Apple Staircase to Budapest

Posted by stephen on Friday, 31st March, 2006 @ 18:16

I've always thought and often commented, much to the annoyance of any shopper accompanying me, that the staircase at the Apple Store in Regent Street has a very 'Apple' feel to it. Of course the aesthetics of it are incredible, and it's an engineering marvel, so I've just read. But no one seems to mention the wonderful resonance and springiness of them, the user experience being my favourite part! Anyway, turns out Apple had them specially built (of course), pushing the technologies involved forward and patenting them in the process. So they truly are Apple stairs! And they've even built spiral versions in a couple of the Japanese stores.

I'm off to Budapest tomorrow for the week with Richard, and I can't wait. For some reason I've got this feeling I'm really going to love the place. There's previously been an unencrypted wireless access point in range of the flat, so we're hoping it's still there. So expect lots of excited posting next week or none at all because I'm having too much fun.

Mucho servaro pokero

Posted by stephen on Monday, 27th March, 2006 @ 18:21

I've been up to my eyeballs in servers lately. Last week was mostly spent inside an SSH session or three to the servers in Scotland Richard had been kind enough to install for me. And incredibly we got all the services of a RegenTV system up and running in about 4 days, albeit in a slightly unrefined state right now (no DHCP and no LDAP directory). Still, pretty impressive we thought.

My little local machine's been reconfigured with a few experimental services. The instant browser VNC service I've talked about before got a nice little improvement and can now poke the pre-launched session with a URL given when the STB requests the page, so we can put links to all kinds of things in the interface now and not have to have a separate bank of browser sessions available for each one.

Unfortunately the Amino VNC client we've got doesn't support VNC displays higher than 99, so I'm going to have to improve things further and make it keep a closer eye on sessions and reallocate the old displays when they're no longer used.

A little further repurposing of the same system provides a Solitaire (plus loads more card games) session to the set top box to keep our clients' customers amused for hours. As instant display of games is less important I can probably refine this to run any game when requested and only spawn the VNC session on request. It'll also need to be enhanced to keep an eye on sessions getting over 99.

My next mission from Richard... get the set top box talking. A quick fiddle with festival's handy text2wave command and a pipe to lame gives me a nice little MP3 of my computer having a chat with me (would you like to play a game??). A quick run through of the Amino documentation and with no real effort on my part the STB is talking to me too! Primary objective complete. Now to refine things a little so any chat's we've already had get cached and don't need to be generated from scratch every time.

But before I get involved with too much with making my little toys 'enterprise class', robust and scalable, etc, which presumably means rewriting everything in C or Java instead of Python, introducing lots of holes and making it all a little less portable, there's more server tweaking to be performed.

This morning the server I share with Cal has been acting like a real dog when it comes to serving web pages. The server itself isn't particularly loaded though. It happens quite a lot to my site and Richard's as we're both running Plone and proxying in Apache 1.3 isn't too efficient for doing that. But this time it was every site, even the entirely static ones.

So a little bit of fiddling and I managed to pin it down to something non-specific running on one of Cal's many sites. It finally gave me the push I needed to migrate to Apache 2. Though as there's so many sites that seems like an awful lot of work, and the main reason for doing it is to make the Plone sites work better.

I decided the easiest thing to do was order a new IP address, tie Apache 1.3 to the original address and install Apache 2 and bind it to the new address, then just copy my configs over and repoint the DNS. Well, that worked pretty well, and not long after the old server started behaving again, strangely enough.

The rest of the day so far has been spent installing a mobile demo server that runs as many of the RegenTV services as possible and can have a set top box hooked into it to make showing of the service nice and easy. I love Ubuntu.

Microsoft Don't Get It: An Example

Posted by stephen on Friday, 24th March, 2006 @ 17:50

I've seen taking a look at some of the screenshots for the latest build of Vista over here. It's certainly very colourful. It looks potentially rather complicated and laden down with too many options, text and buttons. But I'll reserve judgement until I see the real thing and of course I'm a well and truly biased Mac lover, so have come to expect fewer options and sensible assumptions.

One particular screenshot really highlighted a philosophical difference to the approaches of Apple and Microsoft. This is a window used to add more 'gadgets' to your 'sidebar' (an analogue of the non-original Apple widget and dashboard features)...

My real beef with this is why is there a big, not actually but almost, copyright message in the second largest typeface on this Window consuming an inordinate amount of space along with the Windows logo? Why is it here? We know we're using Windows, we're adding a gadget to our sidebar, do we need to know Microsoft Corporation built it and has been doing so since 1985 right here?

I tried to look for an Apple equivalent, and all I can find is the various About dialogues, where you expect the program/system to tell you about itself.

And the copyright information? It's almost self consciously hidden, in lighter, smaller font at the bottom of the dialogue.

Freaky (not mousemats)

Posted by stephen on Thursday, 23rd March, 2006 @ 20:27

What an incredibly small world we live in. Canada is the second largest country in the world (10 million square kilometres, though under 33 million people). I know two Canadians. I met them entirely independently of each other, many months apart, and they've never spoken or met. Both of these fellows now live in the UK, about 40 miles apart. And they have one degree of separation. Julian's Dad was Aaron's geography teacher. How completely bizarre.

The CIA world fact book indicates that the UK has almost double the population squished into 1/40th the land mass. Blimey. Guess it doesn't get quite so cold here though. Now I'm stuck in the world fact book reading all about the UK and comparing it to other countries, it can almost compete with Wikipedia for time sucked away. See, I research my blog posts.

Also freaky, yet unrelated to mouse mats this week is Fat Pie. A couple of weeks ago I linked to Spoilsbury Toast Boy -2, I think I referred to it as bizarre, yet totally compelling. I think the same goes for the rest of the stuff on this guy's site. A particular favourite is The Child That Smelt Funny which has an unusually political message (compared to the rest of the site anyway).

Ich liebe es

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 22nd March, 2006 @ 23:41

I'm really letting this whole blogging thing slip this month, this being the third post and we're in the third week of the month. Must do better next month.

I've been pretty busy if that's a good excuse. Went into London on Friday and Richard showed me where all the wires go and which knobs to turn and buttons to press to operate two set top boxes, a DV deck and a laptop on the projector for Monday's demo day. I was pleased to see my special cable was still working. For some reason the Amino STB doesn't output a ground with it's video so I took a short length of speaker cable, removed the sheath and wrapped it around one end of a double-phono back-to-back connector so it could pick up the ground from the audio line. Unfortunately I couldn't find any sellotape, so a sticky label had to suffice. Fortunately found a little tape later to make it more permanent.

So yes, our IPTV system (at least the demonstration version) is held together with sticky tape. Oh, and we needed some assistance to make it more reliable, so of course we called on our friends at Cisco to see how we could leverage the power of the network, now. And they helpfully provided one of their manuals for us to place on top of the connection when it's in use to keep the image nice and clear. Which is about as much use as has ever been made of that particular tome.

Friday night was spent out in Bedford with Ally, and actually appreciating that the town centre isn't too bad a place on a Friday night. Many different kinds of beer at The Wellington made a good start till 11pm, then to some Australian bar that wasn't massively frequented, which suited us, and that closed at 1am. Stevie need snacks, but the Caribbean food stall that had set itself up over the street didn't look too appealing. Assuming Subway would be shut we wandering into Tesco Value Subway, or rather The Sandwich, for something that was actually similar in price to the real thing, yet similar in quality to the expectation created by the value brand.

Up early (for me) on Monday morning and down to Stratford to perform my very first demo day (because Richard was gallivanting about Scotland), which I thought went pretty well considering various factors. First off, VoD wasn't working, after lots of playing about and with a little help from George it was up and running, then as soon as I got to it in the demo, it wasn't feeling quite so athletic. I was also more nervous than I was expecting and rushed a little bit and lost my thread once or twice. But all together I thought it was a pretty convincing performance and nothing a bit of practice couldn't fix. The main thing (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) is that I managed to speak up enough so everyone could hear and didn't mumble too much. A definite improvement on my former self.

Monday afternoon/early evening involved looking at and hearing about some really cool technology that I'm really excited about the potential of, but don't think I should be talking about here for now.

And since then I've been remotely assisting Richard in getting a RegenTV head end working in our project partner's office up in Scotland. It's been going pretty well really. Some pretty modern SATA hardware meant that the stock Debian Sarge CD wasn't able to do it's job, so I got Richard to install Ubuntu instead which behaved much better, despite his instance on calling it Umbungo Linux.

Talking of Linux, I'm sure you've often seen a crashed out Windows display in public places, well how about this one...

And along with the new company and all that's been happening there, and being single again, etc, stuff I haven't written about here, but that everyone knows now anyway, I made a little self-image change too...

It's got past the prickly, irritating stage, which is good. I think I like it, so it might be permanent. Saw a pic from a couple of weeks before when I was clean shaven and in need of a hair cut. It's pretty bloomin' different!

Back we go

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 15th March, 2006 @ 01:00

Popular opinion from various directions seems to suggest that my hours spent playing with Photoshop and CSS to design the new version of the site were somewhat misspent and that perhaps my time would be better served building IPTV systems.

So not one to ignore such observations I've abandoned the new design and gone back to Plone. Which I guess is fine as the main aim of this site if for me to blog rather than try and fail to make pretty things.

Luckily another project I'm working on at the moment is letting me continue to develop my Django skills and I have to say I find myself liking it increasingly as I continue to use it. It's just so much nicer than PHP! I think there's definite potential for some fast developed IPTV apps once I get my grubby mits on a Kreatel set top box.

Anyway, sorry I've been quiet lately, I'll try and get back to boring you all more regularly.

Busy busy

Posted by stephen on Monday, 06th March, 2006 @ 23:12

It's been a while since I last posted anything, in fact haven't said a word here in March, so I thought I'd best break the silence.

The past week has been a really busy and productive one. There's some pretty major changes happening with me right now that I'll fill you in on soon. Here's a quick preview though, the back of my new business card.....

Next, a few videos...

• I finally understand Quantum Duality or whatever it's called. Well understand it in a very simplistic way anyway.
• Totally bizarre, yet strangely compelling
• Brokeback Mountain in 30 seconds, with bunnies. Pretty much on par with the original in my opinion, if not better
• Microsoft's iPod packaging rationale has probably made it's way around the web a million times, but I thought I'd post it anyway. And I've stuck a copy on my server as the one at YouTube disappeared
• The Simpsons title sequence, but a little different. Hosting this one too until I can find the original source to credit

Finally, a rant. It pisses me off that the US Apple Store does refurbs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Meanwhile the UK store only does them on Wednesdays from 10am. At least they finally do a one year warranty on refurbs, it used to be 90 days.