Although this site isn’t really geared to reviewing products, a recent new software release did catch my eye. Balsamiq’s Mockup, is a really interesting product, not just because it solves a real need, but also because, as far as I know, it’s the first commercial application that is built using Adobe’s Air platform. Air is a way of leveraging web applications, be they a combination of HTML, Ajax, Flash or Flex, the latter two, also being Adobe products. What’s so neat about Air, is that it is cross platform, allowing the developer to deploy the application to Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, all using a single file.

Whilst Air is relatively new, there’s no shortage of applications available. Twirl and Snitter act as desktop clients for the popular social website Twitter. Similarly the Pownce file exchange website also has a client written in Air. There are also a whole host of other applications that do anything from serving up the latest music videos, to a better way to handle your auctions with the eBay client. Finally there lots of neat utilities and goofy programs, like Shrink-O-Matic a batch image resizer and FotoBooth, a great way of taking snapshots at your PC and automatically uploading them to your Flickr account.

OK, so Balsamiq’s Mockup is indeed an Air application, but as I said before it’s the first commercial Air application I’ve come across. This is the thing that first caught my eye, but the second thing was the application itself. As a programmer, I’ve designed user interfaces for desktop, hand held and web applications. This is usually done with a few quick scribbled sketches. When I’ve need something a little more professional, I’ve thrown together some mockups using the design interface of the compiler I’ve selected for the project, be it VB.NET, Delphi or ASP.NET. The problem with these mockups are that they are either not really of a high enough quality to wave in front of a client, or they are so good, the client sometimes doesn’t consider these as mockups, they think of these as the blueprints for the final project, which can open a huge can of worms later in the project.

Balsamiq’s Mockup, is a system created to design mockups, in a way that’s way better than most scribbled efforts and conceptual enough, that the client doesn’t get hung up on the black and white of the design. I’ve got a few projects that will certainly benefit of this approach, but for this overview, wanted to pick on something that isn’t going to give away any of my ideas. What better way than throwing together a quick mock up of Google’s Gmail web email service. As this is just a quick mock up, I’ve taken a few liberties here and there, but it’s very easy to see that my primitive version is functionally very similar.

There is quite a selection of controls, GUI elements and markup images that you can paste onto the screen. The first hump is getting acquainted with them. When doing the Gmail example, I’d say about half of the time was spent looking for the right element to mimic Gmail’s functionality. The first limitation I found that there was no easy way to replicate the checkbox element. It would have been great to be able to do n lines of text and have a check box appear before each line, this wasn’t possible, so I had to create a new check box for each line of supposed email. It was then that my system began to act a little sluggish. Upon looking at the load on the CPU, the software was taking between 5 and 10% of processor, which seemed a little high. Also high was the among of allocated memory, a whopping 150megabytes. The system I did the majority of testing on, is a little long in the tooth now, but still packs a 2.6 gigahertz processor and 1 gig of ram. Things further complicated, when I exited the software and tried to relaunch, only to find the software icon in the task bar, but the software nowhere to be seen. I ended up right clicking on the icon in the task bar and then selecting restore, I then did the same again, but this time selected maximize and the software again appeared in all its glory. I have a funny feeling this was not a problem with the mock up software, as from this point on, everything ran smoothly and checking the processes again revealed a more healthy 3% of processor usage and 40 megabytes of memory allocated, but I’ve never has this problem before. The only other real niggle I had, was the inability to import an image for use in your mockup. I appreciate that this is all meant to be pretty much conceptual, but there is nothing nicer for a client, than seeing their own logos on a mock up. I’m sure this is something that will be rectified with future releases.

Once my mockup was complete I exported it as a PNG file and once actioned it exported instantly. While I appreciate the simplicity of this approach, I much prefer being asked where I want to save it and also what I want to call it. This also happened when I exported the mock up itself, which is saved in XML format, again here I would have preferred a unique file suffix, like .bmu or something similar, but that really because I have so many different XML file for other things.

The more I play with this software the more I find to like. Placing the page elements and changing their settings is very straightforward. Upon clicking on each element, a separate floating design form appears, allowing you to position and change the things that are available to change. While I like the simplicity of the colouring, i.e. black and white, I would have liked to be able to change the colours of the elements, for the more demanding client. This really is small potatoes,

While I only tested the standalone desktop version of the software, it is also available for various collaborative platforms, including Confluence and Jira, and coming soon for Twiki.

Here’s a five minute video that outlines the features of Balsamiq’s Mockup, produced by Balsamiq themselves.

Conclusion : If you ever create mock ups for software or websites, this is an excellent piece of software, which will save you time and blushes when the client sees your next mockup. At $79 it is reasonably priced and will surely pay for itself in very short time.

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I’m not usually one to jump into a conflict, but sometimes it’s too much of an effort, trying not to bite my lip. Jeff Attwood is a respected blogger and programmer, who now write professionally. His blog Coding Horror is one of my essential blog reads, because it’s sometimes thought provoking, interesting and entertaining. Aside from his blog, Jeff has also created a startup called StackOverflow, along with Joel Spolsky another respected blogger and programmer, which at present is in early development, but has a highly entertaining podcast, detailing the goings on, in both their startup and tech stuff, more specifically programming in general.

During this podcast, there has been discussion between Jeff and Joel regarding the computer language ‘C’. Joel think it’s an important language for all developers to learn and Jeff thinks the opposite. This debate has popped up a few times and to be honest I never really thought much about it, although I do have my own views on the subject. Anyway Jeff was taken to task, by another blogger Alastair Rankine, within a blog post, taking Jeff to task on a few things. This is an except of what he wrote :

“In a recent podcast, Atwood disclosed recently that he had never learned C, one of my developer essentials. To me, this revelation is a profound hit to his credibility; it is like finding out that the chef who cooked your meal is a robot with no sense of taste or smell.”

This statement really got my back up. While I tend to agree, that the more computer languages you learn the better, I’ve never dictated to anyone that they should learn a specific one. Yes some languages are better suited to certain tasks, but to say a developer has to learn ‘C’ is ridiculous. Learning more than one computer language, often helps you understand new concepts and allows you to think through problems from different perspectives. I’ve been a professional programmer for over 20 years, programming for fun longer than that.

In all that time I’ve learned and actively used many computer languages including various dialects of Basic (PureBasic, VB.NET, VB) and xBase (Clipper, FoxPro, dBase, Force), Pascal (Delphi), Python, Ruby, many different hardware proprietary languages and many more I’ve now forgotten. I tried many years ago to pick up ‘C’, trying Zortech which later morphed into Zorland C and also Borland’s Turbo C, but just couldn’t get into it. From this list you’ll see that I’m primarily a high level language programmer, so picking up ‘C’ is very alien, as what takes a few lines in a high level language, often takes many, many more in ‘C’. Admittedly ‘C’ does have it’s place. Many assembly language programmers find ‘C’ a breath of fresh air. If you’ve ever programmed at this lowest level, you’ll know why, but they both share a common trait in that they allow the programmers to talk to the hardware at a very low level. This low level isn’t something I’ve ever really needed, as I primarily write bespoke applications that are database dependent.

To say ‘C’ is a number 1 essential for a developer to learn, which Alastair does on one of his postings is crazy. I’ve been programming 20 years and never learned ‘C’, does that make me a bad programmer? Does that make someone who does know ‘C’ a better programmer than me? To me a good developer is someone who is constantly learning. Yes I may pick up ‘C’ and dust off the cobwebs and I may learn many of the new languages bursting forth on the development scene. Developing is a constant, evolving field and one in which ‘C’ may or may not have a place, for me at least.

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All too often people are quick to criticise, but slow, or fail to praise companies when they have a good experience. I purchased a laptop computer back in July of last year, after my 5 year old laptop started to look and perform a little long in the tooth. My old laptop was an HP, and while it was showing it’s age, it has performed very well and in fact had probably been used more than my desktop computer, also an HP. So when it was time to purchase a new laptop, it wasn’t a difficult decision on which I should buy.

Before moving on, I’d like to point out that I’m not a total HP fan boy. At work we use Dell computers, which are also excellent. I even looked at the Dell site, but what starts off as a really cheap laptop, soon turns into an expensive one, once you add on the things you really need. I also get very frustrated with their insistence on breaking computers down into those intended for home/soho, mid size and large businesses. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll buy the computer that does what I want it to do, regardless of how Dell classify them. In fact I recently purchased a computer for the company, which was classified as a home machine, purely because it had the combination of horse power, both CPU and graphics, memory and cost.

So anyway, I purchased my computer from FutureShop, which is one of several big box stores here in Canada. As always I declined the extended warranty, as I a) think it’s a bit of a rip off and b) why is it that stores seem to think that it’s OK to wash their hands of clients after 14 days? I remember, and not too long ago when you could take your equipment back to the store right up to the day the year expired, and even then some stores would, at their discretion still fix problems, if it was within their means.

Where was I, oh yes, I bought my shiny new HP Pavilion DV9408 17″ laptop from FutureShop. I seem to favour them for some reason, even though they are owned by BestBuy, one of the other larger shopping options. All was good with the world until the beginning of this month, when all of a sudden my laptop failed to connect to my home network. I tried a multitude of things, like removing and re-installing the drivers, trying new drivers and trolling message groups, but could not get my laptop to recognise the network card. Finally I called HP technical support and they got me to try a few things, but to no avail. I have to admit, I get a little frustrated with technical support, mainly because, as I’m in the computer industry, I’m usually several steps ahead of them. I don’t mean that to sound conceited, it’s just when they ask you questions like “have you tried switching the wireless off and on?”, well I’m sure you know what I mean, but I’m sure it’s on their tech support script. Finally the tech support guy said it needed to go back to HP. Fortunately for me, it still had two months left on it’s warranty. HP sent an empty box with packaging via UPS and a return label. The UPS guy offered to wait, while I packaged it up, but I wanted to take my time, to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

My laptop was picked up on a Tuesday and by the following Wednesday it was back in my hands, just over a week later. The thing that amazed me, was that according to the slip enclosed with the laptop, they repaired or replace the DVD drive, the LCD bezel, the system board, the network card, both lid hinges and a couple of other things. This surprised me, as the network card is easily accessible via a flap on the underside of the laptop, so either, the network card wasn’t the original source of the problem, or HP took the opportunity to replace or fix a few things that they knew had problems. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’m just thankful to have my laptop back.

So from beginning to end, HP’s service has been excellent. The laptop as well, I have to say, is very good, although it would be nice to have an extra gig or so of memory, which machines now, with a similar spec come with, for the same price.

So what’s the point of this article. Nothing really, other than to recognise a company that obviously cares about their customers. So my laptop is now hunky dory, now time to sort out my digital camera, which has a problem with the zoom and view finder and only a month left on the warranty. Can you hear me Canon, I’m heading your way next!

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I’ve been a big Microsoft fan over the years. I worked my way through numerous versions of DOS and then Windows. I’ve probably at one time or another played with a fair chunk of Microsoft’s other released technologies and while I’ve not been a huge fan of some of them, I could see that they at least made sense to some.

I first came to Windows via version 2. I played around with it for a bit, but quickly came to the conclusion, that while it had some neat features, it was pretty much useless. Remember this is when DOS and text based user interfaces were king. It wasn’t until I joined a design firm, using Aldus PageMaker, under Windows 2.11, that I could finally see that maybe there was something to Windows after all.

Windows wasn’t my introduction to GUI interfaces. I previously used Digital Research’s GEM and their Ventura desktop publishing system, which I have to say was amazing for it’s time. The thing that killed Ventura was it’s slow conversion to Windows, but that’s a whole different story.

While Windows 3 was a huge leap over version 2, it wasn’t until Windows 95, that all the stars aligned and the operating system was really ready for everyday computer users. Windows 98, further refined things, but Windows ME however, well lets just not go there. Running almost in parallel was a new operating system, co-developed by Microsoft and IBM called OS/2. This was going to be the next big thing in operating systems, however Microsoft and IBM had a falling out. IBM continued to push OS/2, while Microsoft concentrated on their new OS, Windows NT, taking a lot of what they’d learned with OS/2.

With Windows NT, Windows finally had the reliability that was sorely needed. Windows NT, turned into Windows 2000 and suddenly more and more everyday users and developers, where using this as their primary operating system. When Microsoft decided to overhaul their consumer operating system, they ditched the 16 bit code base of Windows 3 and instead used the 32 bit code base of Windows NT, to produce the new and much improved Windows XP. This wasn’t without it’s headaches, as is not surprising, but within a year or so, Windows XP was rock solid and instead of having to reboot my machine 8 or 9 times a day, could leave my machine on and count the reboots during a month on one hand, and even these were usually because some piece of software wanted me to reboot to complete an install.

So life with Windows XP was grand. Finally Windows was fast, reliable and a joy to use. Admittedly Microsoft couldn’t rest on it’s laurels and they certainly didn’t shirk away from throwing resources at their next generation operating system, which went by the code name, Longhorn, or what we know now as Windows Vista.

Vista has been long anticipated, but the final version has really failed to live up to expectations and I say this from experience. Vista launched in January of 2007 and I have to be honest, from what I’d learned in the press, felt no compelling reason to upgrade from Windows XP. I did however finally get my hands on Vista when I purchased a new laptop, 10 months ago, so comments here are not without personal experience.

The first thing that I have to say, is that the user interface is really nice, or should I say prettier than XP. It’s still however not a patch on the Mac’s. I’m not a Mac convert by any means. I can remember swearing to my kids, that a Mac would never enter our household. My stance softened considerably when Apple launched their new operating system, OS X, an OS with it’s roots firmly in BSD, a variant of Unix. But what most caught my eye, was the gorgeous user interface (UI), something for which Apple is now well known. When Apple decided to ditch the PowerPC processors in favor of Intel, that raised the Mac to a whole new level.

Vista has come a long way in making their operating system look sexy, but it comes at a considerable cost. My laptop is not underpowered by any means, but when rated by Windows, the machine gets a pathetic 2.4 out of 5 for the Windows Experience Index. When you look at the breakdown of this score, it’s plain to see that the weak link is the graphics card, which in this case is a nVidia 650, so not a complete pile of junk. Fortunately although the new interface is nice, it does begin to get in the way. Being a Windows developer, I’m immersed in various user interfaces all the time. With Vista, it’s all fluff and no substance. Turning off all these niceties, left me with a system, with noticeably more pep.

After using Vista for 10 months, I have had my fair share of problems. Buying a new machine, at least all of the hardware has worked off the bat. It’s the day to day usage that I’ve noticed the most problems. One of the biggest bug bears is the machine sometimes just freezes while it decides what it wants to do next, this is something that just drives me crazy. Also copying files around my home network can be unbelievable slow, even though all devices are 100mbit compliant. I’ve even suffered a few BSODs or Blue Screen of Death, a screen I haven’t seen on my home machines since Windows 98. One of the other real pains I’ve had, is trying to write a regular music CD.

Things improved somewhat with the release of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1. However, while the service pack is a weighty download, you’d be hard pressed to see any differences in your machine after the install is complete. I’m never sure if the machine feels a little more robust, or whether it’s my subconscious thinking “It’s a service pack, it must be better”. I do still have the occasional BSOD, and after the last one, my internal wireless network card has failed. Yes this could be a total coincidence, but it’s another nail in the feel good factor.

Much has been written about the pros (mmm, I’ll need to think hard about that one) and the cons, of which there have been many. In my mind though, it boils down to this. If you receive Vista with a new PC or laptop purchase, there’s no real cause for concern, unless you have a lot of legacy hardware, you also want to use with the machine, like printers, scanners, etc. Also if you are a high end gamer, XP is apparently somewhat faster with certain games. For software, I haven’t noticed any real incompatibilities. I do have one quirk with a particular piece of development software, which creates GUI and console apps. The console apps, I am unable to expand to full screen. This isn’t a real problem, as most of the people I send the resulting software too, are all on XP, so no biggie. There also were a few pieces of development software that performed oddly, but these were pretty quickly patched, soon after Vista was first released and now work fine.

Much is being written about the demise, or rather cessation of support by Microsoft of their Windows XP operating system. I don’t think even Microsoft have the ability to kill this one stone dead. While many people are getting Vista with their new computers, the majority of people I know are sticking with Windows XP for their existing machines and choosing not to upgrade. I don’t see this situation changing any time soon, but with the new Windows 7 operating system on the horizon (currently slated for 2010, but maybe sooner), I think we’ll look back and compare Vista with Windows ME, which worked pretty well on the hardware on which it was sold, but stunk to high heaven on the majority of machines that were updated.

Before signing off, I cannot fail to mention the numerous version of Windows vista available. With Windows XP, all was relatively straightforward. You had Windows XP Home and Professional. Apart from the bundling of IIS IInternet Information Server) on Professional, there was not much to differentiate between the two. There are also several versions of the Server variant of Windows, but this is not really geared towards the masses, so it’s safe to overlook them here. With Windows Vista, there are 4 consumer versions, Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate and Business. The cheapest version Home Basic is a whacking $199.95 USD, with the update weighing in at $99.95 USD, which is horrendous, for a fairly crippled version of Windows. The Ultimate version is a massive $319.95 USD and the update is $219.95 USD. Yes all of these prices are recommended retails, so you can hunt around online for a better deal. In comparison, for the Apple Mac, OSX Leopard comes in one consumer intended version and costs just $129 USD. Life is just so much simpler.

So bottom line, if you are currently using Vista, and have no qualms, all is well and good. If you are using Windows XP, I can see no real reason to update to Vista.

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I don’t have any form of real-time virus, spyware or firewall protection on my main computers at home, other than the basic firewall capabilities of my Dlink router, which serves up wireless connectivity to my laptops, PocketPC and Wii. In all these years I’ve never had a virus or spyware problem. When my wife’s laptop decided to bite the dust, my main laptop, which is in the living room, became something of a communal laptop, used by my wife, daughter and me. Over the course of a month or so, the laptop was getting slower and slower, which was driving my wife crackers. Finally I decided to do some spring cleaning to try to get the laptop to it’s former speed demon status. The laptop in question is only 8 months old, which means it’s main OS is Vista. I’ve already written before on my Vista experiences, so won’t bore you here, but having Vista seemed to be a particular problem in vanquishing the evil peril that lurked beneath.

My first attempt at making the laptop faster, had me pruning files, defragmenting the hard disk and trying various other odds and sods, but something told me, there was a greater problem at hand. In the past Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, has been a tool I’ve turned to, to determine if there was something untoward installed on my machines. I downloaded the latest version, 2007 and sure enough once the software had done it’s snooping, it determined that I was infected by the Virtumonde spyware virus. I let Ad-Aware try to remove the virus and although it reported the virus was gone, upon rebooting, I knew it was still infesting my machine. This virus is a bugger to get rid of as it infects the explorer process and reinfects the host. Once I found out I had the Virtumonde virus, I tried many of the freely available spam busting programs, but to no avail. Ad-Aware now even refused to admit that the virus was still present, after telling me, it had been vanquished. I was now beginning to get really annoyed and a little frustrated,

After doing a bit of research on the Internet, I was able to manually confirm that I was indeed still being plagued by Virtumonde. I brought up MSConfig and looked at the programs in my startup list. Sure enough there were two programs on the startup list that I did not recognise. These two programs are just two of the pseudonyms used by the virus to hide it’s identity. Some of the popular program names are “MS Juan”, “cmds”, and “MSSERVER”. To further confirm these programs roots, they were all set to run from a temporary directory on my laptop, a directory that is linked to the primary user account on the laptop, in this case “colboy”. So the command line for the virus looks something like this ‘rundll32 “c:\Users\colboy\AppData\local\temp\mrkocaef.dll”,run’, the DLL being some random kind of file name. Now using MSConfig, I can just de-select these pesky programs and life is good again, er not quite so fast. I did this, rebooted and found that the files had been added once again to the startup program list. In fact it’s worse than that. I could deselect the programs, exit MSConfig, go back into MSConfig and the programs had again risen from the ashes. The reason for this, as mention previously, is because the main Virtumonde virus, attaches itself to the Explorer process, the one that it an integral part of Windows. As soon as the virus sees the settings in the registry being removed, it regenerates them. Unable to find a software tool to remove the virus and unable to remove it manually, I decided to grin my teeth and bare it for a little while. I even toyed with the idea of just re-formatting everything and at the same time downgrading to Windows XP, but decided I really only wanted to do that as a last resort.

Anyway a few days passed and I finally had a splash of inspiration. Would I have a better chance of removing the virus, if I was in Safe Mode. Safe Mode is a way of running Vista, and indeed former versions of Windows, whereby a limited amount of functionality is enabled. With Windows 95 and 98, Safe Mode was usually enforced after Windows crashed or blue screened for whatever reason. You usually had to reboot into Safe mode, to allow Windows a chance to fix itself. I decided to go one stage more primitive by going into Safe Mode with Command Line, thinking this would give me a a pure console/DOS screen.

You get into Safe Mode, by pressing the [F8] key usually just after you switch your machine on, after the machine reports it’s BIOS settings and tells you the keys required to enter the BIOS setup. I usually press [F8] every second or so, until I get the screen asking me what form of Windows I want to boot. Here I select Safe Mode with Command Line. Once boot up has completed, you get a basic background and a console window, although this looked slightly different to the command line safe mode I’d used before in prior versions of Windows. The first thing I wanted to do, was remove everything in the temporary directory associated with my user login. This is the same directory in which those DLL files were being run from when I checked using MSConfig. I did this by typing:

cd \users\colboy\appdata\local\temp
del *.* /s/f/q

This deletes all files in the currently selected directory, and all sub directories, including read only files, without asking for confirmation. Please bare in mind this directory name will differ depending on the path reported in MSConfig. I ran the delete command a couple of times, just to make sure nothing was missed, as I will still asked confirmation on some files. Now all the files were vanquished, I was about to reboot, but thought I’d see if MSConfig would run in this primitive safe mode. As luck would have it, it did, so I ensured the commands flagged to run at startup, were no longer checked, not that it would have made much difference, seeing as the DLL’s were no longer there, but liked to do this just for completeness.

I rebooted my machine and lo and behold, Virtumonde was but a distant memory. I am a little perturbed that Windows Vista’s Defender didn’t prevent the infection, but now at least I know how to get rid of Virtumonde if it returns, as now do you. Any questions on this process, don’t hesitate to post a comment or email me. Please also remember all these steps are repeated at your own risk. It worked for me, and should work for you just fine, but you never know how these things mutant and change over time.

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There’s been much buzz and anticipation surrounding Google’s unconfirmed, online storage service nicknamed by the media as G Drive. The idea however is far from new. There’s been software available to connect an FTP site as a local drive for years, however it’s always been kind of clunky and signing up for a hosting account at $10 per month or more, just to access a few files is most of the time overkill for many users. I’ve been looking at backup solutions, to allow me to keep off-site and safe, around 50 gigabytes of data. In investigating one of the options, I found an interesting use, which matches the functionality offered by the so far nonexistent G Drive. This option comes in the form of one of Amazon’s web services, in particular S3 and a piece of freely available software.

S3 was launched a year or so ago and in one fail swoop, revolutionised the online data storage market. There had been services like this before, but Amazon took a hard look at what was offered and made theirs vastly cheaper, with an API that was easy to build systems atop. To give you some figures, you can store 1 gigabyte of information for the paltry amount of 0.15 cents per month. On top of this, there are usage / bandwidth charges, so this really works well for one way storage, i.e. backups, but needs to be used with careful consideration when used as a method of media distribution. Animoto, the photo service that turns your digital photographs into professional slideshow videos, uses the service to distribute the final video, which can be as large as 30 megabytes or more.

Anyway I’ll be covering online backup in more detail in a separate article, but when looking at Amazon’s S3 service, I needed something that would allow easy transfer of files to and from their servers. Jungle Disk was something I’d toyed with a while back, but then was a little flaky. Now it works rather well. As I mentioned before, it’s not so much backing up I want to concentrate on in this article, but rather providing universal access to files in a central storage area. Jungle Disk is a conduit for Amazon’s S3 service and has the great feature of allowing you to map a directory or bucket as Amazon calls them, to a local drive. I write lots of articles and reviews and previously stored all my stuff on Google’s word processing service, which allowed me access to my files from anywhere. My hosting service is painfully slow when editing via Wordpress, so I’ve been using one of the many standalone blogging applications. This however means I have to cut and paste reviews from Google to the application and then back again, if I am not ready to post the article. This becomes quite a bind and ends up being mostly unmanageable.

With Jungle Disk and Amazon S3, I now map a remote folder / bucket to my local U: drive (or drive of your choice, if it’s free) and can save and load to my hearts content. If I don’t finish an article, I can edit from anywhere where this setup is installed, in my case the office, my home desktop and home laptop, giving them all the same U: drive. It works surprisingly well. In my case I’m using a pittance of storage space, so would imagine my billing would be around 0.15 to 0.20 per month, if that.

There are many other similar types of services, XDrive from AOL being one of them. With XDrive however I find their software both unwieldy and unreliable. My laptop was forever having problems connecting, which means it’s just not a viable solution for me. It does however give you 5 gigabytes of storage for free, so may be something to look into, as it may just work for you. Jungle Disk on the other hand is a small 1.7 megabyte download and appears to use a paltry 2 megabytes of memory once installed. It works and works well., which is good enough for me. Remember however you will need to sign up for Amazon’s S3 service before being able to use Jungle Disk.

For serious users who want to use S3 for backing up large amounts of data, Jungle Disk can also help. It also has some additional paid features which help in moving large amounts of data and also a meagre $1 per month service which gives you even more features, including web access. There are clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s even possible to run the client via a USB flash drive, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

For me however, S3 and Jungle Disk solve a need I’ve been having for a while. I now have a mapped U: drive on all the computers I use and can happily save and load data between them, for use in many applications. It is worth warning however, that while data transfer is fairly quick, assuming you have good network connectivity, it will not be something on which you would want to edit audio, video or large files where they are accessed a chunk at a time. For most documents, spreadsheets, images, etc, it should prove more than useful.

It will be interesting to see what Google’s G Drive offers, when or indeed if it launches. Until then S3 in conjunction with Jungle Disk is for me the perfect solution.

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Everyday I pour over many web pages and blogs. Now and then something smacks me as a great idea and today it came from Mark Cuban, “The Album is Dead…“. Cuban rode the first Internet wave and is now doing quite nicely thank you very much. As the current owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, he’s certainly no shrinking violet. Indeed with his recent appearance on Dancing with the Stars, there are many more people who know his face, that didn’t previously. However it’s his blog, which I’ve been reading for about 6 months, that I find most interesting.

Today Cuban put forward the idea of serialised music, whereby an artist defines say n songs as a season of tracks. The artist would release a new song every 2 or 3 weeks, until the season commitment is complete. Each track would cost say 99c and you could potentially sign up to the artist’s or tracks RSS feed to receive information on new tracks from the season, or tracks that are either similar to the track you bought, or recommendations, a la Amazon, where you are told what other people purchased, who also bought that track. Add an easy way to purchase the music and I think you have a killer idea.

Admittedly this really hinges on the tracks being able to stand up on their own. You can’t just release a crap track, just because you have a commitment. Far better to have quite a few in the can, or an albums worth under you belt.

Jonathan Coulton did something similar with “Thing of the Week”, RSS feed here, where he released one track every week for a year, although he chose not to charge for each of the tracks… at the time. You can now buy these as individual tracks or split into 4 albums. Some of these tracks were probably better off left in the virtual garbage bin, but on the whole, Jonathon came up with some great stuff. I particularly like his cover of the Beatles, “I Will”

It’s an exciting time for the music industry. With DRM becoming a thing of the past, it’s ideas like this that will drive the industry forward. Now Cuban has no interest in dipping his toe in the music world, which is a shame. With a little support and the right partner, I’m sure this could be a killer idea. How about it Mark?

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I have to say I just don’t get it. Whilst Facebook is the current “in” thing, I just find it a total waste of time. Admittedly, it is a great way to catch up with people from your past, but once that link is made, I don’t want to send virtual hugs and gifts or play with any of the other myriad of time wasting toys. Call me a killjoy if you want, but I have much better things to do with my time.

With current estimated market valuations topping the $15bn mark, this is one instance where I think there is a quick buck to be made, but an even greater loss waiting to greet potential investors. With rumours of Google wanting to muscle in on the social network space, it will only take a modicum of success to frighten the willies out of speculative Facebook investors. Google has already tried once to enter this space with their homegrown Orkut service, which is apparently really popular in Brasil, but I’ve always had the feeling that they’ve never quite put their weight behind it. If that were to change with a second prong of attack, it could result in an all out war.

Even more interesting is the recent investment by Microsoft, which apparently Google was also looking to tie up. Although Microsoft have bought themselves a paltry piece of the pie, expect Facebook to get devoured should the competition heat up. It will be a bloody battle, with the only winner being the original investors of Facebook, who will be laughing all the way to the bank.

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People have childhood heroes for many different reasons. For me, not surprisingly, these mostly gravitate around the computer sector. I probably owe my career to Clive Sinclair, who’s ZX80 advert in a computer magazine, in the school library, caused me to lust, like only an 11 year old boy can. This lead to me gaining a shiny new ZX81, and becoming the first person in the school to own a computer. In fact I think I got my computer, before our school got theirs, but that could be just a bit of romantic thinking.

Another hero of mine, is Jeff Minter, the man behind Llamasoft, the wonderfully “different” thinking games company. Jeff earned a legion of fans for his Commodore Vic20 and Commodore 64 games, that included GridRunner, Matrix, Attack of the Mutant Camels, to name but a few. I never got into these earlier games, as I had a Sinclair Spectrum, but I played them as I worked in a computer games shop, when they originally came out.

As home computer became more powerful, the amount of releases slowed, but man did the quality increase. It was when I got my Atari ST, that I became reintroduced to Jeff’s work, via Super GridRunner. That game to me, should have made it as a full blown arcade game. Llamatron, was also another excellent release, taking Eugene Jarvis’ original Robotron and giving a huge shot in the arm, like only Jeff can do. After I sold my Atari ST (albeit without these great games), I pretty much lost touch with Llamasoft. That was until I purloined an Atari Jaguar console, from Dixon’s, who where selling them off for (searches personal databanks) £29.95. Within a week of getting the Jag, I kept hearing people mention Tempest 2000, as the must have game besides Doom. Indeed Tempest 2000 was a work of art, but Atari was all but doomed and Jeff admits himself that the other game he did for, Defender 2000, was more Atari’s vision than his.

After Atari vanished from the computing scene, Jeff pottered around, doing a number of things, that would never see the light of day, the Nuon being a case in point, but all the while his skills were being honed. In 2002, I think it was, Jeff released both Deflex and Hover Bovver 2 for the Pocket PC. While Hover Bovver 2 was a remake of his Commodore 64 classic, Deflex was a Minterisation of another gaming style, done several times before, but never quite this well. I actually purchased both of these games and enjoyed them a lot.

More recently there was another project called Unity I think it was, which was to be released by Lionhead Studios, headed by Peter Molyneux, more famous for Populous and Black and White. Unfortunately this project was cancelled towards the end of 2004. Jeff resurfaced, surprisingly enough at Microsoft, where his expertise in visualisation technologies, is fully utilised on the XBox 360, with a piece of software called Neon. I think this project, must be very satisfying for Jeff, as he has had a very interesting history with releasing lightsynth/visualisation software, but surely none of them has had quite the exposure that Neon has, coming as part of every XBox 360.

And so we come to present day. Jeff has continued his ties with the Xbox by releasing Space Giraffes via the Microsoft Live Arcade. For just $5 you can get an awsome game, that has all the Minter hallmarks. Based loosly on Tempest, Space Giraffes, takes visualisation, sound and gameplay to a whole new level. I have to admit, I’ve only seen demos and videos, but this is surely a compelling reason to extend my console collection, to include and XBox 360.

So what prompted me to post this. Well the thing is, I found the following video via Chime.tv :

and all those old memories came flooding back. This is a similar presentation to one that was done a few years ago, which I downloaded from a Llamasoft fan page, of which I can’t remember. I realised what an incredible programmer Jeff was, and what a huge legacy he already has. Now he’s found a pseudo home at Microsoft, I’m hoping to see a lot more creative and innovative games. I just wish he would port some stuff across to the PC. Yes there are a few older PC shareware games, but they are DOS based and I’ve only had limited luck getting them to work on todays modern computers.

Thanks Jeff, here’s looking to an exciting future.

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OK, so maybe the title of this entry is a bit on the duff side, but all the other alternatives I came up with, were either even worse, or could be misconstrued as offensive. Now that’s laid a shaky foundation, the only way to go is up, right?

Let me first say, reviewing movies is not something that I’m going to be doing a lot here. The only reason I’m doing this, is that sometimes it’s great to be taken aback, when all your expectations are pretty much shattered. The movie in question is “Hairspray”. a remake of the original John Walters, 1988 classic. I’d never seen the original, but I knew it wasn’t my kind of movie, or so I thought. When my wife suggested the recent remake, as a movie to see on our recent date night, I pretty much dismissed it out of hand. When I realised she wasn’t joking, I pretty much had that standard defence, “OK, you can pick the movie this time and I’ll pick it the next”. Usually we compromise and choose movies we both can live with.

We got to the cinema early, to pick up our tickets, with me secretly wishing they were sold-out, which was pretty unlikely, seeing as the movie came out in July. Sitting down to watch the movie, we ended up with a couple of girls behind us, in a pretty much empty screening. Incessant, giggling and kicking the backs of our seats, nearly resulted in me getting up and laying down the law for the rest of the movie. I needn’t have worried, within minutes of the movie, they must have got lost in the movie, because I didn’t have cause for concern for the rest of the movie.

I can’t go on with this review without mentioning newcomer Nikki Blonsky, the previously unknown actress, but undoubted star of the movie. Within moments of appearing, she electrifies the screen with her performance. It’s so abundantly clear that she’s enjoying herself and her confidence exudes from every pore.

Every macho inch of my being, tried hard to hate this film. It wasn’t my kind of film. I don’t like musicals. Camp is definitely not my thing. All of these things and more were constantly bombarding my subconscious, but to no avail. In spite of everything I couldn’t help but like and indeed enjoy this movie. My wife raved, telling me she wanted to get the movie when it came out and also the soundtrack. The soundtrack for me, was what really holds this movie together. The songs are very in keeping with the 1962 setting and are in keeping with the scenes and settings throughout. Not once did I ever think, this song sucks, or is too long.

As well as the relative unknown (not for long) Nikki Blonksy, the film boasts a whole host of stars, including Christopher Walken, Jerry Stiller, Amanda Bynes, Zac Effron and the inimitable john Travolta, looking like, well John Travolta in a drag. I understand John Travlota’s role is in keeping with the original movie, with the part being played then, by professional drag artists Divine, but for me there was something lacking, which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Amanda Bynes also, while playing the perfect airhead, just didn’t gel with the rest of the cast, but these are really minor quibbles and don’t get in the way of the movie at all.

So why am I writing this? I think mainly to say, don’t let your preconceptions cloud your judgment. Sometimes it’s better to be open minded and be pleasantly surprised by a movie, than to go and watch the same old action / horror / sci-fi brain dead movies.

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