So, I was a little out with my estimates in one of my previous posts.  Cable & Wireless has finally published the prices of their (still to be) upgraded broadband service. The good news is that the prices are lower than I thought it would be:

2Mb:  £24.99

4Mb:  £49.99

8Mb:  £79.99

The bad news is that this is still far more expensive that offerings from the UK.  Also, the standard that the Guernsey is being upgraded to should be able to support 8Mb download and 1Mb upload, however the 8Mb Pro service has an upload limit of 768Kb.  I make that 25% below what it could be.

I’m sure lots of people will be saying “better late than never” but is this really enough of an offering to keep us competitive in the current digital climate?  I wonder what the (not so) wonderful OUR has to say about it?

Last night was my TeamCity presentation for the GSDF.  This was my first proper presentation since about 8 years ago at university.  I feel it went alright but I have identified some room for improvement for future presentations.

Hopefully those that attended will have an idea for the features that TeamCity offers and will go away and try and convince their companies that it is the way to go.  If not then it might at least get them looking into continuous integration solutions for their teams.

The presentations are now available online in various formats:

• Keynote (key) - 348KB
• Flash (swf) - 952KB
• PowerPoint (ppt) - 620KB
• Acrobat (PDF) - 544KB

Tomorrow evening, Tuesday 22nd April, I’m going to be giving a talk for Guernsey Software Developer Forum (GSDF) on TeamCity, a continuous integration system from JetBrains.  The talk will take place at the offices of Rawlinson & Hunter, Trafalgar Court, 3rd Floor, West Wing, St Peter Port, Guernsey at 6pm.  I have posted a map and plan of the office on the GSDF forum.

This is the first time I have done a presentation since my first year at university.  I’ve finished putting together my slides and I’m just taking a short break from putting together a demonstration on using the system.  Hopefully I’ve prepared enough and will be able to convince even just one or two people that this is a good system to switch to, or even that they should be using continuous integration in the first place.

After the presentation I will be making the slides available online and I might even record a screencast if I can find (free) software to do it on a Mac.  If you’re in the area tomorrow come along.  It’s a free event and open to all.

I’m about two thirds of the way though this book now having started it in February - I’m a slow reader ok - and I just wanted to make a few notes about it.  What I’m looking for in books at the moment is something that mixes together techie-sci-fi-fantasy set in an almost believable real world.  I’m not looking for futuristic sci-fi or fantasy set in another realm.

Having exhausted my stock of un-read books I turned to Waterstones, whilst I was in the UK, to provide my next read and what I found was Spirits in the Wires.  This book is definitely one that I’m enjoying reading, although it has taken me a while to get into it.  The author, Charles de Lint, has taken the approach of writing each chapter from a different characters perspective.  So through out the book you’re seeing the same continuing timeline from differing angles.

This is a new approach for me and possibly why I’m so slow at reading it, every time I pick up the book I have to flick back to the beginning of the chapter to remind me which character the current perspective is from.

The core idea of the book is about websites taking on a spirit & life of their own as more and more people visit (worship) those sites.  Whilst this is not something I believe in at the moment, I can one day see a time when system become intelligent enough and gather together enough information to become sentient and free roaming.  It probably wont happen in my life time but I’m certain it will happen one day.

Spirit in the Wire seems to me to be a cross between some of Cory Doctorows ideas and Tad Williams’ Otherland and his War of the Flowers.  If you like either of those you’ll probably enjoy this book.  And in fact, speak of Tad Williams, I’ve finally bought his second book in the Shadowmarh series.

I’ve just noticed that Evernote.com appears to be using Amazons S3 storage service.  It is certainly using it for the desktop application downloads so it is only natural to assume that they’re using it for the main application data storage.

It seems to be the current trend for start-ups to be using third party storage services such as Amazons service.  By using a service like this the startups can benefit in several ways, no storage hardware overheads. Whilst disk drives are cheap providing a robust backup and fail-over infrastructure is not.  Also, having all the heavy weight lifting-and-shifting down by Amazon will reduce the bandwidth costs for the startup.

Of course this sort of service comes at a cost, the question is whether the cost of the service is less than the cost of setting up and maintaining your own systems.  For a startup such as Evernote.com I’m guess the Amazon services would win without a contest.

As with all things there is a downside to using a storage service:  you’re at the mercy of Amazon for data access.  If their servers go offline all you can do is wait for them to restore service, there’s no shouting at your own techs to get the backup server online.

P.s.  Any chance of an early preview version of the MacOS dektop client?

I see from the Evernote blog that they now have support for IE7. I’m assuming that given the fact both desktop and mobile clients released so far have been for Windows and that IE is the second browser (after Firefox) to be officially supported, they are probably primarily a Windows based development company. Either that or they can astute enough to realise that Windows offers the largest user base.

This seems to go against the grain of most Web2.0 startups that seem to favour the [assumed] more tech savvy users of Linux and MacOS.

I was surprised, however, to see that they are running on Apache Tomcat, a Java based web server and development platform. From the look and feel of the application I would have said it had more of a ruby-on-rails feel about it. They do seem to be using a real hodge-podge diverse range of technologies though, the main app is Java, the front/about site is PHP (and I’m disappointed to see that it’s PHP 4.4.0 - come on guys PHP4 support is going to be dropped soon) and the blog is perl powered TypePad.

I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad sign, all I know is that I’m impressed with it so far and I can’t wait to get a desktop interface to run on my MacBook Pro and a J2ME interface for my mobile

One of the really neat features of Google Maps that I use quite often is the ability to alter driving directions if you don’t like the given results.  I’ve just written up my recent trip to the UK on my R1200GS and one of the features of the site is having a map displaying the route for the trip.

Doing a simple driving directions gives the basic route that I took but it doesn’t include the wrong turns and deviations that I made.  In Google Earth the only way to change a given route is to manually modify the line, which  take hours.  With Google Maps I can modify the route to take account of these deviations but it doesn’t allow you to save the changes… unless you know Google-Fu!!!

It turn out the url to view a Google Map is also the same url used by the Google Maps API to access kml files.  The process to save a modified route to kml is as follows:

1. Get the basic driving directions
2. Modify the route as you wish.
3. Click the Link to this page link.
4. Copy the email/IM link.
5. Paste link back into your browser address bar.
6. Add &output=kml to the end of the url & hit enter/go.
7. Save the kml wherever you wish.

After coming back from a biking holiday in the UK last week, I went out for a ride with Shane on Sunday. One of the place we went was Pleinmont where he shot some video of me riding my BMW R1200GS on a track. It’s not terribly exciting as there isn’t much in the way of knarrly off-roading in Guernsey but it is a start.

The whole video was recorded in 4 (I think) takes and was expertly pieced together by Shane. You can watch the video on our bike adventure site - RideAround.net or on our YouTube channel.

Also, I writing up my notes from my holiday last week and will be posting that on RideAround.net as a mini series in the next couple of days.

Have you ever wondered what day Easter is going to fall on?  Well so have I.  Wikipedia has been my source of this information for the last few years but it only gives you the date for the next 15 years or so.  What if you want to know when is the next time Easter is going to fall on March 23rd? (2160)

Having found a formula for calculating the date I threw together a spreadsheet and did a fill down.  Did you know that in the year 3000 Easter Sunday is going to be on April 13th?  That’s assuming Easter is still celebrated, the Gregorian calendar is still used or that humans still exist.

What’s more, I have been kind enough to publish this formula and data (until 3176 - until someone asks for more) on Google Spreadsheets at the following url:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=prVVEmxcBM2cS0KU6TrF7cA

At some point I may add other useful associated dates to the spreadsheet, such as Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday.

For some strange reason I appear to be second entry on Google.co.uk for the search “first day of lent 2008” because of  my previous post about lent (from 2005).

The first day of lent in 2008 will be from Ash Wednesday on 6th February until Holy Saturday on March 22nd, inclusive.  Most people will probably be unaware that lent does not, traditionally include the lent.

The last week of Lent is known as Holy week and, traditionally, there is no church bell ringing within that week.  There has been some debate as to whether ringing is allowed on Holy Saturday, however this is often because it gets confused with Easter Saturday, which is the Saturday after Easter Sunday.

Also, just in case you are interested, the dates of lent for next year (2009) are February 25th to April 28th inclusive.