Aquarionics

Being a mobile company, it’s vitally important we get to test the new and shiniest phones, which is why I will never buy a Motorola, don’t think the N95 is as shiny as many people appear to think, and how I got to borrow the Office iPhone for a while.

The Office iPhone was bought when we launched last autumn and is a US model with the hack so we could use it in this country and install applications on it. I didn’t use many third party apps, simply because doing so was more complicated than I could be bothered to do. I look forward to the day we can develop for it easily, though.

The Good

The interface is shiny and spinny and nice. It is one of the nicest phone UIs I have had the pleasure of using. Things transition between states – often ignored in interface design – rather than instantly changing to other things.

The SMS interface, which is laid out roughly like an IM session, is a revolution someone should have thought of years ago, it’s a very simple threading implementation, but makes dealing with SMSs as a form of conversation – rather than alert – much easier.

The orientation-aware interface is very well done. It flips only when its obvious that you want it that way up.

Safari works very well, though the inability to edit (You can only append or replace) URLS was a bit annoying. Google Maps was very nicely done, and I do like the use of the multitouch interface for pan and zoom, I think they could have done more with multitouch, though.

The less good

On the opposing side, the SMS interface makes dealing with SMSs that are actually alerts rather than conversations – daily updates, calendar tasks, SMS warnings, Twitter – a little less intuitive, and I’d like the ability to say “display messages from this contact individually”.

I didn’t get on with the keyboard very well, possibly it takes practice, possibly my fingers are too big.

The iPod bit… sucks. I hate to say it, but it does. The new interface makes the way I use playlists more difficult (I tend to flip though my oversized music collection adding stuff to an “on the go” playlist. Previous iPods let you do this from any playlist, artist or album list. In the new interface you can only add to On The Go from a dedicated full track list), the recessed headphone socket is incompatible with my headphones. You can’t operate it while its in your pocket, because there’s no tactile feedback for the volume or track changing interface, you have to bring it out and look at it. Coverflow’s useless unless you have art for everything. As a replacement for my 5^th generation iPod, it wasn’t wonderful.

The ugly

I will, however, be buying one. Not because I want one, although it’s a nice enough device I don’t believe it’s worth £300 and a new contract.

No. I will be buying one because some enterprising bastard pinched the borrowed iPhone from my pocket on the tube home on Monday night, and it falls to me to replace it. Which is, of course, the big problem with having and obviously shiny, obviously expensive device that you have to bring out of your pocket to operate.

I’ll stick to my Z310i for now.

trutap, the startup who employ me, are looking for PHP webdevs and Perl devs. Details of the perl positions are on the site, PHP stuff will be up soonish. If you want more details, talk to nicholas at trutap dot net.

We’re also looking for producty people and mobile-focused QA-like people. See the link above for further details.

All positions are London based, the office has a wii but no ball pool (yet) and does do Real Coffee. We get singing cleaners and occasional dancing drunks. I should put more of this kind of stuff on the official company blog, I suppose.

Today, I:

1. Made vegatable soup. It was nice.
2. Played Meteroid Prime. It was nice.
3. Looked at sofas. They were nice.
4. Drank a lot of tea. It was nice.
5. Became 27. It’s indifferent.
6. Told various banks and organisations of my new address. It was complicated.
7. It was complicated because one of the standard security questions is “How old will you be on your next birthday” and the answer is, today, inconsistant between systems.
8. Watched episodes of CSI:NY.

1. Played more computer games. They were also nice.

I am a qualified sysadmin. Whilst I currently am in a “I will never be on-call ever again” phase of my career (Very much like the “I will never drink again” phase of a hangover, with much the same future), the fear of people coming to your desk at 17:25 saying “The little lights have stopped flashing on my disk drive, and I’ve got a report for the board due, is this a problem?” never truly goes away. The other thing that office-environment sysadmins learn to hate with a passion usually reserved for Windows ME is this:

Wireless Networking.

It used to be a truism of security that the only secure computer was one with six inches of air beyond every port. Then came WiFi, Bluetooth, IRDA and such other mechanisms. Unfortunately, it appears that every single writer of wireless router firmware, Wireless card firmware and wireless card driver software is the type of person who go to “Information wants to be free” rallies. Everything is fine, providing you don’t, ever, try to do something as freedom-limiting as secure your wireless fucking network.

(Aside: I know of no way of fucking wired-ly, and that all fucking networks will, by their nature, be mostly wireless. I can, in fact, not think of any exceptions to this last statement and would further request that I not be educated in this regard. Aside ends)

I have borrowed a Belkin wireless router for my new flat, which I configured in no-time flat. Well, no time I was being paid for, at any rate, so in contractor terms it was free. In actual terms it was several hours of faffing with ports and cables and netmasks and reset switches and that was before I turned on the wireless network.

Then I turned on the wireless network. I configured it to be WEP secured with a 128 bit key, generated from a ten byte string set by the administrator – me. I fed this to my laptop, and it was happy. I was suspicious, because my laptop is rarely happy with anything, but I moved on.

My desktop, though it won’t be on wireless often, was also happy. I began to fear.

Sure enough, the Wii disagreed, and demanded I enter the full hex key. Since I don’t have a USB keyboard right now, I did so with the wiimote, over a Long Time.

I’ve borrowed an iPhone from work (I may get one, because (a) SHINY, and (b) I hate freedom). That required the full hex key too.

So did my Windows Mobile smartphone.

I’m beginning to notice a pattern here. Every device without a proper keyboard demands the full hex key. Every device with easy entry of such just needs the passphrase.

I hate computers.

Traditions are fun. Every two years for the past ten I’ve run though Robert Hayden’s Geek Code test (which hasn’t changed in that time). The rules are simple: I run it without looking at previous years tests. That’s it. I haven’t put it in this entry, because it’s slightly clearer as a text file

See my brief flirtation with Babylon 5 and X files! Watch as my dream of owning a mac comes true! Watch the ebb and flow of my housing situation! it’s like ten years of history in condensed form.

It’s a little scary.