It gets more tragic, though, with the self-perpetuating greed and selfishness inherent in such things. After-Christmas sales, mid-summer sales, pre-Christmas sales ... To the point were the acquisition of cheap tat is more important than, well, anything else.
I am referring, of course, to Black Friday. It's a US thing, so I've never partaken of it, but it has come about because somebody noticed that the Friday after Thanksgiving was the day that many stores started to turn their yearly profit.
It seems, though, that now it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Such is the fervour over the concept of Black Friday that it's become a national event all of its own. It's now guaranteed to always been the day of greatest sales, because people have bought into it and intentionally make it so. With terrible consequences.
Consider this article about this year's Black Friday tragedy. Such was the unbridled greed of the shopping public that, even when a man got trampled to death in a Walmart store, the shoppers refused to acknowledge it. They demanded to be allowed to continue shopping. They carried on trampling on the people who were trying to get the man to safety. They even trampled on each other in the mad rush to get the bargains.
What's the point of my little whinge? Not sure. I'm just sick of people. They're stupid, they're greedy, they're selfish and never is it more obvious than in the 4th quarter of the year. Halloween? Christmas? New Year? Whatever they used to celebrate is forgotten. All they do now is perpetuate the blight that is selfish materialism. Humbug to the lot of 'em.
]]>The problem here is quite obvious. Apple have used the name of the album as the only unique identifier when sorting and selecting tracks. It would be quite easy for the iPod to properly just select the tracks to play depending on which album I select. Simply using the artist name and album name together would give the desired result in this case.
This problem is quite widespread, usually on websites that are backed by badly designed relational databases. The selection of keys seems to be something of a black art these days, especially when interacting with user data. To continue the theme of ID3 tags, consider last.fm. The artist entry for Pain contains the details of no less than 5 bands all with the same name. All five bands' albums are listed, and details for all five bands are included there on the wiki page.
This situation could be easily avoided by using aritificial keys and allowing duplicate band names. It's obvious that just the name of the band is insufficient to uniquely identify it, and other information just makes it more complex. Just use an arbitrary integer in the database and voila, you have a unique record. When it comes to user searching, use contextual information to let the end user choose which specific record they want. Genre, top selling album, location ... all these things make record identification easier on the end user without having to make your database any more complex.
Now, last.fm has a slightly different problem to the iPod, although it is based in a similar flaw. When users upload (scrobble) data to last.fm, it relies on the data from the user being useful. If it's misspelled, missing, or just plain wrong, then the scrobbler will have a problem. So how would the scrobbler properly link the data the user sends to the record if duplicates are allowed?
If the user data is correct, then you have a composite key consisting of three elements: the artist, the album and the track name. Consider two tracks that last.fm have listed under the artist "Pain":
They don't sound much like the same band. Selecting the band record from the database by using "Pain" as the only criteria will bring back too many records. But by using the album and track name along with the artist name, finding the actual record and linking them all together is be very simple. Just join the artist, album and track tables in the query, and use the composite key. Sorted. Of course, if the user data isn't correct you may have a problem, but then there are other techniques unrelated to the database schema that can be used to try to figure it out.
So if it's so easy, why is the problem so often found "out there" on the big wide web? I really don't know. Many people seem to be terrified of relational database design, refusing to even try to learn it because it's "not something they know about", and instead seem to come up with hideous messes of schemata that just don't seem to work. This is being made worse with the latest programming memes, in which some people are suggesting that structured data is inherently evil and everybody should just use big, unstructed blobs with search engines. My arguments against that may make a future blog post ...
And as for last.fm's persistent problem with user data, I can't help thinking ... if you want a tool like that to work for you, surely the least you can do is properly tag your music? I know I'm more obsessive than most about that sort of thing, but is it really last.fm's fault if it can't figure out that the track you're playing has a misspelled artist name and no album name at all? When a system has to start trying to guess what you really meant, it becomes immediately less accurate. Help it out and don't submit crap if you want decent results!
]]>Not so any more. Instead they just jump straight to their conclusion. Apparently I am being reported to their "Enforcement Division" for investigation unless I allow them into my home to perform a search and inspection. Breach of privacy much?
I very much doubt they will achieve anything if I don't contact them. They have no rights to enter my home, nor do they have any leg to stand on if I simply don't buy a license. I don't own a television or any other equipment capable of receiving broadcast television. So I'm going to keep the letter and keep schtum.
It just gets on my nerves that such practice is allowed to go on. They're basically saying "pay us money or we're sending the boys round", even though I owe them nothing. Surely the burden of proof is on them that I have been "illegally" receiving television, rather than on me to prove that I haven't. And I'm certainly not letting anyone into my place to have a poke around.
So as I say, I'm going to do nothing and see what happens. It could be amusing to see just how much of this impotent aggression they can pile on before they finally give up. If anything exciting does happen, I'm sure I'll write about it. I don't expect much to come of it though.
]]>Unfortunately for NeoOffice, that's just about to change. I've been playing with a release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac, and it's great. Fully native interface, and everything seems to work. No niggly little keybinding bugs. No scrolling issues. No strangely drawn dialog boxes. It "Just Works".
I'm not really sure where that leaves NeoOffice now, though. While I've appreciated their work, I can't really see any reason to still use it now that the "real" OOo works natively. And seeing as porting OOo 2.x to a native Aqua interface was the prime motivation of NeoOffice, I can't really see what they can bring to the table.
At the moment, the NeoOffice site claims that presentations run faster than OOo 3.0. I'm sure there are other Mac integration efforts they can use to make sure they stay a little way ahead of the OpenOffice.org curve, but for the basic functionality they seem to have been left somewhat high and dry by this latest OOo release.
Time will tell. In the meantime, you have to donate cash to get access to NeoOffice 3, while you can get the OOo release candidate for free. They don't expect to have a free release 'til January 2009. I think I'll just stick with OOo. Sorry, NeoOffice guys.
]]>I got a 500GB Iomega Home NAS device a while ago simply because it was cheap. I needed a bit of networked storage so I could share things no matter which of my machines I was using, and it seemed to fit the bill.
Unfortunately, it sucks. Royally. Mangled SMB packets, random destruction of the domain, all manner of badness. Then I happened across a nugget of information. The firmware it ships with (K104.W11) is just rubbish, and the latest update (K108.W15) is even worse. However, an older firmware (K102.W11) is much, much more stable. Go figure.
Officially you can't get the older firmware any more. But unofficially, you can if you know where to look. So if you're having trouble with your Iomega Home NAS being crap, try reflashing it with this:
http://download.iomega.com/english/storcenter_home_fimrware-k102w11.bin
The misspelling of "fimrware" is deliberate, just so you don't think to try and correct the link. Anyway, it might make all your woes go away. It does say that it makes it incompatible with OS X leopard, but I'm not sure how that's the case if it's just using standard SMB. I think it's the automagical device discovery tool that's not Leopard aware, but the OS already comes with the findsmb command which does exactly the same thing. Suck it and see. It's dead easy to reflash with the latest firmware if necessary anyway.
]]>I got a 500GB Iomega Home NAS device a while ago simply because it was cheap. I needed a bit of networked storage so I could share things no matter which of my machines I was using, and it seemed to fit the bill.
Unfortunately, it sucks. Royally. Mangled SMB packets, random destruction of the domain, all manner of badness. Then I happened across a nugget of information. The firmware it ships with (K104.W11) is just rubbish, and the latest update (K108.W15) is even worse. However, an older firmware (K102.W11) is much, much more stable. Go figure.
Officially you can't get the older firmware any more. But unofficially, you can if you know where to look. So if you're having trouble with your Iomega Home NAS being crap, try reflashing it with this:
http://download.iomega.com/english/storcenter_home_fimrware-k102w11.bin
The misspelling of "fimrware" is deliberate, just so you don't think to try and correct the link. Anyway, it might make all your woes go away. It does say that it makes it incompatible with OS X leopard, but I'm not sure how that's the case if it's just using standard SMB. I think it's the automagical device discovery tool that's not Leopard aware, but the OS already comes with the findsmb command which does exactly the same thing. Suck it and see. It's dead easy to reflash with the latest firmware if necessary anyway.
]]>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.
]]>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.
For some reason, this CD was in the metal section of Zavvi. I don't know why, because it's clearly alternative rock, but there you go. It's not a terrible album, but isn't at all catchy. If you just want decent indie rock you can throw on and ignore, it's great. Hasn't grabbed me enough to listen to it as a favourite.
Bizarrely, I thought the lead vocalist was female until I read the band's Wikipedia page. This could be because of the similarity of vocals (I think, anyway) with Cerys Matthews of Catatonia. I still sometimes forget it's a bloke. That disturbs me enough to negatively impact my opinion. Unfortunate.
Can we hear a "meh"? Of course we can. Modest Mouse. Heard good things, and the album completely failed to live up to them. Ah well, can't all be winners. I guess that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the album, but there's nothing fundamentally right with it either. It merely exists.
Sometimes you buy an album and it's alright. Sometimes it's rubbish. Sometimes, it's actually good. And then you get the ones where you know the all the lyrics after a single day. This is one of the latter type. Good, bass heavy indie rock as it should be. And there's a picture of a gasometer on the album art, for good measure. All for the win.
This is actually a sort of compilation album of B-sides and rarities that The Killers have released between the last and upcoming studio albums. It has such delights as Tranquilize, performed with Lou Reed, and a cover of Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet. It's generally a good mix of stuff. I think this one'll be good for surviving the boredom of work quite nicely. And at 18 tracks long, it's worth the fiver I paid for it.
Well, what to say? Good, solid rock album with a nice mix of tracks, strong beats, good lyrics and listenable enough to have a listen on a whim. I didn't really know what Kasabian were before buying this, but I'm glad I did. In fact, I've since bought their self-titled debut album too.
During the Zavvi jumble sale, I found many copies of this album. I figured that if they had that many left over, it couldn't be very good, but bought it anyway for comedy value. How wrong was. How very, very wrong. This members of this death/thrash metal band were only 18 when they released this album, and it sometimes shows, but the overall effect is spectacular. The guitar solos alone are worth the album price. The production quality is occassionally a bit crunchy, and the young lead singer's death growls are sometimes a bit strained, but none of it takes away from the whole. Top stuff.
Not every random buy can be a good one, unfortunately. Randomness has a habit of throwing in a bad apple every so often, and after hearing such good things about Trivium from reviews and such I have to say I was disappointed. It seems to be the "wall of noise" type of metal, in which any sort of rhythm, melody, words or even variation are hard to pick out. Rubbish.
So what have I learned? Well, it seems that, with few exceptions, I like what I buy on these random little outings. One rubbish, one meh, four good and two excellent is alright for a random sample. I think I might just pop out and get another Editors album next ...
]]>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.
]]>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.
So onto the phone itself. The first thing you notice is the widgets screen, which is the primary focus of the website blurb. You can customise your touchscreen! Why you'd want to, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader, but there it is. Now, I'm a minimalist so the only widget I have constantly open is the clock. If a clock were included in the main screen, I wouldn't use any. However, if you regularly switch profiles or use the phone as a full time MP3 player, you would do well to open up the relevent widget and place it suitably.
The widget interface is friendly enough, with the vibrate motor giving a satisfying 'boing' feel to the opening and closing widget bar. Dragging widgets about can get a little fiddly for fine tuning position (I'm a bit obsessive about things lining up). Still, it certainly wows people, and I love the way message alerts appear with a little pop so they're nice and noticable.
There are a number of buttons around the device to manipulate hardware functions. The most used will be the one on the top, which is the Hold switch. It works really well, being slightly recessed to prevent accidental pressing but responds quickly when you need it. Locking and unlocking the phone is simplicity itself, which may not sound like much, but after fighting with 'menu-*' all this time it's a breath of fresh air.
Down one side are the volume buttons. These allow you to set both sound volume and vibrate strength on the widget screen, call volume on calls, and a myriad other things. It also doubles up as zoom, scroll, and all sorts depending on context. At the other side is the familiar camera button. This is a 2 stage press affair for autofocus/shutter release. It works better than any other camera release button on a phone I've ever used, and I've had a K800i. Really nice, solid feel.
Finally, there are the front panel buttons. The left and right buttons are just the call/hangup buttons (the hangup doubling as a power button). The right hand button is also the global cancel button, taking you back a whole step when pressed, right up to the widget screen. Finally, the shortcut button in the middle has a variety of uses. When on the widget screen, it allows you to pop up five 'shortcut' items, including messaging, the main menu, web browser and camera. This really doesn't give any advantage of just going to the menu the normal way because they are all top level items anyway, so I don't really understand that one.
The other thing it does is unlock the touchscreen for in-call features. This includes popping up a keypad for DTMF tones, putting calls on hold, switching between calls and looking up items in the phonebook. Not sure why they didn't just use the existing hold button for that, either, really. Still, a big button right in the middle is hard to miss. Probably just a usability thing.
The touchscreen UI tries to emulate the functional usability of the iPhone by providing big, friendly areas for fat fingered phone users like me. It's a nice, solid interface that doesn't suffer the spurious pressing and fannying about of previous Samsung touch-sensitive devices. The reassuring confirmation of a slight buzz from the haptic response system also makes it a more usable and all-round friendly UI.
Most of the UI works incredibly well. Scrolling is handled well, things don't tend to trigger at the wrong time. The ability to navigate by icons or words is simple as the menus and controls of all the various applications are well laid out an sane.
Except for anything in the settings menu. I don't know what happened there, but they've really gone to pot. The only reliable way to scroll through the settings is to use the volume rocker as a scroll button. Click and drag scrolling just doesn't work reliably on those screens. Maybe a firmware update later will fix that, because the same scrolling works perfectly on the folder or message browsing view.
The virtual keypad is a work of genius. There is no virtual QWERTY keypad like the iPhone, but there is a context sensitive T9 compatible phone keypad that provides just the right controls for the situation. Again, the haptic response makes entering text that much easier, and the buttons are large and reliable. I make no more or less typos on this device than on any phone with a real keypad.
What is there to say about call handling? Well, it handles calls. The sound quality is excellent, the reliability is good. It all works, really. It is a little bit of a pain to have to unlock the screen and press the keypad button to get to the DTMF tones when phoning call centres, but it works well and doesn't mess about.
One thing I did note is that multiple-call handling is excellent. Having handled 3 simultaneous calls on it, I never once had the usual panic of not being sure exactly which call is active, or which any particular control would operate on. This is helped by the screen being able to show three or four call details, and allowing you to simply press your finger on the call to be manipulated.
The blurb claims that this phone delivers up to 7.2Mb/s on a suitable 3G connection. I don't know about that, but I got 386Kb/s out of it at home which means it's actually suitable as a short-term broadband replacement should my connection fail. It seems pretty reliable, being able to get a connection of some sort (be it 3G or GPRS) just about anywhere. It's failed in a couple of places where other people were also having trouble, so I didn't worry about it.
As a side note on data handling, I set up my Nokia 770 and my Macbook to use it as a modem. They both work just fine using it as a high-speed dialup modem. Top stuff.
The messaging on this phone is adequate. Works well, no problems. As good as any other phone, really. I have no complaints at all about its SMS and MMS abilities, and the UI is as friendly and sane as the rest of the phone. Good stuff.
On email, though, the phone really shines. There are more options than you can shake a stick at, including selecting how much of each message to get, what to do with it after getting, and full SSL/TLS support. Also, and this is a joy, it allows you to delete messages from the phone, and optionally delete them from the server as well. This means I can just get my phone to grab messages marked as 'New', and then delete them from the device without having them disappear from the server.
I'll admit to not having used the camera very much. I don't really 'get' camera phones. I have a perfectly good little Canon I can carry about when a tiny camera is required. Anyway, this thing has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash (ugh!) so I had a quick go.
The controls are well laid out, anyway. It's easy to get to whatever option you want. The button, as I mentioned, is solid and responsive. The autofocus also seems to work really quite well even in low light. My only complaint is that the picture quality is a little too soft. There's obviously too much noise reduction going on, even in well lit photographs. Also, I couldn't find any macro mode, but have successfully focussed down to about 3" so it might not be needed.
This phone is as expandable as any 'ordinary' (as opposed to 'smart') device. It can take microSD, although the Orange branded device comes with an 8GB card to start with. It can also accept standard Java midlets. This is been well thought out, as ordinary programs integrate well with this phone even though it has no keypad. This is achieved by a virtual keypad that appears at the bottom of the current Java application. By default it displays a set of cursor keys, a select button and two 'soft' buttons. Press another button, and a simplified alphanumeric keypad appears.
One particular thing that impressed me was integration with Opera Mini (the only Java app I install on all my devices). I loaded it up, loaded a page using the built in controls, and absent mindedly tried to use my finger to drag the scroll bar. And it worked! Impressive stuff. I assume that Opera have put support for touchscreen devices into Opera mini. However it's done, it's impressive to have it work so intuitively.
As I've already said, I recommend this phone to just about everyone. If you want a phone that has all the features of a modern mobile, with the look and feel of an iPhone, get this. It might take a little getting used to if you've never used Samsung phone before (it's really very different to the Nokia and Sony Ericsson standards).
]]>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!
]]>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!
]]>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.
]]>