Category: Tech

Please can someone combine Netflix and Apple TV

I like Netflix – I pay a fixed amount per month and can watch as many rented movies / TV shows as a I want (subject to having a fixed number at any one time, and transportation time lags.)

I like Apple TV – instant gratification whenever I decide I want to watch something.

What I really want though is the combination of these two things. On-demand access to any HD content for a fixed monthly subscription (even if there’s some kind of limitation to make sure I don’t try and watch 10 movies a day.) Mr Jobs – make this happen.

Spanning Sync – Google Calendar Syncing for Macs (and distributed Calendaring revisited)

I have a mac at work and a mac at home now. How to keep these in sync? Simple – Spanning Sync using Google Calendar as the shared central point. It’s not free, but it ‘just works’ (ok, Leopard had some iSync bugs in the early versions, but everything seems ok again now.) I really like how I can edit a calendar entry on my work machine and know it will eventually get synced to my iPhone when I sync that at home.

I actually talked about doing this kind of thing almost 5 years ago to the day – looking at that list of requirements its nice that it pretty much all works now. 2 things that are missing – I’d like my iPhone to sync automatically with my home iMac over bluetooth, and also it’s still too much effort to sync different calendaring systems (e.g. personal with Google Calendar, work with Exchange) together.

I actually like Google Calendar a lot, it’s fun that it implements those sharing features I talked about 5 years ago. I also think it has a better user interface than the iCal app on the Mac – I tend to find I enter brief details in iCal and then fill in the details on Google Calendar.

Update

Yes, I know .Mac is supposed to do all this too, but it was horribly broken when I tried to use it 3 months ago or so, and it doesn’t have something nearly as useful as Google Calendar as the web accessable / sharable part of the solution.

Job opportunities in my group at NYSE Euronext

I’ve been on my current team a year now, and things are coming along very nicely. We’ve got a great bunch of people, the agile / XP practice is moving along nicely (lots of pairing, big whiteboard walls, TDD, automated acceptance testing, etc.), and we moved the desktop development environment to fully-specced MacBook Pros with 30″ external screens. Oh, and the pool table is still here so we’ve been honing our skills on that too.

The business has also got more exciting since the update I gave year ago. The NYSE merged with Euronext, and the team here is working closely with teams in Europe and Asia, as well as obviously working with our external customers too. We’ve also purchased Wombat – these guys have some great technology and I’m looking forward to our engineering groups working closely together.

We’re growing, and growing quickly! As such we’re looking for some more great developers to join the team. The most number of open positions are for our Senior Java Engineer position – this is a server-side java role. If you’ve got at least 4 or 5 years development experience and have very strong Java fundamentals skills (including concurrency / multi-threading) this would be most interesting to you.

Furthermore we’re looking for a small team to take ownership of the UI parts of our application. This is going to consist mostly of a re-write and adding new features, and the technologies would be largely up to you (assuming that they can run on a JVM on the server-side.)

The specifics of these are 2 roles are available below:

We’re also looking for product managers / business analysts, ideally with agile experience.

If you’re interested in finding out any more about these roles please email me – I look forward to hearing from you!

Kent Beck on code maintainabilty

I don’t often have entries that are just quotes, but I liked this from Kent Beck on the importance of code maintainability:

Your organization is going to spend a lot more on somebody – you or somebody else – reading what you’re writing right now than they are ever going to spend on you writing it.

You’re going to read that code yourself 10 to 100 times for every time you write it, so it’s worth taking the trouble to make it readable. You’re going to modify it five times after you write it the first time, so it makes sense to make it easy to change.

Facebook & Work

I’ve really enjoyed using Facebook for the last year or so. Of all the social networking apps out there I  think it’s been one that has actually added to my overall happiness.

That said, with any new social medium, we still need to figure out what the ‘rules’ are to what we as individuals are happy with. A good case in point for me has been what to do with Facebook and colleagues at work.

Facebook has work ‘networks’ which are interesting ways of seeing what your co-workers are up to if you’re friendly with them in an extra-curricular way, but this situation can start getting complicated if your work relationship gets strained in any way. For instance, I recently saw a Facebook status update of a ‘facebook friend’ who I work with that made an already tricky situation more frustrating for me.

As such, I’m introducing a new policy for myself to limit my Facebook / work overlap somewhat – I’m not going to have any ‘facebook friends’ that are within my reporting hierarchy (i.e. if they report to me to any level, or if I report to them from any depth). For now, I’m happy to be linked to people outside of that, but even that is questionable for the long term.

Has anyone else thought about this at all?

HD-DVD going Beta, Blu-ray to follow relatively soon

The high definition disc war is pretty much a done deal now – Blu-ray is the victor. I knew it was happening, but when I got an email from Netflix today telling me I wouldn’t be getting HD-DVDs from them for much longer it confirmed my suspicions.

I did pick the wrong team – I bought an HD-DVD add-on for my XBox 360 only a few months ago. In fact the speed at which the tide has shifted is the one thing that has surprised me.

One good thing is I didn’t waste too much money – most of the HD-DVDs I’ve watched have been rented from Netflix (Heroes Season 1, Letters from Iwo Jima, etc.), so I’ll just buy a Playstation 3 in a couple of months and switch to rented Blu-ray discs instead.

That said, I don’t think Blu-ray will even last – Apple’s new HD movie rental is the sign of things to come, and I predict before too long on-demand, internet streamed, HD content will dwarf any Blu-ray sales or rentals. So my PS3 will likely be the last physical medium video entertainment device I buy.

The Facebook Douchebag Quotient

Facebook is my second, ok, third favourite new geekyness of the year (after my iPhone and lolcats). Despite the wonderous waste of time in hitting ‘ignore’ for the latest inane pirate / ninja / super-awesome-totally-better-than-the-last-super-wall oriented application I receive an invite for, it has actually provided the ability to contact people I haven’t talked to for ages, and allowed me to email people who change their real email address / lose their phone more often than I complain about tourists dawdling outside of my work building trying to get into Century 21.

But with all good things, must come the bad, and the great Karma Leveller of Facebook is the Facebook Douchebag. All of you who have used Facebook know them – they have a profile photo that makes them look way better than they do in normal life, it takes 10 minutes to scroll to the end of their profile page, they have 5 new brain-numbing applications everyday that you get spammed with notifications for, and that’s just for starters.

In my new found work-life as a manager (yes, I know that makes me a whole other class of douche, and yes I can deal with that, thankyouverymuch) I use metrics often to categorise problems. And as such, I look for a metric to qualify the douchebageriness of certain individuals on Facebook. I think the answer to my search is a simple formula:

Dq (Facebook Douchebag Quotient) = x / y, where x = number of photos of yourself you’ve added to your profile, and y = the number of facebook friends you have.

My suggestion is that Dq should always for any reasonable human being be less than 1. Frankly, anything more than about .5 is questionable. Mine is something around 0.01, but then again, I link to my Flickr page from my Facebook profile so that may be considered cheating. The biggest douche I’ve yet to come across has a Dq of 2.5 – undeniable by any standards, even before you hear that the latest applications on his profile are What kind of flirt are you and How classy are you?

The only question that remains is what to do when you identify a Facebook Douchebag – remove them from your friend list? Humiliate them on their ‘Wall’? Email all their friends? Or just passive-aggressively call them out on your own navel-gazing part of the information superhighway?

Wondering where your Gmail IMAP access is?

I was very glad to hear a few weeks ago when Google announced IMAP access for Gmail, the main reason being that this will mean my iPhone view of my email is much more closely tied to the Gmail application’s view of my mail. They’ve even done some clever stuff like using IMAP folders to simulate some of the Gmail experience (e.g. to remove a mail from inbox, but leave it available in the ‘all mail’ view, delete it from your IMAP inbox and it still appears in an ‘All Mail’ IMAP folder.)

The problem for me was that the ‘use IMAP’ option wasn’t appearing in my Gmail account. I waited, waited some more, fired off an email to some friends at Google, still waited, and still no IMAP access. What gives? Well today I found what gave. After trawling some help pages (help pages, who reads them anyway?) I found out that Gmail IMAP is only available if you set the ‘Global display language’ in your account’s settings to ‘English (US)’. I looked and sure enough it was set to ‘English (UK)’ – changing it to the american setting turned on IMAP access immediately.

Leopard First Impressions

I’ve now had some amount of 3 days to play with Leopard, the new version of Apple’s OS X operating system, after lining up outside the SoHo store on Friday night – yeah, I’m a fanboy. Here are some first impressions (and consider I purely use OS X at home, not at work (yet )

New Finder – Yep, I like it overall. The new ‘path bar’ feature is good, but why it won’t let me copy a UNIX equivalent I don’t know. The metaphor still needs a little thinking – it’s not a total hierarchy (I can’t click on the category headings) and sometimes I end up in places I can’t navigate to. No biggies, but a couple of times I’ve gone ‘huh?’

Network shares work a little differently – a couple of times also causing ‘huh?’s – including Airport Extreme disks no longer turn up on the desktop. You can make all network shares appear on the desktop in a preferences window but I just did that on my machine and saw a bug.

I’m not really fussed about the quick look / cover flow stuff but I guess if I was using it more for work that might be useful.

Dock/Menu Bar – Meh. I don’t hate it like some do but it’s not rocking my world. The new ’stacks’ feature is ok, I’ve started using it, but I’m not sure how big a deal it is. The download stack is useful because I’m trying Safari (see below). I’m fine with the coloured menu bar, the interesting thing is on my oldish G4 mac mini it’s solid grey as opposed to the translucent look on my Core 2 Duo iMac.

Safari – I’m giving Safari 3 a go. This is partly because Camino doesn’t quite work as I want sometimes and Firefox has lost the plot somewhere on memory usage / stability (at least on a Mac).

Safari 3 is definitely quick, and I like how downloads automatically go in the download stack and in the case of .dmg’s / .zip’s do the ‘right thing’ without you asking. (e.g. I just downloaded an app in a .zip – it appeared unzipped in the download stack and I could then drag it straight into the Applications stack – nice.)

Safari seems to spawn too many windows when I just want tabs, but there’s a ‘Merge All Windows’ option (but alas no keyboard shortcut.) 2 features / plugins I missed from Firefox were subscribing RSS feeds to Google Reader and del.icio.us time savers but I’m using this and this to mitigate that.

Time Machine – it’s definitely easy to use but is lacking features and needs work. First of all you can’t backup to network shares right now (which was a big reason I bought an Airport Extreme in the first place *sigh*), and also I think they need to be more sensible with large file support (e.g. at the moment if you use Entourage or VMware by default you’re going to backing up new multi-GB files every hour – whoops!) In fact, it needs better support generally of exclusions / inclusions.

Terminal – finally has tabs, plus ‘close window on exit’ and ‘turn off the annoying bell’ in the preference pane. OK, maybe these new 2 aren’t new but tabs is a biggie.

Spotlight – Yes, it’s usable now (at least on my iMac). It works across a network easily and seems to (a) pick new items up quickly and (b) search quickly. Nice work.

Front Row – Despite rumors going around the web last week, Front Row does work even if you don’t have an in-built IR receiver. I plugged a Mantra TR1 into my G4 Mac Mini a couple of weeks ago and Front Row works with it (I’m having some IR issues generally, but that’s not Front Row’s fault)

Overall – there’s no immediate ‘wow’ about using Leopard but it gives the impression a lot has improved under the covers. Despite my angst with the lack on network hard-disk support for Time Machine, and the angst I would have if I wanted to develop in Java 6 (come on Apple – pull your finger out on that one), I still think the $199 to upgrade both my Macs was money well spent. But I’m a fan-boy, I would say that, right?