Ian McDonald

Our trip to Florida

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:04:00 +0000

We had a great trip to Florida for my nephew's christening and for Christmas. It was great to catch up with them all and my parents came over from New Zealand also.

We had my nephew Caleb's christening the day after we arrived and I was one of the godparents.

Family and friends at Caleb's christening

Afterwards we went back to their house and had a celebratory lunch. Special mention goes out to Vito for his home-made pepperoni/mozzarella rolls that were divine and his home-brew which was a great ale.

Great homebrew by Vito

Pork for christening lunch

We went along to Orlando for a couple of days as it was Nicky's birthday and the boys and Karla went to Universal Studios where the new Harry Potter exhibits were going.

On Christmas Eve we went around to Debbie and Carlos' place for a brunch. Carlos made some amazing crabcakes and there was fresh snapper and a beautiful pecan dish too amongst many other foods.

Carlos' crabcake

Christmas day was around at Chris and Karla's place and was a good gathering of friends and family.

One highlight of the trip was the range of food we tried ranging from Cuban food (including a Cuban sandwich) at Havana restaurant to traditional American food such as chicken wings and baby back ribs at Flanigans which was one of Josh's favourite meals. We also ate out at Sonny's Famous Steak Hogies as seen on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.

Enjoying steak hogies

With all the good food we took advantage of the good weather to go out for runs most days to ensure we didn't get too out of shape. Funnily enough the run distance worked out exactly the same distance as we run at home - just over 5 km.

We went along to BJs wholesale club, Costco and Walmart during our trip which is a different world from the British shopping in just the size of everything. One thing that was a bit sad though was the size of some of the people - they were shopping on carts as they were too big to walk around.
Another highlight was going to see the alligators at the Everglades at Sawglass Recreation Park. We went on an airboat tour and then saw animals at the park also including handling a small alligator.

An alligator in the Everglades

Josh and a gator

I think we got the tipping mostly right although one gas station wasn't sure why I tipped them for using the bathroom!

More photos are over at Google+ here. If you can't see the Florida album drop me a line and I'll give you permission if appropriate.

Thanks very much to Chris and Karla for hosting us.

China and Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:23:00 +0000

We had a great time in China and Japan recently and our video is up on our personal website.

Is 3Par worth $2 billion?

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:32:00 +0000

After seeing all the news around 3Par I started to wonder whether they are really worth $2 billion considering I had never heard of them before.

The primary benefits I can see of 3Par are:

simplification of storage management
thin provisioning

From a pure financial point of view the deal doesn't make sense - their sales were just under $200 million in the last year and I am quite confident that you could build a similar set of products for less than $2 billion.

Conspicuous by it's absence in the bidding are IBM, HDS, Oracle, and EMC. They have either decided it is too expensive or already have something similar under development.

Continue reading at my new blog site here.

State of the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 11:30:00 +0000

I've just finished putting together an article on the state of the cloud. You can go over and read it here.

Shifting tech blogging to Next Generation IT

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:14:00 +0000

Hello everyone. Just a quick note to say that I've shifted my tech blogging to here. Non-tech stuff will stay here.

Using the Cloud for your business - case study from Symbian

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:04:00 +0000

I've given my talk over at Bright Talk now and you can find it here if you are interested.

Cornwall

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:38:00 +0000

A couple of weekends ago we took a couple of days off and took a four day weekend in Cornwall. We stayed at Tzitzikama B&B which was a lovely place in Rock. We got there by taking a car from City Car Club (it's saved us having to buy a car) and on the way we had our first meal at Little Chef which is a chain of "greasy spoons".

We spent a fair bit of time in Padstow, sometimes known as Padstein due to how much Rick Stein owns of the place. It was a short trip back and forth between Rock and Padstow on the ferry. Bizarrely no ferries run between 5:30 pm and 7 pm - perhaps it was to make sure the cab drivers could make a living? On one of the trips we had to scramble between rocks in the dark as the ferry couldn't make it into Padstow due to the tides.

During the weekend we were away the London Marathon was on, so we did our own version on the Camel Trail and did around 25 miles biking from Padstow to Wadebridge to Bodmin and back. Wadebridge was a lovely little town and we were there on a day where they had a continental market, so we had a range of food from German frankfurters to French biscuits. The Camel Estuary was very beautiful.

Of course we had to have dinner at Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant. The attraction is the fresh seafood but Michelin star it wasn't. The seafood was very fresh, but lacked much flavour or flair. We also had a meal at Pescadou which was a little bit better,

The food we did enjoy the most was actually at Shipwrights pub in Padstow washed down by Admirals Ale which is currently our favourite ale, made by St Austell's brewery.

We went one morning to Truro which is a lovely town which used to be the capital of Cornwall. Great shops there and a lovely atmosphere. On the way back we went to Cornish Birds of Prey which provides a sanctuary for birds of prey. Great flying demonstrations and some very happy looking birds and animals.

All in all, it was an awesome little break and well recommended.

Cotswolds

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:48:00 +0000

Over Easter we went for a drive to the Cotswolds. Initially it was a very slow drive through Slough and Maidenhead as I had set the GPS to walk mode, instead of drive mode.

Once I corrected this it was a bit quicker. First stop was Cotswold Wildlife Park which wasn't too bad. A reasonable variety of animals, but some of them didn't seem too bad. Not sure it was worth £12 though.

We then went to Cheltenham which we left pretty quickly as seemed pretty boring.

Next stop was Bourton on the water which was very lovely. Very picturesque and lots of lovely little boutique shops. A stream runs through the area with beautiful bridges over the river. We stopped for a cream tea and then went to the Cotswold Motor Museum. The motor museum was definitely better than we expected and well worth a visit.

We then had a very short drive to Lower Slaughter which is a lovely old small village. Also called in at Chipping Campden which is a nice town and Burford which has quite a lot of houses with thatched roofs.

Tik Tok from Ke$ha done in Star Wars style

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:36:00 +0000

Glasshouses and control?

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:54:00 +0000

I was just reading this article here about why Sun died in the opinion of Jeremy Allison and was quite amazed to be honest.

I have to agree with him that OpenOffice, Solaris etc weren't handled well and this contributed to their downfall. I'm not sure whether it was failure on the hardware side, services attach or the software that did them more damage but I agree with his points.

Most of all I'm amazed because Jeremy is working for Google. Google seem to be doing exactly the same thing with the Android platform. Parts of it are open, but the parts they choose and they release it out when they feel like it. The same thing occurs with Chrome, ChromeOS etc etc, not to mention that so much of their services run on unreleased code.

You can see some independent discussion about this here in case you think I'm biased because I work for the Symbian Foundation. (Of course all this is my own opinion, not my employer's... blah blah blah). Plenty more opinions like this abound on the web as well but I'm too lazy to post them here.

What astounds me though is that Jeremy posts this, while working for Google. Is he getting annoyed with Google and telling them to be more open, or does Google just allow free thinkers? He hasn't made the connection to what is going on inside Google but you don't have to be a genius to link the two together...

We live in interesting times!

My new Nokia E72 phone / comparison to E71

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:14:00 +0000

Well I’ve had my Nokia E72 for about a week now after lending to a colleague for a few days who helped fix a few issues (thanks Shaun).

I’m very impressed with the phone overall. It is a faster improved version of the E71 (or will be once all software bugs are gone).

Things I like about it are:

speed. Much faster e.g. takes about half the time to load Opera than before
optical navikey – very nice when it works
camera. It is actually usable and better than my N78 or E71. E71 on original firmware was a joke and newer firmware was a little better. It has a decent flash and can cope with low light fairly well
the new improved email client. (In theory, as in practice it has let me down)
Being able to group your connections together and WLAN taking precedence over 3G. Let’s hope more software supports it soon.
USB charge

Things that are still a bit problematic about it:

The video doesn’t always cope on recording at highest CPU setting. Stutters every 2 seconds or so. Fixed by going down a notch
Not linking in comprehensively to Google Apps with Mail for Exchange. Can do calendar and contacts but not email. Other people in forums can do email but not calendar and contacts. I have been talking to Nokia Messaging team and they are working on the issue
Push email ignores your connection settings and will keep on popping up WLANs available. If you select cancel it won’t sync your email.
So I’ve changed to IMAP and that works, until it doesn’t! Sometimes you need to exit email, other times you need to reboot the phone before it starts working again..
Can’t default to HTML email. Have to click and then it opens in browser. The Nokia Messaging client that you can download for E71 can and also fixes some of the other email so I suspect the version in firmware is a bit old. Luckily I live in a country where the leading telcos upgrade firmware quickly. Not :-(
The Google Mail app doesn’t work on the E72. Downloaded it, went to install and it just disappears in a virtual puff of smoke. Google Maps works fine but no compass support. Tried Nokia Maps and it is meant to have compass support but didn’t appear for me and now says I need a license.
Optical navikey is not supported properly in all apps and you need to click on the edges which are impossibly hard – need about 20kg of pressure on the edge! Also some applications (Opera Mini) scroll very slowly with it. Thankfully 2, 8 page up/down in it.

I know many of the syncing things can be fixed by products like Dataviz and Goosync but I’d like what I have paid for to work! I’m hopeful it will get fixed in newer firmware which I can hack onto the device.

Overall a very good device and the remaining little irritations can be fixed in software I think.

NB This post does not represent the opinion of my employer or any of it’s members.

Nokia N97 firmware upgrade (and update for E71)

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:58:00 +0000

I don’t have a Nokia N97 but people are asking me about flashing their phones and I’m just collecting a few links etc here for them. This is getting asked more often now version 2/20 is out.

Basically the procedure is the same as my earlier article here except the upgrade is done over the air through menus seems to be the recommended procedure.

As usual the UK is slow at getting updates. For the N97 you can’t set to generic UK product code yet as no carrier has stepped up the plate (yet). To see valid codes look at this All About Symbian article.

The other thing you need to do after the upgrade is to send the settings for Internet and MMS from your carrier. For example Vodafone UK N97 is here and E71 is here.

And remember, backup, backup, backup. I would recommend getting data out in a format other than Nokia backup if you can as an extra precaution.

Open Source Inside

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:08:00 +0000

Following on from my introductory post I thought I’d talk a little bit more about how our IT is run.

As a young organisation we have had the chance to build our IT infrastructure from scratch and my predecessor Suran Naidoo (interim Head of IT) did a sterling job with his team to pull it together.

The tenets that were set down for the infrastructure were that we didn’t need to invest a large amount of capital, that it was software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service and that we favoured open source wherever possible.

So the infrastructure that we have built is largely outsourced to a range of partners. The majority of servers are RedHat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Server with a few Windows servers thrown in for internal purposes. These servers are virtualised around VMWare and we have dipped our toe in the water a little with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

The groupware/collaboration is largely handled by Google Apps – we use this for email and some document collaboration.

We use a range of SaaS services – SAP Business By Design, Salesforce, Spigit, Wordpress.

Our websites are largely built around the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) along with a range of other products such as Bugzilla, Mailman, MediaWiki and soon Drupal.

On the desktop side we use Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X with a smattering of Ubuntu. At present we largely use Microsoft Office, and the majority of people browse with Firefox or Safari but Chrome is coming up fast also.

It was a bit of a challenge pulling this altogether – especially in a short time frame. We also found some open source software and SaaS platforms weren’t quite as ready as they claimed to be and had to change course. We didn’t quite achieve our goal of no servers on site, but we do have a lot less than any other site that I have worked on.

Stay tuned for future episodes where I’ll talk about my thoughts on the cloud, choosing open source vs closed source, how do you live open source when you are doing SaaS.

IT at the Symbian Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:07:00 +0000

I’m Ian McDonald and I’m Head of IT at the Symbian Foundation. I come from a strong open source background and have used open source software since the 1980s.

I started using open source software doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Waikato. I used to download software from around the world and soon got told off for using too much of New Zealand’s bandwidth (It was 2.4Kbits/sec for the whole country!!).

I’ve deployed open source software at a number of large corporates including building work management software using largely open source tools at NZ’s largest telco in the 1990s.

I have also served on the committee and was then president of WLUG which was one of New Zealand’s strongest open source societies (despite the name it was far more than Linux).

Personally I’ve also got code into projects such as ttcp, iperf and my largest contribution is into the Linux kernel for a new networking protocol DCCP. Hopefully I’ll also start working on the Symbian platform as well in the not too distant future!

At the Symbian Foundation we use a lot of open source software internally and I’m looking to increase this further. In a number of posts coming up I’ll outline how we use open source and what are the challenges for running IT on open source.

(Also published here on the Symbian blog)

Flashing your Firmware on Nokia phones

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:41:00 +0000

Now that I work for the greatest phone OS organisation in the world I want to fiddle with my phones a bit more.

At work I have a Nokia E71 supplied by Vodafone. Vodafone is a great company (thanks for releasing a Femtocell - I can use my phone at home now!!) but, like most carriers, they don't release firmware upgrades quickly. So I went and fiddled and broke my phone a few times and decided I should document it so it doesn't hurt you as much as me!!

Firstly all of these instructions assume you are using Windows. The tools don't work on OS X/Linux sorry. So here are steps I went through.

Step 1: Back your phone up in a couple of ways. As I found out later I couldn't reuse my Nokia backup directly. So use the Nokia backup and make sure any contacts, photos etc are also pulled off. You will lose everything in your phone memory during the upgrade.

Step 2: Find your Nokia product ID for a non carrier version of your phone using your favourite search engine. For the UK silver Nokia E71 it is 0567045. For UK Black N97 it is 0585162. (NB I haven't tested this process on N97 but should work)

Step 3: Use Nemesis Service Suite to change the product ID of your phone to this generic one.

Step 4: Run the Nokia update software and it will now update as it thinks you have a generic phone, rather than carrier locked. This process will take a while and do make sure your phone has lots of charge first.

Step 5: If you want to, you can try restoring your backup. Unfortunately for me this bricked my phone (made it inoperable). I had to do a complete reset via holding down *, 3 and green and then turning the power on. This is a tricky key combination on the small keyboard and you need to hold it for about a minute too. I believe this will also work on other Nokia phones also. NB This of course wipes all data... After that I reapplied the Nokia update to get the default settings back.

Step 6: I recovered the data I had lost using Noki which can be found here. This is a great piece of software which is useful in it's own right. NB N97 is not listed as a supported device.

Enjoy the features of your upgraded phone. For me the big benefits were that the E71 camera is now OK (as opposed to being useless with huge banding) and the phone stopped crashing, and battery life improved.

Settling into London now

noreply@blogger.com (Ian McDonald) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:07:00 +0000

We are settling into London now and enjoying the life here. We have got broadband again so can start sending updates to people etc now.

Today we were in Mayfair as I had a job interview. Amazing to see all the Bentleys, Rolls Royces and Bugattis alongside just common Porsches and Mercedes. We also wandered past Nobu (restaurant for the stars) and one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants.

We are settling down in our house now and have put together most of our Ikea furniture. We love the East Twickenham/Richmond area down by the river and are enjoying our place. So much good food around also and so little stomach capacity!!

Office 2007 SP2

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Office 2007 SP2 is out now and has some great changes – like support for OpenOffice and PDF out of the box.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/28/now-available-microsoft-office-2007-service-pack-2.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

However sometimes it won’t pick up new emails in Outlook if running in cached mode – which is the default and recommend mode so watch out for this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968773/

I imagine this may catch out some early adopters out so just be aware. Microsoft won’t push this out for another 90 days so hopefully they will have a fix before then.

Tweeting now

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:34:00 +0000

I'll now tweet more than post here so if you want my updates on tech then follow me here.

TVNZ and Sky gets better

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 04:25:00 +0000

I see today the announcement that TVNZ is now releasing all channels onto Sky – TVNZ6 and 7, along with putting TV one and 2 onto high definition.

About time I say – can only help TVNZ.

Now if only Sky would put Prime on Freeview, and in High Def. Since I have bought a Freeview HD television I watch Prime less since it is on Sky and not in HD…

But then I will be watching Freesat soon with our move to the UK….

Ext4 and btrfs file systems

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:30:00 +0000

I have been watching these develop over time and thought I’d post about them – as much for my own reference as for anyone else’s benefit.

Ext4 is a logical successor to ext2/ext3 and offers much improved performance and features. You can migrate an ext2/3 filesystem to ext4, but not the other way around easily.

Production versions of grub/grub2 do not support ext4 so keep /boot on an ext3 partition. Newer versions do and will make it into future releases.

Btrfs was originally created by Oracle and is released under the GPL. It tries to have a clean sheet approach in it’s design and maximise performance. Btrfs also does not have grub support.

Links:

Article on Ubuntu 9.04 (Phoronix)

Article on Fedora 11 (Phoronix)

Article on Fedora 11 Alpha (Fedora)

Article on ext4 (Kernel Newbies)

Article on btrfs (kernel.org)

MBR Editing in Vista

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:10:00 +0000

I decided it was about time I shifted from a physical install of Ubuntu to a virtual one so I did that last week with VMWare Server. Quite impressed with that, but that might be another post.

Anyway after the install I was left with my old copy to delete and I needed to recover the space. Now once you have Linux installed it isn’t always as easy to remove. In Windows you can’t just delete non-Windows partitions and tell it to rebuild the master boot record.

Anyway after my past experience where I broke things using EasyBCD (my stupidity, not the program’s fault) I decided to look for something simpler.

In Vista you can’t just do “fdisk /mbr” like you did in earlier versions. You have to run the recovery CD or use a tool. So I went hunting and found MbrFix. Then it was a matter of “MbrFix /drive 0 fixmbr /vista” and my Vista boot loader was back in place. After that booted into GParted live CD, removed the Linux partitions and then reboot and extend Windows partition from within Windows. (In theory I could have done this using GParted but I prefer to use Windows native tools).

Thoughts on the Palm Pre

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:23:00 +0000

I see the Palm Pre has been launched today and it certainly is taking an interesting approach.

There is a video of the Palm Pre from CES 2009 here.

It is an all new device with no backward compatiability at this stage which I think isn't a bad thing given how dated PalmOS is now.

The concept looks quite good where you can pull together info from different email accounts, different contacts etc and use them all in whatever way you want. The user interface looks quite good too, and I don't think you can beat a real keyboard either.

It is interesting to note that there is no Flash but I don't think this is a major given that Adobe have written Flash for the iPhone which is the same CPU (never mind that Apple wouldn't let it be released) and that there is Flash for Linux. Talking of Linux I don't think that this is an open phone in the way that Google Android is - it is more just a platform for it.

Also more information here and here.

Looking forward to the GSM/UMTS version...

Photos of London

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:56:00 +0000

We finally got around to putting a few photos up on our website. You can have a look at http://www.jandi.co.nz

Last trip update

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:23:00 +0000

I forgot to mention that at the National Museum there were many cool things such as Egyptian mummies and the Rosetta Stone.

On the Wednesday we went to see the We will rock you musical in the West End. Of course we bought the tickets from the official half price booth. Many of the others claim to be official but aren't... We then had dinner at the kiwi import - GBK.

Unfortunately on Thursday morning it was time to go home. One of the highlights on the way home was flying in the A380. As usual the service with Singapore Airlines was great.

And yes the photos aren't up yet - these might take a while...

Further travels

noreply@blogger.com (Ian) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:19:00 +0000

Since the last post we've been to the British Museum, London Eye, and went and had a curry at Brick Lane.