blueDonkey.org

Finally got around to uploading some of the photos from our Earth Day weekend trip to Oakland Zoo. Along with the shots of the white handed gibbons (one of my favourite animals at the zoo), you will find shots of macaws, giraffes, elephants, zebra, tortoises, camels, meerkats, alligators, a stick insect and more in my new Oakland Zoo set.

Jason Kester has a very insightful post up on his blog this weekend about the use of the terms “magic” and “smart” to describe software tools & frameworks. And more importantly perhaps, about the features themselves, which are often anything but “magic” or “smart.”

The problem is that these features hide the real operations that are going on under the hood. It makes what are potentially complex, time-consuming and performance killing operations seem like a simple thing. They also make it next to impossible to work out when that is the case and when it isn’t. Since I’ve been looking at Ruby on Rails a little at the moment (it seems to be the most popular choice of web development language at the moment), I was interested to see Rails being listed there as well.

In my past I have seen similar problems with C++ (unexpected calls to copy constructors and conversion operators) and had to create coding standards that helped to catch these sorts of problems at compilation time rather than letting them get into executing code where it becomes next to impossible to track them down. That’s harder to do with things like Hibernate where the problem is caused by the abstraction itself, and it not just a symptom of powerful language features.

I installed a new app on my N95 the other day from the Nokia Beta Labs: Location Tagger. This is one of the things that should have been built into the camera application from day one on a GPS enabled phone, but I’m glad to see they’re catching up.

The photo on the right is my first test of this new feature. The photo was automatically geo-tagged (so, if you visit the photo’s page in Flickr, you can see it placed on a map). Flickr seems to be confused about the city (it thinks Alameda is Oakland!), but it shows up in the correct place on the map.

Why was I at Starbucks? Well, I stopped by to see whether AT&T had disabled the free Wi-Fi for iPhone users. The special free login page has indeed gone, replaced by the older iPhone login page, though it did still let me on using the iPhone credentials I had stored in my Devicescape account

Finally, I finally signed up for Twitter, and added the Twitter feed to the left column on the blog. Since it is connected to my IM client (Adium, for those wondering), I can send it short messages about what I’m up to, and they’ll end up here on the blog as well as on my Twitter page.

Well, to be more accurate, free for AT&T iPhone users. If you have your service through AT&T still, then you should get this login page when you connect to the attwifi SSID at Starbucks, or anywhere else. Enter your 10 digit AT&T mobile number and you’re online.

Devicescape users can add the special ‘AT&T Wi-Fi (iPhone)’ credential type to their account, and they will get online automatically.

There have been rumours around that the same will be enabled for anybody with an AT&T mobile data plan at some point; I expect the iPhone is being used as the test platform here since they already had mobile pages for the iPhone (my N95 still sees the full page).

Update, May 4, ‘08: Seems that the web page has been taken down now (guess too many folks were abusing it by changing their browser agent string and getting online with non-iPhone devices).

Last year San Francisco passed a law that made the plastic bags commonly provided by supermarkets illegal. This was a huge step forward in a number of ways, including reduction of the amount of these bags that will end up in the landfills, but most importantly perhaps it will help reduce the number of these plastic bags that end up in the bay and ocean, where they can harm or kill wildlife that doesn’t know what a plastic bag is.

Yesterday though I went to a small supermarket in San Francisco, and found that they were still handing out plastic bags. To side step the law, they seem to have made the bags from a thicker plastic and printed the word ‘Reusable’ on them. As if that will change the behaviour of the people taking them home. The previous type of plastic bags were reusable too, and, like this bag, could be returned to the supermarket for recycling. So, this seems to be just a way to exploit a loophole in a law that was intended to improve our environment. Hopefully, somebody will find a way to close this loophole, and force supermarkets like this one to use only bio-degradable bags, preferably paper ones.

If the paper ones cost more (as a sign in the supermarket suggested), then why not charge customers for them? That might encourage the use of truly reusable bags.

Seems that AT&T decided to send me a new SIM for my phone, and deactivate the old one. Not that serious normally, except that I’m not at home at the moment, so I didn’t get the new SIM.

Worse, when I spoke to them, they confirmed that once the SIM is disabled it cannot be re-enabled, and even if a new one was shipped out to me here, it still wouldn’t help as they need to be activated the first time on the AT&T network. So, no cell phone for me.

Even more annoyingly, the N95 insists on telling me about this every time I return to the standby screen, even in offline mode! I would switch it off entirely, except that I use it as my camera, email and web browsing (over Wi-Fi) and as a VoIP telephone as well.

As seems to be the case in many airports these days, there is Wi-Fi coverage all over the lounge area in Terminal 3 at London’s Heathrow, but you’d better make sure you have a full charge on your batteries if you plan to use it as even at the dedicated BT and T-Mobile hotspot ‘zones’ the power sockets have no juice.

And forget finding sockets anywhere in the main waiting areas - there’s none to be found (they’re all hidden under special covers in the floor). I have to wonder what the point of providing the Wi-Fi is if they don’t also provide the power for the laptops.

Still, it did work well for a quick connection from my N95 earlier - I connected to the BT Openzone, fired up Truphone and made some free international calls to let people know I’d arrived safely!

On the way back from Big Sur the other day I stopped off at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spent a few hours enjoying the aquarium in relative peace (compared to the normal weekend crowds it was very quiet).

These unusual jelly fish are part of the Jellies: Living Art exhibit.

Yellow sandy beach, waterfall, clear blue water and a beautiful sunny day down at Big Sur. What could be better? Well, it would have helped if the trail from the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park parking lot to the observation deck had been open, but as it happens you can get almost the same view from the road above the cove.

This is the Nokia N95’s take on the view; the ones from my 20D will be coming later (once I have them off the camera). The rest of the day was spent driving back along the coast towards Monterey, where I stopped off at the aquarium, then back down south a little into Carmel for the sunset and dinner.

And apparently proud of it. This little Prius was parked in the north parking lot on the southbound side of the Golden Gate Bridge.