stuart test blog

This article compares hard-key QWERTY phones such as the Blackberry to the iPhone’s (or iPod Touch) on-screen keyboard and discovers a higher error-rate on the iPhone. I have some opinions on the iPod Touch’s keyboard myself, but I’ll save those for another entry.

Link: Direct Comparison of iPhone and Hard-Key QWERTY Phone Owners Indicates Higher Text Entry Error Rate for iPhones

With help from a couple of nifty plugins, this site is now optimised for viewing on either the iPhone or iPod Touch. So if you’re reading this in your feed reader and you’re lucky enough to have one of Apple’s beautiful devices handy, head on over and check it out for yourself.

Plugins:

• iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme
• WPhone Version 1.4.0 Has Hit The Streets

Just in case you need another reason why DRM is bad, read this article about the Major League Baseball revoking their DRM license, thus rendering all purchased & downloaded videos now unwatchable.

• MLB rips off fans who bought DRM videos
• Fans shafted as Major League Baseball revokes DRM licenses

While I was in England I visited the Apple Store in Bluewater and had the pleasure of playing with an iPod Touch for the first time. It’s just as good in person as it looks in the demos on the web and I’ve ordered one from the NZ Apple Store as they are cheaper over here than the UK.

I wasn’t planning on hacking/unlocking it as I really only want it for wireless internet access (the photos and videos are nice too), but this article shows just how easy it is now: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/29/instant-jailbreak-for-iphone-and-ipod-touch/

I’ve been too busy recently to pay much attention to this blog, and with the impending holiday coming up (see first point) I won’t be doing much blogging this month either. So a bullet point list of stuff…

• The Maxwell family is going on holiday! We’re taking Elliot on her first big trip to see family and friends in London and Amsterdam. Really looking forward to this.
• On the topic of our trip, www.tripit.com is probably the best new site I’ve found recently. It’s one of many online trip planners available, but what makes it different is that you don’t have to manually enter in your itinerary – you just email them your itinerary that the travel agent gives you, and they instantly convert it into a trip planner and email you back your login details! Great idea.
• Cafenet need to get a better password reset form on their website. I needed to get urgent access to my emails but I had forgotten my Cafenet password. You can reset it from the Cafenet site but they just email it to you – obviously no good to me as I need to log in to Cafenet to read my emails. Couldn’t they just text it to me, or ask me a couple of security questions to reset it??
• Microsoft are releasing the source code to their .Net framework libraries. But pay close attention to the wording though – they are not open-sourcing their code as that would imply that you can modify the code or contribute to it. You won’t find any of the Microsoft guys saying that the code is open source, more along the lines of "opening up the source…" or "releasing the source code…" The code is released under the Microsoft Reference License which is effectively a read-only license – no modifying or redistributing. If you’re a Dot Net developer looking for better debugging ability, this is for you. If you’re an open source developer wanting to look at the code for help with your project, beware – you should read this eWeek article first.
• I’ve gone back to Vista, after vowing to avoid it until at least service pack 1. There is just one feature which I’ve decided I can’t live without and that is the hybrid sleep function. For a mobile user, this is essential – it allows you to start up and shut down within seconds by putting the computer into a sort-of "deep sleep". It’s somewhere between the normal sleep and hibernation. All the fans turn off and the computer goes into a ultra low power state so that your battery doesn’t drain. If you’re thinking that the hibernation feature in Windows XP is just as good, then you haven’t tried hibernating with more than 2GB RAM – it’s almost as quick to cold boot than to un-hibernate a computer with a lot of RAM.
• I’m going to miss the Technet Unplugged event in October due to aforementioned holiday. That’s a pity because it looks like a good one.
• The whole "Office 2.0" space is really hotting up at the moment with new announcements every day. Zoho has an online database application to go with the rest of their office suite. Google now was a presentation app for their Google Apps suite, but it’s far too basic to be useful at the moment. SlideRocket shows how to do online presentations much better – but you wouldn’t want your internet connection to go down during a presentation, so not sure how sensible it is (and we all know how flaky internet connections are at conferences.) Now Adobe has a cool looking word processor built on Flash/Flex/Air/Whatever – basically it runs in a browser but the technology they are using means you can take it offline too. (maybe SlideRocket need to look at that too.)
• Is it just me or is Apple starting down a slippery slope towards becoming as ‘hated’ as Microsoft? I didn’t mind the fact that they dropped the price of the iPhone so soon – especially since they offered a $100 gift voucher/peace token to disgruntled customers. But it does bother me that they have turned people’s iPhones into bricks. These are the same early adopters that flock to the MacWorld conferences and evangelise their products for them, for free. And you can’t even say that the iPhone bricks were an unfortunate side-effect of the update – Steve Jobs himself said that Apple was prepared to play a cat and mouse game with hackers who try to make their iPhones more functional. This is all about money and greed and it wouldn’t surprise me if more and more Apple fans start turning against their beloved company.
• On a related note, I’m looking to buy a Nokia N95. This has all the functionality that’s missing from the iPhone, just not the big screen or cool interface. I want the high quality camera, GPS and maps, Exchange sync (Nokia app takes care of this), Java apps, HSDPA modem, and no lock in to any particular carrier. The current model has come down in price recently, but that’s probably due to the 8GB model coming out that also has a larger screen (2.8" as opposed to 2.6") Do I wait for the new, expensive model, or pick up a bargain and settle for less. (I think I’ll wait…)
• I’m planning to read three books while away on holiday that I’ve had for a while now – Getting Things Done by David Allen, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, and The Dip by Seth Godin – probably in that order too.
• I’ve spent the last few evenings getting my accounts in order, and I’m always amazed at just how good Xero is to work with. The improvements they made to reconciling accounts are just incredible, I reckon Xero saves me around 1 to 2 minutes per bank transaction and if you add it all up, Xero becomes far better value for money than any desktop finance application that I’ve tried. It’s important for me to justify it like that  as I still sometimes wonder if I’m paying too much for the service.
• I fell off my bike the other day trying to go too quickly down a flight of stairs near Frank Kitts Park. The huge graze on my leg wasn’t as bad as my damaged pride when the old lady I had just zoomed past came up to me to find out if I was OK…

OK – that’s enough for now…

According to the NZ Herald, Trade Me are banning all iPhone auctions as they can’t be sure that the sellers actually have the goods in their possession. Seems a bit drastic but I guess when you command the majority share of the market, you can afford to lose a few auctions here or there.

Upcoming auction sites like SellMeFree, are grabbing the opportunity to increase their profile. SellMeFree’s CEO, Josh Bortwick said: "There are a lot of people wanting to use this technology, and we don’t really think that it’s fair to make New Zealanders wait for another year or two before they can."

To be sure that SellMeFree sellers do actually have possession of the iPhones, they are contacting each seller on a case-by-case basis. Not Trade Me though – spokesman Dean Winter says that it’s easier to place a blanket ban on the iPhones: "It is very difficult, if we know that a product is not available in New Zealand, to know if they’re legitimate it or not."

This is a classic example of a company becoming all ‘corporate‘ and losing touch with it’s customers. I’ll certainly be using some of the competing auction sites from now on.

Well done to the Wellington based Ponoko team for getting good reviews at the huge TechCrunch40 conference over in San Francisco. They have a unique idea and I think they will do well. Especially when you look at all the other companies on display – very few good ideas, most of them are just new and improved search or video companies.

I checked out the site a long time ago and found it a bit daunting at the time, but they’ve got heaps of tutorials and great ideas available now, and I can definitely think of some cool things to make.

Unfortunately, due to the huge spike in traffic they’re having, you can’t register or login to the site, but you can still browse through the pages.

Also, I can’t find any easy way to open the ".eps" files that are provided as templates. I tried Inkscape but that can only export to ".eps", and the Adobe Illustrator trial I downloaded didn’t work – it kept asking me for a full version key, and I’m not going to splash out over $1000 just to experiment…

Google have just released a couple of important updates to the Google Reader application. The biggest update is the search feature that has now been added. It seems strange that it’s taken them this long to add it, but it’s here now and it works well. This also gives you the ability to search in your shared items which is great for keeping track of posts that you’ve shared.

The other feature, which I haven’t yet heard anyone else mention yet, is that they have updated the number that displays your unread items to a larger number. Previously if you had more than 100 unread items, it would just say “100+” whereas now it gives you the exact figure. I don’t know how high the new number goes, perhaps if it gets to over a thousand it will say “1000+”.

Just a few interesting links from this morning’s news reading…

From Boing Boing:

LA Times religious reporter loses faith

My favorite news magazine, The Week, reprinted this fascinating personal account written the LA Times’ former religious correspondent.

Nine years ago, William Lobdell was assigned to cover religion for the LA Times. He was a born-again Christian when he got the gig. In 2001 he started studying to convert to his wife’s religion, Catholicism. That was when the trouble began for Lobdell.

Another from Boing Boing:

Boing Boing reader’s steampunk cloque

Bill sez, “I built this steampunk clock after seeing other steampunk items on BoingBoing and just got inspired to make my own. This one is built on an empty vintage clock case from around 1910, and the parts came from local radio repair shops, a bicycle repair shop, Home Depot, and various car wreck sites that I pass on my daily walk. There’s also a part (see if you can spot it) from an old Model T car. Besides the funky steampunk look, the best thing about this is that it tells the actual time, a good thing, since I’m an obsessive punctuality freak.”

From Mark Pilgrim:

Elephants

Why? Because the internet needs a page with 648 elephants. You may not have realized that, but now that I say it, you’re thinking, “Of course! Where are my elephants?” I got your elephants right here.

Update: fixed link.

Just looking through my site stats and I noticed that someone had found my blog through a Google search for “Blue Oyster Bar moustache“

The page they found was my Movember page with photos from last years attempts. Simon had commented that it reminded him of the Blue Oyster Bar (from Police Academy!) Here’s the photo for your amusement: