The dividing line between genius and insanity has never been so close. The results. These are the tunes that iTunes thinks belong together:

• Here Comes The Flood — The Divine Comedy
• Right Said Fred — Bernard Cribbins
• Pretty Flamingo — Manfred Mann
• Mulder And Scully — Catatonia
• Sunshine On Leith — The Proclaimers
• Heroes And Villains — The Beach Boys
• Love Me Like You — The Magic Numbers
• Half The World Away — Oasis
• Together — The Raconteurs
• Still Take You Home — The Arctic Monkeys
• Life On Earth — The Divine Comedy
• Chemtrails — Beck
• Songs of Love — Ben Folds
• All mine (Portishead cover) — The Divine Comedy
• Substitute — The Who
• Sorted for E's & Wizz — Pulp
• The Ballad of Tom Jones — Space
• Funny Little Frog — Belle and Sebastian
• Someone — The Divine Comedy
• Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) — The Arcade Fire
• Disco 2000 (Pub Rock Version) — Nick Cave
• Dog — Ben Folds
• Parklife (Live) — Blur
• Running the World — Jarvis Cocker
• The Size Of A Cow — The Wonder Stuff

I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.

Can you see the metaphor coming, kids? I’m sure you can. Nevertheless, the above actually happened.

Tuesday I made a mistake. Or, rather, a series of mistakes. The first was disabling the active scan of AVG (my virus scanner of choice) because it was fucking up the IO of something I was trying to do. The second was clicking on an EXE from a site I hadn’t used before without the above running. Nothing happened.

Then I got a popup saying spyware had been detected, and did I want to install AntiSpyware 2009?

Then my desktop wallpaper changed to “SPYWARE FOUND! DOWNLOAD ANTISPYWARE NOW!” and I lost the ability to change it.

At this point I ripped the network cable from my machine. I had left Windows open, and now I was being bitten on the arse.

My backup system works, which is fortunate. I have a combination of cygwin, rsync and a framework of scripts to sync my user files to an external location and a backup drive. Within my user files directory are windows shortcuts that the windows version of rsync can treat as symlinks, and these go to things I need to back up outside the general framework of My Documents (Actually, I have a C:Global (Which is also ~aquarion/Global and /Users/nicholas/Global depending on OS) which contains subdirs of Documents, Pictures, Music, Projects and Savegames and syncs up over the machines).

This notably doesn’t include stuff on my Desktop (which is just as likely to be downloads as in-progress stuff) or the contents of my Ubuntu VMWare image which I tend to develop in. I lost everything I hadn’t checked into svn recently, which is probably a good thing to make me do so more in the future.

Windows install was nuked from orbit (It needed doing anyway, it was over a year old) and now I have a couple of days of installing patches (from behind my firewall, natch) and reinstalling things and typing in CD keys.

All while attempting to splatter that fucking mosquito.

I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.

Can you see the metaphor coming, kids? I’m sure you can. Nevertheless, the above actually happened.

Tuesday I made a mistake. Or, rather, a series of mistakes. The first was disabling the active scan of AVG (my virus scanner of choice) because it was fucking up the IO of something I was trying to do. The second was clicking on an EXE from a site I hadn’t used before without the above running. Nothing happened.

Then I got a popup saying spyware had been detected, and did I want to install AntiSpyware 2009?

Then my desktop wallpaper changed to “SPYWARE FOUND! DOWNLOAD ANTISPYWARE NOW!” and I lost the ability to change it.

At this point I ripped the network cable from my machine. I had left Windows open, and now I was being bitten on the arse.

My backup system works, which is fortunate. I have a combination of cygwin, rsync and a framework of scripts to sync my user files to an external location and a backup drive. Within my user files directory are windows shortcuts that the windows version of rsync can treat as symlinks, and these go to things I need to back up outside the general framework of My Documents (Actually, I have a C:Global (Which is also ~aquarion/Global and /Users/nicholas/Global depending on OS) which contains subdirs of Documents, Pictures, Music, Projects and Savegames and syncs up over the machines).

This notably doesn’t include stuff on my Desktop (which is just as likely to be downloads as in-progress stuff) or the contents of my Ubuntu VMWare image which I tend to develop in. I lost everything I hadn’t checked into svn recently, which is probably a good thing to make me do so more in the future.

Windows install was nuked from orbit (It needed doing anyway, it was over a year old) and now I have a couple of days of installing patches (from behind my firewall, natch) and reinstalling things and typing in CD keys.

All while attempting to splatter that fucking mosquito.

This sounds deceptively simple, but really wasn’t, so here’s how it went. I had an 18 month contract with 02, ready to run out in September. But last month they phoned me up, and when I said I was waiting for the new iPhone, they recommended I switched to the Monthly Sim Only “Simplicity” contract, shaving three months off my contract (since Simplicity is a rolling monthly agreement) meaning I’d be able to get a new contract come July 11^th.

This morning at 08:45 I was waiting outside Walthamstow’s O2 shop, on the reasonable basis that it would be quieter than Oxford Street, and there was a couple of dozen people queuing at the time. At 08:55, I moved to Carphone Warehouse on the basis that swapping being 24th in line for being 5th in line seemed sane. So I was the fifth person to get into Carphone Warehouse, the other people selling the iPhone today.

CPW had 24 iPhone 8 gigs, and two iPhone 16 gigs. The first four people wanted 16 gig ones, and it became a race against the (heavily overloaded) computer system as they went though the upgrade process. Two didn’t make it, and left the store. The other two were on hold for credit checks.

Switching to the simplicity tarrif was the wrong thing, because it meant I’d shifted from being a normal O2 contract user, to a non-trusted base-level user, meaning to get an upgrade I’d also have to pass a credit check. Which was fine, but O2 had apparently been recommending the Simplicity route for lots of people, and so the national queue for credit checks was loooooong.

At 10:20 – almost an hour and a half after I arrived – I left the shop to get to work, late but salvageable. Today was a deadline day.

At 11:30 CPW phoned me (I’d left a card) to say my check had gone though, and they had a phone for me, but I would have to collect it by 12:30. Since I’d got in at 10:50, I felt that leaving at 11:30 for my lunch hour was taking the piss slightly, but left dead on 12. Kings Cross to Walthamstow takes exactly 26 minutes, I have found, if there’s a train when you get to the platform and it’s the middle of the day (so stops at stations to exchange passengers are brief). I ran. I don’t run often, but I ran today to get an iPhone.

I got it. It’s shiny. I bought insurance for it after what happened to the one I borrowed.

This doesn’t end here, though.

First, my shoes were not built for running, because they dissolved by my running though the rain. By eight this evening (when I left the office) the soles were falling off.

Second was trying to migrate contacts.

One of the really cool features about OS X is the phone support. For 10.4 it supported the latest Ericcsons, and would bluetooth sync to them, and when they got a text message it would appear on your desktop. For the brief period I had a compatible phone (a few months, the on-call phone for Those Who Evolve was one) it was great. However, it’s not been updated to support any phone since then, so it falls to feisar who provide plugins for many phones.

My first attempt was to sync the old phone to the mac, then the iPhone to the mac. But for some reason whilst my old z310i would sync quite happily with the Feisar plugin, the newer one won’t (I suspect it’s because of the newer one’s Orange replacement firmware), and in attempting to fix this plugin (they’re all scriptable) I ran the unit test suite, which overwrote my entire phonebook.

I swore.

Nevermind, I thought, I’ve got backups. If nothing else, I’ve got all the contacts on my machine from the last fight with phone syncing at Christmas.

Er, no. Gone. No idea where. Fail.

After a certian amount of faffery (including grepping my entire hard-drive for a known-saved number to see if Outlook, ActiveSync or something had left a backup somewhere. Incidentally, the XDA (from the previous article) still has all the numbers, but no longer charges) I remember the existence of…

Bluebook

O2 run a service called bluebook. Bluebook is part of their data network, and (once you’ve signed up) stores SMSs for you from the wire as they go to your phone. Which is Really Fucking Handy. But not as useful as its ability to look like a valid syncing service for contacts, which my phone has been merrily syncing away to since I signed up a few months ago, silently and automatically. A perfect backup.

It’s even smart enough to allow export of your entire contact list in a sane and rational format!

And from there I can import into Windows Address Book (I’m now at home), and from there into iTunes, and from there onto the iPhone, which now has all my contacts.

All for only… 70% of the time of typing them all in manually.

But I have an iPhone, and it’s shiny. Sorry, that’s as interesting as my life gets right now. You should talk to my brother, he’s being eaten alive by doomed crabs.

This sounds deceptively simple, but really wasn’t, so here’s how it went. I had an 18 month contract with 02, ready to run out in September. But last month they phoned me up, and when I said I was waiting for the new iPhone, they recommended I switched to the Monthly Sim Only “Simplicity” contract, shaving three months off my contract (since Simplicity is a rolling monthly agreement) meaning I’d be able to get a new contract come July 11^th.

This morning at 08:45 I was waiting outside Walthamstow’s O2 shop, on the reasonable basis that it would be quieter than Oxford Street, and there was a couple of dozen people queuing at the time. At 08:55, I moved to Carphone Warehouse on the basis that swapping being 24th in line for being 5th in line seemed sane. So I was the fifth person to get into Carphone Warehouse, the other people selling the iPhone today.

CPW had 24 iPhone 8 gigs, and two iPhone 16 gigs. The first four people wanted 16 gig ones, and it became a race against the (heavily overloaded) computer system as they went though the upgrade process. Two didn’t make it, and left the store. The other two were on hold for credit checks.

Switching to the simplicity tarrif was the wrong thing, because it meant I’d shifted from being a normal O2 contract user, to a non-trusted base-level user, meaning to get an upgrade I’d also have to pass a credit check. Which was fine, but O2 had apparently been recommending the Simplicity route for lots of people, and so the national queue for credit checks was loooooong.

At 10:20 – almost an hour and a half after I arrived – I left the shop to get to work, late but salvageable. Today was a deadline day.

At 11:30 CPW phoned me (I’d left a card) to say my check had gone though, and they had a phone for me, but I would have to collect it by 12:30. Since I’d got in at 10:50, I felt that leaving at 11:30 for my lunch hour was taking the piss slightly, but left dead on 12. Kings Cross to Walthamstow takes exactly 26 minutes, I have found, if there’s a train when you get to the platform and it’s the middle of the day (so stops at stations to exchange passengers are brief). I ran. I don’t run often, but I ran today to get an iPhone.

I got it. It’s shiny. I bought insurance for it after what happened to the one I borrowed.

This doesn’t end here, though.

First, my shoes were not built for running, because they dissolved by my running though the rain. By eight this evening (when I left the office) the soles were falling off.

Second was trying to migrate contacts.

One of the really cool features about OS X is the phone support. For 10.4 it supported the latest Ericcsons, and would bluetooth sync to them, and when they got a text message it would appear on your desktop. For the brief period I had a compatible phone (a few months, the on-call phone for Those Who Evolve was one) it was great. However, it’s not been updated to support any phone since then, so it falls to feisar who provide plugins for many phones.

My first attempt was to sync the old phone to the mac, then the iPhone to the mac. But for some reason whilst my old z310i would sync quite happily with the Feisar plugin, the newer one won’t (I suspect it’s because of the newer one’s Orange replacement firmware), and in attempting to fix this plugin (they’re all scriptable) I ran the unit test suite, which overwrote my entire phonebook.

I swore.

Nevermind, I thought, I’ve got backups. If nothing else, I’ve got all the contacts on my machine from the last fight with phone syncing at Christmas.

Er, no. Gone. No idea where. Fail.

After a certian amount of faffery (including grepping my entire hard-drive for a known-saved number to see if Outlook, ActiveSync or something had left a backup somewhere. Incidentally, the XDA (from the previous article) still has all the numbers, but no longer charges) I remember the existence of…

Bluebook

O2 run a service called bluebook. Bluebook is part of their data network, and (once you’ve signed up) stores SMSs for you from the wire as they go to your phone. Which is Really Fucking Handy. But not as useful as its ability to look like a valid syncing service for contacts, which my phone has been merrily syncing away to since I signed up a few months ago, silently and automatically. A perfect backup.

It’s even smart enough to allow export of your entire contact list in a sane and rational format!

And from there I can import into Windows Address Book (I’m now at home), and from there into iTunes, and from there onto the iPhone, which now has all my contacts.

All for only… 70% of the time of typing them all in manually.

But I have an iPhone, and it’s shiny. Sorry, that’s as interesting as my life gets right now. You should talk to my brother, he’s being eaten alive by doomed crabs.

I’ve never used these, and I don’t like them. But now I know about this:

This makes all the little arrows search your internal library instead. So clicking the arrow beside “Hello City” takes me to the album, and clicking “Barenaked Ladies” takes me to my entire collection of canadian bands with a double-bass in them.

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.

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.

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.

But as a biz dev guy (who doesn’t have time – or a reason – to be online much) – and despite the fact that my job is all about relationships – I find twitter to be pretty pointless. LinkedIn, on the other hand, I use every single day.

Oh.

Good.

I’ve been watching the Social Networking backlash with something of a professional interest, seeming as I’m working for a company whose primary product is to interact with many of them, and my primary response to “I can’t use Facebook as a professional Customer Relationship Management system” and “Twitter’s no use in maintaining business relationships” and “Google’s not helping my website get more hits” is… er…:

Oh.

Good.

Twitter is ambient sociality. It’s what it is good at. It’s for “this is what I’m doing” and – more often – a ping in the background with something that someone else is doing. Attempting to use it as a network management tool, either for people or servers, is not what it is designed to do. It works suprisingly well as a command-line interface to remote websites (I’m a new convert to remember the milk), but complaining that Twitter doesn’t help you manage your business is kin to complaining that you can’t use lego for your corporate HQ. It may look the right shape, but you need a heavier tool.

Facebook is at its best as a social – in the “go out with friends” sense – network. Not as a network of everyone you have ever met, but as everyone you’ve ever wanted to keep in touch with. I have a simple criteria for adding people to facebook. a) Can I remember something you’ve said to me, b) Were you on fire, would I look an extinguisher or piss on it if the former is not an option. Subquestion: If the former _is_ an option. As a kind of online contacts directory of everyone I’ve ever met or worked with, or wish to maintain a professional relationship with, it’s not really the target market.

LinkedIn is, though. Facebook I use daily – more this week than ever before – LinkedIn I’ll visit periodically to add someone I’ve worked with/for, or more often if I’m looking for people to work with (trutap is, incidentally, hiring perldevs, Ops team & QA folks), but I wouldn’t use it to keep track of – for example – my best friends from secondary school.

There appears to be a tendency within the web technologist literati to see there only being one online social network to which you throw your allegiances and all others can hang, but they’re all better at some things than others, and until we can transport all our networks from one place to another though an defined standard format (I have my doubts as to this ever actually happening, but leave the floor open to the more optimistic) you’re always going to have more people on one network than another, so you have to decide on whether you’re going to miss out on a person for a website account, which – to me – isn’t any choice at all.

There is no silver bullet. There’s no best language as there will never be a best social network, best operating system, best text editor (though emacs will retain it’s bottom position, obviously), there is merely the best tool for what you’re looking for right now, and you can find me on most of them.

And if just one of them is perfect for everyone you want to list as a friend,

Oh.

Good.

But as a biz dev guy (who doesn’t have time – or a reason – to be online much) – and despite the fact that my job is all about relationships – I find twitter to be pretty pointless. LinkedIn, on the other hand, I use every single day.

Oh.

Good.

I’ve been watching the Social Networking backlash with something of a professional interest, seeming as I’m working for a company whose primary product is to interact with many of them, and my primary response to “I can’t use Facebook as a professional Customer Relationship Management system” and “Twitter’s no use in maintaining business relationships” and “Google’s not helping my website get more hits” is… er…:

Oh.

Good.

Twitter is ambient sociality. It’s what it is good at. It’s for “this is what I’m doing” and – more often – a ping in the background with something that someone else is doing. Attempting to use it as a network management tool, either for people or servers, is not what it is designed to do. It works suprisingly well as a command-line interface to remote websites (I’m a new convert to remember the milk), but complaining that Twitter doesn’t help you manage your business is kin to complaining that you can’t use lego for your corporate HQ. It may look the right shape, but you need a heavier tool.

Facebook is at its best as a social – in the “go out with friends” sense – network. Not as a network of everyone you have ever met, but as everyone you’ve ever wanted to keep in touch with. I have a simple criteria for adding people to facebook. a) Can I remember something you’ve said to me, b) Were you on fire, would I look an extinguisher or piss on it if the former is not an option. Subquestion: If the former _is_ an option. As a kind of online contacts directory of everyone I’ve ever met or worked with, or wish to maintain a professional relationship with, it’s not really the target market.

LinkedIn is, though. Facebook I use daily – more this week than ever before – LinkedIn I’ll visit periodically to add someone I’ve worked with/for, or more often if I’m looking for people to work with (trutap is, incidentally, hiring perldevs, Ops team & QA folks), but I wouldn’t use it to keep track of – for example – my best friends from secondary school.

There appears to be a tendency within the web technologist literati to see there only being one online social network to which you throw your allegiances and all others can hang, but they’re all better at some things than others, and until we can transport all our networks from one place to another though an defined standard format (I have my doubts as to this ever actually happening, but leave the floor open to the more optimistic) you’re always going to have more people on one network than another, so you have to decide on whether you’re going to miss out on a person for a website account, which – to me – isn’t any choice at all.

There is no silver bullet. There’s no best language as there will never be a best social network, best operating system, best text editor (though emacs will retain it’s bottom position, obviously), there is merely the best tool for what you’re looking for right now, and you can find me on most of them.

And if just one of them is perfect for everyone you want to list as a friend,

Oh.

Good.

It says:

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

I would gladly pay a fee to have access to Pandora, it is a wonderful thing from wonderful people, and it is depressing that the organisations who think they are protecting the artists are doing so by fucking over their customers.

Yes, there are technological ways around the IP block, though I won’t discuss them here. This is a sad day for online music.

My main phone has been a HTC Wizard, sold by O2 as the XDA Mini. I bought it because it has a nice screen, a built-in keyboard, and will run PuTTY, which is handy when I’m pretending to be a sysadmin. It’s useful, in that it’s a pretty good Internet Device – though one of the new Nokia tablets would be better – but it fails massivly on several important criteria. Like:

• It’s too big. It’s not a device you can slip into your pocket and forget about, and it has an exposed screen so you have to remember not to put it where your keys or anything sharp is.
• The touch-screen is too stupid, and occasional resets the time while in your pocket.
• The battery life is annoying.
• You can’t lock the display when the media-player is on.
• The headphone jack is 2.5mm. Why? What is stopping them from using a standard jack?
• Windows.
• Mobile.
• Sucks
• Donkey
• Balls.
• Yes, that did need to be five or six points.

So, my new solution is for the XDA to live in my bag and be Wifi and GPRS if I can be bothered to swap the sim around, and I have got hold of a Sony Eriksson z310g. One of the few Eriksson’s with the clamshell form factor I prefer, an Eriksson interface (which I prefer to most of the rest) MP3 ringtone support and, and this was no small part of my decision to buy it, support for trutap. If I’m going to work for a mobile application company, it would seem useful if the software works on my phone. (FTR, it installed quickly and easily, its failure to connect to start with was because the phone installed the new Internet settings for WAP but not Java connections, and the MSN IM networking stuff seems to work. I’m pleasantly surprised :-).

Now the complicated bit. Getting my contacts off my XDA onto the 310 from a clean Windows install (without the supplied XDA drivers). Note: I do not have Office installed.

• Install Microsoft Active Sync
• Discover latest Active Sync will not sync to Windows’ built in address book like all previous versions would.
• Discover that there is no way around this, searching on the internet for a while.
• Decide to fuck this and try it in Linux. (Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn install)
• Find a tutorial for this follow it religiously.
• Everything installs fine, detects fine, all messages fine.
• Click “Sync”
• Nothing happens.
• Tail all relevant logs, track USB connections, unplug USB, reboot, plug in, tracking all logs, viewing all messages, turning up debug.
• Nothing happens.
• Search internet for solutions to nothing happening.
• Nothing continues to happen.
• Decide to fuck this and go back to Windows
• Find age-old version of Outlook 2002 that came with an older computer.
• Install it.
• Discover that latest version of Active Sync doesn’t support that either.
• Wonder how Microsoft Internet Explorer is not allowed to be backwardly compatible with itself when ActiveSync is.
• Wonder how the fuck we expect Microsoft to comply with other people’s data interoperability ideals when their own software is incompatible with itself.
• Locate shady copy of Outlook 2007.
• Install shady copy of Outlook 2007. Am surprised when I don’t have to reboot.
• ActiveSync doesn’t find any copy of Outlook on this computer.
• Reboot.
• ActiveSync finds Outlook 2007.
• The more things change.
• Sync contacts to Outlook.
• Install “Sony Ericsson PC Suite”
• Allow PC Suite to sync with Outlook and Phone.
• Get contacts on new phone.
• Jump for joy.
• Attempt to PURGE all traces of Outlook from my computer
• Fail.
• Book complete windows Reinstall for when I get back home from Christmas With Folks.
• Sigh.
• Go find Christmas Cake.
• Yay Christmas Cake

My main phone has been a HTC Wizard, sold by O2 as the XDA Mini. I bought it because it has a nice screen, a built-in keyboard, and will run PuTTY, which is handy when I’m pretending to be a sysadmin. It’s useful, in that it’s a pretty good Internet Device – though one of the new Nokia tablets would be better – but it fails massivly on several important criteria. Like:

• It’s too big. It’s not a device you can slip into your pocket and forget about, and it has an exposed screen so you have to remember not to put it where your keys or anything sharp is.
• The touch-screen is too stupid, and occasional resets the time while in your pocket.
• The battery life is annoying.
• You can’t lock the display when the media-player is on.
• The headphone jack is 2.5mm. Why? What is stopping them from using a standard jack?
• Windows.
• Mobile.
• Sucks
• Donkey
• Balls.
• Yes, that did need to be five or six points.

So, my new solution is for the XDA to live in my bag and be Wifi and GPRS if I can be bothered to swap the sim around, and I have got hold of a Sony Eriksson z310g. One of the few Eriksson’s with the clamshell form factor I prefer, an Eriksson interface (which I prefer to most of the rest) MP3 ringtone support and, and this was no small part of my decision to buy it, support for trutap. If I’m going to work for a mobile application company, it would seem useful if the software works on my phone. (FTR, it installed quickly and easily, its failure to connect to start with was because the phone installed the new Internet settings for WAP but not Java connections, and the MSN IM networking stuff seems to work. I’m pleasantly surprised :-).

Now the complicated bit. Getting my contacts off my XDA onto the 310 from a clean Windows install (without the supplied XDA drivers). Note: I do not have Office installed.

• Install Microsoft Active Sync
• Discover latest Active Sync will not sync to Windows’ built in address book like all previous versions would.
• Discover that there is no way around this, searching on the internet for a while.
• Decide to fuck this and try it in Linux. (Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn install)
• Find a tutorial for this follow it religiously.
• Everything installs fine, detects fine, all messages fine.
• Click “Sync”
• Nothing happens.
• Tail all relevant logs, track USB connections, unplug USB, reboot, plug in, tracking all logs, viewing all messages, turning up debug.
• Nothing happens.
• Search internet for solutions to nothing happening.
• Nothing continues to happen.
• Decide to fuck this and go back to Windows
• Find age-old version of Outlook 2002 that came with an older computer.
• Install it.
• Discover that latest version of Active Sync doesn’t support that either.
• Wonder how Microsoft Internet Explorer is not allowed to be backwardly compatible with itself when ActiveSync is.
• Wonder how the fuck we expect Microsoft to comply with other people’s data interoperability ideals when their own software is incompatible with itself.
• Locate shady copy of Outlook 2007.
• Install shady copy of Outlook 2007. Am surprised when I don’t have to reboot.
• ActiveSync doesn’t find any copy of Outlook on this computer.
• Reboot.
• ActiveSync finds Outlook 2007.
• The more things change.
• Sync contacts to Outlook.
• Install “Sony Ericsson PC Suite”
• Allow PC Suite to sync with Outlook and Phone.
• Get contacts on new phone.
• Jump for joy.
• Attempt to PURGE all traces of Outlook from my computer
• Fail.
• Book complete windows Reinstall for when I get back home from Christmas With Folks.
• Sigh.
• Go find Christmas Cake.
• Yay Christmas Cake

First (In order of “Things Aquarion saw”) was Opera’s decision to file proceedings with the European Union for Microsoft’s failure to adhere to web standards. I’ve got more to say on this, but I’ll do so later.

Second, we have Malarkey’s call to disband the CSS committee on the basis that browser vendors don’t want CSS to be a quantum leap forward.

Third, there’s a mess about default codecs in HTML5.

Let us deal, first, with the second option, because consistency of options is for sissies. In the rest of the world, that bit not concerned with technology, the way Standards work is that there is an idea for a standard that would make everyone able to work with everybody else’s work. Then a standards body puts together a complete spec, which gets discussed a bit, then ratified, then things are implemented based upon it.

In the web world, which because it moves faster sees itself above such staid systems, innovations go into the spec. The example people give for how well this works is the XMLResponseObject stuff that started in IE and then spread out. The counterexample is the IE Filter system, which requires a DirectX interface – difficult in non-microsoft controlled applications, impossible on non-Windows systems. These two examples are pretty good because they demonstrate a defined, simple expansion that can be implemented by other people; and a complicated expansion that cannot be done by anyone else.

Other examples include the Canvas object, Wiimote javascript events, search engine addition objects, conditional comments, blink, marquee, and various other bits, plus the forthcoming native comet object I’m sure will happen soon.

Mostly these things happen not because of companies intentionally fucking up the web, but because a) They need the functionality for something else the web engine does (XRef Canvas, Filter, Wiimote) or b) to try out forthcoming functionality.

An example of (b) would be Mozilla & Opera’s implementation of CSS 3 things like rounded corners and opacity, which are well-implemented with a distinct namespace.

The bits where we get into trouble are when we start implementing or using a specification before it’s been finalised, as we enter a new set of dark days where your implementation of CSS3 depends on which point-release of it you read.

So, you need give and take. The browser vendors are going to innovate, and some of those innovations are going to be good and useful enough to go into specs, but innovations should be kept in their own namespaces, far away from where you expect the eventual specified method to be, so that when the final method is implemented it can be done so in the right place, with the right methods, and we don’t spend the next decade with backwards compatibility issues, and the only people who suffer are the ones who relied on unfinished functionality who have to rework their code to do things the right way. (This is Acceptable, the penalty for being on the bleeding edge is occasional paper cuts).

The web developers have to step back a bit and see the difference between a standard, an implementation, and a useful hack. The first is the only thing we should rely on.

Specification bodies need to move forward, release a hard specification that things can be built to, and then work towards the next point release. Remember to let developers specify which versions we’re relying on, and help us fall back gracefully if it isn’t there.

And everyone needs to stop overreacting, or we’re going to lose.

Today we have taken a stand. Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. We believe that Microsoft has harmed Web standards by refusing to support them; Microsoft often participates in creating Web standards, promoting them, and even promising to implement them. Despite their talent, however, they refuse to support Web standards correctly. For example, Internet Explorer is the only modern Web browser that does not support Acid2.