The inane comments of a C# developer
General Comments
The Nexus One and Android
Mar 31st
I seem to be blogging quite a bit this month and I appear to have a lot to say!
Anyway, I took the plunge and forked out for a shiny new Nexus One from Google and bought the desktop dock so I could show off to my boss. After using it for two weeks I can only say that my experience so far has been blissful. However I will state that it has not been entirely perfect, with a few quirks along the way.
The phone feels well built with a very responsive AMOLED touch screen, which is also very nice to look at and it leaves my old Nokia E71 eating it’s dust when it comes to performance. The 1GHz Snapdragon Processor might have something to do with that.
The Android Operating system is very swish and fluid, using it is very simple however sometimes drilling down to the settings is a little tedious. When I set-up the phone, I entered my Google Account details and before I could finish a cigarette all my contacts, e-mail and calendar were synced with the phone and any updates on the handset would propagate back to Google. Awesome. Next I set-up Facebook which also synced with my contacts adding addresses, e-mail addresses and profile pictures. At this point I was having to calm myself down with the sheer amount of awesomeness that this phone was delivering.
I have yet to get the phone to crash, freeze or slow down even slightly and I sync my Google, Facebook, Twitter and my work information along with running games, weather and news widgets, there seems to be no end to what this phone can do. I have apps for going walking in the country, to augmented reality browsers to find things that I need and even an app to scan bar codes and purchase the item on ebay.
I did run in to a problem when I switched networks from three to O2. The short story for this was because three was:
- expensive
- provided terrible customer/technical support
- refused to allow me to send e-mail over their network without a ‘three’ proxy application. (They don’t have an android application, so no e-mail)
Anyway when my O2 SIM arrived, I popped it in the phone and found that the cell reception was utterly rubbish and the 3G connectivity non existant. I had activated the SIM and spoke to technical support several times. However I could not seem to register on the cell network for more than five minutes before being disconnected. It seems that the Nexus One stores the network that you are registered to and doesn’t offer a clear option to change the default network. I ended up doing a factory reset and seeing as all my settings and data were backed up to Google’s servers, I was up and running again within five minutes with an awesome cell reception and stable 3G connection. Goodbye three! Despite being a loyal customer, you took advantage and insulted me, so I wont be missing you.
Another minor annoyance is answering calls. Sometimes when the phone rings the screen does not wake up, which means I have to press the top button and then swipe to answer, which sometimes does not register for what ever reason. I would like to make answering calls less fiddly. Obviously the main complaint is the battery life. If you run everything and play about a lot, which is natural when you get a new toy, the battery will last around a day, which when compared with the Nokia E71 is just appalling. My solution was to have the auto brightness adjustment on, I turned off my 3G APNs with APN Droid and can manually enable them when I want mobile internet and I usually turn off GPS and Bluetooth until they are needed. So far, Including taking/making calls, reading e-mails, checking Facebook sending and receiving SMS and listening to music to and from work the battery will go down to around 74% after a day which is far, far better. I decided to give the music player a test run and went into Birmingham on the bus which is 45 minutes each way. I spent around 3.5 hours listening to music and by the time I got home the battery was at critical ( < 15% ) which disappointed me slightly as it rules out the phone for use on long distance journeys as a music player.
After a week or so, I got curious about the Android SDK, so I decided to take some time out and have a quick peek at what was going on. Turns out that Android applications run on the Dalvic virtual machine and the code is all Java. So a quick install of the ADT plugin for my device emulators, a quick install of Eclipse and Subclipse (for Subversion) and a download of the Android SDK and I was nose deep in documentation.
It turns out that Developing Android Applications is very easy and uses a similar paradigm as MVC for web applications. So I spend last Sunday tinkering around and wrote my first proper application after Hello World! which was Droid Partridge. It is a very simple application which plays Alan Partridge’s classic moments and has a dialog box. I eventually released this on to the world via the Android Marketplace, so others can download and install and enjoy the pocket comedy for those socially appropriate moments where “Jurassic Park!” is needed to be said out loud. Over the next few weeks I will be updating this application to include more sounds with better compression and iron out any bugs.
Developing on Android was fun and quick, however the tool kit does have some drawbacks. The interface designer which creates the view layouts in XML is rather lacking and is not quite up to the standard that VE (Visual Editor) was for Eclipse all those years ago, nor is it up to scratch with the WPF / Silverlight visual designer. (which also defines it’s interfaces in XML) It is a shame really as that part makes the whole process much more difficult for newcomers who just want to define a very basic UI to play around with.
Another drawback is the mobile device emulator itself, on a Quad core machine with 4GB of ram (My development machine at work) it is still as painful as trying to run through a swimming pool of treacle, it is so terribly slow! Also if the program does throw an exception during runtime, I often get the ‘Source Not Found’ window open up in the debugging perspective and I can only hazard guesses where it has gone wrong from the not too helpful stack traces that seem to have no mention of any calls to my code.
Despite this, I am quite committed to keep on tinkering with Android. True, I did pay $25 USD for the Android Marketplace account, but it is also a very nice development experience, very much unlike Windows Mobile development. I have a few nifty ideas that I want to try, for which I have yet to see a solution for and also a couple of colleagues have thrown suggestions at me so at least I have something to keep me out of trouble and off the streets of Meriden!
A while back I did mention that I was developing a Windows Mobile Twitter application, that has been abandoned completely as I’ve jumped on to the Google bandwagon and riding off in to the sunset to get as far from Microsoft and it’s stagnation as possible. I just hope that for all our sakes, that Google stick to their “Don’t be evil” ideals.
P.S.
Just in-case you didn’t notice, like the new theme ?
Heart of England Way
Mar 13th
Well it has been a busy weekend so far, managed to get my land line installed finally. It involved running around like a madman after the bus home broke down, getting a taxi to the village, answering client phone calls whilst standing in a chippy. (which I must say, Meriden chip shop is awesome)
So now hopefully next week I will have a proper Internet connection rather than the temperamental (the connection speed depends on which part of the arm of the couch it is on…..) 3G connection through my mobile phone.
Anyway after a shipment from Argos with my new shiny freezer, chair and desk arrived (whilst in the shower this morning), assembling that and doing shopping for the next couple of weeks, I decided to go for a wander into the countryside to relieve my headache and rest my eyes for a while.
I knew that the Heart of England Way ran through Meriden before I moved here, but couldn’t find accurate maps on where it was, without having to fork out 12 pounds for a map book. (HA!) After wandering down Main Street I found the beginnings of the public footpaths that run up the little hill into fields a onwards into the surrounding countryside.
Now I had started walking at around 16:00 so I had a wonderful view down on to the Birmingham Plateau and I could even see where I used to live 16 miles away! To my left I could catch glimpses of Coventry city centre and sadly I did pass through a field where a farmer was spraying muck, NOT A NICE SMELL!
I only walked a very short way, 2 hours 20 minutes round trip, however the walk was enjoyable, the views were stunning and the route is very well signposted which calmed my paranoia that I was going to get horribly lost.
I ended up in the tiny village called Berkswell, which has a wonderful little church, Tudor style thatched houses and is all that you can expect for a quaint little village. Sadly I didn’t linger too long as I was swiftly running out of daylight and I wandered back the way I came to Meriden where I was followed by ducks.
There seems to be a pattern forming with me and ducks.
Overall, a nice chilled Saturday with no work and the discovery of a really nice and quiet route to walk along, might try going north tomorrow or next weekend and there is always the possibility of making a day out of it!
Anyway here are a few mediocre shots that I took on my E71, which to my horror I didn’t notice that the camera settings were on low till I got back 
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- Another attempt to get a sunset shot, bleached out :(
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- Nice little pond, no ducks though
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- It was a nice house!
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- Nice little area to sit and think before going home
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- Small yet beautiful little church
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- The sun shining on the field was rather gorgeous here, just leaving Berkswell
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- Right on the horizon, you can just make out the city centre
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- Managed to get the E71 camera to produce a lens flare!
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- Almost home!
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- The ducks decide to follow me home. GAH!
Meriden
Mar 7th
Well I have managed to move successfully and seamlessly and now instead of living in the city centre of Birmingham I am now living in the centre of Meriden which is apparently also the centre of England! (The centre of the centre! was also tempted to throw in a HTTP 301 reference, but I’ll spare you that)
Anyway, Meriden is a wonderful and quiet little village roughly 6 km from Birmingham International and around 3 miles from where I work, which has cut my commute down to 5 minutes by bus which is awesome.
I find that I am a lot happier here with friendly people from the village who say hello and don’t mind if you talk to them. Also not having to pass through Birmingham New Street station is a plus as the entire place is just pure depression and to be honest, it is not what you need first thing on a Monday morning, especially when that is combined with the arrogance and ignorance of inner city dwellers/commuters.
Anyway, I have a bigger flat that is actually a one bedroom flat and not a tiny little studio. It has a kitchen, bathroom and separate living and bedroom. Combined with the lack of drunkards walking past the window at night and central heating (oh my god electric storage heaters are utterly rubbish at keeping you warm) my sudden departure from Birmingham doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all, however I am lacking in the freezer, computer desk and land line department, but those will be sorted out in due course I suppose.
Looking forward to trying out the Heart of England way and attempting to walk down towards Henley-In-Arden and perhaps see some remnants of the Arden forrest.
Sadly the internet is in the form of net book and E71 which sometimes can be fairly stable and other times wont stay connected for more than a minute, which suffices for day to day Facebook browsing. Another development concerns my Nokia E71 and how woefully unstable it is becoming. It no longer can produce sound out from the speaker, so that means no ring tones, no alarms and certainly no text message alerts which is rather infuriating and also indicates that I will need a new phone in the very near future. Another thing is that it seems to be getting more and more unstable as time goes on. The web browser takes an age to load and running a few programs usually causes a kernel panic and the phone reboots without warning at random intervals, which is both worrying and vexing.
Geeking wise, I haven’t been up to much at all recently. I’ve set up Subversion and Trac to play with when I have the free time and to also get all my code up in to a central location as I keep loosing things that are scattered over several hard disks and machines. I am also going to get accustomed with Nagios again so that I have a playground to fiddle and break so that I can finally get that monitoring server set up at work (Which has been on my TODO list for around a year now). Started coding for a project handed to me by a friend over a year ago and another that started in November. Very slow progress as the last thing I want to do is code when I get in from work during the week.
Anyway all is good in the land of Meriden, we had a drugs bust in the flats across the way which was talk of the village, so it’s all happening here, very glad I moved.
Snow, Games, HTC HD2 and Explosions
Jan 5th
A Happy New Year to all!
Sadly my immune system decided to take two days off resulting in most of new year’s eve consisting of watching films in bed and getting up at midnight to watch the fireworks from the terrace. Which I might add were rather spectacular and I am left warm and fuzzy knowing that Birmingham City Council are spending my council tax well.
Anyway, this gave me time to play Assassins Creed 2, which to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything fantastic considering the first one was pretty, unique and fun to play. Sadly it was killed by the repetitive side missions and mundane tasks which did not fit in to the assassin theme. I was however impressed, the storyline in the game continues right where you left off in the first game, so at least there is a little consistency. The game is far more pretty than the first one, running through Italian streets gazing at the architecture and finding new and amusing ways to kill the guards on the roofs.
The Weekend & MySQL fail
Oct 16th
This has been a long week, with MySQL fails left right and centre.
The actual MySQL server ships with a bomb ready to go off as we found out at work. For every connection to the server it does DNS lookups for the user to verify where the connection is coming from and for a production server all connections will be from a limited amount of known hosts. So when the hosting provider’s DNS blows up in your face, you are left with a MySQL server which is not allowing any connections what so ever, the web servers go nuts with requests failing and retrying and a lot of clients on the phone giving you a good ear bashing. (Plus the boss gets a headache)
You can switch the DNS lookups off, the solution was found here:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/05/31/dns-achilles-heel-mysql-installation/
Another fail comes in the form of the Administrator GUI tool which started today. When connecting to a remote database through an SSH tunnel, (which might I add has worked for the past 2 years.) I get the wonderful 2013 MySQL error, sadly Google has yet to provide me with a solution, however Navicat Lite has provided a clue which is the also unhelpful: Lost connection to MySQL Server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0.
If I find a solution, I’ll post it here.
Ah well, at least the weekend is now here, I can go get drunk off my face and make a tit of myself in front of the general public. Also I’ve just realised that Grey Area is now 2 years old! A rather quiet celebration as there is no user base here.
Squash, Screen and Irssi
Oct 13th
First off,seeing as I am testing out this new VPS to see if it is more suited to my needs. (despite being a complete turncoat and using Windows instead of Linux). I mean to be honest as long as the web server works and I can serve ASP.NET either through IIS or Mod_Mono I am happy. Well I say happy, I don’t enjoy spending endless tweaking of config files to see if changing settings will finally allow the web server to start serving files properly. Platform ambivalent, you could say.
Anyway, I’m currently hunting for a nice replacement to screen on Linux for Windows, as that is one of the main things that I use my VPS for, logging on to the server, bring up the stored screen and use irssi to spread more white noise on to the internet. Anyway, been looking at Cygwin which doesn’t appear to have changed much since I last tried it about 2-3 years ago. So far I have been running a separate SSH Server called freeSSHd and starting a bash shell from there, however putty doesn’t seem to handle this well and the command execution seems particularly slow.
Going to try using just Cygwin for the SSH Daemon and see how the command execution time goes, it might actually work! Anyway, anyone have any suggestions for screen and irssi replacements?
On another note, Played squash with my Boss and co-worker last night, make a complete arse of myself and my left arm has fallen out with me. Still good fun though and now off to be shamed at work. 
Not Invented Here … again
Oct 11th
Another blog, different server.
Well, I’ve decided to install wordpress again, this time on my test Windows 2003 VPS. Sadly it hasn’t lived up to it’s fabulous 5 minute install claim, but I eventually got it running thanks to this useful site: http://www.iisadmin.co.uk/ which contains some useful tips for php and wordpress installation.
What I will say is that attempting to customise wordpress is a breeze, that is if you want to use the already built solutions! Creating your own custom wordpress theme is a complete pain in the backside. So far I’ve managed to rip up the default theme and whip in some css and re arrange some PHP to create what is seen here. At least it now validates against the W3C validators.
Now to see if this VPS if up to the task and finish off my MVC site revamp. It’s nothing exciting, very similar to the theme here with a slightly better cms for me to update the site more often. Hopefully this blog will force me to keep publishing more white noise on to the internet. The only thing now is to see if I can replicate SSH, SFTP and possibly scrreen with irssi. A tall order, but I need something to keep me out of trouble! 
The problem with Google
May 3rd
Posted by Will in General Comments
No comments
Google as a company pledge to not be evil and are the largest and most popular search engine, encompassing the globe for search, e-mail and other cloud based applications. I’ve watched this company start from a relatively obscure search engine evolve into a giant in providing services for consumers. I myself am very much in bed with Google. They manage my mail, my calendar, I have their phone with their operating system that syncs my contacts and settings to them. I also subscribe to Latitude and Buzz, use their Google Docs, their website analytic services and their Checkout for both buying and selling. (I even use their web browser!)
So yes, for me, Google has become ubiquitous. They know where I am, who I talk to, what I say, where I live and my bank details. It’s a tremendous wealth of information and a tremendous amount of faith that I put in to this company as I allow them to encroach more and more into my life, attempting to make it better.
The problem with all this power (excuse the cliché) is that it also means they have a large amount of responsibility. Google has to assure it’s users that it can address any issue that it’s users experience in a timely manner and that it wont provide cookie cutter answers via e-mail and hope the user goes away and figures out the problem themselves. Which may I add is probably just as likely as the user tripping over the meaning of this universe whilst out for a brisk stroll in the countryside with their dog.
The point is, over the last month, I became an Android developer and paid for that privilege. I also set-up a Google Checkout Merchant account so that if I did produce revenue from the applications that I built in my own time, I could eventually access it and put it towards server costs. However, when setting up the account the Google Checkout site completely broke down and I sent numerous e-mails to their support team via their help pages. There is no phone support and no direct e-mail, just a generic inbox. I got a response 24 hours later stating that the problem was fixed. It was not. So more e-mails were sent.
I had a look at the Google Groups and found a couple of threads and commented and added the cookie cutter e-mails that I had received so far. Quite a substantial number of users complained of the same problem and the lack of decent Google technical support. Close to two days after the incident and after many more cookie cutter responses with no time-scale on a fix or even a hint at what the problem was, The Register picked up on people getting more than just annoyed in this article. A few hours after this appeared on the internet, the problem was fixed.
Now I provide customer support at work all the time ranging from application failure and bug reports to supporting end users on varying mobile handsets and handling digital pens. The thing that stinks with Google’s so called support is that it is so impersonal and as generic as possible.
What would had been better is firstly not to send templated e-mails to users. The information is rarely relevant and shows no context of the problem that the user was having. This also infuriates users and highlights that the customer support team are either ill equipped or just don’t want to know.
Second would be to publish a public announcement to let users know that there is a problem, they know about it and any information on cause and resolution time scale. Google did none of this until The Register took notice of the users, which in my mind is shameful customer support. Considering Google make money from Google Checkout transactions, they should be hang their heads in shame at this massive failure, that is the perfect example of how not to support customers and loose business.
Now, that happened well close to 2 months ago, however the reason for this post is because yet again I am stumped by Google’s not-so-fantastic support for the same product. In my case, I’ve been trying to verify my bank details and was sent a generic e-mail with a couple of links which looked like it was copied directly from their help site. I followed one set of instructions, this did not change the situation and I spend a good half an hour running round the not-so-helpful documentation running round in circles. The Google Groups has unanswered threads on this and were informed that only direct e-mails will enable Google to sort this problem out.
So I am awaiting another cookie cutter response back from Google. Sadly I am now left with the sinking feeling that now that I have become one with the hive mind that is Google, is this the shape of things to come when I encounter a problem ? For theirs and my own sake, I really hope not.