The device is nice and responsive which makes the whole experience really great, it’s much better than my little first generation iPod touch.

Over the past week or so I’ve been thinking about jumping to FreeBSD, the project has ZFS which is my main requirement for a home fileserver.  I’ll wait a little longer to see what Illumos is going to do, then see if the jump should be done.

I now work for a company called Eldin in the Welsh town of Machynlleth.
My job is to switch on and off the new ERTMS system that is being installed on the Cambrian line.

After a few days on the job I can say that I’m really enjoying it and I hope that when my contract ends in December I’ll get to stay on for some more!

The script now lives here, while the blog concerned with it lives here.

I find it interesting that this is being done for the reasons it is being done. Chrome sandboxes tabs, IIRC, to enhance performance; if something crashes it only crashes that tab, not the whole browser.

By sandboxing something like Adobe Reader, all you are doing is saying “We really can’t be arsed to fix this, lets put it in a situation where it doesn’t need to be fixed”, isn’t that like having a leaky bucket and rather than patching it just putting it into a larger bucket? It works, but it’s lazy.

Is this the new lazy era of computing?* If it’s a security risk shove it in a sandbox?

*The previous era being lack of memory management and consideration for CPU usage because the hardware will support anything we write

I got fed up with it being under hasnbang0.com/blog, I decided to move it to it’s own subdomain.  The reason it was bugging me was that it was mixed in with all of my other files.  I needed to make scripts test to make sure it didn’t touch the blog files, and that was a nuisance (simple, but a nuisance).

So, here we are: blog.hashbang0.com

Please update any links, and your RSS/Atom feeds, here are the updated feed links:

• RSS 2.0
• RSS .92
• Atom 0.3

I’ve no plans to move from now on, and I’m going to do a bit of trickery to make hashbang0.com/blog still work for anyone who really doesn’t want to update their links.

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

I got excited about the first point there, not because I’ve ordered an iPhone, but because if my Mac can sync with one, I should have the iPhone 4 icon.  However, I don’t…

Looking in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources reveals the old iPhone icons and plenty of Mac and iPod Touch/iPad icons, but no iPhone 4 icon.

I think this means Apple will be releasing either a ‘point’ update for iTunes (perhaps 9.2.1) or another small update somewhere else along the way.

It’s true that Apple have been pumping out some great mobile devices since 2007, but each year at WWDC we see more and more iPhone and iPhone OS stuff than we do Mac hardware and OS X development.  Since the iPhone launched back in 2007 we’ve had two revisions of OS X in the form of Leopard and Snow Leopard (while there has been three (almost four) releases of the iPhone OS), and these have been treated somewhat like an afterthought to the big iPhone/iPod Touch news.

Even in the Mac hardware we’ve seen Apple take a very mobile attitude since the turn of the century.  Look at TV, you’ll see MacBook Pros and PowerBooks and TiBooks all over the place.  All the while the iMac has really taken over as Apple’s main desktop system, even that came with a handle when it was first introduced in 1998 and now the iMac is so slim that it’s very portable in itself (OK fine, you couldn’t sling it in your rucksack, but slinging it in the car is a hell of a lot easier than slinging a Mac Pro in the car!).

In January Apple announced the iPad, and in less than 60 days it has sold 2,000,000 of them!

I’ve just been watching some of the videos from the D8 conference and Steve Jobs was asked this questions by Walk Mossberg:

“Is the tablet going to eventually replace the PC?”

This was Steve’s reply:

“PC’s are going to be like trucks, they’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.  And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy, people from the PC world like you and me, it’s going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long way, it’s brilliant.  And we like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people.  And because it’s change, and a lot of vested interests are going to change and it’s going different.”

Check out the video here, the question pops up around 3:53

So, Steve at least can see a time when the PC is going to be less important.  He is reluctant to give an estimation, but could we see Apple starting to roll the ball now?

With the increased attention on Apple’s mobile devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, increased portability of the Mac platform, the mobile hardware, and dropping the Apple Design Awards for Mac applications, I think Apple are stating their position for the future: Computing is going mobile, and we’re here to lead it.

Coming to Aberystwyth back in 2006, I recall moving into my house in PJM (91, room C) with my family, Mum fussing about unpacking everything in my room, and my sister shoving all of my kitchen stuff in my cupboard (I never knew exactly what I had in that cupboard until I moved out the following summer).  I recall them leaving and being terrified to go downstairs, when I had plucked up the courage to go downstairs to meet my new housemates I was greeted by a friendly face offering me a cup of tea.  This friendly face was, of course, Faye’s and we spent many hours sitting in that kitchen drinking tea.
The year went on and I met new people, learnt new things, and had some wonderful times.  Perhaps most memorable is the ‘snow day’ in late February 2007, the revision sessions with seven of us crammed into my PJM room and generally ended up with Street Fighter being played on my SNES, and the long summer days playing frisbee on the University grounds.

After a long summer working, second year was upon me.  New lessons to be learnt, both in University (computer architecture, network programming, data structures and more) and in life (managing bills and other household issues).  Shortly into my second year Faye and I started going out, meaning we’ve been together just over two and a half years as I write this.
The second year saw me get an interview with Sun Microsystems and after an exam in January 2008, I was offered the job.  Revisions sessions got bigger and moved to lecture halls with projectors and elaborate slide shows.
The most memorable events of second year has to include mine and Faye’s “one month anniversary” dinner (after spending all day working, we were just about to get ready to go out when a friend knocked on the door and had us talking for three hours.  After getting ready and finding a restaurant that was still serving, we managed to order lots of tapas, but they refused to make us paella), and going to see Bill Bailey perform Tinselworm in Birmingham.

As soon as second year finished, I was plunged into yet new situations.  Moving from Aberystwyth to Camberley, I started work at Sun Microsystems.  Rather than go into any sort of detail here, I’ll direct you to my various postings of which there was one a week detailing what I was up to in Sun.
Sun gave me a lot of new skills, and made me realise what I was interested in and that what I learnt at University might actually not be much use in the big wide world…
I loved being at Sun, everything about working, and working for a company that did what I wanted to do, and in a way in which I wanted to do it.  I hope that I have a similar employer in the future.

After spending the summer working for the MOD, I entered my final year of University.  It was difficult to get back into lectures, and I found coursework terribly difficult to get on with.  I was constantly pining to be back at Sun, back at my desk in GMP03 collecting tickets, tinkering with servers, and having a chat and a laught with the great people around me.
Of course, I had to go on.  The first semester didn’t hold much for me, apart from an overly crowded timetable.  After a terrible Christmas, I was back to do terribly in my exams (all passes, but not great ones).
Semester two came and went.  It was filled with loathing for my degree and a want to break out of the formalities and just learn things that would be relevant to me.

So would I do it again?  If I knew then what I do now, well, I wouldn’t do a computer science degree would I?  I’d already know it all
Seriously, University itself hasn’t always been a happy experience, and of late it’s been the cause of much anger.  But the people I have met and the relationships I have gained have been so great, how could I turn that down?

So, after four years, it comes to a rather awkward end: I’m still here in Aberystwyth, I will be for the next 24-30 months as Faye finishes her masters in fine art.  I am looking for work, hopefully something IT based, but I’ve just got to pay the bills.
If you are thinking of coming to Aberystwyth University, I’d advise that you have made the correct choice.  If you want to email me about it, I’d be happy to answer your email, and if you have an interest in anything you see on my blog or on my website, I would be thrilled to meet up and share a quiet pint chatting about it with you!  Drop me a line to arrange a time.

If you know me and are reading this, now, in six months time, or six years time, send me an email and say hi, I’d love to hear from you too

After some searching, I found some magic AppleScript to do the job for me!  After some remembering, I managed to execute that AppleScript on the command line.  Here’s what I did:

$ osascript -e "get volume settings"
output volume:0, input volume:50, alert volume:100, output muted:true
$ osascript -e "set volume output volume 50"

The first command showed me what the current settings were, and the second command allowed me to change the volume to 50%.