My Glu

Somehow, time seems to have gotten away from me. Last post, 8th April? Two months? Has it really been so long?

In my defense, it's been a busy time. Lots to do at work, and also lots of rental apartment hunting, followed by moving, followed by sorting out the infrastructure in the new place. On the subject of moving ....

I'm somewhat wary of drawing attention to my previous diatribe on London Estate Agents, as this year I realised I was cheerfully giving out an email address that led them straight to an incentive to screw up my move (london_estate_agents_are_scum@andrewsavory.com? estate_agents_die_die_die@andrewsavory.com?). But some parts of the recent experience I had just beg to be documented. Next year I'll have to register estateagentsaretotallywonderfulandterrificallyspecial.com, or some abbreviation thereof. Suggestions welcomed.

Last year, I saw an awful lot of properties as I narrowed down the area to live in and the exact requirements. Typically, three or four places a night. This year, I was lucky if I saw three or four places a week. The market is very strange at the moment - everyone currently renting seems to be staying put, and there's very few new properties coming on to the rental market as buy-to-let sales collapse almost as fast as the banks' profits. Sadly, any drop in prices due to the recession seems to be as frequently offset by the rise in prices due to lack of supply.

Anyway, from the ones that we did see, some highlights include:

• A "balcony" that was actually a strip of fenced-off roof accessed through a window. It was a new property, and the agent said "they forgot to put doors instead of a window". More likely, they failed to get planning permission, since they "forgot" the doors on two flats side-by-side.
• A property being refurbished that had a bathroom "retiled to a high standard", that came replete with wall-to-wall mould (presumably lovingly regrown in record time after the tiling?)
• My personal favourite estate agent, who when questioned about the large amount of black fur on the floor, swore there were no previous tenants with pets.
• The same agent, when questioned about the large damp patch and water stains in one corner of the ceiling and down one wall, guaranteed there were no problems with the roof and no leaks.
• The property with "rear garden" that was actually astroturf.
• The elegant, space-saving, "kitchen in a corridor" - is it a kitchidor or a corrichen?
• The flat viewed twice, each viewing a month apart (in case it was judged too harshly first time), that was missing a patio door to the balcony both times it was viewed, and the agent that could not guarantee the door would be fitted before a move-in date a few weeks later. When I say missing - this brand new fourth-floor apartment on a windy street had a piece of plywood propped up against it.
• The minimalist art student pad that consisted of a bed, a bar, and unopened packets of condoms all over the floor.
• The property that we put an offer on, only to find that another agent had already let it out.
• The property with the heating cranked to maximum and no visible thermometer (despite three people searching until we had to leave lest we suffer from heat exhaustion)

Anyway. New place found, after much stress, and some more colourful stories of London Agents to discuss over beers.

This just in from the big G:

We're writing to let you know about a pricing change to Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google reviews prices on a quarterly basis, and the price of Google Apps Premier ($50 and £25 for UK customers) has remained unchanged for the last two years. Effective immediately, the price will change from £25 per user, per year to £33 per user, per year for all customers transacting in GBP. At renewal, you will be charged the new price of £33 per user, per year. The price of Google Apps Premier for USD and EUR will remain at the same price of $50 and €40 respectively, the current increase for GBP reflects the recent unprecedented changes in the dollar versus pound exchange rate.

We believe that Google Apps Premier continues to represent affordable innovation and excellent value for money for businesses of all sizes, compared to traditional desktop solutions. We are committed to continuous innovation and helping businesses like yours benefit from seamless introduction of new features such as Google Video for business, Google Sites and Google voice and video chat. We're constantly working to build the most innovative products for our customers and look forward to introducing even more functionality to Google Apps Premier.

If you have any questions regarding this update, please don't hesitate to contact us through the support tab in your Google Apps control panel.

Thank you for using Google Apps Premier.

Ouch. Do I scream and shout at Google, or at the UK Government for screwing up our country's finances so badly that the relative value of sterling has dropped so much?

Particularly galling is the "effective immediately" line. No discussion, no forewarning.

It would be interesting to know how many UK datacentres Google have, and how much money they've saved on their UK operations as a whole when paying for them with a strong dollar.

If I'd seen a corresponding increase in the responsiveness of Google Apps Premier, I wouldn't be so annoyed, but the truth is the service has been getting progressively worse over the last few months.

Finally: why is there no global currency unit for this sort of thing?

Grumble grumble. I'll crawl back under my rock now.

savs posted a photo:

- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

A bunch of LiMo Foundation news is breaking this week in the run-up to Mobile World Congress, which hits Barcelona next week.
Here's the ones I've spotted on the wire and the website so far:

Vodafone signs Linux deal with U.S. firm Azingo

Telefonica, other telcos to launch Linux phones

That makes five operators backing LiMo, the others being Vodafone, Orange, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, and Verizon Wireless. See also Telefonica and SK Telecom join LiMo Foundation Board of Directors, Global Mobile Operators confirm commitment to widely deploy LiMo handsets. 1 billion subscribers is a BIG number.

LiMo Foundation gets ready for next-generation platform

Release 2 is coming. See also LiMo Foundation announces key updates to LiMo Platform.

LiMo Foundation endorses OMTP BONDI specification to bring Web 2.0 applications to LiMo handsets

BONDI could be hugely significant in the mobile space, more on that later.

savs posted a photo:

Logo for LiMo Foundation

savs posted a photo:

Igloo built by kids on Brook Green
- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

savs posted a photo:

- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

savs posted a photo:

- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

savs posted a photo:

- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

savs posted a photo:

Via Rands, a tag cloud of my followers' biographies on twitter. Awesome TwitterSheep!

Just a quick check to see how ecto 3 behaves. Hello world, can you hear me?

Meh, where's the 'preview' button gone?

Seems strange that years after I first started using ecto, nothing better has come along to challenge it in the world of blogging on the Mac. What do others use / recommend?

savs posted a photo:

Yup, there's a bloggy rant coming real soon now ...

Yes, I'm still alive.

Hippo released CMS 7, a long-awaited update of their excellent enterprise document and content management solution, touting separation of concerns, an all-new Apache Wicket-based GUI and a super Apache Jackrabbit repository to replace the old and retired Apache Slide WebDAV repo. If you need a CMS, you know who to call.

MobileMe is still a bit of a dog's dinner. I had to sit through two painful live support sessions on Apple's website in order to get my password reset correctly. For the record, using iforgot.apple.com seemed to have issues and to be out of sync with MobileMe, and confusion abounds since an Apple ID is not a MobileMe ID. Genius. But: calendar, bookmark, and keychain syncing all seem to be working smoothly and proving useful.

If you're trying to get Yojimbo to synchronise via MobileMe, make sure you've entered a license number on both machines you're syncing and not using the free trial on one of them. It took me a couple of days of occasional googling and finally simple trial and error to track that one down. It's not documented anywhere that I could find. The irony is I was trying to do the sync so I could get hold of my Yojimbo license numbers on the new machine...

My EeePC was doing sterling work as a MiniMacbook, apart from a slight hiccup with driving a projector today. I'm still not sure why that didn't work, since I can cheerfully power a large external LCD panel with it. Other than that, I've been cheerfully using it for mail, news, twitter, powerpoint, and all the other day-to-day requirements of work, rest and play.

I say "was doing". Approximately since upgrading Quicktime, I've been getting kernel panics instead of suspends occasionally. Tonight I re-installed the kernel extensions to see if it helped - and now I have a blue screen of death, pre-login screen. Ho hum. Reinstall? Rescue boot? Who knows. One thing I do know is I've been enjoying the significantly lighter rucksack on the long walk to the office, so I'll be loath to go back to the Macbook Pro.

Right, where's my Leopard CD .... ?

Technorati Tags: apache, appstore, asus, b0rkb0rkb0rk, cloud, computing, eee pc, failure, java, macosx, open source, osx, software, workaround

Toward the end of last week, Nokia made the announcement that they would add LGPL as a license option to the QT toolkit.

QT is a highly-polished, well documented modern GUI toolkit - some consider it to be the best GUI toolkit for UNIX compatible systems.

It's well-known for being used in the KDE desktop environment, the biggest competitor to the GNOME / GTK desktop. There was some controversy in the past surrounding KDE's use of QT, as it was not originally available under any open source license. QT 2.2 added the GPL to available licenses, and while this was good for free software projects, the requirements of GPL compliance still limited it's widespread adoption.

Nokia will finally release the next major version of QT (4.5) under the LGPL as well as existing GPL/commercial licenses. Once QT is LGPL it will put them on the same licensing footing as Gnome's GTK.

General response seems to be along the lines of "this is huge!", "no more $5000 licenses!", "excited!", "huge win for cross-platform development", "sounds like Nokia is keen on pushing QT as defacto standard GUI toolkit", "the change is needed to lower the cost barrier compared to other mobile platforms".

But what's the real impact of this change? Will we see developers dropping GTK in favour of QT? Will people flock in droves to the Symbian platform with QT on top? Is KDE going to become the de facto desktop?

No. My guess is "not much change, business as usual". Alex has some interesting thoughts on it as well, as I knew he would when I asked him :-)

I think in the short term, we will see a significant amount of noise about this. It's particularly relevant in the mobile space since Nokia announced the port of QT to Symbian S60 in October. In some ways, this move was innevitable given Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech (the company behind QT, now called Qt Software), and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation.

I think Nokia are hoping they will see a few more developers adopt Symbian as a result of this move, and it makes a nice soundbite and story - but my suspicion is that a toolkit on it's own is not sufficient (the rest of the platform needs to be familiar and friendly too).

Given the momentum, ecosystem and companies around Gnome (Ubuntu, RedHat, Google, Sun, ...) I don't see Gnome / GTK being visibly impacted any time soon. There's an outside chance the next major version of GTK will be ditched in favour of QT, but I suspect inertia and fear of capitulation to Nokia will prevent this happening.

Finally - Alex wonders why we're tied so thoroughly to widget toolkits. I suspect this will change. WebKit and WebOS initiatives may make GTK and QT much less significant than it used to be, as we see native apps marginalised in favour of HTML++ for most application developers. Not least because it's only going to get harder to find "low level" developers (with Java being taught instead of C/C++ in schools and universities), and internet apps have the "cool" factor without (allegedly) needing so much of the blood, sweat and tears.

There will still be a need for someone to write the toolkits like GTK and QT - after all, how will web browsers display themselves? - but the apps on top just won't care. The big deal here is what ships in mobile application stores in the future. With the Apple iPhone app store seeing 15,000 apps and 500m downloads (and Apple redefined drag 'n' drop interface building), and Palm Pre App Catalog effectively offering a web widget store, our perception of what's in an application and what's needed to run one is going to go through some subtle but dramatic changes over the next year or so.

See also:

• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081020-nokia-releases-first-qt-preview-for-symbian-s60.html
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=QT+LGPL
• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html

Technorati Tags: apple, appstore, debate, floss, gnome, iphone, kde, lgpl, linux, mobile, nokia, open source, proprietary, licensing, software, ubuntu

When I moved to London, one of the things I was looking forward to were all the fringe benefits of living in our nation's capital: being able to go to see plays, concerts, eat out at the finest restaurants, go for a beer and be just a tube stop away from home, see more of the wide network of friends who live here or pass through here on a regular basis, take advantage of superior services, and so on.

What I hadn't counted on was the terrible problems I'd have with domestic infrastructure. Two such examples follow.

Despite living approximately one mile away from BBC Television Centre on Wood Lane, rather ironically I was unable to get a decent television signal. The Freeview website even reported that Hammersmith was not due to get a signal until 2011 or 2012, though it has since been updated to report availability. Fortunately, after complaints to the landlord, the roof aerial was rectified, and TV is now a possibility, though not with portable aerials such as the one on my TV Mini.

The second problem (and the real reason for my thinly-disguised morning rant) was the inability to get a decent broadband connection. I'd been drooling over the prospect of 24 meg broadband, but it turned out that my local exchange was full and the only provider able to offer broadband was, surprise surprise, BT Broadband. It's a bit dubious when the only provider able to offer connectivity over a forcibly derestricted monopoly line is the retail arm of said monopoly.

BT was a less than delightful option: they have been known to cap their bandwidth, to censor web access, and to offer hideous service. I swore many years ago I'd never go back to them, but faced with the option of BT or no internet, I decided to put my principles in a box in the cupboard, next to the BT Home Hub.

It turns out I should have listened to my instincts, and opted for a 3G data card, two yoghurt pots and a piece of string, a yearly subscription to WiFi in the local pub, or some other contraption. Since mid-December I've been fighting with BT over noise on the line, and for the last week I've been fighting to get a workable internet connection. Despite having a line rated for 4mb/s, I'm lucky if I can get 10k/s throughput.

So far I've had four engineers come out. Two have claimed to have "tidied up the wiring in the exchange" (how messy was it??!?), one has been unable to find any fault, and the most recent actually appeared to have done a good job, testing everything thoroughly and working inside and outside the house until the line was clear as a bell - until BT Broadband started running their tests again, once the engineer had left. According to one of the engineers, BT sold off the local exchange (West Kensington), and just before Christmas they moved everyone over to another exchange, a kilometre or so further away, with "big fat cables to try and limit the impact of the increased distance". I wonder if the money made from the sale of the exchange is greater or lesser than the cost of sending four engineers to every house affected by the move?

Meanwhile, I spent the bulk of Saturday morning and Sunday night on the phone acting as liaison between BT Openreach and BT Broadband, since open tickets with one part of BT prevent the other part taking action (even to close the ticket). On Saturday I was in the crazy situation of being asked by a BT support person to unscrew the faceplate on my socket in order to test the line myself before they would close a ticket. Shortly after that, another engineer turned up at the front door unannounced and unexpectedly. The saga continues, with the prospect of me sitting in the office at midnight this week in order to participate in online conference calls if BT are unable to get their act together.

The irony here is that in parochial Norwich, which is located just off the edge of the map of the known world, I was able to get a 10 meg internet connection and cable TV (heck, I was receiving channel 5 from virtually the first day of broadcast, not that it's something to boast about). Moving from the countryside to the city is supposed to result in a better service, no?

Technorati Tags: apartment, failure, house, life, london, norwich, bt, renting, uk

So, shocking news that a plane crashed into the Hudson shortly after take-off yesterday. I'm sure it was a terrible experience for all on board, and it's good to know there were no fatalities.

That said, Hudson Crash Landing Still Better Than Heathrow is a perfect example of why I love the daily mash. Irreverant, topical (given the go-ahead for a new runway at Heathrow), and distinctly not politically correct, get your laughing gear around this:

Kathy Cook, a sales assistant from New Jersey, said: "I looked out the window and saw the water getting closer and closer. I thought of my children, my husband, all the things I've never done and then I thought, 'oh well, at least it's not Heathrow'."

Then go read the full article, and subscribe to the mash news feed. A brief flash of sanity in an otherwise insane world. It's like The Onion, only better.

Some of my other favourites there:
BBC hails new Doctor Who as much cheaper
Treasury has been able to print tenners all along
Richard Branson dies laughing

Technorati Tags: accident, comedy, satire, transport

I've started to receive spam phone calls on my mobile.

The modus operandi is as follows: the phone rings, displaying a blocked number. When I answer, after a brief pause a recorded sales pitch kicks in, prompting me at various intervals to press a number to hear more about their services. If you press the number, you're put through to a well-trained call handler scripted in selling, but also trained to give no details out about the company they are working for.

The first time it happened, yesterday, they told me they got my number from a marketing database. My number shouldn't be on any marketing database. I told them to remove my number from their list and not to call me ever again (after trying to find out everything I could about them).

This evening, they called again, interrupting my dinner. I can't ignore blocked numbers - sometimes overseas numbers or office numbers are blocked, so it could be friends, family, or work calling me. This time the person I talked to gave out no information at all about the company, other than a bogus name that comes up with no hits in the Companies House database or on Google. When asked for a phone number I could call them on, I was told it was an outbound sales centre with no incoming number, but that a manager could call me back. Needless to say, that hasn't happened.

This is a serious problem for me, as I'm often travelling, and when overseas I pay the bulk of the call charges when I receive a call. Even if it's only a few seconds, it quickly adds up, and this is the worst possible type of abusive marketing: spam you have to pay for.

Sadly, the law is woefully inadequate in this area. Ofcom, the toothless independent regulator that's little more than an industry front, recommends signing up to the Telephone Preference Service. Useful, except I signed up when it first launched, and the website confirms my mobile number is still registered with them.

Next up, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who enforce and oversee the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, amongst other things. What do they say? See Ofcom. Or, if I think the regulations have been breached, write to the organisation that breached them. Yes, the same marketing organisation that phoned me up twice, refusing to provide any contact details whatsoever, certainly not a postal address.

What else can the ICO do? They can ask (or even order) the organisation to follow the law, assuming I can identify them. But they cannot punish an organisation that ignores them.

So, basically, there's no one to stop these people, no way to stop these people, and no way to punish these people. I have a suspicion the future of mobile is whitelisting phone calls. That's just crazy.

Technorati Tags: debate, fraud, government, law, marketing, mobile, spam, regulation

So, back in November I picked up the Asus EeePC 901 (901 specs), in the interests of research and geek fun. I installed Ubuntu Netbook remix on it, then plain Ubuntu, but it mostly languished on the shelf. I found linux a little sluggish and honestly, although it was cute the lack of Mac OS X was a real pain. I need my eye candy and proprietary lock-in.

I was, therefore, curious and excited to discover the EeeMac blog, particularly with a rundown of installing OS X on an EeePC 901. I'd previously tried installing OS X on a Dell laptop, with moderate success, so I understood the basics. I just hadn't twigged that the same thing could be done on a netbook.

With this in mind, last week I bought a couple of upgrades for the 901 - specifically a 2GB RAM upgrade from Crucial, and a faster, bigger RunCore solid state drive (SSD) from MemoryC. Both of these were trivially easy to install after unscrewing the access panel on the bottom of the 901. I did try Ubuntu with the 2gb upgrade, but there was no significant speed increase.

Actually, the 901 is an amazing little machine, and from reading reports and looking at the guts inside, it's clearly a hacker's dream, with the possibility to add a homebrew 3G data solution, more storage, touchscreen, and so on. It's unusual for a laptop to be as readily upgradeable as a desktop machine. No wonder Asus are selling boatloads of them.

Last night I went through the install process, and I tested it out a little today to make sure everything was working. Sure enough it is, and although there's a couple of areas requiring some polish, for example slightly incorrect keymappings (they are all in the right place on the keyboard, but the keys have the wrong things printed on them, so the command key is labelled "Alt" etc.), a crufty third-party wifi manager instead of the OS X one. But these are things I can ignore on a day-to-day basis, or seek out solutions for, or wait until someone else does.

This evening I've been installing all my usual required apps (Adium, iTerm, DropBox, MenuMeters, Teleport, Ecto, NetNewsWire, Transmit, for a start). Then over the next few days I'll really put it through it's paces, and see how it holds up. I'll keep you posted ...

Technorati Tags: apple, asus, computing, eee pc, hardware, install, leopard, linux, mac, macosx, osx, software, ubuntu, upgrade

savs posted a photo:

- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu

savs posted a photo:

Asus EeePC 901 running OS X
- Camera phone upload powered by ShoZu