Goodbye user-names

I was on the Underground the other day on a very long journey and due to the ageing battery on my iPhone had to resort to good old people watching.

Sitting opposite me was a group of guys who had obviously come back from a holiday (I was on my way back from the airport). And opposite them was a very attractive young lady. One of the guys started talking to the young lady and after all the usual conversation stuff it came to the obligatory exchange of details. So, how do we exchange details with people we just met, well the options are:

• Phone number
• Email address
• myspace/internet handle/page
• Old school snail mail address

Well, what happened next some may think signifies nothing at all and wouldn’t bat an eye lid at it. It made me stop and think. The guy asked “Are you on Facebook?” To which the girl said “Yes!” and they exchanged their… names? Not some long Internet handle or string of numbers, just their names. I don’t know whether it’s that important but I think it shows how the Internet and the overall way in which we interact with each other is changing. We are moving away from an Internet alias we give ourselves and back to our names and more personal information. This could be good because we may get more in touch with each other and it can be bad because obviously our information can be stolen and used against us.

What ever it means, it’s a change and it’s happening around us as we speak. So watch this space.

Shiny happy people: The Church of Apple

I was waiting in the queue at the Apple store the other day (as any good Mac geek should do at least once a month) when it struck me how much Apple and the idea had changed. From what? You ask. Well cast your minds back to 1976, I can’t because I wasn’t around but some might just be able to. Two young techies, well one techie and a hippie start a company in Cupertino California selling computers. The two guys were the ever famous Steve Jobs and the not so well known Steve Wozniak.

When I think of Apple the person that always comes to mind is Wozniak or Woz. Yes yes, we all know about Steve Jobs and how he’s catapulted himself into the hearts and minds of nearly 90% of the technological world but it’s the older of the pair that fascinates me. I think he embodies what Apple always used to be. It started out as a company selling the computers that he built whilst attending the ‘Homebrew Computer Club’ and were designed for that market. I can’t help but think that Woz just wanted to build machines for him and his friends to hack and tinker with. And that’s what I think Apple used to be. A company making machines that were originally designed as hacker machines for enthusiasts. This didn’t suit many others and as time went on Apple changed dramatically into the super power it is now.

At this point I ought to confess, I am writing this on a Mac, in a room surrounded by them, of all different ages and types and I do make the monthly pilgrimage to the ‘Store’ to see what’s new and expensive. I like Mac, but not for the reasons that they’re trying to sell. I enjoy using an Apple Mac because I love *nix systems. They’re so much more interesting and powerful to use than a standard Windows machine (nothing against Microsoft). And I’ve spent too much time messing with many of the plethora of Linux distros and actually need to get work done. I find that when using Linux I’m just too tempted to see how small I can get the install or how fast I can make it boot and before I know it all of my projects are a week overdue and I haven’t even installed and IDE because I ripped out the package manager system to make the system smaller! I suppose there is something to be said for the aesthetics of an Apple Mac but then again, there are other machines that look just ask good. Ok, rant 1 over.

My main observation is that Apple is really trying to sell the American Apparel life style. i.e. Happy shinny teenagers just hanging out and having a good time eating ice cream by the beach, oh and what’s this, Tim has just finished snorkeling the great barrier reef and wants to email his pictures to his gorgeous girl friend in New York whilst video chatting to her over the Internet. They are trying to tell us how things should be done and implying that if we aren’t doing them they’re way then we will not be accepted into their castle of beautiful clever people. The stores are arranged in a way that makes us feel instantly peaceful (except you can never test the machines because there’s always some smelly backpacker emailing their friends or office worker checking their Facebook account).

Contrary to what you may be thinking right now, I don’t hate Apple, or their marketing style. I think it’s incredibly clever. I think their products attempt to push the boundaries of what you can do in a consumer market. The only thing I’m disappointed with is that  Apple has lost it’s hacker roots. Every time someone hacks the iPhone or Apple Tv, or figures out a way to use their software on a PC they stamp it out  and smash it down with patches and ‘bug fixes’. I think there can be space in their business model for both the hackers and the everyday consumers. It just seems a shame with all of their great hardware out now and their apparent championing of innovation that they are trying to stop design and creativity at it’s source, the hackers.

2 Years with the iPhone

It’s been 2 years since Steve Jobs stood onstage and changed the gadget world forever. If you didn’t see it watch this. It was truly a momentous moment for Apple. Really, up until that point they had been the ‘other’ computer/software manufacturer but as soon as the iPhone was announced it pushed them to new levels in the great tech race. Now Apple make some of the most desired and revered products available and the iPhone is partially the reason for their success.

I was lucky/stupid enough to have bought an iPhone on it’s day of release (in the UK) in November 2007. I queued up outside the Apple store in Manchester, well, correction, my girlfriend queued for 3 hours for me whilst I made my way there from London. They handed out muffins and free Starbucks coffee to all those queueing. There was a real sense that something special was going on. Finally the doors opened and the queue moved in. I think I was about 10th or something. I handed over my £300 and got the little black box. Eager to get it up and running I opened my laptop in the store and activated it there and then using the Apple stores wireless network, something the store manager wasn’t too happy about.

Well it’s been two years, several software revisions and new contract terms but I still use the very same iPhone I bought that evening in 2007. I’ve had a few minor problems over the last two years, mainly just software but they were all easily fixed by restoring the software. So, here is it, the one and only first revision. It’s been a little scuffed through being in my pocket for nearly two years but as Apple promised I’ve not had any scratches on the screen at all. Physically it’s in good shape, my only problem with it is that my headphones keep popping out when I listen to music, I think the slot has become loose through constant use. The battery lasts just over a day now, down from the 3 days it used to.

From memory there have been around 3 major updates to the software all bringing new features to the phone. The one that changed how I used my phone was when Apple finally released support for third party apps. Up until then I still considered my phone to be, well, just that, a phone. When third party apps were released I saw my iPhone as something that could entertain me and something I could use to make me more productive. I will admit, as anyone who knows me will say, my favorite app is one called ‘Tris’. It’s a copy of a popular falling block game that another game company owns the rights to. I do play it for several hours a day, but hey, what’s a geek to do?

Another app I find invaluable on my phone is Tweetie. I’ve gotten very into Twitter and use Tweetie all the time to keep in touch with various people. It’s simple and really well laid out. And I think it’s set apart from other Twitter apps because it’s so fast.

As well as apps like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Skype’ I do play games (other than ‘Tris’). My favorite at the moment has to be one that I found a few weeks ago called ‘Eliss’, it’s really hypnotic and I think the guys who made it have a really good idea on how to use the iPhones multi-touch interface.

So there it is, the two year old iPhone still changing the way we use mobile technology. I’m going to upgrade to the new iPhone 3Gs but I will still consider this device to be one of the most important pieces of technology I own. It has changed the way I work by using electronic reminders, lists and calendars, the way I keep in touch with people by making heavy use of Facebook and Twitter and how I enjoy my media with it’s audio/video/youtube capabilities. There are more and more web sites now that aggregate feeds and scrape various sources of data but I still think the iPhone, although not often thought of as one, is the best feed and source aggregator available.

Gin + Macbook = 1 Unhappy Girlfriend

So, a little different from the usual stuff I blog about (don’t panic, I’m not starting a how-to blog). I thought I’d put this online because, well, it’s funny.

My girlfriend is possibly one of the clumsiest people on the planet. Always has been and always will be. Before she went to University we went and got her a Macbook (one of the old white ones, ooo retro!) She loves it and uses it all the time. It’s not very high spec but it does the job and does it well.

Set the scene: it’s only a few days until her last exam and a lot of her revision material is on her laptop, which is sitting just in front of her on the table she’s working at. She spend half an hour complaining that no one would go and make her a gin and tonic. Eventually someone relented and in no time at all alcoholic relief arrived. I don’t quite know what she was doing but she managed to knock the glass and tip just over half of it all over her laptop.

I’ve never had this happen but had read a few horror stories about it on the internet and knew that the first thing to do was to take the battery out (the machine had already switched off!) I then went to work with her Father on dismanteling it. I followed the great guide at iFixit.

So, once dismantled we needed to get air moving over it for as long as it takes to dry out. My girlfriend’s father suggested putting it in the oven. Not like this guy did with his graphics card. There was no heat on, just the fan.

So after a night in the oven and a quick assembly the Macbook was ready for a boot. And…. it worked! So even though it switched off, after drying it for a night everything was fine.

Mac G4 Cube First Impressions

Wow, what a few weeks it’s been. Started of getting the Mac SE (more info soon) and have now ended up with a PowerMac G4 and a G4 Cube. I don’t quite know what possessed my to buy the G4 Cube but it was there on Ebay for a good price so I went for it. I remember watching a youtube video a few years ago where Steve Jobs first introduced it at a Mac event. I remember being amazed as the blue jeans and black shirt wearing tech guru unlocked the machine and pulled the whole insides out from the case. The machine isn’t fast by any modern standards but I still think it’s one of the best looking computers ever to be made. Apple have constantly broken new ground with their design over the years, from the first iMac to the iPhone they appear to have no fear.

The G4 Cube came out in 2000 and was only sold for around a year. This was due to it’s extremely high price. It was released with a 450Mhz processor which was then pushed to 500Mhz in an attempt to push up sales. I have the 450Mhz version. Of course the machine is running a G4 series Power Pc Processor, 1.5 Gb of ram, the original 20Gb hard disc and an ATI graphics accelerator. So, as computers go nowadays not that fast. But this doesn’t matter. The computer is a piece of art, it’s fantastic to look at and amazing to use. It’s totally silent (apart from the dying hard drive and cd-rom), being cooled by convection alone. In fact, if you open the machine up most of the ‘cube’ is taken up with a HUGE (for the time) heat-sink that sits right in the middle of the components. This allowed a tunnel of moving air to come from underneath the cube, up and out of the top. One of my flat mates has actually taken to calling it the Apple Toaster.

It came with Os 9 and after using it for around 10 minutes I decided I had to boot Os X onto it. The latest version that is ‘officially’ compatible with the Cube is Tiger. Leopard can run on it but apparently you have to trick it into thinking the processor is faster than it really is. It took a while to install Tiger, mainly because I wasn’t paying attention and chose to install ALL of the language packs. But anyways, after it had install it runs perfectly. Slightly (obviously) slower than my unibody macbook pro but certainly useable. 

I don’t have any real plans for it yet. I’m going to put a new 80Gb hard drive in and maybe clean the case up. I don’t have an Apple desktop so I think I’ll be keeping it for web surfing and Spotify. Anyway, enough of me blabbing on about my new toy, here it is: (I apologize, my desk is a tip because I’m in the middle of revision!)

A Look Back

Ah, the days where a computer with a beige finish was all the rage and a 9” screen was something to brag about. Yes, I’ve just bought a Mac SE 5011 from Ebay. Why? I haven’t quite worked out a good reason but it was made around the time I was born so it’s almost vintage…

Yes, a Mac SE 5011. As detailed by Low End Mac it was the first Mac to have a built in fan and sported a hefty 8Mhz processor. The system running on it at the moment (I think) is about 6.0.x. I’m planning to reboot it with a new copy of System 6 to see just how it used to be done. All I need to find now is a USB floppy drive that’ll support the correct discs. Anyway, here it is in all its beauty. More shots to come of it running. 

Oh and thanks to Chris who was a real help lugging it back home! I owe you a pint!

Network Signification and Representation in Processing

Ah yes, another meaningless Processing application. Well this time it’s a little more interesting that the last one. I promise!

I was browsing the Processing discourse a while back when I came across the Carnivore networking library. It allows the quick and simple fetching of packets from what I believe to be the pcap library, although I’m not too sure. The library is very simple to work with, the only problem I found was setting it up initially. I’m running Java 1.6 on my Mac and this Carnivore does not play nice with it. Every time I want to use the library I have to go into the Java Preferences and change back to 1.5, just to run a library? Hmm. Well given this annoyance I proceeded with development. I was able to capture packets and print out their respective details within minutes. 

The key with Carnivore is, yes, the Carnivore Object that you set up at the beginning of the sketch. This is done by simply passing it a reference to a Processing sketch or anything inheriting from PApplet.

CarnivoreP5 c = new CarnivoreP5(this);

Bam! It’s that easy. From here you just have to override the packetEvent method that is called when ever a packet is detected by the Carnivore Object. Inside here you can access the packet that the method captured and pull loads of data out, such as the sender and receiver addresses and the transport protocol used. You can even look at the actual packets data but I didn’t go that far.

So, what to do with this then. Well, I’ve wanted to try out the Minim sound library for a while now so what better time that with a packet capturing library? My thought was that way back when you had to ‘dial’ into the Internet I was fascinated by the noises the modem made. I kind of miss that with Broadband so… why not make something that tries to replicate that sound only with a digital packet switched network? When ever a packet passed through my computer the app makes a sound. Simple. It was pretty quick to do as the Minim library provides some really good tools to get things working. I won’t go into too much detail because their site has some great info. 

My intentions for the future are to improve the app and make the sound more meaningful. At the moment the same sound plays whether a packet is sent or received. I intent to change the sound based on the packets type and destination/source etc. All pretty simple stuff but with revision it’s getting harder to spend time on this stuff. Anyhoo, watch this space! Oh and here’s the app. The position of the dots is calculated as a function of the Ip address of the packets sender, (thanks to my flat mate Marc for the idea on that one). They also flash when active. 

Twitter and Processing

Yes, I’ve finally gone and done it. I have twitter. it was a long time coming but now I want to make the most of it. So within minutes of logging on I found a nice set of Java API bindings and got writing.

I wanted to quickly make something that would grab a load of simple data from my twitter account and display it in a meaningful way. So my first approach was to add the Processing core package into the class path. I’m really impressed by Processing because I can mock up an animation / visualizer really quickly just by feeding it data.

With Processing in the mix I decided to make a visualizer  for my followers and those who I follow. I wanted it to show them moving around the screen and maybe somehow show any links that may exist between them. It would be really cool to see any links between my friends that I didn’t know about. 

I started with the basic JFrame and embedded PApplet. From here I  gave the applet a nice black background and went about grabbing the data from Twitter. I used the Twitter4j bindings found here. It was recommended on the Processing Discourse and provides some really nice tools to easily get simple data from the twitter servers. 

Using the Java bindings I was able to do several things. First I logged in by passing the username and password of the user to Twitter. I then retrieved all of the users followers and all of the users that they are following. This data is all returned as a List cast to User type. I created an inner class allowing me to store an x and a y position for these users within the PApplet. I stored instances of this class in ArrayLists for quick and easy access.

So with all of the data I needed, stored away, I went ahead and displayed it. This was the easy bit, performing most of the animation etc within the draw method.

So here it is, I’ve called it pTwitter (I’m sure I’ll come up with a better name later!) Completed within 3 hours on and off. My next steps are going to be drawing symbolic lines between users who are associated in some way.

 

Edit: The blue bar at the bottom and all buttons are from the ControlP5 library. The allow the user to update their status directly from the app.

Last Fm and Java

Having just finished my first application using the Java bindings for the Last Fm Api I thought I’d look back at how easy it was and problems that I had to overcome.

A friend and I took part in the first Last Fm hack day a few months ago. We used the Api with the Maps Api provided by Google to mash up data from events and shows listed within Last Fm and a Map/area. When we wrote it we used straightforward Java script and Php. Both of which I’m not too fluent with. So when the Java bindings where released I jumped straight in and tried them out.

The hard part was thinking of something I could do with it. I wanted it to be a proof of concept, of how quick and simple it is to fetch data from Last Fm and display it to the user in a clear and concise way. I decided to use their ’similar artists’ search engine. Basically all this does is, when given an artist it returns (from a pre-populated database) artists that are similar. So, I used this in conjunction with JLayer (a simple mp3 player for Java) to allow the user to select an artist and find similar artists (who they can listen to). ‘Ah, so simple’ you say. Well… yes! It took not much over 4 hours to complete from conception to finished project (with a small font end).

When using the Api I found it annoying how I had to pass my Api key etc with every call I made. So the first thing I did, a any good OO programmer would, was separate out the calls to another class. This class, I think it was called ‘Connection’ contained the key, user name, password etc. Using this, I was able to make calls from anywhere in my program to the Api, without having to send a load of other data with it.

So with the connection set up it was plain sailing. There were no other special connection criteria. From here I was able to retrieve data from their database. In the return data I could get  URL to the mp3 tracks location. This meant that I could then pass the URL to the JLayer player that I set up before hand for it to play. 

So, again as I’m sure I’ve said on this blog before, watch this space. The next thing I want to do it create a visualizer in Processing for album covers. This front end will handle all interaction so the user can select an artist in a pseudo 3d space! Maybe I should revise for my exams first though!

Upgrade upgrade upgrade!

The move from a 13” to a 15” laptop has got me thinking about the way things are going in the world of laptop computers. The sales of mini notebooks have gone through the roof as they have become cheaper and more powerful. This does beg the question, do people prefer smaller computers

Having spent two years with a 13” macbook the jump to a macbook pro brings a welcome change. I find that working with a larger screen makes me more productive as I can have several documents or environments open at the same time, avoiding the annoying case of switching between windows every time I want to glance at something. It has also made me feel as though I can do more with my machine making it more of a desktop replacement than anything. This is why I’m curious about those who use the mini notebooks. A screen size of 9-11” seems so restricting. As I look around I see people bent over peering into their small windows to the internet. I think if things continue the way they are the ‘eee-back’ will be a regular phrase. 

I’m not saying they aren’t impressive, what Intel has done with the Atom processor is great and they all look pretty good, it’s just, in an age where people want more and more why do they want less and less screen real estate?