Drive Through…

• It wasn’t hard to get one if you were prepared. I pre-ordered early the day the pre orders started and was ok. There was a bloke in front of my in the O2 Blanchardstown store who pre-ordered a 16GB and was only offered an 8GB, despite his protestations about being ‘the first person’ to pre-order.
• O2 ported over my pre-pay number right there and then. I’m used to this taking days in the UK.
• Sign up and activation was painless. I think mainly because I had it all done by 10am Dublin time and Ireland is a small country anyway.
• The device is noticeable heavier and fatter than my 16GB iPod touch, which is not a criticism, just a difference to be expected and gotten used to.
• The Home button seems to require more of a firm press than the Touch.
• The multi-touch screen seems like it has been slowed down a bit from the Touch. Presses need to be a bit firmer and scrolling seems slower.
• Love the volume and silent buttons. LOVE the speaker and not having to find a pair of headphones just to watch a quick video or listen to a song.
• It makes and receives phone calls.
• No visual voicemail - now I have one I honestly don’t care. I maybe get 1 voicemail a month and never have to trawl through any others to get to it. I can understand the value for heavy users, but that ain’t me.
• It sends and receives text messages. I honestly cannot remember the last time I sent or got an MMS - not bothered about that.
• Wifi with enterprise access at at last. However I haven’t been able to get it to work at work, due to the fact that there is a rogue unprotected adhoc access point somewhere with the SSID I need to use and that’s all the phone will see.
• I need to get over the mental hurdle of being stingy with using cellular data. So far I’ve used 244K of download. I still get a slight panic when I tap on Weather or Stocks and it just goes off and gets data. So I only (only?) have 1GB per month, but I need to just go with the flow and treat data access as a normality.
• App Store - immediate downloads: Twitteriffic, the light saber thing, Facebook and Exposure.
• App Store - there’s lots missing from the Irish store. No games at all, and certain other apps are not there. I WANT SUPER MONKEYBALL!!!
• The Remote app is teh awsomeness. It may just make me get an Apple TV just to show it off!
• There’s lots of crud and no way to get through it other than scrolling. More evident on the iPhone interface than iTunes. Let me ignore the app developers producing ebooks or bible stuff please!
• I’ve not paid a penny for an app yet. I want to hear the wisdom of those who have. I want a good weight of reviews.
• GPS - well I went outside and it knew where I was, so it works. So does cellular triangulation.
• Maps - tried to search for ‘Hotel’ when located at home. It gave me three results. IN THE WHOLE OF DUBLIN! I know this isn’t a phone issue, it is a data issue. Come on Irish companies, start advertising yourselves - your market just got a whole lot more mobile.

O2 Ireland are bringing the iPhone here on 14th March.

Some points:

• No unlimited data plan. 1GB per month limit. 2c per MB after that. That works out at just over €20 for an extra GB/month.
• No visual voicemail
• €399 for the 8GB, €499 for the 16GB
• €45 per month for the cheapest tarrif giving 175 minutes and 100 texts per month. 18 month agreement.

So, am I going to get one? No. Why?

• I already have a 16GB iPod touch that does just about everything I need bar making calls
• My Nokia N80 suits me fine.
• I’ll wait for the 3G iPhone to come along thanks.
• The handset prices are too high, coming in at more than £50 more expensive than you’d pay on O2 UK for a 16GB model.
• I’m a Speakeasy (PAYG) customer. Those contract rates look stupid compared to what you get on O2 in the UK. £35 for 600 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data and visual voicemail. I’m not about to sign up for 18 months of what o2.ie are offering.
• No indication of any wifi hotspot deal such as O2 UK have with The Cloud.

All in all the term rip-off springs to mind.

So Apple have announced an event for 6th March (see TUAW) Here’s my wishes:

• Obviously the SDK is going to be released. I hope this provides support for the iPod Touch as well.
• Flash would be nice
• Enterprise capabilities? Well support for 802.11 authentication and LEAP would be nice!
• There’s already a VPN client, but I don’t know if I can use it to get into IBM (I suspect not) One where I knew I could would be cool

This web site and blog is hosted by the ever excellent register1.net

On my previous blog entry I hit a problem when uploading photos (I normally just link from ones on flickr) Specifically I hit a php process memory limit. Register1 responded to my support ticket asking for the limit to be raised within 5 minutes and doubled the limit. That is amazing service given it is a Sunday. During some recent problems with my blog being hacked to insert search keywords and links they provided log details of attempted ftp accesses and blacklisted various IPs from China and elsewhere. All in all my experience of them over the last year has been entirely positive and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them for anybody in the UK or elsewhere looking for hosting.

Well you kind of let me down with the Macbook Air. 1 USB port? No replaceable battery? Lack of the syncing stuff I hoped for. And the price…

However, I’ll let you off since you gave me this:

£12.99 well spent. The touch was already eminently useable for most of my browsing and media needs, now it’s even more so.

Everybody else in the tech universe seems to be making predictions about what Steve Jobs is going to come up with today, so here’s mine:

• He will announce the new Macbook Air, as many have reported is likely.
• Also as widely discussed it will be thin, very thin, and likely have nothing more in terms of ports than a couple of USB and power. Network? Wireless only. Peripherals? USB and Bluetooth, including things like headphones. No external monitor capability.
• Explaining away the lack of Firewire, Jobs will announce that Apple will put their support behind USB3.0 and Wireless USB from now on with Firewire still supported for legacy reasons on desktop, Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware. Macbook Air probably won’t have enough disk for video editing anyway…
• Disk will be solid state.
• Will support two essential use-cases - standalone laptop machine in which case you will likely need the USB optical drive accessory, or much more interestingly it will be able to sync up to a host machine e.g. iMac. iTunes on the Air will sync to a host iTunes in much the same way as Apple TV does.
• iTunes 8.0 will support DVD ripping and iTunes movie rentals. You can rip your DVDs to your host Mac and sync them to the Air or via USB optical drive directly. Movie rentals are a no brainer.
• The syncing mechanism will be extended to include your home directory, settings etc, allowing your Air to be a truly portable mini-copy of your desktop Mac back home.
• Naturally remote syncing will be supported via a combination of .Mac and Back To My Mac.
• Time Machine will be updated so that it knows not to backup synced content on an Air that is already being backed up on a host Mac. That is if you are using the host Mac as the Time Machine destination.
• It won’t have any sort of multi-touch interface, just keyboard and trackpad.
• It will be powerful enough to run stuff like Aperture or Lightroom for photo editing with comfort, and the screen will be widescreen, probably not OLED yet.

Ok, I confess, this isn’t so much a prediction as a wish list. Whilst I love my iMac to pieces I would like to be able to take it on the road sometimes, especially when away on trips and I want to do some photo editing. I don’t need things like optical drives, external monitor ports or at a push a wired network connection. What I do need however is to not feel like I would have to maintain data between two machines. This is why I’ve never bought a companion Macbook for instance. Currently you either go mobile with a Macbook/Pro and compromise on disk and screen real-estate, or you stay deskbound with an iMac/Mini/Mac Pro. The Air would seem to fill the gap between the two allowing desktop Mac owners to take their data on the road without feeling like they have a whole management problem with two machines.

I know I’d buy one like a shot…

Historically I’ve been pretty poor at keeping backups of my data. Recently however I’ve become aware of the need to be more vigilant in this area. Touch wood I have never suffered a disk failure on any computer I’ve owned, so I reckon I’m overdue one. The fact that my iMac disk now contains the results of months spent ripping my CD collection as well as a growing library of photographs it is time to take it seriously.

For the past few months I’ve been using the excellent SuperDuper! to perform backups of the iMac. However although the software is good I didn’t set up a scheduled backup so it relied on me to remember to run it regularly. Secondly the backup was performed to a Lacie 500GB Big Disk Extreme. Whilst this is an excellent external disk and runs very fast over Firewire 800, it is actually two 250GB disks arranged in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 means that the two disks combine together and data is striped over them. This makes read and write access faster than a single disk, but has a big potential problem when the disk is used for backup, namely that if one disk fails then you lose all your data. Effectively you are doubling your risk of a hardware failure. Not ideal.

With the arrival of OS X 10.5 Leopard and the built in Time Machine backup I’ve decided to sort out my backup solution in a proper fashion. Therefore I’ve just ordered one of these beauties:

The Lacie 2big Triple is a 1TB triple interface (USB2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800) drive. Like the extreme it actually contains two 500GB drives that make up the total capacity. The difference however is that this one supports RAID 1 as well. RAID 1 puts the disks in mirror mode, meaning that they both contain a copy of the same data. Thus, if one disk fails the other one is still there to serve your data. What’s more the drives are hot-swappable so you can replace the failed one and it will spin the new one up and copy everything onto it to bring it in line. In fact the disks can work in four modes: the aforementioned RAID 0 and RAID 1, plus JBOD which allows both disks to act as separate volumes, and Big which just creates a single volume without RAID support.

A couple of years ago consumer level (read affordable) hot-swappable RAID arrays were unheard of, so I’m really looking forward to throwing Time Machine at this beast. Unfortunately for the time being I’ll probably have to leave my Adobe Lightroom catalog out of the backup until the Leopard compatible fixes are available later this month. In the meantime I’ll back all my photos up to the old Lacie.

Of course, any comprehensive backup strategy will include offsite storage, afterall if the flat burns down or we get broken into then I could lose the iMac and the backed up data. I’m not yet sure what the best way to go with offsite is. Either buy a cheaper 500GB external disk and run a SuperDuper backup onto it every now and then and take it into the office to store, or try online storage with something like Amazon S3 or even .Mac. The latter is probably more reliable as I can script it to happen without needing to remember to bring a disk home every so often. I need to work out if it is cost effective for the 300GB or so of data which I need to have backed up.

I’ve owned a number of MP3/digital music players, but up until recently only one of them was an iPod. The first two of note were versions of the original Creative Jukebox - the silver and blue ones that came in a form factor not dissimilar to an overweight portable CD player. The battery like was as woeful as the interface, and uploading songs using USB 1.0 was not fun.

In 2003 I succumbed and purchased a 15GB 3G iPod - the one pre-clickwheel with the touch sensitive row of buttons under the monochrome display. The size was sufficient at the time, even though my digital music collection was more than 15GB even at that time. I never found that not being able to carry around every single track I own limiting. In fact it was refreshing to have to consider what to put on the device.

The 3G iPod served me well. So well that I felt no need to ever upgrade it. I didn’t need a colour screen, and whilst video and photo display was enticing, viewing them on a tiny screen wasn’t. I swore that I wouldn’t upgrade until it either broke (which it hasn’t, nor has the battery diminished enough to warrant replacement either) or Apple produced a true video capable iPod, by which I mean one with a screen you could actually contemplate watching on a plane.

The iPod Touch fulfills my criteria, and so I’ve bought one. The 16GB model give me more space than I’ve had before (so no problem there. I’m even happy to sacrifice music space for video space) and has the killer advantage of wifi and web browsing. It is pretty much the perfect device for me. I’ll address the major features in turn.

At last the effort I put in earlier this year to re-rip, encode and provide album art for all my music pays off. Coverflow on the touch is so much better for choosing what I want to play than looking at a monochrome list of albums or artists. For one thing I can now see the artist and album information at the same time. The killer though is being able to see the artwork. It is so much more like flicking through my CD collection. Something I can no longer do as it is all boxed up and in storage.

One entirely understandable but slightly annoying thing (certainly in comparison to the iPhone) is the lack of an external speaker (bar a simple one for the alarm and a couple of other things) A number of times I’ve found myself showing off the device only to say “of course you have to have the earphones in to hear the audio for this video” It is an iPod at the end of the day though and really meant for personal consumption.

If Coverflow is the eye-candy, then it’s made all the more better by the multi-touch interface. Using this is simple and effective. The damping effects when you scroll at different velocities are awesome.

Video playback. Not made much use of this yet, save for the Make Love Not Warcraft episode of South Park which was immediately downloaded from iTMS. Playback is good though. The YouTube stuff I’ve found flaky. Some work fine, some seem to hang the application (from which the touch recovers quite well after a short delay.)

Wifi and web browsing. The killer factor, and the reason I already love my touch. I’ve had mobile wifi in the form of my Nokia N80 for 18 months now, and whilst viewing HTML based web sites is possible, it is not a pleasant experience and I found myself heading to WAP sites in preference. Safari on the iPod Touch however is awesome. It renders pages faithfully and quickly, the landscape view is perfect and the zoom function easy to use and effective. Text input is excellent (most notably when in landscape mode) and little things like adding previous and next buttons to the keyboard popup to save you having to press to select individual fields on a form make it truly usable. One of the annoying things about the N80 was filling in forms. Something you typically have to do any time you join a public wifi network, even if it is just a userid and password. With the touch it is simple and quick. I need go no further to prove that the touch is a capable and usable web browsing device than to say that a friend managed to do the whole of the Facebook movie compatibility test application, in the full Facebook web UI not the cut-down iPhone/Touch optimized version, whilst connected to a public wifi point in the pub last Saturday night.

Yes, the lack of flash is an annoyance, but not a big one.

Lack of mail app? So what, web-based mail is perfectly usable (at least mine is)

As for the lack of 3rd party application support. Well I did Jailbreak my touch, as you can see from the photo above. To be honest however I’ve not found any compelling additional applications for it. Yes I could find and install the mail app if I wanted to, but I don’t. When I show the device to people I end up demonstrating the hacked nature by running a terminal and typing ‘ls’ To be honest, so what if I can now ssh into my touch, or run a VNC client on it (honestly, why would you want to?) I’ll be doing a restore and upgrade if a new firmware comes out rather than keeping it hacked. Things may be different once the official SDK comes out I feel.

Battery life is superb. I charged it up on Thursday night before a day of work, followed by a flight over to the UK for the weekend. Music playback during work, the flights, lots of showing off and a good couple of hours of wifi usage and browsing over the course of the weekend failed to use the full charge up by the time I got back on Sunday evening. That’s good enough for me.

Annoyances? Well it seems to have a problem with the correct display of some album art. I’ve seen various thread on this and it seems to be a problem with the way iTunes stores album art and corruption of the data. Everything is displayed fine in iTunes, but some albums get the wrong art when transferred over to the iPod. I’m still searching for a resolution that doesn’t involve anything too drastic like resyncing the entire device.

Why didn’t I wait for the iPhone. A number of reasons. Firstly there’s no news on when it will appear in Ireland. I am not interested in getting a hacked one, the touch is much thinner and finally because I don’t believe in uber-converged devices. The battery life suffers and it tends to become a jack of all trades and master of none.

So in summary, I couldn’t be happier with my iPod touch!

As mentioned in my previous entry, I’ve been playing the Electronic Arts Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 game on my XBox 360 since the weekend. One feature of the game is “Game Face” which allows you to model your career golf character on your own face. Now face modelling in video games isn’t new, for instance 2K Games’ Oblivion had an extensive modelling editor which took the approach of using sliders to alter every part of a model head to match your own. The FaceGen engine used behind this has a demo downloadable app with which you can plug in a photo (or for best results a couple of photos) and it would create the 3D model for you. It was then just a simple case of copying the slider settings manually into Oblivion to create a pretty realistic likeness to yourself.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 takes this much further though. The Game Face engine is part of the game code, and allows you to use one or two photos to create the 3D model directly. Naturally, I spent a good amount of time playing around with this before I even swung a club in anger in the game itself!

My first attempt was with my XBox 360 Vision Camera, a 640 x 480 web cam that plugs directly into the console. I took a head-on and side profile shot of myself, taking care to make sure that the lighting on my face was even (the 32″ reflector from my camera gear came in handy here!) The game then processes the photos to create the 3D model. It takes about ten minutes if you use a single photo, or up to about 20 minutes if you use two, the latter giving a more accurate render. EA keep you up to date on progress with an amusing set of status updates. So, here’s the result of the Vision cam render…

Overall, very good, and certainly better than you could hope to achieve using a traditional slider approach. It isn’t perfect though, so I broke out my Canon 400d and took some proper photos of myself:

(It was a bad hair day, and the morbid expression was suggested as being best for the rendering!)

In order to get the game to use these photos, you have to upload them to the EA website. Now this proved to be one of the most frustrating experiences on the web I’ve ever had. Firstly I had to register. Now I was already registered for the EA web site, and it knew about my XBox Live gamertag, but apparantly this wasn’t enough. Getting the correct registration involved constant back and forth between three different EA sites, and lots of patience and experimentation. Finally, though I got to the page where I could upload my photos… except it wouldn’t let me. Apparantly their servers were very busy and I should try later. Checking various forums it appears that they’ve pretty much been like this since the game was released three weeks or so ago. Finally a day later I managed to get them uploaded whilst the US were asleep. Once I got started it was pretty painless. The web app does a good job of helping you optimize the photos ready for the rending by zooming them to fit a profile overlay.

From that point it is back to the XBox to go through the Game Face process again, this time telling it to download the images from the EA server. This was painless, and the render process started. 20 minutes or so later, and I have one of those WTF moments when this appears on my HD TV:

Now that is pretty damn near photorealistic. The Nokia N80 camera phone photo from my TV screen doesn’t do it justice. Let’s put it this way, I got Lana to look at it and she freaked out when a bald, blinking me stared back at her from the TV!

The final stage was to “dress” myself with a hairstyle, beard, clothes, etc. etc. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, which in this case is how the avatar appears in-game. Here’s are some more (poor) camera phone shots:

All in all, Game Face is pretty awesome and it is quite a surreal experience to see yourself on the screen. I can only see more games taking this sort of approach to give added realism. Imagine how this technology could enhance an adventure or FPS game. Of course, the real-time 3D graphics in a golf game are much simpler and less dynamic than a typical FPS, but it is probably only a matter of time and processing power.

I and a few of my team have just registered to attend and participate in MashupCamp 5 which is being held at Trinity College Dublin on 12-13th September.

The two days are being run as an open space/unconference with a preceeding Mashup University on the 10-11th. We will be bringing Lotus Connections along to show and play with, with the aim of discovering integration points between social computing within the enterprise and beyond the firewall. There’s already a proposed discussion item about “Mashup Adoption Issues Across the Enterprise” which sounds promising.

So, if you are going be sure to look out for us. I don’t know yet how we will advertise our presence or anything! IBM are a sponsor of the event so maybe we can get some goodies or something. The list of attendees includes Stephen O’ Grady from Redmonk, who I look forward to meeting.