Craig K

The fluffy side of living together Nov 2, 2009 No Comments

I admit that as per usual my plans for keeping my blog up to date have not quite worked. Let's face it, everyone is used to this by now, moving on...

Life has been too busy. It is always too busy and I wish it would stop. I know a lot of it I bring on myself and that is fair enough, but I also could do with a break. Just a chance to catch my breath.

Last weekend I went back home to Horsham (not sure if Horsham counts as home anymore... maybe I have two homes...). It was the first time I had been back since the summer. I went back for two reasons, first to tidy up and clear my room so my little brother could take it over as his own and secondly because the weekend before was Nik's Birthday and in the time honoured tradition we were planning on going out for a meal.

Meal was good, drinks were good and still the purple rain cocktail shines on as the house favourite.

Sunday I did the epic drive back home to Devon. 5 hours 30mins non-stop. Boring and annoying, but it had to be done. Unfortunately given the length of the journey I had to leave Brighton far earlier than I wanted to. Then again, I spent nearly two years living with those guys, so it is always going to feel like I'm leaving too early.

The week that followed my trip back was not quite as I planned it. I can only assume I had been holding off illness for that trip. Almost as soon as I got back I wasn't feeling so great. It is no great surprise, everyone around me has been on and off ill a lot of the time. It finally caught up with me and that took me out of work for 3 days. I did try and go in on the 3rd day, made it in, one meeting 2 e-mails and then back on the way home again. On a plus side that seems to have gone now.

That brought us round to the weekend. Cunning plan was to have a nice day off on the Saturday and relax a little. Unfortunately a recent discovery in our bedroom put a stop to that. Turns out when we moved into the flat there was mould in our room on the walls. At the time we didn't realise it was this. My best guess is someone brushed the walls down to make it look more presentable. Had we known when we moved in we would have dealt with it there and then.

It had been growing behind the wardrobes and down by the side of the bed against the wall as well as around the window. Hence Saturday was spent trying to find a decent cleaner which wouldn't stain the paintwork and Sunday morning was spent moving EVERYTHING out of our room and cleaning the walls.

Suffice to say it smells like a swimming pool in there but the stuff is dead and gone.

We haven't yet moved our stuff back in as we are letting the room air for a while, but that was one headache we could have done without.

Maybe next weekend there will be that time to relax... I live in hope.

Down but not out Oct 10, 2009 2 Comments

My clarinet teacher once told me that the key to practice was little and often. My retort at the time was "I've done the little, but not the often".

I think it would be safe to say this rule works for many things, blogging for one.

I have been meaning to get back into keeping my online persona and blog alive for some time now, but for one reason or another other things have taken precedent.

A lot has happened to me of late and as is always the case, it is hard to know where to start.

Last time I wrote anything here I had recently moved out of the house in Brighton. I was back home living with my parents with a bit more summer still ahead of me, hunting for and applying for jobs and looking forward to a nice Holiday in France.

That holiday has since been and gone (and if the temperature in the mornings is anything to go by, fairly long gone). The job hunting has also come to an end as I am now gainfully employed by a small company called RPM.

Living arrangements have changed too. No-longer am I filling a small room at my parents house, nor do I take up far too much room in a house in Brighton. I am now living in deepest darkest west country Devon with Demelza in a nice little first floor flat.

Suffice the say in my online downtime things have been very busy. To begin with I was busy house hunting (although, as luck would have it that didn't last long). Then I was busy with planning and taking all I could down to Cornwall to Demelza's parents house. After that came a nice holiday and a short time to relax (although even this was filled with writing lists of things we needed to do/get). Then finally a quick trip to London and then down to Cornwall to begin my job.

During the first week of my new job we got the keys to our flat, I spent my days working and my evenings moving stuff in. Then on my first full weekend down here we moved in for good. Well, I say moved in, we did, everything else was just a big pile of stuff on the floor.

What followed was a series of trips to Ikea, Sainsbury's, Tesco's, Argos and anywhere else you might find all the things you need when you move into a new place. The big things were, well, big, but at least we knew what we wanted. The small things took the real time, the wooden spoons, the cheese graters, the hand towels. You only ever realise you don't have them when you need them.

All the while with this backdrop of sorting the flat came work (for both of us), sorting out of bills, more calls to the rental agency than I care to even think about. I could have written 100 blog entries on the trials and tribulations of moving in, but as is always the trouble with the interesting things in life, you are always too busy to talk about them.

Suffice to say, it isn't all done, we have already had two visitors and still the weekends have long lists of things that need doing. We are however slowly getting through them. More importantly I feel like we are getting through them.

In other news, my computer is on its last legs, I have a new phone and the world still spins...

The myth of intuitive Jul 21, 2009 No Comments

Today in a description for a Bluetooth headset I read the following line:

"Intuitive, single-button control"

To me this reads as something of an oxymoron. How can something with multiple functions and only a single button to achieve them with ever be called intuitive?

Intuitive is a word that gets thrown around rather a lot in IT. Normally it is used to describe something people can just pick up and use with no training or instruction. Apple likes to use the word a lot in in relation to its devices and software. But tell me this, on the iPod, does the idea of moving your thumb round and round a dial ever equate to an up and down motion? Does three diagonal lines in the bottom corner of a window on any OS suggest to you that this is where you click to change its size? Does a circle with a line breaking it in the vertical suggest on and off or power?

The simple answer and conclusion from this is that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface or control mechanism. An easy to use interface is simply one that builds upon knowledge you already have.

To return to my Bluetooth headset, the one I was looking at was a few models up from the one I have now. It has the same one button structure as my current headset. Although I would not describe this interface as intuitive, if I ever was to use this new device I would assume double tapping that single button will call the last dialled number, pushing and holding for 6 seconds will change to pair mode.

These are not intuitive interactions, but they do come from knowledge I already have.

Tinker time Jul 21, 2009 No Comments

We are always so scared about children getting hurt we never give them the chance to find out for themselves...

This is just a short presentation by a guy who runs a "Tinkering School" for kids where they are given real tools and real materials and actually allowed to do things. What they achieve is really quite impressive.

Just works (TM) Jul 20, 2009 No Comments

There is a certain irony to how I feel about computers at the moment.

Today started with the sync partnership between my phone and Outlook on my computer getting lost broken or stolen from me one way or another. The net effect of this was all my contacts, tasks, notes and calendar entries vanished from the phone. While this was not a catastrophic loss as all the data is in Outlook too, a phone with no contacts is like a car with no wheels.

So I set about restoring the flaky connection between the two devices and forced them to kiss and make-up. All in all this lost me about 3 hours of this morning with other distractions and tasks occurring in-between. You would have thought that now I would be generally annoyed at technology, but in actual fact the exact opposite is true. This successful patching of the morning spurred me on to sort out a couple of other things on my phone and general organizational system in the in-between times of the day.

Specifically I re-discovered MS OneNote.

In a way there is nothing that special about OneNote, it is a note taking application for the computer which is part of the Microsoft Office suite. All you do is keep notes in it, that is all. Yet it is how elegantly that this all works that makes me feel I can appreciate computers for that they are again, tools to get the job done.

I dragged bits from websites including text and images and they just appeared in the note along with date time and where they came from as a block ready to be moved about. I can just pick up any element and move it round like publisher. I can also just start writing wherever I want and use all the nice powerful formatting tools from Word. I have workbooks, tabs, pages, folders. I can tag items, draw things in, highlight text, search for anything (including text inside images). In short, it is an application that makes collating and storing little notes and bits of information for projects and alike really really simple.

The best part of all of this... I knew I could set this up to work with my phone. I found the option to install to my phone. Up on my phones screen popped the installation, I clicked through and 30 seconds later I had all my notes on my phone so I have them with me.

I like it when things just work!

Firefox 3.5 Jul 1, 2009 1 Comment

OK, new version of Firefox came out yesterday, version 3.5. Nothing that interesting in my opinion, bit faster, uses a bit less RAM, look and feel is pretty much the same and all of my add-on's work. Nothing that special, nothing bad, just gentle progression. To be honest, it is the kind of development I want from something I use everyday.

For those who feel like giving it a go, have a wander over here: Firefox 3.5 download

However today one of those "little features that makes the big difference" caught my eye.

Normally if I were viewing the source of a page I would see all the URI's of all the media included in that page like the CSS files. If I then wanted to go to that CSS file I would need to select the text, copy it, go back to the browser and then paste the link into a new tab and go to it. This is a little slow but it is just second nature these days.

Enter Firefox 3.5 and below is a screenshot of what I see when I view the source on my site:

Clicking on any one of those links opens it in the source viewer!

This tiny change is a major step forward. Unfortunately there is no back button, but backspace works just as well.

All I want now is CSS code highlighting built in and we are there...

Is Google really the best search engine? Jun 11, 2009 No Comments

Some of you (tech foo dependant) may have seen that Microsoft have released a new search engine to replace Live Search called Bing.

This in itself is not that interesting. It does have a couple of nice features in things like the image search and the drilldown on each item in your search results. I do recommend that you have a go with it, if only to have tried Google's competition.

What I would much rather talk about is a service called Blind Search.

It is pretty simple, it takes the query you enter and comes back with three columns, each containing the results from either Bing, Google or Yahoo. To find out which results go with which search engine you have to vote. This is actually a pretty cool idea, it takes branding away and forces you to base your decision on the pure results. What I find really interesting about this is you would assume Google to be on top of this...

In fact I found Google to come back with my least favourite set of results pretty consistently.

This was not something I was expecting at all. According to the 30 or so searches I have done on the site it turns out I prefer Yahoo.

I have no plans to switch to Yahoo in the near future due to them having the most cluttered homepage known to man, but it is still interesting to see how poorly everyone's saviour Google can perform.

What is clutter? Jun 11, 2009 2 Comments

So I'm moving out of the house in Brighton this weekend. I have lived down here for the last two years and in that time, although my living has been fairly spartan there is still a fair bit of stuff in my room.

Turning into a neat freak has certainly had a hand in helping me stay fairly organised, but it doesn't seem able to stop the clutter... well, maybe it has, I don't think I'm really sure what I regard as clutter.

For example, I am always fixing computers and picking up spare parts. Every time I am about to throw some random bit of hardware that doesn't work I take all the screws off it and add them to the (sorted) box I have. I hate having a screw that just fits when I could have one that really fits. The same applies to bigger bits of hardware such as MODEM's and graphics cards. To that end I currently have 5 spare graphics cards and 3 spare MODEM's in my room. OK, now it doesn't take a genius to know that is too many, but exactly how many is the right number? Fine, one lets me help one person with that problem, but I don't get new graphics cards every day. It would be really annoying for everyone involved if I ended up needing two.

This sort of problem, however small, seems to apply to a lot of my stuff. I like to keep things around that would be handy to have in the future, but at the same time I don't want to be surrounded by stuff that never gets used.

I do something similar with clothes. When something is old and worn out it just moves into another pile so it's kept for events (mainly Scouting based it has to be said) when I want something I don't care much about.

How about magazines. I pick up PCPro fairly religiously each month if only for the DVD of software it comes with. I regularly find myself going back a year or so in magazines to find some article or bit of software they talked about. OK, so I could throw out everything older than a year but I guarantee the day after I do that I will want something from 13 months ago....

I want less stuff in my room, I want less clutter, but what will it cost me in convenience to do that?

Apple's newest service pack out Jun 10, 2009 No Comments

OK, so technically it is a new OS, but I'm sorry Apple, this is just too feature light to ever be considered a new OS. As far as I can tell you like the sound of "OSX" so you don't want to move to version 11 because it sounds less cool. You also take as long with your service packs as everyone else, but it is much easier to be "current" when you call them a new OS each time.

Now it has to be said, unlike previous service packs this one will not cost $129 (or about that in £'s), nope this one will only cost $29. Now you might think that to be mighty generous of them, especially given last time they released an update the 3rd best feature according to their own website was a more shiny dock menu (no, not the new features in the dock, just that it was more shiny).

So, given the last light feature set you would be expecting something pretty pathetic for this amount of money.... and you would be right too. Here are the user noticeable features this upgrade includes as noted by Lifehacker:

• Faster bootup and shutdown times, and half the disk footprint of Leopard, which will save you about six gigabytes of disk space.
• Signal strength indicators in the Airport menu.
• A split pane terminal, so you can run jobs side by side.
• Date in the menu bar.
• Safari 4 (which is a free upgrade/download to all current versions of OSX anyway)
• Video editing and screen recording in Quicktime (I'm going to assume this is going to be for all OSX versions too).
• Microsoft Exchange support.
• 64-bit computing.

Hell, 64bit won't mean anything to almost everyone anyway. So all in all, it sounds truly pathetic doesn't it.

Well, it seems that all the changes are "under the hood" giving you a much faster OS. And if you read the Apple press brief you get some pretty impressive numbers like this:

Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster*

These are however the only OS specific statistics they give, for everything else they claim it is all "faster".

How the movie industry could have stopped piracy before it began Jun 3, 2009 1 Comment

In recent weeks the news has been awash with yet more "statistics" and articles regarding movie piracy, particularly this rather disturbing bit of research that claims that the UK industry could be loosing £120billion per year (films software and music mainly).

How flawed this "statistic" is boggles the mind. They are assuming that every file that is downloaded would have been bought in full every time. This method of analysing the costs of piracy was shown to be more than just a joke, it is a fabrication leading people to the wrong conclusions.

Before I get to the movie industry I want to take you back to the music industry. The internet has come on a long way since the late 80's early 90's. For one thing is has got faster every year and it is this speed boost that gave the movie industry the head start it needed. You see, in the days of the slower internet movie piracy was never an option, it could take you weeks and cost considerably more than the price of the film to download it. However music files are much smaller in and were much more in the grasp of the ordinary person. With the onset of the MP3 player people started looking for ways to get more digital content. With an absence of anything official, illegal alternatives such as Napster (now re-opened and legal) popped up. People shared their content there for some time before the music industry got wind of it and had it shut down. But by then the damage was done, people realised the best way to get digital content (in this case music) was to download it.

It took the iTunes store to ever make a dent in that method. Where the iTunes store succeeded was it made music easy to find, readily available, granular and most importantly, sensibility priced. It was a hit and didn't take long to be a major driving force in the music industry. There was however still one problem, Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM allows manufactures to lock content to only be  able to do certain things. It can only be played on specific players, on specific machines by a specific number of people. People were also used to being able to download illegal copies without DRM or for more money go get the CD and make DRM free versions of the files. Recently the music industry finally "got this" and started making DRM free tracks available. The online music industry is moving on in leaps and bounds now, OK, there is a lot of catching up to do and some more tweaks to the system are still required, but it works and gives people a viable alternative to piracy.

Now with this firm and clear example ahead of it you would have thought the movie industry would have been more than prepared for the digital revolution to hit its market. Apparently that is expecting a little too much of them...

If you think back some time ago we had the VCR and the cassette that went with it. This had no concept of DRM on it whatsoever, it was a simple device that went from one side to the other. Yes, they put advertisements and notices at the start of the tape back then, but at the very least you could fast forward through them.

With the arrival of the DVD the industry took advantage and ended up not only getting, but abusing the ability to force people to go through content that could not be skipped or fast forwarded. To add insult to injury this content is mainly a lot of anti piracy stuff being targeted at the people who didn't pirate the film. Not only do they force you to watch adverts etc, they are also big fans of DRM, using it to lock content onto the disk so it can't be copied easily, locking which screens you can view it on (ever heard of HDCP?) as well as even locking some of the sound out on certain devices.

Now in our ever connected world these restrictions simply cause people further frustration and aggravation. What happens when I have a film on DVD and I want to watch it on some small device I can take on the train like the Archos? The simple answer is it is almost impossible. What happens if I would rather download my films and not have to go to the shop and buy them on disk. What happened to the iTunes concept for the movie industry? Well, the simple answer is they never made it. So, what would I do if I wanted to solve all these issues? In fact the answer is fairly simple, your pirate it. This gives you the content you want DRM with a method of delivery that works for most people instead of paying through the nose for content which doesn't do what most people want. fact, only the other day did a study come out showing that DRM actually encourages piracy.

So, what is the final step in this picture? Well, in the last year or so content providers are starting to get this, they have realised the way in which films have taken off online and are finally starting to push back with solutions not laws. They are starting to see that the internet could be a very powerful delivery tool, but in my opinion they still missed the boat. They were too busy stopping people pirate they forgot why people did it, they did it because industry never provided the content people wanted in the way they wanted it, they ignored all the evidence and now they are quite literally paying the price for it. These should have been the companies leading the digital revolution, not trying to slow it down.

Yes, there has been change in the right direction, but if this comment by Sony pictures CEO Michael Lynton is anything to go by, they have a long way to go.