Recently in tech Category

Alexanders the estate agents currently have a banner on their web site which proudly proclaims their use of "State Of The Art Technology & Integrated Computer Systems".

The effect of this boast is somewhat lessened by the fact that their site claims that today's date is "November 18 108". They also have a "rental property of the week" called "End of file".

Somehow over the last few years I have acquired two Google accounts. One of them is associated with my Gmail email address and the other is associated with my dave.org.uk address. Recently I heard that the G1 phone ties itself to a single Google account when you activate it, so if I'n going to get a G1[1] then I need to combine them as far as I can.

This has proved to be a bit of a battle. And as it gives an interesting insight to how Google's tools aren't quite as integrated as they would like you to think they are, I thought I'd write up my experiences so far.

My first approach was to find some way to just merge  the two accounts. That would have been great - just take the data from both accounts and combine it. But there wasn't an option to do that. I could add other email addresses to my dave.org.uk account, but they explicitly stop you from adding Gmail accounts. So I was left with trying to combine things a product at a time. I decided that I wanted to move everything over to the Gmail account.

Google Calendar
I've been using Google Calendar a lot recently. But it was on the dave.org.uk account. So I wanted to move control of that calendar to my Gmail account. That proved to be impossible. I could give the Gmail account complete access rights to the calendar, but I couldn't give it ownership. In the end I exported the calendar to a .ics file and imported it into the other account.

Google Docs
I have a number of documents in Google Docs. As with Calendar, it's easy enough to give another account complete rights to access and update you documents. And, even better, there's a new feature to transfer ownership of documents to another account. There's a rather scary-looking warning that you can only transfer ownership to another account from the same domain, but that didn't seem to be a problem as I was able to transfer documents from my dave.org.uk account to my Gmail account. Well, I could transfer some of my documents. For some reason, thsi feature isn't currently supported for spreadsheets. So I hav a bout a dozen spreadsheets that are still owned by the wrong account. I suppose I can download them as OpenOffice files and then recreate then in the other account. But it seems rather a roundabout approach.

Google Analytics
This worked well. I could add another account as an adminstrator of my Google Analytics account. And then that account could remove access from the original account. If only all the transfers were as simple as this one.

Google Adwords
I have a couple of small ad campaigns running through Google Adwords. This transfer was supposed to be simple. You can replace the owning Google account with another Google account. Except, apparently, my Gmail account was already the owner of another Adwords account. This might be to do with the connection between Adwords and Analytics. Anyway, I just closed down the old account and opened a new one.

Google Adsense
This is the one that it's most important to get right. I don't want to lose any money from my Adsense account. And I'd really like to hold on to all of the historical data from the existing account. I can't see any way to transfer control to another account, so currently I'm thinking that I might have to keep the old account open. If anyone has any advice, I'd love to hear it.

Google Maps
Trivial but annoying. I've got a map stored in Google Maps (it's the one on my Livery Companies site). As with Calendar, I can share it with the other account but I can't actually transfer ownership (as far as I can see). It would only tak an hour or so ot recreate it, but it's annoying to have to take that time.

Google Groups
Another slightly annoying one. I can obviously unsubscribe from all of my dave.org.uk groups and resubscribe from Gmail (there are only eleven of them). But then I'd get the mail in Gmail and I'd really rather that it continued going to dave.org.uk. I suppose what I'd like to do is to make another email address the main address on the old dave.org.uk account, then move the dave.org.uk address into the Gmail account. I haven't looked to see if you can do that yet. Something to try this evening. [Update: I've just looked. It seems you can't remove the primary email address on an account]


Having so many linked services run by one company is supposed to make life easier. But having battled with this over the last couple of weeks, it's clear that these services aren't as closely linked as you think they are.

I wonder what proportion of Google's customers have multiple accounts, and how many of them have tried to correct that. I bet most of them just give up.

If anyone has any stories about this (or, even better, inside information) I'd love to hear them.

[1] Actually, having had experiences similar to Nik's it's becoming less and less likely that I'll get a G1. But I still think this is a useful exercise.

My current mobile phone contract has finished so I'm looking around for a new phone. This means that I've spent some time over the last few days looking at phone company web sites. And it seems that although they might be selling cutting edge technology, phone companies still get their web sites built by the same idiots as most of the world. I came away distinctly unimpressed. Here are a couple of the best examples.

My current phone is with O2. Whilst I was on their site I wanted to contact their customer service department. They provide a web form for this on their site. I went through a couple of filtering forms (what kind of customer are you? what is your query about?) until finally I had a text box where I could enter my question.

I had quite a complex query, so I typed rather a lot - three or four paragraphs and a few hundred characters. I then pressed the 'send' button. Only to be told that my text was too long. That's all it told me, mind you. There was nothing really useful like telling me how many characters I was allowed to enter or how many characters I needed to remove. Just a stern warning that my text was too long. I snipped and abbreviated for ten or fifteen minutes and eventually I managed to sneak in under the wire and submit my query.

It's 2008. People expect a little more sophistication from a web site. Twitter manages to give me real-time feedback on how many characters I have left in their 140 character text box. This is really quite basic Javascript. There's no excuse for making a customer do all that extra work. Even a message telling me how many characters I was allowed to enter would have been more useful that what I got. You also have to wonder why the limit was imposed. Do they really store customer queries in  database with 255 character limits on the text fields?

So that's a failure at the technical level. The technology is available to give the customer a far better experience than the one they currently get but O2 are, for reasons I'd love to hear, not using it. My other example is a failure at a far higher level.

Today the Google phone is launched in the UK. And T-Mobile have an exclusive contract to sell it. They've made quite a big deal about it. I registered for information about the phone on their web site a couple of weeks ago and I've been getting email from the regularly telling me what is going on. Their Oxford Street shop opened at 7am today to allow people to buy the phone early.

For a few weeks, their web site has proclaimed that the phone is "coming soon". And as I type this, almost six hours after the phone went on sale, the web site still says that the phone is "coming soon". There are plenty of pink buttons inviting you to register for for more information (not sure why they insist on calling it "pre-registration") but nothing saying that the phone is actually available or letting you order it online.

I'm not sure who is failing here. Is it that the marketing department didn't include the update of the web site in their planning? Or does the software running their web site only allow updates over the weekend? Or has the person who was supposed to make the changes called in sick today? However this failure was caused, I suspect it's costing them a few sales.

I'm planning to go into my local T-mobile shop and Saturday and play with the Google phone to see if it justifies the £40/month they want me to spend on it. If it isn't (and that's a lot more than I'm currently playing, so it'll need to be bloody good) then I'll get a Nokia E71 from the Carphone Warehouse next door. I'd order it direct from O2, but they've apparently decided not to stock it. And don't get me started on the rant about how they're not stocking any decent phones in case that affects sales of the iPhone...

Update: Kai has a horror story about buying a Google phone. Apparently you don't need to pay the £40/month tariff. And on the phone yesterday, O2 told me that the E71 will be available in the middle of next month. Decisions decisions..

About ten days ago, I took delivery of a new toy - a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. I spent last weekend happily repartitioning and installing Fedora Linux and I was planning to write an entry this weekend about how well I was getting on with it.

Except, I'm not. It's stopped working.

I did some stuff on it on Tuesday evening. And then put it into hibernate mode and stuck it in the corner of the room. I started a new job on Wednesday and I've been a bit busy all in all, so I didn't pick it up again until last night.

To find that it didn't work at all.

This isn't, I pretty sure, something that has been caused by the partitioning. The system is completely dead. I don't even get to the BIOS boot screen. I just get a power light glowing feebly for a couple of seconds. The battery is fully charged and I've tried switching the machine on using both battery power and mains power. Nothing makes any difference.

This afternoon I posted a message on the Dell community forum and I've had a response from someone, but their suggested workaround doesn't seem to work. It seems I'll need to get in touch with Dell and send it back to either be fixed or replaced. Which is all a bit of a pain.

And that's not the only problem I've had. I watched a DVD last night and the quality of the picture wasn't very good. And it wasn't the DVD that was the problem. Other disks did the same thing. It's a problem either with the DVD player or the TV.

As you can see, the problem looks a bit like a glitch in the matrix. I get a dozen or so equally spaced parallel lines of interference on the screen. They fade out as a scene goes on but come back again if something moves across the screen or when the scene changes. I have many inputs going into the TV and currently it's only the DVD player that's giving this problem. The DVD player is plugged into the composite input on the TV, so I need to swap a few plugs around to see if the fault stays with the DVD player or switches to whatever is plugged into the composite input.

I hate it when technology goes wrong. And having two such expensive pieces of technology break on the same day only compounds my hate.

Maybe I'll just go back to reading books.

p.s. A small prize to the first person who leaves a comment telling me what film I was watching.

As a freelancer, I've got more than a few jobs through Jobserve. In the past, they used to just post email addresses of the agents who were advertising the roles, but recently they've got cleverer than that. They now publish an email address that goes to the Jobserve servers before being passed on to the agent. It's clever, because they now know what sort of jobs you are applying for and can use that knowledge to suggest other similar jobs that you might be interested in.

Except it doesn't really seem to be working. I've recently started getting these recommendations from Jobserve. They actually come from a system called "Jobserve Alchemy". I got one just now. It says "From the information you have registered with on JobServe and your recent application activity on JobServe you appear to closely match the requirements of the following job".

They have an interesting definition of "closely". Here's the specification.

Type: Contract
Position: GIS Geographic Developer Contract
Skills: GIS, geographical information system, GIS Developer, Contract, Programmer. Fantastic opportunity for an experienced GIS Developer to join a prestigious market leading organisation. Talented GIS Software Developer to join a specialised team working in a fantastic environment Responsible for developing ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS Server using the MS .NET platform. GIS using the C# .NET platform or VB.NET. Responsibilities also include database integration, developing Web services using SOAP. Technologies: ArcGIS GIS .NET C# Please apply immediate for this GIS Software Development opportunity.
Location: Berkshire
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 6 months

Those of you who know me will realise how well this matches my skill set.

I have no experience of Geographical Information Systems. I have never used C#.NET or VB.NET. I'm a Unix developer and haven't developed anything on a Microsoft platform using Microsoft tools for about fifteen years. I have no idea what ArcGIS is. Oh, and I have no interest at all in working in Berkshire. Nothing about this role matches anything that I've applied for through Jobserve in the last ten years.

I think that Jobserve Alchemy still has a few bugs in its search algorithms.

Whilst waiting for my comment to be published on the Daily Mail web site, I took a quick glance at their terms and conditions - just to ensure that there wasn't some obvious rule that I was breaking by calling attention to their hypocrisy. I didn't find the "you can't disagree with us" rule, but I did find this interesting clause:

You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated's prior written consent.

Which basically says that you can't blog about the Mail's site. Well, I suppose you can, but you can't provide links to the source material.

And just above that nonsense, is this:

You may not distribute, display or copy any of the contents of the pages contained in this web site to third parties including, but not limited to "caching" any material on this web site for access by third parties and "mirroring" any material on this web site.

Which, if nothing else, shows a spectacular lack of knowledge of how the internet works. Any ISP that caches material for its customers' use had better beware of the Mail's lawyers.

p.s. Oops. I've realised that this entry contains a link to their site. Please don't tell them.

Sometimes (actually, it's really quite often) Free Software enthusiasts are their own worst enemy. Their insistence on using completely free formats for audio and video instead of the proprietary formats that most people use means that their message is often only seen by a tiny minority of people - generally the people who don't need to see their message anyway as they are already converts.

Here's an excellent case in point. The GNU project is twenty-five years old this month. And to celebrate the anniversary, Stephen Fry has recorded a video for them introducing the concepts of free software[1] and talking about the project. This would be a fabulous marketing tool for them, But the only people who will be able to watch it are already Free Software users.

If you had a video to share with as many people as possible, the way that most people would do it would be to upload it to YouTube, Google Video or some other video sharing site. The GNU project won't do that as all of those sites use Flash video which is a proprietary format and the GNU project are sworn to spurn proprietary formats at all times. This religious adherance to their holy writ also prevents them from using the second best approach which would be to make Quicktime or MPG files available on their web site. Again, these are proprietary formats and therefore verboten.

The approach that the GNU project takes is to make the video available as an Ogg Theora file. Now Ogg Theora is a perfectly good format. Videos in that format are reasonably sized and of pretty good quality. Also, and this is what the GNU project love about it, the format is completely free and open. For that reason, it's the format that the GNU project use for all of their videos.

There's only one problem with the Ogg Theora format - almost no-one can view it. On most standard installations of Windows and Mac OSX, there is no software that can play an Ogg Theora file. Which, to my mind, rather defeats the object of having such a useful marketing tool. The GNU project are using this as a way to encourage people to install and use their new gNewSense software package, but I can't honestly see anyone installing all of that just to watch a Stephen Fry video.

"Ah", I hear you saying, "but that's not really a problem, is it? Some clever geek will convert the Ogg Theora file and upload it to YouTube by the end of the day. We'll all watch it there." And you're probably right. There's a very good chance of that happening. But if it does, the GNU project will probably issue a takedown notice. You see they've released this video under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works licence in order to specifically prevent people from converting the video to a more friendly format. It's like they want to prevent people from seeing the video.

[Update: As pointed out by Matt (the producer of the video) in the comments, I was completely wrong about the licence. The No Derivative Works clause does not exclude conversion to other formats. There are many versions available on YouTube.]

Of course, this isn't a problem, for me. I use Linux on my desktop and that's the only major desktop platform which supports Ogg Theora out of the box. Or so I thought. My first attempt to play the video on my standard installation of Fedora 9 failed. I just saw a grey box and a Java applet error. I fiddled with the options a bit and tried again using the Totem video player. Ironically, that popped up a dialog message warning me that it needed a proprietary plugin to play the video and then telling me that no appropriate plugin was available. Ignoring the error, the video played fine anyway. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the BBC will play the video and lots of people will see that way. But getting Stephen Fry to record a video about your project is an incredibly powerful publicity tool. It is stupid to hang on to your religious beliefs to such an extent that you prevent most people from seeing it.

[1] The Free Software Foundation never ever use the term "Open Source Software" as it dilutes their brand.

Update: On investigating gNewSense further, I see that it's a completely new Linux distribution, because popular distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora are happy to include proprietary software. I despair.

Update 2: In the comments, Paul points out that they are using a Java applet to play the video, which will mean that it works fine everywhere where Java is successfully installed (not, it appears, on my machine). But it's 2008. No-one uses Java applets any more. And anyway (as Paul also points out) Java was proprietary (and therefore verboten) until very recently. What did they do before that?

My current phone is a Nokia N91, I've had it for well over two years, which is probably the longest time I've owned any phone, and I've been very happy with it. Of course it's showing its age technologically now, but I haven't had any problems with it.

But last week, whilst I was in Copenhagen, it started acting very strangely.  Usually, it runs for two or three days between charges, but it started running out in less than a day. Also soon after turning it on, the user interface slowed to a crawl so that, for example, it took at least two minutes to open a text message. The longer the phone was on, the slower it got. After ten or fifteen minutes the phone became unusable.

My first thought was that the battery needed to be replaced. It's still the battery that came with the phone and I'm not sure what the lifetime of these batteries is supposed to be. I found some selling the correct batteries cheaply on Amazon Marketplace and ordered a replacement.

But that hasn't fixed the problem. Everything is still exactly how it was. My next plan was to upgrade the firmware and reset the phone. But both of these actions will delete all of the user data from the phone. So I needed to back it up first. This involved booting my laptop into Windows for the first time for months (and spending half an hour installing all the security updates that have been released since I last used Windows) so that I could use the Nokia PC Suite and the Nokia Software Updater. Having installed both of those I prepared to backup the phone's data.

But it didn't work. Remember the problem where phone slowly grinds to a halt? Well that also affects the backup process. You can only back stuff up in tiny chunks. And in the hour I spent trying it on Wednesday evening I didn't manage to get everything backed up successfully. I'll try again over the weekend. I suppose I should have been taking regular backups anyway. And I would if Nokia had software that ran on a sensible operating system.

My current theory is that there's some kind of runaway process on the phone and that it is taking all of the processing power and draining the battery. Does that sound possible? And if that's the case, how would I go about fixing that? What are the Nokia N Series equivalents of 'ps' and 'kill'?

The most annoying thing about this is that my current contract with O2 only has another six weeks to run. So I'll be getting another phone soon any way. I just need to resurrect the N91 for a few weeks until I can get an upgrade.

I cheer myself up by considering what I'll upgrade to. The N96 is currently favourite, but I might just go with an N95 if their price drops following the release of the N96. Most of the phones I've had over the years have been Nokias and I'm used to the way they work.

Of course I'm not even going to consider an iPhone. There is some strange reaction between me and Apple hardware. It always ends with me wanting to throw the hardware at the wall.

Over on O'Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled "Why Corporates Hate Perl". I'm working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year's YAPC::Europe. I didn't think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning I found a link to it on the front page of Slashdot. It's also been discussed on Reddit and on Digg.

I've mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn't had any problems and just wanted to say thank-you for the programs. Here's what he said:

David I wish to personally thank you for the help you provided to my wife in being able to place a search engine on our friends website. We have needed a search engine on my own personal site and have not been able to accomplish it but now that we have done it on our friends site [url removed] our site is next in line [url removed - but it's a gun site].

Please believe me from my heart when I say thank you and I am so glad there are people like you in this world. I help many people in my business and because of their needs and lack of money. Many many times I do not charge one red cent. Well it came back to me 100 fold in enabling us to use your valuable information. We cannot afford 20-30k for what we needed and because of you we can now make it happen. Thank you ad infinitum, [name removed]

If you ever need help in locating a machine gun, silencer, destructive devices, mortar or grenade launcher, or anything else down to a handgun or long gun don't hesitate in contacting me I am completely at your service.

[contact details removed]

HARD-CORE RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE AND PROUD OF IT

I wrote back to him thanking him for his kind words. I tried to explain the concept of open source to him and pointed out that personally I was involved because of the good fit with my socialist principles. I also thanked for the offer of business assistance but pointed out that in the UK those kinds of weapons are not allowed to be owned by private citizens - a law which I wholeheartedly support.

I'll let you know if I get a reply. But it's an interesting illustration of how open source software can help all kinds of people. Not just the ones that you'd like to help.