• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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The books may be finished but we still continue to learn more about the characters we have come to love through Joe’s comments. I posted before about how great it was to see a more open JKR now that the books are over. It’s great to finally get to see her starting to share more of the encyclopedic knowledge she has of her characters and their world. However, I have to admit that I thought we’d heard all the big revelations at this stage. It turns out I was wrong! During her current American tour JKR told an audience in New York that Dumbledore was gay! You can read more in this BBC News article.

[tags]Harry Potter, Dumbledore, gay, JK Rowling, homosexuality[/tags]

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I was invited to a careers fair organised by my old school yesterday. The idea was that past pupils would come back and be available to talk to current students and their parents about their experiences in further education and/or employment. I was past student number 78, and if memory serves, there were another five to ten past students after me on the list. For a school of about 600 students I was very impressed by those numbers. The place was also packed with interested students and parents so it was not only a good idea but also a success. I had a constant stream of students talking to me about the sciences and IT throughout the two hour event. The students were keen and enthusiastic, which was great to see. However, the students who spoke to me all had one other thing in common, they were all male.

I always hopped that as time went on the gender imbalance in the sciences and IT would sort itself out. I thought it was just a relic of long gone times that would automatically be corrected as the older generations were replaced by newer ones. That is plainly not the case in rural Ireland. I don’t think this imbalance is down to prejudices or uneven opportunities within these disciplines. That certainly was the case in the past but, I see no evidence of it now. So, it must be something else. I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I can only assume it has something to do with image. I guess school girls don’t see either science or computers as interesting. We’re going to have to change that, but I’ll be damed if I can see how. Anyone out there got any ideas?

There are a lot of articles on the net. Only a subset of those actually obey the rules of grammar, of those, an even smaller subset are actually well written, and of those, an even a smaller subset could be described as ‘riveting’. Today I had the pleasure of reading one of these rare articles. Be warned though, it’s long, but IMO well worth the effort to read. That article is ‘The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory‘ and is about the Cannon Ball Run.

At this stage I’ve run the Touch through everything I ever do with iPods and have found three additional annoyances to the ones I described in yesterday’s article. Two can be fixed by simple software updates, one cannot. None of these are show stoppers and don’t affect my over-all conclusion that this is a great iPod and a taste of the future.

1. Poor Support for Older iPod Accessories – I recently bought an iPod compatible stereo thingy for the kitchen and the touch only half works with it. It charges and the sound comes out but the remote does not allow you to play/pause or go forward/back a track. Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying. I believe the iPhone suffers from the same problem.
2. Long Names Don’t Scroll – On my previous iPod when ever it encounters a name that is too long to be displayed the name scrolls so you get to see all bits of it. This works in the menus and on the now-playing screen. The Touch does not do this and it’s a real PITA for audio books in multiple parts.
3. No Sleep Timer – This probably only affects a few people but I normally fall asleep to my iPod so I set a 15 minute sleep timer on it. I can’t do that with the Touch so my old iPod now has a permanent place next to my bed 🙂

Update (26 October 2007): As Jon has pointed out in the comments below, you can get sleep functionality, just not in an immediately obvious way.

[tags]Apple, iPod, iPod Touch[/tags]

Tagged with: hardware • review • iPod Touch • Apple

For people living in the states the iPod Touch is old news by now, but for those of us this side of the pond we’ve only gotten our hands on them this week. What Americans may also not realise is that we don’t have the iPhone over here yet, so for us, this is not just our first taste of the iPod Touch, but of the whole Apple multi-touch thing. I ordered mine the day after the ‘Steve Note’ that announced it and it just arrived today. I’m a little grumpy that it made it in to shops in Dublin before my pre-ordered one arrived but mine is engraved which it wouldn’t have been had I bought it in a shop. Perhaps the engraving makes up for the two or three day delay. Anyhow, for us here in Ireland this is not old news at all, it’s big news!

This review is going to take and odd form. The majority of it is going to be dedicated to pointing out the short-comings of the iPod Touch. That may inevitably lead people to assume I’m not happy with it, or worse still, that I hate it. I’m going to pre-empt that right now by saying that this device is superb. It rocks. It’s the most revolutionary piece of technology I’ve ever held in my hands. This kind of touch-based interface is the future, and man, what a future it is! Before today I thought I probably wanted an iPhone whenever they finally make it to Ireland, now I KNOW I want an iPhone! I’ll come back to some of the good stuff nearer the end of the review, but first I want to start with the not-so-good stuff.

[tags]iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple[/tags]

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Tagged with: hardware • review • iPod Touch

Yay!!! It finally arrived 🙂 will do a full review soon. Just wanted to test the browser and keyboard. Have to say the keyboard is not half bad. I’m already using two thumbs!

Any how, more later.

As things stand third party apps on the iPhone suck. Web-based apps which are confined to the browser are not the long-term answer. The problem isn’t really that JS+XHTML+CSS is a crap platform, because it’s not. It’s not perfect, but it’s a grand platform as demonstrated by the glut of Dashboard widgets out there. The big problems with the web only iPhone apps are that you can only use them when you’re online, and they are stuck in Safari and can’t be launched from the main screen. What good is a great third party app if you can’t use it on a plane or if using it abroad will cost you a fortune on roaming data charges?

I have no idea what Apple have up their sleeves, or indeed, if they have anything up there at all with regard to third party iPhone apps. But, as far as I am concerned, Apple have the solution already. It’s a pre-existing part of OS X Tiger, Dashboard. Dashboard widgets are basically off-line web apps. They are written in JS+XHTML+CSS, just like iPhone apps have to be now. But, they are installed on the machine so, when I’m on a plane, I can still use my dashboard widgets. Now, there are much smarter people than little-old-me in Apple so surely someone in there must also have come to the same conclusion? Maybe that’s why they are making developers work on web-based iPhone apps for now. The only way I can make any sense out of that decision is to look at it as a half-way-house on the road to Dashboard-like apps installed on the iPhone.

[tags]iPhone, Apple, Dashboard, 3rd Party Apps[/tags]

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Tagged with: iOS • OS X

Eircom’s security issues are bad enough to be getting on with but at least users can protect themselves with a few easy steps. BT customers seem to be much worse off with a remotely exploitable authentication bypass vulnerability. A quick scan of their website shows no announcement of the flaw or mention of it. They had better respond soon and respond well!

Although I’d been pretty good about actually taking pictures over the last two months I haven’t been very good about uploading them to my gallery. I’ve remedied that today. Check them out:

• August 2007
• September 2007

Please note that this article is a follow-on article from two previous articles (Eircom Exposes Its Broadband Customers to Serious Security Risks and Eircom Security – More Bad News and Some Suggested Solutions). The previous articles lay out the problems and some suggested solutions in detail. This article will not repeat those detailed explanations and justifications. I am writing this article with the assumption that readers will have first read the two original articles.

This article starts by presenting the details of Eircom’s response before providing a brief analysis leading to some conclusions. For those of you too lazy to read the whole article, were this to be school I’d give Eircom a passing grade, but not a great one. Say a high D or a low C.

[tags]Eircom, Netopia, WEP, WPA[/tags]

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Tagged with: home routers • internet service providers • vulnerability

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