TFL journey planner is useful, but stupid

Have you noticed that the Transport For London journey planner website actually gets things pretty wrong?

http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk

e.g. going from W12 7TP to Charing Cross station: Walk to the tube, change once and you’re there. 37 mins. Fine.

But if I want to go from W12 7TP to WC2N 4HG, a short walk of not more than 5 minutes from Charing Cross station, it tells me a different route, this time taking 51 minutes. That’s not right!

It seems to work best if you try a variety of options and nearby locations, then use your own judgement to work out which is best.

Portable external hard drive filesystem?

How should one format a 500Gb Maxtor USB2 external drive for read/write use on both Windows and Mac?

I tried using NTFS, but you can’t write to it on the Mac, except using MacFUSE and NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver which *totally* corrupted all the data, after the computer crashed in the middle of writing to it.

I tried using FAT32, which had to be done using Swissknife, because 500Gb is too large for Windows to format in FAT32 natively, but it was immediately totally corrupted on the Mac.

It eventually worked though.

IMAP access to Gmail on your Blackberry

Orange told me that Gmail IMAP on the Blackberry Pearl they sold me is “not supported”, and couldn’t tell me how to set it up. In fact, it can be configured to work.

What you need to do is set up a new email account with an email such as anything_at_all @ site about nothing .com. The “site about nothing” part needs to be a domain that has a mail record set up, but don’t use gmail, hotmail or yahoo for this because the blackberry will set the mail server automatically without giving you the chance to choose IMAP.

It will tell you it cannot configure the email account for you, and offer the option of configuring it yourself.  You will have to follow through 3 or 4 pages saying the same thing, but you will reach a form that lets you enter all the fields you need to. Go on to enter the true details of your Gmail account, using mail server: imap.googlemail.com, port: 993.

It might be a little slow for your email actions to be synchronised between your blackberry device and your Gmail account, but it really does work! Now when I mark an email as read on my blackberry, it is also marked as read in my main Gmail account.

Crunch

The credit crunch. I thought this was just a media invention until Lehman Brothers closed down. 

Then I started to read about sub-prime loans, NINAs and NINJAs, world savings of 70 trillion usd, and I realised that there was a housing bubble, and it just burst. 

There is a very informative and humorous piece at thislife.com called The Giant Pool Of Money. Go and read it or listen to the recording.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Blackberry Pearl review

This phone is great! Just get one, it does everything. Well, almost everything. It’s a million times better than Windows phones. The brilliant predictive text software makes sure you don’t even notice you’re using a new half-qwerty style keyboard.

But I must complain anyway:

• the email message system is a bit too ‘automatic’. By that I mean all received, sent and drafted emails are all in the same place: your inbox. Why they couldn’t have separate folders for sent and drafted email is beyond me. There is an SMS outbox but no email outbox. But there is a good customisable ’saved search’ function. So to see only mail you’ve sent, is as simple as typing alt-s, once you’ve set it up. If you don’t mind all that then its pretty cool because you can have your work and personal email, along with SMS, MMS, instant message conversations and saved web pages all in one list. 

• you can’t easily save attachments. Well you can save the email they’re attached to, but not the individual files. There’s some commercial software called BeamBerry, of which I have a 10-day trial, but its says that .htm and .jpg are “unsupported types”. So it’s not really possible to organise your files like we’re used to doing in a graphical file explorer program.
• I can’t figure out how to get the IMAP feature of synchronising ‘read message’ status from the phone to my web gmail account. Orange tell me it’s “not supported”. Maybe I can make my own IMAP proxy server that could do it!

Moonfruit flash

Moonfruit seems to be a way to build websites entirely from Flash.

It’s a good thing Google now indexes Flash!

But how good is Google’s Flash indexer, really?

BBC Olympics mobile site

I thought I’d see if watching video on my mobile phone via the BBC Olympics mobile site worked. Predictably, it didn’t work at all.

I was using the following technology stack:

• HTC Touch Diamond
• Windows Mobile 6.1
• Opera Mini 9.5 (build 1184)
• Windows Media Player 10, Version 10.3 Build 19591

The error was:

Server or data time out; tap play to reconnect.

HTC Touch Diamond, personal review

I got a new mobile phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

The good

• It comes in a nice black diamond shaped box. So shiny!
• The handset is very slim and light. Its case is great.
• The Teeter game using the accelerometer is so much fun!
• The camera images look really good, and it has auto-focus.
• Google maps with GPS… Wow! I could use up my 500Mb allowance in no time playing with this.
• Using Wifi & GPRS to browse websites is awesome, and it’s really easy to save pages for offline viewing.
• Hidden magnetic stylus that I didn’t even realise was there.
• It’s small and light enough

The bad

• The “TouchFLO 3D” menu is very slightly more jerky than I’d want it to be.
• The speakers are very tinny and too quiet, even on  loudest volume setting is pretty quiet.
• View emails and texts through the TouchFLO menu takes too many steps (there may be a shortcut I’m not aware of, but I have not been provided with a user manual, even after asking Orange for one).
• Shell32.exe crashed already. Within one day of using it! Didn’t actually have any bad effect though.
• HTCAlbum.exe also crashed. Again, no noticable effect.
• mbutton.exe crashed too. Okay that’s 3rd party, but it never, ever crashed on my SPV M3100.
• manila.exe crashed. [update: I complained to Orange about this and was told “Windows isn’t even stable on the desktop. We can’t investigate isolated crashes”.
• The on-screen keyboard irritatingly pops up and obscures forms and emails so you can’t read what you’re typing. The M3100 also had this problem, but then its on-screen keyboard was a lot smaller.
• I’m really feeling the lack of a hardware keyboard. It takes a lot more concentration to type.
• When on a phonecall, the screen switches itself off after 5 seconds of inactivity. I suppose this is a feature, but I wish I knew how to disable it.

Mini review of Sun’s NetBeans IDE 6.0.1

We used the NetBeans IDE in a Java course I just took.

It seems like a pretty helpful IDE, but as usual, I can see its disadvantages much more clearly.

Disadvantages

• When you start adding new code, loads of ‘errors’ immediately appear in the margin. The whole syntax checking mechanism *should* wait wait several seconds after you’ve finished typing before it checks your code. Otherwise it’s just distracting.
• Despite checking your code too much, there are circumstances where an ‘error’ icon stays stuck on your class file icon in the Projects tab, but there is no error marked in the file. it goes away when you do a clean and compile, but I still consider this a bug. [update: is this a notification of a compile error?]
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to add an existing file to your project (update: There is. You have to right-click copy it from the files tab, and paste it into your project. I was looking for a drag option).
• The auto-suggest-methods doesn’t work if you start typing the first few letters of the method too quickly after the dot.
• There are too many colours and flashy things.
• It doesn’t fix the case for you like .NET

Advantages

• It does all the hard work of renaming and moving files between packages for you.
• If you make any structural changes or rename key files/classes, it automatically refactors the code for you, even allowing a preview so you can see the extent of proposed changes.
• Integrates with JUnit, and produces a set of automatic tests, based on all your existing classes and methods. Sweet!
• Ctrl + the arrow-keys counts capitals as word boundaries for easier navigation (e.g. BufferedWriter).
• If a class is not imported, type Ctrl-space with the cursor at the end of it, to import the relevant package (does not work if cursor is at any other point!)
• You can click on the run-time exception in the output window and be taken to where it occurred in the code.
• it has cool WYSIWYG / .NET-style forms building stuff for all your GUI needs. It then ‘protects’ the GUI code so you can’t change it by accident.
• it has a Windows | Services menu where you can browse databases, start Tomcat in debug mode, etc.
• Easily add in abstract methods required when implementing an interface.

What is the best mobile phone for playing videos?

Or more specifically, which smartphone can play mp4 video and divx movies without skipping?

My SPV M3100 cannot, and apparently neither can the HTC TyTN II (which looks startlingly similar to the M3100). They both run the Windows Mobile operating system.

Does anyone know the answer?

I don’t know much about video formats, so I don’t know if there can be much variation between mp4 formats.