As one might speculate based on the name alone this is a fairly minor revision of the current-generation iPhone 4. The new device carries only a few minor hardware adjustments, but some very significant changes for the software itself (most of which the iPhone 4 will receive as well).

The most significant hardware changes are the upgrade to a dual core ‘A5′ ARM CPU, a completely redesigned 8MP camera and the integration of the voice-interface called ‘Siri’.

The first two pieces of this puzzle are fairly easy to understand. The new A5 processor will give the handset much more power, particularly for gaming or video intensive applications. The second new piece of hardware, the redesigned camera has a higher resolution sensor, larger aperture and an additional lens element, all of which are said to contribute to brighter, crisper, “better” photos than any of the previous iPhones.

The odd-ball of the bunch is Siri. This is something which might be described as an assistive technology, something designed for users who would have trouble interacting with the phone in a traditional manner. But if science-fiction has taught us anything it’s that we’ll all be talking to our computers in the future and the keyboard and mouse will be “quaint” figures of our collective social memory.

Siri was rolled out in Beta to the iPhone 4S and is the only iOS 5 device receiving the enhanced voice interface despite similar processing power in this past year’s iPad 2. The “beta” monicker is something that Apple has used only sparingly in years gone by and it tends to be in a fairly traditional sense of the word, being applied to products which are truly unfinished when they are made available to the public. There has been a great deal of speculation as to what this means for the future of Siri. Many feel that the technology will eventually make its way on to every Apple product from voice-enabled phones, to computers through to the Apple TV. The digital living room device is, in my opinion, the killer target for the new technology as it would allow a remote-control free experience (assuming it knew when to listen to you and when to ignore the sound coming out of your TV).

But all that aside I really wanted to focus on this one point: the iPhone 4S is the next logical step for Apple. After the initial release of the iPhone in 2007 it was followed up with the iPhone 3G which was arguably the first “complete” version of the handset in 2008. June of 2009 saw the introduction of the iPhone 3GS which was for all intents and purposes a revised version of the previous year’s model. 2010 introduced the iPhone 4 with an all new design and the first instance of an Apple device with an Apple CPU (the A4). After such a major upgrade nobody knew what would happen next. Speculation early in 2011 led many to believe (correctly as it turns out) that Apple would abandon it’s traditional June timeslot for iPhone launches eventually delivering the new phone in October.

The delay also led to a great deal of speculation that Apple must be using all this extra time to produce an absolutely killer new iPhone 5 which would revolutionize the phone market as much as the iPhone 4 had the year previous. The iPhone 4 is still one of the best selling single handset models ever, particularly if you focus on smartphone sales. As time dragged on so did the predictors, pundits and pranksters. We saw mock ups of super-sized, super-small, super-thin, dual screened, cloud-based, fat, thin, black, white, pink, polka-dotted, tutu-wearing, pipe-smoking, tap-dancing iPhones (OK, I made some of those up, but you get my point). When the new handset finally arrived, it was not the much touted iPhone 5, but a revision to the iPhone 4 complete with evolutionary hardware upgrades and a new piece of software that may someday change the way you interact with most of your technology.

It makes sense. The next iPhone will (probably) have a more significant redesign. The next iPhone will (probably) not be called the iPhone 5. The next iPhone will have Siri. The next iPhone — well, we’ll see it when it gets here, won’t we (or when it inevitably gets left in a bar somewhere in San Francisco).

Revived Apple

Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in the late 1970′s. The company has had its ups and downs over the years and Jobs was ousted from his leadership position only to be hired back on in the 1990′s when Apple was bordering on irrelevancy. Starting with the iPod and iMac in the early 2000′s Jobs and his leadership team helped make Apple one of the most recognized and relevant brands in the world.

Reinvented home computing

The early Apple II computers were some of the first to be placed in the home as the “family computer”. While they weren’t the only ones, they were certainly among the first and also among the most widely deployed. The number of people who can tell you today that their first computer was an Apple IIc, or Apple IIgs is lengthy; myself included.

Revolutionized portable music

While not the first company to produce MP3 players, or even hard-disk based MP3 players, Apple created a beautifully designed device in 2001 called iPod. Jobs took the position that existing media players were not particularly good, or usable. He assembled a team to create a new device as a part of Apple’s “digital hub” strategy. This was, at it’s core, a basic MP3 player with an internal hard disk which could store 5-10 GB of music, which at the time was all, or most, of most peoples’ digital music collections. iPod became the foundation of later forays into the personal electronics space which has become central to Apple’s position in the market.

Reimagined telecommunications

It has been called “the second coming of mobile telephony”, it is Apple’s iPhone. Jobs and members of his leadership team like Jonathan Ive released it’s first iPhone in 2007 and has revised it every year selling millions upon millions of devices every year. Apple has become a (the?) leader in mobile phone sales and development worldwide leading a device category that they helped create less than 5 years ago.

Redefined portable computing

With the launch of the iPad tablet in 2010 Apple helped to define a third product category which had, until then, been somewhat vaguely defined. Steve Jobs himself referred to the iPad and it’s successor the iPad 2 as devices that would usher in the “post-PC era”. While not everyone feels that iPads will replace their computers, they have certainly helped to define a product category where people will use devices to complement their “real lives” with their digital ones.

So there you go, a brief summary of the impact Steve Jobs has had on the worlds of computing and technology in the past 35 years. We can only hope that he’s inspired his teams at Apple so that the innovation of Apple, particularly over the past decade, will continue in years to come.

Science & Technology Shows

Aussie Geek Podcast – Bloody Awesome Tech. Two Aussies (Dave and Cait) and a Canadian (that’s me!) put their unique slants on the technology news, applications sites and services each week (or so).

CommandN – Amber Macarthur and friends bring you a weekly dose of tech news.

Digital Planet (BBC) – The BBC’s weekly technology show looking at trends in tech and how they affect your daily life, hosted by Gareth Mitchell.

Discovery (BBC) – A weekly science documentary examining hot trends and profound topics in the world of science.

Knightcast – Tuning tech into your way of life, Knightwise offers a look at ways to make technology work for you, instead of the other way around.

Mac OS Ken – A daily dose of Mac (and iPhone) news delivered by the sarcastic, funny and insightful Ken Ray.

One Minute Tip (TP) – Byte-sized pieces of knowledge to help you be just a bit more productive with your everyday tech.

Podcasters’ Emporium (LPN) – James Williams and Dave Gray cover all the topics you need to know to become a better podcaster.

Quirks and Quarks (CBC) – Bob MacDonald’s weekly look at science and technology from the CBC mothership.  The show looks at new and emerging sciences and technologies, often with an eye towards how they affect our environment.

Run As Radio (PWOP) – Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes provide a weekly batch of insightful trends and topics for the IT pro.

Security Now (TWiT) – Steve Gibson’s weekly dose of security news and security-related topics is very insigtful  (even better if you skip over Leo Laporte’s TWiT ads).

Search Engine (TVO) – Jesse Brown’s brutally honest opinions and reviews of life in the Internet age.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe – Members of the New England Skeptical Society debunk the myths and frauds of the scientific age.

The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5 – A shorter companion podcast for the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.

Spark (CBC) – Focusing on the softer side of tech, trends and how these things work their way into our day-to-day lives.

Software Development Shows

Hanselminutes (PWOP) – Scott Hanselman’s weekly look at software and technology topics with his inside the MS machine take on things.

Herding Code – A group of “real-world” developers discussing topics and technology that affect code-slingers everywhere.

.NET Rocks! (PWOP) – .NET Rocks brings together the incomparable Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell who interview cool and interesting people in the Microsoft developer space.

Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker’s periodic exploration of software and best practices for .NET developers was one of the first software podcasts I started listening to.

Stack Overflow – Jeff atwood and Joel Spolsky’s companion podcast to the Stack Overflow Q&A site project.  A weekly chat about the project, interesting Stack Overflow questions and other software topics.

Humour & Entertainment Shows

Mondays (PWOP) – Mondays is a comedy show from the crew at PWOP that’s released on a somewhat sporadic basis.  This one’s definitely NSFW — unless you have headphones. =)

Star Trek: Defiant – A fan-fiction podcast set a number of years after the events in Star Trek: Nemesis. Produced by the crew at Pendant Audio with a fairly talented voice crew.  It’s a good listen.

Two Schooners (LPN) – Dave Gray and James Williams get together again for a somewhat less serious show covering the weird and hilarious stories of the week over a schooner of their favourite brew.

Business / News Shows

Campbell’s Comment (CKNW) – Michael Campbell’s daily business comment.

Get It Done Guy (QD Tips) – Sever Robins provides great productivity tips, business tips and general “how-to-cope-with-life-after-college” tips.

Modern Manners Guy (QD Tips) – The Modern Manners Guy’s advice on how not to inconvenience those around you.

Nutrition Diva (QD Tips) – Eat better, and learn about food myths that’ll keep you on the healthy track.

Reality Check (CKNW) – Bruce Allen’s pull-no-punches daily comment about social issues and pop culture.

Sports Comment (CKNW) – Neil McRae and others provide a comment on the sports world from a Vancouver perspective.

Grammar / Language Shows

Grammar Girl (QD Tips) – Mignon Fogarty’s weekly language show will help you tackle the tricky issues of trying to write successfully in the English language.

Kalye Speak – Learn tagalog as filipino’s actually speak it.  By far the most successful podcast of its kind.

Podictionary – Charles Hodgeson gives great background on the etymology of words that we use every day. The show is insightful, fun and concise.

It’s been fun putting this list together.  I’d love to hear your comments on these shows, or others that you listen to regularly.

This is stunning news particularly when thinking back to the release of Windows Vista 18 months ago. Vista was pushed back a number of times and the delays caused the operating system no end of grief when the OS failed to meet the expectations of consumers when it hit the street in 2007.

A Windows 7 RTM in July would mean that desktops and laptops enabled with Windows 7 may be ready for consumers in time for the key back-to-school buying season.  Add to this that PC vendors like Alienware are already selling Windows Vista licenses with a Windows 7 upgrade offer; and that Microsoft is taking pre-orders for the OS, and it really smells like Windows 7 is not far off.

Sources: Ars Technica, Geeksmack, @Codinghorror

Marketing and Markets
Both Windows and Mac enthusiasts love to evangelize about their platform of choice.  It’s human nature, we all want people to know how smart we are for choosing the best of what’s available.

As is often the case with most of these “holy wars” the smaller market tends to be more vocal, and more likely to point out all the flaws in its larger competitor.  This is certainly the case with the Apple community.  From the endless stream of “Get a Mac” ads and their YouTube parody counterparts to news releases and security firms touting the reduced target area of not running Windows, those who have and love Macs are always there to tell you that the solution to every problem with MS Windows is to simply get a mac.

And it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t provided a great deal of ammo for the pundits to use in their PR-muskets.  From the troubled launch of Windows Vista to the sad state of what is the Zune to the rather pathetic I’m a PC ad campaign Apple has certainly made up ground on the Redmond-based software giant.  Since 2001, Apple has nearly tripled their market share.  That’s a very significant jump for any company.  But let’s be realistic about what that really means.  The Mac maker has raised its market share from about 3.5% to somewhere around the 10% mark.  Even with Apple’s huge growth over the past 8 years, nine out of every 10 computers sold is running a version of Microsoft Windows.

As a result, Microsoft for their part shrugs off the attacks of the all things “i” maker, often ignoring the marketing onslaught and focusing on its target market: the Enterprise.  Does anyone remember when Apple launched the 3G iPhone, App Store and support for Enterprise features on the iPhone?  Apple certainly hasn’t made great strides into the corporate handheld market, which is something the Microsoft does better, but that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry does extremely well — but that’s a topic for another post.  Microsoft and Apple both make products which can be used in the business markets.  But time after time, companies are continuing to choose the Microsoft platform over that of Apple, a huge percentage of the 90% that Microsoft controls in the operating systems space is thanks to the purchases of large companies.  If one were to examine only consumer purchases of computers, Apple would fare much better, probably somewhere around the 20% mark in parts of the world.

The consumer market is without question Apple’s strongest.  By developing a series of technologies and services that all work well together, it’s quite possible to change over your entire home to run on Apple technology.  From beautifully designed iMacs that can sit proudly in your living room, to powerful Mac Pros that can serve content for the entire household, to AppleTV which can sit atop your HD digital cable box and serve as an all-in-one media centre, to the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule backup consoles to manage your network and keep everything interconnected.  Add to that Apple’s iTunes and Mobile Me services and you’ve got an entire suite of hardware and software that talks to each other almost flawlessly, and really does make your day-to-day computing experience much smoother.  There’s only one catch, the Apple Tax.

The Apple Tax is what those outside the Apple community call the difference between the price of a Mac, and the price of the most closely aligned (in hardware specs at least) PC.  Often times the difference between a Mac and a PC comes in between 20% and 40%, with the Macs invariably being the more expensive machines.  PC enthusiasts will shame people for wasting their money on “pretty hardware” while the Mac community talks about security, ease of use and bundled software.  Over the past three years or so I’ve come to realize that the reason this debate won’t die is that they’re all right.

My Mac Experience

When I first picked up my Macbook one of the things that excited me about the experience was the new-ness of it.  This was a computing platform that I wasn’t particularly familiar with, and since I considered myself to be something of a technology afficionado I figured I should jump in and see what all the fuss was really about.

Within hours I had posted my first blog post and was happily exploring the features of OS X Tiger.  There were a few quirks of the Mac OS that drove (drive) me nuts but overall it was a pretty good experience.  Much more polished than other Windows alternatives (RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora) that I’d looked at in the past.  One of the strongest points in the Mac’s favour early on was the Unix-style BSD-based terminal.  This is where, for me at least, some of the magic of OS X came into play.

I’ve always been a command-line geek.  There’s no question in my mind that computers function at their best when they don’t need to worry about drawing a “pretty picture” for us lazy humans.  Command-line applications (and for that matter services/daemons) run better, and more often than not, more reliably than applications with elegant user-interfaces.  Being able to explore the world of the UNIX/Linux command line on my shiny new Mac was indeed a revelation for me.  It even led to me porting the wget application to run on Mac OS X.  This wasn’t something that I’d ever consider trying to do for Windows, though it probably isn’t much more difficult.

As time moved forward I really enjoyed my MacBook. Adding new applications to the computer was as simple as downloading them from the Internet and in most cases dragging the application to the Applications folder.  In other cases I would need to double-click an .mpkg file to run the installer.

But I noticed after a while that all the software I’d been downloading for my Mac Lab Rat segments for the old version of the podcast had really cluttered up my system.  Thankfully OS X allows you to clean up all of that mess from the installations with just the drag of a mouse.  Yep, that’s right. To uninstall an application from OS X, you just need to drag it to the trash can.  That’s much simpler than un-installing programs on Windows, right?  Well, that’s not really the whole truth.

First off, you need to understand how a Mac stores applications.  Each application is stored in a package ending with a .app extension.  This is, in reality, just a folder that contains the majority of the files that the application uses.  Dragging “the application” to the trash is really just a way of deleting the application folder.  But with many applications this doesn’t delete the entire application footprint.

There are two folders where applications store the majority of their extra files and these are the /Library and the /Users/<username>/Library folders.  Apple’s own recording application GarageBand stores over 1.5GB of files in these library folders, removing the application using the Drag-and-Drop method will leave those files on your computer.

Malware & Baddies
There’s no question that anyone who buys a Mac today, or has bought one in the past 10 years has experienced but a fraction of a percentage of the malware, spyware, viruses and badness that Windows owners have to deal with on a regular basis.  Apple touts this fact when they promote their Macs as one would expect, and as they should. The lack of these problems on a Mac is a great reason to use the system.  Mac fanboys would have you believe that the Mac Operating System is fundamentally designed to be more secure. They talk about the fact that because you’re less likely to be infected by problems on a Mac, the Mac OS is orders of magnitude more secure than Windows.  But notice nowhere does it say that there are fewer vulnerabilities in OS X than in Windows.

The reality is that with Windows’ huge market share (remember the 90% number we talked about earlier?) they are the 10,000lb gorilla.  When your next biggest competitor makes up less than 10% of the market, it’s clear who will be the target. (For those in the business of building gorilla killin’ helicopters (malware), the real target is King Kong not Nim Chimpsky.)

If you’re writing malware of any kind, you’re typically doing it in one of two ways:

1. Target companies
2. Target the highest number of people possible

The majority of malware authors choose to go with option #2: cast a wide net and see how many fish you can catch.  If your net is set to catch Windows machines, the sheer math of it will get you more infected machines than if you were to target the much smaller Mac market.  That said, with success comes difficulty.  Mac users are starting to see pockets of activity targeting OS X.  Consider the Pwn to Own competitions that security companies have run for the past few years. Invariably, OS X has been compromised at each of them, and in most cases extremely quickly. Modern operating systems are all susceptible to exploits and security holes. Even linux systems are vulnerable to attacks, they simply have the benefit of a large number of people to quickly patch holes and a user community generally less susceptible to getting themselves infected.  OS X is not an invulnerable operating system.

Software – Included and Excluded

It’s often touted that the software included on Mac Systems helps to justify the increased price tag of purchasing these machines. It does help, to be sure. The quality of the included software is quite high, and allows you to manage photos, music & email, make videos, burn movies, and record audio.  What Apple doesn’t want you to know is that there are lots of applications out there for Windows too, some of which may even be bundled with your system when you buy it.  Consistency is Apple’s strongest point. They can use phrases like “iLife comes with every new Mac”.

I’ve used every application that comes with iLife at least once.  The most frequently used applications being iPhoto and GarageBand; unfortunately I’ve not been overly satisfied with either and the only reason I stuck with them is that they were for all intents and purposes free applications.  iPhoto in particular lacked a number of features, the most obvious of which is the ability to organize images into folder hierarchies.  This has been fixed in the latest version, but I don’t feel like paying $69 for something that free apps like Picasa can do for free.

GarageBand has worked out quite well for the most part, but does leave a few things to be desired.  The interface is excellent, making creating podcasts and other recorded audio quick and fairly intuitive.  It becomes obvious fairly quickly though that this product too is targeted at a consumer audience as there are a number of audio manipulation features missing including fine grain control over cutting and pasting audio, and the application crashes with my podcast files once it gets over an hour in length.

While the iLife suite is touted as being partial justification of the increased cost of the Macs, in many cases I’ve abandoned these applications in favour of free applications that I was able to download from the Internet.  I’m in the midst of replacing iPhoto with Picasa and GarageBand with Audacity (which admittedly is missing a bunch of features too, so I’ll probably have to use both).

Coming from a Windows world, I was accustomed to being able to find software online that did what I needed my computer to do, and the vast majority of the time not having to pay for it — and let me be clear, I’m talking SourceForge, not PirateBay.  What I found in coming to the Mac world is that commercial ISVs (independent software vendors) were far more common for home-use applications on the Mac than for Windows.  Translation: If you want it, be prepared to pay for it.  Third-party developers have done a great job of writing software that has a Mac look & feel.  Apple and Microsoft both publish guidelines on best practices for developing software for their respective platforms.  The ISVs that publish software for the Mac do a great job of creating a quality product the only catch of course being that you need to buy the apps.  There is open-source software available on the Mac, but as with the malware developers. the open-source community prefers to stick to platforms where they can get the most eyeballs on their product.

Getting Things Done
This is far and away the most subjective category in my review.  There is no question that I’ve been extremely productive with my MacBook over the past three years.  I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, contributed to my online forums, remotely managed software on my websites, handled email, instant messaging, twitter, virtualization and managed my online life.  The thing is, most of the time I’m not using a Mac specific application to do those tasks.  All of my Internet activity is done using FireFox rather than Apple’s own Safari browser.  The main reason for that is that I find Safari to be a bit clumsy to use, and above all else, I miss the ability to download tons of free plugins and extensions for the browser that make my online life better.

One task where the Mac has a leg up on Windows, conceptually at least, is the fact that it’s built-in command-line interface is based on BSD.  This means that all of the default tools for handling command-line operations in a Unix environment are already present, and the most important of those for me is SSH.  Native command-line support of SSH makes administering my web servers a more seamless task, and despite the fact that it’s command-line in nature, that may be the most Mac-like feature of my Macbook.  I can get this done on windows without much effort as well, but with the Mac, this truly was built-in from the get-go.

Re-Staging Systems
I’m hard on my computers.  I always have been.  Every system I’ve ever owned prior to my MacBook has been re-staged or re-imaged about once per year.  Sometimes this was for OS upgrades, sometimes because it had become slow and unusable, and sometimes because I wanted to try a major configuration change to make the computer more useful to me.  Something that really appealed to me about the Mac from those I’d spoken to prior to purchasing it was the idea that all of this would be gone once I got a mac.  Never would I need to do the dreaded “wipe and reload” operation that I’d become used to in Windows.  The reality is, I’ve re-staged my Macbook about the same number of times (if not more) than I had originally done on Windows.

1. Bought a new Mac
2. Over the course of the first 6-8 months, downloaded every piece of Mac software I could find. Un-installing them left me with a clutter of junk in the “Library folder” for the dozens and dozens of apps I had removed. To clear this up permanently, I re-staged the computer.
3. About 6 months later, I wanted to try out the pre-release version of Boot-Camp that came with OS X 10.4.  Unfortunately after the previous re-installation I had chosen a “case-sensitive” file system — this doesn’t work well with Boot Camp.  I re-staged the computer.
4. When OS X 10.5 came out, I felt somewhat duty-bound to pick up the new release on it’s first day of RTM.  To put this on, I followed my policy with all OS updates (and the advice I had found online) which is to always start clean. I re-staged the computer.
5. I decided a few months later that I wanted to try dual-booting my computer with Windows and OS X 10.5, unfortunately I had filled up my 80 GB hard drive so much that the OS X couldn’t create a decent boot partition.  I re-staged the computer.
6. Several months later I bought a new 320 GB hard drive and promptly proceeded to load it into my Mac.  Since the Boot-camp thing wasn’t really working out anyway I decided this would be a great time to get a fresh start.  I re-staged the computer.

Over the 32 months since I’ve owned the Macbook, I’ve re-staged the machine five times.  That’s about once every 6 months give-or-take.  That’s a bit more often than my Windows machines annual re-load, but I figure two of them were due to my unfamiliarity with the Mac OS.  So three times in three years, I call that a draw.

Conclusion – Will my next computer be a Mac?
After looking at my Mac experience objectively for a couple of months as I’ve written this article on and off, I’ve come to two undeniable truths about how the Mac fits in to my life.

1. The Mac is an outstanding computer, that does nearly everything that I’ve ever needed it to.
2. For me, it isn’t worth the 30-40% premium over a comparable Windows-based notebook.

I really do love my Macbook, and I’m going to find a way to keep it running and in active service until it simply becomes too expensive to maintain (read: need to replace the battery, or a system component out of warranty).  But I also know that my next machine, which will be a replacement for the desktops in my basement will most likely be an off-the-shelf PC.  The vast majority of what I do on my computer is done on the Internet.  The applications I use on my Mac every single day are Firefox, Thunderbird, MSN, TweetDeck, TextPad and the CLI SSH client.  All of those applications are available on every single computer that I’ve ever used.  So when I buy the next system, the only decision for me as far as operating systems go, will be whether I buy Windows, or install the latest LTS edition of Ubuntu.

I was wanting to get some source control in place for a few of my personal projects.  I chose to go with Subversion for my source control server for a few reasons, not the least of which was that my hosting company supports auto-configuration of SVN repositories, so I was able to get that set up in just a couple of minutes.  That left me some time to contemplate how I would access the repository from the client.

I’m running Visual Studio 2008 on my development machine and this gives me the ability to use plugins for the IDE, a feature that is sadly missing from the express editions.  There were a couple of good options available for SVN plugins, VisualSVN which is the 800lb gorilla in this space, and the open-source option CollabNet’s AnkhSVN.  Given the fact that this was for personal exploration of the toolset, the open source (free) option was the obvious choice.

The setup for AnkhSVN was quick and painless, and when the IDE opened up it put options for source control right in the menus where they were nice and easy to find.  I created a project, and selected the “add to Subversion” checkbox, entered the necessary credentials and created the project in my SVN repository.

When in Visual Studio, the AnkhSVN controls are located on a tab at the bottom of the IDE, alongside other solution-wide functionality like the To-do list, output window etc.  This pane tracks all of the changes (adds, deletes and updates) that you’ve made to the solution files.  This is extra handy as a review when you’re ready to make your commits back to the repository.  By quickly scanning the list of changes you’re able to write solid commit comments to provide some decent documentation for you, or those who come after you.

I’m still relatively new to Subversion and AnkhSVN, but I’m looking forward to exploring them in more detail — maybe I’ll even do a podcast episode about it!

This past week I’ve gone back to the ASP.NET website and discovered that there is now a long list of tutorials which have been put in an order to help make the major features of the MVC framework more learnable, particularly for those of us who haven’t had that MVC-heavy comp-sci education.  The tutorials come in either written or video form (there is some overlap) and do provide some good step-by-step instructions for exploring the new methodology.

Expect me to get into more detail about the ins-and-outs of the MVC framework in upcoming editions of the new podcast (more details soon, I promise!!)

You can, of course, download and use the MVC framework with Visual Studio 2009 without the tutorials, but I would highly recommend giving the first few a once-over.  Have a look at the tutorial site and see what you think.

No operating system is perfect, they’re all designed by people and are full of flaws as a result.  It’s important to keep in mind that one of the reasons that Mac OS X has had precious few problems with viruses and other nasties is market share.

Writing viruses is much like sending out mailers for advertising your new business. The more people you reach with your message (or malware) the more people you’ll connect with (infect).

If you want to infect lots of people, you write your malware for Windows.

Five years ago the market share of the Mac was in around the 5% mark, meaning that if you wrote a virus for the mac and distributed it to 20 million computer users you’d infect 100 people (at a rate of 1 in 10,000). If you write for Windows and infect people at the same rate, you’ll infect 1900 people.

With the market share of the Mac increasing, so does the surface area for attacks. Many Mac owners have become complacent over the years believing that they are safe because they use a Mac. As a result the infection rates of Mac systems could be much higher than Windows-based PCs if malware authors decide to target the Mac platform.

Food for thought.

New iPod Nanos — No surprise here, at all.  Announced today, shipping sometime between now and Christmas, a return to the slimmer, sleeker design of the iPod nano.  The screen is much larger than the Gen 1 and Gen 2 nanos, and the ipod is now oval shaped (read: won’t sit flat on a table).  It also comes in about a dozen different colours.

“New” iPod Touches — Though not receiving anywere near the revision that the nanos did, the iPod touch now sports new side-mounted volume controls and a small external speaker.  Both of these will make the App-store games much more fun to play.  I’m sad that they’ve chosen not to integrate a microphone (though the exclusion was one of my predictions), the external volume controls will be a very handy new feature.  I wonder how hard they had to convince Jobs to abandon his “no buttons” policy?

Apple & NBC Kiss & Make up — Again, not a big surprise, NBC is returning to the iTunes store.  All your favourite syndicated NBC crap will once again be available in iTunes.  Meh…

iTunes 8 — The next version of iTunes is out, and it sports a fancy new “genius” feature whereby Apple takes a look at your listening habits and makes recommendations.  It’ll also build playlists for you.

iPod Touch / iPhone Software 2.1 — A revision of the software for the two fanciest iThings to hopefully fix the bugs and constant crashing that have plagued the devices (even 1st Gen iPhones / iPod Touches) since the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases.  I sure as hell hope it’s stable ’cause I’m planning to get a new iPod touch to replace the one that “disappeared” somewhere in the Minneapolis airport.

So there you have it.  5 things that actually did happen, to go along with the 5 that didn’t.

There’s been lots of ideas floated around, so I figured I should jump into the mix now before the news so I can call these predictions of things you definitely WON’T see

The iPod Touch with a built-in microphone and bluetooth — This would harshly cannibalize iPhone sales, particularly given the cost of iPhone data plans.

iTunes Music Subscriptions — People like to own their music. ’nuff said.

iPhone Revisions — Not a chance, with the 3G iPhone barely 3 months old, there’s no way that Apple can justify a revision already.  The backlash from iPhone early adopters last year will be a lesson.

The “MacBook Touch” — Even though a niche of Apple fans would love to see a Mac tablet to compete with all of the Windows based tablets out there, it just doesn’t make up a large enough piece of the overall computer market for Apple to try to carve out a piece.

Beatles Music in the iTunes Catalogue — Despite recent notions from some pundits that the Fab Four’s music will be part of the “Let’s Rock” announcement, there have been far too many false alarms for this to be the case.  Besides, the music is being remastered right now and will probably go through some kind of digital release next year once that’s done.

So there you have it, the five things you definitely won’t see at the Let’s Rock announcement.  Now we can sit back and see what the all things “i” maker will announce later today.

It’s been a long month but after a couple of early glitches and a fight between WordPress 2.6 and PodPress the first official episode of the AGP is out.

We all missed doing regular shows during the forced hiatus and it showed in the show.  There’s a lengthy out-take at the end of the show.  If you haven’t subscribed to the new feed yet, do it now! Either by RSS or through iTunes.

Due to the covoluted nature of my own school experience, I haven’t had much in the way of formal exposure to MVC concepts.  In fact it wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I first heard the term when we were rolling out a new Java framework at work.  This was a pretty major shift in direction for my team as we’d been using ASP.NET and webforms to do web application development for the past few years.

The transition hasn’t been an easy one.  Most of the folks involved in the project are new to the company, new to the working world in general and the training on MVC was at a minimum.  (I’m leading a team to replace that framework now, but I’ll talk more about this in some future posts.)

So over the past few months I’ve been reading posts by Scott Guthrie and listening to every episode of the Polymorphic Podcast that I can get my hands on.  The PMP in particular has proven to be an excellent resource for information relating to the ASP.NET MVC framework.  Craig Shoemaker regularly brings on guests who are experts in the field of .NET development and key players in development of the framework.

Over the next few months (in amongst my myriad other projects) I want to take a closer look at the MVC framework and see what all the hype is about.  I need to figure out how to get a decent windows development environment up and running.  For that I’m thinking about returning to a Boot Camp setup to give me a bigger boost when running my Windows environment locally on the Macbook.

Since my new role doesn’t involve a lot of development work, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands dirty again, and diving under the hood once again.

First, the before.  Click through to get a full view of the disaster that was my office.

In taking the opportunity to do the cleanup, I decided it was time to replace the small Ikea computer desk which had served me faithfully for about five years, but is just too small to accomodate all the gear that I use on a regular basis (podcasting setup, flat-panel, printer, server, etc. etc.).

To set up the new desk, I decided pretty early on that it wasn’t going to be another $149 Ikea special.  Though the products work well for me in most cases (judging by the amount of Ikea stuff in the house) it just isn’t rugged enough to go into my daily-abuse-cycle in my office.  No, I decided that I needed something stronger and more durable.

I also decided that I wanted to have a hand in designing and building my desk but at the same time put as little effort into it as possible.  I finally decided on a DIY geek project involving only three main components.

I picked up a couple of basic filing cabinets from a local office-supply store to make-up the legs of my desk.  The cabinets are two drawer letter-size (A4) filing cabinets which are about 29 inches in height, and 26 inches deep.  Long deep file drawers were a must, because I found a very special desk top.

The top of the desk came from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The ReStore sells donated building supplies to contractors and DIY-ers with all proceeds going to support the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.  The unit itself didn’t start out life as a desk, but as a door.  That’s right a door.  I picked up an eight foot by three foot door that sits proudly atop the two filing cabinets, and gives me a huge open expanse of desk top to store all my gear.

Surprisingly enough, within days of me devising this particular desk strategy, Knightwise did an episode of the Knightcast entitled “KC0013: A Geek’s Palace” in which he described an almost identical desk setup.  Nice to know I’m in good company.

So anyway, the office is much tidier, and my new workspace is working out brilliantly.  I now have sufficient room to spread out all my gear, and not have to sit a secondary keyboard on my lap if I need to access another computer.

The image above shows all the stuff in “the nerve centre”.  From left-to-right:

• Ubuntu Server (with my wife’s photo, box-o-batteries and 500GB WD MyBook)
• Keyboard and Mouse for the server (I don’t have a USB KVM yet…)
• Coasters from the Grasshopper
• Behringer XENYX-802 mixer (for podcasting)
• Behringer C-1 Condenser mic (also for podcasting)
• Labtec speakers (I’m too lazy to crawl down and look up the model number on the sub)
• Samsung SyncMaster 2253LW flat screen
• MS Natural Keyboard Pro
• RSA authentication fob for VPN at work
• Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse
• 13″ MacBook
• HP PSC (P.o.S?) All-in-one printer
• Obligatory tin of Altoids

So be good and organize your gear.  Get yourself a nice flat surface and get your geek on. 

In the house, we’ve got four computers running various editions of OS X and Windows.  What I’ve been looking for is a solution which would serve all these platforms seamlessly.

The first part of the project was to sift through the guts of all the computers that I had in my house and see if I could get something put together which would serve the duty of the home server.  The server needed to perform a few specific functions:

• Backup Server
• Web Server (LAMP)
• SFTP Server
• DNS Server

In addition, I may extend the capabilities of the server to include:

• VMWare Server
• TorrentFlux Client

With those requirements in mind I set about scrounging through the working, and not-so working hulks that I had laying around the basement.  I was able to come up with the following configuration:

• P4 1.5GHz
• 512MB DDR SDRAM
• 3 NICs (Onboard + 2 — will explain later)
• DVD Burner (just in case)
• 2x 80GB IDE Drives
• 1x 40GB IDE Drive

The first priority is to get some backups going for the house and get some of our data copied.  There were two priorities for the backup: seamless and automatic.   This last item is particularly important because as many experts have noted a backup is useless unless it will happen automatically for you.  If you have to think about it, you won’t do it.

After looking at the hardware configuration it was obvious I was going to need some additional storage.  2 80GB drives would hardly do to backup data from four separate computers.  So I picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook.

And with that the gear was complete.  Now all I had to do was image the franken-box with a copy of Hardy Heron and actually put it to use.

As these devices have made their way into our lives, the concept of convergence has helped them stick.  Two hundred years ago, the only way to communicate with someone was either in person, or by post.  Then came the invention of the telegraph.  This would allow someone to send a text-message to someone in another city by way of an electrical current.  Really, this was the predecessor to email, fax and text messaging.

Seventy years later, Alexander Graham Bell was busy working on a device to help his wife hear, and in the process managed to invent the telephone.  Imagine, being able to have a conversation with someone across the country much the way you would if they were sitting in the next room.  Before long these technologies began to make their way into every home in the Western world.  You could contact anyone, at home or at their place of business and speak to them directly.  The information age was upon us.

By the time I made my way on the scene in the early 1980s phones were commonplace, analog phones were beginning to give way to faster and higher-capacity digital phone systems.  With these came the advent of the modem — a device solely designed to translate analog telephone signals into digital signals for processing by a computer.  The age of the Internet was beginning.

This brings me to the 1990s and the start of my serious involvement with technology.  I was fascinated by the ability of computers to connect and talk to each other pretty early on.  Being able to exchange files with my friends via the local BBS was quite amazing to me at first, but soon became a primary method of communication (even if it did take an hour to download a file over ZMODEM on my 2400 baud modem!) for passing geekery, photos and games back and forth with a few friends who “got it” early on.

As technology continued to improve, so did my Internet experience.  We soon upgraded to a 56k modem which allowed us to download more than 20 times faster.  I could download the new 1.2MB Wolfenstein Demo (which wasn’t really new) in only several minutes.  But this really was only beginning, because a few short years later came ADSL.  This may have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

As things were progressing on the home Internet side of things, things were also progressing with my own personal communications.  By the mid-1990s (sometime between 56k and ADSL) I managed to convince my parents to buy me a cell phone.  A communications device of my very own.  We had tried to convince our parents to get us a second phone line, just for the kids.  Something they begrudgingly did as the Internet became more popular because, well, they couldn’t get or make a phone call after we came home in the evening.  But back to the cell phone, my first phone was what I liked to call the Motorola “Brick”.  I don’t know the exact model for it.  This phone lasted me for about three years and quickly became my constant companion.   This may also have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

When I speak of my technological dependence, I do so in the context of activities that I used to be able to do unassisted, but which now seem to require some sort of technological intervention.  Let me provide an example.  When I go to a large event, or even a shopping mall with friends or my family, often times we’ll split up and explore individual activities.  If one of us has forgotten their cell phone, or has managed to run out of batteries this tends to propose a rather large problem: how will we meet up later if I can’t call Jimmy on his cell phone?  In these instances I’m reminded that I haven’t always had a cell phone, and at some point in the past nobody did.  How did they manage to co-ordinate their activities?  Pre-arrange a meeting time with friends?  Wow.  What a concept.

In other cases the technological dependence has taken the shape of changes in the fundamental ways that we conduct certain activities.  For this example, I’ll employ an experience from a recent trip to the airport.  When checking in at the airport the airlines now have a vastly reduced number of check-in agents.  Why?  Because all they need to do now is check your bags and place a sticker on them.  Your boarding pass?  You deal with that at a computer terminal before you queue up.  Not handy with computers?  Well, you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.  The process is entirely computerized.  Add to this that all the security equipment is powered by computers and you’ve got a pretty technology dependent industry.  Never mind a power failure.  If there were to be a major failure in an airport’s computer network (border router failure, cable cut) it would put the entire airport out of commission until it was fixed.

In still other cases our dependence shows in our inability to follow the guidelines that technology gurus have been spouting for years.  The one that comes foremost to my mind is that of “Backup! Backup! Backup!”  The majority of people who use computers on a daily basis don’t back up their data regularly, if at all.  I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion, and have been remarkably fortunate with relatively few disastrous events though I’m far from immune to the data-loss syndrome.  Our lack of ability to simply copy and paste data into another location is astounding.  As with most things in life it’s the people who’ve had the most dire failures who tend to be the advocates for helping people to avoid future catastrophes, so considering their wealth of knowledge, why don’t we listen?

Now despite my deliberately negative slant on the first two examples of technological dependence, the news isn’t all bad.  Technological dependence is simply and indication of how society has developed technologies which are so useful that they’ve permeated the daily lives of billions of people around the globe.  What we need to do as a collective in the years and decades to come is to develop methods to keep the technology we use sustainable and mitigate failures of the technology so that only the most disastrous events could ever disrupt the service.  Some of these solutions will be high-tech solutions that will require investment in infrastructure or new product development.

For the airport example, and admittedly this is something that is probably already done to some degree, ensure that there are multiple points where a network connects to the outside world.  By ensuring that network infrastructure is made redundant and is kept as physically separate as possible, the airport can continue to operate with little or no time spent with systems being offline.  The same would apply for connections to the power grid.  Though simple in concept, a solution like this is relatively complex compared to those for some of the other problems I presented.

The backup problem represents trying to a fundamental behaviour in people: we’re lazy.  The only backup solutions that tend to work very effectively are those which are automated and which we don’t have to think about unless disaster strikes and we need to recover our data.  To solve this problem there are a few possibilities.  Backup services which with only a few clicks of the mouse we can connect to and have them store our data.  Easy enough for most people, and as long as you’re happy with your information sitting on some company’s servers this is a viable solution.  The second (and admittedly more complex solution) is to back up everything to an external hard drive and store that in another location.  This requires planning, forethought and at the very least a spare drawer in the desk in your office to store the drive offsite.  This also requires more up-front investment than the previous example, but doesn’t have any ongoing monthly charges.  In both cases the backup can be relatively automated and off your mind.

Let’s not forget about that pesky dead cellphone problem either.  There is one really easy solution for this one too.  Plan ahead.  Try it sometime, all the cool kids are doing it.  By agreeing on a predetermined time and place to meet up, you can avoid those nasty “Where’s Jimmy??” scenarios and save on precious cellphone minutes to boot!  Now if anyone raises their hand and says that “but I use my cell phone to tell time?  I can’t check the time if I don’t have my phone!” — I have two solutions for you, ask someone or build a sundial.  Oh wait; you probably need the internet access from your phone to get the sundial instructions off Google… scratch that.  The second solution is to bring your iPod.

Photo Credits: marcin wichary, lady madonna, rebelniko, alexmuse, kevin

Good morning Your Worships,

I’m writing this letter to you from the city of Boston where I’m currently on vacation.  The subject of this letter is also the service which is allowing me to send it; Boston’s first open-Wi-Fi project.  The city has partnered with local companies to provide free Wi-Fi access to residents and visitors of the city’s Faneuil Marketplace.

I would like to promote the idea of starting up a open Wi-Fi project in the Lower Mainland.  With the pending influx of international visitors to the region, providing an easy way for them to stay connected to their families and report back on their adventures in BC would cast a brilliant light on our ability to embrace new technologies and the region’s vision for the future.

While covering the entire region in time for the Olympics is hardly a feasible option, placing the free access in some key locations around the region could be both cost-effective, and provide basic access to a large number of people.

A couple of examples would be:
- Key Olympic Venues (GM Place, Skating Ovals etc.)
- Library Square, Vancouver
- Robson Square, Vancouver
- Pacific Center, Vancouver
- Metrotown, Burnaby
- Deer Lake Park, Burnaby

I know there was talk about placing Wi-Fi access points in Vancouver a few years ago, in fact I believe it was mentioned on Mayor Sullivan’s blog.  With the  coming international attention on the city, I feel this would be an excellent opportunity to showcase the region’s growing technology sector and to make the Olympic and Paralympic games that much more accessible to the world.

Thank you,

Keith Murray

That’s it!  I’ll let everyone know if I hear back from either Mayor.  It’s really windy, and I’ve chosen an outdoor location.  Time to run!

This is a move by the city of Boston which will help to improve the level of technological livability and help the local residents to take advantage of high-speed Internet access where they wouldn’t have necessarily had the opportunity in the past.  This got me to thinking about the situation with Wi-Fi access in the Lower Mainland.

Vancouver has no such municipally supported Wi-Fi efforts, despite some rumblings from the Mayor’s office a couple of years ago.  With the large influx of international visitors that will be descending on the city in the run up to the Olympic games in less than 21 months (642 days as of this writing) the city is in danger of becoming a technological relic.  Wi-Fi coverage in the city is rapidly improving, but it’s all being done by local businesses.  Private companies who are offering free access to the Internet to to their customers.  The problem is that these Wi-Fi networks are not standardized or linked in any way.  Though there are many places in the city that you can pick up a signal, you need to constantly re-connect as you move throughout the city.  This makes technologies like voice-over-IP inconvenient at best, and unmanageable at worst.

The City of New Westminster is once again evaluating the merits of city-wide Wi-Fi.  The issue was raised several years ago but never made it to council.  That delay has provided time for the city to learn from the successes and challenges experienced by other cities across North America and around the world.  Michael McQuillan recently published a piece on this discussion and notes that New Westminster’s small physical size make it an ideal candidate for a “mesh”-style Wi-Fi network.

Tomorrow I’m going to head down and try out Boston’s free Wi-Fi.  I’ll use it to send an email to Mayor Sullivan, and Mayor Corrigan of Burnaby to see if I can get their thoughts on municipally-supported Wi-Fi initiatives.

Here is an excerpt from the email sent to Canadian Jott users today:

In an effort to protect your privacy, most Canadian mobile providers have blocked caller ID information from being passed to toll free numbers. This leaves the alternative of using local access numbers across the country, so that everyone can send Jott messages without having to pay long distance fees.

Here are the new Canadian local numbers

I’ve been using Jott off and on for the past couple of months, and with the addition of local Canadian numbers, I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my GTD arsenal.

Though the battle is far from over with technology giants like Intel and Microsoft backing the Toshiba-led HD-DVD format.  Disney and Fox have both committed to the Blu-Ray format.  WB has been producing movies in both formats until now.  With the decision to move to the Blu-Ray format, this tilts the scales in the direction of the Sony-backed format quite significantly, particularly for movies.

One possibility we may see is Blu-Ray being adopted for movies, and HD-DVD being adopted for the video game industry, particularly given Microsoft’s support of the format in it’s XBox 360 console.

The video was done by Johnny Lee, now a quasi-famous Internet personality for a series of articles he’s done about Wii-hardware-related topics on YouTube.  The other two being Finger Tracking and the Multi-Touch Whiteboard.

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw]

The software for the demos are available from his website.  All of the PC development work has been done in C# using the Direct-X SDK and Visual C# Express (which I’ve blogged about before).

After seeing these videos I want a Wii more than ever.