I just spotted that my Nagios/RRD graphs of my home server are showing a strange correlation.
From these graphs, it seems that the higher the outdoor temperature, the more free memory the system has available. I’m sure this is just a coincidence, though…
Outdoor temperature
Free memory
Perhaps my job as a mobile IT specialist is getting too much for me.
Last night I had a dream that someone configured my alarm clock for push notifications and then signed me up to a high volume mailing list.
When it went off this morning, in a half-awake state I irritably tried to remember how to configure my push mail settings (aka “snooze”) and went back to sleep. Repeat in five minutes. Ugh.
Perhaps it’s time for a holiday!
I’ve now had an iPhone 3GS for a couple of weeks, and it seemed only right to write something about it. This is not a review – there are many, many other reviews of the iPhone out there. This article is just a collection of my own thoughts, and a few comparisons to my other current smartphone (an HTC Magic) and my old smartphone (a Sony Ericsson P1i).
It might sound like a daft thing to complain about, but the iPhone doesn’t have an “alert LED” to warn you when there’s a text message or voicemail waiting. The P1i and the Magic both have this – and it’s great because you can see from across the room whether you’ve missed a message. I didn’t realise how much I used it until I realised that the iPhone doesn’t have such a feature. It’s annoying to have to walk over, pick it up and unlock it to check.
The iPhone suffers from poor battery life. Admittedly I tend to keep wifi and GPS turned on all of the time, but with an average day’s use (0 phonecalls, a handful of texts and maybe 30-60 minutes of app usage and web browsing) the battery gets down to 25% and I have to recharge every night. It’s OK provided I’m able to charge it every night. If I was going camping, I’d make the effort to turn wifi and GPS off, and maybe even get 2 days of use out of it! My P1i lasted for days before it needed fresh coal, and the Magic lasts for a few days between recharges with wifi enabled.
Some people have also complained that the iPhone’s battery can’t be changed by a mere mortal and have cited this for a reason for not buying it. I agree to a certain extent, but the battery isn’t likely to wear out for a couple of years, and by then I’ll be wanting a new phone anyway.
This next item might be seen as a pro or a con – the iPhone doesn’t really have many options. This is probably OK for most people, but it is not as configurable as the Magic. If an app or an aspect of the OS works the way you like it, then good. If not, it’s a bit tough. The Magic is inherently more geeky and everything has options. Having said that, the options aren’t in your face and are not intimidating for novice users.
The browser, as many have noted, is excellent. I won’t go into detail about it. The browser on the Magic is also good at rendering pages properly, but unfortunately lacks a multi-touch interface. This means you can’t do the pinch-zoom gesture, among other things. Other HTC handsets have multi-touch interfaces, though.
A minor annoyance with the iPhone is that it has to be registered with iTunes, and must be connected to iTunes when you want to update the firmware. It might not affect most people (especially if they already use iTunes for listening to music), but it could be annoyance for those who don’t want to install an unnecessary music player, and especially for me, as I had to build a Windows virtual machine to install iTunes. In contrast, the Magic simply receives its updates over the air, using 3G or wifi.
I prefer the feel of the Magic in my hand over the iPhone. The Magic is a bit smaller, a bit lighter and a nicer shape, I think. Doesn’t make a huge difference though. By this point, I’m just nitpicking.
Both devices have good screen, good onsreen keyboards and generally similar. The iPhone is a bit slicker, but I think my favourite phone out of the two is the Magic. I’d like it even more if it had multi-touch, too 
Since getting my iPhone 3GS, I’ve been playing with a few apps. Today I tried one called Cyclemeter, which is a GPS tracker and can provide some interesting stats about your cycle rides.
I set it to track my journey to work (Speedwell – Clifton) and was quite interested by the elevation graph in particular. (N.B. this route is slightly shorter than my usual one, since the Bristol-Bath cycle path is currently closed near Lodge Causeway, so I’ve been taking a shortcut on main roads).
I’ve included some iPhone screenshots of my results:
Map of my route to work
Graphs of my route
Key points:
This week, my phone contract came to an end and it was time to say goodbye to my old smartphone – a Sony Ericsson P1i. I thought it fitting to say a few words. Don’t confuse this with a review for a 3-year old phone – this is more like a comparison between the early days of smartphones, and the handsets you can buy today.
Sony Ericsson P1i
I’ve had the P1i for 19 months, during which time I have used it every single day – so I know it pretty well. I originally chose it because I wanted a smartphone – something that could handle web and email. My previous phone had been a Sony Ericsson K800i, which had GPRS, and a basic email client and web browser. It was slow, and it never really worked properly. I guess that’s what you might expect given that it wasn’t a smartphone
So I chose the P1i because it boasted 3G, wifi, a decent web browser, a more complex email client and other Internet-oriented features. It also had a QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen with a stylus. There wasn’t a lot of choice because at the time, nearly all smartphones were sold intended for business, and the Apple iPhone had just been released but cost a weeks’ wages – even if you were the boss of Apple.
(I briefly owned a BlackBerry Pearl 8100, but it was so awful that I sent it back after 48 hours).
I had used a Sony Ericsson M600i at work, so I knew vaguely what I was getting. The P1i was pretty much the same, except with twice the memory, a newer OS, and wifi. When I started using it, I was excited that I’d be able to browse the web at will, read my emails on the move and never be bored again.
But my dream never quite came true. Why not?
As mobile browsers of the day go, it was pretty good. It was an integrated version of Opera Mini which is a decent browser. It just doesn’t cut the mustard these days, as you simply can’t do without Flash or Javascript. Many sites simply don’t work.
Like today’s smartphones, it had options for portrait or landscape viewing. Unfortunately, you have to go into a menu to switch your view.
There’s no automatic resizing or scaling, so if you are looking at a “real” website, typically you only see the top corner and there’s an awful lot of vertical scrolling and horizontal scrolling before you find what you want. You also can’t scroll the way you can on modern phones such as the iPhone – by dragging the whole page with your finger. Scrolling was done using traditional scroll bars, which had to be dragged with the stylus (because they were too small for a finger).
And, as we now know, the concept of duplicating all web content in a special mobile web doesn’t really work. Sure, some sites offer mobile-friendly versions (e.g. Bristol University’s Mobile Campus Assistant) but it’s just not feasible to expect that you will never need to look at a “real” website on your phone.
The overall experience wasn’t great, and was mainly reserved for needing to find information on the move, such as store opening hours or a postcode for the sat nav.
If you only have an inbox folder, then you probably wouldn’t mind the email client on the P1i. However on my work email account, I have dozens of folders that incoming mail gets automatically sorted into. This is a nuisance on the P1i, as you have to go a couple of levels into the menus to choose which folder you’d like to view, and you have to go into each and every folder to see if it has any new messages in it.
I only really used the email client for writing emails when I was out and about.
Data contracts were expensive at the time I bought the P1i. They were most definitely targeted at business users, and my domestic mobile contract only included 1MB of data a month. That might let you view a handful of mobile websites, but it’s really nothing as soon as you start looking at “real” websites.
So I only used it in emergencies, because I knew that anything more would start to cost an arm and a leg.
The P1i has a QWERTY keyboard which is great for quick typing. It also has a jog-dial and some navigation buttons on the side, and of course the touchscreen. Depending the app or menu in question, you can sometimes use the touchscreen with a finger if you’re careful. Other times you’ll need the stylus.
The problem is that you have to keep switching between different input methods. The number of times I’ve started going through menus with the jog-dial, been forced to intervene by touching the screen, pressing the wrong thing, being forced to get the stylus out and then ended up typing awkwardly while also holding the stylus shows that the interface isn’t really mature.
Today, it’s practically impossible to buy a smartphone with a stylus (or a keyboard, for that matter).
The main downfall of Symbian UIQ3 was its excessive complexity. Basic tasks, such as writing a new text message, would mean the user had to find their way through several levels of menus. Everything seemed to be hidden behind several menus, and there were pages and pages of options that would frighten most people. Consider also what I just said about constantly switching between input methods, and you might get an idea of the pain involved in, for example, changing the time zone when you go on holiday.
If this weren’t enough, the menus are slooooow and laggy. Opening a menu with several items might take a second, maybe longer. Opening your SMS inbox sometimes took as long as five seconds. That is an eternity in the world of technology users, and I often found myself hissing “come on!” at the phone when I was trying to do something.
Symbian was the forerunner of today’s smartphones in that it allowed users to download and install apps on their phone. There was no app store, and finding apps involved browsing the web endlessly and downloading them. It was a bit of a pain to do so on the phone itself, so I usually would find and download apps on my PC and transfer them to the phone using the cable or Bluetooth.
That’s fine for a geek like me, but the main problem was the fact that there were two Symbian based platforms – Sony Ericsson’s UIQ3, and Nokia’s S60. As always, there was a platform war and S60 won. It’s now quite hard to find any UIQ3 apps, and when most software developers say “Symbian” they mean “S60″.
Incidentally, Sony Ericsson are still making Symbian-based phones (such as the new Satio) but they now use S60.
Despite what I’ve said so far, it’s not all bad. The P1i did have some great features, such as:
It’s been a good phone. It’s just time to move on now
My friend Stu (former organiser of the Photo Challenge and professional photographer based in Leicestershire) has recently launched a photography tutorial website called CameraTutor. There’s not much more I can add other than this info from the site itself, and my encouragement to follow the blog if you are interested in photography yourself.
Starting on the 1st of January, 2010 will be a series of photography tutorials to help you get the best from your camera – it doesn’t matter if you have a top-of-the-range SLR or a point and shoot, there should be something for everyone here. A new tutorial will appear each Friday morning, giving information on a single technique, concept or other thinking point. I hope not to make anything too complicated, and welcome questions and comments on each post in the comments section.
So come along for the ride – I hope I will learn from you as much as you will learn from me, and we can all improve together.
Some years ago, my dad bought me a book about electronics, computers and robots from a jumble sale for 10p. It was published in 1984 and probably about 15 years out of date when I received it.
Today I came across it on my bookshelf back at my parents’ house, and there’s a double-page spread in it called Television and Video in the Year 2000. It has a picture of how a house might look in the millennium year.
Of course, speaking today with a decade’s hindsight, the house looks like something from Thunderbirds, but some of its predictions have indeed come true. Let me reproduce it for you here.
When you are grown up and your children are going to school, this book may not exist. In fact, schools as you know them may not exist either, and libraries with books may be museums. All this will happen because of television and video. Television was invented during the 1920s by John Logie Baird.
Studying by Television
Let’s visit a home of the future, say in the year 2000, and see what everyone is doing. Alice is 12 years old. She is not wasting time watching television; she is at school. That’s her teacher on the screen. She manages to see Alice once a week to check her written work, but not for long. By teaching on television she could have a thousand pupils in her class at once, but she doesn’t have more than a hundred. Alice likes to ‘go to school’ in the living-room where there is a row of flat screens against the wall. She wears headphones to listen to the teacher.
Alice’s brother, Peter, likes to work by himself in his bedroom with a smaller, personal screen. He is 20 years old and, although he lives in Britain, he’s studying with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. His microcomputer and screen are linked by telephone to the local library. They are sending Peter a new article written in America. They received it overnight from the United States during the cheaper-rate computer time.
Work and Leisure
Dad has worked at home for the last five years, ever since his supermarket became fully automated. As supply manager for the supermarket, he checks the stock on the shelves every Monday morning visually through the closed-circuit television cameras. On his home screen he can also study the computer totals produced by the automatic check-out tills.
Mum is watching a live television programme. Her favourite daytime programme is the 24-hour European news station which the family receive through their satellite dish receiver on the roof.
Grandad Jones is the only member of the family who uses the video disc. At the moment he’s looking at a dahlia catalogue, and the video disc gives the best picture available on any system.
Granny Jones can hardly walk and spends her time watching the goings-on out in the street through the local closed-circuit camera system. The council originally set up the system to help stop burglaries.
I’ve also photographed the image from the book – apologies for the quality. I might even get round to scanning it one day. Click for a larger version.
A house of the future
So how accurate were the predictions?
Lots of the things mentioned in the picture are easily possible with today’s technology. But few people do them because they are inconvenient or expensive, or simply a bad idea.
It would be easy to set up a videoconferencing system to allow pupils like Alice to have school lessons at home – but nobody would do it because it misses out on an awful lot of face-to-face contact. Peter’s use of technology to get hold of documents is more realistic.
Likewise the father working from home – it’s possible to install cameras around Tesco and have the stock manager working from home, but it’s useless and expensive.
As for the mother watching 24-hour live news and the grandad watching what’s essentially a DVD – spot on. But how bored must the granny be to sit there watching CCTV in her own street?
It seems to me the biggest omission of this futuristic house is the use of computers and the Internet – although lots of the video systems in use seem to do computer-like tasks. Each person in the house is using specialist equipment for each task, and each piece of equipment has its own source of external connectivity.
The beauty of modern computers is that they can do a wide variety of tasks, and that the Internet can be used to carry any sort of data, whether it’s a text document or a video stream.
The most saddening thing about that house is that nobody is talking to anyone else, and nobody has any reason to go outside. I hope that doesn’t come true!
I posted a few months ago to say that my server wasn’t a massive fan of the high temperature in my loft.
Well, now it’s too cold. The UK has had a bit of a cold snap lately. Outdoor temperatures in Bristol last night got as low as -3 °C, and in turn the temperature in my loft went down to 2.5 °C.
Ambient temperature in my loft
Thing is, that’s probably a bit too cold for my server now. The CPU is happily sitting there at 24 °C but the disks are all around 15 °C.
According to Wikipedia:
A common misconception is that a colder hard drive will last longer than a hotter hard drive. The Google study seems to imply the reverse – “lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates”. Hard drives with S.M.A.R.T.-reported average temperatures below 27 °C had failure rates worse than hard drives with the highest reported average temperature of 50 °C, failure rates at least twice as high as the optimum S.M.A.R.T.-reported temperature range of 36 °C to 47 °C.
So my disks appear to be at risk of failing sooner. Worse yet, they’re not consistently at 15 °C but fluctuate wildly on a daily and seasonal basis. Looks like all I can do is keep my data on a redundant array and swap out any disks when (not if) they fail.
A friend of mine spotted that his bank claims to use “the highest security available” when actually they use ARC4 and 1024 bit RSA. He sent them this:
Dear HBOS security
I have recently received the below message in regard to your paper-free service. While the message was genuinely sent by yourselves, I do take issue (and most strongly so) with the statement that “You can access our paper-free service safe in the knowledge that it uses the highest level of security available.” In fact, your SSL security is bordering on outmoded; if you took security seriously then you would certainly use 128- or 256-bit AES (rather than ARC4) and 2048- or 4096-bit (rather than 1024-bit) RSA. I very much hope you already know that NIST will consider 1024-bit RSA (equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key in terms of the effort required to break it) officially obsolete as of 2010, so I would certainly have expected that you would transition to 2048-bit or longer RSA keys by now, although I still hold out hope that you will finally do this before the new year is upon us. Until then, I would suggest that you do not allow misleading statements such as the below to be issued as regards your security provisions.
Yours faithfully
B S T
Having received no response after several weeks, he then sent them this:
Dear HBOS security
Since I sent the below message over a month ago, I have received no response but for an automated acknowledgement which has not been followed up. However, I have received another message seeking once again to inform me that you supposedly use the highest level of security available. With 2010 almost upon us, and with Christmas cheer in my heart, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and check to see if, in fact, you have at last dragged yourselves into the 21st Century as far as encryption algorithms are concerned. It was with disappointment, then, albeit little surprise, that I found no change since I had sent the previous e-mail. It is pertinent, although perhaps somewhat ironic, that even the Web-based interface through which I write this message is served along with DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encryption.
Perhaps it was not clear enough to you lackwits the last time, but a viable security policy consists in practice of more than simply claiming that something is highly secure and hoping that nobody will notice otherwise. On the other hand, perhaps I should not have such high expectations of the competence of a bank that invested heavily in US mortgage-backed securities, which anyone with an ounce of common sense could see had been vastly overvalued due to a financial mania, and failed to make a sufficiently early exit from this market, with clearly disastrous consequences suffered as a result. If you insist on continuing to pursue these games of brinkmanship not only in your financial dealings (alas, supposedly your primary competency) but also in respect of basic consumer protection such as website security, then perhaps I shall be better off to take advantage of the recent market corrections to withdraw all but a nominal sum from my current account and make sounder investments by acquiring additional gold, silver, and foreign currency instead.
Yours, with much disdain
B S T
He has yet to receive a response, but we shall see what they say in the end.
Today I signed up for Twitter – not for personal reasons but because I needed it for work. Of course I’ve heard about it in the past as the leading micro-blogging service, but it hadn’t interested me in the slightest.
I have used Facebook since its early days (when you could only get in if you had an academic email address!), primarily to keep in touch with friends. When they brought out the status updates feature, I couldn’t see the point. Even less so having something like Twitter that’s purely status updates.
There are so many ways these days to get content out there and onto the web. But I can’t see the point in many of the newer sites.
Like I said, I use Facebook as a way to keep up with friends whom I don’t see very often. While I was at school, MSN Messenger was all the rage, but now we’re a bit more grown up we don’t all have time to sit on MSN all night. So Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch from time to time – given that email is only really used for work these days.
But my only friends on Facebook are friends in real life. I don’t meet people through Facebook. For me, it’s just a direct replacement for emailing friends or chatting on MSN. I don’t broadcast my life to the world. I can’t see why they’d care.
Which brings me onto Twitter. I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested in snippets of my daily life. If they’re that interested, they can text me and ask. As I mentioned, I now have a Twitter feed and you can follow me if you want – but I don’t recommend it. I’m not intending to write anything interesting – only to use it for following boring feeds like these from the University of Bristol.
I’m more interested in personal websites, often in blog format. Maybe it’s because I used the web for years before these social, collaborative sites popped up, and the only resources available were traditional websites.
I’ve had my own website for over a decade now, in one form or another. When I was a kid, I didn’t have much of interest to say and there was nothing on the site. Nowadays I have two blogs: this one, mainly for technical articles, guides, reviews and so on; and my photo blog where I publish photos that I have taken.
I’m a geek, and so I have my own server and I run these blogs from scratch using Wordpress. Obviously such an approach isn’t going to work for everyone, which is why I like sites like Flickr. It’s a really easy way to get your work online. I set up my own Flickr page some time ago, before I decided where I was primarily going to host my photos.
As you can see, there’s hardly anything on it and only two comments. I’ve worked a bit harder to promote my official photo blog, which also gives me the freedom to customise it exactly as I want, and here I have had thousands of views of my photos.
I’m not saying that “Web 2.0” is a bad thing – I’m just saying it only works for me in limited ways.
I want to publish my articles and photos in a more traditional format, and I only use Facebook because most of my mates don’t use MSN any more.