Sometimes, when I'm bimbling about in town of a lunchtime, I feel like getting something new to listen to. Seeing as I usually forget my "to buy" list, it's not unheard of me to buy something completely random from the HMV or Zavvi sale sections. That means that these albums rarely cost more than a fiver, and can be easily ebayed if they turn out to be rubbish.

I thought I'd take stock of what I've bought and see if the not-entirely-random selection process I employ works. Here are a few that I've bought over the last year with tiny, little baby reviews just to say if they're pap or not.

So I've spent a couple of weeks with my shiny new toy, the Samsumg F480 Tocco, so it's time to write a little review of it. I have to say that I'm very pleased with it, and would gladly recommend it to, well, anyone. The touchscreen interface might be a little too alien for some, but for anyone reasonably mobile-savvy it should present no issues at all.

Of course, it's going to end up getting compared to the iPhone a lot. It looks just like it to the untrained eye. It's actually slightly smaller than the iPhone, and the iPhone users who've seen it have commented that it's a much better size. Oh, and it comes with an optional faux-leather flip-front which is very effective and looks pretty good, too.

Those of you who remember the bad old days will know that getting freebies out of mobile companies was a worthwhile, though arduous task. Free upgrades, price reductions and other goodies could be had if you were able to withstand the tiring process of pretending to want a PAC to bugger off to pastures new.

More recently, the phone companies changed their tactic. You could phone up and request a PAC, but rather than offer you goodies to stick around, they'd just give you one. You then had a choice; let it expire, or use it to try and find a decent deal in a harsh marketplace.

Thankfully, yesterday Orange proved that the tides is changing once again. They called me, out of the blue, and said that my contract expires in 2 months. They offered me, right there and then, a free upgrade to any handset I chose and a substantially better value tariff. So I did. The fact is, I didn't actually want to leave Orange this time because they are, in my opinion, the best operator at the moment. However, they didn't know that, and I'm more than happy to let them ply me with free stuff to keep my custom.

So taking advantage of this generosity, I chose the new Samsung F480 Tocco, their new iPhone-alike with more features than you can shake a stick at. I was a bit dubious, a fan as I am of simplistic devices that do exactly what I need and no more. The X820 has been an absolute dream in that respect, being both completely reliable and having a very good feature set. So here I am branching out toward the world of shiny things without keypads.

Another reason I stick with Orange: they deliver promptly, and when they say they will. Unlike, say, O2, or T-Mobile. My new shiny device arrived promptly the morning after the night before, right on my desk where I could play nicely with it. I mean, where I could get on with my work and leave it until lunchtime ... *ahem* ...

So initial impressions, then. Excellent. I was worried about build quality, but no problems there. I was worried about touch screen sensitivity, and no problems there. I was worried about typing directly on to a touch screen, but again, no problems at all. The new "haptic response" system (i.e. a little buzz when it detects a click) means you get definite tactile feedback from the touch screen, which is both novel, and an amazing boost to usability.

Feature-wise I'm not very demanding of a phone, but I know what I like and I know what I don't. The T9 system is good, the touchscreen is just responsive enough, and the menus are logically laid out. The only complaint I can find so far is that the scrolling is upside down. The iPhone gets it right; move your finger down, and the screen scrolls down. The Tocco goes the other way and acts as if you're dragging a scroll bar, and it doesn't always realise that you're not clicking on the items you're dragging over. Still, it works well enough after a couple of minutes.

I'll use the phone for a bit and probably stick up a more detailed field report later. Until then, hooray for toys!

Tuesday 17th June was supposed to be a big day in Firefox history. The long awaited version 3 of the popular browser was to be released to record breaking numbers of downloads. The world would be in awe of the majesty of ... wait, maybe that's going a bit far.

Anyway, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't download it. I tried, but I failed. There were two things that stopped me in the end. First, the stability of the servers. All the various domains returned 'Http/1.1 Service unavailable' errors in the evening when I actually tried to get it. That didn't help.

The main thing that stopped me, though, was that it was released at 10am on the 17th. 10am PDT that is. California time. Those of us with a vague grasp of world geography will know that California is on the trailing edge of the world timezones. Indeed, by the time 10am PDT rolled around, it was already Wednesday the 18th at the international date line. Being sat there looking at the Firefox 2 link on the 17th didn't do wonders for the world at large's perception of the Mozilla organisation's ability to, well, organise.

In my mind, there were two possible things they could have done to make it not suck like it did. Either release it at midnight GMT (or UTC as people now like to refer to it), making sure that the two extreme timezones have at least 12 hours on the 17th where it is available. This would satisfy the world record download attempt's rules of it only being one day. The other way would be to launch at midnight on the 16th on the international date line, meaning it would require 48 hours before the whole world had seen midnight on the 17th.

Either way, the Firefox site gave no indication of intentions, fell over repeatedly and generally left those further east of California wondering what the hell was going on. Remember, Silicon Valley people, that most of the world sees the dawn long before you do. Without giving us more information than "the 17th" we'll all just get bored and wander off to the pub. Which, in fact, I did.


It was a busy week last week. I ended up going to two gigs on consecutive nights in backwater little townlets to see some really quite surprising bands.

First up was Blue Öyster Cult in the tiny village of Holmfirth, made famous by being the setting to Last of the Summer Wine. The venue was certainly peculiar, being as it was a half renovated play house with scaffold and steel fencing supporting half the structure and a peculiar sloping floor. Still, it was a decent enough place and the sound was fine to my ear, so I was ready for some rock.

Given that BÖC released their first album 7 years before I was born, I think they can be referred to as "old school" quite legitimately, and the show reflects this. As Ian (whose idea it was to go to this gig) pointed out, when the band started out a live show actually meant more than just playing a selection of songs from the album and going home. And it shows. 10 or 20 minute versions of classics like "Then Came The Last Days Of May", "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and "Godzilla", complete with duelling guitars, massive 4 guitar riff fests, drum solos and alternating vocalists. Top stuff.

So after all that, what could follow it? Well, a Friday night in Stocksbridge, steel centre of Sheffield, to see Mostly Autumn on the weekend prior to the release of their new album, Glass Shadows.

After finding possibly the single most distant venue in Sheffield, and standing around for an hour drinking a well kept and surprisingly cheap Farmer's Blonde from Bradfield Brewery, the band took to the stage. They played a good selection of classics and new material, which was great for me. Hearing songs from a new album live before you've even taken the album out of the shrink wrap makes them all the more special, and owning the album 3 days before general release makes it even more so.

Overall, the new album is a bit less proggy, a bit less folky, but definitely Mostly Autumnal. It's a solid release that surpasses the sometimes half-baked Heartful Of Sky, with none of the songs particularly disappointing (although one or two bring out puzzled expressions and exclamations of "What the... ?!", but in a good way) Still, overall a win, and a great couple of gigs. More like that, please.

I suppose I should come clean about something. I recently installed the Team Foundation Server PowerTools and have been using them successfully for a while. They have one or two very handy features that make TFS suck less. Get them direct from the TFS PowerTools page at MSDN.

Online Mode

Using the tfpt.exe command line, the 'online' mode will search your repository for changed files, added files and removed files and check out, add or remove the files as necessary. It also has a simple preview mode. This means that, with only one extra step, you can fix all the missing icons or forgotten checkouts or whatever. It would be nice not to have to do this step at all, but at least it's not entirely manual now.

Annotation

The PowerTools add a new feature to the Source Control Explorer: Annotation! Now you can actually see, line by line, who changed what, why and when. Jolly good.

Recursive Diff

Probably the biggest, most important change is the ability to diff entire directory trees. This will show you a nice window with all the missing files, all the changes, all the things that have not been checked out but should have, and everything else all in one lovely window. This alone is worth installing the PowerTools for.

Unchanged File Undo

A problem that arises from the 'check out required' nature of TFS is that sometimes Visual Studio checks things out automatically that are then never edited. When you check in, the files haven't changed so are not included in the changeset. This means you have a bunch of unchanged files marked as checked out. Very annoying.

Enter the tfpt.exe command line tool, with its 'uu' command. I assume that 'uu' stands for 'undo unchanged' or something. It basically performs an 'undo' on any checked out files that haven't actually changed since being checked out.

One of the banes of my current working life is the heaping mound of crud known as Team Foundation Server. I know I've ranted about it before, and I'm sure I'll rant again. Such is the heinous evil that is TFS.

This time, I'm going to list 4 things that TFS does (or doesn't) that means it's completely unsuited to modern development practice. I'll be comparing the functionality with that of Subversion, currently a very popular open source VCS that I like a great deal.

So, on with the rant ...

My Macbook PSU finally gave up after 19 months of undeniably hard wear. The cable frayed enough near the little magsafe connector to render it completely useless. Ah well, c'est la vie. I've just been to the Apple store and picked up another one. £54.12 if you please.

This got me thinking. One of the criticisms levelled at Apple is that you can "only" use Apple parts in Macs, and these parts are expensive. This is absolutely true, aside from the falsehoods (e.g. 3rd party RAM and hard disks). But the fact is, you actually can buy Apple parts for it. I just popped into my local shopping centre and walked out with a new laptop PSU as part of my normal shopping. I can't think of any other laptop brand that has the same level of availability of parts or accessories.

Of course, if your Toshiba laptop PSU explodes for some reason (manufacturing faults occur in all brands, Apple included. No fanboys here, ta) you could buy some 3rd party "universal" adapter from your local electronics retailer. These will probably work as well as 3rd party mobile phone chargers; adequately for a while but with half the working lifespan of an original. Or, of course, you could call the Toshiba spares line and buy an original, but that won't be cheap and you'll have to wait for it.

I don't have any particular deep or philosophical point to make here. It's just that somebody actually said, when my laptop PSU died, that I'd "be stuck buying an expensive Apple replacement." And yes, I did. But it has a full year's warranty and it took 30 minutes to drive over and pick one up. I like that.

So I've been a Telewest/Blueyonder/Virgin Media customer for some years now. I've gone up the service chart from 56K modems to 10Mbps internet connections. I've been a customer through all the buy-outs and shenanigans. And only now am I pissed off. Why?

Apparently I'm getting a "free" upgrade to 10Mbps from 4Mbps by the end of this week. So is everybody else on 4Mbps. Whoop-de-doo, eh? Whoop-de-doo ....

... because as we all know, nothing is free. The price for this extra bandwidth? Traffic management.

Traffic management when done right can help a network cope with all sorts of stuff. However, in this instance, it's just a synonym for "punishment". I'm presently being "traffic managed" because I had the cheek, the shear audacity to download 800MB in a five hour period. Damn my eyes.

"But wait a minute," I hear you ask, "surely on a 4Mbps connection you could theoretically grab 9GB in a five hour period?" And you'd be absolutely right. In fact, 800MB in five hours is the equivalent of a 384Kbps connection. So much for 10Mb, eh?

And to add insult to injury, the free support line is gone. Now it's an 0906 number that costs 10p just to call it, and 25p a minute after that. And wouldn't you know it, you just can't hurry them up. I've never known support personnel speak so slowly. They must get extra commission for sounding like they wouldn't know a computer if I hit them in the face with one.

My only problem now is that they're still one of the best of a particularly bad bunch. I mourn the UK ISP industry, I really do.

I've just finished rewriting my MegaHAL/Irssi script to be a lot cleaner and a lot easier to configure. You can get it from the MegaHAL/Irssi page.

New features include:

• Configurable using standard Irssi /set commands instead of hacking the script
• Supports changing nick without hacking the script
• Generally requires less hacking of the script ...

So, erm, yes. Enjoy!