (in some cases the Mac and PC clients haven’t even been compatible!)

The architecture for FolderShare seems to be quite simple;

FolderShare consists of two components - My FolderShare and the FolderShare Satellite. ‘My FolderShare’ is the web site that you use to administrate, invite, and generally manage your account, The FolderShare satellite is the software you run on your PC or Mac to allow synchronisation between the devices you choose.

We tried a simple set-up between three of our machines within the IBM network. Each machine having a folder, and one inviting the other two to sync a folder. The result was quite interesting, a file dropped into the folder on any machine, appeared a few moments later (depending on size of course) on all the other machines. Since the satellite works in the background, the files silently moved over to the other machines after they were added to the folder.

Set-up is pretty simple as well.. sign up, define your folders, repeat for each folder on each device you want sync’ed, start syncing..

The mechanism seems to be peer to peer encrypted, although I’ve not done any extensive testing yet.. There is a limit of file size though, each file can be a maximum of 2gig at the moment, which would suffice for most files I guess..

Would I use this? between the Mac and PC, possibly not, between PC’s maybe.. Across the internet.. jury is out..

It seems like a neat idea, and being Microsoft, apparently ‘There is NO spyware or adware‘ within the package..

Technorati Tags: Apple, foldershare, geeking, Mac, pc, sync, syncronisation, technology, windows

I downloaded and used Parallels Desktop for Mac a while ago, and was very impressed with how well it worked on my intel Macs. Like a lot VM type software, Parallels uses the new Intel virtualisation functionality.

Basically, you can run windows (or another OS) and mac together, each in their own true (unlike VMware or Virtual PC type offerings) space. When I tested it with a standard Windows XP build, it seemed to fly (although you really want to make sure you have about 2 gig of ram). I put it onto the list of items to buy at some point, given I’ve almost completely removed Windows machines from my network.

What’s now very different, and very unique is Parallels Coherence support. Coherence is quote ‘..a groundbreaking feature that lets users run Windows applications without seeing Windows. When a user switches to Coherence mode, their Windows desktop disappears, leaving their Windows applications running directly on their Mac desktop. This is the first opportunity ever for Mac users to run Windows applications in an effectively native environment!’

Windows itself vanishes.. and you’re left with the applications running natively on the Mac Desktop, you can even drop Windows applications onto the mac dock, and treat them just as if they were windows applications. As you can see from the screen shot, that’s MSProject running on the Mac desktop next to iPhoto and Internet Explorer, just like it was a native Mac Application. It’s worth watching the video on the site to see just how funky this is!!!

Parallels have also added Transporter to the latest version. this allows you to convert an existing windows machine over to Parallels, or convert VMware and Virtual PC images into Parallels. The Transporter seems to be a Mac and PC application. You install it onto the machine to be ‘cloned’ run it. It then proceeds to clone the machine either via the network, or onto removable media in a Parallels compatible image.

The other excellent news for those wanting to go out and buy big new shiny PC’s running Vista, is that vista is supported not only under Apple’s Boot Camp but also under this version of Parallels, meaning you can have a Vista install running as applications on the mac, or as a full boot OS, or in a nice window.

Parallels seems to really fly, and looks like a great alternative to having Windows and Mac set ups, just for a few windows applications that are Mac ported, such as FLStudio and Acid Pro. Both these music applications may never hit a Windows release, but are bits of software I use(d) a lot before I decided to abandon Windows in favour of Mac OSX.

Lifehacker.com has a nice overview and video (with nasty music!) on the beta that was out last year… Windows seamlessly on your Mac Desktop.. Oh makes you feel dirty!!!

Technorati Tags: Apple, bootcamp, Coherence, geeking, Mac, operatingsystems, parallels, pc, technology, virtualisation, virtualmachines, vista, windows

I’ve always been a great fan of TabletPC’s I’ve had one since they first came out, and gone through a Fujtisu, and a Toshiba. They’ve been great for a number of reasons. Firstly.. I have a memory like a sieve. In my day to day work role, I have to record tons of information about customers, projects, conversations, phone-calls to name but a few, and to be bluntly honest. I forget half the stuff once it’s written down in a notebook someplace. Not to mention the fact of forgetting to bring the particular notebook you need to the office when someone just wants to know that vital bit of information you recorded 3 years ago..

I became a good IBM citizen a few weeks back, by dropping my Toshiba M200 off the IBM LAN and going with my ThinkPad T60p, reverting to the old ways of paper and pen, sticky notes and scrabbling for notes when someone rings me up asking about a meeting.

Years ago I saw some technology from Anoto, providing a Digital Pen and Paper technology that allowed quick transmission of hand written text from paper to digital media. The technology is based on a special digital pen and a paper printed with a pattern that is almost invisible to the eye, combined with advanced image processing.

The digital pens use ink and works just like a normal ballpoint pen, but it also contains a tiny digital camera, an advanced image processing system, some memory and a some sort of communication to a master device (say your PC or for some pens mobile phones or wireless)

The paper is the clever bit, it consists of an a dot pattern, almost invisible to the eye.The displacement of the dots, 0.1 millimetres in size, from the relative position enables them to be programmed to tell the pen the exact location on the page, pad, or pads you’re working on.

By registering the pen’s movement across the paper, and also the pressure, the writing is interpreted and digitalised. Meaning that you dont have to write in a special way, in fact you dont have to write at all, everything and anything you write on the paper is digitised.

Just like real paper, since it is real paper, since the pen’s movements are stored as a series of map coordinates and the paper defines where on the paper you’re writing, it’s possible to go back and complete previous notes in a pad (regardless of if you’ve already uploaded ink into the PC)

The paper is even smart. It enables different parts of the paper to be assigned different functions such as writing an post-it note, and ticking ‘done’ when you’ve completed that task, or want it added to a to-do list. Add to that gestures or tags that you can add through pure software.. the solution seems pretty advanced.

I decided to get a pen a few days ago, and see if it really did what it said.. I picked up the Logitech IO2 Digital Pen it’s fairly cheap, a good weight, and seems to be a fairly good implementation of the Anoto technology.

Now the other fly in the ointment is Lotus Notes, again being a good IBM employee, this is my choice of email client, love it or hate it, it does have some things other application don’t, normally it’s support from vendors. They tend to add some support for notes as more a token gesture than a feature. I was actually very surprised to find excellent support out of the box for Notes.

I needed to do two main things with the pen, firstly record notes and have them saved digitally on my PC, and secondly, be able to convert these into a form that was useful. On my TabletPC I used OneNote, which was an excellent application, but without a pen interface on the screen, it’s pretty useless to me. This offered me full search capabilities, ink to text and a place to store all my notes. Thankfully people have grasped onto the ink this time round and a number of applications support the .pen format provided by Anoto.

Logitech provide you with some software out of the box that uploads the ink from the pen into the PC, it provides a tagging system so you can start to organise your ink notes (keeping in mind you still have the paper copies as well). The whole upload process is smooth as could be, drop the pen into it’s cradle, and the ink is silently uploaded into the application, appearing as its own page per ‘real page’ view. This is the other nice thing. your digital ink is the same as your real ink. the dot pattern uniquely identifies your books, pages, pads, notes etc, and yes you can swap from book to book, A4 for meetings to A5 or BL for on the move stuff.

Now comes something I was very impressed with, IOTags. Lets say I’m in a meeting and I need to assign a to-do, or i need to send an email based on something from the meeting. I can assign an IOTag to a block of text, sorry, writting on my paper. By drawing a tag (e for email, t for to-do, w for convert this section to word) I can automatically cause something to happen when the ink it transferred.

if you take the example of email. I put in a to: someone@uk.ibm.com re: subject and the body of the email onto the paper. I then draw a small E circle it, and draw a single line down past the writing I want in the email. When the ink is uploaded into the PC, the software spots the IOTag, and converts the writing to text, builds an email and has it ready to go. The same with a to-do note.. little T, circle, mark.. done, To-Do items appearing in my Lotus Notes client as soon as the pens docked.

The pen and software does do a pretty good job of converting to text, even with my scrawl, although I still like ink, especially as it’s searchable!

The pen holds about 40 pages, and last for about 3 hours of constant writing, which is probably more than enough between docks. the special pads are readily available (ebay, amazon and other sites) for reasonable costs..

As for the TabletPC.. it’s ready to hit ebay later this week, it’s not because I dont love the TablePC idea, its just I cant get an IBM Tablet, and the Pen seems a great replacement

Technorati Tags: anoto, digital ink, digital paper, digital pen, geeking, IBM, logitech, lotus, new toys, notes, tabletpc, technology

Hugh Thompson has a great blog post about how he managed to crash an in flight entertainment system, something he called a ‘Software Abuse Case’

One of the most interesting examples of a software “abuse case” came to me rather abruptly on an airplane flight from Las Vegas to Orlando in mid 2005.

Each seat in the airplane had a small touch screen monitor built into the head rest of the chair in front, and on this particular airline, passengers could watch a variety of television channels and play a few simple games. One such game looked remarkably similar to the classic strategy game Tetris, where players use their skills to manipulate falling blocks on a screen to try and form horizontal lines. I’m a big fan of Tetris; for a few months in 1998 I was borderline obsessed with it. I would start looking at everyday objects and start mentally fitting them together with other tings in the room to form weird line configurations. One of the options on this particular airborne version of Tetris was to alter the number of blocks one could see in advance on the screen before they started falling.

To give myself the biggest advantage in the game, I pressed the + control as many times as it would allow and got to the maximum value of 4. I then put on my “bad guy” hat on and asked: How *else* can I change the value in this field? Near my armrest was a small phone console; you know, the one where you can make very important calls for a mere $22 per minute. I noticed that the phone had a numeric keypad and that it also controlled this television monitor embedded in the seat in front of me.

I then touched the screen in front of me to highlight the number “4″ in the options configuration. I tried to enter the number 10 into that field through the phone keypad with no luck: it first changed to the number “1″ followed by the number “0″. Frustrated, I then made the assumption that it would only accept single digit values. My next test case was the number “8″; no luck there either, the number didn’t change at all. I then tried the number 5: success! ‘5′ is an interesting test case, it’s a “boundary value” just beyond the maximum allowed value of the field which was ‘4′. A classic programming mistake is to be off by 1 when coding constraints. For example, the programmer may have intended to code the statements:

0 < value < 5

When what actually got coded was

0 < value <= 5

I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the + button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like “if value = 4 do not increment.” In this case, the value wasn’t 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the + button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 + 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the + button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof…screen goes black.

Poof…screen of the person next to me goes black.

Screens in front of me and behind me go black.

The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn’t spill over to the plane navigation system)!

After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played.

via: slashdot

It seems from the Whats New section on GMail / GoogleMail that you can get all your email from other accounts in gmail;

Get mail from other accounts

Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized ‘From:’ address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled

It’s called ‘Mail Fetcher’ and allows you to get mail from up to five other non Gmail accounts with all the functionality of Gmail.. The instructions look pretty simple, alas its not yet applied to everyone’s account; This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. We’re working on making it more available soon.

It seems like a nice feature, especially as I cannot get to my home email server from inside IBM offices (not quite sure why!)

Technorati Tags: gmail, google