Portmoak '11

I find it crazy that having just bought a flat and whilst still paying rent on a house I have spent the last week living in neither.

That said it's been a fun week away in Scotland. In terms of flying I've had better weeks up there, as we only got one day and an evening of ridgable flying weather, but it was still a fun holiday. Highlights were an hour in the club Discus, T19, on the Bishop and a bit of mutual flying with Michelle in a K-21.


Cludeo playing skills were also practiced, though not needed where damage to the Acro's trailer was concerned; it was the Reverend Bromley in the coach park with the Fox One trailer.

Completion!

Today I passed an important milestone; I have just completed on the purchase of my very own flat.

It's all happened very suddenly. Yes I kicked off the process months ago with a conversation with an independent financial advisor, really got things moving when I put in an offer for the flat I wanted, but until now it all seemed like stuff that would happen at some indeterminate time in the future.

That was until I picked the keys up this lunch time.


I will confess that I felt quite emotional when I found myself stood in my own home for the first time. That's what it's all about though; my home. For the last five years and especially for the last six months I have felt as though I haven't really had a home, just somewhere I have lived. I can stand in my bedroom, my office, my living room and feel the anticipation for all of the future scenes from my life that will unfold in this space.

Most of all I want to give my thanks to my grandparents without whose boundless generosity none of this would have been possible.

There's no plug for the bath, the paint on the walls has a nice singed effect going on above the storage heater and the previous occupant somehow managed to melt the handle for the grill in the oven. Bliss...

Tributes to XKCD

I've been a fan of the web comic XKCD for quite a while. Unfortunately as I did not have the required social skills to do computer science at university I often feel left out from some of the strips that hinge on computer geekery, my own specialisation being in aerospace engineering. That's why a year or two ago I found the need to translate a couple of the better known XKCD icons into engineering language.


A t-shirt I should get made

Why all engineers love running an ANSYS simulation

iPhone 4 antenna

There has been a lot said about the iPhone 4 and its antenna recently. As someone who has recently acquired one of these phones I feel that I should write a little bit about this issue and what I have experienced in the first week of using it.

For those of you who aren’t aware of this issue, the iPhone 4 uses parts of the metal band around the phone as its antenna. The story goes that if it is held in the left hand one of the gaps is bridged de-tuning the antenna and causing the phone to lose signal and drops calls. Not good.

The first thing I should say is that I was well aware of this antenna issue when I ordered the phone, who wouldn’t be with all the words flying on the internet, and in truth I was completely prepared for it to be a major issue. Why did I go ahead and buy it anyway? Well, after being absolutely delighted with my iPhone 3G, the first Apple product I ever bought after a previous eternal scepticism about all things Apple, I was quite keen on the idea of an upgrade, especially in light of all the new features the phone offered. Above all though, I have always kept my iPhone 3G in a case and had been expecting to get one for the replacement anyway, so embarrassing for Apple as it may be, the antenna was always going to be a non-issue for me.

Anyway, I got the phone home, plugged it in, and laboriously transferred everything across from my previous phone (I think I had to click the mouse twice). With my new phone set up to be exactly like my previous phone, I unplugged and had a play.

The phone was showing 4 bars of signal so, curious, I tried clamping my hand over the infamous gap in the steel band on the lower left hand corner of the  phone. It took a few seconds, but yes the reported signal strength steadily dropped from four bars down to just one. I took my hand off and sure enough, the indicator rose steadily back up to 4 bars.

Next I switched on the speed test app, a useful device for testing just how much our broadband company are overselling their pitiful broadband services, and with the wi-fi turned off sure enough I saw a dramatic difference in speeds depending on whether my hand was on the device. Videos of both of these effects are of course all over the net, so my phone clearly isn’t unusual.

Oh well, I thought, time to buy a case.

Or was it? As I didn’t feel like spending the extra £5 on postage ordering online a case that was already overpriced - sadly the true for all mobile phone cases. I decided to wait and just buy one the next time I was near an Apple store. As a result of this I have found myself using my iPhone au naturel so to speak for the last week, and this is where the plot thickens.

The odd thing is that the apparent reporting of the “bars” and speed test app doesn’t seem to reflect itself in the way the rest of the phone works. Where I’m sat right now speed test actually times out and reads big fat zeroes for both upload and download speeds when my hand is in the wrong place. However, safari still happily loads web pages, facebook works absolutely fine, texts still transmit, and I’ve had absolutely no trouble at all with the phone dropping calls.

The other weird thing is that no matter what the signal to start with, strong or weak, bridging the gap never seems to cut off the signal.

Now, it seems to me that something is definitely happening when the gap in the antenna band is bridged, there can be no doubt about that, but what? Is it really as crippling as some people would have me think? Apparently not. Apple have of course come out with their usual propaganda saying that this is just a software issue relating to how the “bars” are calculated. “Bars” do not really exist and they are just arbitrarily calculated by the phone’s software to show when signal strength is, say, between 0% and 15%; the range 15%-100% all being “5 bars”. I’m sure that there is an element of truth in this, but it doesn’t explain everything; the speed test results for example.

What this all has to boil down to is my experience of actually using an iPhone 4 for the last week, and that has been very unlike what the all the internet hype would seem to suggest. Of course, the Apple-haters have been all too happy to dance in delight that Apple finally made a real mistake for them to talk about, the media have all covered this story, and there have been anecdotes all over the internet. I, however, fail to see what all the fuss is about. I am actually holding one of these things in my hand and it is working well.

The iPhone 4 is an awesome piece of kit and I am really enjoying owning one.

To make my point, I have posted this blog entry from my iPhone 4, over the phone network, with my hand firmly clamped over the gap in the antenna.

Coast to Coast '10

Holiday time! Once again this year our summer holiday has been cycle touring. Just a week this year, so we planned a route across the spine of the UK that took in all the best of Cumbria, Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. We started at Windermere, made our way west to the coast at St Bees, then headed east and north taking in Bassenthwaite Lake, Hadrian's Wall, Kielder Water, Berwick-upon-Tweed and Lindisfarne Island on the East coast.

Over 6 days of cycling we covered over 300 road miles. We also took a day off to walk the wall from Housesteads fort all the way to The Twice Brewed Inn and then the museum at Vindolanda. All in all an excellent holiday!


Yours truly posing on the beach at St Bees

Rosie setting the pace on one of the quiet back roads we took to climb out of the Lake District

Rosie poses on Hadrian's wall

Arriving to find queuing traffic at Lindisfarne Causeway

Lindisfarne Mead!

I can definitely recommend cycle touring as the best way to truly experience the places you visit. During this holiday I lost count of the number of people who, when we showed up on our bikes, wanted to know where our car was. So many people are so dependant on their cars, and yet I find that travelling these sorts of distances without one is a very liberating experience.

Now, where we will be cycling next summer?

The evils of the iPhone

As my friends will doubtless be able to testify to I am a big fan of the iPhone. Being a fan of the iPhone often leaves one open to accusations of being a fanboy who has been duped into buying something that is over-hyped, and of course inevitably leads to lectures on the evils of the iPhone. Here are the common arguments, and my answers to them.



1. "The iPhone doesn't run flash."

Only people who don't own an iPhone seem to think this is a problem. I guess if you wanted to access video sites like YouTube, Veoh, BBC iPlayer... oh wait, no, those all work on the iPhone, either through a free app or a non-flash mobile page.

There are flash games on the internet, true, but by the nature of flash none of those are really designed for a touch screen interface or to be viewed on a mobile phone screen anyway. Why not just spend 50p on a decent game that actually fits the screen and uses the phone's accelerometers and multi-touch interface? There are also free games in the app store if you don't mind the odd advert - just like flash game websites.

After videos and games the only thing left is those annoying flickering adverts. Oh no! My phone browser won't display them!

Flash is not an open standard anyway, it is closed and owned by Adobe. The iPhone does support and run all the common open standards for video and other web content like MPEG, Java, HTML5, etc. It is in Apple's interest, as a minority player in computing, to promote such universal standards.

2. "The iPhone is chained to iTunes."

I think the iPhone is best thought of as an iPod that's also a phone. This is because all of the data resides on the parent computer, and is synchronized when the phone is connected to it. This makes it very easy to choose what content is on the phone and automates the whole process. Music (with cover artwork), video, pictures, applications, calendars, contact details, notes, basically everything on the phone, is backed up and copied across with minimal effort.

There are some huge advantages to this philosophy. For example, new podcast episodes are automatically added and old ones deleted. If you lose or wipe your phone you haven't lost your data.

Software updates also come through iTunes and are installed with just a click.

In my opinion the iTunes connection is a good thing.

3. "There's no way to manage files on the iPhone."

You don't have to manage files on the iPhone because everything is done automatically; this saves hours of faffing. Why do you want to waste your time pushing all your jpegs and mp3s around into folders? With the iPhone you just tick what folders you want to sync in iTunes and press go.

4. "But I want to use my phone as a mobile disk. The iPhone is useless because it won't let me do that."

Okay, so you want to carry around a USB cable around with you just in case you want to plug your phone into any computer you want to get files off? What's wrong with a flash memory stick? I have one, cost me £20, very small, lives in my wallet. Much easier.

5. "The iPhone has no removable storage."

I have had had several phones with removable storage cards. Such phones inevitably come with cheap, low capacity, memory cards which admittedly makes the phone seem cheaper to buy. Having subsequently bought a high capacity card for such phones I have never once changed the card from then on - because all the phone's files are on it! I do not not know anybody who has changed cards in mid use.

Most anti-iPhoners argue that they want "the option" to remove the storage. Most do not use this option on their existing phones where it does exist, and those that do are a tiny minority of phone users.

The iPhone's memory is built in and cannot be changed. This means that there is no confusion as to where, say, application and music files are. The easy sync with iTunes wouldn't work if the phone's memory could be changed during use, so I think losing the ability to remove the storage is quite an acceptable tradeoff.

6. "The iPhone has no removable battery."

The iPhone's battery is built in and cannot be removed. Here, again, we are into the "I want the option" territory. I have been told by people that they want "the option" to pop a couple of spare batteries in their bag if they're going on holiday - presumably to antarctica where there are no wall or car cigarette lighter sockets.

I have never met anybody who owns spare batteries for their phone, or indeed carries around spare phone batteries with them. I certainly never have either. It's an option that nobody ever really uses. Don't forget that making things like batteries and memory removable also requires infrastructure inside the phone making it heavier and bulkier for the same level of performance. In my opinion Apple have made a good tradeoff.

For that tiny minority of people who do want to be able to top up their phone on the go there are relatively compact external battery packs available for the iPhone that will charge it up again several times. Apple, or several 3rd parties, also offer the service of replacing worn out internal batteries if that's ever needed.

7. "The iPhone cannot multitask."

Every iPhone from day one has been able to multitask. The OS is constantly managing wireless connections, checking email, running alarms, calendars, etc. It can also play the iPod app's music in the background. What's that if not multitasking?!

What anti-iPhoners mean when they say the iPhone "can't multitask" is that up until now the iPhone has been unable to run multiple third party applications concurrently. The trouble with running multiple applications at the same time on a phone is that it runs the battery down very quickly and can impact on performance of the foreground application. Multitasking is easy to implement but it's very difficult to do this well.

Apple's solution until now has been to restrict the phone to running one 3rd party application at a time - there is, after all, only one small screen anyway. iPhone OS4, which will be released this summer, will allow 3rd party apps to run in the background and in a much more efficient way than on any other phone operating system. We will then hopefully cease to hear whinging about the iPhone's lack of true multitasking.

8. "But I want to run a messenger app or facebook in the background."

Apple's solution to the most common multitasking problem, ie wanting to have something like MSN or facebook in the background, is actually a much more elegant solution than simply running the app on the phone.

Run a messanger app or facebook feed application on a phone that does support multitasking and that application will be running on the phone, periodically contacting the server to see if there's new information. This all uses power.

The iPhone has something called the "push notification server", which is provided by Apple as part of the app store and doesn't require any tinkering to set up. It is possible to close the messenger app on the phone completely, whilst instead the server, not the phone, stays logged in to the messenger service. If anyone sends a message to the user, the server receives it and then pushes it as a notification to the phone telling the user that there is a message waiting. The user then fires up the messenger app, which takes all of about 2 seconds, reads the full message, and can answer. This means the user can be online continuously with barely any use of power or processing power. I think it's a much better way of doing things!

9. "The iPhone is expensive."

Fair. You get what you pay for though. It's not much more expensive than the Google Android equivalent phones - the Nexus One or HTC desire, especially after you've also bought a sensibly sized memory card.

10. "The iPhone will only take applications from the Apple app store. This is a bad thing and kills bunnies."

Yes, without jailbreaking at least, the iPhone will only run applications from the app store. This restricts the unfortunate iPhone user to the mere 185,000 apps that Apple have approved.

There are plenty of good things about the app store. It is a highly effective distribution system that allows professional and amateur application developers to write and distribute software easily and get paid for their efforts. It also means that theoretically none of the programs that one can legitimately download and run on an iPhone is going to do anything Malicious as they've all been checked and approved.

Perhaps in principle Apple's monopoly of iPhone software through the app store is not 100% good and perhaps in time users will be able to get iPhone software from other sources. This is not, however, an issue that manifests itself to the man in a street holding an iPhone.

10. "The iPhone is made by Apple. Apple = bad."

This is really the usual argument being put forward, if under the guise of one or more of the above, and the most likely reason why any true anti-iPhoner will not be swayed by what I've written.

Apple = bad. Playing in a loop inside their heads.

This is why, to them, the iPhone is a totally flawed concept, but the Nexus One or HTC desire are the best thing since sliced bread. (Err, it's the same form factor and the same interface guys!)

Apple are a company. They are interested in selling their products and increasing their market share. So are Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Dell, HTC and indeed any other company that makes computer software or hardware. Any company behaves in ways that are both "good" and "bad" to the outsider's eyes. What really matters is what the product does and how well it does it.

Apple believe in vertical integration - their software running on their hardware - and they believe in selling products that are of the best quality and targeted at the average user, priced accordingly. That's their niche in the market. If their products are "locked down" it's not out of some huge conspiracy it's simply because doing so makes them more suited to the people they are designed for.

These conspiracy theories are often wild and illogical anyway. For example I've heard people claim that Apple are "anti-developer", which is presumably why the full suite of software development tools for OS.X and iPhone are available for free from their website!

The average motorist doesn't want to have to strip down and clean their engine very 1,000 miles. That's the final word here; the iPhone isn't designed for a geeky minority who enjoy opening up the bonnet and tinkering with every aspect of their techno-toys, it is designed for the majority of users who want something that does awesome things without that fuss.

In conclusion

There is no doubt that the iPhone was and still is a game changing device. It has set the bar for a new generation of smart phones and brought many new technologies to the marketplace. I am glad that there are imitators like the Nexus One out there because it provides the incentive for Apple to innovate as they continue to evolve the iPhone concept.

There are many myths about the iPhone perpetuated by a very small but vocal minority of technophiles, mostly born from the discord stemming from the fact that the iPhone isn't really designed for them. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the way in which people who are not hugely technologically savvy will tend to listen to such people and, whilst not understanding the myths, get a bad feeling about the iPhone and be discouraged from getting something that is incredibly sound and better suited to them.

At the end of the day the iPhone is a superb, highly capable, easy to use, and incredibly reliable device. I wish that the nay-sayers would at least acknowledge that, even if they don't think it is for them, but I guess that's just wishful thinking on my part.

Portmoak '10

Once again Rosie and I have spent a week up in Scotland doing some rather enjoyable gliding and other shenanigans. The Scottish Gliding Club at Portmoak were once again very graceful hosts to the universities easter soaring week, and a good time was had by all.


My pictures from the week are in my web gallery here.