Manda QoP

The new phone has shipped overnight. If the US postal service gets a shifty on, it could arrive next week and the queue of people wanting to check it out before I leave MBIE will not be disappointed. I have turned into an excited Tigger! Bounce, bounce, bounce.

I've needed a new phone for a while now. My first edition HTC Desire from a gazillion years ago is starting to get quite battered and its second battery is now starting to fail, prompting me to finally give up and buy a new phone. The problem I have with buying a new phone is researching them; I always end up finding something amazing that isn't yet available, which means a new phone never ends up being purchased. This time though my research wish list item from earlier this year was the Nexus 5, and given that my HTC Desire is due for retirement I have decided to stick to my guns, not look at any new shinies that are coming out in the next few months. I have closed my eyes to the Phone Arena phone compare tool - it will not taunt me with the pretty 50tetragigamegabyte camera phones covered in bling that would make a magpie envious. So, having decided to actually buy a new phone, it's time to research prices. As you probably know, this little gem of a phone isn...

I've uploaded the presentation from tonight's talk at CodeMania after dark.    It was great fun showing everyone how easy it is to create your own Google map, and it was quite interesting the number of people afterwards who said they'd always thought it was something difficult to do.   Lots of people are hopefully now going away to play with customising their own Google maps and with any luck creating loads of funky fun things to play with online.    I can't quite name the overall highlight of the evening for me, but it's a close run thing between the great diversity of topics covered by the other amazing speakers, Corey's disco ball hoodie and Zak the Cat!

Okay, time to bite the bullet.  I'm always going on about how great Google Apps are and promoting them to other people, but for some reason I'm not fully utilising Google to their full potential when it comes to my own business, so to see how easy it is to set up with Google Apps, I've decided to migrate my website from its current opensource FuzzyLime CMS to Google. I was planning a complete overhaul of the site anyway to make it look more professional and to add some new pages & features, so it may as well be moved at the same time. Before starting the move I need to sign up for the free 30 day trial and spend a bit of time taking a good look around to see what's what.   If you want to check it out for yourself, here's the link: http://ping.fm/wTk6n Things I need to consider: 1.  Make sure mail delivery to *@beegle.co.nz is not interrupted 2.  Make sure visitors to www.beegle.co.nz don't get a 404 at any stage during the move 3.  And erm.... that's it ...

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a Google presentation in Auckland. It was a chance to catch up on the latest news from Google Apps and to also get a first look at an actual Chromebook. Chromebooks aren’t yet available (officially) in NZ and Ed from Google said that they’re due for release here early next year. If you can’t wait that long then Amazon are doing some good deals and you can pick one up from around US$350. If you haven’t already heard about the Chromebook, here’s the official info from Google . Chromebook Overview Uses Chrome browser as its user interface. Instantly boots to a web browser which can’t be closed as it’s the o/s. No gradual slow down as nothing is stored locally – it’s all online You can set up multiple logins on your Chromebook so that whoever logs in has access to their own Google apps Constantly up to date as apps are online and new apps are always being created Chrome O/S has built in security Built in wi-fi and 3G means you can...

Google, you rock!  The Navigation add-on on the Android is rather spiffing, especially now you've fixed it so that it works in NZ.   However, there is one wee bitty problem in the function where you can speak your destination, though it is proving somewhat amusing.  We've tried Kiwi, English, South African, Welsh and German accents, which all result in some interesting locations; only when we adopt a US accent do we get close to the right location.  Now as much as I enjoy playing around with accents, it can be pretty embarrassing in the car if other people are with you and you suddenly start talking like an American just to get your phone to understand you.  It just isn't cricket old chaps.  So any chance you could do a wee tweak to Navigation so that people can 'Speak Your Destination' in their own native accent?  That would be rather spiffing thanks.

If you're one of those people who uses Google for email, searching for internet stuffs and looking at their house on Google Earth, then it's time to do a bit more wandering around the Google site. Did you know that there are LOADS of other things going on with Google? Have a bit of a browse around their site one evening whilst you're having a surf and you could find all sorts of cool little gadgets. Google have made their code easy and freely available which means there are lots of people are out there creating cool gadgets and applications just for the fun of it, for example, the following: - Kick it old school with a game of snake in Gmail by using a certain ctrl key function. - Move the chat box to the right side of the Gmail inbox - See an email time in the sender's time zone - Enable Mail Goggles to stop you from drunken emailing - Send an SMS using the chat gadget - which I need to test to see if it works in NZ as this could be quite useful dontchaknow All th...

I’ve been feeling pretty tired recently, well, for about 10 years . V arious trips to the doctor have resulted in all manner of weird diagnosis’ for this, including when I was 30 the wonderful medical opinion of “it’s just because you’re older now, it’s normal, of course you won’t feel as energetic as you did in your 20’s” erm…. I’m not an expert or anything but I’m pretty sure that’s not right. Over the past 10 years I’ve been to a few different doctors to complain about tiredness, and I’m not talking feeling a little bit snoozy, I’m talking the fighting to keep your eyes open sleepiness. During this time my weight has been slowly climbing and this has been making the sleep issue worse and the lack of sleep in turn makes my weight worse – it’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken. Eventually I got fed up with doctors and being the geek that I am (though a somewhat tardy geek in this situation) took matters into my own hands. Google is your friend. After a bit of Googling I fou...

I work for Fronde Systems in Auckland as part of the S+S, SaaS team .   Fronde has recently been appointed Google’s first partner in New Zealand for the Google Security, Compliance and eDiscovery products as well as Google Apps.  Hopefully this means I'll be able to get my paws out to play with some Google Apps though as we're specialists in transaction processing I'm wondering if it will be the security & transaction guys who get all the fun.  Guess I'll find out when I get back from speaking at TechEd Australia. Fronde had other good news last week as well.  We won the Microsoft Partner Software Solution of the year award for 2008.  Pretty spiffing eh?

So far I'm impressed with Google Chrome.  I love simple designs and I'm particularly liking the garbage collection and process handling.  Very neat.  It harks back to the days when I was learning C & C++ and I remember these being standard requirements when writing code - tidy up after yourself, avoid creating memory leaks etc...  I take it that previous browser developers either forgot this or thought it didn't matter. I'm also wondering if they've read my TechEd talk on complexity where I talked about leaving cool stuff out so that the first iteration of your software is a workable, robust solution... maybe not, that was yesterday afternoon and I'm pretty sure the Google devs don't have a time machine. :-) I had a quick look at ESI as well and this is looking like an interesting thang that deserves a more in depth look.  More info on how that goes later on...