A Chat with Ben and Pete

A Chat - World Phone Day!

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:08:21 +0000

Pete and Ben chat about the iPhone 3G, a week on. We talk about:

Purchase stories
Activation
Hardware
- Plastic back
  - Feels good in the hand and doesn’t slip
- GPS
  - A bit subtle about satellite lock
- Reception
  - 3G doesn’t drop back to 2G quickly enough
- Sound
  - On 2G in my bad reception it’s the best phone Peter’s used
- Camera
  - Disappointing but functional. Lens flare if there’s any backlight
- Battery life
  - Lasts a day of pretty heavy use
Software
- App store
- Favourite apps so far
  - Byline
    - Google reader reader (with offline)
  - iPint
    - Always gets a laugh
    - It is now the top free app
  - OmniFocus
  - Twinkle
    - Ben - The best use of location I’ve seen so far. You see people responding to other tweets locally. Normally these people wouldn’t be able to find each other. Recognised a name mentioned in one (a former colleague of some people at work)
    - Peter lives 5 miles from Ben.
    - Peter - Someone rather menacingly said “we know where you live” after I posted with GPS position outside.
  - Shazam
  - Mocha VNC Lite
  - More Cowbell
- Crashing apps
  - Peter - AIM
  - Ben - A few apps crash. Kind of makes me wonder if it’s the apps or the OS?
- Problems
  - Peter - Push email notification troubles
    - Stopped on Friday
    - Rebooted and then my .mac account came back
    - removed .mac and it works again
  - Ben - Push notification works from the iPhone but not the mac itself. Found I need to sync explicitly or wait for the next sync (even on “automatic”)
Data usage so far…
- Peter - Sent 3.1Mb, Received 42.4Mb = 45.6Mb -> 152Mb / month
- Ben - I can’t say since I’ve had it reset to some value twice after the iPhone restarted itself. Currently says Sent 2.4Mb, Received 24.2Mb

A Chat - World Phone Day!

A Chat - Episode 23

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:03:16 +0000

Neil Young and the Java?

Show notes are here: http://bgcooper.com/2008/05/11/a-chat-episode-23-show-notes/

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A Chat - Episode 23 show notes

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:58:03 +0000

Neil Young and the Java?

Neil Young at JavaONE talking about Blu-ray

Story by Dan Farber here
He’s not a fan of mp3s

That said, he’s clearly not a fan of MP3 quality: “Putting on a headphone and listening to MP3 is like hell,” he said.

He says that audio definition in blu-ray brings us back to the way we were with analogue (
Java based UI in Blu-ray players can create much better interactivity than before
Interesting quote:

Larry Johnson, of Shakey Films (which works on all of Young’s films),
said Young had the concept for his latest project on paper 15 years
ago. About two years ago, they put the footage all together and waited
for the Blu-ray HD-DVD fight to end.

I love the quote from the infoweek article:

Perhaps Young had witnessed the earlier live
demonstrations of JavaFX, both of which froze in their tracks and
needed to be restarted. “We’re going to give a demo,” announced Young,
“and it’s going to work because it’s fake [recorded].”

Alternative firmware for Canon point and shoot cameras

Wiki here
Works on a wide range of Canon point n shoot cameras
It’s non-destructive, you load it after turning on

Put two files on the SD card
Turn on in play mode
1 extra menu item, “upgrade firmware”

You get extra on screen displays
Lots of great features:

Raw file save
Zebra display of over exposure
live histogram & colour histogram
all sorts of techy readouts
They re-use the direct print button as “alt”
various grids, including user designed
depth of field calculator
scripts in a ubasic language!

things like bracketing

File browser
Calendar
Text reader
Flash light!

How do Leopard macs know that you just downloaded a file?

stops you executing it with out agreeing to the risk
ls -l shows an @ attribute:

-rwxr-xr-x@  1 marksp  staff  1368  2 May 05:44 LICENSE.txt

      drwxr-xr-x@  4 marksp  staff   136  2 May 05:44 bin

      drwxr-xr-x@ 13 marksp  staff   442  2 May 05:44 dbgp

Peter-iMac:Downloads marksp$ xattr -l maxi-meter_051.zip

com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms:

0000 62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 A1 01 5F 10 39 68 74 74 bplist00.._.9htt

0010 70 3A 2F 2F 6D 61 63 70 6F 6D 6D 65 2E 63 6F 6D p://macpomme.com

0020 2F 77 69 64 67 65 74 73 2F 6D 61 78 69 2D 6D 65 /widgets/maxi-me

0030 74 65 72 2F 6D 61 78 69 2D 6D 65 74 65 72 5F 30 ter/maxi-meter_0

0040 35 31 2E 7A 69 70 08 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 51.zip……….

0050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 …………….

0060 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 46 …….F

com.apple.quarantine: 0000;482370e0;Safari;6C367C85-D790-4381-82CB-BFA85AFF3D73|com.apple.Safari

To get rid of it: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

OLPC in Australia

As reported on SMH, the OLPC organisation has set up a local group in Australia
Signed up to the mailing list at olpc.org.au
Event on this Friday at Mitchell Theatre, Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney

Home broadband upgrade

Pete switches from Optus Cable to Telstra Cable

promises “up to” 30Mbps down and 1Mbps up

Blog post here

A Chat - Episode 22

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:16:04 +0000

Google App Engine and more.

Show notes are here: http://bgcooper.com/2008/04/20/a-chat-episode-22-show-notes/

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A Chat - Episode 22 show notes

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:01:23 +0000

Google App Engine and more.

Google App Engine experiences
- Early problems with django app, used too much time, no clue as to why
- Got it working by using later examples
- Seems fairly quick ab says about 450ms (ping is 300ms)
YUI
- Benefits overview
- Lovely menus
- Excellent examples
- Can serve the CSS direct from Yahoo’s server
Home brew electronics
- Morse ident keyer with Atmel ATTiny85
- Programmable with gcc
- 8 pin device
- My code uses 1k or 8k available
- 6 pins available for input or output
Amazon Web services action
- They seem to have become very active since google launched
  - “Elastic” IPs
  - Data centre location
  - SLAs
- New dashboard for showing service status
  - They say that users tell them there are problems some times…
- Higher level, higher cost support options
  - If you bet your business on these services you need someone to call
Amazon MP3
- Got an invite offering free tracks
- No DRM is attractive
- They have a downloader that automatically ads to iTunes
- I tried but it wanted a US credit card address.
SafariAdBlock
- blocks most ads in Safari
- free from here
- Sites that make me scroll down past ads have pushed me to this
- Have tried other approaches such as squid with perl script to replace banners in the past
Trying Twitter
- micro blogging
- useful? hmm
- twhirl client is an Adobe Air application
  - scary thing is that an application is installed by flash running in a browser
iPhone Australia gossip
- Someone is working on getting iPhones approved on Australian carriers
- This is said to take “months”
- But there’s lots already on the network so presumably it could be sped up
- Or not, if they are new models
Open Source Corporations
- We talked Sun buying MySQL in Episode 13
- How will this change MySQL?
- What’s happened to other open source projects?
- Peter’s blog post here

A Chat - Episode 21

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:13:39 +0000

The MacBook Air is lethal!

In this episode we chat about

Apologies for lack of show notes in last episode (Ben)
- Tried publishing from Google docs and didn’t quite like the formatting
- Tried changing using Wordpress’ visual editor and got strange results
- Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 this week which includes a much improved editor
  - Supposedly doesn’t interfere with crafted HTML in the code editor
- Attempted the same for these show notes without success. Here is the error from Google docs
  
  (perhaps those extra checks broke something for Google?)
- Pasting Google docs generated HTML looks OK
Cut myself on the MacBook Air (Pete)
- Really!
- My USB ethernet adapter has failed
- Overall, very happy with the laptop
- Sometimes would like it to be faster
Websites: Everyone’s doing APIs (Ben)
- FaceBook - with some controversy about the data it shares
- LinkedIn are supporting Google’s OpenSocial
  - as are Friendster, MySpace (late to the party), Ning, Plaxo, Salesforce, Six Apart
  YouTube - offers access to the YouTube video repository and community features via a GoogleData (”GData”) API.
- Google apps for your domain
  - Provisioning API is quite compelling
  - Only for paying users:
  - Get a strange exception when trying to use the provisioning API on a free service, that contains no information.
    - (’status’, ‘body’, ‘reason’)
  - Signed up for 30 day trial to test out
    - You need to enable it before it works
    - What the python library docs don’t tell you is that you need to make an explicit client login before you can do anything (otherwise you get the strange exception above). Kind of bizarre since you need to put authentication information in the AppsService object. e.g. to create a user:
```
#!/bin/python
```
```
import gdata.apps.service
```
```
service = gdata.apps.service.AppsService(email='ben', domain='bgcooper.com', password='password')
```
```
user_name = "me"
```
```
family_name = "Cooper"
```
```
given_name = "Benjamin"
```
```
password = "secret"
```
```
try:
```
```
    service.ClientLogin('ben@bgcooper.com', 'password')
```
```
    user = service.CreateUser(user_name, family_name, given_name, password)
```
```
    print user
```
```
except gdata.apps.service.AppsForYourDomainException , e:
```
```
    print e
```
    - The result is:
- Twitter - Restful api here
- Perhaps the symantic web is really happening?
Searchme Visual Search (Ben)
- Got an invite to the private beta
- Fairly novel interface to searching:
- Suggests categories in searching as you type:
- It’s novel for sure, but all I see with this is one of the big players licensing the technology, not actually competing in this field.
Apple WWDC sessions announced (Pete)
- Huge iPhone track this year
  - 40 Mac sessions
  - 27 iPhone sessions
  - 10 IT sessions
- I try to go about every other year, not this year
- Apple Australia no longer puts on sessions?
Scalr, open source AWS management tool (Ben)
- Write-up here
- At google code here
- TechCrunch has a good writeup
- Interesting that the creator is a ruby shop and it’s a PHP app.
- Rumours are that Google might release BigTable to compete with Amazon’s SimpleDB

Sydney Horological Centre (Pete)
- Pete’s blog post here
- Clock repair supplies
- Good collection of Cuckoo clocks
- Amazing that these places still exist
New linker for GCC released (Ben)
- It’s a total re-write of the linker
- 5 times faster at linking large c++ projects (but will it improve Gentoo’s 3 day install?)
- Developer Ian Lance Taylor works for Google and has just finished the project
- It’s being widely tested within Google
- Shows the excellent computer science being done at Google (if only to solve their own problems)
- Called “gold” which could be confusing
- The speedup effects of this will ripple through everything that uses gcc
- Currently beta quality, if you link the Linux kernel it won’t boot, presumably this bug will be found pretty quickly
Visualising WSDL with GraphViz (Pete)
- Pete’s blog post here
- Hard to read xml for humans
- Wanted a way to visualise the wsdl api
- Wrote a little python tool that reads wsdl and outputs dot format
- Doesn’t scale up well, needs some sort of “pagination” to divide the api into parts
- (as a side note, I’ve never seen google ad words respond so quickly to a post)

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A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 20

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:32:23 +0000

Intro to random topics.

Thanks for the comments Alastair and Geo!

In this episode we chat about:

Ben’s Time Capsule experience
OmniFocus 1.0.1 review
Safari 3.1
Bicycle news from Ben (he didn’t get the African Hair Sheep gloves)
Ham Radio News from Pete

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Note: Sorry for the lack of detailed shownotes for this episode. An attempted Google docs to Wordpress export went awry.

A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 19

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:42:54 +0000

iPhone 2.0

This week we talk about:

About the podcast
- Change of name?
- Suggestions and Feedback? Perhaps we should talk in more depth about topics?
iPhone 2.0 software launch and SDK
- Ben hasn’t been able to get the SDK yet:
  - Friday signed up to get the SDK and all day the email link didn’t work
  - Saturday email link worked, logged in to find a page without functionality
  - Hit a link to download SDK and got back to the register to download page again.
- Engadget posts an excellent SDK comparison chart
Internet Explorer 8 beta
- Supports CSS 2.1 and they have open sourced their CSS test suite
- Mashups built in:
  - Activities. You can do things like select an address, right click and go straight to maps (or see a preview in the menu)
  - Web Slices. A good example is eBay where you can follow an item and place a bid directly from the toolbar
- They’re not going all out. SVG is still unsupported
- It has a javascript debugger!
Google Sites
- Last week Google launched sites.google.com (built from jotspot)
- You need to have your own domain with a email account at that domain to get started
- Features:
  - It uses a wiki style of editing of pages
  - Very simple “list” feature that can be used for simple database tables
  - Built in search
  - Navigation tree
  - Editable nav bar, logos etc
  - Create page: web page, dashboard, announcements, file cabinet, list
    - Dashboards are made up of “gadgets” such as image, calendar, document, picasa web slideshow, presentation, spreadsheet, video, recent items…
- It certainly is designed to bring together all the Google Apps
Silverlight 2
- We all saw the impressive World Wide telescope demo at Ted, and the intro to the technology at last year’s Ted
- The Hard Rock Cafe launched it’s new memorabilia web site at the mix conference with a very impressive demo of Seadragon in Silverlight 2 (it’s live here)
- A good article about data and web services support in Silverlight 2 is on The Register
  - SOAP support by importing WSDL / generic XML support (like YUI?) / JSON support
  - No REST however.

A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 18

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:54:07 +0000

WiFi Balloons!

This week we talk about:

Microsoft opening up?
- They’ve published the file formats for Office documents
- Now they’ve published thousands of API definitions and are encouraging open source interoperability
- RedHat is skeptical
- The EU expresses doubt
Google news for video?
- Check out NewsClipper
- TechCrunch story here
GSM encryption broken
- Researchers at a Black Hat conference in Washington claim to be able to listen in to GSM phone conversations with $1000 worth of equipment
Balloon WiFi
- Google may team up with Space Data Corp., which provides wifi and cellular services via weather balloons
- Original story in the Wall Street Journal
Document collaboration with SubEthaEdit
- Check out SubEthaEdit
- Very cool document collaboration:

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Full shownotes at http://tinyurl.com/23qk6e

A Chat with Ben and Pete - Episode 17

bgcooper@gmail.com (Ben Cooper and Peter Marks) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 12:03:55 +0000

A New Trend in Openness.

This week we chat about:

Follow up
- HFS: The Good & The Bad
- No More Tasting: It’s a Bad Year To Be a Registrar
XML is only 10 years old?
- XML People
- XML: History
Symbian touch interface is horrible
- Nokia’s Touch UI Hands-On: Officially Way Behind Apple
New browsers take 2
- First look: Firefox 3 beta 3 polishes rough edges
- Beta 3!
AppleTV take 2
Mac OS X 10.5.2
- 10.5.2 Stack as Folder won’t update on added files
WiMAX VoIP Mobile Phone
- WiMAX-enabled VoIP phone showcased at Mobile World Congress
High Performance Enabled SSH
- HPN-SSH
Amazon Web Services outage

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Full shownotes at http://tinyurl.com/2wazja