Solving the iPhone Calendar Colour Problem Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

A long standing irritation of mine, and something many people have stumbled across when syncing multiple calendars to their iPhone, is the calendar colour problem. While the calendar entries are synchronised correctly, the entries show up in the wrong colours. This is actually far more irritating than you might immediately suspect...

The problem is, theoretically at least, solved if you use MobileMe to sync rather tha syncing directly from your Mac, but at least for some people this doesn't seem to resolve the problem.

It currently looks like if you were a .Mac subscriber, and your calendars were already synced to .Mac, then you still get randomly assigned colours when the calendars sync to your iPhone from MobileMe. However interestingly, the calendar colours are correct inside the MobileMe web application. This recently suggested a fix to me...

Go to MobileMe and select each calendar in turn, hit the calendar actions button which is just to the right of the Month drop-down at the top of the calendar. Select Calendar Info and you'll get a pop-up which has the calendar name a selector to choose the colour for the calendar. Re-select the correct colour, and hit Ok to save the colour choice. Now, after syncing with your iPhone, it'll show up with the correct colour. Even if the colour you just selected was the same colour you always had.

Irritating, but there you go...

The Tablet PC Trial Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I've had a tablet PC on loan from the Open University for the last six months or so and, as it's getting shipped back to them tomorrow, I thought I'd bounce a few ideas around about how I got on with it...

CREDIT: TabletPCReview.com

The Toshiba Tecra M7

The OU lent me a Toshiba Tecra M7, which is about two years behind the cutting edge, and had fairly lackluster reviews even back then. However I know at least one person who, despite the relatively poor uptake of tablet PCs in general, swears by theirs and wouldn't have a normal laptop, so I was really interested to get my hands on one for an extended test.

However even after six months with the Toshiba, using it for all my OU teaching support and marking, I'm not a convert. In practice I found the tablet an ergonomic nightmare to use. While in the end I worked out a method of propping the tablet and my elbows up to different levels using stacks of books, so that I could use it for several hours at a stretch to mark scripts, it was hardly an elegant solution. Using the tablet on its own for any length of time severely exacerbated my RSI, making it almost entirely un-portable.

I don't really want to get into issues specific tablet model I was testing, for instance placing the power jack directly under where you'd normally want to put your elbow was an act of twisted genius, but suffice to say there were many.

However I can see why the OU lent it to me, in theory being able to write comments, draw freehand diagrams, and scribble equations onto student work allows a much more flexible approach to marking work submitted electronically by the students. In practice the tablet only partially lives up to what, in theory, it should be easily capable of...

It really didn't help that the software integration of the tablet into the OS is also pretty poor. Writing large chunks of text you intend to be read by the OCR software is a laborious process, and spinning the display around so I could use the keyboard to do so wasn't really practical, or particularly convenient. I'll draw a polite veil over the possible comments I could make about painstakingly spelling out words on the software keyboard.

Ergonomically therefore, the tablet PC was a total bust. I'd almost go as far as saying it was unusable. It was certainly almost entirely un-portable, it also counts as one of the heaviest laptops I've ever had the misfortune to have to carry around. If you've followed the blog for any length of time, you'll know that I subscribe to the notion that there are two main core demographics for laptop users. The road warriors, who would kill for another half hour of battery, or half a kilogram less of laptop, and the power users who desperately want another couple of inches of screen real estate, and another hundred gigabytes of hard drive.

I definitely fall into the road warrior category, the tablet PC I had on trial weighed three or four times as much as the Dell mini I recently picked up to use while traveling.

So it's not exactly with a heavy heart that I'm saying goodbye to my loaned PC. I can see the problem the tablet PC is trying to solve, but at least for me, it doesn't even come close to living up to the hype.

Worryingly senior... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Astronomy is one of the more computing intensive of the sciences, and historically we've pushed the boundaries of the available computing resources. But we're also dependent on a thinning cadre of dedicated hero programmers...

Our ability to provide comprehensive software suites to our users hinges on our ability to hire staff experienced in both scientific data analysis and software engineering... In the absence of such people, much larger teams containing both astronomers and industry programmers under formal project management need to be formed. - Economou et al. 2004

However with the data reduction systems and the telescopes themselves becoming more and more automated replacements for those hero programmers are becoming hard to find because of the lack of experienced developers with an appropriate astronomical background, and the fact that it's not really a respectable profession...

We have found it extremely hard to hire good people to work on astronomical software. There is no career path within the universities for software specialists, despite the fact that there's no logical distinction between building hard- and soft-ware instruments. Smart and sensible graduate students, desirous of a career in astronomy, simply don't choose to specialise in the software required to reduce modern observational datasets. - Lupton et al. 2001

Which of course is the reason we're having to replace those hero programmers in the first place, without some sort of established career path the astronomical software community is suffering from 'leakage' around the edges. My own situation is typical, I'm generally described by faculty as a "worrying senior" fellow.

Despite industry-led criticisms of the hero programmer paradigm, such software-scientists are a required. Building complicated bespoke systems to do science takes domain knowledge, not just of software engineering, but also of the underlying science behind what you want to accomplish. Simply put scientists, and the institutions the employ them, can't afford to support the large structured software teams that would be necessary if those hero programmers didn't consitently punch above their weight. Scientists also generally aren't that keen to get involved in the software design process made necessary by more formal processes that larger teams would entail.

Unfortunately historically those same scientists have been reluctant to provide the necessary support and career advancement that would be required to keep people like me around, sometimes through a misguided belief that software is easy and robust software can be produced by any wet-behind-the-ears graduate student.

While there is of course a huge oversupply of hopeful candidates for any long term posting in astronomy, but if you talk to software-scientists at those watering holes where we usually congregate, like the recent ADASS conference in Quebec, you'll find more than the expected amount of doom-and-gloom going around. My situation isn't unique, I'm not the only worrying senior programmer living contract-to-contract...

Of course up until recently, despite our complaints, it's been other people worrying how senior we've become, not us. Most of the programmers that have managed to stick around inside academia for any length of time, and there are many that just come and go, are usually fairly good at what they do. That means they knew they could go out and get a 'real job', probably paying more than they were earning in academia, when or if it came to it...

Unfortunately, amougst other things, the current economic turmoil has taken away our comfort blanket and left us very much out in the cold. Although, perhaps, with a better winter coat and a set of decent boots than many these days. None the less, its not a situation that's going to encourage people to specialise in software.

I don't see any of this changing in the near future. In fact I see the situation getting worse, the current generation of students are further away from the software, and underlying hardware, than I've ever seen. A culture of black boxes is very much in evidence. But you have to ask, what happens when the black boxes break?

The non-arrival of the (next) Dell mini 9 Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

So after buying one of Dell's new netbooks, the Inspiron mini 9, for myself as a travel laptop and living with it for a month or so, my wife was sufficiently impressed with it to order one herself.

She placed the order on the 16th of October with an expected delivery date of the 31st of October. A couple of days before it was due to arrive her expected delivery date was put back until the 17th of November. Today, a couple of days before it was due to arrive, she received another revised delivery date of the 26th of November. That's a full month lead time now, and two slips in the shipping date.

She isn't happy, and since the reason she was getting a new laptop in the first place was an incident involving a dog, a baby, a low table, a full cup of milky tea and her previous Dell laptop you can probably figure out why. Her unhappiness hasn't really helped by the fact that my original mini 9 was delivered over a week early...

This has started me wondering why the shipping dates for Dell's "off the shelf" mini 9's are slipping, and whether this has anything to do with their deal with Vodafone. Are UK destined netbooks having to be diverted to fulfill Dell's obligation to its partner? Is Vodafone putting pressure on Dell to slow down shipments of stock netbooks to encourage sales of their own WWAN-enabled version? You have to wonder...

Update (17/Nov): Well you have to be reasonably impressed by that. Having spotted my complaint on the blog someone, somewhere, did something. One phone call and an email later, the laptop shipped. We all know things go wrong, and delays happen. But if you point out a problem, and the problem gets fixed, that's good customer service.

Update (19/Nov): The laptop has now been delivered...

Missing Google ads? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

So if you follow the blog by actually going to the website rather than getting posts via my RSS feed, which actually accounts for most of my readership anyway, you'll have noticed something over the last few days. No advertisements, my AdSense account has been disabled.

At this stage I'm not entirely sure what's going on, I'm presuming it's something to do with out of the ordinary click activity originating on the site, and considering Google's track record about such things I don't really anticipating finding out either way, even if I do by some sort of miracle get my account reactivated.

So, for now at least, enjoy your Daily ACK advert free...

Update: ...and that, is very much, that,

...after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account.

This is the Earth I was looking for... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Well I wasn't waiting all that long as today Google released Google Earth for the iPhone.

Sure enough there is geo-location support and the controls are fairly intuitive, including the use of the accelerometer to control your viewing angle which is a fairly neat trick.

Disappointingly, at least from my point of view, there isn't any support for Google Sky. Or at least there isn't any support yet, I'm still hopeful. Time to start lobbying the people I know in Google. I guess the Google Sky and MS WWT tutorial at ADASS will be a good place to start. I'm already talking there anyway.

To get Google Earth on your iPhone, visit the App Store in iTunes...

Living with the Dell mini 9 and Apple's iDisk Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This is another quick note about living with Dell's new netbook...

CREDIT: Dell

I'm storing most of my files off-board in the Cloud using Jungle Disk and Amazon S3. But since it's been around longer and I've got a bunch of files on it, at least for now, I also needed to mount my Apple iDisk. While there is the iDisk Utility for Windows XP from Apple it grates that you have to use a seperate bit of software for something like this. Fortunately you don't actually need it...

Like a lot of seemingly proprietary bits and pieces from Apple, the iDisk isn't, it's basically just a simple WebDAV share, and Windows has built-in support for that. All you need to do to connect to your iDisk is go to My Computer and click on Tools > Map Network Drive and enter \\idisk.mac.com\username in the pop-up and select an unused drive letter. Enter the username and password when asked. Your iDisk should now show up as a network disk in Windows Explorer.

Living with the Dell mini 9 and ISO images Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Just over a month ago I picked up a one of Dell's new netbooks...

CREDIT: Dell

I rarely use the DVD drive on my Macbook, and generally there is only one reason that I need to fire it up, that's to install commercial software. Which is exactly what I need to do with the mini today.

However rather than go out and buy an external USB DVD drive I decided to work around the mini's lack of internal DVD by using my Macbook to create an ISO image, transfer the ISO onto a USB memory stick, and then mount it directly on my mini 9.

Inserting the CD into my Macbook I opened up a Terminal window and unmounted the disk from the command line,

$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Then I created an ISO file with the dd utility, you'll either need to do this,

$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=image.iso bs=2048

or this,

$ dd if=/dev/disk1s0 of=image.iso bs=2048

depending. You can test the ISO image by mounting the new file using the command line,

$ hdid image.iso

or simply by double clicking on it in the Finder. If all is well, copy the ISO image onto a USB memory stick and plug it into your netbook.

If your mini is running Linux, you've now got everything you need. Login as root and create a directory to use for your mount point, and then mount the image on the mount point as follows

# mkdir /mnt/iso
# mount -t iso9660 image.iso /mnt/iso/ -o loop

On the other hand if your mini is running Windows XP like mine, there isn't anything pre-installed that will let you mount an ISO image. Fortunately however there is an unsupported, and more or less unadvertised, freeware utility from Microsoft that lets you do just that, the "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP" allows you map an ISO image and make it look just like a normal drive to the operating system.

At which point you should be able to install your software as normal and even, for those bits of software that demand the original disk in the (non-existant) drive, run it as if a disk were present by leaving the ISO image mounted as a mapped drive. Although, depending on how picky your particular bit of software's thrice-cursed DRM turns out to be, your mileage may vary on that one...

Three's 3G Wi-Fi router Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Back in May I noted that Three were thinking about rolling out a line of home routers...

So this is just to note that they're now offering their D100 Wireless Router for £69.99 when purchased with one of their USB broadband dongles which I recently had for review. The nice thing here is that, unlike some other 3G routers, this one uses the USB dongle to provide the network connection, which means that you can pull the dongle out and take it with you when you're traveling.

It's nice to see this sort of technology trickling down into the consumer market at last. Of course, I'm still more interested in getting my hands on a femtocell. Is there any network that's even doing a closed beta trial of femtocells in the UK?

Update: Unboxing video from KCJH (via 3mobilebuzz)...

The Mini 9 from Vodafone Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

So as I've mentioned before Dell's new netbook, the Inspiron mini 9, is going to be available for free with an 18 month mobile broadband contract on Vodafone here in the UK.

The launch date is the 13th of October, but the netbooks have already started to arrive at Vodafone's offices in Newbury. Disappointingly it looks like the rumours were correct, and I won't be able to just install a WWAN card in the off-the-shelf mini 9 which I picked up a couple of weeks ago.

Netbooks causing a stir at the Vodafone offices...

Posted to Flickr by jonmulholland.

Perhaps I should grab another from Vodafone, and then install Mac OSX on my current mini 9?

The mini 9 running OSX

CREDIT: UNEASYsilence

Tempting, but I'd really like to see how integrated the WWAN is into Windows before signing up for an 18 month contract. Or, thinking about it, whether anyone can get Vodafone's card to work under OSX if it comes to that. One of the things that seriously put me off the HSDPA USB dongle I had on loan from 3 was the hassle involved in actually using it...

Update: Dean Bubley has a cost analysis of Vodafone's offer, comparing it against an off-the-shelf mini direct from Dell with a 3G dongle. To cut a long story short it's more expensive, which at least to me, isn't exactly unexpected. You're paying, or at least being charged, for the extra convenience of having things built-in rather than having to carry around extra "stuff". Essentially you're paying an early-adopter premium.

I must admit I'm still very disappointed that I was unable to specify a vanilla 3G module when I bought my mini 9 directly from Dell. To be honest I wouldn't even mind having to post-purchase a WWAN card from Dell's co-marketing partner, in this case Vodafone, and slot it into my mini myself. However if the off-the-shelf mini's really are lacking the internal antenna infrastructure needed to support the card, that's probably a non-starter. Oh well...

Exploding custard Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Not something I'd normally talk about, but since I was not more than a couple of miles away at the time I thought I'd point everyone towards the exploding custard truck near Chagford yesterday...

CREDIT: The Telegraph/SWNS

Fire crews raced to the blaze after being alerted but the desserts were too well alight and the whole lorry was consumed in just 20 minutes.
...you couldn't make this stuff up.