For the second year running I went to Gadget Show Live, the technology event based on the Channel 5 TV programme. While I enjoyed last years event it wasn’t very big and it looked like it had been put together at the last minute.

This year was completely different. Spread over three halls there were gadgets for everything you could possibly imagine and every price point.

Big this year was 3D with several major manufacturers showing off their 3D TVs. We took at look at the offering from Panasonic and I have to admit that it was pretty good being one of the most realistic that I have seen (you still need to wear those glasses though).

For many years I couldn’t go anywhere without my Psions and I was really sorry when then ceased to make portable computers. So I was really happy to see the psixpda which has the Psion 5 in it’s DNA. However, rather than running EPOC this device runs Windows XP and while it looked good it was simply too small for general everyday usage, which was a shame.

Also looking good was the swap watch which had bluetooth phone capabilities, a camera as well as being able to be tell the time. But you do need large wrists to make the most of it.

As well as the stands in the halls you could also go to the live theatre where the Gadget Show presenters put on a live version of the TV show which was really well done.

I was glad that I made time to go up and greatly enjoyed the day but it was packed. At one point it was so busy that the walkways were gridlocked. A real sign that they have a winner on their hands so lets hope it expands again next year.

Below is a small selection of the pictures and videos taken at the event and you can see more here.

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Despite still suffering from jetlag Mat and I got out of bed early this morning to drive to the NEC in Birmingham for Gadget Show Live. We are both fans of the show and of gadgets in general so we were looking forward to finding out what was on offer. What it turned out to be was, perhaps, more a collection of hi-tech retailers gathered together rather than a showing of gadgets. it seemed particularly heavy on gaming, an area I have no interest in, and light on up-and-coming gadgets.

It did offer Mat the opportunity to play on a number of games, including Guitar Hero and Rock band, as well as seeing the Guitar Hero World Champion in action. He must have been about 16 and while quite impressive you can’t help but think that his parents would probably have been more pleased if he put in the same amount of effort on revising for his GCSEs than the enormous amount of practice he must have put in on Guitar Hero!

As you can see from the photo we did get to meet presenter Jason Bradbury who was signing copies of his new book aimed at teenage gadget lovers. Jason was just as you would imagine him to be, friendly in a cheeky-chappy sort of way and Mat was made up to meet him.

I got to play with Sony’s answer to the Netbook the snappily titled VAIO P VGN. I was a fantastic looking unit and, as you would expect from Sony, beautifully put together but completely impractical and, at a shade under £1000, too expensive.

So we had fun. Would I go again? Probably but not less than 24 hours after stepping off a long flight!

Click here to see all pictures from Gadget Show Live

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I am pleased to be able to announce that I have now setup my own business, Ammat Consulting, offering strategic consultancy and tactical support to software companies of all sizes. This makes use of the more than 20 years I have in both software development and running of software based businesses.

The website was launched this week which gives further details of the services on offer. You can visit the site here http://www.ammatconsulting.com.

I have already secured a number of clients but still have some time available. If you think that I may be able to help you or your colleagues then please get in touch.

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I was lucky enough to get an opportunity last night to visit the synchrotron at the Diamond Light Source at Harwell, Oxfordshire. Unfortunately, due to bad weather and an accident on the A34 I was late and missed the start of the presentation. This meant that I missed the why are we here part of the discussion and came in during the "difficult" science bit which blew my mind somewhat (see previous references to my prowess in Physics).

I did learn some interesting things though. The project is completely government backed to the tune of £370M, so if you are a UK tax payer you have contributed to this. 90% of the time available in the synchrotron is available for academic use and is free to use. The remaining 10% is for company research, predominantly pharmaceutical based, for which they pay "a few thousand" per go.

I was also surprised to learn that there are about 70 other synchrotrons worldwide and the one at Harwell is the 4th largest. Although size does not seem to be what is important with these things but how bright the light is determines how good it is. In this case it is one billion times brighter than the sun, so pretty bright then. 

For those that are interested there are some pictures of the facility below and for the really curious you can visit their website here.

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I wrote a while back about my love of Wordpress but after my experiences this morning I am feeling a little less charitable. I am currently setting up a new site (spokenlikeageek.com) for which I had intended to use the latest build of Wordpress (2.5). As part of this I wanted to transfer some existing entries from this blog and so I exported out all entries (the only option) and imported them into the new blog. This seemed to work well and, as an added bonus, also copied across all the files that had been uploaded as well. The next step was to delete the entries that I didn’t want which should have been easy to do through the admin interface. Problem is that I receive and error message which says there has been a problem with the deletion but, crucially, doesn’t tell you what the problem is. A quick search of the Wordpress forums shows that others have had the same problem but there seems to be no fix.

At this point I decided that the best course of action was to install the previous stable build (2.3.3) and redo the transfer. Again the install was a breeze. This time I encountered a different problem in that not all my posts would import. I then spent a while checking a number of things from the size of the file to the format of the XML. A number of imports later and I am still no closer.

So I have a number of choice:

• import all items and not be able to delete them
• import only the items that Wordpress decides
• move to some other blogging platform
• give up.

Right now I am going with the latter option while I do some more research on resolving one of the issues. When I find a solution I will post it.

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This little device arrived through the letter box this morning and while it looks like a three year olds first calculator it is, in fact, my banks attempt at improving on line security. Now you might think that I would welcome this but actually I have mixed feelings on its use. It seems that it will be used for signing on to the internet banking service and then to carry out some of the more "dangerous" transactions. I say "it seems" because the accompanying documentation is, well, pretty much non-existent other than a short letter – all the documentation is online and not very clear.

So what are my objections to the innocuous looking device? Well for a start I access my bank account from home, from work and, crucially, while on the move from my mobile. This implies that I will have to carry this calculator around with me too. I can’t see that working. I will, no doubt, leave it on my desk at work, get home and find that I cannot make a payment as I don’t have the required security codes. And as for keeping it in my pocket so I can access on the move – forget it. So from that point of view it is a backwards step as I will no longer be able to manage my account where and when I want.

Perhaps that is the real security improvement. As this device is going to be tied to my debit card and not (easily) transportable I won’t be able to access my account as often and when I do it will be only on a single PC. Once the system is operational in a couple of weeks I will report back on its use.

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Over the last week I have been trying out a new beta plugin for Outlook called Xobni (Inbox backwards) that helps you make sense of the mess that is your email.

Xobni appears as a column down the right hand side of Outlook that displays information about the sender of the currently selected email. At the top is a picture placeholder which is a little redundant in my case as I don’t collect pictures of my contacts. Below this is details of your email activity with this individual and their rank.

The next block has telephone number details (if available) and a clickable link to call them via Skype. Also contained in this section is a really cool piece of functionality that is a simple link that says "Schedule time with x". When you click on this an email opens with details of all your free time over the next few days (you can set in options which days it includes). This is great as if you get asked to schedule a meeting or a call, rather then check your calendar you can just press the button and Xobni will do the check for you. It’s a great idea and very simple but unfortunately there are a few problems with it – more of which later.

The final sections have details of the email conversations you have had with that contact and the files you have sent them. Both of which are invaluable when you are looking for an email you know you have sent recently but can’t quite track down. You see on the bar a few lines from the email but clicking it displays the whole thing in the Xobni bar.

But the best functionality is the least visible and this is a small search field at the top of the bar. Searching in Outlook can be a painful experience: slow and with little choice over the folders you can search at any one time. Xobni searches across all folders and does it at lightening speed much better that Outlook itself or Google Desktop Search.

I have to admit that I was a little bit dubious about Xobni at first as it takes up a fair chunk of screen real estate down the right hand side. However, the functionality offered is genuinely useful and the fact that you can collapse Xobni down to a thin column means that you can regain the space should you need to.

Xobni is currently in beta and there are a few wrinkles to iron out, particularly around the schedule function which doesn’t work if you have the email type set to HTML and you are not using Word as your editor. However, I have to say that the guys on support at Xobni have been very responsive and I have every confidence that these problems will be sorted for the final release.

It also seems that I am not the only one that has taken a shine to Xobni as the rumours suggest that Microsoft may be looking to buy the company.

Xobni is currently in closed beta but if you would like an invite please send me an email.

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At the end of yesterday I had a fully functioning laptop again having completely wiped it and done a fresh install. This process involved a trip into the office to join the machine to the domain and synchronise Outlook to my Exchange folders, all of which took an hour or so. One thing that this exercise has shown me is that installing the software is the easy part – anyone can double click an installer and get the files onto their machine – no, what is really challenging is getting right all the settings for all the programs.

As an example take Microsoft Outlook, I like the preview pane to be down the bottom but out of the box it is down the side. Also, again by default, when a message arrives you get a “bing”, an icon in the notification area, a pop-up with details of the sender and subject and finally, if the previous hadn’t alerted you to the fact that you might have an incoming email, the cursor also briefly changes. All great allowing you to personalise Outlook to just how you want it and over the years I have done precisely that. Problem is I have no idea of all the tweaks I have made and the same applies to countless other pieces of software and there seems to be no way of storing these setting and reapplying them – perhaps there is a gap in the market here?

I promise that this is the last post on this matter!

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My laptop has been giving me increasing problems over the last few months and I have been putting off the inevitable need for a rebuild. Today, however, the final straw arrived in the form of a very untimely "Blue Screen of Death" so I decided to rebuild from scratch.

Before blatting the laptop I took a good look at what I already had installed and came to the conclusion that I had an amazing amount of stuff that I used on a regular basis that would need to be reinstalled. I was equally amazed at the even greater amount of stuff that I had installed over the last couple of years that was was never used. I am hoping that it is things in the latter category that led to the lack of performance and other assorted problems.

While it has been a while since I have done it I have installed XP on numerous occasions and so am quite familiar with the process. It’s not that quick but it is relatively straight forward and armed with the original Dell driver CD after a couple of hours I did have a basic operating system installed along with Office.

Next, I went to Add/Remove Programs and removed from the systems all those system programs that I knew I would never need – such as Outlook Express. I was intrigued to see that Internet Explorer was offered as an uninstallable option. Surprised because I thought that the operating system relied on it. Anyway, I unticked it clicked ok. After a few minutes the IE icon disappeared from the quick launch bar… Then I realised that without a browser I was going to find it difficult to download Firefox. So this was a bit of a dilemma, did I reinstall IE or transfer the Firefox installer from another PC. In the end I went to Start|Run and typed "http://www.mozilla.com" and, of course, up popped IE… So the uninstall option obviously just removes the icon. Oh well, I tried.

Finally for this evening I went through the Windows update process. This took longer than the original install to collect all the updates since my XP SP2 CD was burnt. So I now have a bare machine that is beginning to look like being serviceable.

So far, so good. However, it is the next stage that takes the most time and needs the most planning – reinstalling all my must-have applications, restoring all my files and applying my personalisation. Then there is the small matter of rejoining the machine to the domain and synchronising Outlook with Exchange. By Monday morning I should be back up and running with something that is more stable than the dog I carried around with me previously.

All of this has been time consuming but it has taught me three things:

1. Windows is easier to install and setup than Linux
2. Don’t use your day-to-day machine for cutting edge stuff
3. Expect to rebuild your machine on a regular basis if you ignore point 2

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I wrote recently about the impact of the new Google to Outlook synchronisation tool on the third party supplier SyncMyCal. I felt that Google’s free tool would cause significant difficulties for SyncMyCal who were selling their tool at £25 a pop. It seems that SyncMyCal has a bit of a card up it’s collective sleeve as I notice on its website that they are soon to support contact syncing. I have been looking for a way to do just that and so far not found anything suitable so I am pretty excited about the prospect. Not that it will bring any more money for them as this is being offered as a free upgrade.

So what I think we have here is a free basic version from Google that offers simple calendar synchronisation that will probably be fine for 80% of people. Then there is a “pro” version that is being offered by SyncMyCal that have more options, including contact synchronisation, for the other 20%.

You can see a comparison between the SyncMyCal and Google offerings here.

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Been playing around with Twitter recently to try and understand what the value of it is and how I might make it work for me. Right now I can’t get over the thought that no-one is going to be interested in what I have to say. Then again I slavishly work on these blog entries on a regular basis so I must be expecting someone other than my immediate family to read my thoughts.

My initial problem with Twitter was that it was a pain to have to remember to do it and then when I did remember to go to a browser to actually make the post itself. Well I have found an answer to the latter problem by using a third party service that lets me post to Twitter from Skype. You can find details on how to do it on Robert Sanzalone’s blog. Other than the obvious privacy concerns with giving an unknown person or persons your Twitter username and password it works smoothly enough. Given that I am constantly in and out of Skype I think that this could be the solution for me. Now all I need to do is find something to say…

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A few weeks ago when I was having problems with Outlook I mentioned in passing emoze and said I would blog about it at a later date, well that time has come. Emoze is a service that allows you to have your email pushed to your mobile device (Symbian or Windows Mobile). It comes in a couple of flavours, the personal edition, which is free, and a corporate version, for which I couldn’t find any pricing. The latter is set to compete with RIM’s BlackBerry offering. I have been using push email with BlackBerry for a few years now and I was keen to see how they compared. I ran emoze on my Nokia N73 while I am using RIM’s offering on a BlackBerry curve.

emoze Installation is simple and the application sits in the background unobtrusively enough running as a native Nokia application. I am pushing out my Google mail emails and details for this were pre-configured so all I needed to do was enter my username and password. If you install the application on the phone rather than a memory card then you can also set emoze to startup automatically when you turn on the phone.

Emails arrive quickly and in most cases before they get to my Gmail account. When a mail arrives you get a discrete "beep" and a message telling you how many unread emails you have. You can then go through to the mailbox to view and read the mails. It is here that the service is at it’s weakest viewing emails, not that this is an emoze problem, but that email viewer on the Nokia is text only which means a lot of information gets stripped out. Still this is the same on the BlackBerry which also doesn’t have an HTML email viewer.

So far, so good. However, one thing that has been very noticeable is that emoze seems to be very heavy on battery use. I am now charging my phone every other day whereas before it would have been maybe once a week. Also sometimes the service needs a prod to get it going, particularly after going out of coverage. Also sometimes it seems to affect other data connections that refuse to connect until I shut down emoze.

On the whole it has all been a pretty positive experience with it doing what it says. It certainly seems to be an ideal solution for a small business or maybe a sole trader. That said I am concerned about the battery usage. I don’t make many calls on my Nokia so if you are a heavy call user that and emoze could finish off the battery before the end of the day. For corporate use BlackBerry still has more going for it but with emoze you get a better choice of devices.

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With the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch SDK on its way and the first raft of application intentions announced I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what applications I would like on my Touch and, what I would pay for.

The list itself is actually pretty short but these are a few of what I would regard as killer apps for me:

• mobipocket reader. I like the idea of eBooks and have a number from various sources which I currently read using the mobipocket reader on other devices, such as my BlackBerry. However, a mobipocket reader on the Touch could be very compelling
• BBC iPlayer. Recent updates have allowed programmes to be streamed to the device but it would be great if they could also be downloaded on played offline saving battery through not having to use the wifi
• Task manager. I know that tasks can be done through third party apps (such as Remember the Milk) and (probably) can be sync’d with the Calendar but to me neither of these approaches works. The former because you need to be online and the second because it has always struck me as strange having tasks in a calendar. Tasks to me are prioritised and dates are less important. I want something similar to TasMan an app I wrote for the Psion 5 years ago
• wifi toggle. I find it a real pain to have to keep going into Settings | Wi-Fi to turn the wireless on or off. I want an icon on the home screen that toggles it on and off.

And that’s about it. As for paying I would consider it for all of them but from what I have read I am not going to have much choice as downloads are going to be tightly controlled by Apple and are only going to be available through iTunes (which I still haven’t overcome my objection to).

One final thought is this: with the calendar, mail, contacts, notes and other applications the Touch is much more than a media player but much more closer to a PDA, albeit a closed one that is difficult, if not impossible, to update. How long before it becomes a serious threat to the multitude of Windows Mobile and Palm devices?

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So two guys from Hawaii have started a lawsuit to stop the CERN project as they fear that it might destroy the universe. CERN is the European Centre for Nuclear Research and it is their Large Hadron Collider project that is at the centre of the lawsuit. The two claim that the project might create a black hole, which could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

All of this reminds me of the Joint European Taurus (JET) project based in Culham which is doing research into nuclear fusion as a future method of generating power. Current nuclear power stations use nuclear fission and generate lots of nasty waste which fusion does not. The JET project has a way of crashing particles together which generate energy (in the form of heat) as a by product of the process.*

I visited JET during one of their open days probably about the same time that I was doing poorly at O Level Physics. I remember very clearly being told/hearing/making up that if one of the particles that was being accelerated around the ring hit the sides it would blow a hole in the Earth 40 miles in diameter. That would have been enough to include where I was living at the time and where I am sitting now. So you can see why the guys in Hawaii are getting conCERNed about this.

What I find even more amazing is that I accepted this fact and lived with it for the next 30 years. I certainly didn’t stop my guide on the tour and ask him what safety features had been built in to ensure that I wasn’t going to be blown into outer space with some force. Nor did I ask to see the HSE risk assessment that was bound to have been carried out – now that must have been a weighty document.

I also remember that Fusion was the great big hope for the future of energy at a time when the oil reserves were going to have run out by the year 2000 and we needed a clean, reliable alternative pretty quickly. I had envisioned that by now we would all be going round in De Lorian cars with a device looking suspiciously like a sodastream on the back delivering fusion based drive (time travel strictly optional). However, none of this has to date come about.

So should we be ConCERNed about the Large Hadron Collider? Well under normal circumstances I would say no but this is a massive project with input from twenty different European countries. These are the same countries that can’t agree on the outcome of a singing contest each year… Also the number languages that the documents must have to be translated into leads one to wonder about the ability of the translators to get the nuances correct. I have worked with enough developers to know that it is sometimes difficult to workout what is meant to be going on from a document written in your native language. It only takes for someone to mistranslate the size of a bolt and we are one step away from being a black hole.

If that isn’t enough to get you to sign up for the inaugural Virgin Galactic flight then take a look at the video on the link below. However, better be quick as the Collider goes live in May ‘08.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7334208.stm

*NOTE: this paragraph contains my understanding of nuclear fusion. It is inevitably going to be incorrect since I only got a "C" at O Level Physics some 30 years ago. Check the facts for yourself, links provided!

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This has just appeared on the wires purportedly having been posted by Sir Richard Branson to the Official Google Blog. The post talks about a joint venture set up between Google and Virgin to put a human settlement on Mars. Well, if anyone outside of NASA had the funds to do it these two would be good candidates.

But wait a minute, check your calendars… It’s 1st April. Of course this is a jolly wheeze from those pranksters at Google. However, if you think this is for real then there is an application for you to becomes a Virgle Pioneer here. Good luck!

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The picture on the left is of a small piece of plastic that comes with the Apple iPod Touch. Initially I had no idea exactly what it was for and the lack of any instructions meant that for quite a while it just sat in the box. Then I also noticed that the box stated that included was a “stand” but I could find nothing in the box that fitted that description. Then a friend of mine who also has a touch pointed out that that bit of clear plastic was the stand I was searching for. A quick trial showed that, despite it’s simplicity, it does indeed function as a rudimentary stand, as shown below. Simple but effective. However, the plastic itself is tiny and could be easily lost. Of course, Apple have the answer to this too. The back section of the stand is just the right size to act as a cap for the sync cable – brilliant! All in all it is a very clever piece of design.

Mind you given the price of an iPod Touch you might be left feeling a little bit cheated that all you got was a tiny piece of plastic that can’t be worth more than one pence when what you were really expecting was a Stand.

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I have recently been trialling emoze, a free push email solution, for delivering my personal email to my Nokia phone. I’ll blog about that at some point in the future. However, using it has highlighted an interesting issue with Outlook- it never closes. Yes, it appears to close but the outlook.exe process is still running. This has a number of unwanted side effects beside continuing to use vast quantities of memory. In my case if continued to download my mail preventing emoze from working correctly.

Searching the net I found a good article about the problem on Mike Swanson’s blog. While this didn’t give a way of actually solving the problem it did highlight a few ways of dealing with it, including a small system tray utility called KnockOut which allows the problem to be managed. The root cause may well be to do with an Outlook plug in with SyncMyCal or iTunes being likely culprits. No one knows, or perhaps no one is saying, who is to blame. Is it that the plug in doesn’t release Outlook correctly or the other way round? Whatever the only sure fire way of getting rid of it is to kill the process.

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I see that Google have at long last released a utility that allows synchronisation to take place between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. The only real surprise is that it has taken this long to be released. Since Google Calendar was launched this seems to have been one of the most requested features and has allowed a number of third party utilities to pop-up to fill the gap. In fact I already use SyncMyCal to do exactly what the new Google tools now does. The one significant difference between the two is that to get the same level of functionality SyncMyCal will set you back $25. So will Google Calendar Sync affect SyncMyCal? you bet it will as no-one likes to pay for something that they can get for free, particularly when it is from the original developer as in this case. Sadly this is all too late for me as I have already splashed my cash with SyncMyCal but that said it does work well without any fuss.

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Yesterday saw the launch of a new online magazine iGizmo. This is a magazine in the traditional sense of the word in that it is presented as an electronic view with pages to turn just like the real thing. Of course being online allows it to do other neat things like embed videos and link to websites – both of which iGizmo makes good use of.

This seems to be the latest thing as I have been invited to "subscribe" to several online mags in the last few weeks. These include the aforementioned iGizmo (gadgets) GP Mag (motor sport) and idiomag (music). The latter is interesting in that it (allegedly) tailors its content to your musical tastes. You give it the name of three artists you like (or point it at your musical profile on, say, Last.fm) and it then tailors the output.

In general I like this advance in publishing options and it brings with it a couple of clear advantages over print magazines: 1) they are more regularly updated, or contain more up-to-date information and 2) they are (generally) free. Of course the downside is that you cannot (easily) read them on the train as they need a laptop and an internet connection. The question is whether they provide any information that cannot be obtained from a traditional website with a good RSS feed.

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I am out of the office in London today and am staying connected through both my BlackBerry and wireless access on my Asus EEE PC. I am sat at a Starbucks using the t-mobile wireless connection to check my mail and to generally keep in touch with the office while I am waiting for my next meeting.  Connection speeds are quick and more than workable. The tea is flowing and the panini is pretty good.

However, there is one fly in the ointment.  This particular Starbucks is tiny and I am sat outside . It is freezing and certainly not conducive to doing too much work. Oh and also now all the smokers are out here too so I am cold and engulfed in second hand smoke!

Still, at least it is not raining… Oh hang on!

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