I’m off tomorrow an a very unearthly hour (4am!) to Italy for a weeks holiday. I’ll be taking a borrowed Blackberry GPRS handheld PDA with me (thanks Ian) so I can blog from over there assuming everything works as it should. One side effect of the blog-by-email system is that my work email account attaches a copyright signature by default which can’t remove so all my posts will have some a couple of paragraphs of rubbish below them - unfortunately there’s no quick way around this. I was tempted to take the laptop along with me but unfortunately I don’t think the travel insurance would cover it!
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Nothing much to report from the last couple of days, work is busy as ever so I’m very much looking forward to going on holiday next week to Italy. I’ll be staying somewhere on the Amalfi Coast (described as ‘Europe’s Most Beautiful Stretch of Coast’) which is apparently quite close to Pompeii & Vesuvius which looks pretty interesting. Apparently it’s usually quite hot over there at this time of year (!) so I’ve been preparing myself by getting some new cloths more in line with the climate! With this in mind there probably won’t be any posts next week but expect a pile of new pictures when I get back.
As you may have probably heard parts of Google experienced a short period of downtime this week due to a massive hit from the MyDoom.O virus - it must have takes some serious traffic to partially take out one of the most powerful distributed computers in the world. As well as Google, Lycos, AltaVista and Yahoo were bombarded with requests until they could not cope showing that the technology has some fairly serious flaws when it comes to protection against this new sort of attack. As ever the worm only affected Windows systems but not Linux or Mac computers! Over the last couple of days at work we’ve seen a couple of machines infected with the virus and are just hoping that it doesn’t spread otherwise it could potentially take out the entire network fairly quickly!
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Had a rather tiring day down at Archant Specialist near Saffron Walden today clearing out their small server room which by the looks of it has been used as a dumping ground for miscellaneous computer rubbish for a good few years. It was a bit of a health an safety minefield when we arrived but 5 hours later we had it all neat and tidy and drove back with a couple of tonnes of stuff in the back of the van we hired to get rid of.
The trip to the office always takes us past the austere ‘Audley End House’ - a huge early 17th century country mansion on the outskirts of Saffron Walden, and just a few miles from Stansted. It’s a pretty impressive place with sweeping lawns and a lake leading up to the main house - one day it would be good to have a look round. I took a few pics for the car on the way by which came out quite well considering the speed we were probably doing!
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Today (or was is yesterday?) George Lucas & Co. announced the name of the last chapter of the prequel Star Wars trilogy: Episode III: Revenge of the Siththe name may sound quite good, I’m not holding out much hope for the film which should hit screens some time in May next year. The idea of Hayden Christensen making the transition from the sniveling Anakin Skywalker to the evil Lord Darth Vader is just too big a leap in my mind to be plausible in any way. I guess only time will tell.
The only thing we can really be sure of is that the CG will be pretty stunning, shame the acting and story line can’t be of a similar quality.
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Occasionally a product comes along which completely displaces whatever has come before it usually because of a unique combination or form and functional factors which simply put it miles in front of the competition. This has been seen throughout history with technological advances and social trends propelling supply and demand forward at a pace determined by levels of economic prosperity. A prime example of this would be the evolution of music storage which has progressed from vinyl records through cassettes & Cd’s and more recently into a totally digital format in the form of MP3’s etc. A product that has captured a majority share of this new market is the highly regarded iPod from Apple. What makes this gadget unique is its perfect combination of functionality and stylish looks which appeal to a wide market other than just the technically minded.
The iPod is basically a small hard drive in a case with a tiny computer attached to it to provide a means to access its contents. Although it is primarily designed to store music you can use it to store anything you like and with capacities of either 20/40gb thats a fair plenty of room for movies/pictures/documents. Its minimalistic design leaves little to be confused about and can be easily operated one-handedly.
Last week saw the release of the 4th generation of iPod which boasts greatly improved battery life, thinner profile (about the size of a pack of cards) and a new touch sensitive “Click Wheel” for interface navigation. A good move that Apple made early on was not to implement heavily restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management) as other manufacturers have which limit what you can play and how many times content may be copied. All in all its a pretty nice bit of kit, if a little on the pricey side. I don’t actually have one yet but that may all change considering the amount of overtime I’ve been doing at work recently! Check out the ipodlounge.com for more info.
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