byteblog

Not long ago, I extolled the virtues of the BlackBerry over the iPhone. I realised this may have been a bit hasty when I started playing with my friend’s iPhone back in May of last year.

My phone contract was due up, so, although I found it difficult at first, I was drawn inexorably into the desirable, hopeless-to-resist, financial black hole that is Apple’s product line-up. Although my initial decision was probably based more on the “shiny factor”, rather than any serious investigation into its capabilities, I’m happy to report that after 9 months I know I made the right decision in going for the iPhone.

The fact is, notwithstanding it’s aesthetic appeal, the iPhone has won all manner of smartphone awards since its launch in June 07, and the latest incarnation which I have, the 3GS, merely adds to the misery of the competition.

Its appeal seems to affect ones’ thought processes, given that I went out and bought a MacBook Pro not long after, just to give it something to plug into: some company, maybe.

As I said to my Mac-stalwart friend, it seems that everything Apple produce just “works”, and I suppose that’s the best thing about their stuff. But they also seem to offer that something extra, which makes you wonder, when you fall under the spell, how you resisted it for so long.

New day, new announcement about a new product development/cash-generator from those leviathans of Silicon Valley. This time, however, it is something they can slip under the door onto the mat without any effort on their or our part. As a way to launch a new product, they have it pretty easy, given that Buzz is an add-on for GMail, their web-based email service.

Apparently, in the coming days, users of GMail will see the link to Buzz appear under their Inbox link, and they are automatically connected to their contacts in a way similar to followers in Twitter, and Friends in Facebook. It all sounds good, but I haven’t seen my link yet in the Apps version, so it makes me wonder what I have to do.

Given that they search everything that comes in and out of my email account, maybe I should write a lovely email about them and see if that does the trick?

http://www.google.com/buzz

Apple have announced a new OS for their ubiquitous iPhone. Amongst the amazing new features is “copy and paste”, which apparently allows you to copy one piece of text from one place, and then move it all the way to somewhere else.

Who knows – it might just catch on.

http://bit.ly/123Q26

We love WordPress. We use it for our blog, and are also considering it as a CMS for clients to be able to update their sites.

If you are a blogger, and haven’t tried it out yet, then check out version 2.7 at www.wordpress.org

Google have released a new version of their mapping software package, Google Earth, and this time it makes inroads into tackling the 70% of the Earth’s surface that previous versions have neglected – the bits covered in water.

Granted, you can’t really blame them for leaving it out, given that the average punter isn’t going to be interested in looking at mile after mile of water (although some people have devoted significant time to spotting boats in the midst of all that nothing).

It is only really in the past 40 years that we have begun to map the undersea surface, through the use of satellite and thermal/sonar imaging, and this understanding has allowed us to solve the problem that vexed the Victorian geologists and evolutionists – why are some species spread across the continents, and others not? The answer, the undersea mapping told us, is that the Earth’s crust is constantly moving and being replaced, and the continents, far from being static, were once clumped together and are still moving around on the surface of the molten interior.

Only 5% of the Earth’s ocean floor has been explored (by humans at least), and so scientists and technologists alike have welcomed the development of this side to Google Earth. Instead of spotting sunbathers on ocean-going yachts, perhaps those with a few spare hours could put their minds and eyes to something a bit more important, and not even get wet in the process.

Funny to think that it’s been 40 years since someone (Doug Engelbart) came up with the idea for the first computer mouse.

Made of wood, and with one button, it shook up the traditional ideas of computing and redefined how people should interact and use computers – they should help us.

Many of the things we take for granted today, and perhaps thought had only been around since the 80s and the first usable PC-based word processors, were demonstrated at that show in California in 1968. Copying, pasting and clipping text files and hyperlinking  - all things previously unheard of, were unveiled by Engelbart and the team behind NLS, the name of the system to put the ideas into practice.

What is perhaps most significant about the event was that NLS was adopted by the Stanford Research Institute who, together with UCLA, formed one of the two ends of the first link in the Arpanet network – what we now call the Internet. 

I think we should all raise a glass to Mr Engelbart today.

Read more at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7768481.stm

It’s late. You’ve had a few drinks. Instead of waiting until the morning to send that email, you’ve sat hunched over the keyboard and spat out a bilious missive to a client or a friend/ex, or (worse), declared undying love.

Go on, you can admit it. You’ve done it.

Now, in recognition of all those emails sent in haste, never to be recalled (wouldn’t THAT be a great invention – a “retract” button), Google has come up with a solution that although won’t stop you altogether, will at least make you think twice before pushing “send”. It’s called Mail Goggles, works with their GMail service, and the idea is that it presents you with a series of simple maths questions that you must answer correctly before being able to send the message.

It works during those key night-time hours when alcohol or just sheer exhaustion can play a big part in thinking whether something is a good idea or not. I think it’s just a shame they don’t do one for the phone too.

There’s a challenge for you, Google bods.

http://tinyurl.com/4gljkl

The latest furore surrounding the loss of a memory stick with the data of all the prisoners in the UK is surprising in a number of ways.

However, the media have chosen to focus on the loss of the key itself, but I don’t think that is the surprising thing; I mean, we all lose things from time to time, especially something barely bigger than an AA battery.

The really surprising thing to me is why I can ensure that we can have all our company disks and portable media encrypted in less than a few hours for the sake of a £150 outlay, but a government contractor with contracts worth north of £50 million over the past few years hasn’t put a similar system in place.

What have they spent all that money on I wonder?

If you deal with any commercially or personally sensitive information, and if you’re in business, then that means you, then do yourselves a favour and invest a small sum in getting things secured.

www.pgp.com

Spell-checkers can be pretty handy. When you are staring at the same document for sometimes hours on end as it is being compiled, sometimes you can miss the simplest of typos, so it is useful to run it through a spell-checker or at least past another pair of eyes before you send it to the client.

However, we didn’t realise that spell-checkers can also pass comment on the policy of our friends and neighbours in the US.

After recently checking the spelling in a document we are putting together for a client, the US-centric spell-checker flagged up “healthcare”.

It said “word not found”…

The search giant Yahoo, amongst others, is experimenting with a new version of the internet called the “Semantic Web”. In other words, the aim is to try and get the internet to behave more like person, rather than just a collection of dumb terminals.

At the moment, when you do a web search for, say, “office equipment”, the search engines use the specific words in that search request, and try and match pages that they have previously indexed. This can sometimes throw up all sorts of anomalies and weird pages. Basically this is because people are still much better than computers at associating between words and phrases, and as people’s associations differ wildly between age groups, countries, races and so on, it is very difficult for a search engine to get it right every time, for everyone.

The solution, say the techies, is to have the web think for itself, and instead of just dumbly returning a list of pages, it should actively search for relevant content by understanding its meaning. Of course “understanding” is a relative term – we think it is doubtful whether a computer will ever pass the Turing test in our lifetime, as the meaning we as humans attach to information is vastly complex and, ultimately, any computer will have to be programmed by us, and we do not fully understand this relationship ourselves.

We all saw what happened in Terminator 2 when SkyNet started to think for itself (it fought back, apparently, when someone tried to unplug it), so maybe going as far as a fully self-aware internet wouldn’t be such a good idea. However, anything that makes our daily trawl through the internet a little easier and quicker is a good idea in our book.

Check out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7296056.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test