The Free Speech

Yay! Finally read the following on Google Groups..

Hi,

We are excited to share a beta version of Gears for Safari with you!! We
would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can
polish it and find all the corner cases.

Thats awesome! Why do I care? Well, I’ll finally (hopefully) be able to use buxfer in an automated manner, so it can download my bank transactions automatically. I know Buxfer released something for Safari recently, but that still won’t work with one of my bank accounts.

Anyways, will definitely wait for Gears to move out of beta before I trust it with my online banking credentials.

Google Groups via Lifehacker

Been reading a lot of the iPhone 3G  connectivity issues these days, especially at iPhone Atlas, like this. I do not think so many people could be wrong, but I am a bit skeptical, most probably because I haven’t experienced 1 bit of this problem. I kind of feel left out, although in a good way. Must be karma.

So I tried the tests as they mentioned, and I don’t know about someone else, but in my books, a download speed of 844 KBps is fantastic speed on 3G. Its fast enough to allow me to listen to streaming radio for most of the time during the day.

Again, this is not about my lawn is greener than yours, or Three is better than Optus. But I do think we as Australians might have kind of escaped the connectivity issues that the US is facing. The ‘inferior chip’ theory sounds good, but why does it affect some countries more than others? Meh.. what do I care?

Interesting survey this one. I am a big fan of Apple and Google, and am kind of not surprised at the results Afterall, it does not take a lot of effort to be better than Windows or MSN. But customer satisfaction is a lot more than being better than your competitors.

Personally, as a customer of both these products, I would rate them higher than their competitors, simply because they just work. They release features and updates that reflect a customer’s needs; the new feature releases are not too slow, nor are they that fast that I cannot keep pace with it.

Also worth considering:

• What stops companies like these from being complacent, from continually innovating?
• How do they sustain their culture?
• Do surveys like these actually affect the way they move forward?

Since opinions are dime-a-dozen, I thought I’ll write one of my own - on the month-old iPhone 3G. Thats right - I got mine on d-day - July 11. I thought the iPhone would be a good topic to start blogging again.

Not having played with an Ipod Touch or the first generation Iphone before,  I felt like Alice in Wonderland on laying my hands on the IPhone 3G. Whats more, the novelty has not died yet, unlike some of my other love affairs with tech toys that I have flirted with in recent times.  

Is it perfect? Hell no! Can it be improved? Of course, yes. Would I buy one again in its current state? Absolutely! Sure, people complain about it not being capable of sending MMS messages, recording live video, having a meagre 2MP camera, missing copy-paste capabilities.. the list goes on. Personally, it gave me a tough time just trying to unlock it (I am on the 3 network). Not to mention its crashed on me twice in the last month! Why, oh why then, you skeptics might ask, that I would buy one again in its current state. Two words - simplicity and futuristic.

Let me explain…

Simplicity

This sleek telecommuting thingy is one of the most amazing pieces of disruptive technology that I have come across in recent times that, while capable of almost everything that one has come to expect of smartphones, is also damn simple to use. I could give it to my granny, and she could start using it without a lot of help. Once upon a time, Nokia used to be the leader when it came to making simple-to-use mobile phones. But at the time, phones were just that - phones. Nothing more, nothing less. I can be modest and yet safely say that I am no simpleton when it comes to using technology. The iPhone 3G has brought simplicity back to phones, and thats what I love about it. Multi-touch, context-specific buttons, touch scrolling, among others means the device behaves in a pragmatic fashion, rather than in ways being bound by the traditional limitations of hardware and software, like other phones of current times are. 

Futuristic

Crystal ball gazers, or tech pundits as they are often called, have, time and again stated that more and more computing will be done on smaller devices. Pieces of technology around the home will be connected to each other. Fridges will be connected to the Internet and will be able to order milk online, just in time. We have heard it all before, and surely, as prototypes,  these ideas already exist. The iPhone 3G is the one consumer device that makes many of these ideas a reality. Applications (or Apps in iPhone 3G’s lingo) like Apple’s own ‘Remote’ means I could be controlling music on my Mac’s iTunes, which streams music though my living room speakers, while not being physically close to either. (Products like these cost in excess of AUD $1000, meaning that the iPhone3G pays for itself on day one even if you were to buy it outright.) 

I can today capture photos on the phone, upload them to my Flickr at the same time or send it to location-aware social networking sites. Or I could blog something on this very site, while on the bus on my way back from work. And if I were bored, I could always play my game of Sudoku, or listen to online streaming radio.

Quite some time back, a futuristic idea kind of fascinated me - Smart alarm clocks, which would know of your flight timings, know the route to the airport, and wake you up early if it detects adverse traffic conditions. Coming to think it - we are not that far from this idea becoming a reality. The iPhone has an alarm clock, has email and calendar functionality - which means it is capable of knowing your flight timings, the A-GPS knows of your location, and the use of Google maps also means it knows of traffic conditions (not for us Australians, yet). And if there is one company that can combine these smarts, its Apple.

The Quirks

Yes, the phone only has a 2MP camera, with neither zoom nor flash. Hopefully, Apple will listen to its customers and upgrade its camera. And yes - no recording capabilities and copy / paste. But hey, these are just software capabilities, which in all likelihood, Apple may already be working on, and in theory, it might just require a software update to bring these capabilities to the iPhone. The point is, it does not matter which phone you buy, there will always be some things that you’ll miss.

Almost forgot - the phone does not have MMS capabilties either. And Macbooks don’t have floppy drives. Thanks Apple.

A first visit to the real Australia: The spectacular Australian outback:

Till recently, I had a weird compatibility issues with my Macbook and the office Exchange server. The problem was related to meeting invites, in particular, the way Exchange wrote timezones in its .ics files.
Well, I am in Brisbane, and the way I expect any sane programme to write its timezone is “Australia / Brisbane”. However, Exchange being Exchange, writes it completely different, and when opened in iCal, the meeting invite almost always gets offset by 10 hours or more.My solution was to create an applescript, that striped off the ics attachment from the message, modified the timezone in Textwrangler, and then opened the modified ics file in iCal. You can find the script here: do_ics_magic.scpt

Requirements: I have tried it on OSX 10.4. I am sure it should work on 10.3 as well. Since it depends on Textwrangler to modify the timezone, you’ll need it installed. Textwrangler is free and you can get it here

How to use: Simply download the script to your scripts folder. If you want the script to automatially appear when you have Mail.app open, you’ll need to save it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/ folder. I have created a rule in Mail.app which automatically launches this script when it sees a file with an ics attachment. But then the only emails with ics attachments I get in my office account are internal. So this may not work for you. In this case, just select the message and run this script.

Well, I’ll be in Maleny, with my friends, but those of us who are in Sydney, can get themselves on Google Maps. See Australia Day 2007 on Google Maps

In my last post I blogged about how there are cool third party
clients including flock and Journler, that I could use to blog, in
theory. But for some reason, they didn’t quite work.

I since tried a few suggestions, and am happy to say it worked. But
first the problem, or at least what I think the problem is: The
xmlrpc.php file, of late has had lots of vulnerabilities. It seems that
hosting providers have taken a proactive approach and added a htaccess
rule that denies access to the file.

The solution, as pointed out by lots on forums of most blogging
sites, is to rename the file. My xmlrpc.php file, though, was
configured to log errors. The log file however, was again not
accessible, and this prevented the hack from working. Once I changed
the line, $xmlrpc_logging=1 to $xmlrpc_php=0, it was all cool and
groovy.

Blogged with Flock

Well, I have decided enough is enough. Every few months or so, I decide to update my blog regularly. However, this time I am a bit more serious (Lets see how long that lasts). Anyways, this time there are more helpful tools, in theory at least, that might allow me to honour my resolution.

First off, there is Flock, which, for some reason, does not want to work with my hosted version of Wordpress. Second, there’s the excellent Journler, which has, for some reason, stopped working with WordPress. Hopefully, I will figure out whats going on soon and write more consistently this time around.

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