What can I say... Been very naughty and not written a blog post in a while. It's probably more for good reasons than bad as Neetrix is starting to take off and the feedback has been brilliant. Still loads to do, but have a number of small businesses using Neetrix to run their businesses. We're are currently going through the second phase where the interface is having an overhaul now that the core is stable. The recent completion of the Trial Balance report for Neetrix Accounting has been a significant milestone that has proven the accuracy and stability of the system. These new enhancements will provide a far faster administration area, reduce our code-base for quicker implementations of new features, and hugely improve the ease of use of the system. In every respect, its very exciting.

I've also been trying to get the 2nd and 3rd piano pieces down on paper. That's been on the back burner for ages, but has recently had a bit of a burst of progress. I'm looking forward to publishing them up on this site as soon as they are done so I can put them to the side and work on my next stuff with the piano. (my reading speed has taken a small blow because of the focus on writing theory).

One thing I have managed to do recently is sort out a twitter background for my personal twitter account.. It's been long overdue! Check it out http://www.twitter.com/_AdamSaunders.

 I was really looking forward to seeing Law Abiding Citizen for a while. I love "clever" films that uses more intellect than high explosives. Unpredictable, smart movies get me on the edge of a seat, and I'm sure that is the same with many others.

So when such a film comes to the silver screen I look forward to the first opportunity in watching it, and this film certainly started on the right rails. It looked to be a thoroughly well thought out and one to twist and turn and take you one of those "how" journeys.. How disappointed was I when it slips into quick and unsatisfying ending. Without spoiling the plot, I can see what it was trying to do, but it seemed to lose out on the mystery with too much explained too quickly.

Perhaps I went with too much high expectations, but I was at least hoping for a little more.

Oh well.. at least I've still got my most anticipated film of the year to look forward to. Avatar! 

A particularly geeky post, even for me. As I wait for my Hero this morning I've been running some disk benchmarking on the micro SDHC memory cards I have around here.

That is quite a significant difference between the devices. The 8GB Class 6 Micro SDHC that I purchased for the HTC Hero really looks to be exceptionally quick for a SS memory card.

Baring in mind that smartphones are doing a lot of read AND writes to their main storage because of the wealth of applications, background processes and more over, swap file requirements, especially of the Android platform, I'm expecting this to have a significant difference in the general response of the phone. The swap file in particular will require plenty of read and write throughput when the device is in use, especially when the device is loaded up and is more and more reliant on that file.

Luckily I'll have TWO HTC Heroes here today, which means I'll be able to do a side-by-side comparison between using the 2GB Class 2 (?) Micro SD card that comes with the device, and the replacement 8GB Class 6 Micro SDHC card. For the sake of £14.99 which included a small USB card reader it's barely a price to pay for what I hope to be a significant difference in user experience.

For some time I've been very disappointed with Microsoft Outlook. It was one of the best applications to ever come from the giant software provider, and even today its features and capabilities surpass any other email client. But with all that power comes a gigantic resource requirement, and over the last decade this once lean mean communications and organisation machine has been slow, buggy and expensive.

If I was to be an exchange server user, wishing to spend nearly £10 a month on a single mail box with a store for my calendar, tasks and contacts etc, then Outlook would be my single port of call, and spending that much on a single mailbox would mean I was the type of guy that didn't care about what it cost to get what I believe would be the best. What if I could get it for free or near to?

So I'm on a quest at the moment to see if I can live without the Outlook monolith on my computers and laptops and see if I can get complete email, calendar, tasks and contacts synchronisation including all the push email support that exchange and outlook services can provide, but without all the expense. So far this is what I have:

• An IMAP email account so I can have my email synchronise with all my devices. It also supports IMAP IDLE to give full push email support (means that as soon as an email gets to the account its immediately pushed to all devices so communications are more responsive). Gmail has both of these as well as a few other free providers, but if you have your own domain name "@majicware.com" for instance you'll be paying a little more but FAR less than an Microsoft Exchange account. You can use your own domain with Google, but it would be cheaper to shop around.
• A Google Gmail and Calendar account. This gives me the ability to store my contacts and calendar on line.
• Mozilla Thunderbird for reading and composing emails on my computers and laptops. I'd also need the following add-ons for Thunderbird:
  • Lightening - To add calendar and task support to Thunderbird
  • Google Contacts - To allow sync of Gmail contacts with Thunderbird Address Book
  • Provider For Google Calendar - To ensure that appointments are written to as well as read from Google.

This isn't very much "stuff" which is a great thing, and best of all won't cost a penny for any of it (unless you have your own domain name of course, but would be minimum (Google is about £33/year/account).

So what I have next to do is to set these up. Setup the IMAP accounts in Thunderbird and it will detect them as support IDLE automatically which means that push email is immediately available without any extra leg work. You can also setup the IMAP accounts on your mobile phones if you have the appropriate Internet data tariffs.

Next add your calendar into Lightening by creating a new "On The Network" calendar using CalDAV with the URL https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/youraccount@Gmail.com/events. Don't forget to add your Gmail account to the URL.

Getting your contacts to sync is a little harder, but not difficult. You need to go to the options of the "Google Contacts" Add-on in Thunderbird. Add your Gmail email address to the "Accounts" section and set the maximum contacts to something reasonable based on your current contact size and likely growth. You can always change these later. On the Advanced tab you can enable Disk Cache to keep things speedy, and set the Group Mapping to your Contacts group.

And that is largely it!! Simple! which is what we love, and you can add all of these to your mobile devices (as almost all of them support IMAP, and most modern ones support IDLE as well, and goto http://m.google.com/sync to find out how to sync your calendar and contacts with your device. I'm using a Nokia E71, and that supports Email for Exchange, and fortunately Google now supports Active Sync protocol which basically means instant synchronisation of your calendar and contacts to your mobile device just like email!

Enjoy!

- Also note that Thunderbird is available for Windows + Apple Mac

Ok. So I've only used the Digsby application for a second day, but two surprising features I wasn't expecting.. Firstly (the lesser surprising, but none-the-less useful) is that it integrated with my LinkedIn account showing the latest activity with connections I have. However, the best surprise was when I was installed Digsby on my laptop, I was thrilled to find that it had kept all my accounts and settings such as skins/themes avatars etc and pushed them to the laptop, meaning I didn't have to set up accounts twice everywhere!

For as long as I can remember I've been fighting problems like having to have two Live Messenger accounts to keep business and personal contacts seperate. Live Messenger doesn't allow you to have more than one instance, and therefore more than one account signed in per machine at one time. However, with a patch like A-Patch, you can get around this, which is what I've been doing all these years. I guess you are waiting for a "but" and this is what it is. Live messenger is quite a bit of a resource hog at the best of times, but needing two seperate instances open really eats into your system resources, and add to this all the other clients like Google chats, ICQs etc, and then you have all the social networking tools for Facebook and Twitter etc like Tweetdeck, and the machine is almost on it's knees..

Well it seems my wishes were granted on behalf of a free application called Digsby. I'm not going to jump to any forgone conclusion as I've only been using it a day, but so far I'm thoroughly impressed. Now I get all my communications coming through the single client which uses very little resources.

What's very impressive is the little extra features they have added, such as on the side of my website you can now see a chat applet that shows you when I'm around allows you to contact me through my site. (I have the right to ignore you by the way. Just the nature of being busy).

What this boils down to is that "I can be everywhere without needing to be all over the place!". That would probably make a good tag line for Digsby!

Hopefully at some point I'll write up something more about its pro's and con's. I have noticed two con's so far. Firstly is that the Live Messenger implementation doesn't support the new ability to be logged in on more than one machine at a time. Pitty, though expected.. And secondly that your status is set across the board, and not just for single accounts etc, although this won't affect me much.

You can get more info and download this tool from: www.digsby.com.

What I find interesting in my response to such an application is a greater appreciation of the side of forthcoming applications like Google Wave. Not only everything in one place, but richer functionality and a more immediate response.

I've been having lots of fun since last night installing and playing with Windows 7 using my HP Touchsmart TX2 tablet PC. Considering the general bad feedback Vista got, Windows 7 is like a complete breathe of fresh air.

Installing it on the tablet PC was a breeze, and instead of the gazillion applications and drivers that I required to install for Vista, Windows 7 only required the graphics driver (which would come on windows update but I chose to install the one from the ATI site), the new n-trig Windows 7 RC drivers from here, and the finger print drivers which appeared on windows update after trying to find and install the ones from the Authentic site.

What this now means is that I have all the glory of multi-touch tablet PC fully working! I can use up to 5 fingers at a time based on the n-trig RC drivers, and I've not found a single fault yet.

The new start bar for Windows 7 is far nicer than I thought it would be, especially to use with fingers, and the onscreen keyboard seems much more clear and accurate. Even the finger print software was built into Windows 7.. There simply isn't anything extra you need, making the whole system more stable and far less cluttered.

I've installed Office 2007 SP2 back on the laptop, and Microsoft OneNote is even more of a godsend that it was before. With multi-touch I can scroll pages down without accidentally scribbling on the page, and pan in and out with the common pinching gesture.

Finally, the PERFECT tablet PC. If only sold state drives were cheaper (all in time)! That would be the icing on the enormous cake!

I was doing my usual glancing at the BBC iPlayer today and spotted two things I love very much. Firstly my passion for modern classical music, and secondly my admiration for the humour of Bill Bailey. Bill is a very very talented muscian, and the way he can just take the most serious piece of music and turn it into something histerical is no easy feat. So seeing the opportunity to see him use the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Albert Hall to portray his wild thoughts and musically brilliant ideas was a no brainer.

What can I say.. Everything I expected and more... If you have access to the iPlayer, it won't be there for very long, so watch it as soon as you can!

Click here to view it.

After a nice meal with a few friends we decided to go for a last minute, late night preview of the new Star Trek movie.

I have to say, I went there with great expectations, and those were completely fulfilled and some. Although I have no reservations to admit that I did watch the TV and previous films of Star Trek when it was airing, this did help understand some of the underlying decisions in the plot of the new movie, and certainly some of the "trekky" humour, however what I really wanted the movie to do was to be enjoyable by those friends that don't know the difference between a scotty and a spock. Those that had never seen a single episode of Start Trek still very much loved the film. Perfect.

So that's two great films out now. Wolverine (which was simply brilliant), and now Star Trek. Both that would seem a geeks dream, but I certainly haven't heard a single piece of cynicism from "regular" folks.

On a related, but different note however.. Cinema prices.. come on guys. You were taking the piss before, and now you are really stepping over the lines.

I finally went to celebrity chef's, Jamie Oliver's, italian restaurant in bath to have a quick lunch there with Sam and Anthony.

The menu is mainly "typical" dishes, and I just selected a simple spaghetti bolognese, but it was both reasonably priced, and tasted sensational! You know when you are eating something truely devine when you don't want to ever stop chewing!

This is the first celebrity chef's restaurant i've ever been to, and it's left me curious as to what others are like. Because of the recession they have all reconsidered their pricing to keep their bookings up, and this makes it an ideal time to try a couple more in the next two or three months.

Well, finally the time has come, and today the Street View feature I mentioned in a previous blog post some months ago, has now officially hit the UK. There was lots of talk about it being done, but was pretty surprised today to see that Bristol now has it.

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

I'm sure other cities have been done, but been so facinated with the Bristol one, I've not yet taken my eyes away long enough to check for other cities yet.

Quick update.. Looks like most of the main cities of the UK have been done.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a newest tablet PC. The HP TX2-1010, as it is far better value at £799 inc VAT, than of its Dell rival.

The only downside of buying HP laptops is that they put a 32bit Home Edition of Vista as the warranted factory standard, and then bloat the software with such nasties as AOL and the likes.. One of the main reasons I think this is not right is that this is no doubt a laptop more oriented towards the business and student market, and Home Premium doesn't cut it with missing features like offline folders etc. In effect if you were to use the laptop as they give it to you, you don't have access to all the system memory, and most of the icons lead you on to paying for something or another. It's a terrible affair.. but there is a simple solution to this. You can just rebuild it yourself using a better version of Vista, such as Vista 64 Ultimate, and then get the 64bit drivers from the HP site. At least you think you can...

This is what the resolution should be like, but HP don't want to make it that easy. Neigh, if you were to talk to a HP support staff member, they'll let you know that using any other OS would void the warranty, i.e.if you need to send it away, you have to put the crappy factory install back on, or need assistance with the support team.. which ties the average user down to a over bloated software monolith. What doesn't make sense is that HP provide "support" for 64bit operating system on their websites by providing the drivers ready to download. But I found out this is just a tease... I checked that the drivers were available before I bought the laptop, as I knew I needed the upgraded OS, but it isn't until you actually reinstall do you realise that they haven't put all the drivers, and none of the software on their website.

An entire weekend, and I did find a solution. Most people I see around the web give up and revert back to the factory build, trying to uninstall all the crap that comes with that, but the recovery drive is the key.

Using 7-zip file manager, you are able to get hold of all of the software and drivers under "D:\Proload\Base.WIM\1\swsetup". This means that even after you have reinstalled, the software is still there ready for you to reinstall manually. And you can pick what you really want/need versus bloating the laptop out. You will find that some of the drivers are 32bit only, however a lot do have both 32bit and 64bit available. Those that are missing can be obtained from the HP website, and I did find the 64bit drivers for the ATI graphics card from the ATI site (you need to get the ATI HD 3400 drivers which work) to be better.

This only leaves one really essential part. N-Trig.. N-Trig is the manufacturer of the duo sense screen.. this screen is pretty remarkable engineering.. It is a pen, touch and multi-touch combined device that sits over the normal LCD screen. It gives a slightly grainy look, but the quality and accuracy is second to none. It even has the forward thinking to stop the hand touch technology whilst the pen is in use, allowing you to write whilst you are still got your hand resting on the screen. Those that haven't use a touch screen before may not appreciate the magnitude of something as "simple" as this, but it really does make the tablet mode effortless and natural. Ok, so I did mention a problem, and the problem is simply that the drivers that are on the recovery disk are 32bit only, and HP do not provide any drivers for the device on their website (remember this is the touch screen part of the tablet PC! essential stuff!). I was lucky enough to figure out that Dell (whom are much better at hosting software and drivers) do have a 64bit edition under their opposing Dell Lattitude XT section. These do work with the HP, however the HP version of N-Trig has the pinch to zoom and rotate gesture support which makes the device act a little like a giant iPhone. This version however I am still hammering at N-Trig to get hold off. Unfortunately I get the feeling it will be in vein based on their general responses I've seen around the web regarding support of their product.

But no worries in the longer term.. The entire device support Windows 7!! Which has all the gesture and multi-touch built into the OS, and N-Trig have already released the 32bit Windows 7 drivers. I'm sure, by time Windows 7 is out (i'm guessing towards the end of this year, possibly even before with the generally good feedback it is receiving), they will have the 64 bit drivers which will put the new multi-touch laptop I now use into usability overdrive.

UPDATE (7 May 2009): n-trig have now released the Windows 7 RC drivers which includes 64bit! I have not yet tried them as I'm still having difficulties getting hold of them from the n-trig website. Click here for more information about the HP TX2 tablet PC on Windows 7.

I was just contemplating some European trips and was doing my usual, using Google Earth to check what's around hotels and city break areas to see if there is anything worthwhile visiting.

Now Google has a new perspective called Google StreetView, which is exactly that. You can actually have a full 360^o look from a drivers perspective. It means that you can basically take a drive through a city and see exactly what it might be like before you even ever been there.

So, for instance, here is Times Square in New York.. 

(you can click and drag around these images to see the 360^o view! Or click on the arrows on the road to move back and forth)

Or perhaps a quick look around Paris?

 I just think this technology is fantastic. England is being mapped at the moment, so should expect that properly some time next year I believe. However, I'm more interested in seeing more places that people don't tend to get to see, like eastern european countries and the middle east.

Here's a geeky post regarding my poor quadro graphics card being pushed with having to deal with my work machine and its multiple monitors.. all gour of them are pushing the GPU to process 6,305,440 pixels 60 times a second at 32bit colour. That equates to 1.44 GigaBytes of graphics every second.

And it doesn't even have a fan on it to keep it cool.. Well. i've been having a few graphical glitches, but apart from that its surprisingly smooth.

Thanks to the wonders of the uneducated press, I've had so many local kids fretting about the end of the world thanks to the black holes that the LHC at Cern will produce.

There is a chance that it could produce black holes, which is enough for the press to go crazy over, but its highly highly unlikely and they would be super small too. I've even seen stupid youTube videos of people animating what they believe the black hole would do when engulfing the earth. It's amusing, and at the same time disturbing how people seem to "like" the idea of the earth disappearing in a black hole.

Just a shame it won't happen then ;-)

I actually find this area of physics facinating, and really hope it helps us to understand everything around us more than we do already. I believe there are knock-on implications way beyond that of just proving the big bang theory and why we exist because of it. It's because of experiments like these we accidently find ways to make science fiction a science fact. For instance, 70% of the entire universe is dark energy.. what if there was a way to use it rather than just acknowledge its existance.. Would solve a few problems on our tiny little planet for sure. Even proving the existance of the "god" particle would be pretty cool achievement.

But, the main reason I'm writing this blog entry is because a silly theory that came to mind when all the news and panic striven kids started to throw their hands in the air. What if this very experiment started the big bang.. as in taking apart space and time and it's complex nature... what if the experiment was the actual cause of everything.. How ironic would that be.. We are studying the big bang because it happened, but it happened because we tried to study it. :-)

I'd think i'd call it the "Big Bang Paradox"...

I have to say that this is a pretty damn good way of using the Google Earth engine. Put together for the American Astronomical Society and looks at the stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. It's quite a sight. This image is called the Spitzer. Click on the picture below to see it properly.

However I do have to mention that there is also the Google Sky. This is a look at the sky using the infamous Hubble telescope. No doubt having a play with this for a while will certianly make you feel very small indeed...

This is a 5 year old who can play a piano from purely it's sound.. No lessons, and she can't read sheet music because she is completely blind.

Her brain is so good at hearing and dealing with pitch and tone that it can improvise a song in real time, and then remember the entire event and play it back. Having "perfect pitch" is quite rare, but you can find it in a number of people in varying number of degrees (some that don't even know it), and can be practiced like most things. This girl really has a unique capacity to deal with music that it is quite shocking..

The way she deals with the piano is facinating too.. She can't see the notes and her small hands means that she can't just reach spans that adults can. This means she is finding notes based on their exact pitch and using spacial awareness simultaneously to place her hand in where she believes that matching note will be found. Again, this isn't new as pianists do this through practice to read music, play without looking at their hands, but the way her brain is dealing with it seems much more raw.. as in she isn't thinking about the piano as a pianist does. What is interesting is that she can also have problems recognising tones at certain pitches. Those with perfect pitch have stronger capabilities within a certain range. Pianists generally will have their range around middle C and one or two octives out in both directions, but this is mainly because of tones they are used to hearing. She has a large range, but seems to find it difficult hitting towards the 4th octive up.. It's definately not hearing and remembering the tone is the problem, but the spacial awareness of where to find that note instead. It's a bit like someone that can hear music and remember it really well in their mind, but can't sing it when they try and so sounds like they heard it wrong.

Amasing.. It will be interesting to see if this girl continues to be televised and how things change as she matures.

Posting this up because I completely by accident stumbled across this whilst looking for a few rememberable places (as you do with Google Earth).

I know of several interesting posts about google earths images and people spotting a few odd things, but this was quite shocking.. The chances are probably likely I guess, but none-the-less was proud to spot it.

Yup, its a flying Air Canada aircraft getting caught on camera as the arial photo was taken. And in case you don't believe me, go download Google Earth yourself and use this bookmark :-)

Unbelievable.kmz (.59 KB)

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=51.57725,-0.697466&spn=0.0022,0.005997&t=k&om=1