News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • Yes, the 9.7″ iPad Pro is the iPad you want.

    (This is an old post from June 9, 2016, recovered via the Wayback Machine…)

    If you’re looking for a tablet because you draw stuff for a living, then there’s no doubt the 12ʺ iPad Pro is the tool you want. It’s fast, the Pencil is as responsive a tool as you could ask for, and it has all the benefits of being part of the iOS ecosystem. And I can say this as someone who also owns a MS Surface Pro.

    The thing is though, if you’re actually in it because you want an iPad, you’re better off going with the 9.7ʺ. It’s almost exactly as fast as the 12ʺ, but its weight and form factor make it a tool that you will carry around with you all the time. By contrast, as Deb said, the 12ʺ is something you’d “always be worrying about bending”. It’s just too unwieldy to be anything but something you put in a laptop bag when you’re not using it.

    The other side of the question is whether an iPad Air would be just as good as your main iPad. All I can say to that is, if you want that to be true, do not try the iPad Pro. The Air is a great device, but the Pro really is materially faster. Really, with the lighter weight iOS running on it, the iPad Pro feels like it’s faster than my MBP for many tasks. It’s definitely the best way to read Notes email now.

    And speaking of which, I did indeed put the IBM security package on it, so I can now read my Notes mail and calendar, and get access to VPN, etc. To give you some idea of how much faster this is than my old iPad. My first gen iPad Mini took about 2 hours to install all the software. The Pro took just under 10 minutes. Very nice.

    Anyway, the iPad Pro is too expensive to be an impulse buy. I was lucky enough to have my wonderful wife Deb give me permission to get one as an early Father’s Day gift. Thanks, love. It’s awesome.

  • A new machine, a new era.

    Just a quick note to say that I have upgraded to a new machine. I had been using a Mac Mini to host GCW for many years, but the hard drive in the old beast is starting to sound like the gerbils are getting tired, and I thought it was time.

    I know no one would guess I had given up on the Mac universe, so without further ado, here is the new beast…

    It’s a 27″ iMac, with the 3.5 GHz i7 and the upgraded graphics chip (780M w. 4Gig of RAM). I must say, it is amazing. It’s actually fast enough to play PC games under Parallels with completely acceptable framerates even at high detail levels.

    And so, it’s the end of an era: I am getting rid of my gaming PC. I’m also getting rid of the Mac Mini I was using for the server, and the MBP I was using for music. Believe it or not, at the end of this process, I will have just the one iMac in my home office, plus a station to hold my work laptop when I bring it home. I’m not sure how long I can stand it, but that’s the plan.

    In any case, I have once again transplanted Great Castle Wilson to new hardware. This move was more difficult than previous ones, since (for some unknown reason) I was unable to load the mysql database directly by importing the records from the old site. Instead I had to use the export/import capabilities built into WordPress, which at least appear to have been successful. This is the first time I’ve tried this though, so if you see anything wrong/missing, please let me know.

    One note: So far of all the old blogs on GCW I have only gotten this one going. I don’t think the others get many visitors, but I will get around to moving them eventually.

  • I know, I know. I haven’t been posting.

    This is yet another of those posts that starts out by apologizing for not keeping up with the blog. Believe me, I’m more frustrated than you are that it’s been so long since I last posted.

    The thing is, my life has been busy, to the point where I haven’t even been finding the time to keep up with 140 character tweets, let alone full blog posts.

    Anyway, here are some highlights…

    New role at work

    In addition to being the Eclipse Project PMC lead, I have now taken on a significant architectural role working on the “IBM DevOps Services powered by JazzHub”. This is a new property that provides project hosting, including online development (based on Orion), tracking and planning support, etc., which is intended to be the premiere environment for building applications that are part of the “IBM BlueMix” platform-as-a-service. What’s even cooler about this is that it can be used for free. Definitely check it out.

    Just finished a Divertimento concert

    *sigh*. Yes, it would have made more sense to talk about it ahead of time. Oh well. This was the orchestra’s 30th anniversary concert, and it was an awesome program:

    • J. Strauss — Die Fledermaus Overture
    • Mozart — Violin Concerto No. 5, K.218
    • Brahms — Symphony No. 4 Op. 98

    The concert was sponsored by the Austrian Embassy including bringing in the soloist for the Mozart, one Daniel Auner, who is a truly excellent up-and-coming violinist. Even though we only had a single rehearsal with him, I felt like he helped us achieve a recognizably stronger understanding of the music.

    I bought a car

    A Fiat Abarth. I haven’t actually received it yet — It’s still being built — but I expect it will show up some time in the next couple of weeks. For now, here’s a shot of basically what it will look like:

    It’s very small, but I verified that it will hold my cello case with the back seats folded down, so we’re good. Zero to 100 KPH in 6.9 seconds. I’m excited :-).

  • MacBook performance

    I have two Mac laptops, a 15″ MacBook Pro from 2011 and a 13″ MacBook Air from 2012. I use the MBP as my main home Mac, and it’s also the one where I do my music production. The MBA is my work laptop.

    To give you some idea about their relative performance, here are their GeekBench scores — bigger numbers are better:

    As you can see even though the 15″ MBP is older, it is a bit faster (19%). Mine even has an aftermarket SSD in it, which likely improves things further.

    For comparison purposes, here are the numbers for the fastest current generation MacBook Pro and Air:

    In both cases, that’s a gain of about 25% over what I have. I do find it interesting that the current MacBook Air is faster than my existing MacBook Pro.

    Anyway, all this rumination is because I have been thinking about upgrading my work laptop to one of the new MacBook Pros. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Air, but unfortunately it only has 4Gig of RAM, which is fine for almost everything I do, except for running VMs with entire WebSphere installs on them (that require 4Gig allocated to the VM at minimum). You can get a new MBA with 8Gig of RAM, but honestly, for this use case I think going for 16Gig makes more sense, which means it has to be a Pro.

    The thing is, given that the performance improvement is really not all that significant, I could probably hold off on getting a new machine for another year by switching my work environment over to the current MacBook Pro. The problem with this idea is that it would require me to move all the music software I use over to the MacBook Air. If you aren’t a musician, you simply don’t understand how painful that can be. Suffice it to say that I have three separate hardware (i.e. physical) “keys” that lock various pieces of software to one machine only. You have to painstakingly un-authorize each music application (and all the plugins) on one machine, then move the keys over, then re-authorize on the other. In a world where most of the software I use can be installed on a new machine by just connecting my Apple ID and going to the App Store, the music software industry just seems archaic.

    In any case, it may yet come to that. I don’t imagine I’ll see much of a bonus this year, and without that I can’t actually afford a new machine. I guess we’ll see.

  • Mini Review: Kobo Aura

    I didn’t really need another ereader. I have numerous tablets in multiple sizes and a phone with a retina display, all of which have reading apps for every ebook store out there. I even have a Kobo Touch, which is a perfectly reasonable e-paper device once you figure out how to get all your content onto it.

    But I had seen various reviews (like this one from Engadget) that said good things about the Kobo Aura, so I went down to the local Indigo and checked them out.

    I must say, they really are every bit as nice as you would expect for a $150 device: light weight, solid in the hand, easy to hold onto with a textured backplate, a brilliant front light [pun intended], and a capacitive touch screen. For me it was this last point that was the deal maker. I’ve never liked the feeling of “reaching past the bezel” of the Kobo Touch (or any of the IR based e-readers) to touch the screen. I’ve always found it error prone both in my targeting and the device’s ability to consistently register the interactions. Unlike IR based devices the Kobo Aura has a perfectly flat front face, and in addition to just being more responsive and accurate, I suspect the move to the capacitive screen also helped them get the overall size of the device down — the Aura is significantly smaller than any other reader I’ve seen with a 6″ display.

    Anyway, as I noted above, the deal was made. I ordered an Aura from the Kobo store and Canada Post even got it to me undamaged, in less than a week. Time to go to bed early and catch up on my reading. 😉

  • Technology! Just because you *can* do something…

    … doesn’t mean you should.

    I bought a Philips hue starter kit a while ago. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a system for controlling the colors and intensities of LED lightbulbs remotely, via a wireless base station connected to your home network, which in turn speaks the Zigbee protocol (I believe) to the lights. Essentially, it allows you to do stuff like this:

    There are actually 3 lights in that picture, red and green ones visible, and a blue one lighting the top right corner.

    Anyway, my thinking when I bought the kit, was that I was going to use the (very cool) RESTful API it provides to do some interesting web hacking of my the lights. Of course, I haven’t had time to do that — I don’t know why I thought otherwise — and so what I have effectively done, at this point, is replace a perfectly functional light switch with an app on my phone. I.e. enter room, get out phone, start app, tell lights to go on, put phone away. Not a win.

    But wait, I think, someone must have built a light switch that will control a hue setup. All it would have to do is tell the lights to go on when the switch is flipped. Well… this may exist, but I couldn’t find it. The closest I could come was this:

    The WeMo Light Switch

    So, this is a light switch that, in addition to doing what it normally does (i.e. switch the current to a light on/off), also talks to your wireless network. That, in itself, wouldn’t solve the problem, but along with the obvious feature of giving you yet another app that can control your lights, the WeMo switch also interfaces to the brilliant site IFTTT (a.k.a. “if this then that”).

    IFTTT is a website that lets you set up simple rules based on a trigger (i.e. “this”) and an action (i.e. “that”). It behaves exactly as you’d expect: when the trigger happens the action gets executed. There is quite a range of triggers and actions — it’s worth checking out — but the operative detail here is that WeMo light switches can be triggers and hue lights support several actions including turning on and off. Can you see where this is going?

    The sequence of operations is this:

    1. Hit WeMo light switch
    2. Light switch connects (over the internet) to IFTTT.com
    3. IFTTT tells all (3 of) my hue lights to turn on.
    4. Room lights up

    Unfortunately, aside from the completely gratuitous use of the internet to control something entirely within my home office, there are two real problems with this:

    1. One of the 3 hue lights is connected to a wall sconce that is physically switched on/off by the WeMo switch. Because the power to that light is interrupted when the light is turned off, when it turns back on, it comes on white (i.e. it loses whatever color setting it had before).
    2. Although IFTTT does get the other two lights to turn on, the time between when the switch trigger happens and the resulting action is fired is… variable. Often it’s only a couple of seconds, but I have waited as much as 15.

    Oh well. The end result is I can now almost turn the lights on and off again, and I have learned an interesting lesson in the limits of technology.

    (Oh, and my lights flash when someone blogs about Orion. 😉 )

  • ChromeBooks

    So, my wonderful wife decided to get me something especially nice this Father’s Day. I had pointed out to her the Chromebooks that they have down at the local Future Shop, so she took me out Friday night and we went and got one. This one, to be exact:

    At $250, it’s clear that compromises were made, but it works surprisingly well given it’s specs — 2Gig RAM, 16Gig SSD, 1.7 GHz “Samsung Exynos 5” processor (ARM Cortex-A15). The benchmarks show it as faster than a base Atom machine, but only 30..50% of an i3. Anyway, plenty fast enough.

    To give you some idea what it’s capable of, as I type this, I’ve got a mouse and keyboard plugged into it, along with an external (HDMI) monitor. I have about 10 Chrome windows open (because, really that’s all you can do <g>) with one of them pointing at Rdio (and playing the latest Punch Brothers album over the HDMI speakers), one showing a remote desktop on my home server, one SSH’ed into my Raspberry Pi, a couple being used to write this blog post, and one connected to JazzHub where I’m keeping notes.

    It also has a builtin microphone and camera and will happily participate in a Google Hangout video chat. It will cold boot in about 10 seconds and wakes from sleep in about a second.

    As to the apps for it, in addition to the above, I managed to find solutions to almost all the things I normally need to do:

    • Files — DropBox, GoogleDrive, iCloud
    • Mail — iCloud Mail and GMail for home email; iNotes for work
    • Chat — Hangouts; no solution for Sametime yet
    • Twitter — Tweetdeck
    • RSS — Feedly
    • Reddit — Reditr
    • eBooks — Kindle Cloud Reader, Kobo Instant Reader, Google Play Books
    • Office — Google Docs, Sheets, Slides (and iWork once it comes out of beta)
    • image editing — Pixlr

    I even managed to get access to my password safe, albeit without the full browser integration.

    Of course, the reason I wanted one of these was to use it for testing the experience of working with Orion. I’m going to try to use it for my day to day development and testing for at least the next few weeks. So far, the experience has been good, but I’ll let you know if I discover anything particularly limiting.

    So what don’t I like about it?

    • Regardless of the offline support some apps provide, this really is a one trick pony: It’s for being on the internet, and if you don’t have a connection, you might as well save your battery life.
    • The external hardware support works, but just: I wasn’t able to get the acceleration rate high enough on the mouse I use; the max resolution on the HDMI port was lower than the native resolution on the monitor I use; I hung the entire machine twice while getting the display hooked up; etc.
    • The keyboard layout is pretty wonky — massive ctrl and alt keys, with a tiny shift key and hard to hit return key, and somebody must *really* like the backslash character since there is a key to enter it on both sides of the keyboard (in exactly the right places to have you accidentally hit them while going for the shift and return keys).
    • It really does have an incredibly small SSD drive, plus limited ability to expand that using the built in SD card slot since the memory card sticks out so far you have to remove it when you aren’t using it. *sigh*. The former I might understand given the low price, but it makes the latter unforgivable.

    Anyway, it’s not a replacement for the MacBook Pro, but it works pretty well. I could see taking just this device (and a USB HD to download pictures) if I was travelling. I believe the pricepoint is interesting too. It’s a nicer experience to work on than an iPad (even with a keyboard) at a significantly lower price. Now all they have to do is get the app ecosystem a bit bigger and it might start to make sense for the wider community.

  • All I need is a Portal

    No, not that kind of Portal.

    In this case, I’m talking about any device that can connect to the internet: desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, e-readers, smart TVs, and I’m sure many more that I have missed. I’m probably late to this party, but I have finally clued into that fact that I no longer do anything that doesn’t require a connection to the internet. “But wait!”, you say, “what about…”

    … Professional Life?

    I’m guessing most people get this already but, of course, there’s email. And then there’s the myriad of web forms that I process. And the scheduling that lives on a central server. And the 7 (!) instant messaging systems that I’m always connected to…

    Like most people in the high tech industry, the entire context for the work I do lives entirely on the internet (or at least the intranet). Heck, my team is split across half the world, so I couldn’t even communicate with them without Sametime (*sigh*) and IP phones.

    But then what about the actual software development tasks that I’m supposed to be doing? Well, you know desktop Eclipse is still my bread and butter, and aside from downloading it (and updating it) via eclipse.org, it really will run without an internet connection on your favorite desktop. But then all of the content that I work with actually lives on the eclipse.org servers, so I do need a connection to pull/push my work, even if I can get by without one in between.

    And that’s the important detail, actually. I now think of working locally as “working from the cached” data; it’s certainly useful to have a way to work without an internet connection, but I absolutely must have one when I’m doing something real. That progression is what’s at the heart of the Orion work.

    Orion actually seems like the most natural thing in the world to me now: I could run an Orion server on my local machine, which (together with a browser) gives you a story conceptually equivalent to Eclipse desktop: Local tools, running against a cached version of something that really lives on the internet. But why would I want that? If I need the internet to get the “real” data, why not serve the tools from there too? Obviously, they would need to still perform well and be fit for purpose, but beyond that there really isn’t anything special about having them local.

    Case in point: While waiting for a laptop upgrade at work I was stuck for a few days running on a 1Ghz netbook with 2Gig of RAM. (Long story, better left untold.) During that time, I used the netbook as just a portable web browser — think “Chromebook” [Aside: why are all the current Chromebooks slow?]. On it, I kept web pages open on Lotus iNotes (for work mail/calendar), iCloud (for home mail/calendar/address book), and GMail (to hold my bugzilla spam 😉 ). I also spent the time doing useful Orion work, again with multiple windows open. All in all, this worked perfectly well. It wasn’t speedy, but it wasn’t holding me back. On that machine, at least, there would have been no hope of getting Lotus Notes and Desktop Eclipse both running reasonably. No way.

    I can even get to all of those sites, and work with them, on my iPad. With an external keyboard, it’s actually almost good enough as a full time “portal”. Even without one, the first time you realize you can now do work anywhere there’s a cell signal is quite an eye opener.

    Regardless of the tool to get there, I really can’t do my work without access to the internet. Maybe I could have at one time, but now if the network goes down, it makes more sense to go home, or anywhere else that you can get a network connection. (I actually shared my phone hotspot with others the last time that happened, so they could keep working.)

    Ok, so what about…

    “… gaming?”

    Well, let’s see, what games do I currently play? Truthfully, all the games I play are PC based. It’s been years since I played a board game or card game, and I only occasionally play games on handhelds or consoles. For me, it’s all about PC gaming (and really that’s only reason why I still have a PC 😉 ).

    So, what am I playing? There are the MMOs, of course, which are internet only by definition:

    (and those are just the ones I’m currently playing).

    Then there are the blockbuster single-player titles that I still make time for — things like Diablo, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and hopefully Watch Dogs (I’m expecting good things).

    The thing is, I never go to a brick and mortar store to buy PC games any more. I almost always download the games from one of the online providers like Steam or (if there is no other choice) Origin. When you use one of these services to buy your games, the systems requires you to check in with them (via an internet connection) when you go to play the game. Not ideal, but I’ve gotten used to it, and (at least in Steam’s case) they also provide the side-benefit of uploading your game saves, so you can just delete the entire game off your system, and if you ever decide to play again, pick up where you left off at the cost of a (free) re-download.

    Diablo 3, of course, is even more tied to the internet. It is effectively running an MMO backend, under the covers, even when you are playing in single-player mode. Your character can’t do anything without a connection. Wow! A couple of years ago, that idea would have been laughed at, but clearly that’s changed.

    In any case, for me, computer gaming really does need an internet connection.

    Ok, so what about…

    “… everything else?”

    You get the picture and this post is getting too long.

    I make music; it uses samples from (and gets saved back to) SoundCloud. I watch movies; they come from iTunes. My car dealer, dentist and family doctor all remind me of upcoming appointments via email, and almost all of my bills now come in the same way. I buy things from Amazon and pay by PayPal. When I travel my GPS app gets current traffic info from the web. When I buy coffee, I pay for it with my phone. I’m an avid reader of ebooks, but haven’t read a paper book in years…

    It would take 10 more articles this long to capture all the ways I depend on the internet.

    So, like I said, my entire life needs an internet connection. I’m actually ok with that. I’ve come to grips with the fact that we’ve crossed a boundary we can’t uncross. What about you?

  • Mini-review: iPad 2012

    Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I fully intended to not buy the new iPad. Based on what I had gleaned from the tech news community, it was heavier and thicker than the iPad 2 (which I already owned) and, despite more powerful graphics, was effectively the same speed when it came to my most common use: browsing the web.

    But… as I was standing in the lineup at Timmy’s to get my morning coffee — reading RSS feeds on my phone, as usual — I saw a post that said “most stores will be open at 8am for potential iPad buyers”, and I thought, “Gee (or something like that), it’s 8:20 and there’s a Future Shop between here and my work! I might as well go look at them at least.”

    As you have probably surmised, I went, I saw, I purchased. I’ll warn you now, if you are vacillating over buying the new one, don’t look. Seriously, don’t look!

    For me, tablets are defined by exactly two things: their responsiveness and the quality of their screens. In the iPad’s case, the responsiveness is as good as ever (and I still believe that the compromises that the Apple team made to get there were the right answer), but the screen is something else entirely. I can honestly say that this is the highest quality display I have ever seen. The iPhone 4 may have higher pixel density, but the small form factor doesn’t do it justice. Looking at the iPad screen you get the same sense that you are looking at a printed page that you get from e-ink screens, but with beautiful, vibrant color. [Yes, I know it has more glare and isn’t outdoor readable — everything has trade-offs]. Text is absolutely gorgeous and reading is a joy. Scanning through photos leaves you thinking you’re looking through a 10″ window.

    As to the rest, I can’t say I’ve seen a significant performance improvement overall (either from the improved graphics processor or increased system memory). It may stutter a little less, but not so I’ve noticed.

    I will say the “back” camera is much improved. I’d include a picture here, but I’d have to reduce it in size, which would defeat the purpose. The front-facing camera is just as crappy as it was in the previous generation; I actually find it to be so bad that I’m not even happy using it for FaceTime. Oh well.

    We’re now a 3 iPad family. Deb has my old one; the 3G will come in handy for her business travel. Her first gen one is now in the hands of Dennis. I’ll let you know the result of that toughness “road test”. 😉

  • Maker wannabee

    I did do a couple of actual, for reals, hardware things while I was on vacation, which for anyone who knows me has got to be pretty surprising :-). The first was to put together a little Arduino (actually Freeduino) board:

    I have vague plans to take this plus a DAC and produce a midi to CV converter, something like this.

    The other project was more prosaic, but probably more useful: I replaced the lawn light outside GCW. Really, this was just removing the old bits, repainting the post, then putting in a new light sensor and headpiece. The result actually looks pretty good:

    Anyway, nothing earthshaking there, but there’s nothing like a couple of successes to refuel your interest in making things again. Anybody want to help build an analog synthesizer?