Ok I was prepared for the multitude of software bloat I might find on the Acer 5920 when it arrived and actually it wasn't too bad! Just a case of removing a few irrelevant games, some dodgy looking attempt at DVD authoring software and finally making the decision to replace NIS with BitDefender. Actually this was only after, having installed and updated NIS, I discovered when I awoke Aristotle (yes all my platforms are philsophers!) this afternoon that my 3 month subscription to NIS had expired in 1 day!? All looked a bit time consuming having to deal with support and no way I was restoring this puppy so off it went. Fortunately an uninstall process that was far less painful than I recall encountering with my old Win98 box many years ago - thanks of course to RegSupreme.

Great so I have a secure system, I have removed the unwanted software and killed the odd unwelcome service. Nice sleek, clean Vista platform ready to begin software install for development. No time to deal with all the usual software tools initially as I had to crack straight on with testing. Joining the wireless network was not an issue - although file sharing was (for another post perhaps!). And soon I had the sandbox up for testing in IE7 on Vista. Great! Now time to download the Virtual PC so I can get on with legacy testing….. Arrrrrggggghhhh……! Virtual PC doesn't support Windows Vista Home PREMIUM. But I thought Premium means all the bells and whistles. Well according to MicroDollar it clearly doesn't! In fact it only seems to be a few more quid than Windows Vista Basic!? So what is the actual point of all these different versions. It seems to me I have wound up with Windows Media version and am looking at another hundred quid to get it updated to a version that will allow me to do all those lovely developer like things I like to do with all my philosophers. Nice one MicroDollar!

I thought it would save me time and money getting a laptop with Vista to do M$ testing rather than going down upgrading route on Socrates - my iMac box running Tiger at present. But now I guess not. Painful…

To be continued I am sure…

• Getting my head around Vista's services thanks to Black Viper's Service Guide
• Tracking down the Norton Removal Tool since that will be the first thing going.
• Verifying the compatibility of old faithful system maintenance tools including CCleaner and RegSupreme

The platform will principally be used just for testing so I will also be after Virtual PC and the Windows XP disc image to allow standalone versions of the legacy exploders. Will blog on this in due course…

So, with my first footsteps into Vista looming on the horizon I felt this was a good time to try and return to some informative blogging.

I was starting to share the feeling of others on the web that this might be a repairable bug until I discovered last night that it is all down to the position I hold the iPod Touch. If the Touch is being held vertically (at right angles to the ground) the accelerometer seems to be flawless in its performance. The problem only arises when the Touch is held horizontal (parallel to the ground) - I assume because the detection mechanism does not work in this plane. Seems to resolve any issues and while I generally prefer to hold it fairly flat in my hand I will be prepared next time a friend asks to see my iPod Touch.

Following expedition leader Antony Yep Colas first scouting river trip on a jetski, Eduardo Bagé (Brazil) on a longboard and Patrick Audoy (France) on a stand-up board, managed to ride the bore for 1 hour and 10 minutes on a distance assessed at 17.1km.

The local papers headlined with foreigners break the law and a surfing world record and went on to report several altercations between the surfers and the local police following complaints from locals but in his press release Yep followed this up:

The situation changed when Chinese Authorities started to smell the economical potential of creating a possible surfing show on the river. Law has not changed yet but when surfers got wet again, many helped them to catch up with the bore hitching rides along the riverbanks!

While this is unlikely to be accepted as an official world record due to lack of GPS and an official adjudicator to observe that the very strict guidelines were adhered to it is an excellent acheivement and clearly opens up the doors for the Qiantang Dragon to become a new playground for surfers from everywhere! As Yep finished up:

Beyond an unofficial record, the main point here is that surfers have been changing Chinese Authorities perception of the recreational use of the river during the bore. If any surfing demonstration should be done for the next Olympics Games in China 2008, there it should happen !

I have to say my one disappointment from the news is seeing how dramatically the bore has been effected by the construction of the Hangzhou Bay bridge in the estuary - the world's longest trans-oceanic bridge. Before the turn of the century I made an agreement with my good buddy Steve King to surf all the tidal bores of the world. At the time international bore surfing was in its infancy and since has become the attention of the global surfing industry such that my personal goals have now changed. However while we set our ultimate goal at being the feared and infamous Qiantang Dragon I think on seeing the photos I feel the goal posts should be moved to the far more impressive and untouched Araguari river which Sergio has surfed at 4 metres plus.

Currently I have chosen not to jailbreak my iPod Touch since it will invariably lead to far too much time preoccupied with installing and testing 3rd party applications! After all it is an MP3 player not a phone so do I really need all those extra applications?

But the one thing I do really need is an e-book reader and this was one of my main reasons behind investing in an iPod Touch to allow me to read my e-book collection on a more portable device than my iBook. Accessing PDF files on the Touch is simply a case of visiting the PDF URI in Safari. This is fine for my purposes and the clarity and sharpness of the screen make reading PDFs very enjoyable. A few important features such as bookmarking are absent but this serves as an adequate stop-gap for me at present. So I just had to find a simple way to access all my PDF files from my iMac harddrive. Fortunately this wasn't too hard since I have recently been test driving the excellent Papers for archiving all my e-books and journals and have them indexed in a library directory with sub-folders for each year of release.

So, I just needed to configure Apache to access that directory so I could load up my e-books in Safari on my iPod Touch. Since my apache server also serves my sandbox for web development I wanted to keep access to my e-books separate. The normal approach to this would be to create a new name-based virtual host and update the machine entries in NetInfo Manager. But without jailbreaking my iPod Touch there is no way to override the local DNS (i.e. lack of a NetInfo Manager and shell access to lookupd).

Instead, the best solution was to enable another port in the apache configuration, and then all requests on this port can redirect to the e-book directory:

Listen 192.168.1.65:99

Port 99 seemed like a nice easy number to remember. So after enabling port access in the firewall and a little bit of Apache virtual host configuration later:

NameVirtualHost *:99
<VirtualHost *:99>
        DocumentRoot /Path-to-Papers-Library
        <Directory /Path-to-Papers-Library>
          Allow from all        
          Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
          IndexOptions +SuppressHTMLPreamble +FancyIndexing +NameWidth=* +SuppressDescription
          IndexIgnore *.papers* Unknown .svn ._* .DS* Spotlight
        </Directory>
        
</VirtualHost>

The virtual host is enabled on port 99 and the root directory for this site will point to the Papers library. I then just used a few rules from the mod_autoindex module to make the directory index available in a simple to browse layout.

And there it is. I can now load up Safari on my iPod Touch and browse to http://192.168.1.65:99 on my local network and have ready access to all my e-books. Of course this requires I am within range of my local network. Taking my e-books away with me would require hosting on a network available outside my LAN.

The iPod Touch is great. The iTunes WiFi music store is great. But do not reset your iPod Touch if you have manual syncing and have not manually transferred (is that even possible?) your purchases to your iTunes library!

Yes I have just kissed good bye to my first purchase from the iTunes WiFi store - fortunately only one song. My iTunes library is way too large to utilise automatic syncing with my iPod Touch (as I am sure is the case for most people). But with manual syncing set-up it would appear that any music purchased through the iTunes WiFi store on the iPod Touch is not transferred to the iTunes library automatically. I assume (and hope!) there is a way to drag and drop instead - I cannot try this since there is no way for me to reacquire the song I have lost from my iTunes account. So will have to buy some more music first.

Anyway this is an unfortunate flaw in the iPod Touch integration and will more than likely deter me from using the WiFi store for anything other than just listening to previews of new releases. After all it is just a simple one click Restore to again kiss good bye to all those purchases.

I also think it is wrong that I cannot download the songs I have purchased a second time. It is my account, no-one else has access to it, so how can this breach any legalities (other than affecting the download count at the store - a little bit of code perhaps). It is not often I am disgruntled with Apple but this sucks a little…

function array_merge_assoc($map, $data) {
  $data_clean = array_intersect_key($data, $map);
  return array_merge($map, $data_clean);
}

The first call to array_intersect_key strips any invalid keys from the $data array hence making it safe to then merge the two arrays in the second function call.

Personally I will be jumping on the Leopard train as soon as I have invested in a reliable backup solution to boot my older Tiger off an external drive if I so wish.

Finally, a PC Unix that everyone can love. OS X Leopard is a triumph of customer-focused engineering Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade. Tom Yager