Blogging on the road, traffic, procedures and CMS

I'm blocked on the bus, in the traffic, after bad weather and a couple of small tornados have given their best to add some more entropy to the everyday caos in Rome.
The bus is surprisingly empty and I actually found a seat!
That's a chance to download a blogging app on the phone and see if it actually works; that' the blogging "on the road" and the "traffic".
If you read this it actually works!
My chosen app is "blogpress", works ok.

Procedures.
I work in a large company and am a customer of our IT department. Everything has a procedure, but to access the procedure there is a procedure to be allowed to submit requests, what a mess! You find out things are having problems when after days nothing happens, and so you start calling people and find out you have to submit a new request to someone else. So for me procedures = large waste of time.

CMS
I've been using CQ5 in the last few days. Wow, it looks quite a big jump ahead, but still we need tweek many things.

Got off the bus.. blogging while walking could be risky!!

iTunes pre-order feature does not work!

This is the text I sent to Apple through their support page:
I pre-ordered "High School Musical 3: Senior Year", it never downloaded (it said it would be available 10/23/2008, yesterday), today 10/24 it is available to buy. What the heck is the pre-order feature for? I had promised my children to have the music yesterday. Thought I could trust your store, and if this is the only way I can communicate your support is also utterly inadequate. I will give all evidence of this deficiency on my blog and to all my friends and through my social networks. I hate not being able to maintain my promises and its all your store's fault.

This is th pre-oder in my account (it states music will be avialble 10/23):

I'm waiting from Apple's response and will follow up.

Update (11.47 AM) I recieve a fantastic email from Apple:
Gentile Alessandro Canepa,apple

L’ordine in anteprima "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" di "The Cast of "High School Musical"" è disponibile. Per scaricarlo clicca sul link qui sotto o apri iTunes e seleziona Controlla acquisti nel menu Store. Se hai impostato iTunes in modo da scaricare automaticamente il contenuto acquistato in anteprima, controlla nella tua libreria.

Hours after the album is freely available they tell me I can download it, what a service!!!

Changing the look of my blog

I'm trying to change the look of my blog, it's a work in progress.
As a consequence I'm seriously hating the templating system used by blogger...
Anyway I found a base template that I like and I'm working on tweaking it to my needs.

Update: Argg! Why doesn't IE 6 support transparent PNGs?? The result really stinks! I'll start all over again..

Really good disk encryption and much more: Truecrypt 5

I have been a long time user of Truecrypt and have used it to protect personal and business documents on hard disks and even more on USB dongles (with what is called virtual encrypted disk).
Recently the TrueCrypt foundation released version 5 of their software which includes at least a couple of great new features, entire partition with pre-boot authentication and storage device encryption.
Another really cool feature for what they call "plausible deniability", which essentially allows you to have two passwords, one that gives access to your files and a second to use in case someone forces you to reveal it, in which case you are granted access to a set of valueless files you have previously saved.

The most recent release, 5.1a has also solved the problems related to hibernation, which was previously blocked when full disk encryption was activated (not so great for laptops).

I have encrypted my laptop's system disk and one great side-effect is a visible improvement in disk performances, evidently the new disk access drivers implemented have been so well optimized that they outperform Microsoft's native drivers even while adding the encryption layer.

MySQL AB messes up European geography

I recently received a MySQL newsletter on the "MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference 2007", great, I thought, they'll do a southern Europe conference too..
I checked their site, and indeed they will, in Paris.
In Paris?? Southern Europe? Yes, and one in Munich, Germany (which is, by the way, north of London):

• MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference: London, Tuesday, October 16th 2007
• MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference: Munich, Thursday, October 18th 2007 (In German)
• MySQL Southern Europe Customer Conference: Paris, Tuesday, October 23rd 2007 (In French)

They might have to check their geography; North, Central, and Southern Europe have never been so close (and messed up)!
What about Norway and Spain? These are all Central European conferences for me..

Inside the iPod Touch

iFixit (http://www.ifixit.com/) has opened and disassembled an iPod Touch.
It seems most of the space is dedicated to battery and screen while the electronics are all crammed in the bottom where the connectors are.
What remains unclear is whether there's the components needed for bluetooth or not.
As all other electronics from Cupertino it is a great work of engineering and design.
You can find all pictures here.

iPod Touch order cancelled, let me wait and see it first

Last Friday I canceled my order for the iPod Touch on the Apple Store (a plus for their on-line store, nice thing to be able to do..).

Reasons:

• don't know if it will be open to third party software or not
• might have a conspicuous price drop after just a couple of months (iPhone docet)
• had a feeling I would repent having bought it in such a hurry
• bluetooth would really make a difference for me (is it there or not?)
  

I'm a bit sad about this choice, but as soon as it will be out, I will run to the Apple Store try it hands-on and wait for someone to open it up and see what's inside, and then I will decide whether to buy or not.

Maybe I just don't trust Apple enough...Technorati Profile

Windows Mobile 6 on the Samsung i600

A couple of days ago I successfully upgraded the Samsung i600 mobile phone to Windows Mobile 6.
Having an Italian branded phone the operation was a bit tedious, it required de-branding the phone and setting the phone country to Netherlands in a hidden menu, downloading the upgrade from the Samsung website and setting the phone back to Italian.
The procedure is well described (in italian) in this forum.

The differences in the new OS appear mainly cosmetic, since the announced improved radio component software is very difficult to evaluate if not in a lab.

The most visible changes are some improved features in Outlook, which has better designed views and, for example, the possibility of deferring appointment alerts, previously they could only be deleted.

Internet Explorer is said to have been improved but the only difference I have perceived is an new animated logo, a blue ring.
Whereas rendering is still very bad.

A new feature which might be very useful, since software from Redmond is traditionally very buggy, is Windows update which, unfortunately, I have not managed to get to work (great if it was a bug in the bug fixing app!).

As far as previously present bugs, the Samsung RSS and Podcast apps are still internet configuration unaware and don't work through eventually configured proxies.
Too bad because one of the things I like in windows mobile is the logic behind the internet configuration.
You can add a connection and say, for example that it connects to your "office" and then configure a proxy that connects from th "office" to the "internet". But if applications don't read the configuration it is pretty useless.
Not that I will ever use this phone instead of an iPod!
I don't understand why the update is not easily available in some countries (the Italian, Austrian and French flags are shaded o the Samsung site), but as always when companies place stupid barriers the online community finds a workaround..

Update: Does Apple's iPod touch have Bluetooth?

I just found this news on engadget, wow it would be very nice if it did have bluetooth I could connect it to my phone which has high-speed mobile connectivity and a decent camera!

I Just ordered the new iPod Touch!!

I couldn't resist, the new iPod Touch is so nice, and it expands on how I use my iPod today (mostly audio books and podcasts) so I ordered it immediately (delivery is expected on the first days of October)!
What I hope is that, apart the applications which Apple has included (which seem already very useful), a whole set of new and imaginative applications will be developed by the Open Source community. The multi-touch interface together with Wifi could be the starting point for a whole new set of on-line applications, but I wonder if Apple will open the iPod Touch to third-party software, or will it be necessary to hack it?

Let's wait and see...