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Monthly Archives: September 2006
HP Chairman resigns
September 13, 2006 – 9:11 am
Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn has resigned as chairman over the investigation of other board members to find the media leak.
Dunn’s quiet investigation into media leaks from the boardroom has erupted over the last week into a major corporate drama. Now it’s cost Dunn her job at the top–though she’ll remain on the board.
iTunes 7 Visual Walkthrough
September 12, 2006 – 9:33 pm
iTunes 7 is a significant update to iTunes, bigger than the jump than from iTunes 5 to 6 at least. But on first impressions, not much has changed. It still looks like iTunes, and bar some new blue icons and sleeker scroll bars1 it really hasn’t changed much on the looks front.
Upon opening iTunes 7, I was disappointed to find it removed all my customisation of the main track window. It lost my custom ordering, and enabling of compilations. Apart from moving the Browser button (the eye icon) to the bottom right from the top right of the window, everything seems to be in the right/same place.
Apart from the left-side menu, the most noticable change is the new View selector on the top right. You have the standard list, and then theres grouping the tracks by artwork, and then with the cover browser.
Personally, I can’t see much use for these new views apart from when you’re looking for something to listen and you just want to browse your library. In every other situation, the use of the search facility or the Browse window is quicker.
Speaking of search, I remember it letting you choose how to filter down your results with a bar on top of the music list, although you can use the more standard (if you use OS X that is) way of filtering your search, by choosing your search filter by click the little hourglass icon.
The biggest interface change is now the management of iPod settings and firmware updates is done within iTunes and not in the Preferences window anymore.
You also get a much more detailed view of the disk space usage on your iPod, with audio, video and other categories. You get all the standard tabs such as Music and Podcasts which have the same functionality as the old Preference window, and now the Videos has been seperated into Movies and TV Shows, and the addition of Games.
Honestly though, this new interface seems very amateurish and not thought through. The tabs conform to no known interface look and feel for OS X or Windows, the Cancel and Apply buttons goes against the conventions of every other pane, which apply updates immediately, and the increased screen real estate has been totally wasted.
The new fifth-generation iPods now feature downloadable games at £3.99 each, or £35.01 for all nine games. Current fifth-generation iPods to require a software update to 1.2 before they can play games, but it brings no new free games.
Some other non-UI improvements include the getting of album art from iTunes itself, and not needing some third party application. This has been a feature that has been requested since the first incarnation of the iTunes Music Store, and I’m glad it’s finally been implemented.
iTunes now finally supports gapless playback, and although it needed to analyse my entire library (which took a good ten minutes) to do it, it was worth the wait. My dance compliations are completely gapless, and also play gaplessly on my iPod too.
There are some good, and long awaited updates to iTunes 7, although us people in the UK are unalbe to use its most touted feature, the Movie Store, until Apple manages to get international licenses. Either way, version 7 has some good features and is a good upgrade.
It’s Showtime!
September 12, 2006 – 7:45 pm
Apple’s “It’s Showtime” special event has brought us many more consumer products, of which I’ll briefly list here.
- New iTunes 7
- New blue icons instead of the old green ones.
- Will download missing album art for free.
- Reorganised left section.
- Gapless playback.
- New “album view” and “cover view”.
- Spruced up interface (a lark to Lepoard?)
- iPod Updater and iPod Preferences now built into iTunes interface (no more seperate applications or going to the Preference window).
- Sync between computers with your iPod.
- No more Mini Store?
- iTunes Movie Downloads
- 75 movies currently all from Disney owned studios (Pixar, Touchstone etc.)
- 640×480 .h246 encoded videos.
- Same access rights as TV episodes.
- TV episodes also receive a resolution boost.
- New iPods
- iPod Nano now aluminium.
- Nano available in 2, 4 and 8GB sizes.
- 2GB is only in silver, 4GB in all the colours of the rainbow, except black which is exclusive to the 8GB.
- Dissapointing update to the iPod Video, just brighter screen, longer battery life and updated interface.
- iPod Video also gets gapless playback (has Apple been listening to feedback?)
- A smaller iPod Shuffle.
More updates and opinions later.
TubePort
September 12, 2006 – 3:41 pm
I think the iTunes Movie Store and new iPods are a given for todays Apple press conference, but if the rumours are correct, then an interesting if poorly name product, TubePort, could be the missing link for internet movie downloads.
TubePort. A $99 2-piece set that includes a dongle that connects via USB to your mac, and another dongle that connects via included HD cables or regular Component cables to your TV. The movie is accessed on your Mac via an iDisk-like storage component hosted by Apple.
If they add SCART support (essential for older TVs), and then allow to stream any movie format that QuickTime is compatible with (DivX, XviD, WMV etc.), I can see this being a big winner. Unfortunatly, my guess is that it will only allow the streaming of videos converted to QuickTime’s MPEG4 format, and if they feel very harsh, just those bought off the iTunes Store.
Nissan M-Primera GT
September 11, 2006 – 7:55 pm
What do you get when you mix a Nissan Primera GT with a BMW M3/5/6? A Nissan BMW M-Power Primera GT 2.0.
My “Rubbish” Defense
September 11, 2006 – 1:13 pm
The Cole to Chelsea saga continues, with Cole’s recent statement of that he moved to Chelsea for a new challenge and to win trophies:
“I know full well that I’m not a greedy person. I’ve not come here for money,” said the 25-year-old England left-back. “I’ve come here because I want to win things and I have a good chance of winning things at Chelsea.”
But in his new book, name My Defense, he contradicts himself:
The England defender wanted £60,000 a week but says the Gunners board were only prepared to offer him £55,000.
“The club made Thierry feel wanted and special, wooing him, wining and dining him, speaking in public about how much they wanted him to stay, going on a deliberate charm offensive,” stated Cole. “But me? I didn’t have one dinner, one meeting or one phone call from anyone.
Boo-fucking-hoo, maybe they didn’t want to wine and dine you after the Chelseagate scandal, why should they? This just goes further to show that his primary interest was money and notoriety, rather than playing football. This has just been bad PR for Chelsea and Cole ever since the scandal.
Driving Vista
September 11, 2006 – 12:58 pm
I installed Windows Vista RC1 over the weekend, in what turned out to be a relatively painless install procedure. You give it your product key, your name, your region, and it does the rest. Fantastic.
But the Vista doesn’t come with the full NVIDIA graphics drivers installed for my GeForce 7900GT1 so I headed over to the NVIDIA site to download them.
The standard driver experience seems to be an InstallShield based Windows Installer application, which then gives you a few Accept buttons to click on and then does some “magic” to your computer. However the experience can vary wildly. Sometimes they force you to install some other software that bloats up your computer with the drivers, and sometimes the install doesn’t finish properly and you have no idea whats happened or how to fix them.
Seeing as Microsoft overhauled Vista’s driver management, I hoped to see some kind of unified installation and management application for drivers, ala Windows Installer for application set up packages. This management would handle the installation 2 upgrading and uninstallation of drivers. It would be able to rollback failed attempts to install drivers, it would uninstall previous drivers and install newer versions, and it would keep track of the drivers installed, and when uninstalling, delete all the files associated with it.
But no, we are stick with the old system. The NVIDIA installation seems to have corrupted my second display, and screw up Vista in the process. No error messages, no option to roll back and start again. A restart fixed this, and the driver seems to have installed, but there was no control panel or configuration application. This is something that an OS like Vista (five years in the making) should be able to handle properly and gracefully.
After a few days of using Vista, all it feels like to me is an interface upgrade to Windows. I personally can’t see where five years of work went to, especially from an organisation like Microsoft. Theres no WinFS, perhaps one of the few features that got me excited about Vista, it’s Windows Mail application can’t connect to my IMAP server, and the basic essentials have not been touched3 Even some new applications, like the Sidebar, have serious interface consistency and usability issues.
I think people don’t give Windows XP as much credit it deserves. It’s a stable and mature platform, and Service Pack 2 really gave it the foundation to be a secure operating system too. I think Microsoft struggled to create an operation system that is significantly better than XP, pinning it’s hopes on the legacy of Cairo‘s object-orientated file system. It probably would’ve faired better if it did an internal redesign of Windows instead, reducing the bloat and increasing the stability, something which everyone would probably like.
But what they’ve ended up with is a slower and more unstable operating system that offers very little past XP for the average user. Take-up will be slow, it will happen, but people expecting the kind of difference going from Windows 9t to XP are going to be disappointed, and rightly so.
- Although the installed drivers do support DirectX 9 now, so you get the full Aero goodness but not optimal performance. Better than VGA compatible 640×480 16-colour drivers that came as default in XP I suppose. ↩
- I’m still skeptical about whether forcing only signed drivers to be installed is a good thing. While I think every manufacturer should go through the Windows Logo driver signing program, small incremental driver updates do seem to work better than just releasing milestone drivers. At least the bugs get fixed quicker, but new bugs get introduced quicker too. ↩
- The “new” Control Panel just seems like some forms have been rearranged and a long overdue modernisation performed. Big deal. ↩
Mint: A Year in Green
September 11, 2006 – 10:56 am
Mint turned a year old over the weekend, which is arguably one of the best stats packages around. The fact that a small $30 paid application can compete with the free monolith that is Google Analytics is testament to it’s success.
Return of the Cube
September 8, 2006 – 11:27 am
Apple’s current computer lineup is probably the best they’ve ever had. All the computers feature at least a dual core processor and 512MB of RAM. And they’re neatly slotted into the budget (Mac mini and lowest spec iMac), home (iMac and MacBook) and professional (top end iMac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro) categories, with a very simplified product line.
However, what Apple seem to be missing is a head-less computer to fill the home and low-end professional. They have the Mac mini, but it’s not upgradeable, and because of it’s laptop components, it’s limited in RAM and disk space. The high end iMacs do fill this void somewhat, but the high end customers will almost certainly have large and expensive monitors already1 and again the only “easily” upgradeable component is the RAM.
This leaves the Mac Pro as the only choice in the desktop segment for the less demanding professional that wants upgradability. While it is priced competitively for it’s specification at £1699, how many people really need quad Xeon processors, eight FB-DIMM slots, 750W PSU and the 5000X professional chipset – which all ramp up the price. What is needed is remarkably similar to the old Power Mac G4 Cube.
The G4 Cube was ahead of it’s time. The technology back then just wasn’t there to produce a small and fan-less computer without some major problems, such as lack of upgradability and over heating. But now we have mobile chips that are just as fast as their desktop counterparts2 and that run much cooler, there is no excuse. We also know that it is possible, the iMac and Mac mini are great examples that Apple already have.
So why have we yet to see the real successor to the G4 Cube? A recent Apple patent filing may suggest they have something in the works, or they’re just tidying up loose ends. The extra space over a Mac mini would give the ability to have full size hard drives, higher end graphics cards and much easier upgrades. It’s the killer product thats just waiting to entice Windows users over to the world of the Macintosh.
My inklings tell me that Apple may decide to introduce the first “new” product since the Mac mini at the expo in Paris in a week, as they’ve quietly released the iMac and Mac mini upgrades before the expo, which means maybe an even bigger announcement is in store. Maybe a new iPod, probably the iTunes Movie Store, but possibly the Mac Cube3 I’m having flashbacks of One More Thing.
You heard it here first.
- Not to mention that once your iMac becomes obsolete, so will the monitor in it. Somehow, I find it hard to imagine that a 24-inch fully HD capable monitor would be obsolete in three years. ↩
- Intel’s mobile Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors just have amazing amount of power per watts ratio. ↩
- Or Mac mini Pro or Mac Pro mini or Mac Pro Cube or Mac mini Cube… But I’ll stick with Mac Cube as it sounds cool. ↩
Ejecutive is IE compatible
September 7, 2006 – 11:05 am
Internet Explorer users, rejoice! You make up over 60% of my readership, so it’s about time that I made Ejecutive 100% IE certified! You’ll see no more ugly headers, infact, the header works better in IE than other browsers!
Five steps towards a comfortable commute
September 7, 2006 – 9:55 am
If you commute to work via public transport like I do, you’ll appreciate it when you find you have two seats to yourself rather than one. This isn’t always possible, especially when you get a busy train or bus, but if your vehicle is only moderately busy, being that not every seat is filled, then I have formulated a five step plan on how to increase your chances of getting two seats to yourself.
The problem I find isn’t with people who are fat or smelly1 but even with someone like me2 fitting two of me into two seats on my coach is uncomfortable. The seats are just too damn small. To get enough leg room, you must use up the leg space of the other seat, and to be able to sit comfortable, one person must squeeze their shoulders into their body.
The five step plan
- Sit on the outside seat. This is the obvious one, people are less likely to ask you to move over if there is someone else sitting on the inside seat near you.
- Put all your stuff on the other seat. People will see you have lots of stuff with you, and it will likely create a hassle for you to remove it all, so they are less likely to ask you to.
- Look down and avoid eye contact. Eye contact is one of the worst things you can do, if you lock eye contact with someone, this massively increases the chances of them asking to sit next to you.
- Sit close to the entrance. The closer you are to the entrance, the less likely you are to be asked to move over or vacate the seat next to you. People are going to keep going down in the vain attempt to find two vacant seats.
- Pretend to be asleep. This one is the killer one, unless the seat next to you is the last one, people are highly unlikely to wake you up to get that seat. I recommend practicing your “sleeping face” in front of a video camera. Make sure your lip is slightly ajar, otherwise you’ll just look like you have your eyes closed, and don’t “wake up” until you are sure that everyone has passed you.
Windows Vista RC1
September 7, 2006 – 9:18 am
Microsoft has made Windows Vista RC1 available for download for the public, but have given no obvious way to get a product key unless you got one when they released beta 2.
However, if you do want one, here are a few simple steps to getting one:
- Browse to Microsoft Connect.
- Click on ‘Invitations’ on the left hand side, and log in with your Windows Live ID.
- Use the following invitation ID:
TE06-KVM4-3RM9. - Then click ‘Product Keys’ on the left again, and click Request Product Key.
- This should give you a ‘Longhorn Beta 2′ key, but will work with Vista RC1.
Updated Mac minis
September 7, 2006 – 8:28 am
After the iMac update, the Mac mini range have received a welcome update and both now sport Core Duo processors. The bottom range £399.01 Mac mini now has a 1.66GHz Core Duo processor, while the range topping £529 Mac mini now has a 1.83GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive.
This will probably now be the Mac of choice for newcomers to the Apple arena, while the bottom range mini makes a very tempting proposition for a media centre computer, now that it has enough processor grunt to decode full 1080p HD video.
New iMac
September 6, 2006 – 3:08 pm
Apple have very quietly released a new range of iMac computers, now with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a new 24-inch model. Prices start at £679 for the base 1.83GHz 17-inch model (which excludes Front Row, the remote, Bluetooth and a DVD burner), leading up to £1349.01 for the top of the range 24-inch model with a 2.16Ghz processor and a 7300GT graphics card.
Ubuntu for experts
September 4, 2006 – 9:30 pm
People have been banging on about Linux is ready for the mainstream ever since the term fanboy was invented, and to be perfectly honest, it’s been nowhere near beating Windows or OS X for the “out of the box” experience.
However, recently Ubuntu has been getting a lot of publicity as the “Human’s Linux”, with many claiming that it’s the first Linux distribution to rival Windows. So I decided to give it a try, and installed it on my spare hard drive, which currently has Windows Vista RC1 on it.
I pooped off onto the Ubuntu download page1 and got the latest version, which was 6.06.
After burning it to a CD, and booting up from it, I was glad to see a colourful and friendly option menu to start up with. This allowed me to try out Ubuntu before I installed (known as a Live CD), albeit at a turtle-like pace. As standard, Ubuntu has a bunch of useful (and open source) software installed, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Evolution (although I prefer Thunderbird). More than enough to get you started on the free software bandwagon.
The install system is deceptively easy too, you double click an icon on the desktop named “Install”, and it starts a dialog which asks you some basic questions about your name, password and keyboard layout. Then, it asks if it should automatically partition your hard drive for you, and gives you a nice slider to select how much space the Ubuntu partition should have. Very simple, and much better than the old Windows XP partition interface. So I let it do its own merry thing, and that was the last button click I had to do before it was all setup on my hard disk.
Great I thought, what a simple installation procedure, finally a Linux distribution that can be installed by anyone. On booting up, the GRUB multiboot boot loader didn’t find my Vista install. No problem, the syntax for modifying GRUB’s list of installed operating systems is very simple.
However, disaster struck when Vista failed to boot, giving a rather worrying error of “No valid boot loader found”. I then booted into Ubuntu, and tried and failed to mount the Vista partition, even though Linux is capable of reading NTFS partitions out of the box. The damn installer corrupted my Vista partition!
Fortunately, I had nothing important on that Vista installation, or otherwise I would’ve been screwed. But shrugging off this problem, thinking that Vista would be simple to install again, I then proceeded to install Compiz and XGL, looking to get some crazy effects that you’ve probably seen on some YouTube videos. I followed the tutorials, ran into a couple problems, but some threads on UbuntuForums fixed those. In the end, I restarted and… got a blinking command line.
OK… I managed to reconfigure the X Window system (again from the UbuntuForums), and I tried again, with a completely different tutorial. And the command line welcomes me again after a restart.
It was at this point I thought: “Fuck this shit, why am I bothering with this?”, and switched back to my other hard disk, and back to the welcoming arms of Windows XP.
The same goes for many things about Linux, that I just don’t get. Like, when I use the apt-get command to install applications, where the hell do they get installed? Sometimes they’re in the bin folder, but othertimes I just can’t find them. Why isn’t there support for dual monitors out of the box without me having to mess around? Why doesn’t so many things don’t work without lots and lots of terminal commands?
This, I think, is why Linux isn’t ready for the desktop. In the areas that have been changed to be user friendly, it’s extremely easy to use and well designed, but at its core, it’s still a command line based operating system, and anything slightly advanced (like installing/compiling some of the best open source applications) requires use of the command line, something which I don’t want to do.
Criticisms aside, Ubuntu is actually pretty good. It’s quick, comes with all the essential applications, and I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who has an old computer, and just browses the internet and uses e-mail (although the lack of QuickTime and Flash 9 plugins are worrying). But it still needs a lot more work to be completely user friendly.
- Which unfortunately still asks me to select a mirror, and uses confusing acronyms and code names such as LTS and Dapper Drake, when all I want is a big download button. ↩
Opacity: No more comments
September 1, 2006 – 2:37 pm
Comments for blog posts are as synonymous to blogs as the posts themselves. Nearly every blog has them, and every CMS worth its salt will cater for them. But recently I’ve started to wonder just how useful comments really are?
Comments encourage responses to the posts from readers, casual or regular (as long as there’s no authentication system used). However in the near three hundred posts this blog as had, and the four hundred comments that accompany them, I can only think of two situations where the comment system was really and truly used to its potential. Most of the time, comments don’t really add to a post, and don’t offer that much more insight other than the opinions of other people.
The biggest problem to a commenting system for a small blog such as mine, is that it makes it look small! Most readers of blogs judge the popularity, and sometimes even the quality of a blog through the volume of comments it receives. Ejecutive averages only just above one comment per post, and this is just not popular enough to warrant a commenting system.
On average, I receive under one hundred unique visitors per day (bar the rare traffic spike), and the majority of the comments are centralised on a few posts. So I’ve decided to take the rather unconventional measure of disabling comments on all posts as part of the second phase of the Opacity experiment, which you can already see happening.
This will be the last post with comments open to the public, and this will be closed in a few days. After that, if you want to contact me, I’ll make it painfully easy to on the contact page.
One very successful blog, in the form of Daring Fireball, doesn’t have comments, as it relies purely on the quality of it’s content, which is hopefully why people will start reading Ejecutive.
“The best left back in the world”
September 1, 2006 – 1:26 pm
Theres an interesting post on the BBC 606 discussion boards about the Cole and Gallas transfer, in which Kapt Boris writes:
This season, for the first time, Arsenal fans will be able to look at Ashley Cole and realise that the player they have supported over the past few years is a very, very average defender.
Terry will find himself exposed this season especially now he has the extra liability of Ashley Cole on his left flank (think of how weak England are defensively down the left flank with Cole/Terry in tandem).
Any average left back that Arsenal use to replace Cole with, I feel sure will be idolised by Arsenal fans as “the best left back in the world� © by the end of the season.
Cole for Gallas
September 1, 2006 – 11:12 am
So Ashley Cole finally got shafted from the Arsenal team sheet, and in return they get William Gallas and five million smackers. This has been an on running saga since the beginning of the Summer, in which Arsenal were desperate for a new central defender, and Chelsea were desperate for a left sided full back.
Even though Arsenal were holding out for a rumoured twenty million plus Gallas deal, a swap of Ashley Cole and any money would’ve been a welcome move, as they are really desperate for a new experienced centre back to plug the hold that Sol Campbell left, and also someone that can cover the full back positions too.
Even though everyone at Chelsea will welcome the move (except perhaps Wayne Bridge), they’ve still lost their most experienced and arguably best centre back, and in the mean time gained someone who is only reasonably better than Wayne Bridge.
Of course, only time will tell whether Cole will play well for Chelsea, whether Gallas manages to maintain his solid form for Arsenal, and in the end, who got the best out of this deal.
