Latest Rants

Apple Doomed .... not that old story again! (07/05/2008)

Recently, a friend forwarded me an article about Apple - and how they were doomed.

This is my reply to him.

I think it’s interesting that even with Apple this successful, the pundits still trot out the same old criticisms of Apple, instead of the real issues - like say software that is so broken in parts it’s a freakin’ joke (Leopard, I’m looking at you) or loss of focus (iPhone - yep, you). They clearly don’t actually use the product - or they’d be able to give you much better reasons why Apple fans should be slightly worried about this recent growth at Apple.

If you wanted me to give you an overview of the problems with Apple today, it would consist of growing too fast and loosing the focus you used to have. Not selling too much. Or not selling not enough. And certainly not that “we don’t sell to big corporations, we’re all doomed”.

I’d look at things like how Apple clearly rushed the release of Leopard, or have been hiring so fast that they have had to hire less competent employees. I leave you with this thought: if all the top developers went to work on the iPhone (Apple said that was why Leopard was late btw), who finished Leopard? The interns? Would certainly explain why stuff just doesn’t work (Airport Utility flakiness, .Mac Sync ‘just-not-working’, AFP on Leopard Server, etc. etc.).

Anyway, this is fast becoming a completely different rant!

John

Tags: TechnologyRantsAppleiPhone

Missing Christian Fellowship (22/08/2007)

Camp was/is an amazing experience. I haven’t really written much about it this year, mainly because I was too busy while I was there to actually write my thoughts.

I want to say it’s very easy to be a Christian at camp, but need to qualify the statement, lest it get misinterpreted. I don’t mean that camp is easy (heck we all know it’s darn hard work!), or that being a camp christian is easy as if to say it’s less genuine. Not at all. What I mean is that it’s easy to be a Christian in that setting of constant focus on faith, and constant fellowship with like minded people.

Back in the real world, I’m struggling. I miss that fellowship. I miss being able to talk openly about my faith with people other than my God. And it’s almost like I spend the time I have with my Christian friends here talking about everything other than my faith! Through no fault of me or them, but just from a lack of focus. Camp focuses your faith. Puts a point on it. Makes it the center of your life. I want my faith to be at the center of my life again. Back in the real world that’s a bit harder to do. But I need to find a way.

It think what I’m trying to say is that I need Christian fellowship. Without it, it’s far too easy to be a Christian without really living a Christian. I am a Christian. I no longer fear telling people that. Don’t worry, I’m still not a raging evangelical (!!), but I am sure of who I am, what I believe, and that I want that to be at the center of my life. The last 2 weeks have been really hard. I am simply not happy. Sure, part of it is that I miss my friends. But the bigger issue, I think, is that I miss my God. At camp you can feel his presence. You can feel the community of God. I want to feel it, that strongly, every single day of my life.

I guess need to find a church. But I have no idea how to go about it. Anyone got any recommendations for a liberal (or accepting of), young, vibrant, medium sized congregation in Melbourne?

Tags: ChurchFaithFriendsLife

If you've ever watched an Apple product introduction video... (18/08/2007)

Tags: AppleTechnologyFunny

Camp 2007 Portfolio (15/08/2007)

So a few people have asked me to post some pics from Camp this year… well here are a few of my favs. If you click on one of the photos it will enlarge it, and then let you scroll through them. There are 17 at the moment.

All of them were shot on my Nikon D50, with a 35-70mm AF Nikkor Lense (Fixed 2.8 Aperture).

Camp 2007 Landscape Portfolio - 12 Photos
Tags: CampPhotography

What have I been up to all winter/summer? (15/08/2007)

For those of you who didn’t know, or I haven’t really spoken to for a while, I thought I’d write a quick update about what I’ve been up to for the past few months.

Most of you probably know that I went back to the USA to camp this year, but some of you may not know what it is I do there!

Basically, I’m the camp photographer. This means that I take roughly 12,000 photos in 8 weeks. Of that 12,000 I choose about 6,000 ‘selects’ which then get uploaded into a photo tagging & management website that I built. I keep track of which camper is in each photograph - so that each parent that signed up to get photos of their camper at camp can then log in and see a personalised set of photos.

Yep, that’s right. In 8 weeks, I took and sorted 12,000 photos. This would simply not be possible without my MacBook Pro & Aperture. Aperture is Apple’s professional photo management tool - a little like iPhoto on steroids. I’ve written about Aperture before, but I’ve never really described my workflow. I figured it may interest a few of you, so here it is.

I basically shoot a schedule that is generated from the Camp Registration system. During the week, each camper chooses 4 activities that he/she wants to do. This may be things like Archery, Mountain Boarding, Horseback Riding or even Circus Trapeze (I know - how cool is that!). They also have the option of signing up for the Photo Program, which means they are on my list of campers to photograph.

At registration (where the campers arrive, have their heads checked for lice, etc.) I would take an ID photo of each of the campers I was going to be photographing that week. I did this using PhotoBooth (the fun app that comes with every Mac with a camera) and my Web Application (which accessed the folder PhotoBooth captured the photo to). I could then see what each camper in my program looked like:

Registration Information for each Camper

At the start of each week, I would generate a schedule that listed for me which campers I will be photographing. Because the campers are broken into two age based ‘units’, there are actually 7 periods of activities each day that I need to photograph (the older and younger kids overlap for one period each day). Based upon that schedule, I would then make my way around to each of the activity periods in the week. I generally made it to each activity once in the week, and took photos of each camper.

Back in my (thankfully airconditioned) office, I would download the photos a few times each day. I generally shot about 600 photos each day (on shoot days). Then, in the evening, I would trawl through the photos from that day and using Aperture’s Star Rating system, give the photos a rating. I basically rated as either nothing, 3-star or 5-star. 3-Star I used for photos that were my second choice, and 5-Star were my ‘selects’.

I would then export the photos out of Aperture. Here, again, I would not have been able to have managed so well without Aperture, as it has a fantastic ‘Export Presets’ system, where I could specify that I wanted each photo exported at a certain size (i.e. 50% of original) and with a custom name + counter. I exported them in the form photo_xxx.jpg. The great thing about Aperture is that it remembers what number your counter export was up to, which is great, but more importantly if I needed to export just one photo using a different preset, when I switched back to my custom preset, it still remembered where it was up to.

After the batch of selects (usually around 300) was exported, I would then ‘upload’ them to my web application. Here again my MacBook Pro was a godsend (as all macs are) because I was able to run PHP, MySQL and ImageMagik locally on my laptop. So while I ‘uploaded’ the photos - at this point I only really uploaded them to the webserver folder on my own machine. This made the process far faster than if I had had to wait for the photos to upload to my server in real time. (I bulk uploaded them later - as I’ll explain).

My web application let me add photos based upon activity. So for example, from the exported batch of photos (300) I would preview them in the Finder, and then choose the 10 photos for one activity, and upload them in a batch. These photos would then automatically be assigned to an Activity, and the Web App would create a thumbnail as it uploaded the photos (using ImageMagick). After the upload was complete, it would show me a list of the uploaded photos.

From here, I was able to click each photo (I usually opened them all in a new tab each) and then tag which camper was in the photo. The beauty of my system was that because I had a list of which campers were in each activity, and I’d taken an ID photo at registration, each photo would be presented with a list of which campers could possibly be in that photo (based upon the activity etc.). Each photo was a link that added a tag for that camper, so I would simply click the faces that matched the photo and close the tab to move to the next photo. It worked a treat, and looked like this:

Tagging Photos

After each Photo had been tagged, I then did an manual SFTP batch upload of the photos (and thumbnails) to my web host. This server was running a copy of the same MySQL database as my local MacBook, so I also did an export of that database and uploaded it to the server. I then updated that database on the server with the newer version (with info about the new photos I’d added). It looked like this:

Notification Email

Because each camper had a parent email address in my system, I then had a script that emailed the parents a notification to let them know that new photos had been posted. This directed them to a custom page on my server that was the Parent Login, which checked their credentials and then showed them just photos of their camper.

On that page, the parents could download the full size image (well, 50% from camera actually, but it was still 1500x1000). And that was basically it. The system was great, and scaled quite well.

Over the 8 weeks, I took around 12,000 photos, chose 6000 good ones, categorized and individually tagged each of them, and uploaded them to my web server. I had 474 individual registrations (i.e. kids to photograph, tho some were the same kids in subsequent weeks) which generated around $4700 for camp (it was $10 per week). Each Parent got at least 5-10 personalized portrait shots of their camper, and in most cases many more.

This is why I didn’t get much time to write my Blog, or respond to emails! Single handedly I ran the program, successfully I believe, and we actually limited how many campers we accepted into the program in later weeks because of the limitations on actually photographing so many kids. My system would scale nicely to even twice as many photos - we’d just have needed 2 photographers. But as a single photographer / admin guy, I think we did ok!

Want to see some pics? Check out this Gallery of my favorite pics from my 2007 in the next post.

Photography Equipment Used:

• Nikon D50 with a 35-70mm AF Nikkor Lense (Fixed 2.8 Aperture)
• 1gig SanDisc SD Memory Card

Computer Equipment Used:

• Apple MacBook Pro 15” CoreDuo (2.0Ghz) with 2gigs RAM, 256mb ATI Graphics Card
• FirmTek ExpressCard eSATA Adapter
• Vantec External eSATA Case with 320gig Hard Drive (for my Aperture Library of raw JPEGs)
• 19” Chi Mei LCD Display (1440x900) as secondary monitor
• Griffin Technology Elevator Stand
• MacAlly IceKey Keyboard
• Logitech Optical Scroll Mouse

Tags: CampPhotographyTechnologyAppleMacBook

Sitting in a departure lounge... (14/06/2007)

Well, I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Melbourne Airport. Ok, so I had to correct a small typo there. I typed it as “AirPort”. Yep, I’m a nerd. :P

Anyway, from where I’m sitting, I can see 8 people on laptops (apart from me). And get this - there is only ONE windows machine! That’s right - I can see SEVEN other mac users from where I’m sitting. Crazy! Of course I snapped a pic on my Nikon - I’ll upload later for all the Mac fanboyz/gilz.

Anyway, for those of you that didn’t know, I’m back off to camp. Done with this winter weather. Time for some sun!

Ooh - flight has just been announced for boarding. Better go! Catch you all on the flip side!

John

Tags: TravelCamp 2007TechnologyApple

It's good to be back... (18/05/2007)

In following up to this post, I am now back on a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s a 2.0Ghz CoreDuo (original spec), with 256mhz VRAM RAM. And it’s good to be back. I can play games on Windows again (thank-you ATi XT1600 256mb) and I can look at photos on a color accurate screen.

Long story short, it’s good to be back.

John

Tags: MacBook ProTechnology

If you liked I don't feel like dancing... (11/04/2007)

Hey everyone, if you liked I don’t feel like dancing by the Scissor Sisters, you have to check out this song.. I’m hooked on it..

Grace Kelly, by Mika. I’ve been listening to it for about two weeks, practically non-stop!

You can watch it on YouTube here and then, once you’ve fallen in love with it like I have, buy it from iTunes here…

I promise you, you’ll love it!

Tags: Songs

Finding just my South Africa trip entries... (01/04/2007)

Because a few people have asked me, if you just want to keep up to date with my trip updates (which you may miss the last few of now I’m posting them out of sequence with new posts) but not read the rest of my blog about technology etc., you can read this page, which will only show you posts about South Africa.

Thanks, John.

Tags: TravelNotices

Review : Palm Treo 680 (31/03/2007)

I bought my Treo 680 in December. I got it for a few reasons, but mainly because my 650 was almost 2 years old at this point, no longer under warranty, and at risk of dieing (the ‘p’ key had already lost part of it’s tactile feedback, and I was worried that other things would start dying. This is not to say I was disappointed with the build quality of the Treo - it had served a good 2 years of hard life - I use my phone a lot, every, single, day.

My Treo 650 was, without doubt, the second most used piece of technology I owned, after my Mac of course. I use it for everything - syncing my Address Book & Calendar of course, but also writing memos on it that I send to the Mac over bluetooth, keeping track of the time around the globe for chatting to my Friends in the USA, the RSA and the UK. I have SMS chat histories going back over 18 months, can SSH to my Linux box in the US from it & and manage the contends of my USB memory stick (which is really a memory stick sized USB card reader & an SD card that fits in the Treo). I guess you could say I’m a ‘power user’.

If you read my previous entry entitled “Memo to Palm: I want to give you more money!”, you’d know that I wasn’t overly psyched about swapping to the 680. My biggest concerns were:

• No 3G data
• No ‘Menu’ hard button

Well, I picked up the unit from Expansys because they not only had stock but were also the cheapest at $759.95. I was disappointed to find what my Credit Card was actually billed that they billed me in UK pounds, and whilst it wasn’t a lot more, it did cost me around $800 AU - which makes it no cheaper than walking into Organiser World off the street would have been (which I’ll be doing next time I need a new phone I’m sure!). I was under the impression that Expansys Australia was a local arm of the company and I’d therefore be billed in Local currency. All the prices on their site were in local currency. I’ve a good mind to chase them up about that. Maybe I still will. But I digress. Back to the Treo 680.

BTW, they now retail for around $650.00.

Physical Design

The physical design on the 680 is certainly slick. It looks like a current phone, unlike the 650, the design of which was decidedly ‘late 90s’. Antennas are so last century.

The keyboard is different (softer touch than the 650) - less tactile feedback, but one I got used to it I actually preferred it. Switching back to my 650 now and it feels strange. So no problems there.

680 Button Cluster, pic from The Gadgeteer

Button layout is decidly less useful than the 650. So I remapped them using a $5 piece of software I found called LudusP. I replaced the “Home” button with a “Menu” button. I left the two phone buttons intact, the reasons for which I shall explain in the Software Enhancements section.

I like the new square 5-way nav much more than the oval old one too. Again, it felt a bit strange at first use, but I got used to it, and even ended up prefering it.

The weight & size of the device is a bit thinner than the 650, noticably so. It just makes slipping it in the pocket a bit easier. A definite improvement.

The Sync cable is a much improved version from the 650 also. The old cable had a propensity to work loose after 6 months or so, requiring at times to be held while a sync took place. Given how slow sync was over USB on a Mac, this could get painful. On the newer device, it was fine, and feels like a stronger connection. But given I’ve only had it 3 months, it’s unlikely I’d see this problem develop yet anyway.

Software Enhancements

The new Phone Skin is nice - and more funcitonal for getting to favs etc. I even stopped using the ‘home’ screen on the 680 because it was fast enough to load the ‘phone’ screen (it used to be painful on the 650). So I didn’t actually miss the “home” hard button too much.

I love the name dropdown on SMS compose - it used to be there if you started typing the name and then pressed the 5-way down on the 650, but having it there by default on the 680 is a good evolutionary change.

Ignore with text - I’ve never used it, but it’s good to know it’s there.

I love the green button functionality within SMS. This is the sole reason I left it as a hard button. I am ALWAYS calling my top 5 friends from the SMS app on the 650, for 2 reasons. 1) it was always faster to load “Messaging” than “Phone”. I could simply select them from the top 4-5 names (they were invariably near the top) hit Menu, click up 4 times and dial them. Now, it’s even better! You simply choose them from the messaging list, and hit the green button. Where on the 650 this would be the phone button and would therefore take you to the Phone app, the new Green button presents you with the same option as the old “call sender” menu entry did, and you hit the middle button and away you go. Hit green again (instead of center), and it calls too. This is one of the few areas on this new phone that shows a real user has thought about the functionality. My guess? the engineer(s) responsible for Messaging actually USE their own product!

Love the ‘add to contact’ option (in addition to the “add to new contact” that was always there) when you receive a call from a number you don’t have stored. Of course it should have been there all along, but it’s nice to see it - better late than never!

Software Dehancements

Bluetooth - doesn’t seem to drop the connection straight after calls the way the 650 did. Seems less well implemented than the 650’s Bluetooth. Disappointing.

No call duration on the ‘Call History’ tab. I mean seriously, what is the deal Palm? You don’t TAKE FEATURES OUT when you release a new model! I used to rely on this quite a bit to see how long I had spent on the phone with clients - to bill them. Now I need to make sure I make a note manually after each call - by subtracting the start time of the call from the current time. I had 2 years of Call History. I shouldn’t need to start again!

SMS received date/time when phone is off. The Treo 650 used to tell me what time an SMS was received, even if phone was off. i.e. If I leave the phone off overnight but get an SMS at 2am, when I turned it on in the morning it would work. Not so any more. On the 680, it says I received the message when i turned the phone on.

The Messaging App is still an AWESOME piece of software. Probably the number 1 feature of a Treo in my opinion. Fast, simple & elegant. It’s Palm’s last great asset, even on Windows Mobile (but that’s a whole other disussion!). I’m just disappointed that it seems to have lost functionality. I mean.. what the?

Sound Quality

Let’s not beat about the bush. This is 2+ years old technology (an absolute age in technology years!), and still only a 2g phone. One can’t help but wonder whether Palm has done any work on the phone stack at all in the last 2 years (hey, even the last 5! - they bought it from Handspring as a phone product!) because calls are still scratchy.

Compared to a new Motorola 3G V3xx it’s like night and day. I don’t mind compromising a bit on call quality for all the other benefits of a Treo over a RAZR, but seriously Palm, this is a problem. Add a bluetooth headset and the quality degrades even further. In a noisy ambient area, it’s nigh unusable. A deal breaker for me. Disappointing to see no call quality improvement. I’d be very interested to see if it’s the hardware or the software. Given the 750 uses the same hardware (or so I’ve been led to believe), I’m trying to get my hands on one to try it.

Battery Life

Battery life on the 680 is quite a bit shorter than on the 650. It is slimmer, and has a lower rated battery, so this makes sense. Palm did have a problem initially with a bug in the Camera app draining the batter - you can get a fix for that, which does solve the problem. The battery still easily lasts a full day without worrying about how many calls / data I made. I had no problems with the Battery, but if you were in a situation where you may not be able to charge at least every second day, you may have problems.

Data Usage

Unfortunately in Australia, we have no EDGE data. Thus, data on the Palm Treos is a joke. But given the 650 was EDGE capable too, this doesn’t make much difference to this review - the situation has not changed from when I first heard about the 680. The simple fact remains - Palm have no serious data connection for their OWN OS based smartphones. This is a dealbreaker for many people. It will be for me very soon.

Concusion

The reduced battery life doesn’t bother me. The still-poor call quality does. The software enhancements gave me hope, the dehancements broke my heart.

I wanted to love this phone. But I’m back on a 650. Why? Because there were more things broken on the new 680 than were fixed from the 650.

I think it’s time to buy a 750. I’ve used windows mobile before, and have even used Palm’s Messaging app on an iMate before. Problem is the 750 is $1200, and that’s quite a gamble given the disappointment that was the 680. I wonder if I can get somone to lend me one to review…

To be honest I almost think Palm should send me one to give them some focus group feedback, or as payment for this review. They obviously didn’t get any focus group feedback from anyone who’s been a power user of the 650 in the past when building the 680!!

Thoughts, comments or questions? Email Me!

Tags: TechnologyPalmTreo 680ReviewsSoftwareHardware

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