Warning, this post is purely technical.  If you were looking for something fluffy, then go here instead.  I’ve just completely reset my phone. I’ve been running a continuous set of Cyanogen updates on it for several months now, and it has slowly been getting slower and slower.  In fairness, I’ve had Apps2SD running for a while and I suspect that the whole thing had simply become too fragmented and cluttered.  Apps2SD is short for Apps 2 SD Card and is a small hack that allows me to use a section of my SD card as internal phone memory.  Because I have a first generation phone, the internal space is limited and so this hack is required for installing the amount of applications I use.  I’ve been thinking lately about upgrading it to a newer model, but that’s a topic for another post.  Anyway, over the last several months it has been getting gradually slower, so I figured it was time for a reset. 

The procedure for doing this isn’t as complex as I had thought, but it is long-winded.  First thing to do was back up all data to the SD card.  In my case, that meant only one application; “Note Everything Pro”, which has a nice in-built backup/restore to/from SD card routine.  Everything else gets backed up automatically, or is stored on Google’s servers ready for syncing back later.  When that was done, I backed up the contents of the card to my PC, and then restarted the phone in Recovery Mode.  Once there, I was able to erase all three partitions on the SD Card (Linux EXT4, Linux Swap and Fat) and create some new ones.  I went with a 1GB Linux EXT2 partition (which I just remembered that I have to upgrade to EXT3 or maybe EXT4), 32Mb of swap partition, and the rest (approximately 7Gb) as a fat32 partition for data.  After that was done, I used the wipe commands to erase the user data on the phone completely and restarted.

Instead of booting into my usual screen, I was prompted (very quickly indeed) with the Android Setup screens which took me through the new-user process.  Within five minutes everything was completed.  Unfortunately for me, that’s when the real work started.  I had to then shutdown the phone, restore my data from the PC to the SD Card, restart the phone and start re-installing all the applications.  I post all of this because the commands that are needed in PARTED (the partition editor) always make me surf for about twenty minutes looking for them.  So, pay attention because this is the important bit.

That’s it… that’ll clean off the card and you can begin again.

Continuing on from the last post, I was telling you about Christmas in Ireland.  After we came back from the North, we settled in for an icy and snow-packed holiday.  I’ve never seen Ireland quite so icy before; driving to Dublin for example typically took over an hour instead of the usual forty five minutes I would expect.  A couple of times on the Trim road we were limited to about 30mph simply because the traction was so bad.  It was really interesting seeing the difference between a country that is prepared for ice and snow, and one that isn’t.  I’m not being snobbish here; the ice and snow in Ireland was extreme, and we usually only get a few days of mild ice or frost there.  Of course they aren’t prepared for it.  In Munich they get far much more snow and ice, and they have a three week stockpile of salt for the roads, and two months of grit for the paths.  They grit the footpaths!  Anyway, it was damn cold.  Anna’s parents came over too, so we picked them up from the airport. Slowly.

Speaking of snow, we’re going to Bayerischzell tomorrow.  We are going to spend a week snowboarding and skiing.  I promised James I’d take some pictures this time, particularly of me getting serious air… which means I have to charge the battery in my camera. This post had started out with the title “on piste in twenty four and counting”. Now its more like twelve to be honest.  Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this next week.  Last year I ended up in hospital with a severed ligament that had to be operated on two days before our skiing holiday, and didn’t get any snowboarding at all. Tomorrow that’s going to change.  Provided I don’t crash the car on the way there ;-)

What else?  Oh yes, there’s a reunion of old AOL heads coming up.  Really old timers too, not just folks who were in Fulham Road, but further back.  This is for those who were in the Fulham Broadway office, which I got invited to on a technicality: Although I wasn’t in that office originally, I moved there early on from Fulham Road when we re-located the Marketing department there.  I don’t really think I can justify the cost though, and there aren’t many there that I would actually pay money to see again.  A couple for sure, but they’ll wait until another time.  We’re already going to London in July, so those that I really want to see will be covered.  Sorry Scally.

I started another German course on Monday last.  This time its with the Deutsch Akademie, and the teacher seems to have has a relatively illustrious career having worked in directorial capacities for both the Goethe Instutite and Berlitz previously.  The course is far more what I need, I’m finding the pace just about right, and unlike the last one it seems more at my level.  I may stick with this group for a bit for a couple of reasons.  Firstly they have a higher quantity of narrower scoped bands (twelve as opposed to Berlitz’s ten), and secondly the class sizes are really nice.  There are ten people in my class at the moment, which is so far working out really well.  I’ve had two in a class at Berlitz, and twenty eight at the Volkshochschule, and ten is nice and comfortable.

Right, gotta go get packed and wax my snowboard…

Right, so then… Happy New Year.  Glad we got that out of the way, no need to belabour the point.  I haven’t been blogging at all lately, though in fairness the last couple of months have actually been busy for me.  I have been working.  Sort of.

We have been just over two and a quarter years living in Germany and in all that time I haven’t earned much money, nor do I have a full time job.  I’ve done some freelancing stuff for a couple of companies back in London, but never enough to ensure our monthly expenditure was lower than our income (actually, there was one month, but its only one out of twenty seven or twenty eight).  Over the last couple of months I’ve picked up some more solid work from some online freelancing sites, and its possible that its all turning around a bit right now.  I have two things on the cooker, that might prove to be worth pursuing right now.  One of the two is potentially fun, and involves building portals (and plugins) for OastOne.  We have a nice test version up and running right, which I won’t link to because its ephemeral.  The second is setting up a company with some guys I know online (one of whom is a customer from one of those freelancing sites I mentioned earlier, but there’ll be more about this in a later post).  Actually, I have three things, but the third is just to continue trying to build up freelance customers and jobs as best I can.  I’ve also built out a small portfolio site with which I hope to establish a presence on teh interwebs.  So, with all of this you can see why I haven’t been blogging as much at all over the last couple of months.

We were in Ireland for Christmas, and took a three day trip to The North at the start of the trip.  I have to prefix this by saying that I had never before been further north than Newry (and that was with my dad¹ on a technical call at some point).  We drove to Belfast and stayed there in an incredible hotel that was cheapish, new and incredibly comfortable all at the same time.  (I can’t remember the name, but if anyone is looking for a place to stay in Belfast in the near future then let me know and I’ll dig it out.)  Belfast is a pretty cool city. I’m not sure what I was expecting really and I guess my perceptions were clouded by twenty years of looking at the Troubles on the news. I just had a really interesting segue through Wikipedia there.  Anyway, so my perception of Belfast was completely different from the reality.  It’s a lovely city, and one I would visit again should I have the chance.  One thing which we couldn’t do was see the Titanic museum in the Harland & Wolff shipyards, or the graving docks for her or her sister ship; the Olympic.  We did get to see the huge cranes (Sampson and Goliath) and the whole rebuilding of the docklands, which looked much the same as Canary Wharf does in London.  I also re-discovered Subway!  I had stopped eating in Subway about twenty years ago because I hated the bread they put on their rolls. Turns out that after twenty years you can be wrong about something – and I had a monster sub with just about everything on it :-) 

Anyway, the next day we headed north around the coast road for Antrim.  We stopped for lunch in a place which worried us (actually just me) when we discovered that we were two of the only four customers in the place.  Turns out the food was amazing.  Its a little off the beaten path (actually its about 5 miles off the coast road, at the end of a cul-de-sac) but totally worth visiting if you’re in the area.  Again, ping me for more details.  We eventually got to Portballintrae, after driving through the highest snow I’ve ever seen in Ireland.  There was a good metre of it up in the hills.   There we went to see Dunluce castle (awesome, and very very cold), and finally the Giant’s Causeway.  Twenty years of living less than two hundred miles from this amazing feat of nature tells me that I really am fucking stupid for dismissing such beauty without ever having actually seen it.  Its breathtaking.  The weather really helped too – it was fucking cold, and misty, and the sea was rough.  It wasn’t the kind of day that I’d suggest going to the beach on, but it was just spectacular. The picture really doesn’t do it justice (it was taking with my phone), though I think even with my SLR I couldn’t have captured the heart of that place at that time.  We walked the long way back to the car, heading further around the bay, up the cliffs and then back over the top to the car park.  The view from the cliff path was… white.  We could hear the sea breaking below, but couldn’t see it because it was all hidden by this carpet of low-lying fog. I loved it there, but you probably got that already.  Anyway, we headed back to Trim after that, stopping off in some huge (by Irish standards, tiny in comparison to Leesburg corner or Jersey Gardens for example) outlet mall for some retail therapy.

Okay, I’m going to post this now, because I have to get some homework done for tomorrow, and its getting late.  If I have time, I’ll start the rest of this post a little later.  If not, then it will be tomorrow.

¹ SceneMaker.eu is very much currently under construction. In February and March 2010 it'll be broken and down while we figure out exactly how it's going to work.

Today, Google launched their public DNS project into public beta. The results are in, and they’re okay, but only okay. Over 1,003 queries for random domains from a pool of 10,003 Website addresses. I used Silverwolf’s excellent DPT to perform this test, and the results are below.

My ISP’s DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 62 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,061 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 220 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 25.

Google’s Open DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 15 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,186 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 167 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 32.

As you can see, the average query time is about 25% faster than my ISP, but there are more failures and a slightly higher worst query time. However, the best query time is 15ms from Google, which is pretty good in comparison to my ISP. Of course, results will vary depending on where the nearest Google data centre is to you, but its worth giving it a try.  It should be noted that certain content (streamed content for example) may actually be slower, as the servers that decide where to send you a stream from may think you are actually in a different location. I think I’ll configure my router with the new DNS now.  By the way, the addresses of the Google DNS Servers are awesome – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (IP addresses actually owned by Level 4 Communications).

I’ve updated my GUID Generator based on some user feedback.  Thanks to Joel for pointing out that it would be great to be able to download the results. Joel, your wish is my command.  Now there are two buttons on the bottom of the page – one to generate the text, and one to generate a file with the results.  I have also limited the amount of results to 1000, simply because much more than that would kill the server. Also, if you need that many GUIDs, then you can get them in chunks.

GUID Generator

By this point most of you will know that Microsoft have just released Windows 7.  It should be appearing in the shops within the next couple of weeks, and by some accounts is already available in some places.  I have been using it for the best part of half a year I think, and I find it to be far better than Windows Vista from many perspectives. This has left me in a very unfortunate position, as I actually had to go out and purchase copies instead of getting them free.  You see, Microsoft gave me a free copy of Vista Ultimate for taking part in the beta test for that version, but I didn’t get invited to the beta test for Windows 7.  At least I’m not alone in that, and there were many complaints at the start of the beta test from people who expected to get invites not receiving anything. Rather then doing a large-scale beta like previously, they released two builds to the public; an early beta, and the first release candidate.  Like those of you adventurous enough, I had to download both of these, and have been using it mostly without problem since.

So, what’s new?  Well, the UI has been tweaked a little since Vista, and a lot since XP.  The Start button is different enough that I’m going to have to get a new tattoo.  When you click it, you see something similar to the Vista start menu, albeit one where the search function is taken to a whole new level.  For example, when opening Visual Studio, instead of clicking Start… All Programs… scrolling down to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and then clicking on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, I simply click Start… type “vis” and hit Enter.  The results are shown on the left (click the picture to show a full-size version), and you’ll notice that this is really just an illustration as I have Visual Studio pinned to the task bar at the bottom of the screen.  It is a highly visual illustration of just how much the search feature in Windows 7 has been improved over previous versions.

The next great part of Windows 7 is connected, but a little separate.  The taskbar (the bit down the bottom of the screen to the right of the Start button) has undergone some subtle changes.  First and foremost, you can now “pin” documents and applications to the taskbar, which has been missing from Windows for a very long time.  Don’t get this mixed up with the "Quick Launch” toolbar from previous versions.  It is the same, but also so much more. Applications that are pinned can have what are called Jump Lists.  An example of a Jump List is seen if you right-click the Media Player icon.  Instead of the usual Copy/Paste etc options from previous versions, this click now brings up a special menu for Media Player containing a list of previously played media, which can be clicked on to re-play. Its an incredibly useful (when you remember that it can be done!), that I find myself using more frequently than I had expected.  Also on the taskbar, the notification area to the right has been cleaned up and organised a lot more than before.  MDI or multi-window applications now have a great feature added to them. Instead of switching to the application as an entity and then looking for the document within that application, you can now switch directly to the document.  If you look at the image to the left you’ll see that I have the mouse cursor hovering about the internet explorer icon, and an image has appeared of each of the open web sites.  I can switch to a specific one just as easily as I would switch to a different application.

The general desktop experience is far better than Vista.  In addition to a bunch of new features such as Aero Peek which allows you to look at the desktop and widgets without minimising everything else, several features have been added or enhanced.  Task switching with alt-tab is now much better.  When you press Alt and hit tab you see a new window appear with an image of each open window that you can switch to.  Additionally, after about a second, all of the other windows fade into the background (like the image on the right) with only the selected window showing in its true colours.  Its a simple and exceptionally handy feature that makes it incredibly easy to obtain information from another window without taking your fingers off the alt-tab keys.  There are a bunch of improvements such as these in Windows 7 which I’m not going to go into in detail, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it would take too long to write, and secondly if you really want a good review you should check out some of the better written versions on the net.

One of the biggest problems with Windows Vista was that it was slow, at least before the first service pack was released.  A lot of the speed issues were perception rather than reality, simply because Vista was so much more complex than XP.  When SP1 came out, it really came into its own with regards to speed, and that increase was carried forward to Windows 7 too.  If you compare fresh installs of Windows 7 and Windows Vista on the same hardware, Windows 7 is faster.  I believe that the same is true of a fresh install of Vista with SP2 slipstreamed into it too, but I haven’t verified that for sure.  In any case, while there’s a definite increase in speed, there’s also a significant perception of a speed increase.  This is partly because your first indication that things have changed is with the startup speed.  In comparison to Vista, its blinding.

I didn’t intend to go on about it as long as I have, and I’m going to stop now because I don’t really want to actually write a significant review of Windows 7.  Suffice to say I like it, and I bought it for all of the machines in the apartment.  Its going to be all over the place soon, so if you get a chance to score a demo copy then do so and give it a try.

Last night we went to see The Fray in the Optimolwerke in Munich.  The gig was great, albeit we’re just too fucking short for Munich audiences; they tend to be far taller than us and have an annoying tendency to film every gig they go to in significant detail.  I hadn’t heard that much of The Fray’s music before, even though we have their latest album.  Unfortunately I just didn’t have time to actually listen to the CD before the gig which is a pity as I really enjoyed it.  I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the songs better, I guess, but what the hell.  We’re also potentially going to see Athlete in a couple of days, pending ticket acquisition etc.  They have a new album out which isn’t that bad, though I think it needs some more listening in the next few days.

We saw Bell-X1 recently too.  That turned out to be a fantastic gig.  They’re far better in concert than I had expected, and the crowd were great.  As was Duke Special, who supported them.  Even better was seeing The Airborne Toxic Event live, who were just stunning.  Their most famous song “Sometime Around Midnight”, was incredible live. As I’ve mentioned here or on twitter, I have seen more live gigs here in the last six months than the previous ten years in London, and I had seriously missed the buzz from live music.

Oh, and I just bought tickets to see U2 in Munich next September.

Really interesting development from ScottGu today. Microsoft have announced a new program called WebsiteSpark, which basically provides some tools to allow fledgling web developers get off the ground.  Tools include licenses of VS2008, Expression Studio and Expression Web, and a license for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Nice tools, and they’ll only cost $100 for three years of use.  After that three years, you can opt to purchase them direct from Microsoft.

Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - ScottGu's Blog

So, another day, another German class out of the way.  Unfortunately I have an hour to kill in town before my physiotherapy so I figured I'd hang out in Starbucks for a bit.  I deliberately chose to hang out in town so that I could use the wireless in Starbucks and post a new entry here, but I have to admit that now that I'm sitting here I simply have nothing that I want to write about.  Fucking typical. 
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but we saw a singer called Lenka recently.  She's a Australian who has lived in California for a few years, so her accent is... interesting.  Her singing voice is brilliant though, and you should definitely pick up her self titled debut album.  Before going solo she performed with Decoder Ring.  We went to see her in concert a few weeks ago and she was brilliant.  There were about four fans in the audience, and the rest seems to have been a bunch of jaded music industry insiders.  Reception at the start of the event was kind of bland, with not much enthusiasm from what was obviously a pretty weary crowd.  Lenka brought them to life however, and really livened up what could have been a dead audience.  By the end of the concert, the four fans (of which Anna and I were two) weren't the only ones cheering.

I wrote that first paragraph about three weeks ago, fully intending to finish it off and publish the post.  It seems I’ve been a little lax.  Some of you have made up for it however, and some of you seem to have stopped blogging altogether.  What’s that about, dude?  Anyway, since then, a bunch of interesting things have happened.  We were in Berlin last weekend for the U2 concert, which was every bit as good as I expected it to be.  I think Anna has some photos of me screaming like a little girl when. I have a couple too, and some videos, but they were recorded on my mobile and really don’t do the experience justice. This is a concert and stage that has to be seen to be believed.  It was truly Magnificent. The set list was awesome, and comprised of Breathe, No Line on the Horizon, a much better than expected Get on your Boots, Magnificent, Beautiful Day (awesome… Dave B, was it you who said this song just made you smile every time you heard it?), Mysterious Ways and I Still Haven’t Found what I’m Looking For in which the seventy thousand strong audience possibly out sang the band. Angel of Harlem was next, which was assisted by three musicians dragged from the audience who apparently had a flag saying they were a band from the Czech Republic.  Bono asked our forbearance while they tried something new… and promptly had the three guys play Angel of Harlem, assisted by U2!. Pure magic! Then came Stay, Unknown Caller and the ever wonderful and even better live Unforgettable Fire. Next was City of Blinding Lights and Vertigo (which I had never seen before live), and a different version of I’ll go Crazy than the one on the album.  It was… interesting, and reception was perhaps a bit more muted for it than some of the other tracks.  Then Larry started up the intro drum sequence for Sunday Bloody Sunday and seventy thousand fans just went apeshit.  I have to include myself in that too.  There may have been a couple of tears brushed out of my eyes during that one.  An awesome rendition of Pride was up next, at which point I started to lose my voice. Then MLK and Walk On, and then Desmond Tutu was shown on the screen saying that everyone should be nice to each other, with some background music that faded into the intro for Where The Streets Have No Name.  I almost lost it at this point I have to say, it was a moment of sheer awesomeness that is going to be hard to beat. Once that had ended, and the crowd finally calmed down, we were brought back up again with One which Bono described as having been written in Berlin years ago. You can imagine the reaction to that.  Then came Ultraviolet, which was awesome too, and With or Without You which was so much better than I was expecting.  Bono’s voice cracked (deliberately I think) slightly on the higher registers, giving the song a kind of magic it doesn’t have on the studio version.  Finally Moment of Surrender and that was it for one hell of a memorable night. Luckily enough we were staying in Anna’s uncle’s apartment which is in Charlottenburg and very close to the stadium.  We were home in twenty minutes.

We also visited the Reichstag in Berlin, the Berlin Wall Museum and the obligatory ancient stuff for Archaeology geeks.  The ancient stuff was better than I was expecting actually.  It was in the Pergamon museum where they have the Pergamon Altar, Ishtar Gate and the Gate of Miletus all housed in lifelike surroundings.  We picked up some excellent audio guides for this tour, and again I have pictures but they don’t do it justice.

I often have to generate GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers) for applications, and I’m sick of the process of googling “guid generator”, and then going there.  So, instead of simply adding a favourite, I built my own.  Its here.  Knock yourself out.