Not much, but a good first step to my first real app - iMExpensive.

Connecting to my network

Just would not work. For two hours. Two whole hours. I eventually traced it to the MAC filtering on my router. I’m not sure why Macs and MAC filtering can’t go together. Turning off MAC filtering (which I planned to do anyway, in favour of WPA security) sorted the problem out straight away. There are still days where the Mac takes a minute or so to connect, but considering the boot time of a Mac is about 10 seconds, compared to my old PC laptop’s 6 minutes, I’m willing to forgive.

Connecting to MSN

Turns out Netgear DG934PN firmware 1.05.36 has a bug in it which conspires to not allow clients on the network to connect to MSN via anything but sucky, sucky HTTP. The official Windows client is robust enough for me to have never noticed. Adium was not. A painful downgrade experience to 1.05.35 fixed this.

Not without me checking my laptop thoroughly, trying three or four different clients, checking with my ISP…

What’s Left?

Things left to do:

• Figure out where my install of Java went to.
• Figure out how to tag my MP3s automatically and download album art.
• Figure out how to stop looking so damn cool with the pro balanced on my lap.

Cute. Wait for it on DVD.

Good:

Easy ‘net use

It’s so easy to browse the Internet on the phone. The touchscreen means that clicking round websites is much easier than if I had to use a nubby phone joystick. It’s good that data’s free because going round the web on the iPhone whenever I’ve got a spare minute’s actually become a bit of a habit.

Everything else

The style, the build quality, the functionality…

Bad:

No 3G

Well this one was obvious. Websites are fast enough (especially with a lot of them iPhone-optimised), but you can always wish for faster.

Basic SMS support

I love delivery reports. The iPhone interface doesn’t easily support them. O2 doesn’t actually support them either unless I prepend my texts with an ugly string. It’s strange that such a new device doesn’t have a feature I saw implemented perfectly years ago on my SE T610. MMS is even worse - there’s no native MMS support and you have to mess about with Safari and passwords to view your messages. I suspect the reason for no MMS is because GPRS data is free so MMSs would cost nothing and O2 would lose 10p on every MMS sent as a replacement for an SMS.

No MAPI (MailAPI) support

Checking my work email over web is fine but inconvenient. Replying is even worse. Integration with the native mail client (or even a stand-alone Outlook clone) would be so much more convenient. Ingressed earphone jack socket:Not sure what sort of design oversight this was. The earphone socket is so far sunk into the chassis that most earphones I’ve tried don’t fit in. Shure’s produced a special extension for the iPhone (though not in so many words), but it still stings that I’d have to pay a bit more for a wire.

Needing iTunes to sync

Why do I need to keep a fully-featured music program on my work and home laptops to sync up my calendar? An Outlook plugin would make more sense.

Inconsistent search results with Google Maps

This really bugs me. Some results I find in Google Maps don’t appear in iPhone’s Map application. Aren’t they meant to be using the same data?

The iPhone really has made it easy for me to keep in touch with my friends on the go and I’ve even organised a few social activities on it. It’s obvious that Apple’s made some decisions on how I should do things. While some of the activities I do on the phone do have extremely well thought-out workflows (such as booking a restaurant), anything off the beaten path requires memory juggling and messing about with websites (like… MMS?!) The majority of the problems I’ve experienced can be fixed with software. Opening up the iPhone will allow the sort of diversity that made the desktop PC so useful. All in all, I’m expecting my cons list to be be totally out of date as soon as the SDK is released.

There’s no mistaking what Sweeny Todd is about. Opening credits show it all: Blood and romantic grotesquery. The movie starts off bloody and doesn’t go too far off track. The entire plot formula is simple, but you’ll watch it for the atmosphere. Burton’s rendering of Todd’s London is dirty and macabre and fun. The only thing that let it down for me was the singing. I have a low threshold for people belting out plot lines, and most of the movie is propelled by song lyrics. In fact, it seems like the trailers include pretty much all of spoken words (possibly the studio was worried a musical wouldn’t be so successful?) Still, some brilliant lines, like Todd’s repeated description of London. Brilliant acting too. Extremely Burtonesque, which is a good thing if you like his movies; an awful thing if you don’t.

One negative is Julia Roberts, who looks a bit like a weird alien and is far too monodimensional. Possibly I’m a bit biased after watching Notting Hill on telly last weekend. The CIA man is an excellent character that gives life to otherwise-dull moments.

The movie manages to maintain a close and personal sense of conspiracy with the main characters trying to effect a change below the radar. I, personally, had some trouble understanding all the words due to the heavy texan drawl employed.

Doesn’t need to be watched on the big screen. Definitely don’t watch it in Odeon’s “premier” seats. One slip and you’ll end up with your knee half way into the back of someone else’s head.

(n.b. There’s a good comparison between the movie and real life located here.)

The LinkStation can’t be connected to a PC via USB (as far as I can see). It can, however, connect to other USB harddiscs. It does this to expand storage, but also gives us the ability to transfer data via the USB port - which is so much quicker. To do this, we’ll need to connect to the NAS via Telnet (the web interface doesn’t support using USB thumb-drives as a transfer medium), detect and manually mount the USB drive.

First, to telnet in we’ll need to enable Telnet on the NAS:

1. Download ACP Commander from here.
2. Use ACP Commander using the command java -jar acp_commander.jar -t <linkstation_ip>.
3. Telnet in. Look! It’s Linux!
4. The standard username is root, with no password. Note this gives you complete access to the software innards of the NAS. You don’t want to do anything rash, like delete random files, in this mode.
5. Poke about if you’re interested.

Now we need to find out where the USB thumb-drive is (obviously, your thumb-drive needs to be stuck into one of the ports at the back):

1. Run the command dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device". The output will look something like:

# dmesg | grep -i “SCSI device” SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB) SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB)

We’re interested in the bit that says sdb. Yours may be different (possibly sda). This is the location of the USB drive in the dev directory.

Okay, to mount it:

1. Create the directory /mnt/usbdrive to create our mount point.
2. Run the command mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive.

The USB drive is now accessible from within Linux on the NAS. You can copy files to and from it using the standard Linux cp command.

Unmounting the USB drive can be done via umount /mnt/usbdrive.

(Thanks to this site, here, for all the info).

1. sudo apt-get update - may as well make sure we’re aware of the latest package updates
2. sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny - we’re going to replace this package. You’ll be asked if you want to uninstall ubuntu-minimal. It’s safe to do this (explanation below).
3. sudo apt-get install vim-runtime - this is quite a big package (20 meg or so).

Now we have the latest version of Vim. The command :syntax on will turn on syntax highlighting. To have it on automatically for yourself, create the file ~/.vimrc and enter the text syntax on. You can also edit /etc/vim/vimrc (as root) and change the appropriate lines to make the settings global instead. You can also set whether the background is dark or light (which affects the colour scheme).

When uninstalling vim-tiny, you’re prompted about the removal of ubuntu-minimal. This is an umbrella package that has lots of dependencies to packages needed for a basic workable Ubuntu install. If you uninstall one of the packages, you’ll need to uninstall the umbrella package too. This doesn’t affect the other dependencies so it should be safe.

As an aside, it seems to work better over Putty too. Happy days!

Still, assuming nothing Earth-shattering happens in the first few minutes, like a virus killing everyone on Earth, I Am Legend really is a solid movie that paced itself and ended well. Some good bits with Will Smith showing how lonely being the last man on the planet can be.

The vampires are really quite poor and not terrifying at all. A shame after the atmosphere of tension that is set up every time just before you see one. It’s best to treat them as no more than simple plot devices to drive the core of the movie.

Worth seeing in the cinema or on DVD.

As a side note, this is the first time in years I’ve watched a movie in a crowded cinema hall. A good reminder of how horrible it is. It must be a universal law that if you bring 200 people to one place, there’ll be at least one baby that can’t stop crying, five guys who can’t stop pointing out the obvious in loud voices and two who are incapable of figuring out how to silence their mobile phones.

So, to get started, install uShare. The uShare website (here) gives details on how to do this. Installing uShare using apt-get will set up three files (amongst others) on your Ubuntu machine:

• /usr/bin/ushare - the uShare binary file
• /etc/ushare.conf - the uShare configuration file
• /etc/init.d/ushare - the uShare daemon start/stop script

We can get uShare to start serving our files immediately to the Xbox with the command

uShare -D -x -c /media/directory (where /media/directory is the path to your files).

This isn’t very neat though, so read on if you want to integrate uShare properly with your Ubuntu install.

We now need to make sure uShare knows which files to serve and to make it operate in Xbox 360 compatibility mode. Bring up your text editor (using sudo) and open up /etc/ushare.conf. Change the line ENABLE_XBOX= to USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes. Set USHARE_DIR to the path(s) of the files you want to serve. If you want web access, change the line ENABLE_WEB= to USHARE_ENABLE_WEB=yes and set the USHARE_PORT.

The uShare daemon script also needs to be amended slightly to tell uShare to use the config file we’ve just changed. Using your text editor (again with sudo), open up /etc/init.d/ushare and add a new line under the CONFIGFILE=/etc/ushare.conf that reads USHARE_OPTIONS="-f $CONFIGFILE" (running uShare straight on the command line will automatically open that config file. For some reason, the command used in the script doesn’t. Thanks to [this forum](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=631213&page=7 for the solution)).

Once this is all done, restart the uShare daemon by running the command

sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart.

If you load up your Xbox 360 and go into the Videos section under the Media blade, you’ll see your new media server listed as “uShare” (press X to change video source if not). Happy viewing!

Still need to resolve the following issues:

1. uShare does not differentiate between media types, so all my movies are appearing as music as well. Music also isn’t organised into albums.
2. Only the first directory I’ve specified for sharing in the configuration file is being scanned and delivered.

Conclusion - Use uShare if you want to just deliver movies. For delivery of multiple media types, including a large music collection, uShare can’t seem to handle it just yet.