Time for a new phone I thought, and I’ve been hankering for something a bit more high tech for some time. So having been reading about iPhone vs N95 I thought I’d find out what the computer has become.

First impressions - compared to my old K750i it’s big, but then it’s got that lovely big screen. However it’s been living in my pocket quite well for a few days now, so I don’t think it’s too big.

It’s a new interface to learn - I had Nokia before my last two Sony Ericssons and loved it and moaned about having to learn the SE, but you get used to things don’t you? Accepting that I still have to learn keyboard shortcuts etc. the current issues I have are getting confused with when the keyboard will lock, and the text entry could do with a preview of what the next button press will do. And the camera takes too long from going ‘click’ and freezing the picture, to actually taking the image and storing it (I suspect something in the order of half a second?), so you often miss what it was you were trying to shoot - especially in lower light.

Of course my main interest was the Internet browsing, and it was … underwhelming. I really don’t agree with the apparent trend to try and get mobile devices to render normal web pages on small screens. It’s a bad compromise, and will do nothing to encourage websites to make an effort to improve their rendering for lesser browsers. So it tries to render full pages, with a zoom function and a cursor, but it’s still a mobile device with a small screen and vastly reduced input device. And they’ve even removed one of the most useful features of phone browsers - using the keyboard hotkeys for fast navigation. Point it at a site optimised for mobiles, and I’m sure it’s great (although I haven’t yet found a shining example).

This is my initial reaction after not enough time - I will explore more as I’m very keen indeed to partake in helping the mobile internet evolution progress.

I was fascinated by the GPS functionality, having read so much about that’s the way mobile devices were going to go - and I was frankly very disappointed. It takes an age to get the GPS functionality lit up and knowing where it is, and it’s very flakey. And I don’t know that you can automatically geotag pictures. It may be the future, but it’s not here yet from what I see.

I haven’t yet explored the music / video / 3G features yet - I’m rationing the excitement.

I hate the commercialisation of phones - demo games, subscribe to additional features, constantly having to worry what doing anything will cost you. But I suppose it’s the price you have to pay for subsidised handsets etc.

That’s about it. Other than that it’s a phone.

Boring post perhaps, but we’ve got a few more phones on trial - I’m trying to persuade them that Blackberries are hard work - we don’t run Exchange Server and the grief we have to go to getting emails working on those things…

We’ve had much better results with Active Sync on WindowsMobile devices. Last time I has a Vodafone v1605 (for the FoWA 2007 event - it was great as a PDA, but not a very good phone), this time I’ve borrowed a Vodafone 1210 which is more phone sized but still runs Windows Mobile.

So it’s the same width and thickness as my K750i, about half an inch longer - it’s phone sized. Quite confortable in my pocket, it looks neat, and so far battery life has been acceptable. I’ve not used it much as a phone yet - I wouldn’t call myself a power user - but the few times I have it’s performed quite well, so it qualifies as a phone, and I’d be perfectly happy to carry it around.

We got Active Sync talking to our Kerio mail server without much hassle, but we’ve got the hang of that now with WM5 devices. Yes, it handles email well - perfectly capable of reading emails, and if you can bear the restrictions of using the numeric keypad to type in (it does t9 predictive text, but what phone doesn’t?) it will send too.

The keyboard restrictions and the reduced features of the Smartphone edition of WM5 limit the things usefulness as a PDA - but it’s a phone so who cares?

The Internet browser worked as expected, quite useable given the limitations of the screen and keypad.

My main bugbear - it’s not got a camera.

Given that though, if I wanted a phone with email, it’s a definite contender. But there are still a few more to try…

I’ve been a bit lax with techy posts recently, so I thought I’d jot down some things I’ve been working on of late.

Playing with Flash Media Server and video encoding, but nothing conclusive to write about yet so watch this space.

What I have had some success with though is handling large file uploads in PHP. It’s something I’ve come across in the past that you soon hit upload_max_filesize or max_execution_time when making web apps to allow upload of files into the megabytes and the slippery slope that is increasing either or both php.ini setting in response to client requests and against better judgement.

In the past I used to set up ftp accounts and say ‘use a proper protocol to transfer files - duh!’ but that’s not exactly user friendly.

So last weekend I went on a hunt for a better solution, and particularly any client-side file upload tools - came across a few that were contenders, and finally settled on JUpload as an interim solution, saving having to code something from scratch.

I’ve previously blogged about my love/hate relationship with Open Source software - here’s one that goes down in my book as a goodie.

It took a bit of fiddling to get the demo code working - it helps if you check out the SVN head - the release package wasn’tquite working. It also took a bit of hunting to find the JUpload PHP class in the wiki which saved me a lot of time writing my own (and reinventing the wheel). It wasn’t handed on a plate how to get it working, but it also wasn’t too hard to figure out.

So I’ve got it breaking everything down into 1MB chunks, and uploads are a whole lot more reliable than just using one big fat HTTP file upload. Whether the applet will survive as is or be modified, or if I will develop something bespoke based perhaps on its core concepts only time will tell, but for now I’ve got bigger fish to tickle.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Die Hard series - there are several actors who’s presence in the cast list normally mean I’ll enjoy the film. Bruce Willis is one of those. Right from Moonlighting, through a couple of my all time faves - Twelve Monkeys and the Sixth Sense (no I didn’t see it coming) - but it’s John McClean that I enjoy the most - ‘Yippe Ki-yay, Mother F***er!’

So given a choice of Die Hard 4.0, Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer, or Ocean’s Thirteen to see at Cromer yesterday - it was a bit of a no-brainer (the others will have to wait for DVD).

So, yes, as usual it’s as corny as anything - he gets beaten up and bloodied, picks the baddies off one by one, survives the most imppossible incidents and accidents, and yet still manages to come up with a one liner to meet all situations: “Dude - you just killed a helicopter with a car!” - “Yeh, I was out of bullets.”

I don’t know why it is that since the first appearence of computers in action films, it’s unreal what a kid with a laptop (or a PDA, or a dictating machine) can do - Matthew Broderick in Wargames, John Connor in T2: Judgement Day, Angelina Jolie in Hackers etc - but as I keep telling Mel: “It’s not real!” Suspend disbelief - isn’t that what they say? It’s what all the Die Hards have been about. No way was the winch cable on the pickup that long at the end of Die Hard with a Vengeance - but it was still a cracking plot line, and a great stunt.

The technology was nowhere as cool as, say, in Swordfish (come to think of it, wasn’t Travolta’s character called ‘Gabriel’ in that?), and many of the stunts I seem to recollect from other action films - The bit with the fighter was reminscent of True Lies for instance, and I still couldn’t tell you much about the plot. Still, brilliantly put together into a hugely enjoyable package.

No, I loved it - and four point oh is defintely going into my collection when it comes out on DVD - and I’m so glad I saw it on a big screen with the full Dolby Digital experience.

I finally decided I had to take the plunge, and migrate from SimplePHPBlog which has done sterling service for me up to now, moving on to Wordpress.

Why? Well SimplePHPBlog is just that - simple. It does a job, but I was wanting more, and getting frustrated with it. We’ve been blogging at work (internally for now although I’m trying to get buy-in for a public facing Company blog) and Wordpress was the natural choice for a multi-user platform and it’s working great.

So why didn’t I put Wordpress on my blog in the first place? No idea now. I think it just looked like a bit too much of a sledgehammer and not needed for what I wanted.

Well my view now is that if your serious about blogging, you need serious software, and Wordpress is it for me.

Thanks sphpblog, it’s been fun.

Another film that made me go ‘wow!’

Not a clue what was going on from start to finish but what a ride - absolutely fantastic. And the Stones track at the end - definitely a film to see before you die!

There have been so many disappointing comic inspired movies recently - I was mortally offended by Spiderman 3 the other day for instance - but this one was great. Pays reference to many other films and genres, but the whole thing is unique. I’m so glad I made the effort to find it and see it.

I watch quite a few films, and most are just enjoyable ways of passing time, but occasionally one comes along that surprises. Biggest shock ever was the Sixth Sense - but that’s another story.

In a similar vein, I didn’t see the ending of the Machinist coming and so I have spent some time since watching it trying to figure out how it got me. Very clever stuff.

Is he a psycho, or hallucinating or is there something supernatural going on … I won’t spoil it for you - go see it.

A suprising number of spare seats have started appearing, but I’m hanging in…

Mark Flanders, Adobe, run through of Flex and a plug for Apollo. Very interesting, would like time to play, but not inspiring yet. Perhaps it’s too early in the morning. Impressive examples of performance increase going from ActionScript 2 to 3. If I was an ActionScripter I’d be excited.

Chris Wilson from Microsoft, with a great background to his time at Microsoft (he’s been working on IE since 2.0!) trying desperately hard to persuade that they’re ‘passionate about standards’ - yeh, I think he convinced me. Great quote from his boss when they were developing IE7 and fixing loads of things and finding that as a result a lot of sites broke … “I’m really concerned we’re breaking stuff in the name of goodness and that all users and developers will walk away with ’stuff’ broke”. Which led to the mantra “Don’t break the web”. With great power comes great responsibility! Oh, and confirmation of something I’ve been trying to tell my guys - “It’s not technically possible to have EXACT multiple IE versions on the same machine” - use VirtualPC instead.

Khoi Vinh nytimes.com, some good UI / design stuff, but I’m a geek so I snored. Actually I didn’t - I caught the odd great quote to thrill and impress people with every now and then, probably my favourite “if you’re going to offend anybody, offend experts not beginners”.

Now for the good bit - Simon Willison on OpenID, and I got absolutely, stupendously excited about it, and reslised why all anyone was blogging about yesterday was Kevin Rose’s announcement that digg were getting behind it (damn, I didn’t write that did I, because it didn’t mean anything to me then). OK, I get it now, and it’s going to be HUGE. So later netvibe said they’re doing it, and openoffice.com but I don’t know if anyone noticed. Anyway, much to play with, and I’m going to do something with it because it’s a Good Thing.

What else - Google docs and spreadsheets - sorry, just a bit too smug for me.

Some nice open mike spots - how to run a Virtual Office, JEDI or Just Enough Documentation for Interaction (=Agile Documentation) very cool and I’d love to take that back to work. And opinions on Web2.0 hots and nots.

The one I came for - Daniel Applequist from Vodafone on the future of mobile - I was hoping for a bit more I think but because I’ve done wuite a bit of research myself (and perhaps been polluted by Luca Passani) I didn’t hear anything new. Never mind. A plug for vodafonebetavine.net which should be investigated.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP with a great bit of history, and a preview of what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning (If I remember which workshop I booked) i.e. benchmarking and profiling, and a great little bit on exploits and a few things I hadn’t seen before. Great guy. And some good quotes for a presentation I’ll be doing in a few months on Open Source Software.

Moo.com - why print isn’t dead, and a classic case of a great idea run by people who love their product. As they say their product (business cards) is 300 years old, and many, many people are doing it. The way they do it, and the community they’ve built up, and it’s a great story.

Finally, a spirited presentation about openoffice.com who launched a beta version of their new interface today.

So favourites - Rasmus was great, Moo was enjoyable, but I’m still buzzing about OpenID.

Yay, I’ve got something current to blog about!

I don’t live in Norfolk because I love crowds of people, so I’m not a big fan of being locked up in an auditorium with 850 geeks, wannabe dotcom entrepreneurs and a few who made it, but I thought I should be there so I’m at the Future of Web Apps London 2007 for three days of … various opinions.

So, after day one, what’s happened. Despite not being able to blog during the event (sorry Ryan I know it’s not your fault) and some wierdness about certain refreshment breaks being ’sponsored’ (thanks Adobe for the beer!) and if not a cup of tea is £1.50.

Ryan “frickin’ cool” Carson is a dude I can relate to. I met hime when I went to one of his first seminars in London about devloping dynamic database driven websites. It was great to get confirmation that what we’d been doing by instinct was actually about right. Since then I’ve sent a few of my guys to hear Eric Meyer or other similar ‘names’, and they come back saying the same thing. We may be country hicks, but we’re up there with the best of them in terms of the work we do.More power to Ryan and team for taking the initiative and doing this sort of thing on this side of the ‘pond’, and I wish him all the success he can handle.

Ignoring the wifi, and the tea, what’s happened?

First - get all the freebies you can lay your hands on - the score currently stands at 2 t-shirts, several pens, a mouse mat, a pack of sweets, and something that twinkles when your phone rings. Oh and a copy of Microsoft Expression.

First speaker, Mike Arrington from TechCrunch and I thought I’d made a mistake. I work for an agency, not a dotcom, but I stick with it and there were some interesting views if not immediately relevant to me. But I thank him for the first hint of what I think could be massive - Adobe Apollo. More later when I investigate fully, but it sounds ‘frickin cool’.

Tara Hunt (aka missrogue) made me wish I was a proper geek and into blogging proper. I didn’t feel worthy, and resolved to make more of an effort. SO much enthusiasm for online communities … what more can I say? I must try harder. Twitter!

Enlightening stuff on Venture Capital, which makes me thankful I’ll never need to get involved with it. It was great having an insight into it, but … that’s not me. Hence I’m a wage slave not a millionaire.

Last.fm - now we’re getting somewhere - great stuff and great insight into measuring ‘attention’ and using it to profile your listening preference to dish up better music. Genius, and if someone pitched that one to me I’d buy it! That idea I’m going to have to make use of somehow. And a great bit on how to survive sucess I’ve got to take back - “people trump process” and “use simple tools”. We could use some of that.

Google APIs - yup, great, not much more to say. Other that I’ve got to have a fiddle with Sketchup to see if I can get some cool models of Happisburgh. I did that for Microsoft Flight Simulator once, but who cares?

Werner Vogels blew my mind with the Amazon S3 and EC2 distributed services. That’s going to take so much thinking about, but I’m open to it - I can see the sense I’ve just got to work through the implications in my head. Probably top of my ‘must investigate’ list. Which reminds me that I’ve skipped the nice people at Zimiki with their ‘pre-shaved yaks’. How could I forget that 10 minute presentation? Sheer genius, and hugely enjoyable. Almost trumped by chappie from soocial.com (forgot name, sorry) who has a seperate career waiting as a stand-up.

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! Didn’t get really inspired until he started talking about Pipes, which again made me feel inadequate for not being aware of it. Sounds hugely exciting, but I’ll have to suck and see. That’s what I’m here for isn’t it to find out what I’m missing?

Kevin Rose from Digg - I can see how he succeeded - he obviously loves his product and is ttally imersed in it. Once again great insights into what happens behind the scenes, but not really relevant to me.

So my favourite of day one - other than the entertainment of Ducks and Mum’s contact details (Zimki and Soocial respectively) top marks for me go to last.fm - totally captivating stuff from end to end.

Thanks all, looking forward to day 2.

I wouldn’t like to think I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or other form of mental divergence, but there are several ‘routines’ that keep me sane. One of them is a long hot bath, which I have on a Wednesday and a Sunday, accompanied with a good strong drink (preferably associated with a few slugs of Bourbon), and a good book.

It’s where I do most of my best thinking and strategising, and I probably should be able to blog from there biut that’s another story.

But given that I’ve been a bit lax in recent posting I thought I should share my thinking after a particluarly good hot soak this evening … I envy Jeremy Clarkson despite every instinct in my body.

I’m approaching 40 (fast!) which means I’ve probably spent a good portion of that time avoiding corniness and predictabilty. However I’ve been contemplating that position of recent times and come to the conclusion that I’m able to come out of the closet and embrace corniness - why fight it?

So here’s a start - Jeremy Clarkson is a lucky bastard and I wish I had his job!

What’s triggered this? I’ve just finished reading ‘The day after tomorrow‘ by Alan Folsom and started ‘The World According to Clarkson‘ and it’s killing me that I’m laughing out loud at (and incidentally agreeing with) most of what he’s saying, and wishing it was me saying it.

I’m sure he’s successful because there are many like me who can intimately relate to his views - it’s just the he has the bollocks and the verbosity to express them - that there’s someone out there experiencing and expressing this stuff is brilliant - even if I wish it could be me.