SteveStreeting.com

For a geek, I can exhibit luddite tendencies sometimes. I don’t run Vista yet on anything other than secondary test machines, because I really don’t like it very much  - I feel it’s burning additional machine resources in a way that adds little or no value to my productivity or user experience compared to XP, and I’ve had several usability / stability hassles with the test machines I’ve had. I also remain very skeptical about the relative importance of Dx10 given that the vast majority of users either don’t have Vista, or don’t have a card worthy of being called Dx10 compliant, even in gamer circles. In short, I love reading about and playing with new tech, but when it comes to spending my money and resources (particularly time), practicality and not hype tends to rule my mind.

Another example is that I only just upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X Leopard, even though it’s been out for 9 months already. When it first came out I was reticent to upgade immediately, wary of early problems and also that I was only just getting used to OS X anyway. Since then, I’ve always seemed to have an excuse not to do it - some impending trip / presentation / deadline which meant it wasn’t convenient, and really just lack of time.

Nevertheless, I finally made some time to do it last night, mostly because a couple of people in my family are getting or likely to be getting Macs soon, and of course those will come with Leopard, so I’d like to be in sync. Also Snow Leopard isn’t going to be out for another year by the sounds of it, so it’s still worth me upgrading and not waiting for the next one.

My early impressions have been good - it’s very much an evolution rather than revolution, but then if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I like how once again the things that are good for flashy demos are actually very useful in practical terms too, in particular ‘Quick Look‘ is really very handy. Basically you can just press the Spacebar whenever you’re selecting an item in Finder or whatever, and it pops up a window allowing you to browse the content of the file, whether it’s a PDF, Powerpoint presentation, document, image, archive, whatever - and it does this without starting any applications, so it’s super-duper-fast. Incredibly handy for skimming through a bunch of documents when you’re not sure exactly which one you want just from the filename, without the overhead of firing up apps and loading everything fully.

Other things are handy too, Spaces are handy but nothing new if you’ve used multiple desktops on other systems before, and the fold-out stacks make shortcuts to common folders more convenient than before. I doubt I’ll use many of the other features - all my important stuff is backed up on a server so I don’t need Time Machine (although I will definitely be recommending that one to my parents), and I’m too attached to Firefox and Thunderbird to get excited about the Safari and Mail enhancements. Oh, I could see myself using the presentation features of iChat though, that’s something I normally have to use GoToMeeting or similar for.

As an upgrade I think Leopard is a bit expensive at £70 for what it is (another reason I put it off), but nevertheless it’s a nice increment to what has become my favourite desktop OS over the last 12 months. I really can’t see that changing in the near future either - with Snow Leopard, Apple seems to be taking the opposite approach of those in Redmond by concentrating on optimizing & further streamlining what they have rather than stuffing in more and more features, which sounds good to me. OS X already does everything I want, and is no slouch in the performance dept already, certainly compared to the hulking, sweating mass that is Vista, but if they can make it even faster, and smaller, then all the better.

Hmm, I’m definitely becoming an Apple cheerleader. A bit scary, but hey, they make stuff I really like to use. Sure you have to pay a little extra, but I’d rather choose to pay for something I can take pleasure in using, than be coerced into paying for something that at best leaves me apathetic, and at worst annoys the hell out of me.

Now it’s out of beta, Firefox 3 has become my primary browser - it’s a nice speed upgrade and I like the little extras like the unobtrusive ‘remember password’ prompt, smart location bar and reduced memory usage. It’s a shame their servers went belly-up on the planned release day, but then they did paint a bullseye on their face.

There were a few hiccups- I have a few add-ons I generally feel I couldn’t live without and a couple of them didn’t want to work immediately.

• Firebug won’t upgrade itself, you have to switch to the beta 1.1 version if you want it to work with FF3. Seems to work fine.
• Google Browser Sync doesn’t work and Google have apparently dropped future development support for it - because they never released it as open source (why?) it’s essentially a dead product. Foxmarks is a nice quick alternative, although it does only synchronise bookmarks and not open tabs, cookies or passwords. It does have the advantage that you can sync it to your own server if you want though. Long term Mozilla Weave looks like it could be the best option, but it seems a little young right now.

Also oddly, I had no back / forward button block to begin with. I don’t know if that was linked to the fact that I’d been running the beta beforehand, but I had to customise the toolbar to add it back in.

Still, overall it definitely feels faster and slicker, so it’s a useful update to a major staple of my application toolset. I haven’t tried the native look and feel on OS X yet, I’ll be updating next time I’m on the Mac to see what it’s like.

Opera is still the fastest browser of course, but IMO they really missed the boat by holding on to the concept of being able to sell a browser for a little too long, and I’m not sure they’ll ever catch up in terms of the sheer breadth of available add-ons. I have Opera installed on my machine too (for testing) and although it’s good I always gravitate back to FF just because of all the useful add-ons & the more active community - the same applied to Safari on the Mac.

Whatever your preference, with all these options there’s really no excuse to still be using that buggy piece of trash called IE!

I’ve always admired the iPhone purely because of it’s sleek looks and elegant design, but it was encumbered by an excessive price tag, a lack of 3G (which for the price was scandalous), and a ridiculous telco tie-in that meant you could only (officially) use it on O2 here in the UK, which made it even more useless to me since O2 do not operate where I live.

However, the new 3G instalment which made its widely anticipated appearance at WWDC 08 is looking much more interesting. Obviously there’s the 3G support, which really should be a given in a modern high-end phone, although I can understand that since the US cell phone networks have been very slow to deploy it, it might not seem as important across the pond. GPS is in too, which is good, and Exchange support is probably for those who are wedded to it. But more importantly, they’re slashing the price; it’s half what it was last time ($199 for the 8GB model). Even better, Jobs is claiming that people are not going to pay an inflated price outside the US - they’ve promised that you won’t pay more than the converted price. Of course, given the fluctuations in the dollar rate, I’m not sure what rate they’re going to pick, but it would be a refreshing change not to get ripped off so badly here in Europe if they deliver on it.

The final issue is whether they’re going to lock the phone to a provider again, something I considered to be manifestly stupid from an adoption point of view. In the US they’re still doing this, via AT&T again for a pretty inflated monthly price which I guess is the point of them doing it. If they repeat this in the UK with O2 they’ll once again make it pointless me getting one. Sure I could try to bypass the locks, but the potential for my device to be bricked by a future update isn’t exactly enticing.

So if they lock to O2 again it will be a shame, because otherwise the new iPhone would be a likely purchase for me. It’s a great device, and if I have an excuse to have one I’d love to get Ogre running on it - the SEGA Super Monkey Ball demo in the video was certainly pretty cool

A couple of random thoughts for a slow Sunday…

You know, despite being universally reviled, spam actually has a purpose - and that is to prove that my email is working. My spam defenses are pretty good and sift out the vast majority of junk, but I still get the odd unfiltered mail every day and in a way, it’s comforting. It’s like a little heartbeat telling me that my email is indeed still online, and I will therefore be getting any important mail on time. In the last 12 hours I didn’t get any, and I was actually a little suspicious, and proceeded to test my mail (which was still fine). Funny how you come to rely on such things.

Secondly, I had noticed that YouTube was starting to shut me out of a lot of videos in recent days. It seems they’ve signed partner agreements with a bunch of media companies, and as of now most of the ‘top hits’ for things like music videos I look up have a little red triangle in the top left, meaning ‘partner video’. Yesterday when I was looking these up on Windows / Firefox, without exception these videos came up with an error saying ‘this video is not available in your country’ or similar - so I had to locate unofficial videos for the post I made yesterday. Oddly today (and I’m on the Mac now) I seem to be able to get to these videos - I’m guessing they perform these filters by IP though so my platform shouldn’t make a difference; maybe they’ve changed it in the last 24 hours and allowed the UK to see these videos? Anyone know what’s going on? I see this as one of the inevitable downsides as sites like YouTube start to make money.

I feel like I’m becoming something of an advocate for Apple machines these days, which is not something I ever saw coming. I hadn’t even used one until almost 12 months ago, and like many long-time PC users am guilty of having poked fun at them in the past (hur hur, one mouse button, hur hur, poor game support) but now that I’ve had one for a while, I’ve changed my tune. I’m finding that I can heartily recommend them for quite a wide cross-section of users, particularly when it comes to a portable machine.

My parent’s XP-based Dell laptop keeled over and died recently and while they’ve managed without a PC for a little while (!), they’re missing it. They’re faced with being forced (in practice) to switch to Vista if they buy a new Windows laptop, and they’d heard bad things about it (and not just from me I might add, their friends bought a Vista machine recently and have complained to them a lot about it) so were wondering what to do. My parents aren’t particularly technical but know their way around a computer, so long as nothing goes wrong, and aren’t looking for a gaming or power machine, just something that does email & internet, office tasks etc. Someone else in the family ‘knows someone at Microsoft’ (join the club ;)) and suggested to them that if they were reticent about Vista, the sequel would be out next year so they could always look forward to that, but of course that got me chuckling. I explained that not only was Vista several years late, so predictions about the release of a sequel are somewhat premature, at this point we have no idea of what it will be like.

They even asked me what I thought about desktop Linux, since they’d seen it as an option in one or other shop they went into - something that surprised me actually. However with no on-site support from me (since they’re now 3+ hours flight & train time away) I considered that to be a recipe for disaster, given my experiences even with the latest Ubuntu. Great if you’ve got a tech you can call when things go wrong, not so good otherwise, so I ruled that out.

So, my advice? Although they’d probably be ok with Vista, particularly since SP1, given they would have to re-adjust to Vista’s changes anyway, and given the kinds of things they want to do with it, I really think a MacBook would be a better fit for them as very casual, relatively non-technical people. I didn’t recommend this lightly, because they’re not made of money (being retired) and they will have to save up a little more than they would have to buy a budget Vista laptop, but I honestly think it will be better in the long run for them. There are no drivers to worry about, OS X is definitely easier for regular people to use even counting the adjustment from Windows, and in general everything usually just works with considerably less faffing about. The software to do most of what they want is already there as standard, and works in a consistent fashion. I also think face-to-face support is more readily available if they can find a Premium Apple Reseller; they had been shocked at the outrageous prices they were quoted just to *look* at their slowly dying Dell to see if it was economically fixable. Small Apple specialists seem to be better at providing that kind of more personal service if our local premium reseller is anything to go by, certainly more so than unit-shovellers like PC World / Currys.

Simply put, I honestly think people like my parents will have a better experience with a Mac longer term. I’ve advised them to find a decent reseller first and play with one to make sure they’re happy with the idea of making the transition, and that they’ll have some local hardware support to make them feel comfortable given I can’t be there to organise it, but I think if they get over that bump it’ll be plainer sailing for them.

I’ve often bitched about my connection to the intertubes being pretty slow compared to what is generally expected in the current times. As average download speeds have increased, I’ve found myself going to sites that assume faster download speeds than I have, and thus having to pause & come back to videos when they’ve buffered more to avoid an irritating stop-start experience (note to flash players that only allow buffering of a little bit of a video - shame on you). I jumped on the broadband wagon in 2001 at a downstream speed of 512k/s, and until now, in the intervening 6 and a bit years, the speed has only increased once to 1M/s. That’s pretty piss-poor, but the reality is that we’re an island, and even though we’ve been getting increased capacity via fibre-optic cable links to Europe, our shores are clogged with offshore finance businesses and gambling websites from other juristictions (hosted here for regulatory reasons) who are quite willing to soak up all this extra bandwidth through dedicated circuits at incredibly inflated prices, so the average consumer has been mostly forgotten.

Well, we’ve been tossed a bone finally and my downstream speed has now increased to 2M/s (unlimited), which is certainly welcome, but incredibly late and still below par considering I pay £22 per month for it - in comparison in the UK O2 will do 16M/s (unlimited) for £15pm. A quick test at SpeedTest.net (off-peak) indeed reported a decent performance, slightly off the max reported by my router:

I’m not sure why it thinks my ISP is in Slough, but there you go. The important fact, something I’ve banged on about for some time to our intransigent infrastructure supplier (Cable & Wireless, now rebranded as ‘Sure’ locally, which ironically is my exact response whenever their PR dept claims they’re building a ‘world class telecoms system’), is that we’re still running at about half the average speed of the UK and Europe, which is still pitiful. Yeah, I know there’s the island aspect, but that cuts both ways - the cables never have far to go here, certainly compared to the UK/Europe averages which include distant rural areas - even my parents can get up to 6.5M/s where they live, and they’re in a tiny village in rural Cornwall.  Plus, there’s also a captive market locally sloshing with shedloads of money from rich finance houses and related high-value services, which can easily fund investment - if there’s one place you could build a modern telecommunications infrastructure, it’s somewhere like this. But, they either can’t, or they’re not interested in doing so (for consumers), given that they can make their sackfuls of money from business links, and consumer services are small beer. That’s also why it’s almost impossible to rent a server cost-effectively over here, they’re only interested in (gambling) companies that will rent several racks at a time, small customers are irrelevant to them. Luckily that market is global - I can host pretty much anywhere and get a deal 10x better than I can locally - but when it comes to my local internet connection, I’m stuck with what we have.

I’m holding out for one of the competitors to put up a few high-speed wireless transmitters covering the whole island (not that difficult), using the bandwidth from the extra optical cable they’ve brought ashore in recent weeks, and completely bypass the physical cabling system that ‘Sure’ controls - maybe that will finally shake them out of their torpor and make them appreciate the consumer market again. But, my cynical mind thinks it’s more likely they’ll also chase the business customers first anyway since it has a greater return. Hmm.

I thought the 8800 was quite a big card. I’ve had a couple of them, and they seemed to get a little stockier each time, such that the term ‘card’ seemed a little disingenuous - ‘brick’ would have been a more accurate term. A beautiful looking brick admittedly, shiny and black and with Lambourghini-esque tailorings, but still more cuboid than you might ideally desire.

However, due to the near insatiable demands of a project I’m working on at the moment, the second-generation 8800 GTS that has sat in my main dev machine for all of about 2 months has now been replaced again, this time with a shiny new 9800 GX2. And boy, this sucker is big - a good 1.5 inches longer than the 8800 GTS, and even more brick-like. I almost couldn’t stop myself humming Strauss to myself as I took it out of the box. My case isn’t what I would consider small, but if it had been literally 1mm shorter, this beast would not have fitted - as it is, the back of it is touching the edge of the lower drive bay, which I had to reorganise a bit to ensure adequate airflow, such that either the GX2 or the drive bay has to be inserted / removed precisely vertically to avoid the sort of grinding that makes you wince when you’re dealing with several hundred quids worth of electronics.

Being basically 2 cards glued together, it also requires 2 dedicated power connections too, one 8-pin and one 6-pin. Thank goodness for the new modular PSU I bought a couple of months back!

Despite dominating the inside of my case like an ominous black tombstone, once everything was back together I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t really notice any noise difference. Or maybe I’m just deaf to fan noise by now, having sat next to several whirring boxes for far too long. It’s given me a nice hefty speed boost though, clocking in at just over double the speed of the previous card in the most favourable of cases. As Vader would say: impressive.

I don’t use my iPod as much as I used to, owing to the fact that I work from home now so I don’t have my daily walk to / from work in which to listen to it. Updating it for the first time in ages I was presented with a lovely "iTunes has detected an iPod in need of recovery" error message, which I thought was odd. Nevertheless I dutifully followed the instructions and performing the recovery, which is a pretty laborious process involving some waiting, disconnecting, rebooting of the iPod and reconnecting, at which point I got the same error. Rinse, and repeat. Scratch head.

Long story short, the eventual cause was a drive mapping - I had forgotten that since I last updated my iPod, I’d mapped the I: drive to a local folder (using subst) to replicate a customer setup on my machine, completely forgetting that I: is the drive the iPod likes to use, and if it’s in use it gets rather confused it seems. The resolution was to either to stop using the I: mapping (which is what I did, since I didn’t need it anymore), or telling the iPod to use a different drive letter in Disk Manager.

This is reported in the Apple knowledge base, although it’s a couple of links down from a typical Google search so easy to miss. You would have thought a more specific error message would have been better, since something like this is pretty easy to do by accident and then forget about, like I did.

Bill Gates, who seems to be following the tradition of Tony Blair in doing the sort of ‘long goodbye’ which makes us wonder why he’s still here, like he’s holding out for a standing ovation and encore or something - has irritated me again by doing another presentation of technology we’ve all seen before but that Microsoft is reinventing, just rather less impressively, and touting it as their innovation. It all links back to Microsoft Surface which has always been a total rip off of the work of people like Jeff Han, just with more lag and a clunkier interface. It just makes my blood boil to watch them crow over a juddery, sluggish version of something I gleefully played with 2 years ago at Siggraph, when it wasn’t even new then. Compare the following:

Personally, I know which one I think is innovative, and which is derivative, and also which one I’d rather use. But, no doubt a ton of people will hold out and buy the Microsoft version just because it’s made by Microsoft. Bah.

So, as we all know the whole MicroHoo! idea has been called off now, unless you believe the conspiracy theorists who believe this is all still part of Count Ballmer’s plan to devalue Yahoo! (as some of its shareholders go through a set of inevitable legal tantrums) and make it easier to pick up later. I’m not so sure about that myself - after all didn’t the rotund billionnaire say he wasn’t going to raise the original offer for Yahoo!, before doing exactly that? Doesn’t really sound like a bluff, unless you factor in that he knew they were going to reject that too, thus increasing the chances of annoying their shareholders. But then we start getting into the ‘he knew that they knew that he knew’ territory and it all gets dreadfully confusing. Whatever the case, the whole deal has always sounded like a recipe for total disaster to me. So much so, I was kinda hoping it would go ahead just so that I take some perverse pleasure in watching the train wreck later.

No-one I’ve spoken to ‘gets’ the Yahoo! bid at all, seemingly a constant across the entire spectrum of opinion about both companies. I can understand that Microsoft would love to get hold of Yahoo!’s ad customers, and to a lesser extent all the freeloading users required to eyeball said ads (and the services required to keep them sweet), but they can’t have seriously thought that it would be a smooth transfer. The philosophies of the companies couldn’t be much further apart, with Yahoo! very much invested in open source technology and service models, and spritually the culture of the company is very much of a younger, consumer-oriented, more agile and open thinking sort, very different from the business-focussed, shrink-wrapped and closely integrated, keep-it-in-the-company sort of vibe that Microsoft tends to exude. I’m sure Microsoft must have earmarked a bunch of money to use in encouraging key people to stay, but honestly in my experience the very best people aren’t swayed that much by that kind of offer. I think had the deal gone ahead, MicroHoo! would have haemorraged much of the best Yahoo! talent to other Valley companies like Google (or to new start-ups) in the first few weeks, whatever reassurances might be given.

And what about the technology? Yahoo! is again the antithesis of Microsoft here, running their core business on open source stacks. Quite whether the acquisition would have eventually led to that being replaced with equivalent Microsoft technology I don’t know, but a switch would seem like a pointless effort - regardless of your technology preference, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ rule is universal. But at the same time an entire growth arm of the business running ‘competitors’ products would be somewhat jarring I would have thought, so perhaps their principles would have had them invest in that transition anyway - none of which sounds like a particularly efficient investment.

So actually, I think Microsoft has had a lucky escape here - I think they would have been hugely distracted (not to mention considerably poorer) trying to make a Yahoo! acquisition work. Sure it might have advanced them to some degree, but it surely would have been a messy, inefficient fight which would have given their main competitors - ok competitor - much amusement. The big question is whether they can achieve more on their own. The word is that Steve Ballmer is obsessed with beating Google (you would have thought he’d be content with all the billions he already has, but I guess there’s no pleasing some people), so it will be interesting to see what Plan B is. I hope they’ve screwed the chairs down in his office.