/bin/tim

June 9, 2007

Lobster

Filed under: Dev, General, Microsoft, Mobile, Tech, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 9:24 am

I bought a Virgin Mobile Lobster as its a cheap WindowsMobile test device at £42 delivered with 200 minutes on PAYG.  Its a WM5 device but fine for testing.  You certainly wouldn’t want to use it as your phone, well not if you have any sense of style. 

Its unique feature is that it has a TV function which allows OTA streaming of TV pictures to the Lobster.  Now obviously this streaming requires some special equipment to function, in fact it looks like a full size TV has been stuffed inside the case its so big and thick.  I believe its called to Lobster because the case look like a lobster claw, just looks ugly to me.

Anyway, if you want one you can get it here http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/lifestyleLanding.do

June 7, 2007

Touch and Go

Filed under: General, Mobile, Tech, WindowsMobile, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 12:33 pm

Oh dear, 24 hours in, and things are not progressing well.  I have a theory, there are two types of people; phone people; and PDA people.  I’m clearly a phone person.

I’ve really tried to make this experience work, and the HTC touch should have been a persuasive device, but it fails for me on so many areas.  I can’t fault the build quality or the look and feel.  Its small too, surprisingly, smaller than my all time favorite the HTC Excalibur, and barely any thicker.

So why is it not right for me ?  Well I think the most obvious thing is that for me, WindowsMobile Pro adds no value over the Excalibur’s WindowsMobile Standard, ie it doesn’t do anything more or substantially better.  However good TouchFlo is, you can’t get away from the fact you need a stylus for some (many) tasks.  The touch screen requires quite a hard press, disconcertingly hard in fact.  I know the logic is to prevent accidental touches, but its preventing 1 out of 3 intended ones for me.  This also has the unintended side effect of making the device feel really slow to use.  A real shame.

The skin is not deeply integrated enough into the underlying OS,  even just extending the theme a bit more would have helped. Some of the minor annoyances in the skin should have been fixed before release such as the weather module. Its most local point for me is London which is a hundred miles away, so its pointless having it other than my natural concern for the wellbeing of London’s citizens, I might as well set it for New York. This could be easily fixed by using a better provider. Detail, Detail, Detail.

So what does this tell me?  Well WindowsMobile Pro is still not for me, which will mean the Apple iPhone is not for me either.  I’m simply not PDA person despite wanting to be.

As a side note, I know I’ve said this before to many MS people, and through the CrossBow beta, but please, please, harmonize the UI terms between Standard and Pro.  I still have to double take on which setting is which on each type of device which makes setting the Touch up from my i720 a constant translation of terms.

June 5, 2007

SQL Server 2008 ‘Katmai’ CTP

Filed under: Dev, General, Tech, Visual Studio, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:55 pm

This was quite a surprise to see this available today, as I had just been discussing the TAP with the guys at TVP and they were of the opinion that it would be within the next 10 weeks.

There’s a ‘Katmai’ min-site on Connect where you can get all the info and download the CTP.

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/content/content.aspx?ContentID=5395

June 3, 2007

Philips EasyLife LX2000

Filed under: Microsoft, Movies, Music, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 1:03 pm

I saw this advertised on TV last week and I couldn’t find a review so I went and had a look at one in PCWorld.  It looked very nice and I’d wanted a home media hub to replace an ugly PC for some time now so, despite it being horrifically bad value for money at £499, I bought one.  They also sell an LX3000 which has a bigger hard disk (250GB vs 160GB), double memory (2GB vs 1GB) and a processor with double the cache (couldn’t see any other major differences) but that was a whopping extra £200 and even worse value,  and those are bits I’m happy to upgrade myself if need be.

I was a bit cautious because it ships with Vista Home premium which normally requires a Cray and 100GB of RAM to run at anywhere near XP speeds,  and this was a weedy 1.6GHz Dual Core (think its a Pentium and not Core Duo, the spec says Core Duo but it has a Pentium sticker on the front) with just 1GB.  However, I don’t want it to do anything else but be a media center, so I decided to go ahead.

Quickly got it up and working, but it soon became obvious that this is the real bottom end for Media Center performance with a Vista score of 3.8 (constrained by video perf).  However, to my surprise the built in Intel graphics chipset did run Aero and at the full 1920×1200 of my 47″ HD LCD panel.  I actually ran this through the VGA connection via a VGA->DVI converter.  There’s no HDMI on the LX just a DVI.

So everything worked out of the box, just a little bit slowly.  Its not too noisy, but gets very hot if its in a stack of units, so give it an airflow.  The fan is on the bottom and they provide a stand so that you can have it stand upright, although it looks less attractive vertically.

It comes with a wireless keyboard with a built-in trackball which is the size of a marble and bizarrely light up red,  at which point you can see its filled with glitter… However, you do need to plug in a USB transceiver for it onto the unit which is a bit Heath Robinson.  I do like the remote control which feels good and works well,  in fact, don’t use the mouse in Media Center, the combination of the slow speed of the scrolling the massive acceleration of the trackball means you will never be able to get to the menu option you want, always the one before or after, just use the remote.

One minor annoyance is that the IR port for the supplied remote control is external, in fact it’s that huge shoebox sized unit shipped in the original MCE SDK that looks like a bar code scanner from Tesco, and its very out of character with the rest of the package.  One super-HUGE annoyance is the power LED.  Its blue (but that’s ok) but its as bright as a lighthouse! and when on standby it flashes every second so when you turn the lights out you immediately feel like there a police car outside.  Clearly any fix for this issue will look ugly (tried a plaster) so not sure what I will end up doing…

This looks like its exclusive to PCWorld, Dixons and Currys as the Vista build and even the Philips manuals have been edited, added to and branded by ‘The Tech Guys’, the trade descriptions contravening brand belonging to DSG.

Anyway,  I quite like it overall, and although I know I could have built a better one myself,  there is something to be said for just buying something complete that is just designed to do one job.  The actual clincher to buying it was that my wife said she liked it … its also the same reason that the top wasn’t off it and its guts exposed within 5 minutes of me getting it home, shame!

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/philips-easylife-lx2000-lx3000-tv-package

UPDATE: so lots of people have asked me questions about this article here are some of my answers:

Yes It definitely does 1920 x 1200 using the DVI connection to my ATEC 1080P (1920×1200) LCD TV.

It is slow, just on the cusp of usable.  Getting the extra memory would probably help a small amount but not as much as a better matched processor, maybe a 2GHz.

With media center running and nothing else it uses about 800MB of its 1GB RAM.

Its not at all noisy for me, I stand it vertically so the fan is in clear air.  When I had it stacked with my Apple TV it got very hot and span the fan up.  In normal operation its quieter than a Sky HD or PS3.

I have not found any way to turn the bright blue LED off at night.

No I can’t turn it on with the remote either, I have to press the button on the front to get it back from standby, big issue in my view.

May 28, 2007

Where’s WM6 Then ?

Filed under: General, Microsoft, Mobile, Tech, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:43 pm

After all the hullabaloo at 3GSM back in February about WM6 shipping and everyone supporting it there’s no sign of mass availability.  There’s spotty availability like the HTC S710, and of course T-Mobile USA upgraded the Dash (but not the European equivalent the MDA Mail).  I’ve seen WM6 on device for over a year now including old favorites like the HTC Universal and the HTC S620 (Excalibur) but they all faded away come RTM time.

I think Microsoft really need to get some pressure onto manufacturers and operators to start getting the upgrades out there, otherwise WM7 will be here before we know it and a whole class of devices capable of WM6 will have missed out.

January 25, 2007

Why doesn’t my fridge heat my hot water tank ?

Filed under: General, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:31 pm

In this ever more eco-concious world simple questions come to mind like why doesn’t my fridge heat my hot water tank,  or why doesn’t the rainwater, shower and bath water get used for flushing toliets ?

My fridge is just one of many waste heat sources in my house including TV’s and other delicate electricals, but surely this waste heat could be better used rather than me turning on the air conditioner to cool the house down.  There’s so much we could do if only there were innovative leadership to help us mere mortals actually do stuff that not only saves the planet but saves us money too.

This is right up there with the fact that I can buy a wind turbine from B&Q to go in my field, but the council won’t give me planning permission to erect it!  By the way this is a pretty amazing device, I walked past one in the doorway to B&Q last night.  Takes 7 years to recover your ROI and can only power one light bulb, but hey, it would make me feel better.

Come on government, give us an eco-minister to make all these possibilities happen!

January 24, 2007

BrainBench

Filed under: Tech, Training — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:36 pm

A colleague mentioned he had to take a BrainBench as part of a job interview, which for the unitiated, is a (potential) test of your skills in a particular subject.  I’d been aware of BrainBench for a while but I just looked at it again,  and they offer testing yourself as well as for employers now.  A single test is a hefty $45, but for (a still hefty) $199 you can sign up for a year and take and re-take as many tests as you want, at least thats better value for money at a 4 test breakeven. 

Amazingly, there are over 600 tests in all fields, not just IT, although IT is most numerous.  I’m always wary of these tests as they can highlight misleading results.  I think they are a useful pointer but not the whole story, and of course are only as good or comprehensive as the test authors. Caveat Emptor.

http://www.brainbench.com/

January 13, 2007

Great MDA III deal from Modaco

Filed under: Mobile, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:23 pm

Paul over at Modaco (Hi Paul!), has got a great deal on a T-Mobile MDA III Compact, Otherwise known as the HTC P3300 (’Atemis’).  Despite it being a PPC (sorry, my prejudice just slipped out), the P3300 is a great quad band WM5 device and it also has GPS built-in.  Its a relatively slim 16.8mm thick but be aware, it takes micro-SD memory cards.  I assume, since this is a T-Mobile package, that it ships with Co-Pilot GPS software, although I don’t see a mention of it so check it is included. Is the P3300 the best ever PPC ? Well nearly,  if it just had Wi-Fi, a 640×480 screen and 3G …

Apparently, you get it for ‘free’ based on an 18 month Flext 35 Web ‘n’ walk contract at £21.25 per month for first 8 months, and £42.50 for last 10 months, including 900 anytime minutes per month and ‘unlimited’ browsing.  I should say that of course ‘unlimited’ never means unlimited, and often nothing like it.  In this case unlimited means 2GB per month,  which should be fine for email/browsing on a device like this.  One limitation (not unique to T-Mobile) is that they reserve the right to slow down your connection speed if they detect you using any VOIP software like Skype, ‘to protect the network’.  Technically this also prevents you from using IM like MSN Messenger or Yahoo messenger, but I’m sure they are only looking for hoggers …

Anyway that means the lifetime cost of this package (assuming you necer exceed allowances) is £595 (8 x £21.25 + 10 x 42.50), whereas expansys (http://www.expansys.co.uk) are selling just the SIM-free unit for £480. So that means you get 16,200 (18 x 900) T-Mobile anytime minutes for £115 (£3240 value at T-Mobile £0.20p rate) + ‘unlimited’ web access.  Bargain!

But wait!  There’s more.  You also get a free Bluetooth Headset (although this might be a curse depending on what it is) and MoDaCo Plus membership. 

If you really want to unlock it to be SIM-free as well, then its costs £20 http://www.imei-check.co.uk/c3unlock.php

Anyway, sounds like a good deal to me,  good job Paul!

Here’s the link to the offer …

http://www.modaco.com/index.php?s=aa898cb7ee5f599db89cf9413b20377b&showtopic=251021

mda_compact_iii_with_copilot_g_angled.gif

January 12, 2007

This is future stuff … today

Filed under: General, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:47 pm

At CES 2007 PQI introduced a 64GB SSD DOM (Solid State Device Disk On Module) flash memory replacement for a laptop hard disk.  Low power and silent, but there’s no word on price of performance.  It has a SATA (100MB/sec) interface,  but I hardly think that will be the performance bottleneck, but I really hope its not unusable speed.  PQI also say that 128GB will be available during 2007.  Now this is really useful technology for reducing power, noise and heat emissions and I will certainly look at upgrading my laptop disk to this … if only my laptop had a SATA interface!

http://www.pqi.com.tw/news_1.asp?ID=1444

pqismall.jpg

January 11, 2007

Cool Gadget

Filed under: Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:59 pm

ADS Tech have released a really cool USB key which can speed up video conversion to MP4 up to 5 times, allegedly.  It only costs £50 and is well worth it if you need to convert your movies to PSP or iPod. Unfortunately it is only available to order in the US right now … http://www.adstech.com/products/RDX-160/intro/RDX-160_intro.asp?pid=RDX-160

January 10, 2007

Apple Keynote is now viewable on demand

Filed under: Apple, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:47 pm

including the iPhone announcement.  http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/keynote/

January 8, 2007

Q

Filed under: Microsoft, Tech, altaVENTE — tim CARMICHAEL @ 9:29 pm

Q is the codename for Windows Home Server (WHS) initiative announced by Bill Gates last night.  This type of thing has been done many times before but when Microsoft do it,  thats when its going to take off.  Ostensibly this is a solution to provide homes with their own equivalent of a datacenter where all the family’s PC’s attach to and store their data.  Whilst technologically there’s nothing really new in this technology repackaging, its the packaging of the solution that actually matters. Cleverly Microsoft haven’t skimped on the base OS using Windows Server 2003 as the foundation with all of its security properties.  This is then merged with hardware from a range of partners including HP, Intel and AMD to provide the all in one box solution.

One of the most interesting things for me is that although this is targetted as a home appliance, I can see it getting wide deployment in corporate environments because of its simple deployment and zero management.  Don’t get me wrong,  this would be tactical rather than strategic deployment, but its low cost and no knowledge approach will win lots of friends.

We’re planning to have Rhapzode and Movie Compiler compliant with WHS at launch and integration in with the ratings and media center extensions.  So watch this space!

whs.jpg

January 5, 2007

Sometimes its better to be ignorant

Filed under: Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:40 pm

One of the games I got for my PSP this christmas wanted to do an update of the firmware from 2.5 to 2.8, so seeing nothing wrong with this I said yes to the request and let it get on with it.  When I came back to it, there was a forlorn message saying the update had failed and I should call tech support.  Now normally that would be the last thing I would do,  but I really don’t know much about PSP’s and so I turned it off and left it. 

When I went to use it the next day it wouldn’t turn on.  Strange …. however my first thought was that it was the upgrade that caused the problem so I tried a hard reset … no luck, still dead.  A small amount of research revealed that when the Sony PSP upgrade fails it turns the device into a ‘brick’ ie of no value (strangely no value to a housebuilder either).  There seemed no solution so I went ahead and called Sony.  They explained that it was now a ‘brick’.  Furthermore Sony would not do anything about it and so it would remain dead … WHAT!! surely this can’t be true?  It was, it is.  I explained that the game forced me to do the update and that I had no control over what happened and that I could not be expected to know that it could irreparably damage my PSP.  Apparently I should have known, but because I didn’t and importantly, I had left the room whilst the upgrade completed (and didn’t watch it) they would this once do a warranty replacement.  PHEW!

The rep informed me that had she believed I knew what I was doing, or I had some technical knowledge then there would have been no replacement as I should have known better (known what better I hear you ask!).  Personally I think this is pretty sharp (no pun) practice for Sony to engage in.  Either their update works and they take responsibility when it doesnt work, or they shouldn’t allow it to be done unsupervised. 

You have been warned!

December 15, 2006

The eSATA MultiLane Highway

Filed under: Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:01 pm

This is just a really cool idea.  I heard about this a while ago, but only started to look at it recently after my drive caught fire and then kindly destroyed my whole PC.  MultiLane uses the infiniband cable standard to join 4 SATA drives contained in an external box directly to a PC using two special backplates and one single, robust infiniband cable.  All the remaining internal cabling is standard SATA.  So you get the full 3GBps per channel and the infiniband just has all four SATA cores bundled in one thick cable.  The PC backplanes cost about £10, the infiniband cable is about £35 and a 4 drive cabinet with interface is about £70.

Why bother ? well I can now externalise my SATA drives and have none inside the PC itself whilst still using them to boot my PC.  This reduces power and heat inside the PC case, and makes the drives transportable to any other PC with the £10 backplane installed. Obviously the external drive array is ‘dumb’ and has no inherent abilities like RAID which still have to be provided form the host PC, but this is ok, after all its just a bunch of disks (JBOD) not a server…

There is some good background info here http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_multilane-solutions.html

Picture courtesy of http://www.satacables.com

December 11, 2006

montavista Linux on the Sony PRS-500

Filed under: Dev, Mobile, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:50 pm

I just found out that my PRS-500 has a Linux OS … its actually Hard Hat Linux from montavista (http://www.mvista.com/).  I know montavista as the OS providers for some of the Motorola Linux phones I have seen. 

I found the sources for the PRS-500 hidden deep on Sony’s site (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/PRS-500U.html).   Here’s whats available …

  • EBOOK_1_2_0_P4.2_20051008_Linux_src.tgz
  • USBTG_EBOOK4_20060801.tgz
  • hhl-target-bash-2.05a-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-fileutils-4.1-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-findutils-4.1.7-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-gcc-3.2.1-mvl3.0.0.5.20.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-glib-1.2.10-mvl3.0.0.7.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-glibc-2.2.5-mvl3.0.0.15.14.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-grep-2.4.2-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-hardhatutils-1.14-mvl3.0.0.10.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-hostname-2.09-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-mkcramfs-2.4.16-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-mtd-utils-2.4.16_1.16-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-ncurses-5.2-mvl3.0.0.5.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-openssl-0.9.7b-mvl3.0.0.1.097.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-pam-0.72-mvl3.0.0.4.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-procps-2.0.7-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-psmisc-20.1-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-sed-3.02-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-shellutils-2.0.11-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-sysvinit-2.78-mvl3.0.0.11.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-tar-1.13.19-mvl3.0.0.3.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-textutils-2.0-mvl3.0.0.2.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-time-1.7-mvl3.0.0.1.src.rpm
  • hhl-target-util-linux-2.11h-mvl3.0.0.4.src.rpm
  • mtools-3.9.8.tgz
  • src_librofb_060414.tgz
  • src_libroi2s_060713.tgz

The question is, what can I do with this information ?   Although Sony provide the source, theres no build environment, no flashing tools, no documentation.  I don’t really want to buy a montavista Linux Pro Dev environment, so I guess I’ll never know!

December 10, 2006

Annual upgrade time

Filed under: Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:33 am

My PC recently burst into flames destroying almost everything except the graphics card.  I was actually using it at the time!  The seat if the fire was a small ASIC on a Maxtor drive which then seemed to cause damage via the SATA cable to the motherboard which then started smoking with the accompanying acrid smell of of components frying themselves. Bizarely this also killed the second drive in some way as it wont power up anymore.

So I consigned myself to the annual upgrade exchanging the AMD x64 X2 4400 for an Intel Quad QX6700, 2GB for 4GB, a nVidia 7900CTX for a nVidia 8800.  I enjoy building PC’s so putting it all together is a treat,  but not without its woes …. 

I bought the bits from a combination of ebuyer.co.uk and overclockers.co.uk to get the bits I wanted.  ebuyer were a cool £100 cheaper than anyone else for the Intel QX6700 cpu,  and the picture below probably shows why ….

 

It came packed loose in a small unmarked box, looking like it had been swept up by the cleaners the night before…but, despite my skepticism it worked!  There was no fan but I had already selected a separate Freezer 7 Pro so I was ok.

For the motherboard I picked the ASUS P5W64 WS Pro which I hadn’t given much thought to apart from it supported the QX6700.  The main deficiency for me with this otherwise excellent motherboard is that it only has 2 PCI slots and 4 PCI-E slots for 4 graphics cards. One of the interesting improvements about this mobo is that you can put a ROM upgrade onto a USB key or disk and it will recognise the device from the BIOS and load the file … cool!

For the case I was using my ever trusted option, the Antec Sonatta II which is close to silent with its 450 watt PSU.  However, with all this extra power requirement I went to the local PCWorld and purchased a Jeantec 700W Silent PSU which has a natty wattage indicator on it.  However it went straight back and from the moment it was switched on it was like standing in a wind tunnel …. xtreme noise!  I did like its modular cabling system though, where the internal cables are supplied separately and you only use the ones you need.  What I did notice though was that at standstill, the Jeantec was only reporting 200W usage … so I swapped back to the antec which I’m very happy with.

Finally its all working, and its quick and quiet.

December 9, 2006

The Sony PRS-500, the disappointment …

Filed under: Mobile, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 10:35 am

Well I tried it, and it doesn’t meet the hype, well for me anyway.  For more than 10 years I’ve been waiting for a usable ebook,  and this isnt it.  The basic problem is that the DPI setting for the 6″ 800×600 screen just isnt good enough to match print.  Its also expensive, but feels cheap, and has the aesthetics of a childrens leap pad.  The PC reader software is clumsy and ugly and doesnt work on Vista.   Page turning is painfully slow and you have to plan for it to happen.  Its as if it goes away and renders the next page only when you press the advance the page button, and displays it 2 seconds later, not really acceptable. Its also nearly a year late after appearing at CES 2006.

 The iRex Iliad looks like it might have a slight edge on display as it uses a bigger 8.1″ 1024×768 display, although I think page turning is as lethargic as the Sony.

« Newer Posts

Blog at WordPress.com.