Angus Thinks

Category: General

  • OpenMoko developer hardware

    I love the idea of the OpenMoko platform, an open source mobile phone. It uses linux as the operating system built on a fairly open hardware platform. (Some of the drivers are closed source, apparently due to licensing restrictions)

    You can buy a developer unit right now, although the list of currently incomplete features should (rightly) discourage all but the most enthusiastic.

    http://www.openmoko.com/

    I think when the software is more complete that this could be a great mobile phone. The idea of having almost total control over the operation of a mobile phone seems like a very clever idea.

    Some ideas that came to me:

    • Use the onboard GPS to perform actions when in particular locations (automatically forward calls to my home number when I’m at home for instance, or automatically switch off the phone when I’m at the cinema. Possibly  use different answer phone messages when in different places)
    • Simplified user interfaces with more active assistance for people who only want a basic phone
    • A system that uses the location system to look up things on google maps. (like nearby restaurants that are open and have good reviews)
    • games that use the physical location as part of the gameplay. (Like a treasure hunt maybe?)
    • More advanced actions when people call (like bringing up events that they are connected with, or documents they’ve sent)

    These are just some ideas I thought up as I was writing this, there are probably other better ideas around. Some of these ideas have been done, but I think that the openmoko scheme has a number of advantages over other hardware.
    I really want one 🙂

    Although I will probably wait until the software stabilises and they add a camera. The current plans include a new hardware revision in the Autumn (with wifi) and then more models next year.

  • The phrase ICT

    I really hate the abbreviation “ICT”. Somehow every time I hear it I get slightly annoyed with it.

    Fortunately it looks like other people don’t like it either. 🙂
    ICT which stands for Information and Communication Technology is usually the phrase used by the public sector in the UK to talk about computers and telephones.

    The good news though, is that Register readers don’t like it either. 88% of responders in a web poll wanted it banned. (57% said yes without conditions, 31% wanted it banned but with the condition of more Paris Hilton stories)

    If I’m really lucky perhaps this abbreviation can be removed from usage altogether. 🙂

  • “I would argue that the fact that there are 100,000 people in China who are paid to play the boring parts of World of Warcraft is evidence of serious flaws in the game’s design.”

    Brandon Berg
    [link] (in the comments)

    This is in response to an article condemning MMORPG gold farmers.

  • Email legal statements in headers

    Graham Miln at Dssw has an interesting article talking about adding legally required information to emails using headers instead of using signature blocks. He also talks about a defined microformat for the data.

    This is interesting to me, because I’m already doing something similar with some emails sent by the new MalcolmHardie Solutions order processing system. Most orders don’t involve sending any emails at all, the work is done entirely by swreg, who have their own arrangements. However educational orders go through an approval process which involves sending an email. Including all of the legally required information in the body is clunky and inefficient, because most of the time it won’t actually be used; but it has to be present. It appears that we both developed the idea in parallel because I did the coding on this last week and I only read the article today.

    The dssw headers aren’t the same of course. More options are specified and it seems more optimized for automated processing. My headers are perhaps slightly more optimized for humans. The strings are the same as the strings that were formerly in the email signatures.

    MalcolmHardie Solutions headers:

    X-CompanyInfo: MalcolmHardie Solutions Ltd, Registered in Scotland Number SC283129
    X-CompanyRegisteredAddress: Office 22, 196 Rose Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AT

    Dssw headers:

    X-Company-Address: Dragon Systems Software Ltd (DssW), 3rd Floor Suite, ***** Hereford, ******** United Kingdom
    X-Company-Registration: EnglishWelsh-3397***
    X-Company-Directors: G.C.***, E.A.*****
    X-Company-Secretary: J.E.*****
    X-Company-About: http://www.dssw.co.uk/about/

    (I have replaced some data with stars to slightly reduce the amount of personal data)

    I will have to see how to reconcile the two formats, but I think most likely I will use a combination of the two.

    I particularly like the X-Company-About header which I think is useful and very functional. The machine parse-able X-Company-Registration header is also a good idea, although I like having the complete human readable string as well (X-CompanyInfo) at the cost of an additional line. It might be worthwhile having both a registered address and a company contact address as many smaller businesses do this. Another heading that might be useful would be X-Company-VatRegistrationNumber which is required if you have one.

    Possibly a X-Company-Logo header could indicate a path to a small copy of the company logo which could then be displayed next to the email address in suitable clients.

    Note that MalcolmHardie Solutions doesn’t add the names of the directors as a policy decision. My understanding, based on information from Companies House, is that displaying this information is optional, so we don’t.

    While the details may differ I definitely think this is the way to go on legal information in headers. Structured data should be stored in a structured format and not appended randomly to unstructured data.

    Hopefully we can work towards some kind of common standard, which could then be included in email programs and other tools. Think how much easier it would be to comply with the law if it was a simple preference in your email program and the program asked for the details when you install and displayed the information in the headers section when viewing emails.

  • WWDC: Windows

    It looks like Apple is not moving into any kind of virtualization or emulation of Windows. Although Boot Camp is said to be included, it doesn’t appear that it will work noticably differently to current arrangments (ie. dual boot).

    This is probably good news for Mac developers. I seriously believe that if you could run windows apps natively within Mac OS X without extra software then people would start buying windows software not Mac software in some cases. Look at what happened to OS2, it offered windows compatibility as standard; users asked why bother? Then they switched to Windows proper. Although OS2 also had other difficulties which may also have affected its future, supporting the applications of the main competitor probably had an effect on the number of OS2 applications released. Similarly I think Windows apps natively on Mac would affect the number of Mac apps in certain categories.

  • WWDC keynote: Games

    (Watching WWDC keynote log over at MacRumors.com)

    (It seems to be a blogging day for me?)
    Gaming seems to be one of the big things at this year’s WWDC keynote. EA is apparently going to be doing simultaneous releasing of some games this year including Harry Potter. This is interesting because EA is so important in mainstream gaming.

    Whether EA will follow Blizzard in putting both games on the same CD (hopefully YES) or have separate releases for the two platforms will be a point to note. Dual platform releases like Blizzard are great because it means that you can buy Mac games at mainstream gaming stores and the titles then get released on budget labels (often with the Mac part still attached). I’ve picked up several of the Blizzard games at my local branch of Game here in Edinburgh this way as impulse purchases.
    (Of course where this leaves the Mac Porting development companies is anyone’s guess)

    They also had John Carmack doing a demo of 3D stuff which looked interesting, but, since I’m reading a transcript and looking at photos, doesn’t really make as much impact.

  • Openoffice aqua looking good

    I just downloaded the new aqua port of OpenOffice a few days ago and it looks good. There are some bits which aren’t finished yet, but it runs quickly, it runs natively and it runs the same as the other OpenOffice platforms. (So far as I can tell). It may well be the best upgrade path for people using VBA macros on the Mac.

  • What have I been doing recently?

    Well no updates for a bit. Humm?

    The main things I’ve been working on:

    1) SQLEditor. Lots of things are being worked on. The user interface is being rewritten to improve speed and increase flexibility, the data layer is being rewritten to switch it to cocoa (instead of java), the JDBC code is being rewritten to make it use JNI instead of cocoa/java and a new crash reporting system based on Google BreakPad is being worked on. There are also some other things too like live source view and assorted bug fixes.
    2) HTMLValidator. Also undergoing development. It recently moved across to use Sparkle (yey!) instead of the SQLEditor derived update system (which will also be replaced eventually). The final 1.0 release is due very soon now and several people have set in nice comments.
    3) A new idea (still secret) 🙂

    4) Web site improvements for malcolmhardie.com. Some have been deployed, others are still waiting to be deployed. Although the biggest one which is almost entirely invisible is the rewritten order processing system, which now supports multiple different products and better management features. But only I (and my somewhat-trusted minions) will ever see it. 😉

    Then when I’ve not been working I’ve been playing Pikmen on my new gamecube. (Many thanks to Leynos!). I’ve wanted to play this game properly for years and years and it definitely meets and exceeds my expectations.

    Although I also played some theme hospital this morning using Parallels 3.0 (new release). It runs really nicely, although since it is an ancient game (1997) this shouldn’t be too surprising. I hope to try out some of my other really old games to see how they perfom under parallels.

  • building antlr 2.7.7 on Mac OS X

    It appears that antlr on Mac os x doesn’t like the jikes compiler, at least when I tried building antlr it gave lots of weird compile errors like this:
    Found 2 semantic errors compiling "ANTLRException.java":

    While it would be a good thing to try to fix the actual code, it’s easier to see if the solution is already available.

    The answer came in this posting which suggests renaming jikes before building. Which works, but there is an easier way. Just declare an environment variable before starting the build.


    export JAVAC=javac
    ./configure
    make

    Changing the java compiler that gets used is documented in the configure script.

  • Is it plagiarism if you’ve paid someone else to write the paper for you?

    I happened to browsing a popular site that allows people to post tasks that others can bid on. The focus tends to be on small to medium sized technical tasks like web page design and small applications.
    But there are other categories too. One of which is for technical writing. Ah! I thought, perhaps people offering to write documentation for pay. Well, no, it wasn’t exactly that. What I found was mainly people wanting essays written. One in particular I found very funny. It was looking for someone to write an essay about a networking topic and the requester had simply pasted in the entire task description, including the instructions from the lecturer. It even included the plagiarism statement:

    Academic integrity requirements. Please remember to use quotation marks when you use the exact words from your references. Also you need to use enough citations inside your final paper. The citations should be clear enough for a reader to separate your work from other people’s work. Failure to follow these instructions may lead the paper to be considered as plagiarism.