October 21st, 2011

A tale of two iPhones

October 21st, 2011

I know that several people have been buying iPhones recently, but I wonder how many bought two in one day?

I have. Well, to be fair, I did have to take one back. I initially purchased the iPhone 4S from Three. But unfortunately, the Three network has almost no coverage in my home, as I discovered when I got it back there. (The moral of this story is to make sure that you haven’t transferred your previous phone number to your new network until you’ve tested aspects of it that are important to you. Fortunately, I hadn’t.) Here’s the Three coverage map of Cambridge:

You see that little light-coloured hole in the bottom left corner with no coverage? That’s where I live. Which is a bummer, because Three’s bandwidth, customer support, and prices are all really quite good.

However, I’m working at home now, and so being able to receive calls on my mobile while at home is really quite important.

And so I took my phone back into town, sorted out all the refunds and cancellation of contracts, and got another one. I was actually quite amazed that two shops in the centre of Cambridge both had availability of the iPhone I wanted. But sure enough, there was another 64GB 4S in black at Vodafone. And Vodafone, I did know, had good coverage at my home. Their data plans suck. At least, in comparison to Three or some of the other carriers. But, when I got it home, the coverage was fine.

And with Vodafone, there is an interesting twist, which is that if the coverage hadn’t been good, I could have bought a femtocell to improve it. I gather that these are not really very good, but since, if you have a contract, you can get the box from Vodafone for only £20, it seems as if ‘not very good’ might be much better than ‘nothing at all’ which is what some of the other carriers were able to give me.

Anyway, I’m loving this new phone. The camera is excellent, though I’ve only just started playing with it. Here’s a quick low-light shot from my kitchen:

Kitchen

But the Siri voice recognition system also seems to be splendid. In fact, this entire post was dictated into my iPhone, with only very minor corrections, and the insertion of links and images, afterwards. Writing something of this length, using a small phone keyboard, would have been a real pain. I am exceedingly impressed, especially considering the problems I’ve had with speech recognition systems in the past. The only downside is that it will only work when you have a good network signal because it relies on cloud-based services. But otherwise the implementation is great: there is a little microphone key next to the on the keyboard, and so almost anywhere the keyboard pops up, you can decide to dictate rather than type.

And so this has just been dictated into my WordPress blog page and I’m now going to hit save.

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October 15th, 2011

Taking control of your Mac keyboard

October 15th, 2011

I’m very fond of my little Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Apart from the slightly ridiculous notion of having batteries in a peripheral device which never moves around, it does just what I need: full-size keys, with the cursor keys in a proper configuration, but no numeric keypad to make me stretch my wrist out to unusual angles when reaching for the mouse or trackpad.

However, there is one thing that bugs me. The Ctrl key is not in the bottom left corner where God intended Control keys to be! (Unless you worship the Sun god, in which case you may like your Control keys in the place more commonly used for Caps Lock.) But Sun worshippers, and others who do not consider the Caps Lock key to be evidence of intelligent design, can do something about it: in System Preferences you can remap your Caps Lock to do something useful, like control.

But I don’t think anybody, reaching for the Ctrl key, finds their fingers moving naturally towards the second key from the bottom-left.

Many MacBook Pros have the same layout.

For many Mac users this won’t be an issue, because the Cmd and Option/Alt keys are more important, but if you spend most of your time at the command line or in certain editors, you’ll be hitting the Fn key all the time, and inserting spurious characters into your text.

But today, I found one utility (and only one) that will let me remap the Fn key so it operates as Ctrl: the snappily-named KeyRemap4MacBook.

This offers a scary range of options to remap all sorts of things, but hidden in there is the one I needed:

Perfect. This makes the Fn key operate like the right-control key, which means I can do all those Emacs-y things like Ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the line, but interestingly it doesn’t change its effect on the function keys, so I can still use them to do Volume Up & Down etc.

Update: A little later I found that, while the volume keys worked without any further adjustment, some of the other top-row ones didn’t – in particular, the brightness controls. And, in fact, KeyRemap4MacBook comes with a better solution to my problem: there’s a single configuration under the ‘Change Fn Key’ settings that maps the Fn key to be Ctrl, and Alt-Fn to be Fn. Even better.

That was all I wanted, but I dug a little bit further and discovered that, if you’re willing to edit some XML configuration files, you can create your own arbitrary mappings.

As a programmer, I use # much more than I use £, but on the UK Apple keyboard, you have to press Alt-3 to get the #. So I wanted at least to swap with Shift-3, which is £.

Here’s the XML to do it:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
    <list>
        <item>
            <name>Swap £ and # on UK keyboard</name>
            <identifier>private.swap_pound_and_hash</identifier>
            <autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::KEY_3, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L, 
                                        KeyCode::KEY_3, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L</autogen>
            <autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::KEY_3, ModifierFlag::OPTION_L, 
                                        KeyCode::KEY_3, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
        </item>
    </list>
</root>

I may eventually put # on another key like, say, ‘§’. Who uses ‘§’ outside the publishing world, anyway?

Or – aha – perhaps that’s the best thing to do with CapsLock…

Update: If you use this keyboard with Linux, you might want to check out Phil Endecott’s page here.

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By hook or by crook…

October 15th, 2011

Here’s a way to make yourself feel really stupid: take the SD card out of your camera and slam it happily into the slot in the side of your iMac, only to have it disappear completely. After a short, stunned moment, the realisation slowly sinks in that you have pushed it into the CD/DVD slot instead. How, you wonder, could anyone do something so foolish?

Well, here’s what the side of my 27″ iMac looks like, in a good light, after I have moved my head about 2 ft to the right from my normal sitting position:

I hope you’ll agree that it’s not quite such a daft thing to do. I certainly hope that, and so do the correspondents on this thread on the Apple support forum, where you can read several pages of confessions from people as foolish as me, and some helpful suggestions as to how to get it out again.

Based on one of those hints (Thanks, Cathy1956!) I fished it out with this elegantly-crafted tool:

Getting SD card out of CD/DVD drive

It’s good for people like me to have support groups in times of great need.

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October 14th, 2011

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…

October 14th, 2011

One of the side effects of getting older is that I have to take some regular daily medication (for some trifling ailments). Another is that I get more forgetful. So I appreciate the tablet packets that come marked with the days of the week.

I do sometimes suspect, though, that the manufacturers think you will take a particular pill because you remember which day of the week it is, and not, as often seems to be the case for me, the other way around…

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October 8th, 2011

The font of all knowledge?

October 8th, 2011

One of the most useful sites I’ve discovered recently is called
What The Font?

If you’re wondering which typeface was used in a logo, a business card, a letterhead, you can upload an image of a few words and it will attempt to identify it for you. It works beautifully.

I was creating a DVD of a friend’s wedding and thought it would be fun to have the font in the DVD menus match that used on the order of service. So I scanned a line, uploaded it, and it turned out to be Mayflower. A quick search found a free version here. Wonderful! – it could have been a time-consuming job tracking that down.

If you don’t have an image, but you have a reasonable sample of the text, then Identifont might be able to help. Not as quick, or, in my experience, as accurate, but a good alternative none the less.

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October 7th, 2011
September 24th, 2011

Be proud to be a scientist

September 24th, 2011

The whole faster-than-light-neutrino thing is an absolutely wonderful example of the scientific method at work.

How many other fields of endeavour would handle this the same way?

Can you imagine a salesman saying, “We’ve come up with this product, but we’re a bit surprised to discover that it seems to do something we didn’t expect really, really well! Could you check this for us? Is it as good as we think, or have we just screwed up somewhere?” Mmm.

Substitute a politician, or, better, a religious leader: “Gosh! Errm… We think this might be a miracle… Could all of you skeptics out there check the facts for us and see if we’ve missed some rational explanation?”

You get my point…

This is exactly how science is meant to work. I think it’s wonderful, and it makes me proud to be a scientist.

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September 11th, 2011

The power of the shed

September 11th, 2011

In my studies of transatlantic cultural differences, I have pondered the fact that many successful American companies have been started in garages. HP, Apple, Google… It’s almost a tradition now.

The English, on the other hand, as a naturally modest race, often have more humble beginnings, and the first faltering steps of many companies here are taken in a garden shed. (Though I do have some good friends here who ran their company from a garage for quite some time, and then did very well at getting US investment… Could that have helped? Something to ponder…)

Three of my recent companies – Ndiyo, DisplayLink and Camvine – began life in the shed at the bottom of the garden of a rented house here in Cambridge. The house was used for meetings, for management, for coffee-preparation, but it was the shed where the important stuff happened. Though, to be fair, it was a very fine shed, with four desks, Velux windows and views of the college playing fields next door; it would be fairer, perhaps, to call it a studio.

About 18 months ago, Rose and I built a new shed at the bottom of our own garden. (No Velux windows in this one, though it does have three runs of Cat-5 cable going to it from the house.) We built it mostly just because we needed the space, but some friends saw this as heralding something more significant. You now how, in a movie, when a female character is suddenly sick for no apparent reason, you can tell it won’t be long before you discover she’s going to have a baby? That kind of thing.

Well, as it happens, I do have a project which I’ve been wanting to work on for some years, but haven’t had the chance. I’m not sure whether the technology is really viable, and I can’t talk about it publicly yet because if I can make it work, I may need to write some patents. But I think it’s worth trying.

And so this past week was my last full-time week at Camvine, though I’ll be doing some part-time work for them for a while to help smooth the transition, and maintaining close contact with the company whenever I can. It’s a great team, and they have my strong support and best wishes going forward.

First, I’m then going to take a couple of weeks just to potter about a bit. Other than visits to the in-laws, I think I’ve only had one holiday since I started Camvine four and half years ago, so a short break will be welcome.

But last week also marked the incorporation of my new company, Telemarq Ltd. Sounds good, eh? You know and I know, dear reader, that it means ‘Quentin trying to make new stuff work, while propping up his rapidly dwindling savings with some consulting’. But please don’t tell too many people!

You can tell them, however, that the Telemarq headquarters are in a shed.

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August 25th, 2011

Here’s to the crazy ones…

August 25th, 2011

The wires are buzzing with the news that Steve Jobs is resigning from Apple. Everyone knew it had to come, but he will be greatly missed, and the web is gradually filling with tributes of one sort or another.

The thing I have always loved about Apple was that they broke so many rules, and did so with such glorious success.

Conventional business wisdom will tell you, over and over again, that you should focus on your strengths, cast off all else that hinders, and aim to commoditise whatever complements your core business, rather than getting into it yourself. Microsoft don’t make chips, and Intel don’t make operating systems.

Apple, on the other hand, weren’t listening. They gradually grew to sell hardware, accessories, operating systems, applications, for mass markets and niche markets. They even did what many people thought was bound to be a disaster: opening their own retail outlets! But they then turned them into, per square foot, the most valuable retail space in the world. Having covered pretty much everything in conventional computing, they plunged into the notoriously difficult mobile phone market and, well, you know the story. Oh, and by the way, they sell a few books and some music, too.

When you think about it, doesn’t the fact that Ford doesn’t even sell petrol seem, well, a bit unadventurous?

To understand more about the man who made this happen, I recommend this page of quotes from Steve at the WSJ.

Or, for a bit of nostalgia, you can’t do much better than the posters from Apple’s 1997 ‘Think Different’ campaign:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

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August 23rd, 2011

The Sandbrowser

August 23rd, 2011

Mmm. You can now download C/C++ apps to run within Google Chrome.

So the browser really is becoming an operating system. Or, at least, a sandbox. Soon, I expect, you’ll be able to download full VMs and run them in the browser, at which point the whole idea of displaying web pages will be just one service your browser provides, in much the same way that driving a graphics card is just one function of your current operating system.

The main difference between your browser and your operating system will then simply be whether they think of the network, or the disk, as being the primary filesystem…

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August 17th, 2011

New toy

August 17th, 2011

I’ve been having fun with my new Panasonic GH2. A very nice toy.

All this and it shoots 1080p too 🙂

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August 16th, 2011

Lion Finder crashing repeatedly

August 16th, 2011

Geeky post to help those who might be Googling for this stuff. To anyone who saw the title and came here hoping to read about an accident-prone safari guide, my apologies.

I know people have mixed experiences with Mac OS X Lion, but for me it’s been almost all good, and I’m very happy with the upgrade.

I did, however, run into a curious problem today on one of my machines, which took a while to sort out. The Finder was crashing and rebooting repeatedly, each time asking me if I wanted to restore the windows it had been displaying before.

I tried all sorts of things: moving stuff off the desktop, deleting the Finder’s preferences file, unmounting drives, booting in safe mode… but in the end it proved to be the Trash that was causing the problem.

I started Terminal (which is always in my Dock, but you can start from Spotlight if you don’t have a Finder running) and did:


sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash

…after which my world came back to normality again. (You’ll need to type your admin password).

Hope that’s useful for someone out there!

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