Apple Tablet: Will Steve's New Toy do the Job?

Many people apparently believe that Apple are about to announce a new gadget, the Apple Tablet.

Since it's such a work of art, I always thought it would be cool to take an iPod Touch and enlarge it by several times. It looks a bit like the Tablet (if it actually appears) will look just like that.
I really hope that they do release such a gadget, because aside from an iPhone I've never owned a Mac. It looks like it could be the perfect first buy; possibly portable, durable and running Mac OS X, with a user experience that beats the hell out of Windows (not that difficult).

Of course, it's going to be expensive and demand will undoubtedly reach fever pitch,
so I better start saving!

Posting code in Blog Posts

It's a nightmare trying to post any code in Blog posts. The tags confuse Blogger (fair enough) so if it happens, it won't let you post the code.

I tried to install SyntaxHiglighter from Google, but it requires you to host its code on a webserver somewhere and I couldn't get it to work.

Stanley Shilov came up with a nice alternative online tool which you can paste your code into, and it will parse it and replace any characters which will confuse your blogging engine with HTML tags which it'll love. You can access the tool here, and it needs zero set up and zero hassle.

The drawback is that it doesn't offer any syntax highlighting, but it's still useful and I'll certainly be using it in future!

atom innovation

Finally my new website, atom innovation is online.

Things are looking good so far!

Tech Preview: Palm Pre or iPhone 3GS?

It's been a long time since I've possessed what could be called a 'good phone'. This is because I always found myself willing to sacrifice having a decent handset for the sake of a free xbox 360, PS3 or Wii with my phone contract.

I'm finally out of contract with Orange, and dying to get a new phone with unlimited net access. The only two competitors are the Palm Pre...

...and the new iPhone.
Both have a touch screen, both have unlimited data access, both can be used as an iPod (the Pre tricks iTunes into thinking it's an iPod), both have GPS and Wi-Fi and just about everything else you can imagine (see here for a full side-by-side comparison).

But when comparing the two online, I couldn't help but be more impressed with the Pre. It looks very sleek, and as if a lot of thought has gone into designing both the hardware and the WebOS operating system on it. It has brilliant multitasking capabilities, lots of ways to intelligently organise your data and do cool stuff with GPS and social networking sites.

That, in addition to the fact that I've never liked the look of the iPhone, meant that for the past couple of months the Pre has been at the top of my wish list.

At the WWDC conference in San Fransisco on Monday, Apple announced the iPhone 3GS which is basically a pimped out version of the existing iPhone 3G handset, with a few new features and a faster user experience. It appeals, but still sits second in my wish list when compared with the Pre.

Palm have released the Pre in the US already, but for some reason they have not stated a release date for the UK, where the iPhone 3GS is out on 19th June.

In the incredibly competetive smartphone market where the Pre is undoubtedly Palm's 'do or die' handset, this is an unbelievable error. There must be literally thousands of people like me, who want a new phone and can't decide between the Pre and the iPhone. These people would like to see what the Pre can do, but are not willing to hang around for months until Palm get their act together and set a release date. It's looking likely that I will get an iPhone next week (if there's enough available!) and that in my case, Palm have shot themselves in the foot by being too slow off the mark in releasing their much-hyped phone.

It's disappointing, but if you want to compete with Apple, you need to play the game. And Palm's move should have been to release the Pre in the UK before the iPhone 3GS, or at least a matter of days or weeks after.

Maybe they underestimate the importance of the European consumer electronics market. But they shouldn't, because it could mean their downfall.

Album Review: Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

Back in 2004 when Kasabian released their debut album, I hated it. I thought they sounded like Oasis wannabes who weren't as good. And I detest Oasis.

But over time I bagan to change my mind, as the radio and just about everyone I knew increasingly raved about Kasabian. So I got a copy of the album, listened to it a couple more times and finally realised how wonderful it is.

Two long years later when Empire came out, I was slobbering at the prospect of a whole new Kasabian album to listen to. It did not disappoint, not one iota. And when I saw them live at the Hyrdo Connect festival last year through a haze of beer and vodka, I was totally hooked.

Finally, here we are in June 2009 and they have released their third full album - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. And it's terrifically up to the job.

The wonderfully paced and catchy Underdog is the perfect introduction to the album, which is designed to be a single piece of music rather than twelve seperate tracks, with each song melting into one another with carefully planned transitions. It quickly reminds you of the things you love about Kasabian, with its strong and addictive drum beats, coupled with psychodelic guitar solos.

Take Aim, with its intense orchestral beginning, takes you deeper into the technicolour, drug fuelled minds of the band and is truly different to the music they've produced before. With the 'mentally unstable' theme, Secret Alphabets adopts a nice sixties theme to it, with the traditional oscillating flutes and violins giving a kind of creepy 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest' vibe.

Probably my favourite song, Fire will undoubtedly be a concert anthem with its sleepy eyed, drowsy beginning which bursts into life as if the madman has lost the plot. Which I'm looking forward to witnessing at the gig at the O2 Academy in Glasgow on June 18. I don't normally drink that much, but I intend to tan quite a few beers before that gig so I can assimilate myself into the wild light and music show.

Rather than creating the album and then wondering if it was any good, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum was made by a band who knew it was going to be good the whole time they were making it. It comes across as confident, defiant and crisp, and will no doubt lead them to the position of domination they crave.

The love affair continues.

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

It's noisy, dirty, sweaty, brings out the most basic instincts, and it's full of intense, screaming action.

Keep your pants up, I'm not talking about a porno.

I'm obviously talking about Terminator Salvation. It's been pretty much panned by critics, but it was such a high profile movie that there was no way I was getting put off.

Being a big fan of Christian Bale, I expected him to carry out his role as John Connor with the same gusto as Bruce Wayne and Batman. And I would certainly say I wasn't disappointed. He's the same in every movie, but I think it's a winning formula so a lack of variation doesn't trouble me. Something that did disappoint me however, was that I missed the first ten minutes of the movie due to spending too much time in the boozer drinking whisky.

So it took me a few minutes to get my bearings in the movie, since it was well underway when we arrived. It looked like it had been all-action, right from the beginning - and that would make sense because it was all-action right to the end. That would put some people off, since the action does come at the expense of the plot to quite an extent, but overall, Terminator is not a complicated story.

I had intended to watch the other Terminator movies before I went to see Salvation, but I didn't need to. It was nicely reintroduced, and it wasn't difficult to remember the key plot points from the older movies or to figure out who was who and what was happening.

It also didn't matter that I hadn't seen the other films again because I fully intend to watch them all, then see Salvation once more. It was terrific. I loved every single minute of it and left the cinema completely happy having spent a few quid on the ticket.

I have to admit that it would have been pretty weak if Bale hadn't been the star, but everything was built around him so it would have been a very different film. The cast is quite low-key in terms of previous fame, but they held their own for the most part. Anton Yelchin was crap, but maybe it was his character that was crap, and he was just good at playing a crap person? Not sure. Sam Worthington who played Marcus Wright, was (deliberately or not) portrayed in a similar way to Marcus Fenix from Gears of War - cold in a kind of intriguing way, but you that know he wouldn't hesitate to shoot you in the face if you stole his pint or killed his dog.

There was only one major fault in the movie, which I absolutely and completely hated. The appearance of Arnie as the T-800. The CGI was absolutely horrific, and his appearance was so short that it was as if the producers knew the CGI was crap, but knew that they had to show Arnie to please the fanboys. They clearly wanted to get him off the screen as quickly as possible, much to my relief.

Governor of California aside, I thoroughly enjoyed it but I wouldn't expect everyone to feel the same. It's a 'wash over you' kind of film, probably more suited to the boys.

I'm glad there are going to be another two in the series, and will certainly be going to see them.

Why Don't Flight Recorders Float?

In the wake of the horrible accident which brought down Air France flight 447, it would seem that the recovery ships, divers and submarines are going to have a tough task in finding the flight recorders from the Airbus A330. Some say they will never find the flight recorders since they could have sunk in the ocean to depths of between 8,000 and 15,000 feet.

The actual Airbus A330 (tail number F-GZCP) used in Air France flight 447, sitting on the tarmac at an American airport in 2006. Click for larger version

This immediately begs the question... why the heck don't flight recorders float? I cannot understand this, especially when so many flights cross oceans and seas at some point in their journey.

Surely they could be encased in styrofoam, or some other porous material which would float? Or if the space taken up the recorders is a concern, why not wrap them in some kind of inflatable which only fills with air on impact, like an airbag?

In addition, they only continue to send signals out for thirty days which makes it a race against time to find the recorders after an accident. Surely with modern battery technology, this could be improved?

And finally, if signals can be sent out via the ACARS system to inform air traffic controllers of the status of an aircraft, why can't they expand its capability and utilise it to send out verbose messages which contain all or most of the telemetry from the flight data recorders?

This all makes absolutely no sense to me. I must find the answer...

Oracle BPM: Change Application Title

As mentioned in a previous post, I've been using Oracle BPM in one of my major projects. It makes use of the WorkSpace component to form the user interface, and it offers a long list of ways to customise the WorkSpace to suit your corporate 'look and feel'.

So if you want to try changing your application title so that it doesn't say 'BEA AquaLogic BPM WorkSpace' or 'Oracle BPM WorkSpace', the recommendation is to follow this method:


1. Create a backup, then edit BEA_HOME/albpm6.0/enterprise/webapps/workspace/WEB-INF/workspace.properties
2. To enable the custom properties file, add the key-value pair to workspace.properties (I added it just underneath the # WorkSpace Settings label):
# Custom settings
fuego.workspace.customMessageBundle=workspaceCustom
3. Add the key and value: APPLICATION_TITLE=%(yourcompany) - %(yourAppName)
4. Restart the WorkSpace to see if the change has had the desired effect.

This didn't work for me. I listed the method above because you should try this first to see if it works in your deployment.

For me, the answer was in the core java jars which make up the Fuego components. So to change the application title, make a backup of Glossary.properties in fuego.core.jar, then edit it to change the company name and other attributes.

Once you restart the WorkSpace you should be cookin' with gas, so to speak.

Ahh, Outlook! DIE, LOTUS NOTES!

This is 2009 (gasp!). One of my biggest bugbears about working for a huge company is that we are often subjected to archaic technology.

To be fair, we also get to use some bleeding edge stuff, it's quite a mix.

Up until very recently we had been using Lotus Notes 6.5, which is software that seems like it has been designed by a monkey with learning difficulties. The interface is slow, clunky and ugly, its usability is close to zero and continually hangs and crashes. If you find Notes has hung and you kill off the process, you usually have to reboot your PC in order to successfully launch it again. Not only that, if you type an email in Lotus Notes in one font, there's no guarantee that it will look even remotely similar to the recipient.

We had been using it for email and to host databases (annual leave requests, some application workflow pieces etc).

Finally, it would seem that the powers that be finally decided to listen to the cries of 'BOLLOCKS, NOTES HAS CRASHED AGAIN' and 'HOW DO I LAUNCH ZAPNOTES?', and made the decision that we would migrate to Microsoft Outlook across the organisation. It's been a long process, but a well managed project.

Anyway, I think Outlook is a breath of fresh air. Now normally I'm no Microsoft proponent, and I believe that they are as guilty as IBM or Lotus of producing sub-standard software which belongs in the bin. But Outlook seems to be very stable, well designed and it has a nice sleek interface which makes it a pleasure to use. And for me, one of the best bits is that when you write an email in Outlook, that's how it will look to the other person! Woawhh!

The Outlook window stretches nicely across my two monitors, with one side containing the email list and the other a preview window for the selected email.

It saves you opening every email that arrives to see what it contains, to find that it's crud and to close it immediately. Having a to-do bar on the right hand side also helps me to be more organised, because there's an obvious indicator which is on screen for a significant portion of the day which highlights the upcoming meetings, appointments and to-do tasks. I never used to use the to-do list in Notes because I never opened it. But having something which is almost always visible means that I'm much more likely to note things I've to catch up on, and thus more likely to actually do them.

Finally, something from Microsoft which does the job it's designed to do, and does it well.

Movie Review: Twilight

After having heard much hype about it, we decided to watch Twilight last night.

I'm completely unfamiliar with the book it's based on (it's designed for teenage girls!), so aside from reading a quick IMDB review I hadn't really developed any preconceived ideas of what it would be like. Apparently it has a huge cult following so I was expecting something which was interesting, if not necessarily incredible.

It's based on the story of a young girl called Bella (Kristen Stewart) from Arizona who moves to Forks, Washington to live with her Father. After the stereotypical 'new girl at school' sequence, she meets a bizarre 'boy' called Edward Cullen, and after the usual initial awkwardness, he becomes more friendly towards her and saves her from a car accident using his special vamPowers (I called them that). Eventually she figures out he's a vampire, yet decides she loves him anyway, and the story continues from there.

Basically Edward belongs to a family of 'vegetarian vampires' (even though they drink animal blood), but there are some bad vampires on the loose who are killing people. One gets a whiff of our girl Bella and decides he wants to bite her neck. So the rest of it is about the fight to defend her from the badVamp.

There are several things I really like about this movie:

- The soundtrack. It's really very good, and the the end sequence with 15 Step by Radiohead just makes it. I think it could've done with more tension and suspense, perhaps accompanied by a track from Godspeed or the Mars Volta.
- It's very laid back. Some would find it frustrating, but throughout the movie it's as if the director was constantly telling the cast to 'look pensive! Try to look like you've just smelt a freshly laid fart, look as if you're working out who did it' (Friends style). So there's a lot of angsty teenage moments. The actor who plays Edward (Robert Pattinson) is excellent at this.
- I like the setting of a slightly creepy town where it's always grey and it's always raining. The people there all seem slightly disturbed, and it all adds to the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, there are also several things I really don't like:

- Kristen Stewart is depressing. She takes the 'pensive, angsty' thing too far and she has a face like a broken leg. They could've cast someone better for the role.
- Some of the dialogue is far too cheesy.
- The special effects (particular the vampire movements) appear very contrived.
- The film feels like it's always building up to something, as if an epic scene is just about to burst onto the screen. It never happens, and you feel a bit unfulfilled by the time the movie finishes.

Apparently some people think that Twilight is so good that that they will watch it once, then immediately go back to the beginning and watch it again.

These people are easily amused. It's not a bad movie, but it's flawed. Having said that, I will watch the sequel which is currently in production.