So I picked up my iPhone a couple days ago and I have to say overall I am impressed. Though it also has to be said the iPhone is not perfect as everybody makes it out to be (here’s looking at you Walt Mossberg!)

I’ve been a long Windows CE fan and in fairness I still am. I’ve seen a lot of devices and I’m pretty sure my list below isn’t even complete.

• HP Jordana
• Compaq iPaq
• i-mate smartphone
• i-mate SP3i
• eTen M600
• HTC TyTN II
• AT&T Fuze

So earlier this week I caved in to peer pressure, too many friends who have gone from Windows Mobile to iPhone and can’t be happier, for the most part.

The Good

There is lots that is great about the iPhone and it’s down to these why I am happy with an iPhone until Windows Mobile 7 is released.

• Nice device. Doesn’t feel as cheap as a lot of windows mobile phones, though HTC do make some very good ones!
• Screen size is great, perfect for a lot of content. I would have maybe liked a 9:16 resolution, but it does the trick. The resolution is a little low to what I am now accustom to, but it is good enough (for now).
• The app’s rock. I guess it’s a lot easier to develop for a single OS when all devices have the same functions (for the most part). With Windows Mobile it’s a nightmare with 1000 different options on the phones it’s almost impossible to develop a one for all app.
• Now only if people would convert their apps for Windows Mobile…
• Safari is pretty good. While the PC version is poor (looking at you font layout and stupid update process), the iPhone versions is great! What is even better though than the browser itself are the web pages that are custom for the iPhone. You navigate to King5.com on Windows Mobile you get a nice site with the local news, you navigate to king5.com on the iPhone and you get a great site! Same for other websites like BestBuy.
• Standard nice UI. If you look at windows mobile, even the 6.5 screenshots, the UI still looks like it was made back in 98. Seriously guys, UI means a lot. Apple have pretty much nailed this. All the apps can use the same features, everything looks like it was designed as part of the original device.
• A separate point has to made for this, but the UI is silky smooth. This is what everything needs to be on all devices on all platforms.
• It just works. Ever since I’ve had a Windows Mobile it’s been a pain to answer phone calls. It takes a while before the phone rings. Some times you can’t even answer a call. With the iPhone no problem it just works.

The Bad

There is a lot of bad points here, but even with a lot of these issues, right now it is still better than Windows Mobile. Maybe the Zune HD will be a good competitor from what I’ve heard in the public forums. Now only if they made a non contract version of the Zune HD with a mobile phone app then it would rock probably.

• Hotmail support is poor and only through pop3. Pop3 sucks, if I mark a mail as read on the iPhone it doesn’t mark it as read on my hotmail account. This is a pain it means pretty much reading every mail twice.
  • Still on hotmail, there is no support for contacts or calendar
  • Also I’ve had my hotmail account since the service launched, I don’t plan on giving it up. While you get some extra features with Gmail and the iPhone, I just don’t like Gmail. I’ve looked, I just don’t like it.
• Only support for one exchange account, more likely a limitation by exchange and the same as Windows Mobile.
• You can’t customize SMS, New Mail or Calendar Alert tones.
• The Mail application is the worst mail application I have ever used.
  • For instance when I am in my exchange mail and I want to view my hotmail I have to hit back twice, then click on hotmail, then click on inbox, 4 taps. There should be an easier way to switch accounts.
  • I find the dot to distinguish read and unread mail to be a little hard to notice. I would have liked the mail to remove the bold tag instead.
  • I like to read mails and leave them unread, this also requires several clicks which just are not that fast to do.
  • The screen resolution for the device is a little lower than I am used to, so reading long emails means lots of scrolling. The font also at a small size is not the best looking, again down to the resolution.
• Too many apps! Really as somebody who is new to the iPhone it’s a pain to find good apps. The majority of apps appear to be very low rated and a good chunk of the ones I have tried have been a mixed bag.
• The OS is pretty bug and so are a lot of the applications.
  • Watching a video in an app suddenly started playing a video in my iPod collection!
  • Some apps have a hard time running and just quit as soon as you start them.
• Battery life sucks bad. The second I unplug my phone my battery life goes from 100% to 99%! I get almost a full day. My AT&T Fuze I would get over 6 days at peak. Though in fairness this could be down to me trying every feature out right now.
• Stupid tilt sensor! If I read a web page lying on my side, the iPhone goes landscape. Sure I get why it’s doing it, but please give me an option! Look even the Kindle app has a disable feature!
• Profiles! Sure the button on the side to switch off sounds and have vibrate only is good, actually cool, it still vibrates! I mean when I am in bed, I don’t want to hear my phone pickup email!
• A case! I’ve never had a case other than a screen protector, so while do I feel inclined to use one for the iPhone?… well it scratches so easily. I’ve seen a friends who has theirs as long as mine and already the back is scratched.
• The phone book doesn’t sync with my car stereo. I have a feeling though this is due to some strange policy on the exchange contacts.
• My phone complains about my car stereo not iPhone capable even though it supports iPod… so what, why keep telling me? I get it already.
• Reception is not as good as my old AT&T Fuze… maybe down to the case…
• AT&T won’t unlock the phone to use foreign sim cards! Those bastards!

Conclusion

Look it’s a long line of issues, very long line of issue, but at the end of the day the last point on my good points stands to the highest reason why I am going to use my iPhone for the next year, it just works.

Sure there are some other good and bad points, but this is pretty much the majority of them. If I ever think of more big ones I may add them here. Either way, it’s not for life and I’m keeping my Windows Mobile phone to hand also.

While growing up one game that I loved was the Secret of Monkey Island. Now on Wednesday this week you can buy the original game, plus the 3 sequels all remastered in HD and the first two games of the series have new voiceovers! It’s hard now to imagine a game without any voiceover at all.

Now while I get all excited about replaying these most awesome games, Tales of Monkey Island, the 5th in the series has just released! It’s available on the superb Steam service and I suggest you pick this game up immediately, especially if you are a fan of the series.

Now I played chapter 1 over the last couple days, while it’s not super long, it is enjoyable, the only problem is chapter 2 does not come out until August and each other chapter is a month after also! Oh well, I guess I'll finish this in November!

Last time I wrote about my grill I said I purchased it because I was watched Good Eats. Now I’ve never actually made anything I’ve watched on TV, so this was going to be the first time and what I was making was the Grilled Pork Tenderloin.

Yesterday I went to the local QFC and picked up the following:

• 1 whole pork tenderloin, approximately 1 pound
• 1 lime, zest finely grated
• 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 chipotle chili pepper in adobo sauce
• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil

One reason I have never bothered following TV show recipes is that they usually have crazy things in the list of ingredients. This was no exception, trying to find chipotle pepper in adobo sauce as a nightmare. I didn’t even know where to look in the store. After about 20 minutes of going up and down the same aisles 20 times I finally found the final ingredient. The recipe instructions are up here so I won’t bore you with any more details, other than 24 hours later I was ready to grill.

12 minutes later and the pork was ready. Put in some final marinade and cook the rest of the meal and then slice up. A pretty simple dinner.

Everything looking good. I served it up on a bed of rice with bell peppers, peas and spring onion.

All in all, it turned out great, Yum Yum. Definitely something I will be having again. Even the wife loved it! 

I say cycling is a bitch, but really it’s that I am pretty unfit at the moment. My wife the other day purchased a very nice road bike and it’s been years since I’ve been on a bike, so I decided to have a go and boy do I love it. The only problem is that I only last 10 minutes then I collapse.

The last time I bought a bike, I never used it, so this time I’m holding off before I buy one and will use my wife’s for a while. Something that we were discussing was that we could get a cycling computer and log our progress to see if we are improving and where we are improving, so we had a look around and I found this: Garmin Edge 305. Now if you think Garmin and then thing GPS you would be right. This is a GPS device for a bike. Though this device doesn’t give directions, it just mainly logs details as well as giving you a virtual training partner so you can push yourself against yourself.

One thing about that device is that it is pretty damn expensive, so that’s where the power of eBay comes in. I was able to pick up one of these well under half price refurbished. That includes the cadence sensor and heart rate monitor.

I’m a gadget freak also, so this device just blows my mind. It’s pretty sweet how you hook it up to the computer and you can see your progress, or in my case, lack of progress.

I have my Windows 7 Media Center setup all up and running. Got my two cable cards hooked up to HD Comcast and the PC is recording away. The great thing is I can finally remember to set some shows up to record. One of my favorite shows over here is called Good Eats on the Food Network. Good Eats is pretty much a cookery show which goes into all the science of why to do certain things. So it combines two of my favorite things, science and food :-)

So I was watching Good Eats yesterday and they had on the show a recipe for Grilled Pork Tenderloin. The tenderloins where cooked on a barbeque and I was thinking to myself how I really need to get myself one of those. So that’s what I did.

I have a few restrictions though before I could go buy one. First of all it had to be propane. In the apartments where I live, we are not allowed to use charcoal BBQs because of the smoke. Which is fair enough as it is an apartment block. Second my balcony is pretty small, so I wanted one that doesn’t take up much room. Third and last, I wanted one where I could put into the back of the car and take with me somewhere so we can have a barbeque in a park or something, (to be honest, not sure where yet).

Down to Sears I went after of course a liberal amount of internet research. You can always trust the public right? Down there I picked myself up the Weber Q 100 grill. It is a pretty small grill, big enough for about 4 steaks so that is plenty for me and a couple friends. I really wanted to make sure it was small and this really is. I picked up the collapsible cart and a propane tank and I was ready to go.

I’ve always believed in charcoal barbeques and I was a little reluctant of buying a gas one. (Now remember that I only bought the gas because I can’t use charcoal.) To be honest I think the thing rocks. It heats up fast, it has controllable heat, easy to clean. It’s pretty much perfect. I guess the only thing I miss on this is the taste of the charcoal and from the wood chips, though I hear you can actually emulate this with a gas burner, guess I got to read more about it.

All in all, the weather is good, the food is good and I look forward to the weekend of making the Grilled Pork Tenderloin. Yum yum!

A while back I wrote about issues I had with my home server, but now I have to say I am really satisfied with it and right now I’m sitting on cloud nine. So what is so good about my home server now? Well it’s a bunch of features that I love about it.

Recorded TV: With Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 (wow, what a mouthful), a feature was added that integrates with Windows Media Center. It allows you to playback your recorded TV from your Home Server on your Windows Media Center! It’s pretty sweet. This means I can have massive amount of storage on my WHS and just keep a respectable HD on my client machine. If I want to record a lot more, I just add a new drive to the home server and away it goes. Awesome stuff!

Computer Backups: This is probably my favorite feature. I don’t think I’ve ever backed up my PC, but since I bought my new PC I decided to enable the backup option. It’s all wired over a giga lan so I thought why not. What I didn’t realize was that I was going to need the feature so fast. A few days ago my Raid 0 array failed and could not be restored. Big fright, but 30 minutes later, my machine is cleanly formatted and restored in working order as if I switched on the machine from midnight the night before! I can’t believe how good this was.

Online Backups: Why do you need online backups when you have a home server?! Well first of all why not? You can’t have enough backups. First of all I use my home server as storage not as a backup device. The home server does have support for backup of data over multiple drives so that if one drive fails your data can be restored, but what happens if both you drives fail, or your house burglarized, or there is a fire? Gone in a puff of smoke! It doesn’t matter how many local backups you have, you can always loose the data. So I’ve signed up with Amazon’s S3 service for online storage and with the HP EX 48x series you can integrate Amazon S3 directly with the unit. Unfortunately I only have the HP EX 47x which doesn’t have this sweet feature. So until HP release the update later this fall, I found another solution. That solution is Jungle Disk for Home Server and right now it’s free of charge.

Source Control: So I love source control. It’s needed if you are a developer of any description. It also doesn’t have to be very difficult to setup and manage. I wrote a while back about how to setup Perforce on your home server. Perforce is good, very good, but I decided to change to the more friendly subversion. The great thing about SVN is that there are so many solutions out there, though nothing that directly integrates into your home server client… yet. So I installed VisualSVN Server Manager from VisualSVN and then installed AnhkSVN for Visual Studio. Perfect and so simple!

So there you go, 4 awesome reasons why to own a home server. I am so thankful for Microsoft to develop such awesome software and to HP for making a really sweet rig. If you don’t own one, I suggest you head out and get one asap!

One thing I love about Zune is that for $15 a month you get all the music in the world (almost). The great thing about that is you get to hear music you wouldn’t even think of buying. I got to say Lamb of God is pretty good.

So here I am loving my Kindle reading some great books and Gamefly ships me out Fallout 3. I don’t have time to play Fallout 3 right now. Is this game going to consume all my free time?

At what felt like an eternity my wife is finally able to move to the states! Less than a month away the two of us will be back together.

Hopefully it will have stopped snowing by then unlike today.

So since I purchased the Amazon Kindle, I’ve been reading non stop. The funny thing is even with the Sony Reader I didn’t read so much. So is this just me trying to justify the extra cost I had to fork out, or is that I am actually enjoying reading? To be honest I’m really enjoying the books.

One of the best features of the Kindle is the book store, the second you finish one book you can jump right in and start reading the next one. Along with that, the prices are pretty reasonable for the most content. Anything less than a year old you are likely looking at $10, but all else is around the $7 to $5 mark.

Another nice feature of the Kindle is the news papers. You can pick up the Seattle Times or the Irish Times every day. In fairness I’ve only picked up a couple, I still relay on the web for my news, but at weekends some of the opinion columns are a good read. That and reading a bit of home is also nice.

I guess another reason I’m loving reading at the moment has to come down to the fact the books are pretty good. I have to thank Julien for introducing me to Peter F. Hamilton. I’ve been getting a uber geek urge for some good sci fi and trawling through Netflix I think I’ve pretty much seen every half decent sci fi movie ever made. So reading sci fi books has opened up a whole new avenue for me.

Looking at my desk I noticed I had 4 mice all together. I wrote before about how I wish they still made trackballs, so a couple months back I went out and bought the Logitech Trackman from Best Buy. Sure it doesn’t have a forward and back button, sure it has a cable, and definitely it annoys people who come to my office, but I think it’s great!

If you’ve never tried one before you should head out and buy one.

So my Amazon Kindle showed up yesterday and to be honest I was like a kid at Christmas. As some of you know I used to own the Sony Reader PRS-500. Now the Sony Reader is a pretty good device for reading books, but I found the selection and price of the books on the Sony Reader eBook store were just too expensive.

A few weeks ago Amazon announced their new device, though it was rumored for some time. I made the decision to sell my Sony Reader and put my order in for the Kindle. Now when the first Kindle device first came out, they ran out of stock in 8 hours, so I went ahead and preordered this device. At the same time I put my Sony Reader up on eBay.

Now I love eBay since I moved to the states. Over here eBay just feels more secure, so I didn’t have a problem with selling the device. After a little mess up with the changes to the eBay buy it now option the device sold in 5 minutes! I can’t believe it, just 5 minutes! Wow, it was just a little less that what it costs new, so I couldn’t believe how fast it went and for how much I got for it.

Preordered Amazon Kindle 2, check; sold Sony eBook, check. Now a waiting game that felt like it lasted just too long and was concluded yesterday.

So I’m not going to do an unboxing, but if you want to learn a lot more about the Kindle I suggest you head over to Engadget.com.

1400 jobs gone today, 3600 to go over the next 18 months. Everyone uncertain and all signs show it’s likely to be more than just those numbers.

I survived this long, so here’s to another day!

Something that that always amazes me about Washington is the weather. In Scotland it rains all the time, not so heavy, but just constantly. Ireland was just miserable, rained, soggy, just enough sun to get your excited and the rain again.

In Washington it’s so much different. The rain here is really heavy. So bad you can’t see 10 yards in front of you. The snow here comes hard and fast, though I heard this is a once in a 10 year snow, but it does snow unlike Scotland where the last time I saw snow I think I was 6. The summer here when I moved was lovely and hot, we’re talking over 30 celsius.

Then there is the fog. In Ireland and Scotland you get fog. You get it once in a while, a couple times a year, but not regular. Here you get it a lot. At least twice a month if not more. It also isn’t only in the mornings, it can last days. It’s thick and slow, so hard to see anywhere.

The last two evenings it’s been foggy and you can really see where movies and books can get their inspiration from. I always thought the fog that you see roll in while people were at sea or when that fog comes in during a horror movie were all special effects, but it happens and happens a lot.

Just thank god there are no monsters, lol.

Well that didn’t take long. After 4 days or so with the Korg nanoKEYS I took them back and picked up the M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard.

This keyboard is massive, almost 3 foot long, but the keys are so much nicer than the nanoKEYS. I guess if I knew how to use a keyboard like this the nanoKEYS would be ok to have, but as somebody who is learning I really needed something with some extra key travel.

So I’m learning via youtube, which is really bad, but it’s free. I guess I’ll try youtube a bit longer until I know the basics and have a little practice under me then I’ll go look for a tutor. The problem I have is that I just bash buttons and it sounds like complete garbage (rubbish for my friends back home).

Choosing a hobby is always a problem. They usually cost lots of money and to have several on the go is expensive and time consuming.

For instance, I love computers, I will invest considerable time and money into them, and likely they will always come first in my list of what to spend my savings on. You know I have to have a fast laptop, I have to have a nice screen. It’s not that it has to be the best of the best, but I do appreciate the good stuff and I use it to it’s full potential.

Now I like cars also, but cars are expensive. I could buy a 350z and add new filters, brakes, suspension, but all that is even more expensive than my computers interest. So it’s likely never going to happen. Over here in the states it’s easy enough to get a lease on a new car for a couple years. Far cheaper than owning, well cheaper if you like to change cars every few years. So for me, the idea of buying an oldish sports car and doing it up compared to leasing a new one is not going to happen.

Then there is photography. I tried this and found out I need to spend a lot of time and effort into it. I found myself photographing landscapes most of the time and I bought a good amateur D-SLR a few years back and have taken great pictures, but as time went on I found good quality consumer cameras will take just as good pictures. You really need to spend a lot of money to get the quality prints and a lot of money on good glass to get the shot to make it worth printing out in great quality. So while I don’t focus on D-SLR a lot anymore I do like to keep my eye out on a good composition and have a nice quality consumer pocket camera for that rare occasion.

Now it’s a new year and my brain travels at a million miles an hour and I found out that you can get relatively cheap music components for the PC by Korg. The products are part of a series called Korg Nano Series. In the series they have a controller, a keyboard and a set of pads.

Something else I released is that I am so used to buying stuff over the internet, I don’t even bother with local stores. I had ordered these online and they were going to be in stock next week and I went to bed last night. Then this morning I thought I would go see them in a local shop, go figure they had them all in stock there, so back on the internet, order canceled and down the the store and bought all three. Very happy, I love instant gratification.

So here I am sitting in front of my laptop with the three devices downloading all the software needed to make them work.

I’ll post some tunes when I get good… sometime in the next several years then!

Happy New Year all!!!

So this is the start to my first year in the USA. The last four months have been crazy. So much has changed and so much has happened, but what a hell of a start to everything.

My blogging has been boring and mundane in the past and going forward I’m going to put more interesting things here, mainly how my life is going over here and what I’m up to.

I do have to say though the fireworks in Edinburgh are far more impressive than than the ones in Seattle.

So Happy 2009 and I wish everyone to have a great year!

(Oh and the picture isn’t mine, I borrowed it from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrcrash/3155096835/)

I love using my email address as login for the vast majority of websites I access. Some sites use OpenID which allows you to use your existing login ID for another service to log into website without creating a custom account, that is pretty nice.

Now I decided to start hosting my pictures on Flickr instead of pbase.com. Why? Because pbase.com cost lots of money and Flickr does best for the majority of what I want to host. Now in saying that about money I am likely to signup to the Flickr paid account in the near future. It is a pretty decent service.

So I decided to write some more blog posts about my life in the States (hence the blog title Life on the Other Side). One of the things I wanted to do was to have my Flickr pictures displayed here. The great thing is that it’s real easy, but you have to edit for feckin ages before you get it right. For instance you can’t just add Flickr direct using the spaces tool. Ahh either way it’s added. If you want to know how, let me know.

Ahh well my little rant. Enjoy my pictures ;-) Remember to hit the play button!

I've decided to upgrade my HP EX470 home server. (The EX470 being the same as the EX475 other than the fact it only came with a single hard drive rather than two.) I'm not how ever going to upgrade it with more storage, I don't need that yet, rather that I am going to upgrade the CPU and the Memory.

Officially you are not able to upgrade anything other than the hard drives, but Home Server Hacks has some lovely details on how to upgrade the CPU and how to upgrade the Memory (just got to remember to update the virtual memory afterwards).

So they recommend to buy the AMD LE-1640 CPU. All find and great when you have great resources in the USA such as www.newegg.com. I however not only have to have this in Europe, but in Ireland or from a company that delivers to Ireland. Not easy and not great. There are a few companies out there, but some of the biggest are www.DABS.ie and www.Komplett.ie. There are of course a few others, but none had stock of the LE-1640. In fact neither did those two companies have the CPU in stock either.

After a big hassle I've finally been able to order LE-1640 CPU and the memory I need to make the upgrade. I'll post my results here. Should be fine, and lets see if there is much of a performance increase, not that you really need much anyway, but it's fairly cheap upgrades and it looks like that LE-1640 cpu won't be around forever.

At home I like to work on some C# code and the more proficient I get the more likely I am going to need some source control software to manage my updates and changes. As my programs get larger and more complex so does the risk of messing everything up, so I decided that I should set up a source control system.

As I have the entire .Net suite on hand I was thinking originally about Visual Source Safe or Visual Studio Team Server. Visual Source safe works, but is flaky and some come with it's own issues, so I was looking for something more modern. Visual Studio Team Server is great, but also requires a dedicated machine. I really didn't want to try and see what happened when installed on my Windows Home Server (WHS) box.

Jeff Atwood had a post on Setting up Subversion on Windows and while I love the whole open source stuff, subversion is just a little messy for my liking. It doesn't integrate directly with Visual Studio 2008 (as it requires another third party tool) and it's only in it's first version running as a Windows service.

So I decided the checkout Perforce. The great thing about Perforce is that even though it's rather expensive, they offer a two user edition free of charge which is great, just what I'm looking for and Perforce comes with a Visual Studio 2008 source control add-in.

Installing Perforce on Windows Home Server

First of all you need to download the two components, server and client. You can get these from the Perforce Windows download 32bit site. You're looking for the "Perforce Server Windows Installer" (this is what we put on the WHS) and also "P4V Installer" which is what we will put on our client machine. (I recommend you download these to your home server).

Now connect to your WHS machine using the Windows Home Server Console tool and add a new share called Perforce. Now change the user access rights so all users on your home server can not access the share. We don't want users to connect directly to this share, but we want WHS to manage to expansion of share when we outgrow your available space.

Now close down your WHS Console and log in using the Remote Desktop Connection tool to your home server.

Once you are connected open up the directory to where you downloaded perforce.exe. (In my case I downloaded this to \\homeserver\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce\ and this is in turn available on your WHS in D:\shares\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce)

Run perforce.exe to start the installation. The first dialog is for the locations of the software. I recommend leaving these as default as you want the application run from your system drive.

The next screen on the install configures your port number (I've left the default port) and then there is the option to specify the root directory. This is where you point Perforce to the directory you created when connected to the Windows Home Server Console. My share was called Perforce and is \\homeserver\Perforce\ while in setup you need to point it to d:\shares\perforce\. See the screen shot below. Check your d:\shares folder to get the right name, depending on what you already have there it could be named something else.

After you click next you are presented the client configuration, here you can just click next again. Then click Start to install Perforce.

That's it! Perforce is up and running on your WHS machine! Nice and easy and takes a whole 5 minutes to install.

Running Perforce Client

Now that you have Perforce installed on your WHS you will need to create an account. Install p4vinst.exe on your client machine and then once installed run the tool P4V.

Connect to: server: should be changed to your server name, in my case homeserver and the port number should match what you specified during the Perforce install.

In Connect as: click New... and then provide a username, email address and your full name.

Un the Open workspace: section click New...

You are asked for a workspace name. I would give the name of your machine.

Now create a folder where you want to keep a local copy of your files. I've put mine in C:\p4clients\steve-vaio-sz\. In the New Workspace dialog set the root to the same folder you just created.

Click Save.

Click OK and you're done.

Nice and easy.