Paul O'Flaherty

What People Don’t Get About The iPad

Service or Computer?

Let me preface this post by saying that I will not be buying an iPad (not in the foreseeable future anyway). I own an iPod Touch and that is the end of my Apple affiliation.

I’ve been reading all the complaints about the iPad: No flash, no multitasking, it’s just a big iPod Touch, it’s a fanny pad sanitary towel in disguise etc…

What nobody seams to realize is that the iPad, just like its baby brethren the Touch, is not a computer (not in the traditional sense), it is a service.

It’s much like a TV. You can turn it on and watch or play what you like, but that’s it. You can watch channel 1 or channel 27 and you can install more channells (applications) when you take a bigger sattelite or cable subscriptions(the App store).

The iPad is not meant to be a desktop, laptop, netbook replacement.

It’s a stylish little one trick pony for people who like to be locked in and like to do one thing at a time.

Windows 8 To Support 128-Bit?

128-bit Windows 8?

The Windows 7 launch parties are soon to be kicking off but Microsoft is already looking to the future and working on 128-bit architecture compatibility for Windows 8 and 9.

While the stomping boots of progress cannot be halted in their relentless path, am I the only one who believes that this is premature? Perhaps the effort should be spent on getting everybody onto 64-bit platforms first and fully exploring the potential of the 64-bit space.

We have to have a cut off point. When will Windows 8 come out? 3 years? I believe they’re aiming for 2012. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that everybody, especially the notoriously slow to upgrade corporations will have abandoned their 32-bit hardware. Are vendors and developers going to have to support 3 versions of their programs?

Or will things still be like they are today, except instead of people running 32-bit applications on 64-bit machines they’ll be running 32-bit apps on 128-bit machines?

What XP Netbook Manufactures Aren’t Telling You?

Your XP Netbook that you just bought isn’t secure. Nor will it ever be. It’s running an 8 year old operating system for which support has been discontinued since April of 2009. There will not be any new security patches or updates for your XP netbook. Not from Microsoft at least.

Microsoft announced on April 3rd last year ( 2008 ) that it had bowed to demand of manufacturers and would allow them to sell Windows XP Home for ULCPCs (ultra low cost personal computers or netbooks) will be until June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows.

Michael Dix, General Manager of Windows Client Product Management, also made it very clear in the same interview that just because OEMs could sell netbooks with XP on it, did not mean they were going to be supporting it beyond April 2009:

I should also note that there will also be no impact on our technical support plans—mainstream technical support will continue to be available until April 2009 and extended support will continue until April 2014.

Now I know some of you are baying for Steve Ballmers blood at this point and ready to blame Microsoft for this apparent “injustice” or trickery, but step back and think for a minute about who really is to blame on this occasion. Here’s a hint: It’s not Microsoft.

This all came to my attention today when I read that Microsoft would not be patching a bug in XP that it had already fixed in Vista, citing the age of XPs code as making it unfeasible and I ended up in a lengthy discussion on Twitter trying to explain why it was not Microsoft people should be mad at, but the manufacturers, the OEM’s.

The fact of the matter is that when the manufactures approached Microsoft, due to consumer demand, they entered into the arrangement knowing Microsofts support lifecycle and exactly when support for XP was due to end. Microsoft have never hid or even glossed over the fact that support for XP would be ending last April and I would hazard a guess that the OEM partners involved got a pretty good deal on XP due to that fact.

Yet, this knowledge in hand, the netbook manufacturers have sold and continue to sell and advertise machines that are running an operating system that will not be receiving an more support, bug fixes or security upgrades.

On the whole XP is a dead horse to Microsoft and their only interest in providing any support for it is at business level, which means businesses with XP Professional (and even they would like to bump those up to Windows 7 ASAP ). These are the only licenses that may qualify for extended support as XP Home is a consumer product and does not qualify as business or development software.

Microsoft are more interested in the imminent release of the excellent Windows 7 and erasing the memory of Vista while moving on to the next project.

So where does this leave you? It leaves you with a bone to pick with the company that produced your netbook and quite possibly with your retailer as well.

Questions have to be asked of both. Why weren’t consumers informed when purchasing these machines that the operating system was going, or at this point, is out of date and no longer supported?

Of course, I’m sure that the OEM’s and retailers alike will push the responsibility back on the consumer, stating that if they’re savvy enough to be looking for a netbook they should be savvy enough to do some research on the product they’re about to drop a lot of hard earned cash for.

Frankly I agree with the manufactures and retailers on that score, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that they should have actively informed customers that this was the situation when they were purchasing the netbooks and included it in the advertising literature. After all, it’s a serious thing and a big deciding factor to know that the operating system is no longer supported.

One last thing, considering the OEM’s decided to go with XP knowing that the OS was about to end it’s support lifecycle, should they be held accountable to move into an paid support arrangement with Microsoft similar to what they have in place for business software?

What If ISP’s Operated Like Cellphone Carriers?

The following video and the transcript below, is a direct result of conversation I had with Sara about the fact that there are currently no Android phones available on the Sprint network.

Transcript of the video:

What would the world be like, or what would your communications be like, if ISP’s operated the same way cellphone carriers do?

Imagine a situation where, with ISP’s operating the same as cellphone carriers, every time you wanted to change from one ISP to another you had to buy a new laptop, and the laptop that you bought had to be one approved by the ISP for use on their network!

Imagine every time, if you wanted to go out and buy an Alienware PC or but the latest Mac notebook, laptop or whatever and you couldn’t do it because they weren’t available to your ISP. Further to that imagine if you the got hold of your new laptop after moving to your new ISp and found that you can’t run the software you want on it because the software has to be approved buy the hardware manufacturer in conjunction with the ISP.

This may sound like a really, really stupid situation considering the cost of laptops and the cost of an ISP for a year but it is a situation that we go through and deal with everyday, especially in the US. Not so much here in Europe, but especially in the US in terms of our cellphones.

Now, many cellphone handsets are just as expensive as an entry level laptop or low end laptop. You can pay 300, 400 dollars or more, 500 – 600 dollars for a handset sometimes and yet you can only use it with certain networks.

Here in Europe things are very, very different on that front. I can buy any handset I want (except an iPhone) and as long as I take a contract and get a SIM card, with the network that I want to be on, then I can put it on any network that I want to put it on. And I can move it from network to network just by changing the SIM card.

Now, you can buy a phone here discounted, because of your contract with the cellphone carrier which locks your phone to that cellphone carrier. However, when you finish your contract you are allowed unlock your phone and move it to any other network.

But, you know, that’s besides the point.

The point that I’m trying to make here is that cellphone handsets are expensive. We buy them they are our hardware, once we purchase them.

They have also become very, very central to our communications and they’ve become central to our productivity. They are  just as essential to our productivity in some cases as our laptops are. They allow us to do many of the same functions while we’re on the move and stay in contact. But why is it that while we wouldn’t put up with this behaviour from ISP’s we put up with it from cellphone manufacturers/carriers?

Cellphones cost approximately the same as an entry level laptop yet if somebody was to tell you that you can’t use your laptop with us because we only allow Apple or we only allow say, Dell PC’s on our ISP, you’d be in uproar. The whole place would be in war over it.

So again, why do we allow this to happen with our cellphone handsets?

How Tim Burton and WP Super Cache brought my sites to their knees

We felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole last night. News broke that the the trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland had leaked onto the internet, Sara nabbed a copy, threw it up on Daily Shite and then all hell broke lose.

I didn’t think much of it at first, but then the traffic started flowing in and things started to go haywire.

All of our sites are hosted with DreamHost on various accounts, but O’Flaherty, Suburban Oblivion and Daily Shite are all hosted under the same account, which means they’re all residing on the same server (along with hundreds of other customers sites I would presume), so when my site started throwing 500 errors as Daily Shite came under heavy traffic I knew I’d done something wrong.

The worst thing about being on a hosted server is that it only takes one of your sites to be poorly configured in order to go over your resource allotment and take the others down as well.

So as the traffic spiked on Daily Shite I was left confused as to what was happening. The sites had been working fine under reasonable load, I had WP Super Cache installed so what could it be?

To make matters worse, getting into the admin panels of the sites to change settings was proving difficult as they all kept throwing “Internal Server Errors”.

I’ll cut a long story short and get to the chase, after a quick SSH login it became evident that the reason the sites were throwing wobblies was the very plugin that was installed to help the sites deal with heavy loads – WP Super Cache.

In my eagerness to get everything running smoothly and quickly, I’d enabled Gzip compression on all of the sites. Bad move on my part.

While Super Cache was doing what it should and serving only cached versions of the pages, instead of the whole batch of database calls it’s supposed to prevent by not recreating the page for every user, it was now using CPU cycles to compress the data being sent to readers browsers.

Now this is fine on an average load day, the extra CPU load from compression is negligible and provides a minor speed increase in load times for anyone viewing the site.

But when you’re seeing a spike like we did yesterday, it just brings the entire system to its knees.

Once I had Gzip compression, as well as “Coarse File locking” disabled everything came back to life and ran like a dream throughout the entire 2-3 hour traffic spike.

So, if you’re expecting or hoping for a huge traffic load on your site and are on a hosted server here’s my recommended settings for WP Super Cache:

• Don’t cache logged in users – Disabled (no check mark) If a logged in users visits the site with this enabled they force a rebuilding of the cache which uses up valuable resources under a heavy load.
• Clear all cache files when a post or page is published – Disabled (no check mark) This can significantly increase posting time as a the cache is cleaned out.
• Cache Rebuild – Enabled (checked box) – Serve a supercache file to anonymous users while a new file is being generated. Recommended for very busy websites with lots of comments. Makes "directly cached pages" and "Lockdown mode" obsolete.
• Coarse file locking – Disabled (no check mark) You probably don’t need this but it may help if your server is underpowered. It can cause some server configurations to lock up so best to leave disabled.
• Mobile device support – Enabled (checked box)
• Super Cache Compression – Disabled

One final tip for working with WP Super Cache: Don’t forget your .htaccess files. When you set up, or upgrade the plugin you have to insert (and check for changes in) rules in not just your root .htaccess file but you must also create a .htaccess file in “wp-content/cache” and manually populate it with the rules given in the plugins admin page. Also, don’t forget that adding mobile support requires and additional set of rules to be added manually.

Forgetting to add the rules can lead to trouble and the plugin will not work as it should.

Now you should be prepared to be dugg or any other massive traffic spike and won’t be caught with your trousers down like I was

NEC CRV43 Curved widescreen display! I want! I want!

Dear Santa / Tooth Fairy / Leprechauns / Rich relative with $8000 to spare,

Please send me one of those super sexy NEC CRV43 displays for my desktop, and maybe an extra one so I can have Tweetdeck open at the same time (it needs soooo much screen space).

I know I’ve not been a very good boy this year, but I promise if you get me this I’ll be good forever.

Love,

Paul

Boasting a unique curved design that’s sure to immerse you more than a standard two display setup, this beauty also features a 2880×900 double WXGA resolution, a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, single link DVI-D and HDMI inputs, USB 2.0 ports, an on screen display, and the assurance that you have the most unique monitor in the neighborhood.

Via Uncrate.

Three is the magic number… at least for tech support

I  picked up a Huawei E160G USB Modem for the 3 network and must say that I’ve been happily impressed with it so far (despite 3’s crappy 10GB usage cap).

I’m sitting here writing this, in the office at work, which is a complete cell phone dead zone. I have zero reception in here on my cell phone, nor do any of my colleagues and we all have different services.

Yet, here I sit with my 3 modem seeing 4 bars (out of 5) on HSDPA. Most impressive.

One issue I did have was that after purchasing the modem I had to go to my3.three.ie in order to register and activate it and couldn’t as that particular site has been down all day.

A quick, toll free call to 3’s tech support (in India) sorted things out and thankfully the techie at the other end of the line decided to throw the manual out, listen to what I had to say and didn’t make me walk through the usual steps of uninstall, restart, install, restart etc.. etc..

I was up and running in minutes and even managed to enjoy a Skype video call with Sara tonight without any apparent lag or lack of quality.

I am a happy chappie!

60MB of storage for just £1599 (USD $2808) – Memory Lane!

Remember the good old days of computing when speeds were measured in MHz instead of GHz and the BBS (Bullletin board systems) ruled supreme?

Well this advert for a Supra hard drive for the Amiga with a whopping 60MB capacity might bring back some of that nostalgia.

At a mere £1599 ($2808 USD) this 60MB hard disk was a steal in 1987 and was guaranteed to make you the envy of every geek in the neighborhood.

If you’re wondering where I dug up this little beauty of an advert, I’ll tell ya!

It hails from the November 1987 edition of “Your Commodore”, which is just one of a pile of old computer magazines I came across today, when clearing out some boxes from my childhood, stored in my grandparents attic.

The pile of magazines included issues of ZZap! 64, Your Commodore, Commodore Format and Commodore Force.

You can see some of the pile included in the picture below, and yes, that is sellotape holding some of the covers together.

Don’t tell me I was to only person who had a hard time removing the cover tapes from the magazines without ripping them?

Yeah I was quite the computer enthusiast (must resist saying ge… geee.. geeeiii… geek! Damn it!) growing up and one of my earliest computers was my beloved Commodore 64.

I had all of the models of the C64 at some point, from the original chunk doorstep design, the slim line version and even the C128D. Ah, geeky nostalgia!

Other gems which I dug up, included an old C2N Datasette for loading the tapes on to the C64, my Cheetah joystick (will avoid all jokes about the hours of pleasure I had wiggling my stick) and a box full of games.

Wow, all this talk about the C64 has got me hankering to play some of those old titles that I used to enjoy.

It’s amazing how far gaming has come since I was growing up, yet I think that in some senses the process of being a gamer on a machine like a C64 thought me something that today’s consoles never will.

Today’s consoles are practically instant. You pop in the disc and within a few seconds you are killing zombie hordes or waving your Wiimote around like a drunk pervert at the line to see Santa Claus at Christmas.

Back in my day (geez, I didn’t just say that! Tell me I didn’t just say that!) we had to decide what we wanted to play and wait 30 excruciating minutes for the thing to load from a cassette, which may or may not work first time and very often we would have to wait 5 minutes or more between levels as new data was loaded in.

Imagine the outcry from the “instant on” generation (not a viagra joke, I promise!) of today if they had to wait for a game to load, let alone rewind the tape to a place THEY were supposed to keep track of in order to repeat a level when they die! Heaven forbid!

Enough of my longing for the days when men were men, cars were bicycles, horses were sheep (and well ridden) and we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow and it was uphill in both directions!

I’m off to download a C64 emulator, a bunch of games from Lemon 64 and set myself up to use all the power of my dual core laptop to play games which a wrist watch could run!

Automatically set Vista audio device?

I’ve generally been happy with Vista lately, since most of the driver issues have been sorted, but one thing that still annoys me is the inability to set which audio device is used by which program (apparently I am not alone either).

Here’s the crux of the problem. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts on my laptop but I also spend a lot of time talking to people like Sara and Scot on Skype.

When I’m talking to people I don’t want my music to come out through my headset, I want it to come out through the speakers on the laptop so that I can have it playing gently in the background.

This was actually quite easy to do under XP, but in Vista it appears that you can only set one audio device as the default.

I can actually achieve what I want but it is a rather complex procedure and has to be redone every time I turn my headset on or off.

The procedure involves the following steps:

• Turn on my headset.
• Start Skype and start the call so that the headset is the audio device.
• Right click on the speaker icon on the system tray and select playback devices.
• Set the default playback device to speakers
• Turn on Windows Media Player (or other) and listen to music

So, that works, but the problem is that, as I said earlier, it has to be repeated every time I turn my headset on or off.

The closest thing I could find online that even vaguely resembles a solution to this issue is Vista Audio Changer, but while it makes the situation a little easier it doesn’t solve it because it only emulates what I as a user would do, and I still have to use it every time I restart my headset.

What I (and I’m sure many others want) is a program or means to automatically set which audio device is used on a per program basis and then be able to forget about it!

Is anything like that out there? Can you guys help?

What’s $25 dollars between stores?

A hell of a lot if you ask me!! While in the U.S. recently I picked up a Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 wireless headset for my laptop (which has been performing exceptionally well!) in Best Buy for around $43 before tax.

A few minutes later I was in Circuit City and the exact same headset (and bear in mind that I was less than five minutes away from where I bought the original) for a staggering $69 (also before tax)!!

What gives? How can their be such a disparity in prices between two stores which are very close together, in the same town and for the same product?

I suppose I should not be surprised.

If you visit Microsofts site to view the prices they give a recommended retail price of $69.95 yet their "price compare" feature quotes prices from $39.95 (Amazon) all the way up to $69.99.

While I’m talking about prices, let me have a minor gripe about the fact that in Europe we advertise the price of products in store (and elsewhere) with taxes included. Airlines and U.S. retailers please take note that this is much more convenient for customers.

The ultimate laptop accessory!

I’ve been using my laptop from the couch a lot lately and as such have been dealing with the issues created by excessive laptop heat.

Personal health issues aside, like laptop burn and laptop induced sterility, having your computer actually on your lap can be bad for your laptop.

Ultimately the base of a "laptop" computer is not designed to be placed on your lap.

Air vents and fans can be obstructed by clothing which in can result in damage (or at least instability) to your laptop caused by overheating.

So with all of this in mind I present my ultimate laptop accessory.

The simple wooden kitchen cutting board.

You’ll see three different types of cutting boards pictured below.

Cutting boards are the ultimate accessory because they protect your lap from the heat (and your little soldiers will remain active) as well a providing a flat surface for your laptop to rest on in the manner it was designed for.

The most important thing about choosing a good cutting board is to ensure that it is larger than the base of your laptop.

That way the laptop can rest on it’s feet and still get the same unobstructed airflow to the fan as it was designed to get on a table.

Cutting boards are generally fairly cheap, if you can’t find one like the first one pictured, with a section taken out of it that matches the fan location for my laptop, they are cheap enough to be worth cutting a chunk out of to ensure maximum ventilation for you laptop while protecting your lap.

What is your ultimate laptop accessory?