Michael Henley

Two weeks to part I finals; It’s the (almost) final countdown. Despite this looming deadline I’m still finding time to do a bit of blogging. Actually, looking back at my archives it seems that there is a noticeable upturn in my output during times like this. Rather than being a student, scraping by on doing things last minute and waking late, frequently with a hangover I am working solidly most days in an effort to make this degree decent. I haven’t so much as sipped wine in weeks. Madness.

Since I received an iPad at Christmas I have used it almost exclusively as my portable computer. I can write at a decent speed on it now (~70wpm according to some sources) and the weight is a huge positive over my obese 15″ MBP. This has come with some downsides and I think in a few weeks when I have a bit more time I will properly consider the trade-offs that I’ve made to make this work.

Blogging is something that I have always struggled with on mobile devices. In no small part this is because of the WordPress iOS app, which is frankly shocking. Now I know it is completely done by contributors and all that, but needing to write links in HTML is bad enough on a normal keyboard. On the iPad virtual one it’s just painful. Until recently I hadn’t really explored a way around this. Then a little while ago David pointed out Writing Kit as a general purpose Markdown editor for the iPad.

I have been playing with Writing Kit for a few days and I really like it. The extra toolbar makes writing the syntax easy, which given the way the iOS keyboard is arranged would otherwise be a little stilted. I can write and preview a post in the app and then export the HTML straight to the clipboard for import into the WordPress app. Finally I drop in images using the WordPress app and I’m ready to post. Simples.

There’s a lot more to Writing Kit than just this, but it’s the main purpose I have given to it. Absolutely check it out. It’s worth the £2.99

I have been thinking about how I should write this post for a few days now, and also been waiting for an (as yet unreplied to) support ticket to go through.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that shortly after installing Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro I made a big mistake. After seeing that the Snow Leopard drivers allowed me to read and write to my internal HFS+ volume I plugged in my two WD MyBook Studio external drives to see if I could also read them. They didn’t mount so I popped into Disk Management and was asked what partition table they were using. ‘Simple’, I thought. They are GUID so I selected this and clicked ok. Then things went wrong. The drives came online but disk management showed them both as being unformatted. This was when I started to panic. Still hoping that this was Windows being silly I rebooted into OS X, only to be presented with two dialogs, one for each drive, saying that they were unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize, ignore, or eject. Now I start to panic. Disk Utility shows them as two partitionless drives.

Backups?

Ok, so I try to be pretty sensible about my backup policy. My MacBook Pro’s internal drive mirrors to a partition on one of the effected drive each night with SuperDuper!. Due to size issues however I keep my Aperture library on one of the external drives, with a vault on the other. My theory went that with this in place, and the most likely failures being a physical one on only one of the drives, my most important things kept on these would be safe. I admit that I never planned for both drives dying at the same time. Very very foolish on my part I know but I simply can’t afford to buy another set of 1TB and 500GB drives to image the external ones to. This seemed like the best solution.

Getting some data back:

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed out by the prospect of losing my largeish collection of photos from Aperture, many of which I haven’t put on Flickr for quite a while. There was also a collection of install images which generally come in quite useful along with some other bits and pieces. Basically I wanted/needed to get a lot of this back. Working on the principle that it was just the file tables which had been nuked I set to work trying out a couple of file recovery solutions. After scouring some blogs and support forums I found Boomerang Data Recovery Solutions. I ran the trial version of BoomDRS on the 500GB and was pretty damn happy to see it reporting the three partitions on the drive and detailing file sizes and names along with complete directory structure. I smiled for the first time in a few days. I knew that two of the partitions didn’t need recovering as one was an image of my internal drive which I could remake and the other was a copy of the OS X install DVD expanded to a partition which again I could remake.

Boomerang charge based on the amount you want to recover. This is where my problems with them began but I didn’t know it yet. I paid my £99 for a 1TB allowance (which I couldn’t really afford, but I digress…) and waited. Paying via paypal means you have to send your payment through a third-party called 2checkout. They take your money and then do fraud checks. After you have used paypal. This holds up the whole process for a day or so while they waste time. Once they finally release the order to Boomerang you get your activation code. I proceeded to begin the recovery to a third volume I labelled ‘Lifeboat’. My files began to reappear including the Aperture vault. To say I was happy would be an understatement.

After running for a few hours the folders I selected from the 500GB drive were all back. Boomerang were my new most favourite software company. Once I had repartitioned the 500GB drive and it was restored to its former glory I turned my attention to the 1TB drive. However every time I ran the scans from the Boomerang application on this drive it would crash. This happened regardless of the type of scan I tried to run. The support ticket I submitted including the crash report has not been responded to whilst they promise a response within 72 hours.

So I am sat here with ~850GB of unused recovery, a drive which I can’t use, and data still missing. Admittedly this data isn’t mission-critical. Mainly DVD ripped movies and TV shows along with the virtual hard drive for a Win 7 RC1 VirtualBox installation I had set up. I would rather not lose it but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So I am torn. I have the most important data back thanks to the boomerang software and for that I am really happy and wouldn’t mind recommending them, but they have treated me as a customer pretty badly. I have extra usage which I can’t use thanks to their application crashing and no response to my support enquiry. I think if as a company you are taking this much money off people then you owe them a degree of support especially if it is due to a consistent crash.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

Firstly I think this shows just how much we need a unified file system standard. MS, Apple, the open-source community along with other interested parties need to get together and sort this. Waging their war on consumers machines is not a good way to go. If I as a fairly savvy user can make this kind of mistake with relatively little effort then you can imagine how easy it would be for someone less knowledgeable. Secondly I need to have an even more robust backup solution. I thought what I had was pretty good but evidently not. I also need to be a lot more careful but I do have a habit of blindly running into these things believing I can fix it if I mess up. Thirdly I need to make sure I put even more effort into checking software recommendations. I would love to recommend Boomerang for the work their software did on my smaller drive but the whole experience is marred by buggy software and lacking support. There are other solutions such as Prosoft’s offering which is highly rated but I am reluctant to spend a further £50+ on the hope they are any better. Once bitten, twice shy I guess.

As an aside, I have written this whole thing on my iPhone over a coffee in Nero. I am still pretty impressed with how easy it is to type on this thing. Why it consistently thinks I am trying to type ‘Whig’ instead of ‘which’ I am not sure but on the whole it works well. Aside from slightly aching thumb joints this is easy. I might actually be touch-typing better on this than on a desktop.

I’ve been using Byline on my iPod for a few days now after Alex recommended it to me. He had shown it to me about a year ago now, I think, but I had never seen the need for it. I came to wanting a Google Reader application after using it extensively over the past week in MobileSafari. Having been spending a lot of time in Caffè Nero and the Radcliffe Science Library over the past week I have been relying on my iPod a lot more for the Internet an keeping up to date with the news. My morning routine has now become:

1: get up do the room stuff
2: go to Nero with iPod for breakfast
3: hit science library

I will usually read the news over breakfast. The two main problems I had with using Safari for Reader were that webcomics don’t format properly unless clicked through. They are too small to the text and you can’t zoom in. The other problem was following links in posts. If I am reading David‘s del.icio.us links and I click the first one it opens a new tab and I read it. If I then switch back to the reader tab, it will reload and the rest of the post will disappear having been marked as read. I couldn’t really find a away around this. Similarly when I read the BBC world news feed I click through to read more than the headline and when I switch back it reloads. Now while I don’t lose or miss anything this time it is still a pain.

Byline is £3.99 and great. Enter your Google account details and it logs in and gets your unread items. Not only this. It also syncs them to the program including images so that you can read them offline. Works like a charm. It also has a built-in web browser (seems too be the iPod equivalent of Pokémon cards – your app isn’t cool if it doesn’t have it’s own browser…) which works really well for following through links without losing things. Byline also integrates starring, sharing and noting right into the interface. Only thing I can’t figure out is how to leave something unread – posts containing Flash videos for example.

Only other improvement would be if it could run in the background so that it automatically gets new items instead of syncing when I open it but seeing as this is an OS limitation I can probably let it slide. Absolutely great application. Highly recommended.

I know, I know, I am *so* late to the game on this one, the game has in fact finished and the stadium is in darkness.. but despite that, I have decided to post a little something about Nike+ and an iPod. As I mentioned yesterday, my big gripe with this system is that Apple have decided to totally skip out the iPod touch 1st gen from supporting it. It frustrates me that I have to have and manage two iPods. As @hotdogsladies would say, totally a first world problem, but still a bit annoying.

This term I decided to try out the whole ‘being a bit healthy’ thing, and it isn’t too bad, but exercise truly is the most stultifyingly boring portion of my life. It is right up there with Statistics lectures. Yes. *That* boring. Therefore any little bit of shiny technology to distract me from this might just do the trick. What’s more, I have also learned something from looking at the past few days of records:

Screencapture of Nike+ site for last run

The info is uploaded the the website, and from there you can track progress over the past few days, weeks, months or years. Turns out that I can keep up a decent pace for ~1mile, but then start to drop and fluctuate my pace wildly. Something to work on perhaps.

Is the Nike+ a neccessity? Nope. Is it quite nice to have and use? Definitely. If you have a nano or touch 2nd gen then I would recommend spending the £15. You’re out in the rain if you have an iPhone or touch 1st gen though. While I was reading before buying one I found some great apps for the iPhone 3G which use the GPS to achieve a similar thing. Seemed quite useful so maybe I’ll give them a go in October.

A few weeks back when I was wracking my brains for inspiration for my first re-attempt at the whole blogging thing, I drafted up a relatively self-righteous ranty post about how I had been getting hold of music for a long time, and what I thought was the main points the ‘industry’ was missing. After about four re-writes I canned it and that, I thought, was that.

Then along came Spotify.

First a bit of background (sorry history is the standard filler out there, even if we were warned against using it in our scientific essays…): Most people know my past thoughts on buying music in CD format – suffice it to say that I have a large iTunes library and own three physical CDs. I refused to pay for music with DRM included. I won’t be told what I can and can’t do with my media. If I want to copy it for a friend then I will. I actually get the reason that piracy has the music industry shit-scared, but that doesn’t mean that for a second I condone how they have gone about ‘protecting’ their copyrights. Therefore, in lieu of real alternatives, less conventional methods were employed for getting hold of my music.

I never really wanted to buy something like music without sampling first. I have no one taste in a genre, and so I can’t say that I will like everything by, say, R.E.M. and everything by their similar artists. To this end I usually tried to use the radio (whenever I listened to that – not really going to be a constant source of new music then..), hearing and tagging with Shazam or googling a line I remembered, and then getting the album which that track was on. My interest in David Bowie was sparked by hearing ‘Changes’ on the radio and then pulling down a copy of the Greatest Hits.

This worked up to a point, but there was no real way of sampling an entire album fully before paying for it. Last.fm worked up to a point when they introduced the ability to listen to full tracks, but they didn’t all of what I wanted. Recently I have come across Spotify, and was invited by @alexmuller. Finally I have somewhere to go to where I can search for a track, legally play it in full, and indeed play entire albums in full before I pay for them. There is the odd advert (oddly enough they all seem to be somehow related to the UK Government so far), which pays for my access to the content, and I am more than happy with that. They are not intrusive and I am happy with their presence. Of course I ignore every word between the beginning and the end, but then having been bombared with advertising on almost every entertainment vessel since I was born (God save the BBC and the licence fee I suppose, for the little respite it provides) I am pretty accustomed to that.

Once I am happy I like something, I can simply head over to Amazon MP3 (now my full time port of call for buying music), and within a few minutes (or hours depending on if I am connecting via LSOXS or not) I have my tracks in my library, importantly, in a format I can do whatever I like with. Regardless of the talk that MP3 is still copyrighted etc, the format is ubiquitous and has been the format of choice since day one. Maybe I will eat my words when I have a library full of music in a defunct format in a few years, but I think it will likely be a cold day in hell before that happens.

So I am finally happy. By now you have probably figured that is something I tend to admit to relatively infrequently. I can get my music in a way that is a) legal, b) convenient, and c) exactly how I always thought I should be able to. There is an R.E.M. album (Document, for those interested) sat in my Amazon basket along with some Kinks songs about to be purchased. The artist will get their very meagre cut from my payment, and I won’t get sued, arrested, black-bagged or any other form of financial/physical torture for enjoying it.

This has not been a comprehensive rundown of Spotify. Adam tested it a little more intensively, and seems to be using it in almost the same fashion as I am. Great minds think alike I suppose. Night all.

I decided to bring the blog out of mothballs in the middle of my exams for a very simple reason: It took me a really bloody long time to find out how to do something which strikes me as a feature which should be simple and intuitive. Onwards with the tail of creating PDFs on Mac:

It all began when a friend, Nilpesh, approached me about making the Word Document of the Diary he has been putting together from our School trip to China and Tibet last summer into a PDF. This has been a labour of love from the beginning and he has put a lot into it, and so when he asked me to help with the last section I was more than happy to. He is using Lulu to professionally print the diary, and they have a comprehensive list of requirements for PDFs if that is the format to be submitted.

With this in mind, I headed to Microsoft Word. Here we encountered the first problem – Word 2008 on the Mac totally ignored almost all of the formatting he had put together in Word 2007 on Windows. Saved in a docx file, one would assume that the two would be totally compatible, but apparently not. Why? Ask Microsoft, but God help us if this is to be the open format of the ages… Some two days later after Pesh had reformatted the entire document and saved in doc format, I fired up Word 2008 again, and to my delight it opened and formatted correctly. Head over to the print dialogue and click “Save as PostScript”. Word churned away, and eventually produced some .ps files. “Some?” we wondered. Why is there more than one .ps file? For some reason I still don’t understand, the export to PostScript function seems to randomly split the file at arbitrary points. As this is a 70-page document, I expect it is some processing issue or the file becoming too large, although each time I made a revision to the document and re-PostScripted, the spilts were in new places so I have no clue.

Now the question was, how to make a single PDF from these numerous .ps files? Distiller happily accepted all of the settings I entered from the Lulu support pages, and also happily churned out separate PDFs for each of the PostScript files, but I could not find an easy way to make a single file. To preserve the specific settings of the PDF I did not want to simply combine them using Acrobat. This would have been nice, but although Acrobat and Distiller are related and can do some of the same things, there seems to be no way to enter the specfic PDF settings into Acrobat in the same way as you can in Distiller.

Much Googling ensued. I found some places which told me how to create a ‘merge.ps’ file which basically contained some Distillerese telling it where to find the separate PostScript files and to process them in turn to create a single PDF. However, it seems that to close a security hole, the functionality which Distiller used to have has been disabled, and so the processing of ‘merge.ps’ promptly failed with a log file cheerily telling me “%%[ Warning: Empty job. No PDF file produced. ] %%”. So I guess that wasn’t going to work then…

A lot more Googling ensued, with me trying various alterations on the commands in the merge file to try to get Distiller to behave, to no avail. One final lucky search of ‘distiller 8 combine ps’ revealed the Holy Grail of PostScript magic I had suspected was lurking out there for the hunter who didn’t do the sensible thing hours before and throw up his hands. Fourth result was a macosxhints.com page. With nothing to lose, I downloaded the script and ran it. First thing it asked for was the location of ‘Distiller 6′. Thinking to myself that this was probably going to fail considering I was trying to use Distiller 8, I pointed it to the app anyway and proceeded. The script asked for the folder containing the PostScripts, which I duly supplied, and to my surprise Distiller sprung to life and began processing the files. A few minutes later, the final PDF was done with all the settings I asked for, and importantly, as a single file. Cue angelic chorus of ‘Hallelulia!’.

All credit to Carlo Notarianni for this script, to whom I owe a lot and who likely saved me many more hours trying to cobble together something to make this work.

Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) was the school’s founder’s day, meaning that from about 12:30pm the process of shipping all 1000+ pupils and staff over to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London took place. This meant that myself and the others on twitter were split up in during the transit and service, and so we found that twitter was to be the desired medium for communication. Worked surprisingly well, and was an amazing use of it.

When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…

An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.

Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…

Just a quick software recommendation today. When away from home, even if I am able to take my laptop with me, there is always something that I want to do that can only be done while sat at my desk, in front of my Desktop machine. This is where LogMeIn Free comes in. This is some software which you install on your machines, and then sign into the website. There you see a list of all the machines associated with your account, and tells you which ones are connected to the internet and are accessible.

In the free version what you can do is limited, but I have found that it does all I need – offers Remote Control of my machine, and allows me some basic Admin control. I can take control of my screen from any web browser in the world (even I found, those in censored China!) and so from there can use something like GMail to send myself a file or print a document to the local printer at home. The Admin offers the basics, allowing control of Windows security, such as password changing etc, but also offers a very useful range of system restart options, ranging from Normal to ‘Hard Reset’.

At home I am the de facto IT Support, and considering I am the only one who knows the passwords to nearly everything, it is likely to stay this way. If I am away on a trip and something goes horribly wrong, this allows a quick check and hopefully fix, instead of trying to visualise the screens the user is seeing, and guide them through the troubleshooting and fix process.

Overall a really useful app which I think is irreplaceable! See more and get it here