Lee Packham

The following things happened this week and it’s easier to surmise it up in one post than to do little posts throughout the week:

• The boring personal update first! I’m suffering with quite a significant amount of pain, can still work and the staff at my local hospital (Whipps Cross) have been ace and managed to squeeze me into a surgery next week to at least start sorting it all out. That’d be ace as I really don’t want to be on pain medication much longer – it’s annoying having to remember the regime of 15 tablets I’m currently taking every day to reduce it from the tear inducing 9/10.
• I installed iOS 4 on my array of Apple ‘i’ devices and then ended up jailbreaking one of them so I could do some multi-tasking work. Any iPhone developer that tells you he doesn’t Jailbreak at least one of his devices is really either A: not very good (see my post on memory usage) or B: lying to you.
• I updated and submitted my Tube Notify app. I’m still refusing to use the new Beta API that Tfl have released as, well, it’s a Beta. Also, it appears to be written by some sort of City Banker programmer that has some weird twisted idea of how to do XML… that is, badly. So, the updates were around iOS 4 type things. Still haven’t sorted Multi-tasking background updates – hoping to do that in the next week. Especially as I still use 1/10th of the RAM of my nearest competitor… which just became important with Multi-tasking!
• I started properly working with Node.js after getting so frustrated with Tornado and Twisted in Python that I just gave up. Those that know me might be confused, especially as I’ve never really gotten along with JavaScript before. May I recommend JavaScript: The Good Parts
  by Douglas Crockford as a really good book to read if you hate JavaScript – it’ll change your mind a bit and even if you know JavaScript – it’ll make you better at it.
• I learnt that Slicehost can’t backup Slices that have 4GB of RAM. I also learnt that they have real difficulties with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that their support for it isn’t quite as ‘Enterprise’ as they’ll lead you to believe (sorry guys @slicehost but it’s true).
• I upgraded my MacBook Pro with a 7200rpm 500GB Seagate Momentum. Apple really should fit these stock. 5400RPM on a “Pro” level laptop is just not cool.
• I started using Facebook more as a communication tool – wait that’s a bit weird.

Tada! So that’s the update! I figure that as I suck at updating the blog throughout the week – it’d be cool to try and do at least one post each Saturday with what’s going on. Will this be the one and only time I do this… we’ll see.

As linked to by John Gruber’s blog DaringFireball, this video is a great proof that iOS 4 is just one big ‘told you so’ – and this is without multitasking:

Wow, well that sucks a bit. Let’s look at the main headline features:

• Multitasking
• Desktop Folders
• Unified Inbox
• Better data encryption/security

Other than Desktop Folders, the public have been crying out for these features on the iPhone – especially as other Mobile OSs (read: Android and Blackberry) implement most of the features so readily.

Well – the public got what they asked for. Proof that the customer isn’t always right and companies shouldn’t be so ready to give into demands. All these features are now slowing your device to a crawl – hope you’re enjoying them!

And yes, it effects your games too – as things like encryption run constantly in the background on the device. Other blogs are complaining iPad is no longer as secure as the iPhone – I hope it stays that way for a long long time yet.

Too funny to ignore… that is all!

Apple have opened up a new section on their website devoted to HTML5 demos stating that:

Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

Only, their idea of ‘They are the web’ is a little off:

As Google Chrome is based on WebKit and Safari is really just an older (maybe more stable version of WebKit) there is absolutely no reason to do this!

QtScriptGenerator from Qt Labs is a great way of getting scripting functionality into your apps. However, one has to remember some simple rules – it’s Javascript. As such, you’d be forgiven for writing this:

var flibble = "Hello World";
var my_file = new QFile("hello.txt");
my_file.write(flibble);
my_file.close();

That, won’t work. In fact, it’ll bomb out at line 3 of that script and not close the file. So, obviously really, QFile::write() doesn’t actually support sending strings so, we need to convert it first:

var flibble = "Hello World";
var ba = QByteArray(flibble);
var my_file = new QFile("hello.txt");
my_file.write(ba);
my_file.close();

Job done. It seems really obvious when you think about it – but… heh I imagine someone might Google this at some point.

So magazines are flocking to the iPad with content. Great! Apart from the technical rag Wired, really hasn’t got a clue how to do it properly.

An app – that’s just pictures… of text. You can’t copy/paste and it takes up amazing amounts of space on your iPad. How irritating is that?

The post on Daring Fawnyball links this site that has screenshots of the “PNG slide show” so you can see just how bad it is.

Sorta glad I haven’t bothered with it. It really is surprising for Wired, who even had a Gopher site on the early days of the Internet. Very poor show. Very poor indeed.

Smart designer exports dumb pictures of text « Daring Fawnyball.

Turns out that new employees at Google are no longer given an option to run Windows according to FT.com.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Wow. Makes sense though. More and more, Windows doesn’t fit into the desktop world and the only companies left on it are those stuck on it due to legacy issues.

FT.com / Technology – Google ditches Windows on security concerns.