K.D. Lang 'Live in London' on Blu-Ray

Let's start with the technical aspects of this recording.

This was recorded by the BBC for high definition broadcast and you can tell. It is for recordings like this that I spent so much time and money getting my home theatre just right. The audio is a DTS Master Audio 16 bit/48khz 5.1 mix. The  quality is superb, the balance across all 5 channels is excellent and the sound stage is massive. There is a slight echo in the vocal that perfectly suits the look of the room.

The picture is incredibly clear high definition captured in a well lit studio with great camera work throughout. The BBC should be proud of the job they did on this Blu-Ray.

K.D. Lang's performance in this small venue is remarkable, stellar, superb. She is enjoying herself here, with her usual band at the time backed by an orchestra courtesy of the BBC. There is not a single song that does not show off her remarkable voice and stage presence. The BBC concert Orchestra add a lushn, full feel to most of the tracks and seem to fade into the background in others.

Lang walks the stage, at times her eyes closed as she reaches for that perfect pitch and tone at others her smile is so wide that it threatens to split her face. Here is a true vocal talent, a true performer doing what she loves.

Even if you don't love K.D. Lang you may well enjoy this just for the quality. I can imagine high end home theatre stores owning a copy just for demonstration purposes.

Tio and Due for the iPhone

At the moment I'm taking a lot of medication and performing a lot of tasks while recovering from a serious chest infection. A couple of iPhone apps have been incredibly useful.

The first is 'Due'. This tiny app allows you to quickly turn on a timer or a set a reminder. I use the timers constantly. After gargling to wash out my mouth and throat after taking either my Ventolin or Symbicort I've been advised to not eat or drink for ten minutes - a few seconds with 'Due' and I have a timer. I also have to wait half an hour after taking my twice a day throat lozenge. Another quick timer. I don't use the Reminder function often, but it is easy to use when I do. It will even sync across your iPhone and iPad if you want.

The second app is 'tio'. This tiny app just allows you to log an event by entering a time stamp into an even log. The free version allows you three different events, the 99 cent version allows nine. I use it to log taking medicine and pain killers so I can quickly figure out if it's OK to take some more. I also use it to log each cigarette I smoke for two reasons. One, when I feel a craving coming on I can check the event log and tell myself "No, it's only been an hour since your last one." It also allows me to count the number I smoke each day, making it easier to ration and cut back. The app will email you the event log. Well worth the dollar.

Productivity on the iPad

Recently I found myself in hospital and once again my iPad was a godsend. Yes, it allowed me to watch some TV and movies and read a book or two but it also allowed me some pretty good productivity.

So what tools do I need? What tools are useful and what tools are nice little frills?

The Essentials

The two essentials were Dropbox and Evernote. I have a huge Dropbox folder and an Evernote database full of useful files and information. (So the Specialist wants to know exactly what medication I take, when was my last hospital admission, what’s my GP’s address and how have my peak flows been for the past month? Guess where that information’s stored? I even had a copy of my last discharge summary.)

I’m a coding junkie, I just can’t help myself. Never a week goes by when I don’t find some excuse to write something, an AppleScript, a shell script or a bit of Python. I’ve even been known to play around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to write little web apps. So bored in hospital was the perfect time to play with those. How? I’ve found a great little text editor that deserves a big wrap. Textastic is almost perfect as an iPad editor. It will sync files between itself and Dropbox or an FTP site and even comes with a built in WebDAV server so you can easily get your files to and fro. It even remembers the path to the file and will sync it back with a single touch. To help with your coding you get syntax colouring for more than eighty languages, including all I ever use with the exception of Logo (nothing seems to offer syntax highlighting for Logo). You get next line auto-indent and adjustable tab stops. Even more useful when you don’t have your Bluetooth keyboard along you can set it to add an extra row of keys along the top of the iPad built-in keyboard that include quotes, brackets, parentheses and a tab key. The feature list goes on further.

I could use Textastic for writing my prose and journalling, it does support Markdown syntax  and offer a soft wrap but Pages is not that expensive and is, of course a fully featured word processor so I’ve got a copy of that.

The other thing I like to do is diagram. Well, like might not be the right word, I do find myself doing it a lot and doing it by hand looks atrocious so I do it on the computer. On my Mac I have Eazydraw, a fairly well featured piece of software. On the iPad I use TouchPad, which cost me less than ten dollars and has more features than you can poke a stick at. It has layers, libraries, figures, bezier curves, freehand tools, alignment tools and more. It is  more than I’ll ever need - I couldn’t recommend it more. I actually find myself doing diagrams on the iPad rather than my Mac as shifting things with my finger seems easier than the mouse.

The Useful

The first of these is TextExpander Touch. Cheaper than the Mac version, which I also own, it allows for quick entry of text snippets in supported applications or in its own little note pad. It is supported by Textastic and Plain Text at least. From its little notepad you can Send By Email or send the note to Twitterific. I don’t use  it a lot on the iPad since the snippets don’t work everywhere as they do on the Mac but it is still handy.

Then we get to lists. It doesn’t matter if it is a task list or just an item list, I like to have them. I also like them as an outline so that items can have sub-items. For this I have CarbonFin Outliner - this excellent outliner even syncs to a website so that you can edit the outlines on your computer. It supports outline items as checkboxes so that you can make a to do list and if an item has a number of children the dot turns into a circle filled in according to the amount of the tasks completed.

On the “keeping up with the world” front there are the three essentials. Reeder, my favourite RSS reader, the new Zite news application and Instapaper for all those long form articles I come across while browsing and want to get back to.

I like the interface for Reeder, it is clean and simple, and the ability to sync with my Google Reader account is nice so that’s my RSS reader of choice.

Zite is amazing. A news aggregator that seems to find a good selection of interesting articles every time I open it. When it was first installed it asked to have a look at my twitter feed and Google Reader settings. from that it made some intelligent guesses as to the categories of news i might be interested in. I then added a few others. Since then I have made a point of marking the articles I liked and now it does a good job of finding things I want to read.

Instapaper is another great idea. As  I browse the incoming news stream from both Zite and Reeder I can quickly mark the longer articles for later reading. Instapaper also looks good, often making the articles easier to read.

The Others

Then I need a calculator. A spreadsheet would be overkill but a calculator with a tape is fine for almost everything. since I like to have hex and binary on my calculator you just can’t go past P2. Not that dear and it has every function you might ever want and a nice list of constants.

I also use iSSH, a nice SSH terminal client. Not everyone needs a terminal client but if you do want one then this is inexpensive and fully featured.

I would also like to recommend Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. I carry mine around in the box it came in and it doesn’t weigh much or take much room. When travelling it can go in your check-in bag easily. I find it can even slip into a corner of my briefcase.

All those apps taken together turn my iPad into an incredibly useful and productive platform. What are the apps that allow you to be productive on your iPad? Drop me a note and tell me.

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Still loving the iPad

I just had another short spell in hospital and my love for the iPad just deepened. I'm writing a longer post on the apps I found useful there but the short form is that it made life a lot more pleasant.

Apart from being lighter than a laptop it is useful to have a device that can be recharged from the same gadget as your phone. It also has better games for hospital than any laptop - including a Windows laptop. You really want light entertainment and the ability to keep in touch with people. My iPad connected via 3G was just the thing.

In love with my ScanSnap 1300

Recently I purchased a ScanSnap 1300 and I have to tell you how much I love the little device.

It sits on the edge of my desk occupying less room than a sheet of A4 paper. It uses a neat little application called ScanSnap Manager that runs all the time (Activity Monitor tells me it uses less than 102Mb of RAM.) I insert up to about 8 sheets of A4 (it depends on thickness) or anything smaller such as a cash register receipt or a business card and press the little blue glowing button on the right hand side and away it goes. Since it is a duplex scanner it will do both sides of a sheet in one pass and doesn't care with a one sided sheet if you have it down or facing. If you want to be a perfectionist it thinks that the face down side is before the face up side.

ScanSnap Manager then turns it into a PDF with searchable, selectable text. I then have it set to save the scan in a folder called "Scans" in my Dropbox and send it to Evernote as well (you can change that to any software that will cope with being told to open a PDF.). By default it gives the scan a name derived from the date and time but I changed the preference and I just get a name "Scan" followed by a three digit reference. One funny thing, if you rename the files then it loses it's count; the software obviously looks in the folder to see if there is a "Scan001.pdf" and so on. You can also set it to send to email, send to Excel  or send to print among others. You can also set it to ask you each time, though if you do that you seem to not be able to specify a non-standard application such as Evernote.

The entire process is so easy that I now scan each piece of mail and every receipt I get. I also scan all those bits you get with a new piece of tech; the warranty, the quickstart guide and so on.

Oh, it's compatible with that other popular operating system, too.

Highly recommended. I can't remember how much it cost me but it was worth every cent.

Bynkii on a post XServe world

So we are now into February and as a result you can no longer buy an XServe from Apple.

All us Server addicts had a momentary pang of hope when Active told us they were announcing a new product - after all one of those guys designed the first XServe. They gave good news for theXSan people - a replacement to an XServe as a controller, but no Mac OS on it.

Is this going to be a problem?

John C. Welch (known as bynkii on his blog.) sums it up for me perfectly here.

To be truthful, if the Mini had two NICs then I'd never have bought an XServe. The last time I bought two I'd have preferred buying eight Mini Servers and a really smart switch - the problem would have been convincing the powers that be to let the little beasts into their data room. This may well be the middle ground for Apple. Give us a slightly better Mini.

Why I could not recommend Acrobat Removals

Dear Larry,

I thought you might like to know why I find myself not only unable to
recommend your firm, Acrobat Removals, but to positively discourage
anyone from using your services.

My complaints start on the day your company packed up and moved the
contents of my house and garage.

If you remember you visited my house and gave me a quote for packing
part of the house and moving my goods to Sydney. I then, on Monday,
gave you a chance to revise your quote as I was unable to pack part of
the house that I said I would. So you had two chances to have a look
at the amount of goods to that had to be moved. On Monday you also
told me that the men would be able to complete the packing by 1 PM to
1:30 PM.

My problems started when I realised on Tuesday at around 12 that there
was no chance of your men completing by 1:30. This was unfortunate
since I had to leave shortly before 1 to ensure I could have my cat to
the cattery in Sydney before 4PM, leaving my partner Sonia to
supervise the completion of packing and loading.

Imagine how I felt when at around 2PM I received a phone call from an
upset and stressed partner who told me that your men had said they
woiuld not be able to fit everything on the truck and what of the
unloaded goods were a priority. I got this phone call while I was
driving through the Central Coast on the F3 in heavy traffic and rain
squalls.

Then when you arrived at the loading I thought there might be some light.

Imagine how my unhappiness increased when it was almost 4 PM when
Sonia told me that your men had finished but despite your assurance at
around 2:30 PM that they had not been able to load everything and she
was having to take some things to her mothers before she could at
last start the almost three hour drive to our hotel. It was at this
stage that your men asked me to change the arrival time at my new
Sydney home from the agreed and contracted time of 8:30 AM to 6:30 or
7 AM. You may understand my reluctance to shift it, though I did agree
to half an hour earlier.

My mood dropped even further when my tired and emotional partner
arrived at the hotel and broke down into tears after the stressful
afternoon she had coping with the unprofessional manner of your staff.

I thought it was impossible but I became even more unhappy when I
discovered that the six wheel trolley I bought a few weeks ago to make
it easier to re-organise before moving and after moving was one of the
things that had not been packed onto your truck.

Now my problems continue. Your men unloaded the truck.

While the packing and loading was going on I had stressed that it was
important that in Sydney I would need to be able to have the TV, the
Foxtel box, home theatre and their wiring by 12 as the Foxtel man was
arriving between 12 and 5. While the TvV and the boxes were unloaded
early it was after 11 and no sign of the wiring, which I had
personally disconnected, packed and placed in a bag on top of the two
boxes. It took me losing my temper before a 15 minute search unearthed
them.

When they were about 4/3 through unloading they started saying they
would not have enough room to put all the boxes. I suggested they
unload my dining room table and sideboard and put boxes on top of
them. I was told they were too far back and when I suggested they put
boxes on my verandah until they could be unloaded one of your men said
he couldn't do that as he didn't like putting things down and picking
them up again. The young man is lucky I didn't say what I thought of
his reluctance and where he could put it.

It was around this time that I heard the other man make two rude
comments to my partner. Not a wise thing to do. Once again I bit my
tongue.

Now we come to my discoveries as I started to unpack last night and
today. One of your packers had carefully removed and collected into
one spot all the shelf pins from my four adjustable bookshelves. I am yet to find
them.

While the unloading was going on I said that my new garage downstairs
was to hold everything from the garage in Broadmeadow and everything
marked storage. I now have at least five boxes upstairs that should be
downstairs. While one of the men was unloading I saw him with a box
that contains my snare drum. I said, "that box you've got with 'Tama'
written on the side needs to go in my study." It is now half way back
in my garage.

I now have at least six boxes that came from my kitchen that are
marked with "Kitchen - bits and pieces" and one marked "Kitchen -
miscellaneous" with no more information than that such as what part of
the kitchen they came from or a clue to their possible contents. So
that I could have something to eat off I thought I would unpack a box
that was labelled "Kitchen - plates, bowls and glasses", it contained
no bowls and only four glasses, the rest was plates. One of the two
boxes marked "Kitchen - pantry" contained a great deal of food and an
open bottle of ant poison (which wasn't in the pantry in Newcastle
thrown into the top. Saucepans and their lids have been thrown into
boxes in any manner and without and wrapping or padding. All I can say
to that is that I haven't found the copper bottomed large boiler my
mother paid $250 for when she gave it to me for the my last birthday
before she died but heaven help you if there is so much as a scratch
or a ding on it - I expect to pass it along to my daughter just as my
father passed on to me the high quality, copper bottom saucepans now
almost forty years old your employees threw around with abandon.
Fortunately, apart from a loose handle I fixed with a screwdriver, the
ones I have found so far are no worse off. I guess your employees are
lucky my father bought quality cookware.

So that is why I cannot recommend your company and why I will not be
using them to move the goods I have in storage in Newcastle to Sydney.

I should also advise you that a copy of this letter is being posted to
my weblog and on my Facebook page. You may if you wish reply but I am
afraid I find myself totally unable to listen to any excuses or
argument - if you can come up with a solution to the problems I now
find myself in that means I can avoid an extra trip back to Newcastle,
an hour or two shifting boxes from upstairs to down, hours attempting
to organize my new kitchen without a clue and returns to me the $50 I
spent today on a new trolley (not as good as the one sitting back in
Newcastle) and new shelf pins so I could do some organising and
unpacking then I am willing to listen.

Yours,

Tony Williams

UPDATE

I sent this last week and have yet to receive any reply.

I have since discovered further examples of damage due to haste and unprofessional packing. Despite being assured that pictures would be wrapped I've found many unwrapped glass covere...d photos shoved into boxes. The person who disassembled an Elfa draw frame bent two out of six cross bars. A roll of vintage Apple posters was shoved down so hard into a box it crumpled all of them and tore two - the box was then closed down on them so hard the other end was crumpled - the list goes on.

Feel free to spread my letter as far and wide as possible.

Goodbye to XServe

So Apple has decided to discontinue the XServe. Not a surprising move, I'm sure it doesn't sell particularly well and it has not been updated in quite a while. If you compare it to other server offerings it also lacks serious Lights Out Management and Out Of Band management.

The upsetting thing about Apple's move is not that it is discontinuing the product but that it has done it without giving a large number of enterprises any real alternative or any admission that enterprises need one.

Apple's suggestion is that instead of an XServe you can use either a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro, indeed they are now offering a Mac Pro/OS X Server bundle as they do for the Mac Mini.

In the small business market a Mac Mini makes an excellent server. If, however you want something beyond a few users and simple services then you can quickly find yourself needing more processing speed and much more I/O. Providing backup services for a dozen Macs can quickly swamp a Mini.

At this point, yes, a Mac Pro is a good choice. You can install a Fibre Channel card and hang off a RAID for storage and you have two Ethernet ports.

The problem sets in for organisations that go larger than this. Even a large High School or a small University can find itself handling a thousand Macintosh computers. These are the people that start thinking about two big problems that Apple have totally ignored now they have dumped the XServe. Rack space and reliability.

To put a Mac Pro into a server rack will take 12U space, you can fit two next to each other, but that's still 6U per box, compared to 1U for an XServe. Even the XServe is competing with blade systems that allow 16 high performance blades in a 10U blade enclosure.

Then we get to reliability. The XServe has three major advantages over the Mac Pro. The first is the option of dual power supplies, it might not seem like much but it allows you to factor out both a power train failure by attaching to two different power busses and also a failure of the supply itself. The second is that drives and power supplies are hot swappable and easily removed and replaced. Compare that to the many steps required to replace a power supply in a Mac Pro. The third is lights out management. Once again it might not seem important but if I can hit a virtual reset button from my desk when something locks up rather than rely on another member of staff to walk up to the server room, unlock it and hit the button on the front of the Mac Pro it can save vital hours. It also makes it so much easier to get minor changes past a Change Management Committee when it only involves one staff member to make the changes and roll back if a problem occurs.

Now none of these problems are insurmountable for Apple. There are several possible ways to fix the large hole now left for medium to large enterprises who want a well supported Mac infrastructure.

The easiest for Apple would be a simple change to the End User License Agreement for OS X Server and allow it to be virtualized on non-Apple hardware. Parallels already supports bare metal virtualization on Apple hardware, supplying a ROM image so that this could be done on other hardware is easy for Apple and I'm sure Parallels and VMWare would be happy to get it running on a wide variety of hardware.

The second possible way is to do what they did with RAID. They annointed the Promise VTrak E-Class RAID as the 'official' RAID replacing their own. Apple could organise a deal with someone that already makes a range of servers and grant them a license to sell then bundled with OS X Server. IBM, for example, would make an excellent partner.

The third is that some time quite soon they will announce a new product that does the job of the old XServe but better.

There is one final solution, one that doesn't come from Apple. Since all the services on Mac OS X Server are based on open source cores you can host all the services on a Linux box. You won't get all the pretty stuff and not all the GUI front end tools will work but it is possible. I have a feeling that there will be a definite shift forward in the ease of installation and ease of use for this option as the many large enterprise Mac sysadmins start shifting to this solution and sharing their work.

Watch this space. Over the next few months I'm going to start exploring all the options to see what I can achieve.

Oh e-books are just marvelous!! Not!!

So I've had my trusty iPad for a while now. I've written on it, played games, browsed the web and generally had a marvelous time.

I do, however, have one major gripe. E-books are still a long way from perfection.

To start, why can't Apple sell me e-books here in Australia? Stupid, ridiculous copyright laws that restrict sales from one area in another, that's why. When will these ridiculous wholesalers (and the just as stupid retailers - yes you, dumb independent bookshops) in the media industry realise they are just hurting themselves? If I can't buy a book, record or movie easily from a local store and the ones I buy from Amazon won't work here in Australia guess what I'll do? I'll just go and pirate it!

Yes folks, I have been known to download a movie, an album or a book off the internet without paying for it. Why? Because stupid DRM and stupid companies wont let me buy it from my local retailer. If I could buy it as easily as I can download it I would.

Then I get onto the quality of the books. I've purchased a number of books through the Amazon Kindle store for my iPad. Most have been good but a couple have been shocking. Most notably "The Dead of Night", the second book in John Marsden's "Tomorrow" series. This book had so many errors in it that I was seriously put off - if the writing had not been so good I would have given up. I suspect that the people who produced the Kindle edition had run a copy through OCR and had then asked an illiterate eight year old to do the copy editing. The errors were typical of OCR errors and the mjost cursory of spelling checking would have found at least half. For example 'spy' was spelt 'spv' at least twice.

So why should I pay close to the paperback cost to buy a Kindle edition with such poor quality control? Shame on you to both Amazon and the publisher. If I was John Marsden I'd be throwing things at various people about now.

It seems a shame that such a good device and publishing method should be marred by stupid flaws like this.

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Windows 7 Phone - Colour Me Surprised

So at the World Mobile Congress just concluded Microsoft unveiled a new operating system for mobile phones.

Well , colour me surprised. They've actually done a good job and created something that doesn't suck. A number of smart moves. It remains to be seen if it is too little too late but it certainly came as a shock to me.

I was expecting a rehash of the tired old Windows OS jigged to support touch. Something like the lame tablets Ballmer showed us at CES. Lipstick on a pig.

Instead they have done some good things.

The first good thing is to make some hard decisions about supporting a quite specific hardware platform. To run the operating system MS are specifying even certain performance specifications as well as screen type, size and number of buttons. This is going to annoy the heck out of handset manufacturers but make it much easier for application developers - one place where Apple has had a big win over Google's fragmented Android platform.

The second good thing is that the interface is taken from an almost blank slate. It looks and plays a little like the Zune interface but only a little. There are some really nice things going on there. I think it has too much eye candy and not enough real information density for the small form factor but there is promise.

Of course there are some things I think are mistakes (the FM radio and overspecifying the camera as a minimum 5 megapixels, for example) and it remains to be seen what else plays out between now and anyone actually shipping a handset but this might actually provide some decent competition to the iPhone. If it does I await the reply from Apple with bated breathe, the competition will only do us all some good.

The one thing that gives me pause is the hope that somebody in Microsoft will realise the game changer that the iPad represents and realise shifting this OS up to a tablet is so much smarter than any of the dreck efforts at putting a touch interface on a desktop operating system that Steve Ballmer thinks will compete with it if his CES performance is anything to go by. I don't hold out too much hope. Microsoft has always seemed to wedded to the past and it's desktop OS.

Stop Your Whining

OK, that's enough. I'm sick and tired of all the arguments about the new iPad and I'm sick and tired of people arguing about the hardware and telling us that a Windows Tablet or Google Android machine wth a touch interface or a Netbook will be just as good and no one will want an iPad.

In the design world when looking at redesigning such things as web sites they talk about "use cases" or "user stories." So here's one for the iPad skeptics.

My mother died two years ago having spent only a few hours using a computer. They were too complicated for her and she never saw a huge need when she had a son ready to do her typing for her. This in a woman with an honours BA and three postgraduate qualitifications in psychotherapy and teaching. Over the years her two sons, one with a Phd in computer science and the other with many years experience as a programmer and support technician, tried hard. She did want to learn, she was envious that I could dash off an email to my brother and his three kids. She had to wait for me to bring over my laptop to see the latest pictures. She had a Mac but was never comfortable using it and it was breaking and the software was constantly out of date, supporting her was not an easy task. She was also constantly asking things like "can I use this software that Betty uses?" or "the thing is always telling me a new version is available" when she would download an update but not know how to apply it. She found it hard to know when she had a new email. She even had trouble getting used to a mouse.

Now imagine I go out and buy her an iPad. "How do I install this new software, Tony?" Just go to the App Store, Mum. "How do I know I've got the latest version?" Just go to the App Store, Mum. "How can I be sure the software runs on my iPad?" Just go to the App Store, Mum. "How do I find new software?" Go to the App Store, Mum. "How do I know I've got an email?" See the picture of the envelope, if it has a number on it, that's how many unread emails you have. "How do I keep all my writing safe?" Plug the iPad into the Mac, Mum. I'll come and do it for you once a week or so. "How do I keep these photos of the grandkids your brother sent in an email?" Just touch them Mum and it will ask if you want to save them.

My Mum would use her iPad at home, but take it to the office she shared with several psychotherapists, even if only to show the latest pictures of the grandkids. She would write a few emails, some teaching notes. She might play a game and perhaps extend herself to looking at a few websites.

Now do you think my Mum would be happy doing that on an iPhone? No way on that tiny screen. So there goes the argument that the iPad is just a big iPhone. Do you think she could handle keeping the software up to date on a Linux Netbook or Windows Tablet? No, that's one of the things that had her confused with a Mac. So they can go out the window, too. Could she be sure the software someone was telling her about would run? She'd need to know the brand and model of her device, the version of operating system, all sorts of of inconsequential details. Does she want to deal with viruses, file formats, crashes and programs that don't work together? Does she want to know that if she saves a photo in an email to the wrong place she can't display it in her sideshows?

No, doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

So all you naysayers, realise what Apple has done. Apple have given us an entire hardware, software and back end system that tries very hard to get out of your way and let you get on with it. It's not the hardware, not the App Store, not the easy to use multi-touch interface, it's not the tightly integrated Apple apps, not the ideal size and weight, not the hardware keyboard that's there when you want it and not dragging you down when you don't. It's all these things incredibly tightly integrated together into one package that Apple has spent several years developing and delivering.

How many people do you know that don't really care about computers, they just like what they can do? Yeah, I know dozens, too.

Stop your whining and go buy an iPad for your mother.

Joys and frustrations of OS X

So this week, after coming back rested from a week in Bali I've attacked a few problems that need to be handled before I build next years image.

My first was to get one of my test boxes up as a 10.6 OS X Server. I not only got it up in quick order I managed to get one of the network guys to give me a static IP, a bunch of aliases for it and punch a hole or to in the firewall ready for some of the services.

It's important to get DNS aliases for your test server. It makes it trivial when you decide to shift out of test into production - no changes required on your clients, just a change in your corporate DNS.

My next task was to get Puppet up and running. I'm planning on using Puppet to look after some configuration details. At first in the student labs but then on the staff machines.

The only complication was that when the Puppet server (or puppetmasterd for those that know the details) comes up it wants to use the definitive name for your host and I wwanted to use one of those aliases. This means that puppetmasterd wants to hand out a security certificate for one name while the client expects a certificate with another. Luckily one line in the puppetconfig file (certname = "alias.example.com") and puppetmasterd gives out the right certificate.

My next task was to get managed preferences (or MCX) working with the dslocal domain. I managed that on my other test box, I even got puppet running on it and getting the MCX preferences from the puppet server.

That was a fair amount of success for the week. Then I started running into trouble.

I managed to use dscl to add a computer to /Local/Default under 10.5, I failed under 10.6 and couldn't get a computer into a group in either. I may have to do some deep exploration to get these things working. If you have any working shell for any of these I'd really appreciate a hint or two.

Once I have those done I'm going to set out to explore nodes and such under puppet. Lots of learning in the next month or two.

Services and Snow Leopard

Ok, so across the world Snow Leopard is becoming available as I write.

Apple is billing this as an operating system release without major features. For once a computer company is underselling. Make no mistake this is a major improvement for all owners of an Intel Mac, and further argument to upgrade for all those still on PPC. This is a faster, slicker, more organised OS than Leopard. Snow Leopard is dramatically faster. Apple have also snuck a few really cool features in below the radar.

One they should be singing from the rooftops is the improvement to 'Services' - those little add-ons that applications could add to the contextual menu. First, they are now contextual - if you have a piece of text selected then you won't be offered the possibility of calculating a disk image checksum. Second, you can easily write them yourself using Automator.

Just to make sure you get the best from AppleScript, Automator and Services Apple have built a new website to explain it all to you, provide some neat tools and some even better training - the Services training features some nice video's with Sal Soghoian, AppleScript guru now a Product Manager at Apple for all things automatic. Visit http://www.macosxautomation.com/ and enjoy.

By the way, is it only me or do Apple's support and documentation websites just make everyone else's seem amateur and garish by comparison. Mac OS X Automation is a perfect example - apart from a legal disclaimer that mentions Apple and the Apple logo discreetly visible in the top right corner you would be hard pressed to realise this is an Apple built website. It's just a site chock full of good information well presented.

But I digress. Many others will write reviews of the new OS, I just wanted to share a little of my joy with you.

Bento gets even prettier

I've already posted on Bento 2. I think it's a marvelous product and proof positive that no one can beat FileMaker when it comes to making databases easier.

So now they have released Bento for the iPhone. For $5.99 here in Oz, $4.99 in the U.S., you get a neat little database application with a number of templates you can customise. You can even create a database from scratch. All incredibly easy to use.

To top it all off you can synchronise your iPhone databases with the ones on your Mac (at the record level, thank you very much.)

This makes Bento an essential buy on both platforms.

There goes the productivity - Myst comes to the iPhone

Back in the dim, dark ages of Macintosh computing I was Associate Editor of Australian Macworld and the big news in games was a small company called Cyan that had released another great game built on HyperCard called "Myst."

Myst was the biggest selling computer game ever until it was passed by the Sims in 2002 - almost ten years on top.

I certainly wasted far too many hours playing Myst and the first sequel, Riven.

The Miller brothers had re-imagined computer gaming with earlier games such as Manhole that had no scoring or plot, just attempted to immerse you in an environment that you had to explore. With Myst they got the right combination of game play, images and sound to capture the imagination of people.

So at the moment I am resisting strongly the urge to download Myst, I know I'll lose a fortnight of spare time before I'll be able to break away.

On a more general note it is good to see games such as Myst and Castle Wolfenstein gaining a revival on the new platform. The classics deserve not to be forgotten and iPhone gamers benefit from decent games at a decent price. Of course Apple won't be complaining, Myst wants 1.5 Gb of space in your phone so it doesn't take many games like this before we'll be eagerly awaiting a 32Gb iPhone to fit them all in.

Brian again

So since the last time I mentioned Mr Eno I've been hit by the Brian stick twice again.

The first time was seeing David Byrne, who is touring the world promoting the album he and Eno released earlier this year. It had been a long, long time since seeing Talking Heads at a rock festival but Byrne and his music still impressed.

Now Brian Eno is curating an intriguing festival in Sydney. There is an installation of "77 Million Paintings", a light show on the sails of the Opera House, some intriguing sounding lectures and marvelous sounding music.

If you will be in Sydney between late May and mid-June make sure you catch some of it. Details at the Luminous Festival website.

What file format problems?

I’m prompted to write this post by a couple of comments I received from someone wanting my recommendation for a laptop. I, of course, told them to buy a Mac. They replied that their Mac friend in the US had lots of problems opening files and lots of video wouldn’t work on the Mac.

This is, of course, total nonsense. It’s just that a Mac out of the box isn’t quite finished. So I thought I’d tell you how to finish it properly so that all these problems just disappear. That’s what they pay me for at the University so you can get it for free.

First, common file formats. You can pretty much sum this up by saying “Microsoft Office files.” Now the Mac has no problem opening MS Word files previous to the latest version, 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac.

There are three possible solutions to opening the latest files; buy Office, install Open Office, download and use the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac from Microsoft. If you are a student or involved in education you can probably get a cheap copy of MS Office. The benefit of this solution is that you also get a bunch of fonts from MS that are cross platform. If you can’t get a cheap copy of office then you might prefer to buy a copy of Apple’s iWork 09 which has no problem with Office files.

If you want a free alternative then OpenOffice can also open MS Office files. Running OpenOffice used to be a little problematic but it now runs natively on the Mac. There is also a port of OpenOffice called NeoOffice that has some improved features such as support for services and grammar checking.

The final, and not terribly convenient solution, MS will give you a file converter “Open XML File format Converter for Mac” which will convert from the new format to the old one that can be read by a large number of software packages.

The other problem people run into is video. This, too, can be easily solved.

First, some explanation. Under Windows most video files are in WMV format while on the Mac they are in QuickTime format. Video and audio files use software called a “codec” to compress and decompress the data (COmpress and DECompress becomes codec) and each of these so called formats are actually wrappers around the data that tells the player software which codec to use. There are a number available.

So the first order of business is to get the Mac to understand WMV files. For this you need a free piece of software from Flip4Mac (now called Telestream). Microsoft have licensed part of their software and offer it for free as Windows Media Components for QuickTime. Installing this will allow you to play a large number of WMV files. Unfortunately some use codecs not included as part of this software. Fortunately Perian is an open source tool that will increase this to cover almost everything.

For anything not covered once you have installed those tools, as well as providing an interface I prefer over QuickTime Player and the ability to play streaming video, there is the VLC Media Player. On some Macs it even allows you to play DVDs out of region.

You may also find that people give you a thumb drive or external drive formatted in NTFS. This is a drive format common on the PC. For this you need to install NTFS-3G for Mac, a public domain NTFS driver for the Mac.

Once you have installed these tools you have a Mac that is capable of reading and writing almost all file formats and those incompatibility problems go away.

Do They Get It?

Over the last few weeks a number of interesting things have happened in the mobile phone market and I’ve been watching with interest.

Nokia have launched a handset that comes with “unlimited free music.”
Telstra (Australia’s largest mobile provider) have launched a mobile game portal.
Apple announced iPhone OS 3.0.

Let’s have a look at Nokia’s offer. Nokia are a smart company, if I didn’t have an iPhone I’d be carrying a Nokia, no question. They know that phones are quickly morphing into a device we carry everywhere and not just for phone calls. So they need to do something to counter the iPhone, a music device - therefore free music.

The big hole here is that Nokia can’t offer the entire iPod/iPhone/iTunes experience. I do use my iPhone to listen to music sometimes - mainly at work where I need the mobile nearby and the music cuts off when a phone call comes in. At the same time my music lives on three iPods -- a nano I use when I want a lightweight device, an old iPod that lives in the glovebox of my car connected to the stereo and another that contains the entire music library that gets connected to my home theatre or a little Logitech box I use when travelling. My music also lives on my home computer so that I can listen at my desk or have it streamed to the kitchen stereo.

So Nokia can offer me free music, but I don’t want it unless I can move it around. What’s the point if it’s a single source? What happens when my phone breaks? What happens when I change handsets? Can I change phone companies and keep the music? Can I download it over my much cheaper home network or do I have to pay data charges on my phone?

All these questions and shortcomings make the Nokia offer a little more than a gimmick.

Now let’s have a look at Telstra’s game portal.

First, let me say that I love playing games. I even bought a few games for my iPod, I’ve bought a few games for phones.

The biggest problem anyone has selling games into the phone space is making sure the game will play on the handset. With multiple operating systems in many versions it is way too easy to sell someone a game that just doesn’t work. The most used solution to this problem is to program for the lowest common denominator. The same goes for screen real estate - sure some mobile phones have a fair sized screen but most don’t so games are incredibly low-res.

The other problem is the payment method. Paying for a mobile game on your phone is fraught with peril - it usually means “subscribing” to some scheme that gets you a game, a bunch of ringtones and some wallpapers for a weekly charge that you then have to cancel. It’s a hassle.

The only part of this problem space solved by Telstra is the payment. The rest remains. So why are they bothering? It may well be that they have to do it. Due to the ridiculous way they structure data charges I suspect Telstra are losing to their competitors in iPhone and other smartphone sales and smartphones and data for them seem to be the fastest growing profit centres in the mobile world at the moment - Telstra need to give it a hit.

So why is Apple winning with the iPhone, why is it overturning the basics in this space?

Well, I think the major win is that, despite the name, Apple is not selling a phone. Well, not a mobile phone. It’s too big, doesn’t have a keypad, the camera sucks and I can’t (yet) send and receive pictures of even use Bluetooth to share them with my friends. My daughter thinks these are all required on a mobile phone. It just turns out to be an excellent little compute platform with a phone shoved in it so phone companies give it price support and consumers to carry it everywhere. Once you’ve got a compute platform the most obvious thing to put on it (at least for Apple) is iPod emulation since they win big in that space and they know the back end of iTunes is all organized so people can easily handle the music. They are selling the first successful handheld compute device. They first tried it with the Newtown, Palm got it mostly right but blew the lead and tried to be cheap.

Apple have a history of doing this. The first great product they ever sold was the Apple ][, and when you hear Woz talk about the win it was twofold - you got everything you needed in a package that was as cheap and simple (in both manufacture and use) as possible. The iMac and the iPod won for the same reasons. The iPhone does the same - you get a nice large colour screen in a decent package with a good interface at a reasonable price.

The other reason Apple wins is synergy. Now, I dislike using the term ‘synergy’ - to me it often reeks of marketing speak, but in this case it applies perfectly.

With the iPod, iTunes and iTunes Store Apple put together a system that made it easy to handle the purchase, storage and handling of digital music. They also slowly iterated the various models of iPod so that they had the right model for every purpose at a reasonable price. They also kept the feature set simple and the interface clean. They ended up owning both the digital music player market but are now the biggest retailer of music in the US.

So then it comes time to release a phone. Apple’s first step in entering the phone market was to sell something that wasn’t a phone. If you don’t think that the iPod touch wasn’t built by Apple as a stepping stone to the final phone you are crazy. It gave them a hardware platform to get the operating system out into the wild well before they could build a phone and get it released by a carrier. It also started them building the entire platform, including the application store.

Then you get to the App Store. Apple had already solved the micropayments problem of charging people sums as small as 99 cents and still getting some margin with music so the App store is an almost trivial task. It is incredibly easy to underestimate the power of the App Store in the market. In the ten years I’ve owned mobile phones I’ve bought six games - two never ran on the phone I bought them for. In the six months I’ve owned an iPhone I’ve bought over two dozen games and applications - one I paid over $20 for. The App Store is already on its way to creating the first iPhone application millionaires. O’Reilly, the computer book publishers are reporting a surge in sales of books about Objective C on the back of iPhone development.

Sure, the iPhone and its operating system have shortcomings. Some of those Apple has admitted are due to the lack of processing power and battery issues - start playing intensive games on your iPhone and watch the battery charge disappear. You can be sure that there are a fairly large bunch of software engineers at Apple spending their days optimising large chunks of OS X to make both those problems go away. You can also be sure that hardware engineers are looking at new versions of the processor and new battery tech to optimise on their end. Witness how for several versions of OS X after 10.0 the OS actually got faster and leaner, even 10.5 has improvements in speed over 10.4 in some areas. Apple are past masters at playing the iterative development game. Look closely at the pre-release notes from Apple on iPhone OS 3.0 and you can see them doing exactly the same thing here. I suspect that we will see new iPhone hardware just when contracts are running out on the current version, towards the end of this year or early next year -- A.T. & T. would love to lock those customers back in to new phone contracts.

Apple have also entered the market right at the tipping point (or they are perhaps creating the tipping point.) More and more of the online world is optimising itself for the smaller screens and lower bandwidth of the mobile web browser (but not small enough for the tiny screen of a traditional mobile.) More and more companies are creating applications for the iPhone - if, for example, your bank doesn’t at least offer an ATM finder then it’s time to switch banks. The first pizza delivery company to create an iPhone ordering app will probably be in for a large win - at the moment none even offers a mobile optimised web site here in Australia (are you listening Eagle Boys?)

Just continue to watch. iPhone OS 3.0 delivers a little more that the customer is asking for and with it Apple will have another win. Count on it.