The lost outpost

A break from the norm today – a small group of IBMers went to an infant school in Berkshire to play around with robots!

I’ve written before about my enjoyment of working with schools and helping children to learn about technology. I do make an effort to get involved in these kind of opportunities when possible. I’m a regular helper at IBM’s annual Blue Fusion event in the Hursley lab, but this one was a little different. For one thing it was much smaller… just four of us. We were out on the school site, rather than having the children come to us. Finally, it was a significantly different age group to the ones I’m more used to dealing with – these youngsters were only 6 years old, and I’ve only ever worked with teenagers in the past.

The day was really successful. We were armed with several boxes of LEGO Mindstorms robot kits. We kicked off by talking about ASIMO and how robots work, the fact that they need bodies and brains and so on. After that the children worked in groups of 3 or 4 to build a basic wheeled robot base, making it as funky as possible with tubes and anything else they wanted to add, and then we did some simple programming. It was the first time I’d used the Mindstorms system and I have to say it’s absolutely superb – easy to use and with a lot of potential to do far more advanced stuff too.

A hectic day and challenging to keep children of this age group on track, but I was very excited to see the range of their imaginations and how they were able to work together. I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did – one child asked me “do you like working with computers?” and it made me realise that one of the things I do love about my job is the human side of it, as well as having the occasional opportunity to get out there and introduce technology to youngsters.

I see that the Flip Video camera is now available in the UK. I remember being pretty excited when these things were initially announced in the US, and sent the company an email at the time asking when I’d be able to get one in the UK (answer – they weren’t sure yet).

I have to wonder if these guys haven’t missed the boat and are relying purely on brand recognition to get them through here. The disgo / Busbi Video Plus (see my review) has been available for six months already, and is priced £30 cheaper (available from Amazon UK and Currys). Now, the difference is that the Flip has 2Gb memory, but add a cheap 2Gb SD card for less than a fiver and then remember that the Video Plus has a fold-out screen, and it’s hard to see how the Flip has a market.

I’m not in the market for a cheap video device at this point, but I’m fairly sure I’d think twice about the Flip. If they’d brought the new Flip Mino device straight over the pond it might have been a harder choice, but as it stands, I’d look at the alternatives.

A few people have recently pointed me at Wordle, a new tool created by Jonathan Feinberg. Jonathan is a researcher at IBM who brought the world some cool tools like Dogear.

The above tag cloud was generated from my del.icio.us tags and seems to sum up quite a lot of what I talk about here on my blog Click through the image to see Wordle dynamically build a new cloud.

An interesting comparison - now look at the cloud generated by my CV… it’s fairly different.

Ian, Nick and Roo all beat me to the post, but I think it is interesting to see what people are doing with Wordle! I think this is going to be hugely useful for presentations etc., too.

Well it has been nearly a month without an update here. In case you are wondering, my internal blog at IBM has fared little better. As someone whose Moo cards until recently carried the word “blogger” (they now say “social bridgebuilder“), I should probably be trying a little harder.

The truth is, and this is a position I’ve always taken - keeping a blog going can require some effort. It’s not just the time thing… it’s having something to say and the energy to develop the thought into something meaningful. It’s not for everyone. Not only that, but the growth of other social media like Twitter (or the service I’ve been playing with more recently, Plurk) has certainly eaten into my blogging. It’s interesting that Fred Wilson and Ted Demopoulos have both observed the same thing lately - that their blogging has dipped as they have moved around other media.

So an update, for those interested… essentially things are as busy as ever, but I do recognise that I have things to share… there should (!) be more to follow.

Today, I…

• built an OS X Universal binary
• attended a training course
• nearly deleted myself from the interwebs (long story)
• helped colleagues get their BlackBerries configured
• talked to people about Current Cost meters
• tried to fix an OLPC boot problem
• looked at a new customer engagement
• learned that a wonderful colleague was moving on.

This is what I do. Most days, it is good fun. Some days, it is a little full on.

Recently I’ve been trying to build a C application on OS X. It actually worked first time for me on an Intel MacBook Pro on Leopard (10.5) just via gcc *.c -o [outputfile] … but yesterday it was pointed out that the resulting binary is useless on a G4 Mac Mini.

The nice thing about Apple’s move from PowerPC to Intel chips is that they have this concept of a Universal binary - the same binary file can run on both PPC and Intel. The slightly complicated part is that you have to actually build your binary as Universal, it doesn’t happen automatically.

So it turns out the the corresponding magic-fu is:

gcc -O2 -Wall -force_cpusubtype_ALL -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc *.c -o [outputfile]

At a high level I’m telling the compiler to build for both i386 and ppc architectures. Note that I’ve also set a flag here to specify a minimum OS X level of 10.4 (Tiger).

Of course there are sometimes some coding changes required to support both processor architectures. Apple’s Universal Binary Programming Guidelines should help there.

Although you’ll most commonly hear me waxing lyrical about OS X these days, I’m a long-time Linux user. I’ve been running various flavours of Linux at home since Redhat 5.0 days.

Why Redhat and Fedora? Well, a good friend of mine noted a long time ago that it was the distribution likely to get the blessing of enterprise vendors as time went on. I’m not here to invite a flame war, and I’ve been impressed with a lot of other distros over the past couple of years in particular (while I keep meaning to give Ubuntu a “proper” run, I use it for development in VMWare Fusion on the Mac). I’ve run Fedora on a server and a workstation at home for a while now, and I’m always pretty keen to see what a new version has to offer.

Enter Fedora 9. I use my MacBook Pro pretty exclusively these days, so I just wanted a quick and easy way to see what Fedora 9 was like. I considered the Fusion option, but then read about the “Live USB” option. This is really nice… there’s a (currently Windows-based, sadly) desktop app that you run to select the “spin” of Fedora that you want, point it at an inserted USB memory key, and away you go… I chose Fedora 9 and let the Thinkpad download the image and then install it on my 1Gb USB stick. I also asked for a 200Mb “persistent overlay”, i.e. space that I could use for persistent storage of data like (I assume) my home directory. This is a far nicer option than a Live CD, as I can take my data with me.

A quick reboot, choosing a temporary boot device, pointing at the USB stick. The boot process was not all that promising, as it initially reported what looked like errors about inability to assign USB identifiers (or something), but it did all boot fine.

[click for a larger view]

In fact, it booted more than fine. I was pleased to find that Fedora 9 picked the “right” (i.e. max) resolution for my display straight away. The only customisation I needed to do to make the desktop more pleasant was to reduce the font size, but I can see why they went with the default size that they chose.

The next thing was to get myself online, or at least onto my home network. Based on past experience I went into the Network config under system preferences and started fiddling with the NIC settings. Didn’t work - although it could see the wireless card it didn’t want to let me join the network. Then I spotted the little wireless icon in the system tray at the top right of the screen, and clicking there let me join my home network immediately - with OS X levels of ease. Very impressive stuff.

Sound worked straight out of the box too… if I come across as surprised, remember I’ve been using Linux since RH 5 and I’m well aware of how flaky much of this stuff has been over the years.

Firefox worked fine, Pidgin let me configure my Google Talk account within seconds, taking a screenshot and editing in Gimp was no problem… this was a lovely experience overall. I was even able to install the Flash plugin for Firefox (although I had to download and install the RPM via sudo, rather than it just working via the Firefox addons installer).

All-in-all I was extremely impressed with the ease-of-installation and use. I’m not sure how often I’ll want to use this, but the fact that I have a fully-usable Linux distro on a bootable stick is just brilliant.

In the past week I’ve had two separate conversations with people who wanted to know a way of posting large(ish) files on the web for temporary purposes, i.e. just to let a couple of people download something without going via email.

I don’t have a definitive answer, of course. The traditional way would be something like an FTP server. There’s Amazon S3 too.

The service I’m increasingly using is drop.io - a really simple way of temporarily sharing files up to 100Mb in size. There’s no sign-up or account required. You simply specify a drop name (so I could create a name of “andyptemp” or similar, and it would end up having a URL of http://drop.io/andytemp) and then specify a time limit of between 1 day and 1 year after which the drop will be deleted. Then you can add as many files as you like up to 100Mb for the drop. You can add a password for access if you like. You can specify whether other people can just download / view the files, or add their own. And that’s it.

If you decide to use the service, one hint I’d give is to set the “optional” admin password for your drop when prompted, as it means that you can go back in later and see how many people have downloaded files, as well as adjusting the “self-destruct” time of the drop.

There are some other really cool features like the ability to have an RSS feed of the drop, get email alerts, post MP3 files via a phone number, fax documents into it… a bunch of things I’ve just not needed to play with yet… but it’s a nice service, and appears to work well.

(NB that drop http://drop.io/andytemp is live for the moment, and it is set to read/write, but in time it will delete itself. Have a play if you like…)

(update: actually on reflection I’ve made it read-only as I should have realised that this means anyone can upload anything and I can’t vouch for whatever is uploaded, which was a bit short-sighted - ordinarily of course you’d only share the URL with folks you know)

Here’s something I’ve wanted to get my hands on for a while now… an Eye-Fi SD card. If you don’t know about these things, essentially they are standard 2Gb SD cards that fit into any camera that will take the format (or others, with e.g. a Compact Flash/SD adapter). The good part is that they make the camera wireless-capable….

So I picked up my Eye-Fi card and the first thing that I noticed was the cool packaging… pull on the tab on the right-hand side of the box, and the box slides out to the left, revealing a USB dongle and the card already inserted. You need the dongle, because you need to use the computer to configure the card.

Once I plugged the dongle into the machine, an Eye-Fi item appeared on the desktop… it was pretty simple to just install the Mac software. Once I’d done that, I hit a small snag… I got a message about the Eye-Fi Manager software being unable to initalise the card. I tried running the Eye-Fi Manager a few times, but the same thing happened… until I took the dongle out of the USB port on the right-hand side of my machine, and plugged it back in on the left. That time, I got a set of dialogs enabling me to register an account. Not sure what happened there!

Actually this seems to be an issue on my MacBook Pro… for some reason the Eye-Fi Manager software will never “initialize” the card when the dongle is plugged in on the right of the machine (although it still shows up as a mass storage device, and Lightroom sees it and offers to import images from it). Worked fine over on the left, but then the dongle is a bit too wide to enable the Magsafe power plug to be connected at the same time. Actually it seems a little random, unfortunately. I raised a problem with Eye-Fi support and they basically talked me through steps for checking that nothing else is using the port, plugging and replugging - nothing specifically useful. YMMV.

Right, so here’s how this thing works. You start the Eye-Fi Manager software, which opens a web page to configure the card. Here, you can add wireless network details (it supports a whole range of network settings including WEP and WPA keys), rename the card if you want, and configure a huge variety of online services. I have configured mine for Flickr… but the software supports Facebook, SmugMug, WebShots, SnapFish, Picasa, Photobucket… and a gazillion others that I’ve not heard of before (oddly, Movable Type, Vox and Live Spaces, but not WordPress - hmm!). Once you’ve done that, you put the card in the camera, and it will automatically connect to the network and start uploading shots any time you take them.

What appears to happen, is this: the camera uploads to Eye-Fi’s site, which then transfers to your chosen / configured photo service. The next time the Eye-Fi Manager sees the Eye-Fi site, it then mirrors the photos to the local disk (you can specify a location in the Eye-Fi Manager). I’m not 100% certain that this is how it works, but that’s what I’ve observed.

So now what about the downsides to this? Well for starters, the only supported file format is JPG. That’s OK, but of course Flickr now supports video too, for instance. Oh, and by the way, this is going to upload all your photos, anytime you take any, so I’ve set the default privacy option to private for Flickr uploads so I can review and tag etc. before publishing. The photos are obviously not titled or anything when the Eye-Fi uploads them, and they get a simple tag “Eye-Fi” set, but that’s all. So you will want to go and change title, tags, description, potentially rotate and so on once the image has been uploaded. Now that Flickr has Picnik integration, you can of course do some simple editing later as well. This does all bypass my “standard” photo workflow of Lightroom import, catalog, edit, and then upload, though.

One thing that the Eye-Fi does not support is wireless networks with certificates. Other than that, Open, WEP, WPA/WPA2 are all OK. It’s only going to work with networks it knows about, too (although you can configure more than one) - there’s no UI on the camera for configuring the card, you have to use the Eye-Fi Manager software while the dongle is plugged in to the camera.

Also, because there’s no UI on the camera side, there’s no visual indication as to what is happening… the Eye-Fi will silently upload your shots, and there’s actually no way of knowing that it is doing it, or when it has finished doing it. Of course it would be amazingly difficult for this to integrate with every camera if the makers had tried to build the Eye-Fi into the camera’s user interface, so I understand why this is the case - it’s just a little bit disconcerting! One nice feature is that there appears to be support for “interrupted” uploads, I see there’s a “Receive interrupted” comment in the Eye-Fi manager UI, so I think it will support partial upload and then resume.

Overall, it’s a neat idea, and certainly pretty cool for quick shoot-and-upload scenarios. Of course I often want to catalog my shots and touch-up on the computer first, but I can see cases where this could be really cool. Very handy for conferences etc. (oh, and that USB dongle can act as a reader for any SD card, too - handy). A qualified thumbs-up!

Here’s a link to a nice review, and here’s some news about the new models coming soon.

(post updated 14th May 2008 - a couple of additional details about workflow, the card initialization error, and the screenshot of the local machine import was added)

Until recently I’d hankered after one of the higher-end Intuous graphics tablets from Wacom, but a few friends have bought Bamboo models lately so I began to think that this might be a good option for me[1]. So far, it seems that way. What’s this all about? Well I’ve wanted a tablet for a while to help with photo / graphics work, and to try out sketchcasting (see below).

The product

The Bamboo Fun is a bundle which includes the tablet and stylus, plus a mouse (slightly redundant given I have a Mighty Mouse already) and Photoshop Elements - only version 4 for the Mac, annoyingly, but I guess I could always upgrade. To be honest, I’ve not even installed it yet.

The Bamboo comes in very stylish packaging reminiscent of something Apple would make… the box unfolds neatly, each item is wrapped in that thin foam bag packaging, and the driver CD is in a square box exactly like the ones that Apple uses for OS X CDs! So, first impressions are good. After that, basically it’s just plug-and-play… there’s a driver to install which provides some System Preferences to customise the tablet sensitivity and behaviour of the shortcut buttons, but that’s it.

Negative marks go to Wacom for having their registration page (and most of the website, it seems) “temporarily unavailable” for over a week. Not cool, and they are ignoring my emails too.

Usage - OS X and a tablet

In use, it’s been something of a mixed experience so far. The tablet itself is great, but it takes a lot of getting used to over a mouse (which is something I fully expected). The issues have been around the software support, and specifically in my case Lightroom. Two major annoyances - one that the zoom wheel at the top of the tablet doesn’t work in Lightroom, and secondly that although a single tap/click will zoom in, it is then really hard to get Lightroom to zoom back out with the stylus (should just be a simple tap/click again, that’s how it works with the mouse anyway).

On the plus side, it works beautifully well in Pixelmator.

Although OS X has handwriting recognition built in (the “Ink” system), actually I’ve not found this entirely reliable so far. [For éampe ltd to intSome word Son tbeTABLET] For example, I tried to write some words on the tablet just then, and you can see what happened. There doesn’t seem to be a way for the system to learn handwriting styles either. There is some software called inkBook that looks promising and somewhat more functional than the in-built software in OS X, but I don’t think I need it just yet (here’s a review). Handwriting was never going to be the primary focus of this purchase.

Oh, and it turns out that there are some issues with Ink and 64-bit apps in 10.5.x … I found that iScrobbler started to crash, and it looks like Ink is responsible. Weird.

Sketchcasting / sketchblogging

One of my main interests with the Bamboo was trying out Sketchcasting. Dave Briggs blogged about this a couple of months ago, and I’ve been fascinated since then. My first effort, though, was not the best… it’s way over-long (mainly as I fumbled around to work out how to get the thing to work) and not as well-planned as it might have been. Actually I think the Sketchcast site is somewhat limited… there’s no way of making things private, no friending, few social features at all. So instead, I picked up ArtRage and will try using that and Screenflow to create sketchcasts, and probably share them via my Viddler account, which will at least enable things to be embedded on WordPress.com.

More recently I’ve also noticed that Sacha Chua has been sketchblogging… using her Nintendo DS. Sacha is very creative and this seems like a really cool way of using a DS, although it looks like you need a bunch of homebrew software to make it work. Worth a look if you are interested, though.

[1] and, evidently, the only way I’m going to get a custom header image is to MAKE ONE MYSELF. This comment is aimed at no-one in particular. That is all.

It’s a three-part miniseries on gadgets now that I’m back from Las Vegas. If you’ve followed my Flickr then you’ll know what I’m about to talk about. Techie geekery starts here. Yes, I probably shouldn’t get quite so worked up about technology, but here I am.

One thing that I’ve not found that easy to get hold of is an external enclosure for SATA disks. IDE/USB caddies have been pretty widely-available for a while now, but most disks now use the SATA interface so I needed something that would let me backup my Thinkpad onto a spare 200Gb 2.5″ disk I’d been given.

I had a look through a bunch of enclosures in Frys and I have to say I just pretty much went with what seemed simplest (a NexStar SX from Vantec), without really spending too much time on the features… the decision was mainly based on cost ($20) and size. So when I finally (!) got around to opening the box today, I was completely astounded at the quality of the product, given the cost.

The box itself was solid cardboard (not the flimsy sort of stuff I’d expected). Inside was a soft carry case, and inside that was the metal enclosure itself. The product also ships with a USB cable with a “pass through” socket which seems to enable more devices to be attached, a driver disk, some screws and a screwdriver - very complete.

Once I took the enclosure out of the carry case I had another pleasant surprise. It’s metal and very compact. There are two small squeeze clips at the back… press them in and the top and bottom are released to slide off. The other USB enclosure I’ve previously purchased was really poor compared to this, with ugly screw lugs on the top and a very loose lid… this thing is really elegant.

The only small issue I had was that the Hitachi drive I’d been supplied for my Thinkpad initially would not fit into the actual case, because it is so compact. The side screws made the drive just a little too wide to fit. I had to remove the top cover of the drive (see photo), but since Vantec provided a screwdriver this was no big deal.

That’s really all I have to say, but I just wanted to point out that this seems to be a really good quality bit of kit at a decent price. I probably ought to look for a 3.5″ version and then I can whip out the drives from my old Linux tower before decommissioning it!

Tara Hunt has posted a great piece recently on Twitter for companies (by the way, if you don’t follow Tara’s blog, you really should take a look). Here’s a a small illustrative anecdote from WSTC last week.

I gave a presentation at our internal WebSphere conference that talked about Twitter, among other things (ordinarily I’d Slideshare the presentation, but it did contain some stuff I can’t post externally, sorry about that… maybe I’ll write an external version sometime).

One slight technical hitch. The conference organisers were set up to record presentations from a Windows laptop and Powerpoint using Camtasia. I was presenting using Keynote on the Mac, so I chose to use ScreenFlow to record the session (I noticed that Jason McGee did the same thing for his WebSphere sMash pitch earlier in the week). I tested beforehand and everything seemed good, but just at the end I switched virtual desktops to do an unscripted demo of something, and found a stack dump from ScreenFlow on the screen. I’d spoken for an hour, taken 15 minutes of questions… and lost the lot.

I twittered my frustration and headed out into the corridor, thinking about re-recording.
Within minutes, I checked my email and found an email offering support from one of the guys at Vara Software, who produce ScreenFlow.

Well there’s yet another illustration of the power of Twitter. Let’s be clear, they haven’t in fact been able to recover the data for me, but that doesn’t matter… this level of responsiveness and support just makes the relationship I have to that particular piece of software much more positive and sticky. I’m pretty impressed. I assume that they were using Tweetscan or Summize (Twitter mashups / “search engines”) to watch for references to their software and decide whether to respond. This was just great.

Oh, and this worked brilliantly to illustrate my point about why folks should take a look (or second look) at Twitter in the talk itself. This is increasingly becoming an important channel of communication.