FCHouse

David Pogue and the iPhone

Posted by Carlo - 27/06/07 at 09:06:00 am

I love the way David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist, presents new tech gadgets. This time he was able to play with the new object of desire, the iPhone!

And here he is, with his iPhone Diary!

The Empty Store: repairing my MacBook in Regent Street

Posted by Carlo - 26/06/07 at 11:06:04 am

This morning I pop into the Regents Street because of a crack in my MacBook keyboard. The store opens at 10AM, but my appointment with a “Genius” was before 9AM. It was surreal! The store was completely empty, apart from the cleaners and some Geniuses. The overcrowded store I was used to enter in was somewhere else.

The Genius that took my Mac told me that the crack I had had already been see, but it was uncommon… wow, how lucky I am!

The keyboard was replaced in twenty minutes (great) and in that time I had the possibility to live in a dream. I have never been used to see that place completely empty. There was silence, all the chairs were lifted from the ground and in a sight you could have seen all the macs switched on, ready for the crowd.

Now I have a new keyboard, the warranty has covered me once more. I was quite displeased by the crack; when it happens two days ago, I was sad: I couldn’t believe to my bad luck.

The “sorrow” passed fast and today I’m quite happy that the problem has been solved so promptly! I am very satisfied of the support you can receive from the Apple Geniuses in the Apple Stores: they are very friendly and they know their job!

If you want to evaluate a product, don’t forget one of the most important thing: the Quality of the after sale Support!

PS: I think that with my Bad Luck I will need the AppleCare as soon as possible, don’t you agree?

Books Underground: Dragons of Spring Dawning

Posted by Carlo - 24/06/07 at 03:06:39 pm

And so I ended the trilogy, just in less than three weeks. I didn’t remember the end at all. I was able to remind some details, the end of some characters, but not the general end. Probably my memory is mixing “The Chronicles” with “The Legends“, but reading it again was like reading it for the first time.

This three books has been really good to read: I remembered why I loved them so much. The setting is really well done, and the story takes you from the beginning.

The characters are perfectly drawn. Someone can say that they are stereotyped, but not only they works, but they works great.

I didn’t remember how well designed was the character of Tasselhoff, the Kender, or how deeply dark was Raistlin. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman did a great job, and they did the same also for other titles in the saga.

I think I will read the Legends trilogy, but I don’t think I will move to other novels but few selected (as “The Legend of Huma”), because my opinion is that “The Chronicles” and “The Legends” are the real “Dragonlance“.

LOVEFiLM customer reviews? There are better way of reviewing!

Posted by Carlo - 20/06/07 at 09:06:54 am

We started testing LOVEFiLM, an easy way to rent DVD. After the first film, An Inconvenient Truth, I decided to “participate to the community” writing a short review. I feel this the right way of telling the other customer if in my opinion a film is good or bad.

Before sending my review I was interested by the disclaimer that every user must accept before submitting a review:

Please note that all submitted reviews become the property of LOVEFiLM, which reserves the right to edit or delete any submissions. Your submission must be your own original work and will normally be posted on this web site within 1 business day. Please do not include HTML tags; for a new paragraph, insert a blank line.

Well… Thanks very much! Interesting way of dealing with the customer feedbacks! What about the review copyright? I don’t like this disclaimer and after my first review, I will never write anything again for them, not with these rules.

In these days I’m also using Trusted Places, an interesting website where everyone can review restaurants, pubs etcetera. There is another big difference apart the one that in LOVEFiLM you can review films and in TrustedPlaces you can review…places: in the second one your reviews are genuine, they belong to you and define your style and what you love and what you hate. I don’t want to write something that will not belong to me. If I will write something dumb (or grammatically incorrect) I should be the one to be blamed!

The quality of every website define the use the users make of it. If they want to control (and own) every single review written on every film, well they can easily write them without asking the user to do it(because they do!).

PS: For the rest the quality of this rental seems (I still have to test it) quite good!

An Inconvenient Truth

Posted by Carlo - 19/06/07 at 11:06:48 pm

Today we received our first DVD from lovefilm.com: an Inconvenient Truth. I was interesting in it, and I have to admit that I loved this documentary. It is a straightforward view of the Global Warming.

There are different voices shouting their own truth, and in the end everyone of us has to decide which voice to listen to. I have decided long time ago that I am more scared of this global warming than I am of some stupid terrorists. The fact is that the money spent for the “Green Research” are a tiny part of those spent to fight the terrorism. It means that in fifty years we will be safe to kill the planet our children will live in.

We are our children terrorists, aren’t we?

It’s like the research that says that nowadays the investment for Viagra are much more than those for finding a solution to Alzheimer… in fifty years every old men in the world will be able to have an erection… without knowing how to use it…

Too far? Maybe yes, let’s stick to the film! An Inconvenient Truth is a nice documentary on our world. Watch it, but I fear that this will not be a happy ending film, for anyone.

I think that everyone of us can do something to make the earth better. Even if thee information in this film would be wrong, do you really think that the earth would suffer from a good breath of oxygen?

An Inconvenient Truth? a film to be seen!

Photo Gallery: Wandering Around London

Posted by Carlo - 18/06/07 at 06:06:57 pm

With this post I will start posting a link to every new Photo Gallery we will take.

In this weekend we have wandered around London, without a clear destination. In reality both Saturday and Sunday we knew where we would have gone, but the roads to get there were quite long and lazy!

Saturday we brought a friend of ours to the Forbidden Planet, while on Saturday we decided to walk to the Royal Observatory of Greenwich. There are not a lot of photos, but in the next months we are planning to fill this site with new ones!

Books Underground: Dragons of Winter Night

Posted by Carlo - 18/06/07 at 05:06:57 pm

The second book of The Chronicles is gone, drunk fast as I did many years ago. I remembered the main happenings, but I forgot a lot of details. I loved this book as I loved the first one of the trilogy, maybe a little less, but still I can confirm that these books remains some of my favorites!

I’ve loved some of the passages, while some others were more interesting in my memories than they were in the book, but overall this book has satisfied my thirst of good reading.

I am going to finish the third book of the serie, Dragons of Spring Dawning,  then I think I will take a break from Dragonlance, but I will get back for the Legends. I still don’t know if I will read any other book from that saga, or maybe I will focus on the few I loved.

I am one of those who didn’t love the new evolution of the Dragonlance history, beginning from the Dragons of Summer Flame on: it’s not the world I’ve fell in love so many years ago!

Advertisement and Consumer: evolution of customers’ needs

Posted by Carlo - 18/06/07 at 08:06:05 am

I’ve found this VERY NICE video about Advertisement and Consumer.
I think that the small story is very true and that ironically reflects today approach of a large group of consumers to the market! Have a look, it’s Nice indeed!

This ad was created by Whilst Geert Desager, Microsoft employee for Microsoft in order to advertise Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions

Debugging PHP5 with Eclipse PDT under OSX: a piece of cake!

Posted by Carlo - 12/06/07 at 10:06:57 pm

In these months I have developed in PHP with Eclipse PDT (Php Development Tool). During the first days I tried to make the debugging works, but without great results, therefore I dropped and I took back the usual debugging technique of every good script developer:

echo $variableName;

or simply logging everything possible in some log files. Initially I wasn’t so happy, because every time some result was not what I was expecting I felt myself a little frustrated not being able to understand why in few breakpoints. I have to admit that since then I haven’t thought a lot about debugging, but today my eyes felt on a very interesting post on how to make the debugging works under OSX and PDT, in few steps…

First of all the requirements:

• Eclipse PDT
• Apache (I have found MAMP really interesting)
• XDebug binary compiled  for OsX
• XDebug plugins for PDT.

My version of PDT is the latest one (RC3, the latest available as today), therefore I didn’t download the XDebug plugin version 0.1.3 (good for the RC2) as stated in the post, but the version 0.2.1.

For everything else I’ve followed the instruction on the L.ADrupal site! many thanks Guys!!!!!!

PS: here you will find a copy of the post…

Continue reading Debugging PHP5 with Eclipse PDT under OSX: a piece of cake!…

iPhone and custom application: the missing link

Posted by Carlo - 12/06/07 at 10:06:50 am

I took a look at the WWDC video tonight, and I have to admit that I would have expected something more juicy, but maybe I’m simply greedy and I can’t wait to have Leopard installed. My focus today, however, will not fall on the CoverFlow, the new Desktop or the new iChat, but I will analyze the last part of Steve Jobs’ speech: the iPhone and the “custom applications“.

Jobs presented the possibility to develop applications for the iPhone: -great- I thought immediately! The fact is that these applications are simple Web 2.0 applications, and the integration  that was shown, is simply the capability of the iPhone to react to some elements, like phone numbers or email addresses.

I cannot create something that really integrates with an iPhone SDK, something that would allow me to interact with some API. This is nothing new, nothing interesting, at least not from my point of view… to skin a web application to make it available on a small screen with the look and feel of the other iPhone apps… well, it’s a trick, it is NOT a way of creating applications for iPhone.For those who had tried the functionalities of the IE installed on Windows Mobile this will be another world (I mean, you will use the browser this time, a REAL browser) but it will not change the fact that on the iPhone the custom applications will not be available; I will not be able to write something capable of hooking my SMS Inbox to filter the SMS coming from someone, or I will forgot to have a skype app on it!More than this, this “fantastic solution” requires a constant connection to internet… I don’t know you, but my carrier (O2) ask me 3£/MB, and they don’t offer a flat rate! We are talking about tons of money!!!!! Wait… I forgot… the first version of iPhone (if I’m not mistaken) won’t be 3G…You can tell me that there is the wireless… but it’s a mobile device we are talking about, and you should be able to connect from every single place, not only from the places where there is a wireless network! Uhm… I’m not entirely satisfied… no! 

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Carlo Nicora is at home in London.