I finally got my hands on the iPod Touch I got the team for R&D – cheaper than an iPhone – and have spent a bit of time with it myself.

First thing I should say is that dissapointingly I find I really, really like it – it’s a stunning device that’s hard to fault; at least inital impressions are that way.

It’s a perfect size and weight, screen is clear and bright, and as for the ‘touch’ user interface – well what can I say other than ‘wow!‘?

I’ve played a bit with the music and video playing capabilities, and they’re just stunning, but most of my attention has been, unsurprising, on the browser.

Despite my initial shock that the thing won’t accept xhtml-mp markup, so although it is a mobile device you can’t treat it as such (at least not the way I’d like to with a custome xhtml-mp view of a site) I can see a way past that as it makes a pretty fair stab at rendering the full site. With the zooming feature – the double tapping is just genius – and wifi connectivity meaning the bandwidth isn’t much of an issue, it really is feasible to browse most sites in the full fat version without needing a slimmed down markup.

But, if the site hasn’t been sympathetically designed – and the one big irritant is lines of text that are too long to be able to read in one screenfull so you have to keep scrolling backwards and forwards – it’s easy to get less than satisfied. And if you’re on an iPhone with limited (and expensive) bandwidth optimised graphics etc. wuold be a big bonus. And having seen sites specifically designed for the iPhone e.g. iphone.facebook.com – they’re just so much nicer to use than the full one.

I’m working on a concept proving site at the moment from first principles, using tera-wurfl for device detection, and Smarty templates to deliver different styling of the same content to different devices. I’ve not yet settled on my preferred approach but when I do I’ll publish it somewhere.

One thing is for certain – I’m now more comfortable with the idea that you don’t treat iPhone (or iPod Touch) the same as a ‘normal’ phone, but don’t think you should ignore it either and feed it a site designed for big screens.

I’ve been digging out all the old boxes figuring out what I’ve got and what I did last time with Trundle. Ah the memories, but faded and incomplete. If only I’d kept better records!

I’ve got the original vehicle, but bits of the control system have been removed, and I can’t seem to find all I think I should. Never mind, the bit I really want is the original firmware – but where would that be?

I’m not even sure when I did this thing – it seems to be somewhere in the region 1998 – 2002 – certainly before I got my current desktop computer, and I haven’t still got the machine I was working on in the original state, even if I could remember which of many I’ve had in the past I was working on at the time.

I must have made backups of this stuff I spent so much time on? Apparently not! I’ve got a corrupt CD saying ‘pre Linux big backup 26/7/01‘ which sounds hopeful as one of the contender machines got reformatted with FreeBSD. I also found a ZIP disk with a backup of my htdocs folders from the websites I was running then, including several development projects alas not including trundle.

So it looks like I’ve lost the sourcecode – apart from a dusty manky remins of the vehicle all I have to show for it is a faded Polaroid photo.

The moral of this story – keep backups, and preferably in a format you can get to them again in the future – and your best chance is if you publish stuff to the web.

Ever since I started playing with batteries and wires – and my folks will tell you I was very little when that started – I’ve been tinkering with all sorts of robotic vehicles.

As time, and knowledge, and resources increased they got increasingly complex, but somehow I never got round to building anything really satisfying.

The last machine was quite cool – the original ‘trundle’ – never quit got to be a robot was but was quite good as a remotely operated vehicle. Two geared motors on a disk of MDF, a PIC microcontroller and crude motor controller, mono ccd camera and all power and data coming down a bundle of cables. At the other end another microcontroller and two joysticks, an LCD monitor and crude power supply. It ‘trundled’ quite well within range of the umbilical and fun was had.

That was quite a few years ago now and has been accumulating dust since then – the excuse has always been that I need a more substantial chassis to carry more gear to keep the results coming that I need to keep myself enthused.

Well, now I’ve got no excuse!

Through a happy series of circumstances I’m now the proud owner of an old battery powered wheelchair, in full working order. That’s given me two 24V DC geared motors and wheels, two 12V 33Ah sealed batteries, a battery charger, and a metal tubular chassis to hold it all together. Currently I’ve also got the controller unit but that’s probably got to be the first thing to be replaced with one I can talk to digitally.

Over the intervening years I’ve also accumulated a load of other useful stuff: old laptops, a flux gate compass module, ultrasonic range finders, wifi equipment, other microcontroller gear, and although time might be a bit tight right now I would like to think I’ve got more ‘resource’ available than at any time in the past.

So what is my ultimate goal for Trundle II? I’d like to build a semi-autonomus roving vehicle, like the Mars rover. Being fed the odd instruction from home base,and reporting back where it is and what it’s doing, but on the whole having to fend for itself in the ‘real’ world (e.g. my garden)

First target I think is to get the chassis under computer control, so whereas it’s now moving around via a joystick on the dedicated controller, let’s define success as controlling it via a PC joystick plugged into a laptop? That’ll take me a month or two!

Future of Mobile, London IMAX Cinema, 14th November 2007

The fact that I didn’t have a laptop with me is partly why this post is a bit late, the other is how long it’s taken me to sort out my longhand scribbled notes. So the fact that I didn’t blog from my phone on the train on the way home may indicate the Future of Mobile is ‘not yet’

Hats off to Ryan and all at Carsonified for another excellent conference – I feel privileged to be able to attend these things in my home country rather than having to read about happenings in the States. It was a thought provoking and informative, if long day.

So what did I ‘take home’?

One Web – the future of te Internet is mobile. Adapt the experience to exploit device capabilities maintaining thematic consistency across all the various ‘screens’ (PC / mobile / TV etc.)

Standards are crucial – but some people are stubbornly doing their own thing.

iPhone will revolutionise the market – not just because of the UI / design, but because it’s setting new consumer expectations of mobile devices as more than a phone, and challenging the established mobile business model (carriers / operators control)

Convergence is an assumption – actual usage is multiple specific devices for specific tasks (e.g. phone, Blackberry, satnav each with a SIM) and different people want different things maintaining fragmentation.

Platforms are maturing – including the upcoming Open Handset Alliance. Diverse but maturing.

Exploit device potential – rich user experience not lowest common denominator – media query / WURFL / W3C core vocabulary. Mobile web experience is still poor ‘like kissing a girl who’s leaning away from you’ (Tony Fish)

Content may be King but context rules – location based services still unjustified hype, mobile search results are poor, massive security / privacy concerns.

But overriding all of that – due to the sheer scale of the market (more than the whole population of China) the potential for a successful application is massive.

As John Connor said: ‘I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set.‘

It’s all to play for!

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking on the theme of Mobile Web in anticipation for the Future of Mobile event this week. This has included trying for a few weeks now to get into ‘Mobile Web 2.0′ by Ajit Jankar and Tony Fish.

I’ve been finding it a little hard going, but perhaps I’m not target audience – the bit I’ve managed to get through so far has mostly been about semantics and business.

But there have been a couple of observations I’ve found interesting – the assertion that ‘capturing content at the point of inspiration‘ will be one of the main drivers of the Mobile Web 2.0, and the idea of mobile handsets as just one of the ‘screens’ we use to interact with the web as a whole – others being broadcast screens e.g. TVs which we tend to sit and watch, and interactive screens e.g. PCs which have probably the ultimate user interface, and can be used to configyre the ‘big screen’.

This comes back to their first point that:

‘Mobile Web 2.0 devices will drive the capture of imagination. The information is not just pictures – but rather a range of things like: calendars (the things you need to remember); notes and reminders (viewpoints and ideas that you want to work on later); news (citizen’s reporting) etc. These will then be stored in your private web space.’

I get the idea, and can see it happenning one day, but I don’t think we’re ready yet. Despite the coming of Facebook and other ‘online personality’ applications, we haven’t quite widely adopted the ‘private web space’. Even writing this blog I have not been tempted to use my phone to capture inspiration (textually at any rate) the user interface is still too awful.

So what are phones good for and how could current devices be used to make the mobile Web succeed?

• Communication – the original ‘killer app’, but it needn’t just be voice, or SMS / email, but it could also be updating your Facebook or Twitter status, or forum / chat sites.
• Entertainment - MP3 player, streaming content, games, web surfing
• Navigation - most phones have GPS built in now and mobile mapping apps are widesprea
• Mobile search - information on the go: ‘where’s my nearest’ etc.
• Alerts - football scores, breaking news – pushed informationcan find you anywhere
• Content Capture – photo / video in addition to text / data

My view of the ones that will succeed? The ones that are enabled by or rely on the mobility of the device and are weakened without it.

You (nearly) always have your phone with you. Most devices now are more than adequate cameras and MP3 players in addition to phones; some are acceptable as email devices or PDAs.

The line between phone, camera, media player and satnav is blurring – these are turning into realy usable useful devices.

Any sort of web browsing that isn’t bookmarked or pushed to you is a right pain that puts up too big a barrier in my view – but improvements in technologies and user interfaces (e.g. the N95 and iPhone) are making this better. I don’t buy the ‘content at the point of inspiration’ as a major driver (yet).

For me this is still the least likely factor to drive the sucess of the Mobile web, but I’m keeping an open mind. If it were to work, Google would have bought moblog by now.

Tony, I’ll probably be the tallest chap at FoM if you want to argue the point.

In the early hours of this morning, one of the biggest storm surges since January 1953 came down the east coast caused by low pressure and high winds. Combined with above average high tides warnings were sent out that seas an estimated 3 metres above normal could top defences and potentially cause massive flooding along the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts.

Luckily, the surge missed the high tide by a matter of minutes, the sea level rise was approx 20cm less han forecast, and most experts believe disaster was missed by a hairs breadth.

Still damage was done, and as the Telegraph reports devastation was caused just up the coast from us at Walcott with the sea wall damaged, windows smashed and walls pushed over.

I was at the old ramp at Happisburgh at just after 7 this morning, two hours after high tide but the surge was still being felt. The sea was crashing over the top of the revetments that are around 4 metres about nornal high tide. We were lucky that there wasn’t more north in the wind to put more energy in the swell so instead of lapping at the base of the cliff it would have smashed – but still one of the storage buildings to the south of the old ramp finally went over.

Despite a noisy stormy night, the bulk of Happisburgh survived relatively unscathed, as it is likely to do in the future as our cliffs keep the rough sea away from the village as they have for millenia. But our neighbours of Walcott to the North and Eccles to the south have to rely on partificial protection from concrete sea walls, and as we know locally all too well the plan is to stop repairing them.

What will happen next time we have a surge of this size? It is sure that Happisburgh will survive but I dread to think what will happen to surrounding communities if the sea has a real chance at low lying areas or the broads.

We cannot just abandon our sea defences without helping our coastal communities adapt to the risk of incidents like this and the loss of their security, and until they have adapted we cannot stop maintaining the defences. We cannot afford for what almost happened this morning to become a reality.

It’s not often I feel the red mist come over me, and I like to think I’m a careful considerate driver, but I did get caught out yesterday. (Don’t get me started on queue jumpers when two lanes merge into one though!)

While driving home from work last night, one minute I was on the last roundabout in the slog out of Norwich starting to accelerate for the exit, the next thing I knew I had my foot hard on the brake to the point that the ABS cut in as a stupid tw*t had pulled onto the roundabout infront of me from the park-and-ride. How I missed making a big Discovery sized dent in his drivers door I don’t know.

So there I am, stopped in the middle of the exit of the roundabout with him (or her?) speeding off into the distance and it starts to rise within me. It’s too late to honk or flash, but I can’t let it go! So it’s foot to the floor, hard acceleration until I’m right up behind him a half mile or so up the road and we’re doing well over the 50mph speed limit. Now what do I do?

How tempting was it to gesticulate (pointless in the dark), hoot, flash, or even try and overtake so I could make some signal of my dissapproval as I passed? Or I could just sit on his bumper for a bit and wind him up.

But I took a deep breath, eased my foot off the loud pedal, and allowed a sensible safe gap to open up between ourselves while I calmed down. After all, I’d survived with no harm; it was his fault and I think I’d made my point. I could get no benefit from pushing it further and was likely to have a real shunt. Boringly sensible I know but there we are.

So I settle back into my autopilot groove, but he’s still there in front of me, and as we pull into Wroxham he’s a few feet off my bonnet again. Is he going to pull into the garage – if so should I ‘have words’? He keeps going. Doesn’t turn off to Salhouse, Coltishall, Horning, Neatishead or Smallburgh – another 5 miles on he’s still there in front of me. Does he know I’m still back here, still mildy peeved? Is he panicing?

Then we get to Stepping Stone Lane where I will turn off, and he turns off. At the end where I will turn left he turns left. He’s going to think I’m following him!

In my head I can radio interview (‘PM’ is on Radio 4) where the road rage victim says ‘he just kept chasing me until we got to a quiet stretch then drove me off the road – he was a madman – I’m lucky to be alive‘. It’s lucky I’m not a violent person because I can see how it happens, and it was very tempting.

Anyway, it was a hard descision not to follow him as he turned off to Happisburgh but I think I’d had my fun.

A bit of advice to people who do silly things like pull out in front of oncoming vehicles – don’t do it to a Landrover – it’ll hurt you more than it wil hurt them!

The Open Handset Alliance sets out ‘to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience‘. Their first project is Android, a complete open source mobile platform that allows full access to core phone functionality to any applications – such as accesing geographic location data with great potential for peer-peer social networking.

Will it succeed? I really do hope so, but competing against incredibly strong commercial offerings with a massive market share, it might take too long to get the critical mass to allow it to thrive. It needs a ‘must have’ killer app – the next SMS – something that ‘commercial’ handsets can’t do.

There seems to have been a lot of thought put into the licencing, to allow commercial interests to contribute applications whilst protecting their interests – it makes sense to me. If heavyweight alliance members like Google, T-Mobile and LG get behind it rather than just paying lip-service, and if there’s a good take up from early adopters developing real social apps, it could well stand a chance.

I’d be much more likely to buy an Android powered phone (a GPhone?) than an iPhone, let’s put it that way!

It’s not often I come across something that solves a need so completely – but it happened yesterday when I renewed my acquaintance with PRTG Traffic Grapher.

The situation: We have two networks behind a firewall – our Internal ‘trusted’ network and a DMZ for dev servers. There can be around 50 people in the office daily – that adds up to probably 100+ devices all chatting away to each other and the Internet.

Our network has grown slowly over time as the Company has expanded, but we’ve tried to keep up with things and maintain stability and performance. There’s as solid a backbone as we can get without a major restructuring, with as little ‘daisy chaining’ of switches etc as we can arrange, and things are as logical and tidy as is feasible in a ‘real’ environment with things moving all the time.

Most of the time things are tickety-boo, but every now and again things grind to a sticky mess – like when I went in yesterday morning to cries of ‘where’s the Internet?’ and ‘Why can’t I get my email?’. After a process of elimination and some realitively crude diagnostics (unplugging things to see if there’s an improvement) it was tracked down to a single machine, that either had a dodgy network card, or the cabling from the patch panel to the machine was dodgy.

Next thing that happened was the Internet started slowing down, and looking at the bandwidth stats on the Firewall showed that we were pulling almost all of our 2mbps bandwidth constantly. No idea what it’s doing or who’s doing it, but it’s going into the ‘trusted’ network somewhere.

Every time this happens I resolve to find a monitoring solution to give more visibility of what’s happening on the network, so we have advance waring of problems, and the fault finding is more scientific.

We’ve tried various SNMP tools in the past but haven’t been able to get really useful results out of the mass of irrelevant data. We’re currently also using Nagios to monitor things, but again SNMP isn’t quite as useful as one might think to see where traffic is in a network. It also cannot distinguish between traffic inside the network (e.g. accessing network shares) and that leaving the network (e.g. downloading off the Internet)

Then I stumbled across PRTG, and if it did what the site said it did it sounded ideal, so fighting to get a bit of bandwidth (it took almost half an hour to download a 13MB file!) I installed it and started playing. First thing to set up was packet sniffing, which is great in that it breaks down all traffic on a monitored network interface into protocols and graphs it.

The problem is that in a switched network the only traffic getting to my machine (doing the monitoring) is that intended for my machine, or broadcast packets. Then I remember that our Netgear ‘Smart Switches’ have a monitoring function where all traffic to one port can be mirrored to another. So I set it up to send everything that goes to the uplink port to the one my machine is connected to – bingo! I can see all traffic leaving my switch.

What I then do is install the software on a server on the same switch as the link out of the network to the firewall, and that allows monitoring of all traffic into and out of the network. With a quick few filters to ignore connections between devices inside the network, or between trusted and optional, it leaves the stuff that in all likelihood is going to be leaving the network, and there’s a fantastic graph showing what’s going on, and giving information on what connections are using the most bandwidth. No pulling out patch cables until the bandwidth stops – this shows what it is and lets us decide if it’s legit traffic and there are just too many users sharing a single internet connection, or if someone is being greedy.

Yes it does SNMP too, which I’ve started configuring to monitor traffic between switches to check our backbone is OK, but I’ve got a very useful tool now for my biggest headache – ‘Who’s using all our bandwidth?’