I have been working with a lot of documents since late last year and I must say that over the last few months I’ve grown accustomed to working on my documents online using Google Documents. It is the one application from Google that I have used consistently and constantly and I think it is simply brilliant.

Sure, I have had a few funny formatting issues that have cropped up every now and then when I upload and convert microsoft document formats such as PPS and DOCX, but they are minor issues compared to the convenience of having your documents accessible from anywhere and the ability to instantly edit and share them with people of your choice, think collaborators and people who might want to know what your thoughts are on a particular document.

The recent ability to upload any kind of file has added an extra level of convenience. I have been able to upload zipped packages containing documents and images for particular events and classes without having to convert them to Google Document format.

The convenience of editing your documents at home and then downloading and distributing them where you need them (such as lesson plans and tutorials for my students in the class room) has been the winning feature for me. It definitely beats even carrying them on USB sticks and HDDs wherever you go. If you have not yet been using Google Documents for managing your documents, then you definitely should!

browser · cloud · computing · document · google · location · Technology

A couple of friends have got their Wordpress blogs hacked over the past week. If you are running an older version of Wordpress, you should update it to the latest immediately.

hack · security · wordpress · worm

Earlier this year, I purchased my first tapeless camera, the Canon FS11. I purchased it to be able to keep an ultra compact video camera with me that will not weigh my shoulders down too much and at the same time I wanted something that would not lighten my wallet a whole lot. The FS11 seems like an ideal candidate because it is reasonably priced and has the expanded built in storage with a possibility for expansion via SDHC cards. It is also nice and compact in size. As a nice bonus, it also has a microphone input.

The problem with these types of cameras is, as I later discovered, was that it encodes the video into an mpeg2 stream, which is then stored inside .mod files. After a few trials and errors to find a good process, I finally settled with using VLC to process the files. Here’s the process that I use:

1. Download the files to the computer’s HDD and then manually change the extension to .mpg. If you try to play the files without changing the extension, VLC won’t play the files because the extension is associated with an entirely different file format which is to do with audio. So, if you double-click the file to open in VLC, it will not show you anything. By renaming the extension to mpg, VLC will try to read them as mpeg streams.
2. Because in the .mod files the audio is encoded in AC3 codec, some video players and editors will not recognise the audio in the mpeg stream. To alleviate this problem, I use VLC to encode the audio from the mpeg stream into separate wav files.
3. In the video editor, the mpeg gives the visual and the wav file will give the audio.

If you are shooting straight for DVD, then most of DVD authoring software will be able to handle the AC3 audio inside the mpeg stream, so step 2 above is not necessary (tested with Adobe Encore CS3).

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Having owned a Canon DSLR for more than two years now, I have become somewhat aware of some of the limitations of the DSLR format. Even though it is a beautiful piece of equipment with nice results, I often find it a little cumbersome to carry.

Everyday, I find myself lugging a laptop, either my MacBook, Dell or the HP Mini-note 2133, depending on what I need to do for the day. As I am both working and studying, this could mean a whole day out of the home, so that means I have to carry everything that I need for the day from the morning to at least two or three different locations.

While it would definitely be nice to lug around a DSLR with some nice lenses and a flash gun, I sometimes feel that for my day to day photography needs, the DSLR is definitely an overkill. Carrying the whole kit with a laptop and its charger plus everything else that I need makes carrying the camera kit a burden in more sense than one.

With that idea in mind, I began searching for a compact camera that is capable of replacing the DSLR to a certain point, with a good quality sensor and some manual override functions. Since I have always had Canon photographic gear since the days of chemical photography, naturally I thought about getting a Canon G10 (I already own a Canon G6, but it is not in anyway pocket sized).

However,when I went to the camera shop I became interested in the Ricoh range of compact cameras. They looked good and seemed to be solidly constructed. I became interested in the odd-looking viewfinder attachment on the top of the GX200 and when I found out from the sales assistant that it was a tilt-adjustable viewfinder I was seriously smitten, but there was a slight problem.

One of the things that I have found to be quite annoying about cameras in general is the lens caps. The lens cap is the single item that I have to detach from the camera lens in order to take a picture. When I have to take a picture in a hurry, usually I end up not remembering where I have put it. There have also been occassion when the lens cap just fell off the front of the lens and these caps (if you buy the genuine Canon ones) cost about $25 each.

When I found out that you could replace the lens cap on the GX200 with a self-opening ones (it’s a lens cap made up of three leaves which get pushed open by the lens barrel when you switch the camera on), it was a deal nearly done. So I bought the camera with the self-opening lens cap and an extra attachment with an extra wide-angle lens.

After two days of use, I found that the GX200 is a solidly built camera with magnesium alloy body and a soft rubbery grip. It takes pictures in the RAW DNG format (licensed from Adobe?) and 12MP JPEG files. I found the battery to be worryingly small, but its ability to be replaced by two AAA sized batteries to be a stroke of genius (means that you can get emergency batteries from many different places). It is light and slim enough to be carried everyday, but I have found that the focusing is a little hesitant at times, which can slow down your picture-taking speed.

Overall, I have been very happy with this latest addition to my equipment bag.

camera · compact · GX200 · Ricoh

I have been spending a lot of time on the computer these days. Virtually everything I do these days involve the use of the browser and an internet connection. What has caught my attention recently, though, is that many software has followed Google’s lead in releasing perpetual Betas. I use Aptana, Thunderbird and Firefox regularly and they all regularly ask to be updated so instead of getting something done in two minutes you have to spend ten or even fifteen minutes while the software you want to use is updating. I am not opposed to updates, but isn’t there a better way or time to update the software than at start up (usually in the ” I have two minutes to do this thing” mode)?

apple · Aptana · beta · firefox · Linux · software · Thunderbird · windows

While I had some spare time today, I went to the Adobe Roadshow 2009 at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, Sydney. It was quite interesting to see the demos of some of the applications from their new CS4 suite. A lot of work and thought seemed to have been put into applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash (that I sat through). Tighter integration and UI improvements seem to be the name of the game, but in Flash I noticed that they had included some of the tools that were more closely associated with other programs such as (mainly) AfterEffects. Looking forward to running some of the demos myself.

2009 · Adobe · AfterEffects · CS4 · Flash · roadshow

On one hot January night while I was trying to write a statement about some art project that I was working on, I just fell asleep on the lounge. I was trying to type this statement up on my trusty little HP Mini Note 2133 that was runing Ubuntu 8.10. Due to extreme tiredness and heat, I just felt that I could not go on typing or even thinking so I closed the laptop expecting it to spin down and hibernate while I just headed straight to bed.

When I woke up in the morning, the notebook was in an extremely hot state, it was more than the normal warmth you get from running a notebook for a few hours. When I tried to switch it on, it was not responding as normal. There was no HP logo at startup even though all the normal lights were on. The notebook was pretty much dead and did not respond to anything.

After leaving it alone for about a week (actually I just forgot all about it for a few days), I decided to contact HP since the notebook was still under warranty. After the usual menu selections I spoke to an operator who suggested that I plugged the notebook to the power (already done), to see which lights were on (already done) and then to plug it into an external monitor (already tried that too). He suggested that it might need a mainboard replacement (thought so).

The operator then rang me back and suggested that he could guide me over the phone to try to reseat the RAM module (unfortunately, already tried and I even tried another module of the same specification–1GB DDR2 667Mhz). He then said that I would get a phone call from an engineer who would visit me with a new mainboard.

Three days later, the engineer showed up and replaced the motherboard in all under 20 minutes. I was very impressed with the service and wish all notebook manufacturers provided the same level of service. Good work HP!  Shame on you Toshiba! Shame on you Apple!

2133 · hardware · hp · Linux · motherboard · notebook · replacement · service · warranty

After two years of using the I-mate Jamin smartphone, I finally decided that it was time to upgrade to something with better feature set and a more open connectivity options. This time around, data was becoming more of a priority, since I don’t seem to use voice calls terribly much. I needed a phone that I could get on a contract that has a cheaper monthly payment than what I was paying before. While I was with Vodafone with the Jamin, the best I could get was $50 plan and $20 repayment for the handset. It offered GPRS EDGE connectivity with no included monthly data allowance which was charged at a rate that would give anyone a heartburn . With the least addictional cost, the best Vodafone could offer was an extra $10 on top of the already quite expensive plan to give me a mere 5MB of data per month. It definitely hurt.

Soon after i Acquired the I-mate Jamin, to make the experience even worse, I ended up buying a MacBook. The first thing I wanted to do was install Thunderbird (my favorite email client on all platform) on it and to my disappointment, I discovered that I could not do a sync between Mac and Windows Mobile without either using Parallels and Windows (and then only with that beast called Outlook) or buying some third party software. It seems that neither Apple or Microsoft wanted to know about people in my situation who did not want to subscribe to either one of the platforms (aka platform agnostic) for everything. The only thing that came close to being a solution was to use a Funambol Server installed on one of my servers, which was not only clumsy to use, but also difficult to manage. In the end I settled with using Schedule World so I could do sync between my Windows XP, Linux and OS X notebooks and my Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. This approach, while it works, is not really ideal since I have to rely on an external server to manage the synchronisation and the data.

The I-mate Jamin was a reasonably good phone, but its shortcomings were mainly caused by the Windows Mobile platform it was built on. While it works almost seamlessly in a Windows world, when you start venturing outside that walled garden the problems become unbearable. The minute you don’t want to use Outlook anymore (did I mention that an early version of Microsoft anti-virus product ate my entire Outlook database because of a single infected email?) you start seeing the ugly brick walls and quickly hitting your head against it. This gets a lot worse when you decide to try working on another platform such as Mac OS X. While there is Microsoft Office for Mac, there is no activesync for Mac. Entourage which was supposed to resemble Outlook on the Mac does not have support for syncing with Windows Mobile.

The only way you could access the files on your Windows Mobile was to use the Acitvesync software which was not a good thing when Activesync decides to play up. In the end I basically had had enough of the “closed” way in which Windows Mobile was working, so this time around I decided to look around for a phone built on a platform which supports open standards.

My first choice would have been the iphone from Apple. It is a beautifully-designed piece of technology with a very nice and intuitive interface, based on a platform which originated from a Unix world. I was quite sure about getting the iphone, until I discovered that despite its appeal, it does not really support open standards that well and I just could not understand why they would limit the bluetooth profile to headset-only. So the iphone is out.

The next on my list was the Nokia E71. Ever since my partner acquired the E65 phone from Nokia I was always a little partial to the Symbian platform, so when the Nokia E71 was released I was itching to get my hands on one to try it out. However, when I read more about the specs it soon looked like a very good candidate for my next phone. It supports 3G HSDPA, most of the common bluetooth profiles, SyncML synchronisation standard, Wifi, Assisted GPS, Flash Lite 3.0, push email  and the list goes on. It even has IRDA support.

The day I went to a Three shop in Sydney, I just wanted to check it out and hold it in my hands. The phone feels very nice to hold. Its thin and wide frame sits well in my hand and having a qwerty keyboard definitely makes things a lot easier when it comes to hammering an email or a text message. The screen looks nice and smooth and the phone is suprisingly large. It definitely amazes me what Nokia engineers manage to fit into such a thin and small device.

I liked the device so much that I decided to sign up for a plan right away. What I ended up getting was the E71 on a $29 cap plus $10 handset repayment a month on a 24-month contract. This was cheaper than getting the E71 on a $69 cap plan with no repayment. To quench my thirst for mobile data, I added $20 X-series (1GB/month) to the plan which brought the total to $59 per month including 1GB of data. This is definitely in my ball park and having 1GB of mobile data to play with means I will not hesitate to use the phone as a modem with either my Nokia N800 tablet or a notebook when needed.

3 · Australia · data · E71 · HSDPA · mobile · mobile data · Nokia · phone · Three