Jason Hook's shiny new blog......

Tags: iPad

There's a fair amount of chatter about the iPad since yesterday. My first reaction to it was disapointment, and I'm still a bit disapointed. I saw It as a scaled up iPod, and a missed opportunity. But is it?.

I am in love with my iPod. I use it to read, browse the web, it's my metronome, a music making tool on the move, and I have a dozen games and other uses for it. There are two main drawbacks: it's physical size including screen size and no camera. I find holding it to use the touchscreen awkward if I want to use two hands and the real estate makes viewing books and web pages difficult.

When I imagine a big iPod it looks like a joke, I see Dom Joly with a huge mobile phone clamped to his ear. But when I imagine the iPad as a library of full colour books and magazines (with subscriptions) it makes a lot more sense. I've looked at the Kindle and the Sony e-reader and they remind me of the first Palm Pilot. The flash as each page is turned, the lag when buttons are pressed not a good experience for me. I've got two MacBooks currently but for reading books I'd be very happy to leave the hinged screen behind for something more book-like.

The hardware is only half the story though, the iBook Store could do for e-books what the App Store has done for developers, created an easy to use outlet and a massive market. Of course Apple will lock down the device and tightly control the store so I'd hope that other manufacturers will develop similar solutions Amazon are well placed.

Will I rush out to by the first generation iPad? I don't think so** At least not before I can get Guitarist Magazine, 2000 AD and the like OTA but when that happens I'm in. If the 2nd gen has a webcam that supports video chats over Skype it's a no brainer

** I'm almost certainly lying about that

Posted by Jason Hook At 11:01 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (7)

Tags: Film

I saw Avatar in 2D at the AMC in downtown Disney last night. When asked I've said "yep enjoyed it!" But after a night's reflection it's not as easy to see it just as a piece of entertainment. Clearly the Na'vi are native peoples of this Earth viewed through 180 degrees making the people who walk and talk like us in the film the aliens.

I saw the Na'vi as native Americans and I think there were strong clues that Cameron intended them to be so. There are many native peoples that have rubbed up against incomers and suffered the terrible consequences of their ambition.

Flipping through the Guardian iPhone app over lunch today I found this commentary on the film and it makes interesting reading:

Mawkish, maybe. But Avatar is a profound, insightful, important film by George Monbiot

Many aspects of the film are silly, and contrived but I think it's very good at telling a story that would be very hard to hear told more plainly. I think you can enjoy the film as a piece of entertainment, you can marvel at the technology but ultimately you'll be saddened to know how it reflects aspects of us as a race that are ugly. I'm not surprised but I am shocked to learn that we are every bit as cruel today. It's so easy walk by isn't it.

If you have not seen it I'd recommend the film to you warts and all. If you have, what did you think?

Posted by Jason Hook At 6:19 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tags: LS10

Early start today (up at 5:30am) and looking forward to a busy day of great looking sessions:

• JMP104 - Javascript, JSON, JQuery and AJAX
• BOOT103 - Running with scissors: Pain free 8.5 Upgrade
• SHOW112 - How to build an xPage Application from scratch
• BOOT104 - Lotus Sametime 8.5 Deployment workshop
• TURT101 - The Turtles guide to Lotusphere
• Welcome party, and warm food

• Sleep count for last night: 2.5 hours
• Sleep count for Saturday: 8 Hours
• Sleep count for Friday: 3 Hours

Have found a few friends here so far, must catch up with more. Got some useful Salesforce info from Bruce Elgort already. Met up with my sister and family.

Have a feeling about the OGS speaker. I haven't noticed anyone else mention the name yet but he's a space tourist.

I'm off site with a car It's good but a bit like living at home with your parents when you go to university: you miss out a little on the social side. I'm lucky to be staying with friends in a fantastic Villa in Davenport, very close and comfortable.

Hate, hate, double hate the conference badge that you HAVE to wear around your neck and would love to see it integrated with the conference bag (say on the shoulder) which would have the added benefit of making your bag distinguishable from the other million Lotusphere bags.

Indifferent to breakfast which was a bit dull, hope lunch is better. Have become a Subway junkie already, need a Taco Bell.

Love the new pocket agenda which looks like a school timetable and is much better than the booklet of previous years.

Keeping in touch with family over Skype, and enjoying watching my wife coaching children trying to get them to at least ask how I am before asking what are you going to buy me

I need: a good bookshop, to make up my mind about the magic mouse and iLife 09, to talk to Eric Mack for my boss, visit Ytria, MartinScott and TeamStudio, get to the Lego shop for Star Wars Lego, go to Mars just to play a guitar

Posted by Jason Hook At 1:15 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tags: Tools

Like many of us I'm having to be more productive with less resource than I might have been used to. I'm using a variety of tools to help me do that including: The excellent Noteman which I use daily to compare documents, fix field values and occaisionally look at design information in the database.

I use Teamstudio tools: Ciao, Configurator, Delta and Analyzer. Typically I use configurator and Ciao daily

All of those tools have their place but I could probably do with tools to help me make our old apps more attractive and usable. I've started looking at Ytria's tool suite again viewEZ, actionBarEZ and possibly designPropEZ. Actually all of their tools are potentially huge time savers. I'm looking at upgrading the designs of lots of databases and want introduce standard fonts, and action bar design and positioning.

I'm in a famliar chicken and egg trap. Too busy to evaluate a new set of tools which could potentially save me hours, and there's the budget too of course!

I see that Ytria have released version 9 of their products, have you used them yet & what do you think? Do you have any other recommendations for the busy jack of all trades developer come administrator?

Posted by Jason Hook At 10:14 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (6)

Tags: Random Apple

I recently bought a second hand Macbook Pro (the machine I should have bought in the first place but couldn't afford) and wanted to move my files from my Macbook to the new machine.*

If I were a PC (nothing against them I own a few) then I'd have been locating files copying them across the network, reinstalling applications and activating them

But no, I'm mostly a Mac these days and so all I had to do was start Migration assistant on both machines, tell one about the other and go to bed. In the morning Macbook Pro had all of my documents and wait for it applications too. Admittedly some of those applications needed activating afterward but my new Mac looked a lot like the old one only faster and backlit at night How cool is Migration Assistant?

"Cool as der cucumber, Johnny" - Wulf (Strontium Dog)

Wonder if Windows 7 has anything like it, if not maybe Windows 8 will be my idea

* Not sure if the seller would want to be publicly identified but both of them are fantastic people

Posted by Jason Hook At 3:28 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tags: Mac

A quick note for those planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard: check the kind of partition you intend to install Snow Leopard on.

Somehow I managed to have an Apple Partition Map (APM) rather than the GUID style needed. The fix was simple but a little time consuming. If you know a better solution than this, please do tell..

• Installed the brilliant "Super Duper"
• Connected a GUID formatted external drive
• Used Super Duper to make a botable copy of my internal drive [3 hours]
• Once complete rebooted and booted from the external drive by holding down the option key as the computer booted and chose the external volume
• Used the OSX disk utility to repartition and format the internal drive ensuring that you I chose the GUID partition type, I formatted with the extended journaled fomat case insensitive [I was erasing all the data on my internal drive at this point so I checked the copy I booted to make sure all of data was there and that I repartitioned the right drive]
• Used Super Duper to backup [restore] the external drive to the internal drive [3 Hours]
• Rebooted with the USB drive disconnected

Snow Leopard would now install. Installation seemed to take about an hour. The result's aren't spectacular but this Macbook seems faster and I haven't found any appplications that won't work yet. Not sure how I ended up with the APM but I suspect it's a default option.

All in all the upgrade took 7 or so hours, Is it worth the effort? The jury is still out but things in general feel a little faster which is good.

Posted by Jason Hook At 9:50 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tags: Iron Maiden

It's hard (for me) to believe Iron Maiden's World Slavery tour took place between August 1984 and July 1985, that my friends was 24 years ago. 24 whole years, where did they go?

If I had a picture of the 15 year old youth that I was in 1985, with shoulder length hair and a sleeveless jacket repleat with patches I'd shred it before posting it here I have worse memories like having one of those really tight perms you had to keep lubricated with gel to keep it from looking like wire wool. I was stick thin then too, those were the days....

My first experience of Iron Maiden was the Piece of Mind album and the World Piece Tour. I would have been at one of the gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon (25th May to 28th May 1983 if Wikipedia has the dates right). I remember being an awkward, hopelessly self conscious teenager. I couldn't do the 'headbanging' thing. I knew how ridiculous I'd have looked and how little I could have afforded the loss of the precious few brain cells I had

Piece of Mind was my introduction to Heavy Metal. In the years that followed the band released some of their best albums (IMHO) Powerslave, Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son before I lost interest and moved on. For those years it was an annual ritual, travelling up to London and Tower records to buy each new LP.

Fast forward to 2008 and Iron Maiden are touring their best songs not from the back of an old transit van but from a Boeing 757. Quite a transition from Leyton, the boys have done good. I couldn't make it for their gig in Twickenham because of a family holiday so the DVD has to be the next best thing. Part documentary, part concert footage Flight 666 is a time machine. I can watch it and be transported back to the Odeon enjoying the songs as much as I ever did.

The documentary is excellent and I enjoyed seeing the band off stage. I've always imagined Bruce Dickinson to be, well, a pain in the arse and I was suprised to find him quite normal. Janick Gers came into the band after I'd lost interest and I wasn't sure what to make of him particularly after Adrian Smith rejoined, I'm none the wiser after watching the film but they seem happy as a six piece so why should I care.

The concert footage comes from each stop on the tour from Mumbai to Toronto. It's almost impossible not to compare it with "Live after Death" which I still have on Betamax somewhere. Bloody Betamax, that's marks those of us that can remember the days of 5.25 floppy disks, green screens, vinyl records, Assembly language and buying the ZX80 from W.H. Smiths as bloody of gits doesn't it? Are Maiden as good today as they were 24 years ago? Probably, but who cares, it's more Maiden and that can't be a bad thing.

Flight 666 puts to rest any suggestion that Maiden should ever have inspired Spinal Tap, it's a triumphant collection of their best songs performed as they were meant to be heard: live! If you have ever enjoyed Iron Maiden then I think you'd love F666. I hope that Eddie and Co. will continue to make records and perform them for years to come and if they do put me down for a ticket

Up the irons!

Posted by Jason Hook At 1:12 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tags: (mac software)

Howdy,

I've been spending a little time trying to find a (X)HTML editor for the Mac. I've used Coda and recently missed the Panic Software sale, had I known I would have bought it. As it is I've got a chance to look around at alternatives. And so I am playing with Flux 2 from theescapers.com. The developers want Flux 2 to be a DreamWeaver killer and although it is early days it has promise.

Flux 2:

• * Is an extensible WYSIWYG XHTML and CSS page editor with a Code Editing
• * Has a useful debugger, a built in preview (though I'd like to see an option to preview in any installed browser)
• * Supports jQuery, Ruby On Rails, MooFX out of the box
• * Can publish pages via S/FTP and MobileMe
• * is Beta software and contains a few bugs

There's a handful of fairly important things for them to get right yet but I got carried away and bought a license for it. It's a bit of a leap of faith but I like it enough to invest in it's future In use it can be a bit frustrating because of the bugs but if you are interested in HTML editors and can't stretch to Dreamweaver it might be worth a look. The developers seem very responsive and there have been regular updates. Flux 2 sells for £40 I would imagine post Beta that price will go up.

MacTech have a discount code worth 33% off the current price of 40 GBP which is valid until the 1st of July MacTech

Posted by Jason Hook At 12:23 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tags: Cool Tools

Today I needed to start learning another developers application it's fairly substantial with plenty of Lotuscript. Possibly tens of thousands of lines of code and you know how unfriendly designer is [I was going to qualify that but I decided not to]. Lotuscript.Doc made it a doddle to get started

After download it took not more than 10 minutes to produce useful documentation for one database. Now I can see all of the Classes, Agents and other scripts, the Function and Sub names and signatures, Types and so on in that db from the point and click comfort of my browser.

All I need to do now is tinker with the comments in the code and I'll be so happy.

Thank You Very Much Mikkel Heisterberg and your merry band of testers you saved me a ton of time today and with the the scheduled building of documentation you'll be saving me loads of time tomorrow and the next day too

Posted by Jason Hook At 12:54 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (7)

Tags: Search

I'm not familiar with the game of Jeopardy but Aunty reports that IBM has been building a new search/knowledge management technology called Watson. Watson's job is to consume a lot of information, 'understand' it's context and be able to apply the 'knowledge' it gains intelligently and confidently to complex problems.

Google on steroids& We'll see. Hopefully this is a big step forward in knowledge discovery technology and Watson wil help businesses discover information often deeply hidden on various systems. If it's to be a success it'll have to address a couple of issues:

• Very few companies could afford Watson outright, I wonder if it will, eventually, be offered as service?
• Knowledge has to be recorded if it's going to be useful

I'm not sure when the game will take place but keep an eye out for this epic struggle between human (and 74 time winner of the game) and frighteningly expensive and considerably less portable computer coming to a TV near you sounds like it's going to be an interesting battle.




Posted by Jason Hook At 9:43 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)