Books, books, books and ebooks

A little history I’ve been an avid reader all of my life, starting when my grandmother, a speculative fiction fan from way back first bought me a little selection of books on my 8th birthday. My love affair with reading covers all genres and I learned to speed-read before I was 12 years old. There were so many books to read and I wanted to read them all. Growing up, I had a bunk bed, with just the upper deck and the wall underneath was filled in with bookshelves. [Read More]

Development tools

Today’s topic is programming tools and environments. I’ve moved back into enterprise-land for the last year and getting back up to speed on all of the complexities of working with the Microsoft web development stack, combined with a bunch of tomcat java systems, mixed in with powershell scripts for managing package deployments and so on. Combined with this I’m watching the stunning complexity of working and maintaining code in these environments and thought I should get back on the learning Ruby on Rails personal project that had been back burnered for a while. [Read More]

From the Mac Power User 93 podcast

Full of interesting stuff - There’s some useful tidbits concerning the workflow aroung building a 1 to 1 iPad school deployment, but the most interesting bits are the insights and observations about how the technology is changing how students interact with computers and how quickly they adapt and acquire new skills @frasierspears quote “Being able to type correctly the first time is an artefact of a typewriter mentality. where correcting the text was very expensive and time consuming and ruined the final product if you like. [Read More]

Siri tricks and iPad keyboards

I don’t have much to add to the immense volume of articles concerning Siri, but I did discover one very useful feature that is not immediately obvious. The dictation feature activated from the microphone in the keyboard is dynamically linked to the type of keyboard selected. Similar to the autocorrect feature switching dictionaries between languages, Siri will listen in French if the current keyboard is AZERTY and in English when using QWERTY. [Read More]

Tablets are for ?

With all of the discussion around Surface vs iPad vs Android tablets, a subtext throughout is the capacity of a modern tablet computer to be a useful tool for accomplishing different types of work. One point in favor of the Surface Pro approach is that you retain the ability to run legacy Wintel applications so you can be as fully productive as if you had a standard laptop computer. There are two subjects there that I’d like to address here since they apply to me directly. [Read More]

Retina notes

I’m absolutely loving using OmniGraffle on the new iPad. With the Retina display, diagrams are just incredibly crisp and sharp. Imported images from templates show up with a level of detail that is just astounding. I am running across two issues that are admittedly, first world computer geek problems. The first is that getting perfect alignment in a complex diagram can now in fact be harder than on a lower resolution display. [Read More]

Surface observations

And to join in the crowd, my observations about the new Surface product line and presentation by Microsoft. First off, from a conceptual point of view, the package definitely looks interesting and should hopefully add some more dynamism to the tablet market. I really like the idea of the multi touch keyboard cover, and despite many of the people decrying the fact that typing on a virtual keyboard is harder than a physical keyboard, my personal experience shows that it’s just a matter of practice. [Read More]

Revised network

I finally bit the bullet and pulled an Ethernet cable from the living room to the office. It was a bit of a nightmare trying to find a way to do this discreetly given the fact the house is over 200 years old, but it’s done and I have the scars to prove it. Previously, I’d been depending on wifi to to link the different network sections. But between the fact that the neighborhood is saturated and that wireless networks can have hiccups we will see micro drops was causing little problems here and there, especially with NFS mounts that depend on DNS reverse lookups to authorize computer access. [Read More]

BYOD revisited

An interesting article from Greg Ferro concerning BYOD and the ever increasing divide between user expectations and what corporate IT is willing and capable of providing to users. BYOD Policies vs. the Realities of Corporate IT This pretty accurately reflects my feelings and experience on the subject. When I was full time consulting on virtual infrastructures, using a Mac simplified my life enormously with its built in capacity to talk to Windows and UNIX systems, BBEdit for munging log files and so on. [Read More]

Salt and pepper

An interesting update that wasn’t important enough to make the Keynote presentation. The Airport Express got an update to share the same form factor as the Apple TV. It also comes with a number of nice under the hood specification bumps, notably the multiband radio. I’m thinking this makes a perfect combination for business conference rooms. Configure the Airport Express to publish on all available radio bands an unlocked network. Then plug in an Apple TV on a pigtail Ethernet connection, and plug this into your overhead projector. [Read More]