A geeky Yule

So, I had a very pleasant Yule with Pat & Julie* out in deepest darkest Brentwood, home of Amstrad. The only other time I've ever been there was to visit the home of a client of mine, many years back, a chap who put me on to a once quite significant client of mine - now, alas, part of Banque Paribas, so well-supplied with in-house support. IIRC he was a friend of an ex of tamaranth's. Oh what a tangled web we weave...

So today, it was off to twistedanimator's place in Leytonstone to build more PCs for her. She has a disused kit pile like you would not believe. So far, from her junk pile, I've assembled 2 Athlon64 3500+ machines with 2GB of RAM each, both with 256MB graphics cards and about 100G of disk. I am hoping that machine #3 will be an Athlon FX55 with SLI graphics. It should be a screamer, if I can get it working!

Oh, and on top of that, I've upgraded her Mac from 1G to 3G of RAM and scrounged a new 256MB graphics card for nolley's PC. And there's still enough kit left over for one kick-ass PC, 2 or 3 pretty good ones and a couple of basic boxes. Plokta cabal, eat your heart out. This is seriously superfluous tech.

She also feeds me enormous and excellent meals every time I visit. (Even when Pat turns up having forgotten to bring the food.) And pays, too, albeit at a special much-reduced "mate rate"! :-) (So if you would feel guilty asking for large-scale stuff as a mere favour but are prepared to pay a modest amount, give me a shout. I'm charging ¹/₄ of my normal going day rate, FWIW.)

For all your Flash-animated dragon needs, and indeed general dragon-themed artwork ones, too, go check out Animation Arthouse. (I believe she even does non-flying-mythical-lizard stuff, too.)

I also had entertainment getting a little Quake 3 LAN going between Pat & Julie's Everquest machines. (Like Twistedanimator, they are sensible types, who do actual work on Macs but have PCs for gaming.) Julie had never played Quake before and she whupped my ass but good - first to 20 frags in the first match, no worries. I stopped trying to play nice after I got about 10 frags down and still lost. I won the 2nd match by 1 measly frag and it was hard work. If this is her first time, we may have the next Fatal1ty here, folks!

Alas Pat refused to let me get the iMac involved as well. :-p

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* Alex, my apologies if this upsets you. :-(

[Geek] Kaizen

Kaizen: Continuous incremental improvement of an activity to eliminate waste.

Spent some time chez pmcmurray playing with my phone on his Wifi LAN, which I originally built for him in sunny Walthamstow. The phone, courtesy of dougs and before that from autopope, is an Orange SPV500 (alias O2 XDA Pro, alias T-Mobile MDA Pro, or something like that.) I also used my netBook occasionally, too. They're both good travelling tools: small, light, solid-state, fast enough for what they do, silent and with relatively enormous battery lives.

Interesting that the phone (HTC Universal, AKA Qtek 9000) and the netBook (strictly, a 7Book, i.e., a Series 7 with a netBook ROM DIMM) share a number of design features: StrongARM-family CPU, clamshell design, miniature QWERTY keyboard, 640*480 VGA-res colour LCD, expansion via solid-state cards, wireless networking and infrared, ROM-based OS designed for usage on the move & sync to a PC, including limited file compatibility, and so on.

Yet the late-1990s netBook is in almost every way a better, cleaner, simpler design, with a more flexible and pleasant UI. The WinMob device, despite more than twice the speed, nearly 10x the memory and far more functionality - phone, Bluetooth, integral Wifi, still camera + video camera and so on - feels cobbled-together and very poorly designed and integrated. I adore its functionality - it's a smartphone, camera, MP3 player and usable WLAN Web terminal - but boy does the implementation suck! I had heard that Windows Mobile 5 was finally getting reasonably polished. Yeccch! If this is the polished, refined, 5th-generation product, I really hate to imagine what its rougher predecessors were like! It's appalling!

Understand, I'm not criticizing the form factor of the phone. A subnotebook-sized cell phone would be very silly. I'd rather it was more like a Nokia Communicator in size and shape, to be honest, but even so, its tiny keyboard is utterly dreadful, with a remarkable profusion of design cock-ups. The hotkey to launch IE is right next to the tiny space bar, so every few words you type, you flip into the web browser by mistake. There are no "<" and ">" characters. There's no Control key, so you can't cut/copy/paste, but there are irritating hotkeys for IE, messaging, contacts and other apps built right into the main alphabetic cluster. The separate camera key doesn't open the camera app automatically. There are 2 pairs of make/break call buttons, which screams thoughtless design. And of course you can't use them to enter the phone app or to return to the home screen, as I could on my Symbian phone.

The simplest change would be to move the app hotkeys onto the screen fascia, in accordance with standard handheld PC design. Oh, and bin the duplicate call/hang up keys, while moving the dedicated buttons on the hinge to somewhere accessible with the machine open or closed. There's lots of wasted space around the edge of the screen it would get them out of the alpha cluster, and with the space thus freed up, the keyboard could gain a Control key, a right Shift key, maybe even an Alt key and a right-mouse-button key like a real Windows machine, and still be more spacious and better laid-out!

While I'm at it, the rocker button duplicates the functions of the cursor keys and "OK" key. (Sometimes you hit Enter to select, sometimes "OK". They're different. Hit OK in the wrong place, it closes the app. Only the [X] in the corner doesn't really close the app, it just puts it into the background.)

But no, honest, it's Windows. If you know desktop Windows, you can work this. Yeah, right.

And with all this, the smartphone has about half the battery life of the Psion, with a big fat extended battery fitted.

So much for progress, eh?