nerd central

The app I wrote about a few posts ago has finally become available. I was quite excited as I checked the app store on leaving the office.

As I sat down on Mum and Dad’s couch this evening, I opened it, punched in my details, and was getting quite excited about how amazingly simple, elegant and quick it was.

I typed in my blog address, and the admin username and password. And voila, that was all that needed to be done for a self-hosting WordPress blog. Amazing. Once open, there was a list of my latest 30 posts, and I could just click on one to read it, and then simply tapping on the text brought up the keyboard for me to edit.

All was going brilliantly… it was very impressive indeed! However, as soon as I tried to save any edits, the app just crashed. Sad. It does auto-save all your progress though, which adds to the impressiveness… but that is fairly useless when I can’t actually save anything that I type.

I’m sure an update will arrive very soon.

It was well worth me getting up at 3am this morning.

Yay for the iPhone 3G!

My first few thoughts were that if you’re a Windows Mobile handset manufacturer, then you should be seriously scared (especially considering the Blackberry Bold is just around the corner too). This iPhone is everything a PDA should be, and has seriously pushed the envelope of mobile data technology. It’s more than I ever expected I think.

Second thought was that Apple seem to have gone out hard against RIM and Blackberry! (Which may very well be why there’s no Telstra link on Apple Australia’s iPhone site.) Not just through their “Enterprise” features… but through MobileMe. MobileMe goes way over and above what Blackberry have ever been able to provide to a non-email-server user.

I was sitting at my computer quite in awe at MobileMe. I’ve never been a huge fan of .Mac, never needed it really. But all of a sudden, this has broken through to be something extremely amazing; something that’s always been limted to corporates. It hasn’t been available to consumers at this extent. All of a sudden, everyone has dual sync emails, calendar, contacts… not just Blackberry corporates who have a $6000 server next to their Exchange server.

So yes, damn straight I want an iPhone 3G.

It doesn’t look like Telstra’s on board; which for mine, is sad. They have the best 3G coverage - no matter how you feel about them, that’s pretty undisputed. But, my guess is that they feel it would entrench far too much on Blackberry (who seem to be getting very close to Telstra with this new HSDPA Blackberry only just around the corner), and very possibly, the lack of Bigpond/Telstra branding on the handset may be against Sol’s directive for mobile handsets. That’s just a huge guess on my part though.

So Voda or Optus? My choice will be down to price - if one of them brings out an unlimited data plan, I’ll be there queuing up at the store with the rest of ‘em.

Having quite a bit of fun this morning. I have awoken after a few hours sleep to watch the Keynote presentation from Apple’s WWDC. I’m very much hoping my early rise is worth it and that I get to see a 3G iPhone :)

I’m just doing the reading of updates on AppleGazette while I listen to the new Offspring album that is streaming. I do indeed love this new Offspring album. Definitely very Consiracy/Americana. Very cool indeed. I’m hoping it’ll still be up on their site when I get to work later on so I can listen to it a bit more.

After the presentation, I will try and head back to sleep for a few hours before work, I think.

edit: More Offspring thoughts… There’s piano on an Offspring track! Perhaps for the first time ever? And another interesting point is that 4 out of the 12 tracks are 4 minutes+. 

Glorious Sunday - two of my favourite things: Whitlams music, and wireless internet.

Yesterday arvo I finally got myself a new wireless router after B’s Airport base station, which had served the House of Bach for many years, headed to its new home at Morling. I headed to DSE Powerhouse, where I’d seen a D-Link wireless router with USB print server for $147 - pretty decent price. Took it to the counter, along with a $20 cable that I grabbed as well, and somehow managed to walk outta there paying $150 for the both and an extra year’s warranty on the router! Thank you check-out people! [They were supposed to discount the router's extended warranty to make both items $150... but instead discounted my entire order - score!]

So this morning, I had a bit of fun setting that up. It was fairly quick and easy… but the internet wouldn’t work for some reason. After much stuffing around, I finally decided to just power-cycle our cable modem… and voila! I guess the cable modem was just a bit upset about being connected to a new MAC address without it being reset.

Anyway… enough of the nerd-talk. Time for the more important bit: music.

The Whitlams released an album this morning; an album that came free with the Sunday Telegraph. It was a live album of their concert they played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra back in September 2007. At the time, I was flawed by the evening and the music that filled my head. Tim Freedman describes it best on the cardboard sleeve that the CD came in this morning:

You sit in the middle of a symphony orchestra for two hours and you come out feeling you’ve been hit over the head with a velvet hammer. It’s not even that loud up there, but it’s lush and heady and very powerful.

The CD is just brilliantly mixed. The sound that I heard that evening was phenomenal (it was the first thing I’d seen at the Opera House) - I couldn’t believe how amazing the sound was for a live performance. But then hearing the recorded product was just incredible as well. I can’t believe how well they captured that atmosphere and how they managed to mix 100 odd musicians onto one CD and make it sound amazing!

The bonus bit was one track on the CD, and two tracks for download from Warner’s website, that have been lifted from Tim Freedman’s solo album that is apparently due out in 2009 - Piano / Vocal. Very, very cool indeed. They are all just previous Whitlams’ songs, but re-recorded with pretty much just Tim and his piano. I’ve always very much loved Tim’s playing and his lyrics - so hearing his songs very simple and “bare-bones” as such, will be very, very cool. Looking forward to that album.

Blackberry is so entrenched in corporate culture it may think it’s untouchable, but Microsoft always wants to be your best friend… right before it stabs you in the back.

Microsoft bashing is so fun.

Full article about Blackberry working with Microsoft a bit is here.

Well, if there’s no wireless in the house, I’ll just make-do: using my data card from work :)

Feeling very, very tired this evening. Felt pretty tired and quite a bit bleh most of today. I headed home from work about 3 this arvo, and after doing a couple of things around the house, I had a pretty solid hour-long nap - which is actually pretty strange for me. Not the nap bit, but the length. And my glands are a bit swollen too. I’m desperately hoping it’s just a virus or something and that it’ll go away soon. It would suck muchly if it’s gladular fever back for round two (round one was in late 2004).

Anyway, I have been hanging in my room tonight rather than bible studying, and I’m just about to climb into bed and sleep. Nice and early.

I have been enjoying using Blackberry’s latest OS 4.5. This is definitely RIM’s worst kept secret - they’re usually very good at keeping software and information from being leaked, right up there with Apple. But this update is floating around the internet everywhere and is still yet to have a formal release date announced. So even though it’s a little bit buggy, it’s just brilliant and I love it. Much, much nicer email reading and composing, and it actually sends in HTML format, even though I seemingly can’t view it on my device. There’s quite a few more themes in the update too - Verizon Wireless’s theme is the nicest for me at the moment.

Anyway, now that the nerdiness is out of my system, I’m heading to sleep.

I have a Sony Ericsson K850i. I can’t send MMS messages - I keep getting “communication error”. I want to be able to send MMS messages so I can use Twitpic! Sending MMS messages is also included in my cap, whereas data charges aren’t.

Given B’s frustration back in the day, I wondered if it was a Sony Ericsson thing. I dug through his posts and found the page he’d written for his Sony Ericsson K610i and Optus, and had a play around making some changes and trying and trying.

Nada.

Nothing works. Still keep getting error after error after error. I’ve checked the settings in the back-of-house system for my mobile number, and everything’s fine there! I tell you, it really is the ultimate frustration. This is my job; it’s what I love being good at! And I can’t make it work for myself!!

But after what seemed like a two week holiday, posting to my photo Blogspot directly from my phone has randomly started working again… so I think I’ll just stick with that. Twitpic woulda been fun too.

My goodness, the last 72 hours have been crazy for iPhone Australia rumours. In particular, which carrier(s) will be ranging the phone.

From my personal point of view, I love it all. Can’t wait to see what happens in the next 6 weeks! I’m quite excited that the rumour that began about a month ago (3G iPhone announced in 1st week June, launched in Australia on all carriers in last week of June) seems to still be the latest rumour. A while ago, that dream of an HSDPA iPhone on both 850/2100mHz and not carrier locked seemed crazy. But as June draws closer, and that rumour hasn’t been quashed or proved wrong, it gets more exciting…

But from a work point of view, it’s incredibly frustrating. All the non-mobiles people and customers expect us to have all the answers. And that’s frustrating because Telstra haven’t released anything at all. And very importantly, neither have Apple. I guess people who don’t normally follow all the Apple releases know that until Apple actually say something, nothing is in concrete. There’s just been article after article after article on what “people” and “sources” have said.

This is the latest article that everyone’s talking about in the office today - apparently Telstra are ranging the iPhone. It’s a great wonder who ZDNet’s source is… cos I reckon out of Telstra’s 10,000 odd employees, you can probably count the number of people on your hand who are actually in the know on what’s happening between us and Apple. And I’m most definitely not one of them.

Everyone knows that Vodafone announced that they would be selling it. However, I love how very vague this press release is - no date, no mention of what version, certainly no mention of excusivity… just that they would be selling it. And I find it really interesting that Voda actually annouced they’d be selling it before Apple announced it in those countries - isn’t that very, very out of the ordinary for all the other country releases?

Oh and it’s “understood” Optus will sell it too.

But again, I know better than to trust anything about Apple until Apple tell me themselves :)

Wondering what’s doing tonight. I’m thinking pizza and bludging. Debbie is off dancing the night away in the city at a hens’ night, and two of three of my housemates have already ventured out for the evening.

Had a second visit to Rouse Hill shops this arvo - with Debbie this time. Afterwards, as we just hung out at her place, she napped while I played with yet another new fun mobile phone toy: HTC Touch Dual 850. It’s a pretty sweet phone - quite small for a PDA, and it’s slide out semi-qwerty keyboard. But the coolest bit is it’s nicer touch-screen interface than other Windows Mobile devices - it means you can actually use your fingers to do things and not rely on a stylus. It’s certainly no iPhone, but it’s going to be fun using it next week at work :)

I don’t know if it’s just been me, but I feel like SMS spam messages have increased 10 fold in the last fortnight. SMS spam messages being any SMS message that isn’t personal, and that wasn’t requested - that is, annoying advertising stuff, through to crazy ringtone SMS messages that charge you $1 just to receive them when you haven’t subscribed to anything.

I have felt like the amount of time I spend dealing with this issue with my customers has more than tripled in the last two weeks. And it’s quite frightening, because there is really very little that can be done to stop this, and it’s only going to increase.

Customers will come and say that they’re getting all these SMS messages that they didn’t subscribe to. No problems - I apply a barring on their service that stops all premium messages, both sending and receiving. Problem is that if you ever want to vote for Dancing With The Stars, or SMS a radio station, you can’t. And that’s all fine and dandy for the SMS messages that charge you to receive them… but for just general crap SMS messages that are just normal, and not the subscription ringtone stuff… there’s no way to stop these without completely turning off the ability to receive SMS message.

And it’s even more frustrating when I have to explain to customers that aside from applying barrings, there’s nothing I can do - we don’t control companies that use bulk SMS for unsolicited advertising, and don’t have any authority over them. It’s up to them to report unsolicited SMS things to the ACMA. But unfortunately, as the provider of their mobile, they feel it’s our fault. 

Oh, how I loathe Bigpond Music! Not only do I have to dodge the DRM so I can play any songs I buy on my Mac… I needed 2 separate upgrades to the evil and disgusting Windows Media Player!

Allow me to ellaborate: The Cat Empire put a couple of cool tracks up on Bigpond Music (a cover of Dumb Things and a live version of So Many Nights with the Australian Youth Orchestra). So sitting here on my work computer, I thought I’d download them, then burn them to a CD before re-ripping them on my Mac.

But when I bought them and went to download them… I needed an update to Windows Media Player. *sigh* Fine. Did that. 15 minutes later, after closing everything and having to restart my computer, I log back into Bigpond Music and hope to download my music. Negatory. Now you need to update the security of Windows Media Player 11. Why didn’t that happen when I just installed it 5 minutes ago?! So I did that. And now I’ve just downloaded the files… supposedly. Except it didn’t save them to my desktop like I asked. After 5 minutes of searching Windows, I eventually found them buried in My Documents. Phfft.

Stupid stupid Bigpond Music! At least the songs are awesome.

edit: Well. I thought they were exclusive to Bigpond Music. Or so I was told. I really should’ve checked iTunes first. Oh boy, that’s annoying.

Relax time now. Work is done for the day and I am heading to Mum & Dad’s to start cooking some dinner - Spaghetti Bolognaise. Awesome.

Crap… forgot some garlic bread.

There we go… that title ought to attract a few extra referrals from Google over the next couple of days. [edit: seemingly, it will also attract a mass of spam comments within hours of posting.]

Just read a very interesting article on smh about free wireless around Sydney. A group of nerds are seemingly frustrated at the government’s lack of speed at setting up free wireless in Sydney, and so have started their own development of a network. They’re using devices made by a company called Meraki. In essence, these devices are repeaters that connect to each other, but not all devices need to be connected to the internet.

The network that they’re creating is only in its very early days - as a group, they purchased all the Meraki devices (only about $AU50 each) in November, and so are setting and mapping them now.

It’s such an awesome idea… and it’s great to think that in just a couple of months these people have started creating a network around Sydney that is visible. I think there’s huge potential for free wireless internet to be pretty huge in the CBD by even the end of the year. It would be great to just be able to be somewhere with a PDA and just be able to log on to check email quickly without having to dial into your telco’s mobile internet session and pay a lot. Sweet.

Think I might do some war-walking around the CBD this arvo to see if I can find parts of the network…

I had a bit of frustrated moment this evening as we tried to plan tomorrow’s travels into Macquarie Centre by car… because the campsite manager preferred us to use our cars rather than pay for a bus. In the end, it got so incredibly difficult to organise the logistics of it, and at 11pm, I threw my hands up in the air and said, “we’ll sort it tomorrow!” and came here to my room to sit and breathe… :)

Anyway, it’s a long story that I needn’t bore you with. Instead, I think it would be better for me to bore you with a good handful of paragraphs on music and mobile phones - my two loves, really.

So… I just came across this article from smh - its headline was Musical mobiles take aim at iPod. Now, almost any article in passing that mentions mobile phones in the title is guaranteed to draw me to read it. However, mobiles replacing MP3 players (the iPod will be my example because it’s what I use - but feel free to subsitute for your MP3 player of choice) has always been something I’m so-so about. Certainly at the moment, I’m very sure that mobile phones are not even close to the standard that most iPodphiles would accept as a replacement for their beloved device.

My first qualm is that, to my knowledge, no mobile phone currently available in Australia has a 3.5mm headphone jack as a standard feature of the phone. I would love to be corrected though. Some manufactures (Nokia, as an example) ship adapters for their phones to plug headphones in. But that means you have to make sure you have that with you all the time - not really handy, personal, or easy. And the second major point is much more subjective… but the “media player” software in the majority of handsets is just ugly, hard to use, and slow.

A third and fourth point that just crossed my mind too: thirdly, most of the online music purchasing in this country, nay, worldwide, goes on via iTunes Music Store. Currently, I believe that only one handset can play iTMS music, and that handset is the iPhone. Yes, a lot of iTMS music is now DRM free, but not all of it. And again, as a user, a good chunk of my music is bought from iTMS and I don’t want to leave that behind at my desk and not be able to load it up onto my phone.

Fourth point is the pretty shocking amount of memory that mobile phones come with - most are 1 or 2GB. Nokia pushed the boundaries with an 8GB phone. Cool… for a top-of-the-range, $1000+ phone, that’s on par with the $300 and bottom-of-the-range iPod, and only 156GB short of the top-of-the-range, $800 iPod. Hmmm… something’s a miss there if they want to try and get me to ditch my iPod.

So at this point, and mainly because of the above three points, no mobile phone - even Sony Ericsson’s much talked about and hyped Walkman series of phones - have even remotely enticed me to think about getting rid of my iPod. And I’m all for convergence - I work for a telecommunications company!

At this point I think it’s important to note that I’m only taking into account mobile phones that are currently available in Australia. There are actually a lot of fantastic handsets out there that beat my points above and would potentially change my mind. But Australia is just a little bit smaller than America, and so we get these wonderfully feature-packed handsets a lot later than the rest of the world - if ever. And the bottom line is that, yes, they may be available to purchase from a tech store, or from eBay, but the fact is that the majority of mobile phone handset purchasers do not pay $800 upfront for their phone - they pay $0 for their phone and are quite happy to sit on a 24mth contract with their provider of choice. So that also means that the phones need to not only be available in Australia, but also available on subsidised phone plans. And that range of handsets is what I am taking into account.

After saying all that, there are some exciting things that come out of the smh article that started me writing and thinking about all this:

• Motorola are again trying to break into that music phone market with something that looks pretty cool - it’s the pictured one. I do like the “Song ID” feature he points out on the phone… but sorry Ian, Sony Ericsson have already been doing that for some time, and it’s actually on my current phone. The scrolly-wheel type feature looks sweet, and there’s a possibility that this Moto handset could sync with iTunes, as its last music-type handset did.
• Nokia are where the excitement lies though, with their music store that you buy a yearly subscription to, and then can get as much music as you like. However, I can’t help being a little worried about how many record companies will actually be available on such a service in Australia - look how long it took iTunes to get up and running, and then we’re still paying by the track.

Bottom line is that things look great - but if you live in America. Sorry, I can’t help but be just a little cynical in summary about this article. Yes, these are services and phones that are talked about being released in Australia this year - but the questions in my mind remain:

• Will there be a 3.5mm headphone jack on the device?
• How much memory will come built into the phone?
• What is the extent of music that will be available in Nokia’s music store?
• Will they play iTunes’ music? (silly question, but it’s an important point for me).

Now that I have used almost all of my laptop battery writing that, and I’m now feeling quite tired and relaxed from this evening’s frustration… I think i shall go to sleep :)

Finally today I got my present :)

Sony Ericsson K850i
Muchly excited! What a brilliant phone this is… and it’s good to be back using a Sony Ericsson again - they are just such simple and wonderful phones. The menu system, graphics and general feel of the phone are all just so easy. The big bonus with this phone (and probably the biggest drawcard for me) is the 5MP camera. And not only does it have the huge megapixel amount, but it also packs a pretty sensational lens as well. I’ve taken a few pics tonight and am liking the quality. I guess I’ll find out more as time goes by.

I’d thought recently about getting a digital camera finally, but then thought that I’d only really want to take “happy-snaps”, and so spending a few hundred dollars on one, and then forgetting to take it everywhere seemed stupid. Thus the K850i - if the pics are half as good as I’m expecting, then I will really have no need for a digital camera. Having a SE phone again means that photo blogging returns! You see, all recent SE phones have a “blog this” function that publishes straight to Blogger, and bypasses the whole MMS thing that you usually have to do to photoblog via Blogger (and that isn’t available from Australian numbers). And hopefully my photo blogging will be a little more frequent than when it finished up 12 months ago and I switched across to a Motorola.

A nicety that is more for looks than anything, is the phone’s very cool “buttons” along the bottom of the screen. They’re actually not physical buttons, but rather, the bottom section of the screen is a touch surface. So they’ve saved room and made a bigger screen by losing some buttons, and then overlapping those buttons with the bottom bit of the screen. Cool.

I reckon the only downside of the phone is its size. But I’m not at all worried considering the features of it, and if you have a camera of that quality inside, you can’t expect it to be battling for title of the world’s smallest phone.