With this being fundamentally a financial challenge on Apples stronghold of the smartphone market it would eventually lead to confrontations and Apple has gone for the first strike. Recently they have filed a law suit against HTC for patent infringement on 20 counts. Now some may see this as a smear campaign against potentially their biggest competitor and to be honest I would agree. The reason I would agree is that some of the so-called patent infringements are a bit flimsy at best. I’ll give you an example of this:

They are claiming that they have patterned the slide to unlock feature that was common place on the Hero and Nexus One etc. Now this is not a hardware feature, it is a software design. There are plenty of apps on the Android market that actually supply the exact function of unlocking screen by sliding a bar, and are identical in looks to the one on the iPhones but you do not see Apple chasing them so publicly. And if you have seen the slide to unlock feature on the Nexus One then you can not argue that it looks massively different from the iPhone version. This is just one of the few that I have heard of and to be honest I couldn’t help but laugh! I mean come on, if Microsoft tried to file suits against every company that has an icon in the bottom left hand corner of your screen to access features and functions then you would laugh (if you spend enough time like me looking at the alternatives) so why do Apple think the slide to unlock is solely theirs!

Admittedly there might be some of the 20 infringements that could hold some depth to them but surely the slide to unlock feature is a software design from android 2.1, not HTC. Yes HTC could remove it but as Android is open-source means joe blogs could add it back at any point.

Apple are obviously worried about the increased rate at which they lose market share to android devices in places outside the US. Personally I think Apple are becoming more and more like the Microsoft of old and going after HTC or indirectly Google is just the start. With Android being open-source means many more mobile OS’s could be released that would support the functions supplied by Android 2.1, what would Apple do then? Focus on improving their products or focus on stamping out their competition – Microsoft tried this and it got them no where except to elevate the profile of open source computing and if Apple are not careful they could end up doing the same and paying a hefty financial price for it.

Then Windows 7 burst on to the scene.

I say burst, I mean explode – its pre-order sales outsold all Vistas sales in 3 months according to some sources which I find unbelievable. Online distributors like Ebuyer had to keep ordering more in as they were selling like hot cakes so they surely Microsoft has done something right. Now in my other blogs I might come across as anti-Microsoft and to a degree that might be true but what a job they have done here with Windows 7.

The operating system itself architecturally is exactly the same as Vista but with a few tweaks and the user interface is slightly better looking but what they have truly done well at is making it idiot proof. The install from fresh is like Vista, simple and straight forward but with a few advanced features for the techies. Once installed it finds the majority of drivers which was a major problem for Vista and still is. But all that falls into insignificance once your actually into the operating system. Not only is it pretty but the speed of it is on par if not quicker then Windows XP as well as stable. They have fixed the problem with the IPv6 stack so no more limited connections and once you get use to where everything is you soon start to appreciate the little things they have done, a couple of which I will cover.

Look at how pretty she is

One of the first things you notice is the rich aero interface which has had a little face lift from Vista. Its cleaner, smoother looking and the faded windows effect is very pretty. The one other feature which again is very pretty is the window preview from the traditional task bar at the bottom of the screen. When you hover or click over say Internet Explorer it will show ALL the tabs you have open in Internet Explorer and if you hover your mouse over one of the tabs then it will fade all other windows and show the tab you are hovering over which although not entirely useful does make it feel like your organised despite the mess of windows you might have open.

Yes yes I know this is a small thing and the same thing has been in the Linux world for a few years now but for some reason when Microsoft do it, they seem to make it pretty yet functional where as (and this is coming from an avid Linux user) in the Linux world it just functional but not as pretty or refined.

I could bang on all day at how good this operating system is as it’s not just the user interface or the little tweaks, there’s alot more work and thought put into the Media Centre, sharing files easily, IT support and so on which I will cover in another blog next week as I recently setup WMC (Windows Media Centre) on my home machine and love the results.

I urge and Windows Vista user to upgrade straight to Windows 7 today, the Home Ultimate Edition can be found for only £120 and will transform your machine – trust me.

There has been discussions, trials and errors in trying to create a mobile phone which can be used like your PC or laptop or as close as but in all honesty this phone comes closer than most. There has been a lot of thought put into not just the phone but the services offered with it and the way it runs on the hardware supplied by HTC. I will stop preaching in a minute if I can help it but I can not say how much I adore this and Google in the same breath.

You see we use Google to handle our company e-mail, calendar’s etc for several reasons and so after two of my colleagues got the G1 I was pretty much against them just for the fact of being awkward but I soon admitted after using it that there is no better phone especially for us techies even if your not a Gmail user.

So lets explain this a little bit further and compare it to say the HTC Touch Diamond which I used before this phone and was quite a strong windows mobile phone.

To start lets look at the e-mail functionality, they both use Push Technology, one is on the google network, one is any Exchange or Hotmail service. There’s not much difference here except that the Gmail application organises e-mails into conversation threads which if you’re an experienced gmail user like me will find very handy. It downloads all the e-mails from your mailbox and is quick and painless. The Touch Diamond however is sometimes slow to open the list of e-mails in your mailbox and even slower when downloading the full items, not sure if this is the network but I doubt it. As everything in the Touch Diamond seems slower than in the G1 and I think I know why but I’ll get onto that in a little while.

The calendar sync in both phones is equally good and speedy but I do prefer the Touch Diamond layout and use but that’s due to years of using Outlook.

How about the interface? Well the G1 has a lovely home screen which can be customised with different background images exactly like most phones today but it’s selling point over the Touch Diamond is the widgets and customisable layout of the home screen. You see the Touch Diamond uses HTC’s Touch Flo interface and without using 3rd party applications has a very limited scope for customizations. It’s nice, a bit temperamental but on the other hand the G1 home screen hardly ever slows up, fails and is smooth to the touch! For instance on my home screen I use several widgets, one for weather, one for Facebook, one for accessing and playing music from the home screen etc and like everyone else the Google Search box. As for the Google Search box – fandoobedootastic! That little sucker finds pretty much anything for you on the web and voice recognition is near perfect. For example I press the voice button and say “how to install ubuntu” and it takes me to my browser on my phone with the results matching word for word. I have played with alot of voice recognition software over the years and have never found one so near perfect on a phone. In the next release of Android (1.6 aka donut) it will also search contacts and perform voice dialing which I am looking forward to testing. The Touch Diamond doesn’t have anything close to this which is as good.

Now the G1′s phone or indeed any phone running Android has the biggest selling feature of all phones today which is the market place. You can find almost anything you need for example a little application to SHH into firewalls, RDC client, VNC application, Torrent download manager – ANYTHING! Some are free and some are not but nothing is massively expensive and the phone also gets OTA (Over the air) updates to Android! Where as with the Touch Diamond you need install these updates and most applications using ActiveSync – ergh.

But why does the G1 beat the Touch Diamond in almost every department? I personally believe it is down the notorious Windows Mobile 6 platform that it runs. Now don’t get me wrong the Windows Mobile suite has come on leaps and bounds over the years but the software is never and has never been truly complied onto phones like Android has. Android works so well on the G1 as the software, kernel etc was built around the G1′s hardware as it is also done other Android phones on the market. The problems with Touch Diamond is not down to HTC or it’s Touch Flo interface, after all that works very well on the HTC Hero (Android phone).

But it can’t be all good, and it’s not unfortunately. The G1 at the moment if your running Android 1.5 can not accept files via bluetooth (without an application which you can get in the market place), there is no fully functional SatNav and the battery is not better or worse than HTC Touch Diamond, but it’s not great. You will need to charge the phone everyday or night depending on how much you use it. However there are SatNavs being made for the Android phones, which are at the moment FREE and the bluetooth I am told is fixed in Android 1.6 which I eagerly await and will be installed without pain

All of the above is why the G1 is a revolution, software is always accessible if you need it and it has created a market for linux developers which was a stroke of genius and a large part of the phones success. It’s intuitive thinking like this which has made Google such a big player in our industry and I believe the biggest brand name out there at the moment – they just can not put a foot wrong.

I could sit here all day banging on about how great this phone is but simply I have work to do but would urge anyone looking to get a touch screen phone to look at the G1 as it is without doubt HTC, Google and T-Mobiles understated greatest success.

As in my last Linux blog I have been getting more and more drawn in by the sheer genius behind some of the programs created in the world of Linux. One that I have been using for a while but only recently had time to delv more into it’s functions is VirtualBox a free virtualisation program.

You can download VirtualBox from here and the install is easy in windows or if you are running Ubuntu like I am then you can easily get it from Add/Remove. Once installed you will be ready for some serious fun, if like me you don’t get that much sun!

This next part won’t be that interesting for Windows users however the process is identical.

Open VirtualBox as the below image shows

Now click the New button in the top left hand corner like the below picture

Next a wizard should appear that will walk you through configuring your virtual server. First things first you will need to give machine a name.

Next tell it what OS type you are going to be running in a virtual machine like Windows XP Pro.

Next it will ask you how much RAM you want to allocate to it but it will only show the amount of RAM you can allocate. Typically I give Windows XP Pro 256MB.

Now this is where it gets just a little tricky, it will ask you for a hard disk to boot from (virtual one of course). Now if this is the first time you have used VirtualBox you will need to create a new one bu clicking the new button.

When you click New it will pop up with another wizard to help you create your first virtual hard disk. When going through the wizard you get the option to create a fixed-size storage or dynamically expanding storage. Personally disk space is now issue for me so I always use Dynamic but if you do not have GB’s of space then I would suggest using a fixed-size storage.

Now just finsish the last stage of the wizard(s) and you will be taken back to your original screen with your new virtual machine all ready to be installed.

Next you will need to tell the virtual machine what to use for it’s CD-ROM so that it can install the operating system. Typically most people will use a CD so by default it will use that but you can also point to an ISO image if you have one on the host operating system. Also a side note here, in the settings of the virtual machine under CD/DVD-ROM you can also enable pass through. This will allow your virtual machine to burn CD’s – this is a cool little feature.

Once you have gone over the settings and are happy just click the Start button on the main window and will start your new virtual machine and beign the install of the operating system you chose.

Once installed I would recommend installing the guest additions which is simply done by clicking Devices at the top and selecting Install Guest Additions (once your operating system is installed!) so that the mouse and keyboard maps correctly and so you don’t have to keep pressing CTRL each time you want to click away from the virtual machine.

Now that you are in and all virtualised up finally check out this great feature, its called Seemless Mode. Basically the virtual machine will operate as if it’s on your PC as a pose to virtualised.

To do this in the menus at the top click Machine and then Seemless mode (you can swap back by clicking CTRL + L). Then just access your windows programs from the start menu that is now on your screen!

Now play away until your hearts content and the best thing about this is that you can move the virtual machine to other machines running VirtualBox.

Resources:

Disaster Recovery

Now a lot of us know in the IT world how to host a website, you need a web server like IIS or Apache, a database backend  like MSSQL or MySQL and then some other element like PHP etc. In the main we use WAMP which is a lovely little tool that originates from my favorite community – Linux. It has all of the above and more in one seemless little install however I stress it is aimed at testing and not actual production websites.

Now even if you do not use WAMP or XAMPP you can build your own little web server quickly and easily, so I can not help but wonder how some webhosting companies can get it so wrong! I won’t name the company in particular that gave me a headache for some sort of legal reason – my legal team are trying to prise my hand from the keyboard to stop from me destroying this two bit hosting company…..yes i know deep breath…. and release!

The dilemma began when a client of one our business partners purchased a hosting package which also included the domain name they wanted. Since that was taken care of and she had purchased the package with database and PHP included and various of other lovelys that we needed we progressed to building the site in our test enviroment. All was well and good and after a couple of weeks we were ready to upload the site and take the little demon live. But we stumbled across a problem, when we logged into the hosting companies website there was no cpanel (Control Panel for web developers) so we had no way of uploading our tidy SQL database. We called them several times and got answer phone messages time and again – even during working hours. After many voicemails and e-mails we finally got a username and password to access the SQL database so that we could upload our own however there was still one problem……….no URL to the cpanel or PHPMyAdmin.. nothing, not a dicky bird. So i improvised and found that their SQL server (MySQL) was accepting external connections…….sillly people, so I uploaded our database through there and wala – still no site.

After some more testing it became clear that there was no PHP enabled on their site!!!! ARGH!!!!!! is just an understatement of how much I hated them at this point and I almost forgot to mention, despite our client paying already for a package which includes a database they wanted to charge more to allow us to upload one!?!!!?!?!?!?

If my legal team was not here then there would be corporate slander all over this page!

They finally enabled PHP and the site is now up and running – finally! But it did make me wonder how many other people are affected by issues like this because of poor advice, re-sellers, and general lack of knowledge. Needless to say we are going to move our client to our web hosting provider which is of course ourselves - the best way in my eyes.

Let me know if you have similar problems because it would be nice to know it is not just me!

For now I am going to elaborate on the Ubuntu desktop OS as I believe this is the closest to thing to an all round desktop OS that could ultimately replace Windows. Ubuntu has got alot of recognition within the IT industry and over the past 12 months this has expanded and crossed over into the general population when Asus released their netbook with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed which I have tested and have to say was fantastically compiled to run on such hardware. With a little tweaking you can remove the Netbook remix interface and use the standard Ubuntu desktop layout but really who would want to. Joe Bloggs would not know how and to be honest doesn’t need to. The Netbook remix is simple and straightforward and not limited by licensing problems etc. This remix of Ubuntu was so succesful that in response Microsoft are going to be releasing a comparible version in Windows 7 once they decide how to license it and charge for it where as Ubuntu Netbook Remix costs absolutely nothing. Not a penny, not a dime.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

But that’s enough about the Netbook Remix – what about the full desktop OS. Well all I can say is I love it! The reposotories, updates and the ability to find any program to do any job for free is fantastic. As with every other linux ditribution you can combine Compiz and the emerald theme manager to create some stunning GUI’s when working and Ubuntu support forums are fill to the brim with help and advice without anyone really being condensending. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 a few months back and the installation was smooth and painless. It let me install it side by side so I can boot into Windows 7, XP or Ubuntu depending on what tasks I need to do. Why keep Windows if Ubuntu is so great? Well I’ll get to that in a minute.

Once I had installed it I immediately played around with Compiz (search youtube for some great examples) and found that the Compiz cube and workspaces do actually prove to be a useful way for managing multiple apps at any one time so multi tasking was easy. There was plenty of games, office type applications and even software to manage my ipod. Digging further I found some cool applications like wamp which worked even smoother in linux then it did in Windows, GIMP to edit photos like i do in Adobe Photoshop however I have to say that it was much easier in Adobe Photoshop but only because I was use to knowing where everything was. 

Just see what ubuntu can do for you

All in all I was happy until I wanted to use our CRM in linux. The CRM installation package was an msi and the program was an .exe. So I did some research and found that I could run these using Wine. However once I did get the CRM application working it would continually moan about this that and the other and I could not add any charges to accounts which is of course essential. After speaking to the developers of our CRM they confirmed that it does not work in this configuration and more importantly it is not supported in this configuration and if I was to corrupt the database then they would not help – boo hoo.

So I used VirtualBox which you can install for free and created a Virtual machine running Windows XP Pro and accessed my CRM system via that. Not ideal but not painful, you see linux organises and uses the RAM, CPU and hard disk much more efficiently then Windows does and so it was not a drain on my computer to run Ubuntu and then Windows XP Pro within a virtual enviroment. However I did also need Adobe Photoshop for alot of our web design work so I now had a dilema.

This is why I left my setup in dual boot mode, I can easily boot into Windows and when I need to I can boot into Linux. Both have pro’s and con’s but I have to say  this (and I am no anti-microsoft person, I believe they can and do deliver) the only pro’s that Windows has over Linux is not it’s functionality, not it’s looks……god not it’s looks but it’s market share. The bottom line is Microsoft is the still the market leader and so alot of software vendors code their applications to run on Windows, not Linux unless of course their is a marketable demand for it.

A perfect example of this is games, users in the Linux world have been crying out for stable, detailed, fulfilling games and there are a few but that is it. There is only a few. However I have to say that I believe Linux is technically and functionally a bettre OS then Windows – this is my opinion and not all will agree with it and I have come to that conclusion using both operating systems at work and at home.

O and another plus for Ubuntu here is that the downloaded ISO is also a live CD, so you can actually try it before you install it. Would love to see Microsoft do the same however I doubt this.

Long live the tux!

Resources,

IT Support

The cloud is a metaphore for all your files, and software being kept in a large data centre which you then access from a PC, no matter how lowly that PC is.

However I believe to see it is to understand it, I had worked on a “cloud” project for about 2 years and although the marketing guys at several IT companies will have you believe it’s the best thing since sliced bread and costs next to nothing I would take a deep breath, sit down and read of the pitfalls I experienced supporting and providing one of these “clouds”.

About 3 years ago now the company I worked for at the time was crying at us to get the “cloud” up and running, and I would tell you what the cloud was called but I can’t face the embarrsement. Anyhow after 1 year of testing, ordering and planning we finally had a go date………..sort of. You see the go date would of been there that day even if all we had was a piece of string with cups at each end. It seams there was some large financial complications to our “cloud” that meant the margins were not as big as the Director’s had previously projected.

So we went live and during the next 3 months we had several companies come on-board, everyone was getting on the best thing since sliced bread, no more servers! YIPPEE! No more license costs! YIPPEE AGAIN!! The feed back was great, everyone loved it and apart from a few transistional niggles we thought we were sitting on a gold mine that kept getting deeper and deeper. But then after a few months even though we had not yet reached the mathematical user limit of our hardware and software we started to get performance drops…………….niggly……bad ones. These drops were like nukes, landing in your bed at the dead of night – you want to close your eyes and wish them away!

We had more and more problems as the months went on and it became apparent that the major oversights was the typology and the testing – there wasn’t enough of either.

It seems that having hundreds of users using a terminal server, sending print jobs in raw format, sending e-mails and trying to browse the web (what I mean by trying is that we locked down the web access so much that the tweenies would of struggled to get in!) was all a bit too much for a small “cloud”. But it wasn’t just performance, as you can imagine people started jumping ship as if it was the titanic, saying no thank you we actually liked our server and it’s noisy fans. Now that people was jumping off means surely the performance issue would go away? ………….um……… no. Splash screens caused processes to lock up, spreadsheets with formulas struggled to open, print jobs would not print correctly due to differential drivers, e-mails with attachments took days to get through and trying to send and e-mail………………..might as well as printed it and sent it in the post.

Needless to say the project was closed and the company was wound up not long afterwards so all in all it was a bit of a disaster. But what about the poor people that were still on there…..all their data……..all their software…………everything their company relies on to run smoothly and turn a profit? Well it was gone and as you can imagine the liquidators had some fun to deal with. First of all I blamed myself… staring at the mirror…. crying….. however I then looked into the market and found we were not alone. Several blog entries and forums of people complaining about the issues they have with their “clouds” or who ever supplies their “cloud”.

It seems to me that really this will only ever take off as the cost in the short -mid term is much lower than in-house setups however the lack of control and interoperability will forever be an issue and once your in a “cloud ” these issues are out of your control. Affectively “cloud”  computing is like being a utility provider that unfortunatly for everyone is not regulated.

I warn anyone that is thinking of putting all their eggs in one basket, it is too soon and too dangerous and this is coming from a man on the inside.

Supplied from an IT Support company in London | Peppered Eggs | 0845 527 6263

As this is my first post I am not going to go on too much about the technicalities of this but just tell you step by step how to get this up and running in about 5 minutes.

Now I assume you have atleast the following:

1. An Xbox360 or Playstation 3
2. A PC running Ubuntu 8.04+
3. A home network, wired or wireless but wired is preferrable.

If you have the above then go to your PC running Ubuntu 8.04+ and do the following:

1. Open a terminal
2. Type sudo apt-get install ushare and press enter
3. Allow Ubuntu to install ushare

Now Ushare is a lightweight program that you can run as a demon but as I am very strict about not wasting system resources I created a bash script and only run it when I want to watch something on my Xbox360. Now ushare is so lightweight that there is no GUI which for most Linux users is no problem but if your new to Linux and Ubuntu then you will need to understand how to run ushare from a terminal.

Now you need to do the following:

1. Open a terminal and type ushare -i eth0 -p 500000 -c [Path to your folder containing your films] -x -v and press enter

This will now run ushare on ethernet 0 which is the default on configure HTTP access on port 500000 but we won’t go into that in this blog. We also told it the path to find these movies and multimedia files as well as to stream in Xbox compatibilty mode. The -v section of the above entry is verbose so we can now see what the program is doing.

Now if you go to your Xbox360 and do the following:

1. Go to the My Xbox section which is usually where you start games from and look at your records.
2. Now go across to Videos
3. Within Videos you should see UShare at the bottom so go into that
4. Now you should see all your films.

Beware to play anything over than WMV files will require an update to your Xbox360 but afterwards it should play any avi or divx file.

I haven’t had a chance to test the Playstation 3 with UShare but I can tell you that the Xbox360 version works quickly and smoothly. I was watching a film within 5 minutes.

Happy viewing!