Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

I love gadgets! I’m a techno consumerist, and maybe even a little bit of an Apple whore (although I don’t unconditionally bend over for Steve!). There, I said it, it’s out of the way!

My love for gadgets started when I got to work on the web (I think) back in 1997. I started to make some real money, so I could afford some things once in a while. Working in this environment exposes you to servers and routers and stuff, and you start to get intrigued about how things work (or don’t work). Still, laptops were pretty expensive back then, and underpowered. My first laptop was some Compaq, a 14″ one with a detachable cd-rom wedge, which made it pretty cool actually. Slim and light. I liked it alot. But my first true gadget, was the Compaq iPaq 3630 pocket pc in 2000. It was the first pocketable device, that looked nice, felt nice and had stuff going for it. It had these jackets you could slide it into that would extend its functionality (like extended battery, compact flash card readers…). Now I wish I was blogging back then, so I’d remember what it was like. I did find this review. But back then, I still felt it was pretty limited in use, not really a joy to use. Since then I had a bunch of gadgets, most of which I don’t remember really (I bought a PSP years ago to browse wirelessly, not necessarily for games), that’s how much impact they had on my life (none).

My first foray into Apple territory was a beige G3 Power Macintosh minitower desktop with a 21″ Apple CRT display, at work, I guess around 98-99. I didn’t like OS9 much, but I was using it to do some manuals in FrameMaker, and video editing, next to the development I did on Windows NT4/2000. Around 99 or 2000, we bought our first Apple for home use, a Bondi blue iMac G3. I played around with some Director development (remember Lingo?), but mainly used it for surfing the web and webdesign. I believe I sold it again and went back to a Windows pc at home. In 2005 I bought my first 30 GB white iPod, which I loved. A couple of years later, we bought a (second hand) white “lampshade” iMac which came with OSX which was so much nicer to use (than OS9 and Windows I thought). We loved it! It still felt underpowered though, if I remember correctly. But then we had to sell it again when moving to Australia. In early 2007 I bought my first Apple Macbook Pro (to replace a dead Acer laptop), followed by a first gen iPod touch, and a couple of months later the first gen, jailbroken iPhone from eBay. Followed up by an iPhone 3G and then last year a 3GS. I upgraded to the new unibody MBP last year. I’ve got a LCD cinema display, an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. Sooo, will I buy an this new Apple device? You guess…

That was a bit of background history. The fact that I remember these Apple devices, and not much of any of the other gadgets in between (oh, a Mio GPS), means that they had some impact in my life, they gelled into life and I loved using them. They do their job and get out of the way. And I’m a (web)developer, I love to get my hands dirty trying things out, see how it works, how to develop something that works on particular platform.

I jumped on the netbook bandwagon. I was intrigued by the its form factor, it’s kinda like a baby laptop.  It’s cheap enough to carry around (and loose it, have it stolen,… in stead of my workhorse MBP), small enough to fit in my “manbag”/gadgetbag, and it “kinda” offers the full PC experience. This when travelling, going to meetups/conferences. Yes, an iPhone does fit this profile too: It’s great to tweet, keep track of your email, search Google, GPS your way around town, grab a picture,… And I love it! It has some crazy cool apps, great games. It contains my most recent music (I’ve got a 160GB classic iPod that contains everything), it links to my Flickr account to show of my latest pictures on the go, I check the weather, the TV timetable, use Shazam when I hear music I like, has my contacts, keep a noise diary in Evernote, get the next Sydney ferry, keep track of my weight, check my bank account, play Wurdle, find nearby ATMs, remote desktop into my work pc at team meetings,… All in my pants’ pocket (yes, I am still talking about the iPhone here).

But the iPhone really isn’t comfortable to read lots of email, blogposts, nor ebooks for that matter (neither is a BlackBerry, or an Android phone). Sure the Stanza an Kindle apps allow you to do read ebooks, and some PDF apps allow you to read PDFs. But you really don’t want to read like that for an hour or more. Neither is it particularly practical to watch long (movie length) videos. It’s great for three minute YouTube videos, and three in a row at that. It’s inherent to that particular formfactor. And then there is the battery life while actively using the iPhone. I don’t bitch about it, because, again the formfactor limits the size of the battery they can use. Previous phones didn’t allow this functionality anyway so that’s why batteries would last for days. Or when they did offer the functionality, you still would hardly ever use it because the user experience would be so appalling (Nokia N95 anyone?).

That’s why I thought a netbook is a great idea. So I’d have something to easily browse the web, read emails and ebooks (pdf or some ebook format), while watching TV at night in the sofa, in bed in the morning without disturbing my partner, or at a conference, or while travelling. My 15″ MacBook Pro is really too big to read in bed, gets too hot, makes too much noise when it is so hot… (though it does have a backlit keyboard) . I got me a 7″ eeePC. It was crap. The screen and keyboard too small to do anything. It was rather a toy for toddlers.

I upgraded to a 10″ Aspire One. It feels more like a normal laptop. It is pretty nice actually. It is a WinXP, with 160GB harddisk, 2GB memory. It’s 10″ but it’s resolution is 1024×600, which isn’t that practical for browsing either as the height of the viewport is pretty low. I mostly end up going full screen in Firefox. Reading ebooks, or particularly PDFs, isn’t practical either on this resolution. It’s just too narrow. Sure I can rotate a pdf, and hold the netbook like a book, but it still doesn’t feel right. The keyboard is decent but cramped. The touchpad is a bit too small too.

And yes, I can multitask, if I want to, but I use Gmail in Firefox, and a Firefox extension for Twitter. When I really want to dig into Twitter, I’d open up TweetDeck, and sure whenever I click a link Firefox pops to the front. I can multitask, to run Spybot or CrapCleaner in the background while browsing in Firefox. I can multitask, as ZoneAlarm keeps me safe, while Windows Update does its thing. I’ve got TopStyle installed for when I ever need to fix some html or css on the go. I can open and edit Word documents. But that’s not what I use my netbook for. I mainly use it to browse the net (as in “net”book right?), on the sofa, in bed in the morning,… Sure I can watch videos in Flash, and then the ventilator starts to blow to keep it all cool… As it does whenever browsing media sites with Flash ads on each side. That’s why you’d install a FlashBlock extension in Firefox.

I’ve taken my netbook to some conferences, sometimes to take notes, or browse any examples given by the presenter, or check email in between sessions. But then again battery life is only about 2,5 hours. I guess by now, netbooks come with 6 cell batteries for the same price which would double that time. And I kinda hate it when people are tapping away on their laptop at conferences as it’s really distracting (so I tend to not tap away either, and an iPhone is a lot quieter to type on, but too small to do so continuesly). So, what was a netbook good for again?

Last year I bought a Kindle when they introduced their international version. This is an ebook reader. No more, no less. I though the price was right, the overall size was right. I buy a lot of “dead-tree” books, but in itself they are too heavy/impractical to log around (on holiday, to work, across continents,…). And often ebooks are cheaper (but not always that much!). The screen really reads a lot better than a laptop screen. The 6″ screensize is the minimum size you’d need to comfortably read an ebook on the sofa. It holds a charge for almost two weeks. It’s got a 3G connection, but only to connect to the Amazon mothership to buy books, and update your virtual bookmark (the location in any book you stopped reading at). When I get back to my iPhone, the Kindle book would update to the last read page. Pretty nice. You can add other books in non-Kindle-drm’d ebook formats easily  over USB, as display PDFs. But you can’t zoom into PDFs, and the 6″ screen is too small. You can rotate them, but the the viewport is too narrow again (like on the netbook). I guess the Kindle DX with it’s 10″ fixes these issues, but at $490 it becomes too expensive for a single use device I think (and a lot less an impulse buy).

I was also interested in getting a Time magazine subscription (as well as some other titles), maybe even some newspaper. But on the international Kindle, Amazon limits subscription by not including pictures (which would be in grey anyway), which makes a lot of articles, and the subscription in general, a lot less attractive. They should, and could, update subscriptions through their desktop app. But the Kindle doesn’t get hot, doesn’t make any noise. It feels good in your hand. And I like it (maybe because it kinda feels Apple-y?). But it only does books. No internet browsing, no email, no socializing. This year more ebook readers are being introduced which offer some more functionality (without custom apps or APIs to build on), but often at an inflated price point. One of the selling points of the Kindle, its “free” lifetime, “Whispernet” 3G connection turns out to be also one of its Achilles heels. Since a couple of weeks, Amazon offers a Kindle API for developers, to develop active content on the Kindle. But how “active” can it be if you can only use 100KB per month of Whispernet on offer (as developer you can buy more data though)?

Anyway, I think I’m going to end this one right here. That’s a pretty long post making the case for the Apple iPad without actually mentioning it, no? I guess the hype was too much this time round for Apple to easily disappoint people. But I feel most of the complaints people vent are full of bull****. Yes it doesn’t do the dishes, nor a good cup of coffee. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on one!

PS: While writing this on my MBP, I started up my Aspire One. It had been a couple of months. I had to restart twice as there were Windows updates twice (in stead of bundling them all into one update), and there was a Flash update. Sigh.

It’s Blog Action Day today. That means bloggers around the world blog about the same topic. This year it’s climate change.

Climate change affects everyone, even the deniers. What’s the cause of climate change? Our hunger for energy. Energy to power our desktops and laptops, our iPhones, our LCD/plasma screens…

Have a look around the office this morning (let’s say early 8am). How many people are around? How many PCs and screens are on, showing their screensaver, and doing nothing? Yes, it’s easy to press a button and have it on instantly. But it’s a serious waste of energy, and money paying for that energy.

Why do people leave their PC on overnight? It might be corporate policy to back up overnight. But shouldn’t files be stored on a file server anyway? Aren’t there images of fully installed OS’s for whenever something goes wrong? And can a backup server not remotely wake a PC from hibernation over Wake-On-LAN to do its stuff?

And, no, turning off your monitor does not turn off your PC (like in the movies). But there is a simple solution, the other way around: a Master/Slave powerboard. You plug in your PC as Master, and your screen(s) as Slave, and when your PC gets into sleep or hibernation, or ideally you turn it off, your screen(s) (and printer, scanner) will get turned off automatically. This is a very low impact (on your productivity) solution, which saves heaps of energy each year for your company, helping its bottom line, and the planet.

So finally, after almost a year since I registered as an iPhone developer over at Apple, I build myself a couple of iPhone apps. Here’s how.

I have a couple of Objective C books laying around, which I opened once in a while, but closing them again pretty quickly… so I never got around developing anything. For now, I couldn’t justify any time spend on learning yet again another language. It is after all just a hobby project (the iPhone development that is). As a webdeveloper I could develop cool iPhone web apps (with jQTouch), but still that wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction as a native app. Then there are a couple of frameworks like PhoneGap and NimbleKit which allow you to develop iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But you’re still confronted with XCode, working in a new environment.

Then I found Appcelerator and their Titanium Mobile. Their Titanium product allows for cross platform development for desktop apps, and their Titanium Mobile allows for, well, cross platform mobile applications, using JavaScript and HTML. And Titanium Mobile is itself written in Titanium. Still in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. Was I in for a surprise! Titanium Mobile creates native iPhone and Android apps, which means you get to use native UI elements, the GPS, the accelerator,… to get some apps up and running pretty quickly. For example, I took the http://nextsydneyferry.com code and converted into a simple iPhone app (in the simulator) in less than 30 minutes! Before I was able to get it onto my iPhone though, I had to set up “provisioning”, generating certificates and all. Something you need to do for XCode development too. Once that was set up, you click a button and it gets transferred through iTunes to your iPhone, and you got yourself a native app. Without opening XCode, in my preferred webdevelopment environment!

Some gotchas:

• If you want to develop iPhone apps, you still need the iPhone SDK which is Mac only. No way around that. But you already have a Mac, right?
• You’re building native apps, and there’s different support between iPhone and Android. For one some features are missing in the other. So you’ll need to cater for that, and fork code between iPhone and Android.
• You still need to follow Apple’s design guidelines (although I’ve seen some horrible apps out there that don’t follow any design guideline). You’re not building an iPhone app for Android, or an Android app on iPhone.
• Don’t expect to go building 30fps 3D apps or something, you’re better of doing that in Objective C

Having said that, for simple text-based, web-connected applications, Titanium Mobile is perfect:

• There’s the basic API documentation of the JavaScript framework.
• They have a Kitchen Sink app and source that shows you all there is available in the framework, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.
• There’s a great forum for support and discussions.
• There are a couple of screencasts to get you started.
• Both iPhone and Android apps (and soon Blackberry) with a little bit of effort. I hope they would also add Palm’s WebOS.
• It’s Open Source (on GitHub).

Oh right, something about the iPhone apps I developed… A NextSydneyFerry app, which is just a port of the web application into Titanium Mobile. I might add some more features like saving the data locally, so you don’t need a web connection (only for updates). And a Twitter visualization tool called TweetFrame, which cycles through tweets based on a search query you define, like “a digital picture frame, but for tweets”. The funny thing is that, through Facebook I got a request to have something like TweetFrame, but as a website widget (don’t know why, but there were already widgets like that). Well, since it’s just some JavaScript, I did the reverse and created a widget based off of the iPhone app… You can see it in action on the homepage, below the Flickr feed.

For now I mainly focused on iPhone. I don’t care that much for Android at the moment, though with a little extra effort I could get them to work on Android too. One of the other platforms Appcelerator is looking at is Blackberry (though could )

It’s golden times for web developers, a Renaissance, where HTML(5) and JavaScript open great possibilities. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much happening now, it’s an exciting time.

So, if you’ve been keeping off developing for iPhone, try out Titanium Mobile!

-day 5 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

And indeed, we woke up to a white blanket of snow. But not enough to keep us in Tarraleah. We drove off at 8:15, as the breakfast cafe only opened at 9. It was a different scenery than the day before, a lovely white forrest around Tarraleah, with snow covered gumtrees and ferns.

We ended up having late breakfast at a Banjo’s in New Norfolk (yummy eggs Benedict, and bacon and eggs). As we drove back down to Hobart, we were looking for Bagdad, but there was actually nothing to see. A truly missed opportunity, marketing wise: no Bagdad Cafe, or postcards or anything.

Drove down to Richmond and the Richmond bridge, and had our Banjo’s rasburry shortbread cake there. There was only a couple of hours left for us to return the car. We still went on to Pirates Bay lookout and the underwhelming tessalated pavement rocks. Times up and we drove back towards the airport, enjoying more lovely lookouts.

We were early at the airport (14:30), but that meant we didn’t have to queue at the rental company, checkin nor security. Unfortunately our plane was delayed by 20 minutes, which meant we only had a 10 minute window for our connecting flight in Melbourne. But on arrival in Melbourne there were no worries, as they hadn’t started boarding yet there, their boarding delayed by 30 minutes. They started boarding as we arrived.

And the rest is history, right? Next day, back to work (for a very short working week)!

Photos on this Flickr set!

-day 4 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

Big breakfast at the Lodge, like really big: bacon, beans and eggs, pancakes with fruit, and a croissant with smoked salmon…

No internet reception in Cradle Mountain, so looked on the Lodge’s internet kiosk for Tarraleah comfirmation. At the same time checked out the new Apple iPhone announcement :), and my mail. Noticed that this day Google Wave hackathon registration would be opened at ten, hmm. So between 9 and 10 we did the Enchanted walk right at the beginning of the national park, and then headed back to this internet kiosk to register (#iamageek :).

Next we did the King Billy loop walk at the Lodge, another easy walk, though it was raining a bit, leaving Cradle Mountain at 11:30, when heavy rain started. Backtracking part of the same road back. At Delaware the road started to get interesting again. At Mole Creek lot of rain, when I wished it would snow in stead (as we didn’t have snow yet). We stopped at a lookout where there was nothing to see because of the rain, where it then started to snow! We drove on and a ute was blocking the road. The car had crashed into the road railing, and it’s front wheel had broken. The local (in a t-shirt in 0C weather) managed to get the car of the road and we gave him a lift till past Bearnie, the next village. It turned out people here also don’t have (Telstra) reception, so dropped him off at a phonebooth, near Great Lake.

Snow at this height had stopped and we passed some great views of the Great Lake. The road turned into gravel road, for the next 50 km. We found ourself on the great plateau, the Central Highlands, at about 1000m. Very desolate landscape (reminds me of Iceland don’t know why because I’ve never been there). More lakes and more dirt road. We finally got some asphalt again, and boy the car looked dirty. Had to clean the back window of car as it was covered in dirt.

We drove past vast hydro works and arrived at Tarraleah around 4pm. Tarraleah is a village turned into a holiday village. It used to house the workmen working on the hydro works, but they have long moved on. We stayed at a refurbished school building, which was pretty cool, but also cold this time of the year. We had dinner at the local Highlander tavern (the only place for dinner), having warm smoked trout mouse and a big scotch fillet with mushroom saus. The Inn keeper was trying to scare us saying two days of snow was expected and we would be stuck!

Read on, final day 5.

-day 3 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We had self made breakky in our cabin (eggs + toast). In Ross I happen to get Vodafone GPRS reception, slow but at least it’s something. No Optus what so ever. So I started looking for Tuesday’s accommodation, somewhere in the middle. I picked Tarraleah, and The Scholar House there.

In the morning we walked through Ross (which is really only one main street), and got some local goodies from the bakery (a shortbread wheel). We passed through Evandale, which is another old, colonial town, and snapped some great pics of low hanging clouds. Again, we passed a bunch of lovely lookouts on the way to Cradle Mountain. But arriving at Cradle Mountain, there’s lots of diseased or dead trees, at Middlesex Planes.

Checked in at the Cradle Mountain Lodge (into cabin 73) and visited… the visitor center of Cradle Mountain (another 22$ day pass). At the visitor centre is a short boardwalk through local forest. There’s a bus service departing here to Dove Lake, as a sign tells us parking spots are limited, and there’s a 30 minute waiting time. We thought we’d risk it anyway and driving down to Dove lake. Turned out not even a third was filled up. Dove Lake with Cradle Mountain in the background is lovely. We walked down towards Glacier Rock. While there a rainbow appeared, a great photo opportunity. Up here it was the first time that we really felt the wintery cold, so you’d better dress up.

We didn’t stay too long, as we wanted to do another short stroll along boardwalk (Kenny something walk). That evening we had dinner at the Lodge’s Tavern (tomato soup and oysters, scotch fillet and salmon). While walking down to the tavern, we had a wombat encounter, a mommy with her baby, so cute! After dinner we enjoyed our cabin’s spa bath…

Read on, day 4.

-day 2 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We cancelled the remainder of our stay in the hotel in Hobart. But canceling the hotel also meant we had to book two other hotels, not sure where. The night before I found a little cabin in Ross, though this morning, driving up to Freycinet, it was too early call just yet. We stopped at the Rosny lookout, looking over across Hobart, and an obvious popular make-out spot…

We stopped at a Woollies to stock up on some water and food, and grab a (next door Gloria Jeans) coffee. While driving up to the east coast, it became obvious quickly that Optus does not have any coverage beyond Hobart (about a 30km radius). Now, how are we going to book our accommodation for tonight? Anyway, along the way we stopped at several beautiful beaches and lookouts: Raskin beach, Oyster Bay, Mayfield beach. And we arrived in the early afternoon at coles baytasau-42.1242750148.2920920Coles Bay. First stop Freycinet NP visitor centre, to get a 22$ park day pass, and see if they know of any accommodation in this area. It’s not a tourism information center in itself so we had to call around ourselves for accomodation,… at a Telstra payphone. Boy, do they swallow coins like… I mean, they take a lot of money, and don’t give anything back. All contacts we’d call were booked, so we tried the cabin at Ross, which is 1.5h back inland. And it was still available! Pfeww, settled for today (we didn’t have to sleep in the car).

We then drove on to the parking spot for the Wineglass Bay lookout walk, which was medium hike uphill, but certainly worth it. It was a very well laid out and maintained path. After this walk, we drove up to the Lighthousetasau-42.122816148.34282lighthouse, which offered nice views of the coast line.

We then had to drive back inland, past Cambell Town to Ross, where we stayed at the TSpot cabin. We arrived at around 5PM, a bit earlier than we had told them. We took a stroll (in the dark) around Ross, which is a tiny countryside village but with one wide avenue and a particular bridge. At 5:30 we checked in with the lovely English proprietors. They used to have a tearoom in the Hunter Valley, but moved down here since a couple of years. We changed clothes and went for dinner at the local pub (for pumpkin soup, gourmet lamb and rib eye steak). After dinner we watched the Story of Ross on DVD (available in the cabin), and  V for Vendetta in cabin.

Read on for day 3

Last long weekend (we made it a 5 day weekend :), we went down to Tasmania, not sure what to expect exactly. We didn’t have any real plans, only thing we planned was a cabin at the Cradle Mountain Lodge, and four consecutive nights in Hobart (which I booked before the cabin, which meant we were going to forfeit one night there), making Hobart our hub to explore the island.

We got up early Saturday morning (3:30 am) to fly with Virgin Blue to Hobart (passing through Melbourne). We arrived in Hobart around 10:15, and picked up our rental car from EuropCar. There was a queue because their computer system was down (tip ctrl+alt+delete :), so there was a bit of a wait. Not a happy start to our holiday. As expected, it was raining in Hobart, and from the forecast, it looked to be rain for five days.

But spirits were high, and we arrived at our hotel at “somewhere past 11″, too early to check in. But no worries, we could leave our baggage behind and park the car in the hotel’s garage. We went straight to the close-by -42.8863630147.3308110Salamanca markets, which turned out to be the biggest, regular open air market I’ve seen  in Australia (true, haven’t seen that many markets here though). We had lunch at Tricycle (a crunchy BLT and delicious ham and pea soup). Because it was raining a bit, and the rest of the weather outlook, I bought some plastic pants at the local Katmandu, as an insurance policy as it were, just in case. At the Salamanca Square, there’s a salmon store which I couldn’t pass by without tasting some smoked Tasmanian salmon. At the same time, next door at Smolt, we made a reservation for dinner that night.

It was almost 14:00, time to check into the hotel, freshen up a bit in our room. We were staying at the LeisureInn on Macquarie Street. The room was small, but modern and decent, especially for the price of $79 a night. We got our rain gear on, and headed to the botanical gardens (something we try to visit in every city we pass), walking through the main Hobart shopping street. The Hobart botanical garden was a nice garden, nothing exceptional. Even in the rain, the Japanese garden looked great. We’d read about a ferry departing at the botanical garden, so we headed down to the water. Well, unfortunately it only goes out a couple of times a day, if it even still does do that, as we couldn’t see any reference to the ferry. Strange. Another thing to keep in mind is that there aren’t that many taxis around in Hobart. Kind of disappointed in this dreadful weather. So we headed back to the hotel on foot. (yes, we could have taken the car too, but then you don’t see that much of a town you’re visiting). Quick jump into the tiny shower, and then dinner at Smolt, which was pretty exceptional I’d say, strongly recommended!

Back in our hotel room, the (single glazed) window didn’t close (like a pinky wide gap). It is winter, and the hotel is on one of the busiest streets in Hobart with a lot of traffic, and it was Saturday night, and it was a long day for us, we weren’t to happy with this. And since it was the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, the hotel was fully booked and unable to give us another room, until the next day. We had to make a decision, stay here (it was cheap, decent rooms except the windows) or cancel. I started to look around for some options, though couldn’t decide yet. Next day we decided to cancel rest of our booking, which we had to do through Wotif. They ended up being very helpful actually!

Read on, day 2.

This is a quick post on a problem I had at work.

At work we got brand new machines with 8gigs of memory on Win XP 64-bit. They have nVidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. We developer on IBM Websphere (WID 6.1.2).

I had the following problem when I tried to commit changes: no comment text box?!

I had other similar problems trying to set project references, and the likes in other configuration panes…

This bothered me for a couple of days, trying all kinds of things, including reinstalling WID. I also looked at the nVidia drivers, and they were the latest, no fix there.

Then I looked into nVidia’s nView Desktop Manager, which was enabled:

I disabled this and… lo and behold, WID problem fixed: I got my comment box back, as also any other pane which didn’t work before.

Just thought I’d share that. Someone might have the same problem, pulling out his hair about this.