Random Developments

So, I’m planning to buy a digital SLR camera in the near future. I currently use a film SLR which is almost 10 years old (a Minolta Maxxum 300si) and a digital point-and-shoot that is almost as old (an Olympus D200Z, I think). I’ve been doing a lot of research online to try to decide which camera to buy, and herein lies the problem.

The fact is, there is an amazing amount of information available about all models on the market. There are manufacturer brochures, specs, reviews, owners’ comments, side-by-side comparisons, “walk-throughs”, videos, audio recordings etc. etc. etc. But the problem is that there is way too much information. I have now read enough material that I would almost be able to write the user’s manual for the Canon EOS400D, the Nikon D60 or the Sony A100, and I’m nowhere near actually deciding for one of them. (At least I narrowed it down to these three models — plus the Sony A200, which is the almost identical twin to the A100, only two years younger)

The Nikon seems very good, but the auto-focus depends on the lens being able to do it, so the lenses are more expensive and the selection is a bit more limited. The Canon is, by far, the most popular of them, and it’s almost the “default” starting DSLR camera out there, but it is a 2006 model (its younger sister, the EOS450D, seems to be a bit too much for what I want) and the lenses included with the camera are universally described as crappy (yes, I can always buy the body only and get decent lenses separately, but this brings the price up). The Sony is, at its heart, an updated Minolta, and in fact it can use any Minolta lens (and I do have a Minolta); in fact, I can’t think of anything bad about the Sony models, but I’ve read much less about them than about the others, so I might have some surprises later. If no surprises show up, I am leaning towards an A200…

I really like GPS; it’s one of the cooler “general use” technologies out there.

GPS is the closest thing we have to a worldwide information network. Granted, it doesn’t really give you that much information: it will tell you where you are and what time it is (assuming you know your time zone), but nothing else. And, ok, it doesn’t really work indoors and accuracy is not great in urban areas (because of shadows and reflections caused by buildings), but it’s still very cool. Think about it: I can be (almost) anywhere in the world and a small handheld device will be able to tell me, in just a few seconds, exactly where I am using only information from a constellation of satellites flying overhead, unseen and ignored by most people. Fifty years ago this would be the stuff of sci-fi.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I recently bought a handheld GPS receiver, and I spent a few hours playing with it yesterday. The reason for that is that I’ve recently started engaging in bushwalking (or “hiking” for those outside Australia and NZ) with the Melbourne Bushwalkers. After my first somewhat “serious” walk, in the area of the Lorne waterfalls (about 13km downhill in the rain…), I tried to identify the path the group followed on a map and failed miserably. So, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to be able to record the track so I could, later, trace it on a map?”. Well, a GPS receiver is a good way of doing that.

The model I bought is a Magellan eXplorist 400. It’s a discontinued model, but it is fairly decent and there’s a healthy market of new units on eBay for very good prices. It can track up to 12 satellites and will use ground-based (WAAS) and satellite-based (EGNOS) auxiliary signals to increase accuracy where available; none of those are available in Australia, alas. It has a grayscale LCD display with a reddish (amber?) backlight and can display fairly detailed background maps (it won’t give you address-based directions or convert addresses to positions without additional software), and it uses SD cards as additional memory to record tracks, routes, points of interest and maps. It’s also fully waterproof (full immersion of up to 1m for up to 30 minutes), which is great for rainy days… And it comes with a USB cable to upload and download data from/to a computer.

I haven’t yet used it “in the field”, so I can’t talk much about it’s performance there; I hope to remedy this soon enough. I can’t talk about battery durability either, for now. I did try to use it in central Melbourne yesterday, with sort of mixed results… it does well in areas that are somewhat open, but “canyon-like” streets (with tall buildings on both sides) are usually blind spots (I wonder how it does in real canyons…). I uploaded the track log to Google Earth, generated a KML file and made a public Google Map from it, which is here; the recorded path is in a barely-visible light blue, and it actually covers about half of the path I followed; I guess it lost the signal in the other areas. The receiver was inside my backpack, which may also not be the best possible position for it.

I will be using it in future walks (and in a trip to remote areas later this year, where I plan to use GPS data to geotag the pictures I’ll take — and to not get lost, also), and I’ll write about how it does later on.

I don’t usually drive around Melbourne; I don’t own a car, so I take the public transport or simply walk to wherever I need to go. However, in recent weeks I had the need to drive to a few places, and I’ve made extensive use of the “directions” feature of Google Maps.

In short, it works quite well. It got me to my destination every time. But… the directions needed some retouching every now and then. That is, it does make some interesting mistakes.

For example, this path, part of a trip from Point Cook to the city:

It seems very reasonable, and it is indeed the shortest possible path. The only problem with it is that the area shaded in dark grey is a Royal Air Force base, and they don’t really like random people driving through their roads. Granted, there is a road there, but there’s a heavy barrier and an armed guard on the way…

Or this, which is how Google Maps suggest you drive from the city to the western suburbs using the West Gate freeway:

One can see in this map a very sharp right turn from Kings Way onto the freeway, which seems odd. It seems even odder when you switch to the satellite view:

It looks like they’re suggesting that you drive over a barrier and across four lanes of traffic to enter the freeway. Hardly the best possible route.

One more: a path from the Franklin Street, in the city, going south to the Eureka Tower (which is at 7 Riverside Quay):

See that sharp left turn from Queensbridge onto an unnamed street just south of the river? Well, look at the satellite view:

The proposed path takes one onto the footpath and over a very tall barrier (the large red thing) before reaching the destination. Again, it’s a very good path, but not legally - or physically - doable. I guess you could do it on foot, of course…

Don’t get me wrong, Google Maps is very useful and helped me a lot. But, if I found these problems in just a few weeks, I guess their maps need some serious revision…

I attended the Google Developer Day, “Sydney edition”, yesterday. There were lots of interesting announcements: the first session was about Google Gears, and it was very exciting. The demonstration (achieved by, literally, unplugging the laptop from the network mid-presentation) went very well, and gave everyone ideas. Soon after, Mapplets were also introduced (well, actually they had been mentioned briefly at Where 2.0 the day before); they’re sort of gadgets for Google Maps, allowing the creation of “instant mashups”.

Also interesting were the “non-announcements”. Everyone got a brochure at the beginning of the day with a list of several Google products, and one of them was the Google Mashup Editor; when I read it, it sounded like it was something new, but it wasn’t mentioned by anyone during the day, so I kind of assumed it was actually something “old” that I hadn’t heard about. It turns out it wasn’t.

It was a great event, and it was interesting being the first ones to learn about Google Gears (as one of the presenters mentioned, usually Australia wakes up to news from the US; yesterday, it was the other way around). It was a bit ironic that, being at the event, I couldn’t play with the tool (or even write about it) yesterday, while everyone else who got the news online could start right away. But they didn’t get the great free food Google gave us

Radio New Zealand’s “consumer affairs” programme This Way Up ran a story, two weeks ago, about the use of mobile phones inside commercial planes (audio here for the next two weeks). They interviewed a fair number of passengers, and I was surprised by how many actually thought that it was a good idea. My surprise went away when they asked one of those “what about all the other passengers talking on phones during the flight?”, to which she responded “hmm, I hadn’t thought of that…”.

My impression is that most people who are in favour of using mobiles on planes are actually in favour of themselves using mobiles, but not anyone else. Because, let’s be honest, conversations on mobile phones are extremely annoying when you’re not the one who’s talking. And that’s the reason why I don’t think this technology will get much traction… Also, the programme mentioned that Lufthansa actually researched the issue and came to the conclusion that people are not interested: the ones who want this technology are telecom companies and airlines.

Why airlines? Because that would be a source of income. The technology being trialled by some companies (including Qantas) makes use of a small cell (a “pico cell”) inside the airplane, to which all phones on board connect and through which all calls are transmitted; this cell is controlled by the airline, which can charge for its use. The calls then go through the airplanes’ satellite communications system to a ground station, from where they are finally connected to the standard phone system. The close proximity between the cell and the phones would make the devices use very little power and would protect the airplane’s systems from interference. It’s worthwhile mentioning that this only makes sense in places where all phones use the same system (probably GSM); if several competing systems are in use, the airplane would need multiple cells.

One interesting point is that airlines, being in control of the cell, can restrict its use; they might choose to allow only data to be sent (such as SMS and Internet access) and block voice calls. This would make wonders for the ambience inside the airplane, while still allowing people to be “connected” if they feel the need to, and the airline to make a buck or two.

Forget 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. The new numbers are 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Read update on this post at the bottom

I do my day-to-day banking with HSBC (and I seem to be one of the few non-Asians doing so in Australia) because, to put it bluntly, it’s free: their basic transaction account has no monthly fee and no fee for transfers, and it allows a limited number of free withdrawals a month using other bank’s ATMs. And it even pays a decent (not great, but reasonable) interest rate on the balance. Adding to that, their online banking system works fairly well with any browser.

Or, at least, it used to. This weekend they unveiled a significant upgrade to their system, which had been announced for the last few weeks, and they seem very proud of it. Unfortunately, it only works in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, it simply does not work at all.

And it doesn’t fail gracefully, either. If you try to login using Firefox, after you type in your username and click on “continue” you get a blank screen. Nothing else. No error, no subtle failures, no garbage, not even a JavaScript error. And, because it manages to set a cookie before falling over, you can’t even go back: even trying to access the bank’s home page still gives you only a very blank screen (because it detects that you are in the process of logging in and tries to go forward with the process, I guess).

It would be bad enough if they had a legacy, old system that only worked in IE. But, in this day and age, to build a new application that does not work in other web browsers can’t be described as anything else other than laziness (or incompetence). Especially in Australia, which apparently leads the world in Firefox usage.

Perhaps it would be time to start shopping for a new bank. It’s a pity that there doesn’t seem to be that many no-fee options out there…

Update 02/05/2007: it now works perfectly well on Firefox. I’m not sure whether they fixed something, or whether the problems were actually caused by teething pains in the new system (of which they had more than a few). The e-mail I sent them about the problems received only an automated response. In any case, I’m happy now.

Ok, I give up. Does anyone know how to make an iPod show the date of podcasts in the dd/mm/yy (or yyyy) format without changing the language settings to something other than English? It seems to think that the only English is the US brand of the language, and that is very out of character for a company so concerned with good design as Apple…

I’m a bit ambivalent about Labor’s plan for a funding a national broadband (FTTN) network with public funds. On one hand, I agree that Australia has a seriously antiquated communications network and that retail broadband services are way behind much of the developed world; some of that comes from the mix of the regulations placed on the telecommunications industry with the characteristics of the country (quite a few people living in very remote places). Telstra has rejected the idea of building a FTTN network due to the possibility (almost certainty) that there would be restrictions on the pricing it would be able to charge to allow competitors to have access to its network, and I can’t say I see a fault with Telstra’s argument.

On the other hand, I don’t like many of the (limited) details of the plan that came forward. The new network would work as a enforced monopolistic resource, with the possibility of Telstra (if it is not responsible for building the network) being forced to be a customer and prevented from building a competitive network. I can see why the Liberal Party would be against a plan like this, and it also rubs me the wrong way.

Worse than that, the idea of using money from the Future Fund to build the network is very, very bad (not to mention legally debatable). The Fund is money set aside for a specific purpose, and that does not include building infrastructure (or funding private companies building it); if they open the doors to use this money, I can see it being used for other ends in the future (and Labor has hinted that they plan to do it) and creating social security problems for the current employees of the public sector.

So, in principle, the idea is not that bad. The proposed implementation, though, is not very appealing; as always, the devil is in the details.

In any case, listening to politicians talking about megabytes per second in Parliament is highly entertaining.

And, this, kids, is why Google always launches its products little by little:

Still, Yahoo! Pipes seems like a cool service. I’ll try it out next week.

Good news… ABC (that’s the Australian ABC, not the American one) plans to follow the lead of the BBC and open its archive of TV and radio shows for download. They now offer several shows as podcasts and video podcasts and, reportedly, more than 2 million files are downloaded every month.

The possible catch is that they may charge for old shows; that would be a way to improve the financial health of the network, which is fully supported by taxpayers at the moment (ABC broadcasts no ads in any of its TV and radio stations, but it’s been exploring the possibility of displaying ads in its web site). The BBC does charge for downloads of shows that have been broadcast more than a week ago, but I don’t know how much money they’re making out of it.

The front page of Techmeme has an article from Zunerama about, say, difficulties sharing songs between Zunes (Zune is the Microsoft answer to the iPod, and one of its exclusive features is the ability to wirelessly send songs to another Zune). It seems that the owners of the rights to some songs — the most popular ones, apparently — decided that they should not be shared between customers, even if the shared copy can only be played three times and expires in a few days.

Now, the famous response from Steve Jobs to this “sharing” feature of the Zune is that, by the time you manage to try to send a song to a girl, she’s already gone; it’s much better to get close to her and share the earphones instead (preferably with an iPod).

So… any bets on how long until record companies try to outlaw the sharing of earphones?

In Firefox 1.5, when you hit “back” and the focus is not in a text field, the effect is the same as that of clicking on the “Back” button or typing Alt + left arrow. In Firefox 2.0, this does not happen. If you want it to work as it did in FF1.5, do this:

• in the browser address bar, type “about:config” and hit Enter
• in the screen that will show up, type “backspace” in the “Filter:” box
• you should see a single configuration option left, “browser.backspace_action”, with value 1
• double-click on it and change the value to 0 (zero)

That’s it. No need to restart the browser or save anything, and the backspace key works as desired again.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Bloglines (in a post that actually got a few responses from their team) and, later, with stand-alone feed readers. In the end, after using Omea Reader for a while, I ended up gravitating back to Bloglines (especially after I moved to Linux on my desktop machine) and stayed happily there (but always wondering about possible missing posts…).

When the first version of Google Reader launched, I imported all my subscriptions and tried using it for a few days, but gave up; their “river of news” approach, with content from all feeds “mixed up”, did not appeal to me. Nor to many other people, it seems.

And now Google came up with the new version of Google Reader, and I’m a convert. It maintains the two-pane, “folder-like” structure of Bloglines, but in a more appealing interface. This way, I can read feeds in the order I want and still get the “continuous scroll” of the first version. A few advantages of Google Reader over Bloglines, in my opinion:

• selecting a feed doesn’t automatically mark it as read: in Bloglines, if I want/need to stop reading a feed with several articles before getting to the end, I actually need to mark every unread post as new; Google Reader only marks posts as read when they are displayed (but, unnervingly, sometimes not even then)
• similarly, selecting a feed doesn’t display all of the new articles: it loads them in blocks of 20, seamlessly (if you scroll almost to the bottom, it starts loading the next block of 20 and appends them to the page)
• the interface doesn’t keep reloading the left pane (the list of feeds) all the time; although, to be fair, it looks like Bloglines released a few changes right after Google Reader lauched that do basically this

The one thing that irks me is that Google Reader is a bit “CPU intensive”, at least in Firefox; the CPU usage goes way up every now and then, and Firefox becomes unresponsive for about one second (this is in a fast machine). Maybe that’s just me, or just Firefox; I have still to test it in other browsers. Still, so far, I’m a satisfied customer.

On Earth, Belgium refers to a small country. Throughout the rest of the galaxy, Belgium is the most unspeakably rude word there is.
-Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the news today there is a report that a Belgian association of newspapers managed to get a court to order Google to remove all of the French- and German-language Belgium-based news items from Google News and the regular Google cache. The argument is copyright violation (debatable) and causing loss of ad revenue (very weird, considering the Google News only shows a few words from each news item and then sends users on their way to the original web site; if anything, they were getting more ad revenue from the users sent to them by Google).

It’s interesting that, at a time when most web site owners are thinking about how to be displayed more prominently on Google, some people seem to simply “not get it” and do their best to get out of it. It’s not clear to me, also, whether that association actually asked Google about being removed before going to court; shouldn’t the judicial system be a “last resort”,only to be used when a situation can’t be resolved amiably? Or am I the only one thinking that?