bigkevmcd’s cerebrations

Yet another visit to the Paisley Beer Festival and the beer was as good as always, sadly no Mead by the time I got there (and that was early on the friday evening) but another great night out

Thanks to the CAMRA volunteers for their hard work.

Facing App Store limbo, StarPlayr developers give up and go home.

I may use a lot of Apple products, but I’m by no manner of means an “Apple Fanboy”, and this is another example of Apple just not “getting it”, how can people be expected to foresee upcoming Apple products, they’ve even gone out of their way to sue people who leak details of upcoming products.

If you want a healthy ecosystem around your products, you have to allow people to choose, perhaps the StarPlayr.com application would have been better than Apple’s own…who knows, we’ll never get to see it now…

Gnocchi is one of my favourite foods, I love freshly made Gnocchi in both cream sauces and tomato sauces…

Creamy mustard sauces being my favourite!

Creamy blue-cheese mustard sauce (enough for 2)

I started off with about 75ml of double-cream, into a small saucepan

Add about 75g of a blue cheese, I like Dolcelatte for this, but I’ve experimented with Rosenborg Danish Blue and Gorgonzola amongst others…

Bring the cream to the boil, the cheese will melt into the cream, once it’s all melted, add about a tablespoon of French wholegrain mustard and stir well.

The Gnocchi will only take about 2 minutes to float to the surface (they’re ready when that happens), so fish them out with a slotted spoon into a pasta bowl, and ladle some of the sauce on top.

I quite like to put some grated cheese on top and stick the bowl under a hot grill for a couple of minutes to melt…

Sprinkle with black pepper and you’re ready to go!

So, my colleagues are in Glasgow for a two-week sprint as we attempt to push Landscape forward for an April release.

Today, we managed to get a couple of new features pushed forward for one of the big new areas for Landscape, I enjoyed pairing again, it’s good for keeping people focussed on the task at hand, and Duncan and I made good progress…

Our progress allowed us to get onto one of the big discussion areas for the sprint, and a two and a half hour debate ensued over package longevity and support periods ensued…it was an interesting discussion, but we’re still not really clear what the right idea is, other than that we don’t really know

So, I arrived at Stansted Airport from Bergerac at 5:20pm yesterday, and I got back to Glasgow at 19:50pm this evening…in between was a mixture of terrible communication and bad weather, but I have to say that my iPhone proved itself as a web-device…it’s just great

When Easyjet told people that a flight was cancelled, they had to rebook online, it was easy to get online to the Easyjet site and rebook within minutes…I was able to email people, and update various status items to say what and where I was up to.

ProRSS is a great wee app too…

I’m the proud owner of a Canon EOS 400D, great intro-level Digital-SLR and more than enough for my experimental side.

I’ve taken some photos I really like with it, but a DSLR isn’t easy to carry around.

My Nokia N95 served as a reasonable substitude for spontaneous pictures in the pub, but the iPhone doesn’t really cut it as a camera, the definition is too low, no flash, and the UI fails.

So, I picked up a Casio Exilim S10, after seeing Neil’s, and it’s much worthier substitute for the EOS camera

I arrived in France on Friday evening, the weather’s been nice, it’s around 11C just now and I’ve been out for a wander with my mum and dad.

So, tomorrow O2 will take on my existing mobile number, and my transfer from my Nokia N95 to my iPhone will be complete.

Pros and Cons…

Nokia N95

Pros

• Great camera
• Standard USB connection
• SD cards!
• Mass storage!

Cons

• Terrible battery life
• Can’t charge from USB
• GPS is very slow (to the point of being unusable)
• Buggy software
• Limited access to software (note, I know there is a lot of Series 60 software, getting access to it isn’t easy)

iPhone

Pros

• Big screen (this is probably my #1 thing)
• Charges from USB
• Really nice User interface
• Better browser (Opera mini doesn’t really do it for me on the N95)
• Integration between Wifi and 3G is great
• Excellent email client (well, for me it is!)
• Very wide range of software
• iTunes
• Excellent integration of GPS with onboard software

Cons

• No MMS, really!  For a phone released this side of the millenium not to have MMS capability is pretty impressive
• Closed software environment (I can’t even install the software I write, on it, without forking over $99 for the privilege)
• Non-standard USB connector
• Poor camera (this is actually a big thing for me, I like the camera on the N95)
• No video calling (in fairness, I’ve never used it on my N95 or Nokia 6680)
• No storage expansion, I know Apple laptops don’t have the all-in-one style connectors that most modern laptops (and desktops have) but it would have been great on the phone, just think, a 32GB SD card would double the music capacity, and it wouldn’t take up much space!

All in all, I prefer the iPhone to the N95, the screen in particular is great, am sad about the camera (it means I might have to buy and carry a small portable camera again, I’ve taken a lot of photos on my N95), and the lack of MMS is a bit puzzling (It’s one of two things, either USians don’t use MMS, or, they want you to use email and the push capabilities of mobileme).

I’ll follow this up at some point.

The social network isn’t light reading!