My Digital Life

Thanks to Laughing Squid for pointing out these amazing photos of London taken at night from a helicopter.  Looking at his site the photographer, Jason Hawkes, seems to specialise in these sort of shots.

I just got back from a fantastic trip to Sorrento in Italy (a great part of the world you should go!).  To get around whilst we there there I hired a car at the airport.  Now I’d never driven in Italy before and didn’t think too much of it.  I should probably have taken more notice of the warning in the Lonely Planet book I’d bought that said of driving in Naples (where I flew to)  ‘There can be no greater test of courage…’.

It was obvious from the first few minutes on the road that the rules there are different, so without having a copy of the Italian Highway Code to hand I started to work out these strange new rules based on what I saw. 

1. The most obvious… they drive on the right (ready as ‘wrong’) side of the road.  Not much of a problem really as long as you remember!

2. Speed limits.  Although there is very little actual speeding, it seems there is an overwhelming sense of urgency that compels you to overtake anything and everything in front of you at all times.

3. Overtaking.  Overtaking is allowed anywhere - on straights, on the entry of a corner or on the exit of a corner.  This can also be used in conjunction with rule 4 below.

4. Any speed is acceptable on blind corners as long as you use your horn as you turn in.  It seems the horns on Italian cars are sufficiently powerful that they sweep away hidden obstacles as you approach.

5. Road markings and signs.  Where as in some countries road signs and markings are used to control and manage road vehicles, in Italy they are for decorative use only and do not have to be obeyed.  For example on motorways although lane markings are present it’s accepted that you just fit as many cars as will fit onto the road.

6. Road positioning.  As a result of rules 2, 3, 4 and 5, the racing line should be used at all times.  It is not necessary to obey rule 1 when following this rule.

7.  Parking.  Anywhere will do.  Really.

Hopefully these observations will help any new travellers to Italy that stumble across this blog.

In truth it’s not that bad.  Whilst it does come as a bit of a shock, even for a South London boy like me, you soon get used to it.  For me I just came to the realisation that you just have drive like you would on a Trackday - not a well organised trackday mind, but maybe a test day or something like that.  All you need to do is keep an eye on what’s in front of you and let whatever is behind take care of itself.

There are some amazing roads around the Amalfi coast, and I’d love to take my car down there someday for a bit of exploring.  Maybe just not during the busy summer months.

Disclaimer:  Whilst these are genuine observations and based on things I saw and experienced, DON’T ACTUALLY FOLLOW THESE RULES!

After a few weeks waiting, O2 finally shipped an iPhone 3G to me on Tuesday, so I’ve spent a good few hours fiddling with it over the past few days.  I thought I’d post up a few thoughts, really for my own benefit in keening some notes.

Compared to the Windows Mobile phones I’m used to, the iPhone setup, activation and registration was a real mess… With pretty much every other phone I’ve used you put in the sim, turn it on and that’s it.  I’m really not keen on this requirement to register the phone with iTunes before it can be used. 

For consumers it’s probably ok, but in an Enterprise do you really want to install iTunes on your (probably) managed desktops?  Personally I can do without iTunes and its MobileMe adverts etc for a work phone.  I’m reasonably sure I won’t be the only one either.  To be honest I don’t even bother with ActiveSync these days and just do everything over the air.  Apparently O2 have some managed services that might help here, and I’ll be looking at them as soon as possible.

The other slight problem was with O2, they managed to incorrectly activate the sim’s or something that lead to a 24 hour delay in activation.  It was only with the inside knowledge of our service manager here that we managed to identify and fix the problem.  Hopefully this was a one off issue with the two iPhones and sim’s they sent over, but if I’d been an end user I would not have been happy as O2 were initially insisting everything was fine and we had registered the phones incorrectly.

Now it’s all working though, I have to say the device itself is great.  Quite a few people have told me that it’s slower and less responsive than the original, but as a new user it seems fine to me.

The apps all work well, and the browsing experience is much better than on Windows mobiles - with the possible exception of the Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond. 

I’m also impressed with the App Store.  I found some great apps for twitter and Facebook, and I can’t wait to see what else appears over the next few months. 

Back to the work stuff… the setup of Exchange ActiveSync was nice and easy, and the interface for mail and calendars is nice to use.  It’s be good to see tasks etc added in, but I can live without those for now.

Although I’ve played with the configuration tools, I’ve not applied any profiles yet.  I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks though.

The big omission in my mind is the ability to set a window where push email is activated.  On my Windows phones I have push setup between 7am and 6pm and manual syncs during the evenings and weekends.  I find this is not only useful for separating work from home, but also saving battery life and data charges.

Speaking of battery life… Oh dear.  Now I’m not really a heavy user.  On my other phones I usually keep wifi and bluetooth off, just keeping email pushing down and doing the occasional bit of browsing.  Usually I go a day or two between charges on my S620. 

When I got the iPhone 2 days ago it was charged more or less all day - in that is was plugged into my laptop while we sorted out the activation problems.  Yesterday I turned it on at about 10am and it was dead by 3.30pm.  Admittedly I was busy playing with it and trying stuff out.  So I got home and charged it up again and turned it off over night. 

This morning I turned it on at 8.30ish to try out hahlo.com (a great twitter app)… looking at the usage stats it’s been on for 2 hour’s 33 minutes and I’m at ~40% battery.  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and everything else apart from 3G and push are off.  That’s really not good.  At all.

I’ve read that the battery life improves after a few charge cycles… if not, as much as I like it - and despite the the little problems I really do like it - I’ll have to send it back… if it can’t last a full day between charges its really no use to me :(

So overall… I really really like the iPhone 3G.  the interface and user experience is much nicer than the standard Windows Mobile phones I’m used to.  I’d like to spend some more time with a Touch Diamond as a comparison, but overall it’s streets ahead.  I’d also like to loose the iTunes requirement - in an Enterprise I just don’t think that’s on.  But… the battery life so far is a killer problem.  As it stands today, mine will be dead by noon.  But I do really like it. Lots.

Yesterday a friend pointed me at blippr.com, a new (I assume!) site that seems to merge twitter like short comments with reviews of books, music, movies and games.

As a format it works really well, you just search for whatever movie you want to see reviews for and browse through the results.  Overall ratings are also aggregated  to provide an overall score. 

For things like movies and games I find a consensus of opinion much more useful than an in depth review followed by one persons opinion.   As Blipper can also import contacts and friends from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook you should also be able to see what you buddies are think of the same movie, and what other things they are enjoying.

Reviews are short <160 character twitter style comments, and use a simple ‘love it’ to ‘hate it’ rating.  I’m not sure if there’s a mobile interface or iPhone app but it would seem like a great addition to catch people views right as they leave the cinema (for example).

The only slight flaw I found was that if you miss spell your email address when signing in the site creates a fresh account for you… so I now have a dummy account there!

Still, I like it :)

Over the past year or so my car’s been looking a little worse-for-wear.  What with moving house and the long commute I’ve not really had a chance to wash it as much as I used to.

Having read though a tonne of car cleaning threads on Seloc I thought I’d tool up with some new stuff from http://cleanyourcar.co.uk and put my new toys to good use. 

So I spent Saturday afternoon giving the car a good clean inside and out.  I ended up doing the full wash, clay, polish, seal and wax routine and am really chuffed with the results.  If not the sunburn I got in the process! :)

The pics don’t really do it justice!

After having a fantastic drive to work this morning, I thought I would dig out an old route for a ‘run’ I’ve done with the Lotus guys in the past.  It’s based around the country roads in Surrey and Sussex and starts fairly close to my office finishing not too far from home.  With the sun still shining I’ll probably take the long way home later - it’ll take an hour extra but it’s worth it :)

Now I’ve found the file I thought I’d post it up here.  The original authors are (I think) lost in time so I can’t credit them, but it’s a great drive.

There’s a great post over on arstechnica asked for a home storage cloud that would seamlessly link together all his home storage.

"So I’m ready for some cloud storage. But I don’t want all my gadgets to connect to some distant cloud. Rather, I want them to be the cloud, so that my data surrounds me like some mist with a life of its own, instead of sitting in these little isolated balls that I have to juggle."

While I was reading though it two things came to mind, the first was Mesh and other cloud storage services.  After all why have storage in your home if you can get it cheaper in the cloud. 

Of course for home media use cloud storage itself isn’t much help, you need the data locally.  That’s where Mesh could play a part by taking care of syncing data across devices via the cloud.  However in this scenario either all the data would be on all the devices or you’d need to setup and maintain lots of individual folders.  Oh… and 5GB isn’t going to hold much music these days.

The second thing that came to mind was a File Virtualisation solution I saw last year from Acopia (now owned by f5).  File virtualisation provides a lay of abstraction between clients that create and consume data and the storage devices that it is stored on.

Essentially the virtualisation layer provides a single namespace that all clients connect to.  As this layer is abstracted from where and how the data is physically stored the data can be located in the best place for that data.  What’s more it can be dynamically moved around physical storage devices without these changes ever being visible to the clients.

This lets you do very clever things.  You can automatically determine what the most accessed files are an move them to your fastest storage.  The least accessed ones you can move to cheap, slow storage.  Don’t want MP3’s clogging up you file servers? (well it is an enterprise solution…) That’s fine, just define a rule that says all MP3’s should be hosted on a single cheap NAS somewhere.  Need to move all the data off a SAN that’s seen better days?  No worries, setup a rule or task and it’ll be moved without the clients ever seeing a thing.

Ok… so for now this sort of thing is the realm of Enterprises.  And Enterprises with deep pockets.  But, it is - I think - what Jon is looking for in his article - his digital mist (I like that term!).  Probably more so than Mesh, at least for now. 

However… if Mesh is providing a ring of devices on which you’d like to store your data.  It’s not too hard to see someone writing an equivalent of the Acopia ‘rulebase’ to manage a set of devices linked using the Mesh framework.

Could be quite useful in a few years.

(I was impressed that in replying to the post on arstechnica I had to sign-in using an account I created in 1999!)

Just following on from my lost post, I’ve just watched an interesting piece on Channel 4 news about fuel prices and green taxes.

In the piece, one of the talking heads said something like "road pricing is far fairer [than fuel duty] by pricing on distance travelled".  I can’t help thinking that this way of thinking is flawed.  Surely we have to drive behaviour towards more environmentally friendly fuels and vehicles rather than away from travel altogether. 

If fuel and vehicles are taxed based on the CO2 they generate, it seems to me that the carrot and stick are then acting in the right direction.  Especially if some of that tax is aimed at the fuel and car companies rather than the consumer - this would incentivise them towards creating cleaner fuels and cars that can use them. 

Being a fan of all things Lotus, I’ve been following news about their tri-fuel Exige 270E technology demo with some interest.  It’s essentially a standard Exige that has been modified to run on either Petrol, Ethanol or Methanol - or any combination of the three.  Sensors tell the ECU what fuel is being used and it then adjusts the engines combustion appropriately. 

Although there has been a lot of focus on hydrogen as a fuel for the future, Lotus is arguing that due to the inherent problems and costs involved with hydrogen, synthetic methanol may be a better choice. From my layman’s perspective Lotus arguments seem pretty sensible.

Simply storing hydrogen is difficult, you can either compress it to 700psi, or liquefy it at -230 degrees centigrade, neither of which are best suited for transport in vehicles.  It’s also not very energy dense, I understand it’s something like a fifth the density of petrol, and once you add in the energy spent creating and storing if the well-to-wheel efficiency drops even further.

One of the biggest problems though is that hydrogen will mean a complete change in engine design and use, a hard change that will cost manufactures and support services like petrol stations huge amounts to implement.

Methanol, whilst not a panacea, does offer some advantages.  It’s a liquid at room temperature for a start.  It’s also more energy dense than hydrogen, though not as dense as petrol.  It does however have a higher octane rating - something that allow the 270E to produce more power than the regular petrol based version.

In my view though the biggest advantage has to be that a move over to methanol can be gradual.  The chaps from Lotus reckon most modern engines should be able to run methanol with very few changes.  The main physical obstacles seem to be around the fact that methanol is more corrosive so seals, pipes, tanks etc need to be changed.

That being the case, a change over to methanol would be much simpler for manufacturers.  Potentially they can future proof their cars against future ethanol or methanol fuels now, or at least within a few years.

If new cars were able to use these fuels in various mixes, fuel producers would be able to add synthetic methanol into their fuels and phase out petrol over a period of time.

Of course, methanol still produces CO2, but as it can be synthetically produced from carbon dioxide and hydrogen the potential exists to recover these from the atmosphere or existing industrial waste collection.  The idea being that CO2 emissions at the exhaust will be balanced to a neutral point.

It seems like an interesting technology challenge, and I’m glad to see Lotus taking a lead in it.  What I’d love to see though is Lotus taking a lead in delivering tri-fuel cars to customers.  It would seem like most of the development for their current Elise and Exige range has been done for this project.  If the costs per car weren’t too great it would be a hell of a marketing tool, and would certainly set them apart from their competitors.  Would the other manufacturers follow?  Who knows, but it’s a Toyota unit that Lotus have been working with, so it would be easy for at least one major company to follow.

Try some, it’s great.  That is all :)