So i finally managed to keep an appointment with the Apple Store's Genius Bar to try and get my iPhone 4 fixed. The issue is very minor, its simply that the volume down button has stopped working. The only other side effect of this is that whenever i reboot my iphone or it runs out of power the phone automatically turns the volume all the way down.

Not really much if a problem but since my phone was still under warranty i had been planning tog et it sorted for months but due to a lack of daily pain associated with the fault it never really made its way to the top of my to do list.

So when i was at the store buying some stuff the other day i managed to book an appointment and actually kept it this time. The "Genius" was very helpful, he instantly went to the back room to have a look inside the phone. He came back and said that he could not find a reason for the fault and could see no other damage so instantly replaced my iPhone 4 for me.

I have to say this is probably the only time i have ever had to take something back where i walked away totally satisfied with the experience. There was no point where i felt like i had to defend my actions somehow which was nice. I walked out of the Apple store and felt looked after. Now i have a shiny new iPhone and feel even better about not upgrading! Maybe this year though.

Posted by James - 5/16/2012 @ 3:41 PM

I have been super busy over the last few weeks so I decided I deserved a treat, the treat being a new Hover Bar from my local Apple store for my iPad.

While the price tag was a bit on the heavy side for what the product actually is I was impressed with it from the moment I got it out of the box. There are a few issues here and there but the experience provided is certainly useful. 

My only real issue with the product is finding a good mounting point. This is mainly because the arm is screwed into the base which means when force is directed in the right direction the arm begins to unscrew which causes the iPad to drop. This problem could have been avoided by a locking mechanism at some point where the arm screws into the mount.

This issue effects me possibly more than the average user because I am not actually mounting it to my iMac but rather a small shelf I have mounted to the wall behind my workspace. This means I mount from the front of the shelf rather than the back which I get the feeling the design of the product was aimed at.

All that said i would recommend this product to anyone who has an iPad and would benefit from an additional display while working with some added functionality.

It works especially well when used as a Touch Screen remote for the Apple Television or for having a Google Document open as a reference for whatever you are working on. 

Posted by James - 5/14/2012 @ 6:20 PM

I'm back after a nice holiday thank you. I have had a chance to play around with a few of the typing apps  available for Chrome browser.I think Type Fu is the best of the downloads in the Chrome web store. It is especially effective because it encourages the user to apply good technique/practice, such as looking at the screen and using appropriate finger for each keystroke. 

Of five I tried, Type Fu is the top of the class and feels like a serious learning tool with an innovative approach, Typing Lessons was in second place. The unmentionables left were samey, seemed unfinished and mainly relied on recording the user's speed plowing through text. I won't name and shame the rest, there were some bad  ones! The moral of the story is: Type Fu for learning to type faster til further notice...

Got an email suggesting more batches of Raspberry Pi's are being shipped out. With  any luck ours will be arriving soon. Here's a list of my favorite links today:

• A large library of free courses: http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses 
  
• Free circuits and electronics course from MIT at: http://mitx.mit.edu/, more courses to come. 
  
• More free elearning coming soon from Harvard/MIT collaboration: http://www.edxonline.org/  
  
• A great interview: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/27/yahoos-doug-crockford-on-javascript/ 
• Shiny:http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/08/wtf_is_intel_ivy_bridge_architecture 
• Madness!: http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/08/review_intel_ivy_bridge_core
• _i7_3770k_quad_core_procesor/

Posted by Pente - 5/14/2012 @ 1:06 PM

I have been very busy over the last five days or so with work over at Yapety but thought i would get a quick update in while i scratch my head over some bugs. Work on the pSite Core is on hold for a little while as i finish with my obligations on the Yapety project which is starting to come to an end of the intense period of development.

I didn't manage to get Chrome working on my netbook and ended up installing Windows 8 CP so i could use Internet Explorer for some testing. I have also modified my MacBook Pro setup due to battery life issues. This is something that has been bugging me for a while, having a virtual machine open for Visual Studio had been draining my battery life big time. 

I had imagined myself using the MonoDevelop tools but the last few times i had checked it out it didn't seem ready for constant use. I decided to check it out again the other day as yet again my laptop battery had died in less than two hours of text editing.. I have to say it seems very stable now and very usable which is not something i came away thinking the last time i had dealings with it.

Its been going strong over the last couple of days and has actually doubled my usual battery time for coding on the run which is certainly notable. I hope the Mono project keeps going the way it is, as it stands i can really see it becoming a big contender in the IDE world especially on the Mac!

Posted by James - 5/9/2012 @ 2:39 AM

So i have recently stopped using multiple machines ate once mainly due to ShareMouse what i had previously thought to be the best in Keyboard and Mouse sharing finished the Beta phase and became freemium. 

Which in any usual situation would not be an issue, its a good tool i use it a lot and i get a lot out of it. The problem being that ShareMouse are trying to charge around $50.00 per installation which means you would be required to by at least $100.00 worth of licenses before you can legally use their software.

This to me is way overboard, the software clearly uses an open source core know as Synergy to allow the sharing of mouse and keyboard. What ShareMouse is at a fundamental level is a refactored version of Synergy with a nice UI on top.

Then i found out about teleport, teleport is a free piece of software found herewhich is capable of most of the functionality of ShareMouse and actually a few extras. The drawback for some may be the lack of Windows support. Apple Mac Lion users will also be glad to know that mission control and space swapping using gestures is supported. This feature is missing from ShareMouse and i feel sorry for anyone who has paid $100.00+ for ShareMouse who only use it on Mac because i honestly think teleport is a much better written application.

Posted by James - 5/1/2012 @ 5:10 PM

I have been testing out the new beta of Windows 8 for a while now and decided to share a few of my Windows 8 photos on various machines.

Posted by James - 5/1/2012 @ 2:35 PM

I have been reading more and more about how fast and easy to use Chrome OS is. Obviously i use chrome on my desktop as i have previously stated in other posts but i have never really had a good look into how it would work as an operating system.

It seems built for netbooks and until recently i had forgotten i have a Samsung Netbook from about two years ago with a 1.6GHZ Intel Atom and a couple of gigabytes of DDR2 memory.

Thats a rather slow build these days but im guessing this is just the kind of machine Chromium OS was designed for. I am currently downloading the latest Vanilla build for USB stick and will be blogging my results!

Posted by James - 4/29/2012 @ 2:31 PM

Hello again,its the other poster on this blog! I recently installed Visual Studio 2010, as my first experience of a serious tool  since university. I will provide a newbies perspective and problems to “counterbalance” James's experienced view.  I started working through the  Microsoft literature for 20 minutes or so but kept getting a Javascript error  which meant I couldnt run any samples from the 'Getting started' page. A quick tour of the IDE  later,I worked my way through Hello world tutorials in C++ and C# on Youtube. The code editor seems quite impressive and I like being able to autohide and use  the same window for different toolboxes.It is workable on my system, it runs slowly and has been stable so far.More on this later.

By now, almost everyone one knows Microsoft have confirmed the versions of Windows 8 to be released. It's a trending topic also an obvious chance for me to demo  some of the site's new features, here is a gratuitous image of Developer Preview running  on a touch device.Go  to  the Psyion YouTube site for video of Consumer Preview and possibly a boot test! 

I  hope there are a lot of changes before final release, I use my system mainly as a laptop rather than a touch device and use the traditional areo interface more.  Improvements on the site are still being made to provide more content, faster. From what I have seen the Content editor and UI editor have had significant changes, the ability to compile code on the fly is something I had not seen done  before.Here are my favourite links for today:

i. I think this is a well written piece.

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/13/how-to-blog.html#more-154632 

ii. Free lectures and materials. 

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm 

iii. Sounds convincing.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate-uk/2012/04/17/why-we-are-not-witnessing-a-tech-boom/ 

iv. The raspberry pi started shipping this week, here are some reviews, and relatively fair comparison.

http://www.designspark.com/content/raspberry-pi-and-custard-engineers-first-hands-review 

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/reviews/raspberry-pi-review-the-price-is-right-but-the-software-is-not/ 

v. Tim Berners Lee speaks the truth!          http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/tim_berners_lee_criticises_government_net_snoop_plans/          

Posted by Pente - 4/25/2012 @ 1:26 AM

I have been working hard on the pSite Compiler, the results are begging to show, in the alpha version of the Module Manager which will be where C Sharp code fields may be managed and compiled.

I have been thinking about the life cycle of the Modules as i want to make it easier to implement more advanced information systems on the fly. Currently the following life cycle methods have been mapped out and are working.

• pInitialize, Loads once on start up.
• WorkerThread, Is fired off in a sperate thread at start up.
• RegisterRoutes, Also fired when the DLL starts up.

Posted by James - 4/19/2012 @ 7:33 PM

So the Content Editor was getting a tad dry and i had been dying to implement a dynamically compiled .net script library which is going well. I have using the CodeDom namespace and already have it compiling C Sharp and VB.net which i have to say is really rather COOL!

This will eventually allow the pSite Core to maintain a smaller code base while allowing easy modification of site systems on the fly. It also means that new object types can now be added dynamically. 

Theres still lots to go in the way of planning for this eventuality as the framework will require a more override friendly design to make on the fly modification less of a head ache. The good news is that its already been tested with an example pObject superclass which worked rather well!

Posted by James - 4/18/2012 @ 12:46 PM