graham’s blog

Notes from the field

I’ve been a member of Plaxo for 9 months now. I have a complicated calendar setup and wanted to synchronize them all.

I was using Google Calendar at home and Outlook at work. I also have an iMac (I love my iMac) so iCalendar is available. If you add Linked-In and mobile access it all leads into something complicated but reasonable (I thought).

Well I’m sad to report that although these services do synchronize I get regularly many duplicate entries and worst of all a lot of my birthdays show up (in multiple entries also) the preceding day of the anniversary.

I think I’ll be cancelling my Premium membership but will have to try and sort it all out soon. It’s becoming a mess.

I don’t want to have to simplify my multiple calendars just to be able to synchronize them!

Intruder alert

I don’t know why, but this blog has been experiencing a fair amount of sp*m lately and I’ve been having to clean it by hand. I don’t know about you, but sp*m in my blog upsets me more than it should as it is an unwanted intrusion.

I tried tweeking the controls of my sp*m killing tools but that hasn’t made a lot of difference. In the end I’ve taken the decision to approve comments myself, for the time being, before they appear so please be patient if your comment doesn’t pop up swiftly.

Strange happenings at home

For a few days now I’ve been unable to use Twitter at home. I first noticed it because twitterific refused to connect (twitterific is a Mac twitter client by the way). There are often interruptions of service over at twitter so I didn’t make a lot of it at first. When it kept on occuring this weekend I insisted and discovered that I couldn’t log on to my account even through a browser.

Strangely though I was able to connect through my widget on Netvibes and received updates through my feeds on Google Reader.

So last night I tried harder but without success. I tried from all the computers at home, both Mac and PC, I rebooted my router (both soft and hard reboots) but the problem persists. According to a twitterfriend my best bet will be an upcoming change of IP (It changes from time to time) as the problem appears to be occuring somewhere in my provider’s hardware. A traceroute shows that a connection is made but results never make it back. 100% packet loss…

I don’t have any other problems (that I know of). Everything else is fine. It’s strange.

And now for something different

My handwriting recognition is pretty poor but I didn’t really make too much of an effort to write clearly and distinctly. Below you will find the translation to text before correction.

I’ll keep you posted of the advancement of my handwriting recognition tests as they develop.

Digital Pens

I’m testing speech recognition, GPS enabled digital cameras and Digital Pens for my organization. I’ve already reported on the first two but have said little about Digital Pens.

My report on Mobile Computing recommended all three technologies but when I asked our purchasing department to obtain a few examples of each they reported that the Logitech Digital Pens were no longer available for purchase. Frustration.

Further investigation has revealed that Logitech appears to have transferred their Digital Pen concerns to an American Company. On checking further the pens are available at Logitech USA but are listed as having been discontinued all over europe although stocks of Paper and ink cartridges are still available.

I have managed to get my hands on an older model and the drivers and software so I’ll be checking it out. With no support in French however I anticipate having to abandon this track.

Personally I think a better route to take would be Java/Symbian/WindowsCE development on mobile phones either with touch screens or pointing devices.

I will be investigating further but if you have any ideas could you leave a comment or contact me? Thanks.

Internetlessness

I know the title is not English but it does describe what I lived through earlier this week.

I decided to upgrade our connection and rent a Set Top Box for IPTv from my IP Bluewin (Swisscom). As we live in the country we can’t get cableTV and so the only way to increase the number of channels is through IPTv and the extra bandwidth will theoretically increase the comfort of our access. I say theoretically because often the cause of slow downloads are elsewhere but you know that anyway so I won’t expand on it.

The result however was a day without any connection at all at home and although I’ve gone without voluntarily on many occasions this of course was different because it was out of my control.

All is good now however and I’m pleased with the Set Top Box. It makes recording programs a snap and whole series just another press of the button away which is nice. I could even set something to record from the net but haven’t tried yet.

As for the increased bandwidth, our connection “seems” a little snappier, but not markedly so. I’ll have to look for some big downloads and see what happens.

Goodbye Facebook

I might be becoming a social outcast but I’ve done something that I’ve been thinking of doing for some time now.

I logged into Facebook, restricted as much as possible who can see what, uninstalled every application I could find, erased as much as possible my profile and then deactivated my account. I didn’t have the possibility of deleting my account or I would have.

I’ve never got into it properly, and it’s too much of a distraction, as my online life is nicely disorganised elsewhere and I have no intention of turning Facebook into my social hub.

I’ll just have to get by elsewhere.

Let’s see how this pans out and whether I’ll get any fallout from it. In the meantime you are welcome to leave comments on my blog, follow me on twitter and tumblr (justgraham), or email me.

Hors d’oeuvres?

Je fais des essais avec mon appareil de photo. Voici ce que j’ai pu faire ce weekend. L’appareil a fait plus que moi mais l’éclairage (soleil à travers les arbres sur la table du jardin) aide beaucoup!

I was trying out my new camera last weekend and managed to take this shot. If I had planned it I would be prouder but to tell the truth I just pointed it, set it to macro and pressed the button. Go Canon go!

Wiki and blog use in Business

Stephanie made an interesting post today reporting on a Suw Charman talk over at Google.

Now this is something I am directly involved in. I use both socially and feel that they are good and useful tools in businesses. One of the problems, from my point of view, is that technical enterprises tend to attempt to solve problems through the use of software tools. Most problems are either social (people) or organizational (people and structures) problems and can only be resolved by directly addressing the causes of the problem.

Personally I would love to read the blogs of my boss and of my Director. I feel it is a much better (and well organized chronologically) medium than newsletters or email distributions and could contribute towards animating business life in my service and organization respectively.

In a service comprised of 12 or so members a wiki would be an excellent way of sharing and building info and documents.

The problem of course is once again people and the organization but (un)naturally my organization is spending a disproportionate amount of time on deciding which tools we need and focusing on the technical platform and the functional matrix of the tools on option.

A social and organizational matrix might be a more efficient way of attacking the problem because in the past our IT department has been known to propose tools that were neither useable or understood and were thus never adopted.

More about this later if it interests you.

Motion sensor appliances

I read the BBC news on the web more or less each day and came across this embeddable video this morning so rather than take a few paragraphs to describe it I’ll just let you watch it yourselves!