I recently got myself an Apple Mac so that I could find out what all the fuss is about. In many respects it doesn’t matter what sort of a computer you use these days, so long as you have a web browser… However I’m still finding it a bit of a challenge to switch over. The most recent challenge has been finding the hash (#) key on the ‘English (UK)’ keyboard.

As you can see I’ve now got it sussed, but it took a bit of messing around. The keyboard is on a Mac Book Pro, and to get a hash you need to press Alt-3 (or ‘Option’ as I think they call it, and the key with the pound (£) symbol on it). Those funny Americans…

I’ve been having all sorts of problems getting my networked attached storage working too. I have two of these devices: and old LaCie Ethernet disk mini and an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The ReadyNAS works fine if I set it up as a Windows share (ironic, I know…), but it just wont work at all if I set it up as an AFP share and enable ‘bonjour’. However, the LaCie device (and I always had the impression that Lacie were more of a mac shop than a windows shop) just won’t work at all. I can try it as a windows share or an AFP share with bonjour, and neither setting will work. It’s very frustrating!

The next hurdle has been screen calibration. I’ve been trying to get the laptop screen and my 19″ LaCie 319 set up the same so that I can run both displays at the same time and have images on either look the same. I set both to the same colour temperature, gave them the same luminance and gamma setting and ran some calibration software that came with my monitor and the Blue Eye Pro colorimeter. No matter what I do they just won’t look the same. The curious thing is if I measure the response of either screen (using the colorimeter) they both report to be the same! Very perplexing!

At the same time I’m playing with Adobe Lightroom, and although I think it’s pretty good software, neither the laptop screen or my LaCie is big enough to make it ‘nice’ to use. I really need to close the laptop lid and use an external display, but have you seen the price of a LaCie 324 Monitor with hood?! They don’t come cheap!

So what other issues am I having?

Well there is mouse that goes exactly where I want it to on my Windows computer, but seems to have a mind of it’s own on the Mac.

And then there is the terminal/shell that doesn’t automatically copy selected text to the clipboard and paste on a right-click.

Talking of shells, the backspace key seems to want to do a forward delete instead in some circumstances. I’ve not worked out the pattern yet, but it’s a very strange thing indeed. And trying all the combinations of Ctrl-Backspace, Alt-Backspace and Cmd-Backspace don’t seem to help this time around. Again, a small annoyance on it’s own, but taken along with all the others it’s getting to be a major irritation!

Finally we mustn’t forget the lack of support for automatic window focus (where the cursor focus follows the mouse). This is a real pain indeed! Most linux window managers that I’ve used over the last 10 years (in fact all that I’ve ever used) have done this without a problem, and you can even do this on Windows, so why on earth doesn’t OS X support it?!

So despite being praised for it’s usability, I’m still having some issues using my Mac.

On the positive side, I discovered is that Safari (which I previously couldn’t stand) supports embedded colour profiles in images. This means that when I look at my photos on flickr, they look exactly how I meant them to look (assuming the viewing monitor has been calibrated). I don’t know if Safari does this on Windows, but it makes my flickr experience much nicer. So much so in fact that I now won’t use firefox to surf flickr! So that’s a good thing.

But I’m nearly there. I’m trying to reduce my clutter so if I can decommission my old NAS and sort out the display problems then I should be able to get rid of some old and bulky hardware and free up some well needed space!

So enough rambling. In conclusion maybe I need to think about installing Ubuntu linux on this laptop instead…. at least things would be more predictable… wouldn’t they? I’m dreading the thought of actually becoming a fan of Windows (XP, not Vista), so perhaps if I avoid installing Linux I’ll never know if it’s better or worse and I can live in the vague hope that it simply must be better, and one day if I ever need it I can switch over… That day must never come.

Right, I only started this post so I had somewhere to check back to when I needed reminding how to get the hash symbol…. so that’ll be Alt-3 then. Remember?

I finally took the plunge today and ordered my first ever Apple Mac. They have come on a long way since the last Apple I used — an Apple IIe that I played on at home when I was younger. Highlights of today’s Mac Book Pro order include a 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a fast-ish 7200 RPM disk.

Despite all the concerns over the security of OSX lately, I think this will be a good move (providing I can get used to the new interface and the one-button mouse). This is going to replace my ageing desktop (a very old Dell Precision 530 workstation running Windows 2000 Pro) for image processing/photography and work, so it should free up a lot of desk space and get rid of a lot of cables. I have an old laptop running XP, so I’m going to nuke that and install Ubuntu Linux on it for sofa-surfing, so then apart from my XBOX 360 and work laptop (when it’s at home) I’ll be a Windows-free zone!

The best thing will be being able to pull up a proper command prompt on my local machine without the need to SSH onto a server somewhere. Sad I know, but it’s little things like this that change using a computer from being a pain to being (almost) a joy…. I’m hoping to see a decent speed improvement on image processing too. I’m going from a single 2.4GHz Xeon with 512KB cache to a two-core 2.6GHz processor with 6MB cache! The jump from a 128MB graphics card to 512MB shouldn’t be all that stressful either

No doubt I’ll post more about this when it arrives… which will be sometime mid-next week

Tags: apple, apple iie, apple mac pro, bye bye windows

Three posts in two days? What’s going on?!

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve started re-ripping all my music. The long term goal is to get a Squeezbox from SlimDevices (which is a network attached media player) but given the shortage of funds at present I’m content in the knowledge that my music collection will simply be more accessible when this task is complete.

Although I can play my music from iTunes on my computer, I’ve been playing around with some media streaming software called SlimServer. “Playing around” is perhaps an exaggeration — I’ve enabled the service on my NAS (and upgraded the software) — and installed some client software on my PC called SoftSqueeze, which looks like this:

There are lots of nifty things with this setup. First and foremost, the server software is Open Source. Around it are lots of third-party plugins, and because the API/Client Protocol is also open and fairly well documented there are quite a few client applications around too (SoftSqueeze being one of them).

SlimServer has a web front-end to it, so I can control what’s playing on the media player from any computer on my network. This is perhaps of limited use given my current set-up, but when (and if) I get a Squeezebox, then I can see this being quite useful.

If you’re looking at a solution to get music from your PC or network storage to your Hi-Fi, then I’d recommend you take a look at SlimServer and the Squeezebox. It’s significantly cheaper than the Sonos products, and will fill most normal needs. (How many people really need to break their home into 32 zones and play different music in each??) If you want to try it out, then you can install the SlimServer software for free on Windows, Linux and Apple OSX (it’s written in Perl so just needs that to run), and you can download the SoftSqueeze client to try out the setup on your PC. SoftSqueeze is written in Java, so should run on most platforms too.

Tags: squeezebox, softsqueeze, music, sonos, readynas, infrant, media server, slimdevices

So here’s the deal: I’ve got myself a swanky new NAS (an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+), and I’ve started re-ripping all my CDs. (For those that are interested, I’m ripping them as AIFF files, at a sample rate of 44.1 KHz (the same sample rate used for creating audio CDs), in 16-bit stereo. This seems to be the most future-proof format, and should give me an exact CD-quality copy.)

But then it comes to classifying the music. I’m using iTunes to rip my music because it’s convenient; one of the useful features being that it downloads the track names and album info from CDDB (or some such site). It also downloads the genre information, but the problem I’m having is that very little music is a perfect fit in any specific genre.

Take for example the last CD I’ve just ripped: The Best of Donald Byrd. This has been described as R&B, Jazz, Funk, Jazz Funk and Fusion amongst other things, but iTunes (and all media players that I’m aware of) only lets me select one genre. It’s only just dawned on me (though I’ve never given it any thought until now), but this is so short sighted of the developers (or the people that wrote the spec.). How do you classify music that spans genres? If you label an album or track as “Jazz-Funk” then it won’t be played when you select your Jazz tracks, and that’s not what I want.

Is there a point to this post? Perhaps not a big one - it was something to do while my tea brews - but if we can’t add multiple genres to our music catalogue, is there really any point in doing it? We can’t even limit the genre selection to a handful because there is still going to be a crossover with some music. Perhaps there is only one genre that is applicable: Music.

So what we need is a music player that supports genre tagging. Anyone know of any?

Tags: ripping, readynas, music, tagging, genres

Nah, you can never have gadget overkill! Long time no blog. So what’s been going on? Well, not a huge amount hence the lack of content, but today was a bit of a gadget frenzy. I got a Blackberry Perl to replace my work phone (a brick of a phone in the shape of an Orange SPV M5000), and so far I’m fairly impressed with it. I guess most notably it’s a lot smaller than the SPV. It’s too early to write a long review on the thing, but the sound (when using it as a telephone) was a bit poor. Other than that it seems OK. It’s small and I can get my email on it nice and easily.

But a new mobile phone doesn’t make a gadget frenzy, does it?! So what other goodies did I get then?! Well, seeing as you asked, my Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ (or Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ since they got bought out) arrived today. This is a networked attached storage (NAS) device, and I’ve got it to store all my RAW images from my camera. It has four disk bays, and my version came with 2 x 500GB drives. This gives me a total storage of 500GB, but with disk mirroring for redundancy. As I run out of space I can add more hard disks to the two spare bays to increase the storage space.

So far I’m extremely impressed with it. Performance-wise it seems much quicker at both read/write activities than my older Lacie single-disc NAS, and the configuration interface is very good. I also picked up a cheap APC UPS. The ReadyNAS detects the presence of the UPC (via a USB lead), and it improves the buffering/writing speed to the NAS because it knows it has a more reliable power source (so can rely on the RAM in the NAS for buffering more). My UPS is still charging up, so I’ll find out tomorrow if this all works as expected.

So that’s the gadgets done. In other news, I had a short ‘break’ in Marrakech a few weeks ago. My one tip from that trip would be to never fly Royal Air Maroc! They seem to be the most disorganised airline on the planet — or at least that I’ve encountered. I took some photos but they’re not that great. I’m sure if I hadn’t been delayed for 7 hours in Casablanca airport I wouldn’t have been so tired for the next few days, which would have meant I could get up early to take some photos in the best light. Instead I mainly snapped around midday!

Ho hum.

Tags: Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, Infrant, ReadyNAS, NAS, Netgear, blackberry perl

After attending the recent Blogs and Social Media Forum, I had lots of ideas about how we should be making more use of collaborative and “social” tools where I work. We’ve had a wiki in place of the intranet now for a couple of years, and so collaborative bookmarking seems like it would (should) be one of the easiest and next most useful things for us to implement.

I’ve used del.icio.us for a while now, and find it very handy indeed. Although I don’t really have much of a network on del.icio.us, the benefits of this type of application seem immense when used by a whole development team, or a sales team researching competitors and so on.

However, the draw-back with del.icio.us is the lack of group-level bookmarking and privacy. If our development team started bookmarking content related to new features that they may be working on/researching, then it would make it very clear to our competitors what we’re doing.

I’ve had a few thoughts on how we could get around this, but it would mean writing more code… and I’m sure it would be reinventing the wheel!

This is where the “enterprise collaboration bookmark server” steps in. But can I find a decent open source one? Well, not yet! In fairness I’ve not spent much time looking. Mike Gotta publishes a useful list of alternatives to del.icio.us, and through this I discovered that the code to connotea is available for download. Just need some time to have a play. I also need to look more at the XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL) to see if that throws up any good ideas.

In the meantime, if anyone knows any good options for me here, please feel free to leave a comment!

Tags: bookmarking, social, collaboration, delicious

It’s been an interesting day for several reasons:

1. I reminded myself why I never want to work in London, after I had to suffer the discomfort of a morning train and tube ride at the peak of rush hour,
2. I went to the second Blogs and Social Media Forum at the Marriott London Grosvenor Square Hotel (more about this in a mo’),
3. I think I may have found a solution to something BritBlog related…., and
4. I’ve made some career decisions….ish.

So the main event of the day was the Blogs and Social Media forum, subtitled “The impact of social media and enterprise 2.0“. This was useful for two reasons: (1) it has given me some interesting ideas to play with at work, which could have a significant impact on both our business and my job, and (2) it helped me crystallise some thinking around BritBlog and what the right next step is.

I’m afraid I can’t really go into point 1 much at the moment - I really need to think about more about the pros and cons of what I’d like to do at work, but point 2 is quite interesting.

Those of you that have been following the BritBlog saga over the last, umm, ‘many’ months, will know that I’ve been working on lots of new ideas for the site. Alas I’ve not managed the work very well (the day job kinda interferes…), and it’s been getting quite messy and very depressing.

Anyway, today has given me some time to stand back and think about the project, and I’ve pretty much decided to scrap all of my work from the last few months. A chap called Lee Bryant from a company called Headshift was talking about a project they’ve recently done for BP/Castrol, and he made some very interesting remarks. I suppose the two that may the biggest impression with me were these:

1. Firstly, they didn’t mind so much about releasing a site to the public before it was finished. There is a theory that an unfinished project encourages members to get more involved than they would otherwise, because they feel like they are able to participate. The example given was MySpace — you know how messy it tends to look? — but it made me think of flickr also, as it was in public beta for years.

   Anyway, this made me worry less about getting things right with BritBlog straight away, and it leads me into point 2:

2. They would make frequent small changes/releases to the website, and gather feedback from users about them. This stuck a chord too: rather than getting all the new ideas out there in one mammoth go, we could release them it stages, making fairly small changes at a time. This will allow us to get the changes right each time, and will give us the room to fix problems that may arise before they get too complex. There are loads of incremental changes I can see us making to BritBlog, and tackling it in this manner makes it all feel much more achievable.

So perhaps nothing ground-breakingly new there, but I clearly needed someone to spell it out to me…

The final thing that happened today was I was able to give my career a bit of thought. This is something I’ve been putting off for a long time because it’s something I don’t really like thinking about! Anyway, although I’ve not made any concrete decisions today, I have at least had some interesting ideas. Again, I want to discuss these with other people before saying anything here about them, but perhaps the future is bright…..^*.

^*And no, that is not by any means a clue. I have absolutely no desire to work for Orange. Or at least not yet!

Tags: Blogs and Social Media Forum, britblog, careers, headshift, web20

I’ve been meaning to write a post titled something along the lines of “10 things you can do to improve the performance of your web application” for the last few months, but so far I’ve not had the time! There are lots of articles out there on the web that tell you in general terms what you should do, but I like to provide examples when I do these things so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for that one.

In the meantime, here’s a handy tip to reduce some of the load from your web site.

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