The FIA – Making a mockery of F1

So after a day of deliberations the FIA (Ferrari International Assistance) has concluded that McLaren don’t have the right to appeal the drive through penalty applied to Lewis Hamiltons time after the Grand Prix at Spa.  On it’s own this would seem like a fair decision – I might not like it but at least it’s a decision.

However…

During last years Japanese GP Vitantonio Liuzzi was given a drive through penalty that was the successfully appealed.  The FIA said last week that of course this was different because the chief steward at the Japanese race changed his mind. and admitted he was wrong.  Unfortunately the steward in question says that’s not simply not true and has submitted documents saying as much as evidence.

Draw your own conclusions, but to me there’s something wrong with the sport, if you can call it that.  It makes me wonder why I bother watching. 

Links: 
ITV-F1
F1 Technical
SniffPetrol (comedy – not real!)

I’m liking Photosynth (gratuitous car content!)

Although Photosynth has been out for a while, I’d not rally had a chance to play with it much until the weekend.  After giving my car a quick wash I thought I’d take a few pictures and feed them into a synth and see how it came out…


(You’ll need a PC, Silverlight and PhotoSynth installed to see the embedded Synth – sorry Mac guys)

Here’s a link to the full thing: Linky

I think it worked out pretty well considering I didn’t take that many pictures.  If I do it again I’ll take more pics around the interior to try and allow you to move in close.

Photosynth is definitely a cool bit of technology and could be used in loads of different ways.  It’d be a pretty unique way of showing off my car if I was selling it online for example.  In fact if I were a car dealership I might experiment with using it on a few cars.

Anyways…. I think it’s great.  Give it a go!

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Yammering

I’ve just been looking at Yammer a bit more after signing up over the weekend.  It’s a great idea – twitter for the enterprise.

Essentially you sign up using a work email address, and then you only see messages from users with addresses from the same domain. Clever idea.  What’s more, although it’s free for end users, the company can pay for administrative controls.  A nice business model I reckon.

They have a web client, a desktop client, iPhone client and one for Blackberry.  It’s odd there’s no Windows Mobile app, but I can only guess that will appear at some point.

It’d be good to see a SharePoint webpart as well, perhaps a couple in fact.  Maybe one to add a Facebook like status, and one to show your messages etc.

I also wonder what would happen for companies with multiple domains used for email – I know we have a bunch of them at work.  And perhaps whether you could ‘federate’ (in the LCS/OCS sense) your company messages with those of a trusted partner.

I really like the idea – I just need to get a few people from work to sign up!

iPhone Apps

Apps that I use day in day out…

Hahlo – not strictly an iPhone app, but the best mobile Twitter client that I’ve found.  It does everything I need of it (apart from maybe twitpic), it’s quick to use and looks pretty.  The only downside it that as it lives in Safari you occasionally get unwanted refreshes so you loose you place in the list of tweets.

Facebook – I’d pretty much stopped using Facebook before installing this app, but now I check it once or twice a day.  It just makes it so much easier to check for updates and messages.

Linked In – This app is much the same as the Facebook app, but perhaps slightly less well executed.  I have to say I use Linked In less, but it’s still a worthwhile app if you have an account.

Tris – I always was a fan of Tetris :)

Evernote – A fantastic tool, if you don’t have an account you should go and try it.  I love the way I can take a photo on the phone, it’s then uploaded to Evernote, OCR’d and indexed.  It makes recording notes from whiteboards so much easier, just take a photo then search for keywords. 

iPhone Second impressions

A few weeks ago I posted up a few initial thoughts about my iPhone 3G.  Without reading back through the post, I think it’s fair to say that my opinions were mixed.  Although I loved the device itself, the silly battery life made it hard to use as a day to day phone.  Now I’ve had the iPhone for a few weeks I thought I’d jot down a few more thoughts.

So do I still like it…?  Yeah, I do.  It really is a great little device, and it’s really changed the way that I use my mobile.  I’ve used smartphones for email, calendar and contacts for years, but mobile browsing has always been something that I’ve done only when I needed to – like checking train times or something like that.  I guess at first cost was a barrier, but I’ve also realised that the general usability of the devices and the browsers played a big part.

Although the iPhone is physically bigger than something like the HTC Diamond, all that extra screen size makes it so much more usable for browsing or running applications.  I now spend much more time browsing when I’m on the move.

That’s not to say all is perfect on the browser front… Although the Safari browser on the iPhone is ok, for me it’s very much a love-hate relationship.  Yes it’s probably the best mobile browser so far, but it crashes faaaaaarrrrrrr to often for my liking, and the lack of support for flash etc is a real pain. 

The traditional mail, calendar and contacts tools are also pretty good.  For me the Calendar particularly stands out, as the interface is much better then the Windows Mobile equivalent.  Although I have seen a few ‘ghost’ appointments where previously re-scheduled meetings still appear in their original times on the iPhone, but not in Outlook or on WM.  Very odd, but repeatable on a number of iPhones at work.

I’ve also seen a slightly worrying security issue with the iPhone and Exchange Activesync…. I’m not going to post the details until I’ve had a chance to check it out with MS and Apple, but it’s a little weird to say the least.

Apart from that push email from exchange works very well indeed, though I’d still like to see a ‘working hours’ style option to set the hours that push email is working and when it should go to manual.  I used that feature on WM to both stop myself checking work email at weekends and save a bit of battery power over night.  It seems like a strange thing to leave out.

Other things I can think of… the lack of MMS doesn’t bother me too much as email or twitter do the job for me anyway… copy and paste – what were Apple thinking by leaving that out?!…  I’m also puzzled why I can’t record video… 

Overall I still really like the iPhone.  It really has changed the way I work for the better.  There are problems that Apple need to fix but I’m sticking with it… for now… :)