Windows 8 looks like an OS for kids

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Well, I went and downloaded the customer preview of Windows 8 a few days ago. The install went really well – I did an upgrade of a spare window7 drive – not the usual scenario for a Beta or preview, but what the hell – I’ll scrub it again later. I was very impressed with the upgrade procedure – it was all done within the windows environment – it was very friendly, with nothing scary or unexpected happening. When it finally booted into nice, shiny windows 8 I was a little excited. I’ve seen many, many versions of windows – each one of them being quite different in style and functionality from the last. As a developer, I’m certainly interested in the new Metro interface – its based on HTML 5, which seems quite strange for a desktop environment, but if it makes the interface more friendly, and more fun to program, then I’m game. Well, I can only say that the new interface befuddled me. I’ve used some strange UIs before – including Unity on Linux, but this is batshit. Honestly, nothing about it made sense. First, if the UI was meant to be more touch friendly, and cuddly for non techies, then why the hell are all of the icons now large, rectangular boxes? Where is the organic, flowing bedazzling phenomena we were expecting. Apart from some stylish colorus, this looks like computers for pre-school. I’ve never experienced anything so mind bogglingly pointless, and difficult to come to terms with. I’ve been using computers for 30 years, and I couldn’t find my programs,  documents, settings – nothing.  When I did manage to open something up, I couldn’t work out how to shut it down again, and had to use the Alt-F4 combination. In fact, when I came to shut the whole damn OS down, I couldn’t find any way to do it, and just held Alt-F4 down until I choked the air from its vile throat, and killed this bastard son of Fisher Price.

A couple of days later, I relented and tried again. It booted up, and I entered my hotmail password to log in (it had asked for my hotmail details during setup). Here, it was again – Lego for grown ups. Stupid looking vector dish drawings, and all. After moving the cursor around the edge of the screen for a bit – hunting for functionality, I noticed a bar that appears on the right hand side called charms (give me a break), with some options, and one in the top left.  The best bit is when you scooch down to the bottom left, and hey presto – our old friend the start button makes a re-appearance – disguised (yes you guess it) as a square box.

Apparently, under the hood, windows 8 is much better – start up times, searches, indexing is all greatly improved, and the overall experience should be better. I was expecting some small issues, as this is a preview – but its not that I found any bugs per se – it just looked really blocky and basic – styled by someone who used to work designing toys for under 5s. I may be missing the point – and in a year or so, I might be loving the whole thing , but I’m horrified at the moment. I’m guessing Microsoft will be quickly releasing Windows 9 next year, with a greatly improved, and classier user interface – along the lines of Gnome 3, or Snow Leopard. it just aint cutting it, Ballmer Baby.

 

 

My favourite free software tools

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Over the years, I have tried out a huge range of different tools for various aspects of software development, web design and general windows use. Many of the tools I have found have been free, which is always greatly appreciated, as I haven’t always had a lot of cash to play with – as programmers, we don’t have the glamorous, well paid lifestyle that people think – especially not here in the UK.  Gripe over – on to my favourite list of freeware tools. This is not an exhaustive list, but If you do any kind of development work on windows, or even Linux (some of these are cross platform), then I’m sure you will find them very useful.

Filezilla  -  does everything I ever need an FTP program to do, and probably more.

Paint.NET – excellent graphic manipulation tool, with free plugins that do an awful lot that Photo shop does, and for a fraction (as in zero) of the cost. Shame about the appalling download site.

7-Zip – simple and free ZIP software

Foxit Reader - light weight PDF reader – unlike adobe reader, this is not bloatware. Its fast, uses minimal resources, and lets you read PDF files. What the hell else do you need?  jeez

Google Chrome – Chromes’ developer tools are amazing. I use them all the time for analysing the HTML that is spewed out by Visual Studio. Having trouble with your CSS? – Chrome tools will allow you to disable/ enable individual style tags for any element in a page. This can be incredible for determining which part of your style sheet is misbehaving (programmer slang for shoddy code).

Teamviewer - need to take over a friends PC (or a customer in the paid version), then Teamviewer is your man. This baby can save an awful lot of driving.

Defraggler - great free disk defragging tool, with a nice visual interface, and some very useful SATA error reporting. This helped me to determine that my main drive was acting like a geriatric old codger and was about to buy the farm. I backed up my latest data pronto.

Spacesniffer - This is a tool that I recently came across while trying to work out why my hard drive was being mauled by some rogue software process. it requires no install, and it is very intuitive. You will quickly see which folders and files have become bloated – you can then deleted them without having to revert to windows explorer. It’s almost Apple-esque in its “it just works” philosophy.

CCleaner - cleans the junk up on your machine – temp files, registry – god knows what else. From the same people who make defraggler. Not sure if this is still the best tool for the job, but it deserves a mention as I’ve used it for many years.

virtual clone drive – If you are a developer, constantly installing and updating packages from ISO files, then this is the kiddie you need. right click on an ISO, mount it and bingo – its now your F: drive.

Notepad++ – for reading any kind of text file, and having it formatted in the programming language of your choice, this cant be beat (unless you know something better). Any hoo, I love notepad++ to death, and it has made my life so much easier at times. You dont always want to open PHP or javscript files in visual studio or netbeans for crumbs sakes.

Putty - has nothing to do with holding glass in window frames. Great for opening up a SSH  or telnet session to your remote server though. I used to use it for administering a red hat server with apache and tomcat server with no problems. groovy.

PADGen - if you sell or promote your software through shareware sites, then you need to create a PAD file. And for that, you need PADGen. PAD files drive me crazy – but this tool makes it just about bearable.

MySQL - yeah, I know. It’s not really a tool. But, it’s free – and contains great data manipulation tools for setting up a test or production server for all of your very important data. I’m a bit scared about the future of MySQl, with all the talk of NoSQL, XML storage, Amazon storage and god knows what else. Poor old Mysql is owned by the godfather of database companies – oracle, and I’ve got a feeling they aren’t gonna be spending a lot on future development of this much loved platform in future. They are getting a bit of an ass kicking now that SAP have developed their own database system, that they claim makes oracle look like a dickensian scribe.

Scam from Indian company claiming to be from ‘Microsoft Windows’

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I, and other people I know have had a few calls recently from some Indian sounding guys saying they are from ‘Microsoft Windows’. They are very convincing, and very polite, and I’m sure plenty of people are falling for this scam, as it sounded like there were lots of other people working the phones in the background.  I led them on today to see what they are after.The guy (calling himself Eric Daniels) took me through the process of looking at the event viewer on my PC, and told me that all of the errors and warnings in there were being sent to them at ‘Windows’, and he was making a courtesy call to try and resolve my problems. He then wanted me to allow them to take control of my PC using a piece of software called TeamViewer. This would allow them to get anything they want off your PC – personal data etc. This is the point where I started to feel very angry. If I knew very little about computers, and trusted this guy, them by installing TeamViewer, I would be giving him total access to anything on my PC, to do with as he wished – personal documents, browser history – and perhaps he was going to install something on my pc that would trap future keypresses and send them to their servers (passwords etc.). Who knows.
I asked to speak to the manager – he was very reluctant to let me speak to him, but he did put me through eventually. The manager started to give me some spiel in a thick Indian accent, and I stopped him by demanding his name. He said his name was Alan Garcia. :-)  When I said thats a funny name for an Indian, he started hurling abuse at me and called me a ‘Black Punk Ass’.
If Anyone calls you from ‘Windows’ or Microsoft, and claims that you have problems with your PC – tell them to get stuffed. Microsoft would never ring any user about problems with their PC.
I demanded the guys phone number, and he gave it to me .Its 03300010981. The company is called Redout. Their website is here -http://radiantoutsourcing.com

They gave me an address – suite 9, 34 Buckingham palace road,London. It turns out to be one of these holding addresses for dodgy companies. Their website gives another address in the states -New York.

Make sure you tell people about this – I’m afraid that a lot of people are getting hoodwinked by this gang of scammers.

The Rasberry Pi might just bring home brew computing back

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If you havent heard of the Rasberry Pi, you might be forgiven for thinking its something you eat. However, it is actually a ARM based micro computing project brought to us by David Braben. Yes, that David Braben ! The one who wrote Elite for the BBC micro back in the mid eighties that had everyone going nuts with the 3D universe you could fly around in. Now, he’s bringing us a RISC based computer that is small enough to fit in one hand, with HDMI, ethernet, USB, and god knows what else for a mere £15.  Yep, you read that right – £15. Or $25 for the Americans. This is incredible. David’s vision is that this little device, which runs a version of Debian Linux, will inspire kids to get into understanding the nuts and bolts of computing, rather than just play with powerpoint, or Paint programs. Computing is just not taught properly in schools, and David Braben was very worried that we are heading for a computing skills vacuum in the UK, as kids are using PCs and XBOXes that just dont allow you to get under the hood any more. Old school computers used to make it easy to understand how they worked at a low level. Computers like the ZX81 could be understood in their entirety by a teenager. There were no abstraction layers, or video libraries back then. You had some RAM, and bunch of BASIC or assembler command, and a bunch of ports you could PEEK or POKE. Simple. And, extremely educational. Most kids these days would be lucky if they could delve into javascript while in school, and most have no chance of understanding anything about processors.

Hopefully the Raspberry Pi will enthuse younger minds, and we can see some great, fun projects being built on the back of it. It could easily be used as a controller for battling robots, for instance. I cant wait to see what happens.  Check out the Raspberry Pi project

Are Yell.com using hard sell tactics?

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At Pendragon Interactive, we have had an account with Yell.com for a listing in their online directory, and in their printed directory for the last couple of years. Last year we realised that our online listing contained details relating to another local company, rather than ours – a circular saw manufacturer no less! We were really annoyed about this, and we complained in the strongest terms to their customer accounts division. To be fair, they were very apologetic and gave us free online listings for the next year, and refunded us for the advertising we had paid for.  This made us feel a little better, but we were worried about the potential damage that may have been caused to our image.

A little while later (june 2011), we were contacted by the sales team at Yell.com, and we were offered more advertising for the next year. I explained that I wasn’t really happy with our experience so far, and we weren’t prepared to pay for any further listing space with them. Well, the sales person was very persistent, and phones repeatedly to try and sell us more ad space, and I in turn, batted him away like an annoying fly. However, mr Sales person changed tactics, and told us that we would have free ad space, if we would only sign the contracts he would send through to us. I told him in very clear terms that we were not prepared to pay for anything, and he was wasting his time.  Don’t worry, he said – just sign the forms he had sent us, and we wouldn’t have to worry about paying anything.  I was under an enormous amount of pressure at the time, and not thinking clearly – so I signed the forms and sent them back. To my chagrin two weeks ago, I received an email stating that payment was now due on our account (£195). I was livid – I sent an email back stating that there was no way we were going to pay this amount, as it was for services we absolutely did not want, and had never been prepared to pay for. In response, they emailed me a copy of the order form – with my signature, and service items listed in full.  I could not believe my eyes – I had been duped!   I had been talked into signing an order forms for the services, that we did not want under the pretense that we would not have to pay for them, only to then receive a demand for payment.

My response to this was to state that I was seeking legal advice, and that my solicitor would require transcripts of the conversations between myself and the sales person (every time you call a company like Yell.com in the UK, they state that the calls are being recorded for training purposes). I also stated that they were using un-ethical hard sell practices that would give them very bad publicity if I were to go public with it. They responded immediately by saying that they would give us the online listing free – but we would still have to pay for the printed version. I pondered my next move – I knew I was in the right, and that there was no way we should pay this invoice. I spoke to a solicitor, and explained the situation – he was sure that we had a clear cut case, and if we pushed it, Yell would back down.  Just as I was about to respond to Yell by instructing the solicitor to send a letter, I received another email from them. This email was quite short, but stated that they were prepared to give us the printed version of the listing free as well, and that they would make sure that no sales persons called us in future. What a result !  Free advertising for the next year, and all down to the idiotic behaviour of a rogue saleman. I assume that they had actually listed to the recordings of the sales calls, and had realised that their sales person had behaved badly.  He had actually asked us to sign contracts for a service that he knew we would be invoiced for, and had told us we would have to pay nothing for it.

I’m really concerned about the way that big businesses are conducting themselves these days – they are using hard sell tactics, and often telling flat out lies to get a sale.

Beware of salesmen bearing gifts !

Need a Bailout? Get a Bailout request form

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Ok, well this is a bit of fun, but it’s on a very serious subject. There are an awful lot of people around the world that are very annoyed that huge banks have been bailed out, rather than being allowed to go under, while the people on the street now have to pay the price. not cool. American banks were obviously the worst, but the banks in Iceland and the UK also behaved very badly with our money, and like the bully in the playground who stole sweets filled with chili pepper, that has gone running back to teacher, the banks have just got their noses wiped, and a big warm hug from the government.

Well, we believe that anyone should be able to apply for a bailout from the government. If you have any debts that you can’t manage, or you have borrowed money, and lent it out five ways, then you can get help from the UK treasury. Just download this form – Bailout Form , fill it in and send it to the treasury.  If enough of us do this, maybe they will take a little notice.

 

TrailBlazerrepairs.com – New website to promote TrailBlazer

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For those who may be interested, we have set up a dedicated web site for our TrailBlazer software now at - http://www.trailblazerrepairs.com/ .  TrailBlazer is a web based repair tracking / repair shop management system – aimed at computer and games console repair centers. Having a dedicated site for this product allows us to put much more information on there about the functionality, add some FAQs and training videos – basically a whole load more resources to help users get more out of the system.

We’ve had some great feedback from clients lately – one of the main points being that it’s very easy to train technicians and other staff to use the system. That’s exactly what were were hoping to achieve, so we are very pleased with that. We’ve also had some criticism that the ordering facilities on the repair list page aren’t working as the client expected, so we will be having a look at that, and trying to improve the features there.

Actually, we have made a list of new features that we want to add to TrailBlazer, and if we can get any free time, we will be getting stuck into them as soon as possible. We want to make information very quick and easy to retrieve, and also put the most important information on the screen at all times. We also want to start adding some reports, such as parts used,  parts to re-order, repairs by technician etc. etc.

Well, I better stop this lallygaggin  and get on with it.

Apple Wizard Steve Jobs dies

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It’s a sad day for the technology community. Steve jobs has died at the age of 56. He had been fighting cancer for a few years, and unfortunately it got the better of him. He was a truly great man, and the world won’t quite be the same without him.

Steve jobs inspired so many people over the years – starting with the home brew computer club, which encouraged so many spotty youngsters to get involved in computing – right up to the amazing stuff he has produced with apple over the last few years. I imagine that Apple will struggle to maintain the high standards and driving vision that Jobs has provided for them. During the nineties, when Jobs was ousted from the board, Apple bombed badly and it’s product range really struggled to capture the market. Once Jobs was brought back into the fold in 1997, the quality and innovation in apple products grew and grew after the production of the first iMacs, and later, the iPod.

Steve jobs had a visionary spirit that very few people have in combination with business accumen. There are many technologists that are great leaders, and can take floundering companies and build them into something bright and shiny, but so few people have such an in built sense of what the user really wants. He was reported to say that there was no point asking the user what they wanted – by the time you had designed and built it, they would want something else. This means that Steve had a sense of what people would really want, and love, in the near future. He could design something, and commit to manufacturing it, believing that when it hit the market, people would fall in love with it. But, he also knew that engineers were often the worst people to design user interfaces. It’s a tough paradox in the computing world that the people who need to work out how to make machines interact with humans, can be terrible at it.

I think Jobs was good at detaching himself from his technical persona, and could see the iPhone, or iPad as something that must just work; and work for anyone – not just computer geeks. A child, housewife, business man or octogenarian must be able to pick it up and be able to use it without reading a manual, or learning qwerks. Jobs got this right, and many other companies have attempted to copy him – most are failing badly, but I suspect they are quietly relieved at today’s news. It will open the market up for shoddier, poorer designed products to take over from an Apple that I suspect will slowly wither and falter.

Steve, you were a great man, and an inspiration to so many of us. We will miss you.

 

P.S. – yesterday was a bad day for legends. Bert Jansch, a truly great folk and Jazz guitarist who inspired many great people such as Jimmy Page and Paul Simon sadly passed away. My father was a huge fan of his, and often played his signature piece ‘Angie’ to us on his guitar.

Pendragon Interactive offer Website Subscription Option

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Just to let you know, that Pendragon Interactive are now offering a subscription service for web sites. You can get a fully designed web site with logo, and flyer designs for £29.99 per month. After a year, you can opt to have the graphics upgraded or overhauled at no extra charge (as long as you keep the subscription).

For £39.99 a month you can get a fully featured Content management system, with custom template, and for £120 a month, you can get an online shop set up, with training on using the admin system, and basic SEO services thrown in.  The SEO services for e-commerce sites is really important, so we can take you through the necessary items, and we can either carry out the advanced work for you, or provide SEO training and support to help you through the process.

Web Site Subscription

All of the subscription plans include logo design, business cards, and flyer designs (printing is extra), as long as the client signs up to the subscription service for a year. Once the first year contract is over, the client is under no obligation to continue with the plan, but can opt for a graphical update if they intend to continue.

 

Amazon have taken us by surprise

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So, the Amazon kindle fire was announced today, and from a financial perspective, it looks like a real competitor. It uses a modified version of the Android Operating System, with a full colour, touch sensitive 7″ screen, dual core processor, and access to a very stable network of music and video. And at such a great price ($199), it’s going to cream the market.

But, this isn’t all. Amazon have also announced the ‘silk’ web browser, which will be used on the new Fire devices. The Silk browser leverages the power of their ec2 web services, and does much of the heavy processing in their cloud servers. This will enable the Fire tablets to run browser apps much faster, and not have to rely on heavy on-board processing. This is going to cut down on load times, and request times giving the user a much snappier user experience.

It seems that amazon have been a bit of a sleeper, and have been quietly planning this huge announcement for a good while. This has probably put the willies up google and microsoft. Especially microsoft. At the moment, they must be wondering where the hell they should make their next move. IE9 certainly doesn’t leverage the Azure platform in the same way.

Google have been concentrating on Google+ lately, and who the hell knows what microsoft have been doing – apart from confusing developers with their announcement that html5 and javascript will be playing a major part in the next version of windows (leaving WPF and silverlight developers wondering if they need to re-train as plumbers).

I’m very impressed with Amazons’ game plan here. This could really kick off a browser war again – which is not good for individual companies, but is great for the consumer.