Monthly Archives: April 2006

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

Macs do Windows (Officially)

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After a pretty short gap from when the ‘booting Windows on a Mac’ prize was given out (which does lead me to think that this has been planned for a while), Apple have come out with an official solution – Boot Camp. Putting aside how sick the people who stumped up cash to encourage the hackers to solve the problem must be feeling at this point, the Apple solution is, as might be expected, a lot more slick.

I’m expecting a real-life report from Mr Durdle once he’s done, but until then the feature list includes:

  • Non-destructive partitioning of the drive – the hacked version required you to clear down the whole internal drive, the Apple solution creates the XP partition from free space.
  • Apple provided drivers for all the Mac hardware – the big issue with the hacked version was that there were no graphics drivers. Here the Boot Camp process produces a CD with everything you need.
  • A nice little boot loader that allows you to boot into XP, which handles the whole issue over the Mac’s not having the BIOS needed by Windows.

Certainly it makes a Mac, as a tool for people who have to work with Windows for part of the time a viable proposition. Although Apple quite pointedly don’t offer support with Windows, they are going to include this as part of the next major release of MacOS X.

Even if you don’t have an Intel based Mac just yet, the Boot Camp pages make an amusing read for the subtle and not so subtle digs at Windows. Gems include the following paragraph discussing EFI and BIOS:

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

The real interesting question is whether Apple will release a version of MacOS X to run on regular PC’s. Personally I would be surprised if they do. Firstly, Apple hardware is seen as a premium product, and as such commands a premium price. They tried the clone route back in the nineties, but Steve Jobs effectively pulled the plug on the programme. The point to remember is that Apple make their money from hardware, so having a monopoly on machines that run both MacOS X and Windows XP would increase demand for their computers – releasing a version of MacOS X that could install on any cheap PC does not, if anything it would reduce it. Whichever way they go, it will certainly be interesting to see what effect this has on the sales of Mac’s now.

Computers/Technology

RFID Training

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Water Feature

So today I had the first of four days of training in the delights of RFID theory and practice given by Intermec, one of the big companies in the arena.

The course was held at their office in Reading, which is conveniently located in what is often referred to as the MCI building, but after the company was taken over is now owned by Verizon in what the front of the buses refer to as the Reading International Business Park, which sits next to the M4/A33 junction on the southern edge of Reading.

The impression has always been given that the building was intended to be used by MCI as a regional HQ, however almost as soon as they moved in the company hit money troubles, and since then most locals have thought that the building was half empty. Certainly walking around the building there is a lot of space, and a number of other companies, like Intermec renting space. The large car park behind the building also appeared to be half empty for most of the day too.

Having said that, it is a very nice building. We had lunch courtesy of Intermec in the subsidised site restaurant, which offered a wide choice of different types of cuisine, and everything from snacks to a full meal. I went for a Beef Madras, which was excellent. Adjacent to the restaurant is a nice water feature, which is visible from the road as you drive past. What isn’t visible is that since the site is on a hill, there is a nice water feature linking an upper and lower pond.

Cottage

One slightly sad feature of the whole site sits adjacent to the main building, alongside the road into the car park, and is a pretty old looking cottage.

I’m assuming that the building is listed, hence why it remains. In some ways I think it makes a slightly depressing site as it is totally out of place in relation to what surrounds it, and location wise sits on a roundabout looking out onto the main dual carriageway into Reading. I guess that for those reasons it probably isn’t used as a house any more, so whilst they’ve followed the letter of the listing rules in preserving the building, I don’t really think that they’ve followed the spirit of the rules, as since with any building the character is as much expressed by the location and use.

Anyway, moving on to the course, it was pretty heavy going technically – I had to remember a whole load of A-Level physics as we looked at the various methods in which RFID works. Whilst I found it complicated, I dread to think how others on the course, none of which, aside from my colleague from work, are native English speakers. We have one Egyptian, two Belgians, two Portuguese and two Hungarians on the course, and certainly in the case of the two Hungarians I think one was at least in part translating for the other. It probably also gets quite interesting for them as the trainer is originally from Taunton, and still occasionally has bits of a classic Somerset accent, which came through quite noticeably when he said ‘RFID‘ a couple of times. In terms of the content, it was pretty obviously an Intermec course, rather than a general course run by Intermec. Although we covered all the different forms of RFID technology, the stuff that Intermec don’t supply was only in brief. We also had a whole section at the end of the day going through the range of Intermec equipment.

Having said that, the trainer did give us some useful tips and tools for working out whether a system is viable in terms of the technology. He also told us a couple of salutary tails, about what users expect from the technology versus what it can actually achieve. For example the oft discussed prospect of tags replacing barcodes on individual items allowing customers to just wheel their trollies out of a supermarket without having to unload onto the checkout is a long way off.

He also told us about a project that he was called in to sort out at a parcel sorting operation in the UK where the initial supplier had led the customer to believe that they could tag almost at the individual parcel level and scan containers of 20 parcels as they passed on a conveyor belt. In actual fact this is nigh on impossible, and the final solution was to tag the containers instead – which achieved what the customer was looking for anyway as the parcels were already sorted by this point anyway.

Another interesting story he told us was about a system he helped to set up for a car dealership in the Middle East. Each car sold by the dealership was tagged, so that when the car was brought in for servicing the technicians could access the service history easily, and also this allowed the cars to be tracked through the various stages of the service, and even linked to spare parts – also tagged – located in the stores. As an added bonus, the tagging allows customers to track progress of their vehicle service in real-time using a web site.

On the next few days of the course we get a chance to try out some of the hardware, exploring the issues with placing the RFID readers correctly, and then on Friday we move on to actually writing the software to process the results from the tags. Certainly interesting stuff.

Movies & TV

Morgan Spurlock – 30 Days on Minimum Wage

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After having watched Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 movie, Super Size Me, where he lives on McDonald’s Fast Food for a month, I was interested to see last night, the first episode of his new series called 30 Days.

In this first episode Morgan and his fiancee Alex lived for 30 days in Columbus, Ohio working minimum-wage jobs. Needless to say the results were pretty predictable in that the amount they earned was barely enough to live on, and they had to rely in part on Salvation Army help, and a Church run organisation called the Westside Free Store which provided them with basic furniture such as a bed, table and chair for their appartment. However what was particularly shocking was that during the month, both of them had medical problems that necessitated a visit to the hospital, and the financial impact of those visits.

Now I know the British complain a lot about the NHS, but I think periodically it is worthwhile watching something like this to realise that whatever problems we may have, at least we have a system where you’re not effectively punished for getting ill. Morgan and his fiancee were charged $500 and $300 respectively just for being seen, Morgan’s bill even included a $40 charge for a bandage. Bearing in mind that the minimum wage for which they were working was $5.15 an hour, and you start to see the magnitude of the costs in comparison to their pay. Whatever problems there may be with our system with long waiting lists, financial troubles or whatever, the NHS in the UK still remains a system that is largely free. I can turn up at my local doctor, or a hospital casualty department and I’m not going to need to take a credit card.

The rest of the series looks like it has some interesting subjects too, with a couple featuring devout Christians – one with seemingly offensive views of Islam spending 30 days living as a Muslim, and another who spends 30 days living in a predominantly gay area of San Francisco.

If you want to read more about Morgan Spurlock’s he has a blog which can be found at http://blogs.indiewire.com/morganspurlock/.

Calendar/Contact Syncing

Why is Syncing Calendars Still Unreliable?

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I commented in my previous post that I hadn’t tried the last part of the synchronisation process, and that I would see what happened when I got to work. Unfortunately when I got to work there turned out to be a couple of problems.

Firstly, for some reason on both Outlook on the PC, and on my PDA I ended up with the recurring appointment for the 11am service at St James having been duplicated, although oddly enough the duplicate wasn’t flagged as private. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but this record was also not visible in Entourage, nor in iCal – removing it on the PDA seemed to remove it without a problem.

I also came up with an interesting issue when I added all day appointments in iCal. I put in the summer holiday as a recurring daily appointment – primarily to avoid a previous problem whereby although iCal will quite happily cope with the summer holidays as a single event for the whole period, it wouldn’t sync to the PocketPC which sets a limit of 30 days on the length of an event. Anyway, the recurring event appeared correctly in iCal, and in Entourage, but when it appeared on Outlook, it came up as overlapping 24-hour long appointments starting at 1am. Looking at the record in Outlook it appeared to be a problem with time-zones as the record stated the time as being 12 midnight to 12 midnight in the Mauritania and Casablanca time-zone. I reset the time on the appointments, and this sorted out the problem, although oddly enough it made no change to how it appeared in Entourage.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Howard over this whole issue. Whilst there are loads of potential pitfalls with calendar synchronisation, particularly with going between iCal and Entourage that have some fundamental differences in the way they handle calendar information, even between Microsoft products there are still problems, as the issues I describe above show. However it’s not exactly a new problem, in my first job more than a decade ago we synchronised appointments with a central server, and yet it still has problems. Why is it that after all this time we still can’t reliably sync between electronic calendars? Indeed, why is it that people still put up with these calendar syncing glitches?

Calendar/Contact Syncing

Keeping it All in Sync

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So after a weekend of playing around with Entourage 2004, I’ve now settled on a setup.

Mail wise I’m sticking with Apple Mail. I did try out mail in Entourage but firstly it really annoyed me that unless I used HTML mail – which I tend to avoid in favour of plan text – the mail editor forcibly limited me to 76 characters, and then when I did an import of my pretty large amount of data from Apple Mail, it messed up.

It wasn’t a mess up on quite the scale that Missing Sync managed on Friday – what was imported came in fine, it just managed to miss the majority of my inbox – and double up on some of the rest. Although the ability to link elements together, for instance linking a meeting in the calendar to the attendees, the word documents of the minutes and agenda, and the e-mails was attractive, the interface proved to be a bit tedious, and to be honest I thought I probably wouldn’t use it much anyway. The problems with the import and the editor sort of set the seal on it.

Instead I turned on the new Sync Services support, to sync my Apple Address Book with Entourage, and also show the calendar in iCal. I expected to get a few problems with the Address Book sync, which I did – with various records ending up with duplicates. However Address Book is pretty easy to sort out, particularly with a nice feature to combine records. All those changes were quickly propagated back into Entourage. The iCal support is a bit of a pain, as it side-steps the problems that applications such as Missing Sync tend to have by putting everything from Entourage into a single calendar. Since my categories are not picked up by the Exchange support in Entourage it’s not too much of a problem.

At the end of the line is my phone, which syncs quite happily with the Mac. Ultimately through the purchase of Entourage 2004 I have got to a point where my calendar and contacts are able to all sync together. At the moment it all seems to be working fine, although the final element will be to see quite what happens when I plug the PDA into it’s cradle at work tomorrow morning!