Software, Technology

Lion upgrade

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Lion InstallerI upgraded the Macbook Air to OSX Lion this morning. Not much to say yet; it took a long time to download the 3.49GB upgrade, but it installed in 30 minutes during the course of which I had to unplug the Macbook – I would never dare do this on a Windows machine, but it worked fine here.

The first thing I did was disable the new reverse touchpad scrolling thing – that is, what Apple did to bring OSX in line with iOS from a scroll usability perspective. To me, it was just counterintuitive – I am sufficiently used to computers (as opposed to tablets) that I don’t find it unnatural to switch between gesture modes.

I do have some other new touchpad gestures to learn, and it generally seems shiny. Will post further impressions if I notice anything significantly different in the days ahead.

I’m trying not to be upset that they upgraded the Macbook Air I just got four months ago.

Gardening

The harvest 1.2

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We’ve now had potatoes from the garden (good, but nothing magical – the Lapland potatoes aren’t ready yet and the other ones are fairly ordinary), tiny strawberries from the strawberry pot (sweet and Em loved them), as well as a bunch of courgettes (standard). We’ve tasted a couple of the (baby) carrots but they need a bit longer to get to a better size.

The rhubarb is ready for a crumble and the tomatoes are ripening fast. A small pepper has materialised but the aubergine remains dormant. The yellow courgette isn’t flowering yet, and squash and pumpkin plants are still young.

The rocket has died – bad luck, ants and weeds stifled them we think – but we may have another go.

Next year – fewer potatoes, methinks.

Huge, delicious, fun.

Books, Dadblogging

Reading to Emily

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sddMy folks used to read to us a lot. Especially my Dad. I remember enjoying it; my father’s flexible vocal range giving silly life to the characters in the books we were reading and diverting off track to recapture our attention if it drifted.

Emily’s been a bit small for stories to be read to her and hold her attention, but we’ve taken her through a few board books here and there. One of my client’s recently mentioned that their HR director has a philosophy based on a children’s book, "Some Dogs Do," so, sufficiently intrigued, I bought it as a gift for Emily on her return from Denmark.

After supper one night, with her attention locked in by virtue of being in her high-chair with nowhere to scamper off to, I read her the book to peals of giggles and laughter. Again, at nine months, I’m not sure how much she’s taking in but perhaps I manage to hit on some of the vocal magic my Dad used on us when we were kids to entertain and delight.

Either way, it’s a special pleasure for me and I look forward to more storytime fun in the future.

Television

Torchwood returns with Miracle Day

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Torchwood Miracle Day 403 BBC Promo_06Excited to see that Torchwood has returned. Despite a shaky start in the early seasons, the Dr Who spin off has grown up and I’m led to understand that many of the new production team – a collaboration between BBC Wales and a US cable network – are very excellent people indeed. The trailers I’ve seen set the pace nicely and I’m looking forward to catching up on the return of Captain Jack (I missed the premier last week – thank the BBC for iPlayer!).

Anyway, no spoilers please (I already know that nobody dies). Trailer:

Technology

Media centre saga continues

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SAMSUNG SSDAfter much chasing, the saga of my media centre PC continues. SSD failure. Who thought that happened, ever? Well… I know it happens, theoretically. I just never thought it’d happen to me. Wonderful as these devices are I guess they’re not necessarily as durable as I thought, despite the lack of moving parts.

I have been distinctly unimpressed by Tranquil PC’s response times; despite promising to return the machine within 10 working days, they’ve had it for the best part of three weeks and I’ve had to write to the company MD to get an update on where it is. I know how long it takes to swap out a drive… so not sure what they’re doing with it.

The failure is going to prompt me to accelerate my "personal cloud" strategy and choose one of the cloud providers out there to mirror my filing system. Dropbox is too expensive for the volume of data I have (50GB music, 40GB pictures, 2GB docs etc), but given that most of that data lived on the secondary SATA drive (which I’m hoping is intact) – with luck I won’t have lost anything too substantial.

What I will invariably have to do is go through the unique displeasure of reconfiguring a Windows install from scratch, including setting up the fiddly and frustrating Windows Media Centre software to receive HD, something that took a not insignificant amount of fiddly hackery to begin with. Google Chrome being the hub of a lot of what I do, and the fact it syncs stuff, will make it marginally easier, but there are other bits and pieces that need sorting too.

Technology

Widi–tastic

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Intel WiDi Wireless Display LogoI missed the release of a whole new acronym  – Widi – which is, broadly speaking, wireless display technology that will see PCs hook up with displays (that have special network adapters connected to them) without the need for any sort of cabling.

This sort of thing has been tried before but thanks to the fact that Intel is backing this particular standard it likely stands a chance where it hasn’t before. Huzzah – anyone with any IT skill who works in an office knows that helping people hook up a laptop to an external display – trivial though it is in theory – is inevitably a cause for some tedium.

Business, Technology

iPhones for Enterprise

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appstorevol

I was talking to a friend about Smartphones in the enterprise. He works for a large public company with a strong heritage of working in the public sector, and therefore an understandably high level of concern about IT security. It was for this reason that – despite the mediocrity of the Blackberry platform against contemporary competition and the plunging market share of RIM – he wanted his organization to standardize on Blackberry.

However, for many people accustomed to more… sophisticated Smartphone platforms, Blackberry seems arcane, counter-intuitive and sometimes an actual hindrance to productivity.  That’s not to say that iPhone, with its Apps, games, ease of use et al won’t cause its own distractions but at least people will be able to effectively browse the web!

So it’s with some satisfaction that I note that Apple is upping the game for its enterprise offer – there’s already Exchange controls on iOS devices (pins enforced etc) and remote wipes and remote management is possible (as is location tracking, natch), so enterprise deployment of Apps is an obvious next step in supporting group policy on App deployments within an enterprise environment. That this holds for non-Appstore apps as well is truly remarkable and a very grown up (and atypical) way for Apple to be dealing with the situation. Now, if Apple could just sort out offline email…

I’m going to write further on why Blackberry’s days in the enterprise are numbered and some thoughts on what mobile operators need to do to create more compelling tariffs for the enterprise for iPhone, as have a few other thoughts bubbling under on this.

Observational, Science

This is why I suck at learning lyrics – study on computers and memory

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Read an interesting study on Wired on memory. A small scale study has shown that if you know you have access to data, you’re far less likely to remember it:

If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.

This is amazingly true. I frequently note that people referencing articles they’ve read to me can’t remember the article title, author or where it was published, or the detail of what it said or why it was interesting or funny. But they can remember the search sequence that got them there and find it via Google. Which is a fascinating insight into human psychology, right there – the journey is more memorable than the destination.

This is one of the reasons why I’m uncertain on social search. People like the solidity of search; the only way to make sure that social search improves on regular search is to somehow confound this pattern – making sure that social search is only a marginal improvement on general, unfiltered search – otherwise people will get frustrated by not being able to find the same things when on different machines.

Music

Playlist in development

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Jack Black @ Blizzcon 2010

I’ve retained some of my inspiration from watching the Warm Leads play a couple of weeks ago and started working on a playlist. Here are the tracks so far:

  • Killers – Mr Brightside
  • Mumford & Sons – Little Lion Man
  • Barenaked Ladies – if I had a million dollars
  • RHCP – Californication
  • Beatles – Norwegian Wood
  • Eagles – Hotel California
  • The Fray – How to save a life
  • Gary Jules – Mad World
  • Kings of Leon – Sex on Fire (terrible)

I think Kings of Leon is going to drop off – it doesn’t work, as Patrick warned me, on a single guitar arrangement. At least, not if you’re me. But the others are working out OK at the moment, if I haven’t made any progress memorizing them yet.

I do have better tools available to me today than the last time I took guitar seriously. There are a plethora of useful (if slightly agonizing) Youtube tutorials (yourguitarsage.com keeps coming up) in addition to lots of freely available chord and tab arrangements out there.

I just need to make the time to memorize some chord sequences and lyrics.

Any other suggestions for songs I should work out, folks? I have a separate list for Emily which includes Old Macdonald, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Dingle Dangle Scarecrow.

Film

Alien invasion movies-Skyline and Battle Los Angeles

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Robbey Battle Los Angeles World Invasion Movie

We watched two Alien Invasion movies recently on DVD-nights-in.

The first, Skyline, is so unspeakably bad that watching it was actually a faintly upsetting experience. In the end, we fast-forwarded to the final scene and retained a sense of lingering frustration as the movie finished up as disappointingly as it started. Alien invasion from the POV of a single skyscraper might make for some dramatic tension, but it’s just not interesting.

The second, Battle LA, is a walking, talking, breathing stereotype of a movie and enjoyable as that. The down in the dumps marine sergeant, the green lieutenant in command, the grunt that’s about to get married, the female soldier… all pitted against an overwhelming alien force with one weak point and one weak point alone.

As long as you can get past the silliness of it (never a problem for me, I love silly), this one’s pretty entertaining, if slightly humourless. It is at least internally consistent – a war of invasion for Earth’s resources – but don’t expect a lot of sense out of it.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.