Things about airports…

 Travel  No Responses »
Feb 182010
 

Yesterday I flew from Sydney to Auckland (a trip which is becoming quite routine now for me), and this time travelling by myself I had a bit more time to reflect on some of the craziness that comes with travel.

So here’s a few things that leave me puzzled about travel:

  1. If it’s the “Final Boarding Call”, why repeat it at least 6 times, spaced at least 5 minutes apart each time? Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of the word “Final”?
  2. Continuing the above, why is the “Final boarding calling” about pulling people’s gear off the plane still not actually the “Final boarding call”?
  3. How hard is it to have a screen at every single gate showing what plane is due to depart next? What 3 planes are due to depart next?
  4. How hard is it to provide announcements when planes are moved from one gate to another?
  5. What’s the go with people standing on a travelator, abreast, completely blocking it and standing still? The purpose of a travelator is to be able to get somewhere faster by walking on a moving surface, NOT to stand there chatting away watching other people walk past.
  6. Why can’t mobile phone manufacturers (and other device manufacturers) work with airlines to come up with a way of allowing devices to be used in flight (even with flight mode turned on) for the entire flight, including take off and landing? If you don’t remember to bring a book with you and only have eBooks, it’s rather annoying…
  7. If everyone – every single person in front of you is filling out a form or carrying a pre-filled form, what makes you think you don’t need to fill the form out that you were handed when you were checked in?
  8. Oh, and a pet peeve from yesterday … if you’re eating an apple in a food hall and you don’t like apple peel, why don’t you grab a plastic knife from one of the various cutlery areas rather than taking bites, chewing the apple flesh off the skin and spitting the skin out onto the table in front of you?
 Posted by PMdG at 6:06 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Oh Vodafone, you're so generic

 Data, Telcos  No Responses »
Feb 162010
 

Turned on data roaming on my iPhone yesterday, and was amused to get the following SMS from Vodafone:

Vodafone roaming message

So I wonder if, since they’ve quoted me a NaN amount of remaining data, it means I’ve got unlimited?

I’m not going to test it, given the price gouging done on international data roaming.

 Posted by PMdG at 2:39 pm  Tagged with:

Nice one, Optus

 Data, Telcos  2 Responses »
Feb 152010
 

In advance of getting a new iPhone in June/July when they’re released, I’m starting to look around at alternatives to Vodafone. Sure, they have visual voicemail, but they also have one of the crappiest networks I’ve ever been with and customer service that rates in the lowest 5% I’ve ever encountered.

As per usual in Australia costs for mobile phone plans are presented in a way that attracts high “suck points”. This one from Optus though takes the cake. They’ve become so complex that the people who design the contracts at Optus clearly don’t have sufficient degrees to understand them:

Optus Fail

Hmmm, so I can pay an extra $20 a month to get less? Get real!

 Posted by PMdG at 2:39 pm  Tagged with: ,

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 152010
 

The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that Pauline Hanson, one of the most divisive figures in Australian politics over the last several decades is planning on emigrating to Britain.

If you’re not familiar with Pauline, she eventually founded a party called One Nation, famously lampooned as One Notion, and which appeared to be shorthand for “The Bogan Racist Party of Autralia”. This was a party and system of political beliefs not really seen in Australia since before the dropping of the white Australia Policy in the 1950′s. This worked on the basis that it was somehow fine to spew vitriol and hateful speech because to deny it would be “political correctness”. She galvanised our ironically named conservative party, the Liberals, into grabbing several of the core beliefs of One Notion and using those beliefs to sickeningly grab elections for all the wrong reasons.

As a parting farewell to Pauline, I nominate that on the day she leaves we all play the Pauline Pantsdown clip that was used to mock both her outrageous views and her monumentally bad way of expressing them:

Goodbye Pauline, take your racism with you when you leave – we don’t need it here!

 Posted by PMdG at 5:12 am  Tagged with:

Robin Hood Tax

 Morality  No Responses »
Feb 112010
 

There’s a fantastic piece of tax legislation being discussed in the UK at the moment – the notion of a Robin Hood Tax on banks. This would apply to speculative (i.e., non-individual customer) transactions, and tax a tiny amount of the money made in the transaction for use in helping developing countries. To quote the website setup to promote it:

The Robin Hood Tax is a tiny tax on bankers that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad.

By taking an average of 0.05% from speculative banking transactions, hundreds of billions of pounds would be raised every year.

That’s easily enough to stop cuts in crucial public services in the UK, and to help fight global poverty and climate change.

The primary site for the Robin Hood Tax is at www.robinhoodtax.org.uk. You can find quite a bit about it by Googling for Robin Hood Tax; there’s a brief piece here too. There’s a great advertisement that Bill Nighy has contributed his time to on Youtube, which I’ve linked to at the end of the article.

This is such a great and simple idea that it deserves serious consideration in more than just the UK. Take for instance, Australia. Our four main banks have been raping and pillaging the Australian consumer for years, charging exorbitant fees for the hell of it, and raking in huge profits, even during the global financial crisis. Not only that, they’re now actively talking about plans to increase their interest rates further beyond the official interest rates because (boo hoo) they aren’t making enough money. As an example, let’s look at the statement from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia on their half-yearly profits, released just yesterday (10 February 2010):

The Group’s Net Profit After Tax (“NPAT”) (“statutory basis”) for the half year ended 31 December 2009 was $2,914 million, which represents an increase of 36 percent on the prior period.  NPAT (“cash basis”) for the half year was up 54 percent on the prior comparative period to $2,943 million.

So in half a year during one of the worst economic downturns in history for the world (with Australia somewhat insulated), they still managed to rake in almost 3 billion dollars.

Bring the Robin Hood Tax to Australia, I say. Let’s see some of those obscene profits used for good. If you’re interested in this, join the Facebook group.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:06 am  Tagged with: , ,

Sorry that argument doesn't wash with me

 Life, Morality, Technical  No Responses »
Feb 072010
 

There’s a type of argument that really gets under my skin. It starts with something like this:

I’ve been doing X for Y years.

You know what? I don’t care. If you have to start an argument with an implicit declaration of superiority, you lose the argument before you actually get it out. Here’s why:

  1. In any situation I could guarantee that I’d find someone who has been doing X for Y+n years who doesn’t agree with you. Ergo, you’re wrong.

Actually, there’s a whole bunch of more reasons including the most obvious: that by starting an argument with such a “fact” you’re aiming to intimidate agreement rather than present reasoned facts. Self important breast-beating doesn’t win arguments. Starting an argument with self important breast-beating leaves me wondering how certain you are of yourself, or your points.

Even as a consultant, humility goes a long way.

 Posted by PMdG at 10:56 am

Guest blog over at Parallels Consumer Tech

 Technical  No Responses »
Feb 072010
 

I’ve done a guest blog entry for Parallels Consumer Tech about running Parallels Desktop for Mac in headless mode, all thanks to the iPhone Parallels app.

 Posted by PMdG at 10:39 am  Tagged with:

Much Drobo goodness

 Data, Technical  No Responses »
Feb 042010
 

The picture speaks for itself.

Much Drobo Goodness

 Posted by PMdG at 12:24 pm  Tagged with:

Storage, the sequel

 Data, Technical  No Responses »
Feb 032010
 

Well, today my Drobo arrived. If you’ve not seen one before, it looks like this:

Drobo Front

Drobo Open

It is a beautiful piece of technology, and makes the average Western Digital/Seagate unit look like a piece of crap. Of the JBOD/RAID desktop providers, so far only LaCie seem to have come close to developing something that even looks as nice as a Drobo.

<rant>

Well, didn’t so much as arrive as I organised to pick it up from the courier depot. This is one thing that shits me about a lot of Australian courier services. Let me give you a counter example. On a Friday afternoon, Australian time, I can order parts from Other World Computing, in Cary, Illinois. I pay for standard international FedEx, and a nice friendly FedEx person drops off the parts for me on Tuesday morning. During that time I’ve watched the equipment travel around the globe. That’s around 15,000 kilometres.

I ordered the Drobo from Melbourne on Monday, it was picked up on Monday, and it took until Wednesday to arrive in Tuggerah. That’s a distance of around 1000 kilometres, maybe less. I would have been waiting until late tomorrow afternoon (or, I’m told, perhaps Tuesday afternoon) for it to arrive at my place.

This isn’t unusual. I can order equipment from Sydney on Monday and I’m lucky for it to arrive on Friday.

That’s why I send my money overseas a lot of the time when I’m buying computer parts: it’s faster to get it delivered from the US than it is from Sydney or Melbourne.

</rant>

OK, so my little rant aside…

I got the Drobo this afternoon and had 2 x 1TB drives, as well as 2 x 1.5TB drives available to put into it. This gives formatted protected space of 3.17TB – and I can expand it if that starts to fill, without reformatting the filesystem. I elected, due to price differences, to go with the 4-drive Drobo FW800 unit, rather than the 5-drive Drobo-S unit that can work via eSATA.

Why did I go with direct attach rather than NAS? I’m not convinced of the virtue of home NAS for a few different reasons:

  • I’ve got an all-Mac desktop environment; this makes file sharing between machines at home easy anyway.
  • I dislike the performance issues associated with ext3, a format commonly used in home NAS units that are run by mini-Linux systems.
  • I’m not all that keen on NTFS, though I’ll admit that’s just sheer antipathy to running anything that smells like Windows in any primary way at home.
  • I feel I have more visibility over direct attach storage than NAS at home.
  • My computer is on all the time anyway.

Other than the fact that my bloody Western Digital Time Machine drive borked just as I was installing the Drobo (not the Drobo’s fault), the entire installation process was, on reflection, seamless and straight forward. Plug drives in. Install dashboard software. Plug Drobo in. Format. Upgrade unit firmware. Done and dusted.

When I subtract all the issues caused by a borked drive throwing up spurious errors on my system, I’d say it took less than 30 minutes to get the Drobo installed and data copying. And that included pulling the 2 x 1.5TB drives from their external casings.

Would I have preferred eSATA? Yes and no. This isn’t meant to be a performance beast; it’s primarily going to be holding my media file. Being able to read at 50+MB/s is more than sufficient for playing back movies, etc. Going to eSATA would have cost me another $400 for the unit, then say, $150 or so for an eSATA card. That’s a lot of extra money that I’d prefer over time to invest in additional hard drives for the Drobo.

What do I like most about the Drobo so far?

It’s difficult to say. I’m of course pleased about having 3.17TB of protected storage – protected from drive failure. (I still have backups for multiple drive failure of filesystem corruption). I’m equally pleased about the build quality and engineering that’s gone into this baby though. Seriously, it’s like Apple spawned Data Robotics or something. The facia for the unit is magnetically attached, meaning you literally just pull it off, no clips involved. The drives plug in without any caddies, making insertion easy. The lights on the unit are designed for ease of interpretation. The unit has no flex and feels physically secure, adding to my confidence levels.

In short: I’m already very happy with this baby.

Maybe in a couple of years time I’ll have filled it up, having upgraded the internal hard drives to 2TB each or something, but for the moment, I’ve generated a nice chunk of protected storage that leaves me feeling quite secure.

Go Drobo, Go.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:02 pm  Tagged with:

All this iPad sounds like feminine hygiene talk belittles the conversation

 Technical  2 Responses »
Feb 012010
 

OK, I’m over the “iPad = iFeminineHygiene” meme that’s been going around the net since the launch of the iPad. For some it’s a giggle, for others it’s a serious reason to criticise Apple. For me, it smacks of over sensitivity and a puerile, juvenile argument.

A while ago, Alex Barrett on Twitter wrote:

As a woman, can I just say that this whole #iTampon #iPad thing is incredibly JUVENILE. Who started this, Beavis and Butthead?

As a gay man, I couldn’t agree more. A casual search reveals all these other horrifying words that end in pad and must be some terrible play against feminine hygiene products:

  • keypad
  • footpad
  • helipad
  • kneepad
  • notepad
  • mousepad
  • scorepad
  • touchpad
  • trackpad
  • launchpad

The conspiracy abounds to destroy the sacrosanct use of “pad” as a shortened form of various feminine hygiene products. A war on the English language must be declared!

Or alternatively, people could perhaps realise that sometimes a name is just a name, and sometimes a word is just a word, and sometimes they’re being too precious. Words get used for more than one thing: that’s the joy that is English. Most people these days hate banks. I love them – I love sitting on banks with headphones on watching the river go by. Most people eat their sandwiches with relish – me, I’m on a no-carb diet, so instead of eating a sandwich with relish I’d instead relish spreading a bit of chutney on a piece of meat and throwing the bread away.

Please, let’s not let the juveniles who like to giggle at fart jokes and live their lives in a double entendre subvert what would otherwise be a discussion about the technical merits of future shock.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:18 am  Tagged with: ,
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