Keys Corner

This web site, has had quite a long gestation period: two and a half years since Richard – my brother in law – and I agreed to produce it for his architecture practice.

But I’m pleased to say that it is now live. It was produced using Joomla! and it presented a few challenges because Richard had very definite ideas about how it was to look. We’ve had to make a couple of small compromises regarding Microsoft Internet Explorer (for example, replacing the Google Map on the “map” page with a sketch that Richard did), but as far as I know, there should be no major boo-boos. If you visit it and notice anything odd, please let me know!

Yes, that is a picture of me – fairly rare, as I much prefer to stand on the other side of the lens. I’m taking a short break from what I’ve been doing for the much of the last week, and what will certainly occupy me for the next couple of weeks at least. To find out more, click on the picture above. (We will update the picture series from time to time as things move along).

Research In Motion, the manufacturer of BlackBerrys says: no way, but the French government has banned the use of the BlackBerry by civil servants because their mail gets routed through servers in the USA. Actually, the ban came into effect 18 months ago, but a reminder was issued this week.

In fact, the US government has required copies of all telecommunications crossing their national boundaries since before the Second World War, and more recently has passed laws such as the USA Patriot Act and CALEA which require communications to be made available to the US government or law enforcement agencies. We won’t mention ECHELON either, will we? So my guess would be that the French government is justified in assuming their Blackberrys are being monitored.

We’ve had the Apple TV for a couple of days now – the 160 GB version, which means that everything can be replicated to its hard-disk. So how do we feel it compares to the Roku SoundBridge, given that we bought both devices as music players and don’t need to synchronize the broadcasting of music to more than one room (in which case, other devices might offer a more appropriate, but more expensive solution)?

Both devices get their music from a dedicated Mac mini server in our office which runs both iTunes (for the Apple) and Firefly (for the Roku, which will now be moved to the cellar to continue its service there). The Roku has no local storage, so always streams from the server; the Apple TV can stream if the music isn’t already on its hard-drive, otherwise it plays from its own disk. In practice we never had any problems streaming to the Roku although the server is on another floor, separated by a reinforced concrete floor. Both can update their software from the internet at the touch of a button. Both are extremely simple to set up and should cause a non-techie no problems to get up and running, and both have active, helpful user groups in the internet if you do have any questions.

The Roku can only serve music, audio-books and podcasts, in various formats including WMA, FLAC and OggVorbis; the Apple TV can also serve music, audio-books and podcasts (but only those formats that Apple supports), but in addition TV-series or films (bought from iTunes), You-Tube videos, or your photo albums. The Roku can use iTunes libraries via Firefly, which means that it can (like the Apple) understand and serve up the smart playlists you have set up in iTunes – even if iTunes is not running on the server at the time.

The biggest difference is that the Apple has an iTunes-like display (on your wide-screen TV) of all the album artwork, so you can scroll through the artwork by album (or by artist or playlist) and pick the music you want to play. That is what sold the Apple TV to Ruth of course, although if you’ve seen her comment on the previous post about the Apple TV, you’ll see that she doesn’t think she’s agreed to move the CDs out of the lounge! Navigation on both devices is simple, but the Apple has the nose ahead here with the huge, easy to read display on the TV. It also has a nice screen saver, which cuts in after a couple of minutes with no input from the remote control, that can be configured to show your CD cover artwork or a selection of photos from your photo-album.

The one thing the Roku has, which we both really miss on the Apple TV, is the ability to build a temporary playlist on the fly using the remote control – the Apple TV can only offer you the existing playlists from your iTunes on the Mac. That is a major disadvantage, as we used the generation of a temporary playlist all the time on the Roku – the playlist is available until you stop playing it. I don’t see any reason why the feature couldn’t be added to the Apple device, so we are hoping it might come along in a future software update.

Brilliant – A guide to modern programming practices:

Abject-oriented programming is a set of practices for encouraging code reuse and making sure programmers are producing code that can be used in production for a long time. The number of lines of code in the application is a common measure of the importance of the application, and the number of lines a programmer can produce in a day, week, or month is a useful metric for project planning and resource allocation. Abject-oriented programming is one of the best ways to get the most lines of code in the shortest time…

(Seen on Digg)

His latest installation at Glastonbury.

Well, only a few months ago when Apple announced the Apple TV, I really wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. I still think it is under-featured if you want to use it to handle TV programs and films that have not been bought via iTunes, although people have been busy hacking the unit and it is now possible to add quite a bit of the missing functionality. (It looks like Philips might soon offer an interesting competitor, which might force Apple to add some features when it comes out)

However, it seems to offer the ideal solution to get Ruth to agree to move all our CDs out of the lounge into storage in the cellar. She really likes flipping through the CDs, looking at the covers, to decide what to play next. And that is something you can’t do with our Roku SoundBridge (it only has text display), so until now the CDs have remained where they are. I had been planning to wait for the next revision of the Mac mini and buy one, freeing up mine to be moved into the lounge as a media center, but Apple is taking it’s time about updating the mini and there are even some gloomy voices saying it might be at the end of it’s product lifecycle, although I’m not convinced about that, yet.

The Apple TV offers the same sort of CD-cover previewing that the Mac has in iTunes, so now we’ve decided to order one and give it a spin – we’re hoping it will arrive in the middle of next week. And I’m hoping to see the back of three cupboards full of CDs soon after that!

The picture of our pond above is a bit blurred. It was pouring with rain and we didn’t want to get wet, so we shot it from upstairs in bad light with a 280 mm lens!

It shows something we have never seen before, ever. The pipe in the middle of our pond is supposed to be the overflow for when the pond fills to the top. It feeds an underground pipe which flows downhill. As it’s been hot recently, the pond was down quite a bit from the maximum. However, as you can see water is backing up the pipe, although the level in the pond is still about 10-15 cm below the pipe. Of course, in the mean time, the pond has filled completely and is not draining via the pipe…

Weird. We suspect that one of the neighbours downstream has made some changes and water is backing up the pipe, although we can’t imagine what could cause the effect you can see. We are pretty sure the pipe only goes downstream, as we had a camera put down it last time it got blocked to check out what the cause of the blockage was.

Does any of our readers have any idea how we can find out what is going on? I doubt we can start poking around in other people’s back-gardens looking for recent changes!

The BBC reports (my emphasis in the following quote):

There are calls for the European Union to ban the making of cars that can go at more than 101mph (162km/h).
The proposal comes in a report to the European Parliament on EU plans for a law to curb CO2 emissions from cars.

The proposal is from a British MEP. I think it is strange that Germany, which has a very high traffic density, doesn’t have any maximum speed limit (although in practice a large number of Autobahn kilometers do have speed restrictions: at accident blackspots, to reduce noise, because of roadworks, or sometimes simply because the road surface is falling apart). Maximum speeds, which would obviously need to be enforced, could help lower pollution.

However banning the manufacture of “high-speed cars” is hardly likely to solve any problems related to pollution.

It will simply encourage moving the production of pretty well all cars to non-EU countries (How many models produced in the EU have a top speed lower than 162 km/h? Even the cheapest Fiat Panda you can buy does 150 km/h). This is something that would probably have happened to a lesser degree anyway due to the pressures on production costs. The result will be just as many heavy, fast cars polluting Europe and an accelerated movement of manufacturing jobs away from the EU.

Ars Technica reports that a new service is being offered by several major US ISPs to positively flag mail the sender doesn’t wish to be considered to be spam.

Senders of such e-mail will pay (a $399 set-up and vetting fee plus a fraction of a cent per mail) to have a special token added to the mail which will allow the participating ISPs to “fast track” the mail through their spam filters and mark it with a special blue envelope icon.

Any product one buys or registers on the internet these days usually provokes a regular stream of marketing mail from the vendor afterwards, and an unintended side-affect might be to make such offending mail easier for recipients to filter straight into their trash-can. So it will be interesting to see if the idea is as successful as the promoters hope!