The iPad ushers in a ‘new category of device’ for ‘the largest mobile device company in the world’. At least, that’s according to Steve Jobs. Having watched the launch event on the Apple website over the weekend I think what Apple have actually produced is a very pretty looking device that completely fails to deliver anything new, and which over-charges for the ability to do the same old stuff on a different size screen.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t entirely hate it. It does look nice (one thing about Apple is that their current range of products is very nice to look at) and the multi-touch interface that was debuted on the iPhone and iPod Touch is getting better and better. From a using it point of view, I can see the attraction.

But from a useability point of view, it doesn’t appeal at all. Starting at $499, Apple is asking potential customers to shell out the same sort of money that, anywhere else, would get them a netbook or a low-end laptop with all the features and abilities of Windows or Linux to choose from. But from Apple, what your $499 gets you is a large iPod Touch. It can’t even be compared to the iPhone because of the lack of featues; there’s no camera (and I would expect an iSight at the very least) and while you can pay $130 more to have the 3G version – and shell out extra for a data plan – you can’t use it for making calls.

I love my iPod Touch, I use it every day. But it was over-priced. I love my iMac, I use it every day. But it was over-priced. Both of these together cover all my computing needs. There isn’t room for a third device, no matter how much Steve Jobs may say there is. To me, to be successful this device needs to be able to perform all the functions of the two devices it sits between. It can do the iPod Touch stuff fine, but it can’t do the desktop stuff because it doesn’t have a fully-fledged operating system. You can do what Apple want you to do, and that’s it. On a device like the iPod Touch that’s not so bad. On a device like this, it’s a killer.

The author of the piece was using a Time Capsule to back up all his data, and suddenly it dies because of a known fault with the power system. The hard drive is fine, and could be used to recover the data if Apple would allow it (the basis of the article is control of the user’s data).

But has he really got a back-up of his data? Well, on one hand yes he has because he’s taken the data off of his main machine and put it onto another machine in case the first one fails. But on the other hand, no he hasn’t because his equipment is faulty and he can’t access the data.

Having more than one copy of your irreplaceable data is A Good Thing ™. It means that you recognise that technology is not infallible and you’re taking steps to plan for the day when something breaks. Think about the things that you keep on your computer – how much of it can you afford to lose? Your contacts? Yeah, you can probably re-create those from your phone or PDA but it’s a pain. The pictures from Junior’s last birthday party? Nope, those you can’t get back. So you need to protect what you can’t afford to lose.

Apple’s Time Machine and Time Capsule combination offers Mac OS X users a simple way to do this; the Time Capsule is permanently plugged in and the Time Machine software automatically backs up the data every hour. For most people, I think that’s a little excessive – my data doesn’t change on an hourly basis, that’s for sure.

But this convenience is also its downfall. First, it’s always on. Therefore it will be prone to things like overheating power systems. Second, it’s automatic. This, to me, is not as good as it sounds. Taking a back-up of your data should be something that you make a positive action to achieve. Yes, automatic back-ups don’t get forgotten but if you think you’re going to forget to back-up your data regularly, set yourself a reminder. You need to think about what data you’re backing up, why you’re backing it up, and whether you can afford to over-write the previous data set or whether you need to keep it – not just let the computer decide. And then, once it’s backed-up, you need to test that it is usable.

You also need to plan for catastrophe. An external hard drive that stays plugged into your main machine all the time is going to be subject to the same dangers that your main system is – fire, flood, power surge, theft. Ideally, you want them separated – in different buildings if possible. If that’s not possible, then find a nice secure place for your back-up drive. Keep it unplugged when you’re not using it. And, preferably, have two that you alternate.

As a guide, this is my ideal back-up scenario:

Main computer: iMac with 250Gb hard drive, approximately 60Gb of data that needs to be backed up. Plenty of music files (which I could rip from CD again, but who wants to spend all that time?), loads of photos that are irreplaceable and a bunch of other documents that need to be kept.

Frequency of data change: when I add new music or pictures, or when new documents are created. None of this happens very often, so a once-a-fortnight back-up is probably enough. Interspersed with one-off transfers of new sets of pictures as they are taken.

Back up solution: two 250Gb external USB hard drives. Powered from the computer – so no separate power unit to fail and take the whole piece of kit out – they’re small and convenient. One time, use drive A to take a copy of the necessary folders. The next time, use drive B. Only overwrite a data set when the drive becomes full. And yes, I do mean take a copy; just drag and drop folders. I prefer not to use back-up software, as while that will save space, it also adds another layer of complexity to the mix.

Storage: drive A at the office, drive B at my girlfriends house. Convenient for the frequency that I need them, and safer than having them all in the same building.

With two 250Gb drives and 60Gb of data to back up once a fortnight I’ve got space to have four months of back-ups available. With two drives, I’m not totally sunk if one fails. And storing them in two separate places – neither of which is in the same building as the computer they’re backing up – means I’m covered for acts of God, thieves, and so on.

To me, Apple’s Time Capsule / Time Machine combination isn’t a credible back-up solution and if your data is important to you, you won’t rely on it to be one.

I’ve sat and watched numerous keynote addresses by Steve Jobs, demonstrating the latest software and hardware advances and I’ve drooled over them just like anyone else, and wished I had the wherewithal to rush out and buy them.

I’ve wanted an iPhone since they were released, but it costs a fortune and the phone functionality isn’t terribly impressive, from what I’ve read. Couple that with a low-spec camera and a bunch of included stuff that I would never use and I’ve steered clear.

Likewise, I’ve never owned an iPod. Again, high price for what you get. Couldn’t really justify it.

And then last week, I got given a second generation iPod Touch as an early birthday present (despite my protestations that – even at the Amazon price – it was way too expensive) and I’m totally hooked. In much the same way as when I first I tried using OS X I didn’t want to go back to Windows, I now wonder how I ever lived without this amazing little gadget.

Firstly, it’s a great little unit from a tactile point of view. It’s lovely to hold, and to use. It fits perfectly in the palm of your hand, and the much-talked-about multitouch screen is so smooth and responsive. Joyous.

Then there’s the fact that it syncs so seamlessly with my iMac. My current devices – a Nokia 6500 Slide and a Palm Tunsgten E – don’t, so they’ve become more and more sidelined over time. I used to put all my stuff on the Palm when I was still using Windows, because it was easy. With OS X, it only sort of works so I gave up.

With the Touch, it syncs with iCal, with iTunes, with Address Book, with Safari and so on and makes it all so much simpler. The addition of To Do from Appigo has given me a great task manager – which also syncs with iCal – and suddenly my Touch is indispensable. Just today, I’ve lost count of the number of tasks I’ve added and which – when I complete this post – are all completed.

And the Touch has become so useful so quickly because it is so easy to use. As the old Apple saying goes “it just works”. When the technology is so easy to use, it gets used a lot.

I can use it for email, for surfing the web, there’s a WordPress app so I can update this blog, I can track stocks, the weather, activity on Facebook and so much more. I can even – amazingly enough – listen to music on it.

So far, I haven’t found anything I don’t like about it – even the much-maligned standard issue headphones seem pretty good to me. All-in-all, if you’re in the market for a PDA or an MP3 player – or both- I’d recommend you take a look at the Touch.

1. Apparently, from tomorrow Sainsbury’s will be asking anyone who looks as if they’re under 25 to prove their age before they can buy age restricted products. The sign I saw didn’t specify which age restricted products they were talking about, but according to the Trading Standards website all the restricted products such as knives, alcohol, tobacco and so on can be sold to anyone over 18.

Which leads me to wonder why anyone that looks under 25 is being carded? Surely you only need to prove your age if you are over 18 but don’t look it? It’s a ridiculous policy and should be outlawed.

2. Mobile phone directory 118 800 is getting a lot of coverage at the moment, unfortunately (for them) none of it positive. In case you haven’t heard, they’ve attempted to launch a directory enquiries service that enables people to ring up and get connected to your mobile phone. The directory has, apparently, been put together from lists already in the public domain and covers approximately a third of all mobile numbers

As described by 118 800, the service they operate won’t actually reveal your mobile number to anyone and you won’t receive any calls that you don’t agree to. What you will get, though, is a text from 118 800 to tell you that someone wants to speak to you; you then decide if you want to take the call and, if you do, they get put through.

When the 118 800 service is back online (they are having “teething” problems at the moment and have taken themselves offline), you’ll be able to ask for your number to go ex-directory and it’s this that seems to have got everyone worked up. For some reason, people have assumed that their mobile number is somehow uniquely private and that no-one should be able to know what it is. This, of course, is patently not the case; none of the mobile operators (as far as I know) promise to keep your number secret and every time you give your mobile number to a third party, you’re risking that data being sold on.

I think the idea does have merits; so many people now have their mobile as their only phone number that it seems a good idea to have mobile numbers in the directory alongside landline numbers. But in these days where around 50% of landline customers are ex-directory, it would have been a much better idea for the mobile operators to get their customers to opt-in to a directory and then make that information available to services like 118 800.

The first is Typinator, a little program that allows you to automate repetitive key strokes. For instance if, like me, you visit a lot of websites where you have to put in your email address to log-in, you could use Typinator to create a keyboard abbreviation to save you having to type it every time. Or you can use it to insert an image of your signature at the bottom of letters. It also acts as a correction service, too, with built in sets of commonly mis-typed words.

Basically, it’s the Auto Correct function from Microsoft Office, but applied on a system-wide scale. So far, I haven’t found any applications where it doesn’t work.

You can buy Typinator from their website or you can do what I did and get it free from MacHeist.

If you’ve spent a lot of time using Windows systems – like I have – you’ll have got used to your Home and End keys working in a certain way. And you’ll probably be quite annoyed by the fact that they don’t work like that in OS X. Previously, I’ve used KeyFixer to solve this issue, but it’s not perfect and doesn’t seem to work with every application. Which is why I’m so happy to have found Double Command, a donation-ware utility, that does.

I’ve been using Double Command for the last couple of hours and so far haven’t found any application where the remapping doesn’t work. As well as remapping Home and End, it also gives you freedom to make other changes, too.

If you’ve got any tips for ‘must-have’ Mac software, drop me a comment.

So, I ran The Wolfs Howl through the validator and was happy to see there were only three or four errors – all of which seemed to be related to the Defensio plug-in that I use. I wasn’t surprised by this, as the XHTML validator had already objected to the Defensio counter that used to be displayed in my sidebar (which is why it is no longer displayed there). Looking at the style sheet for Defensio, it was easy enough to locate the offending lines and comment them out. Hey presto, validating CSS!

But while the CSS now validated, I also had something like 189 ‘warnings’ over the CSS file. There were a number that concerned font family names, where a multi-word name – like Times New Roman – is supposed to be in inverted commas, to maintain the correct whitespacing between the words. Fixing those was relatively easy, although the change required seemed somewhat pointless. Why – or indeed, how – is

font-family: “Times New Roman”, Georgia, “Trebuchet MS”;

more logical than

font-family: Times New Roman, Georgia, Trebuchet MS;

It seems much more illogical to introduce inverted commas for what seems to be no good reason; the code works exactly the same whichever way you do it, but the ‘correct’ way is more convoluted and less instinctive.

Once I’d corrected those, all the remaining warnings seemed to deal with the fact that the same colour or background colour was defined in several different places. Apparently, this isn’t good form. For some of them, I could see the point and taking out the colour reference in one of the places didn’t have any effect on the site. But for others, if I took out the colour reference, the site broke. This, of course, is not acceptable. So I ended up changing a lot of colour references from #FFFFFF to things like #FFFFF1 – not a big enough change to make any difference to the site, but enough to stop the validator complaining.

And this, again, is where my problems with these standards are most evident. To make the site validate as XHTML and CSS, and to remove all the warnings associated with both, I’ve had to remove things from the site or make silly alterations. Yet from what I can see, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the way any parts of my site are coded – so the standards would seem to be supporting a view of the web that just doesn’t exist and, if it did, would not be very interesting to look at.

Like so much in this modern world of ours, the Net is supposedly subject to a set of technical standards. Created by the World Wide Web Consortium, these standards set out the rules for ‘proper’ web page construction; if your web page doesn’t meet the criteria laid down by W3C, then your web page won’t validate and you run the risk of your content not displaying properly in standards-compliant browsers.

So, it would seem that compliance with the W3C standards is a good thing wouldn’t it? Well, yes and no. You see, the fly in the ointment is Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s workhorse of a browser has been around for years and has never supported the W3C standards. A lot of stuff that works in IE simply won’t work in other browsers, and vice versa.

And that’s the big problem. While all the geeks and nerds might rave about Firefox or Opera or Safari or any of the others – and will call Microsoft and IE all sorts of potty-mouth names while they do it – IE still has somewhere upwards of 80% share of the browser market. Most ordinary internet users don’t care about standards-compliance; they use the browser that comes pre-loaded on their system and, as Windows still has the lions share of the home PC market, that means IE. So, if one browser has such a large market share isn’t that the defacto standard? Should we really care what W3C say, as long as the site works properly in IE? In fact, shouldn’t W3C be saying “This is what works in IE, this is therefore the standard. Go to it!”? It would certainly mean less work for web developers, who currently have to ‘cheat’ their way round getting stuff working in IE, whilst remaining standards-compliant.

Whatever the merits of the W3C might be, though, as a geek I’m always interested to see whether a particular site complies or not and, if it doesn’t, what it is that makes it fail. We’ve done some work on this recently at my company, for one of the sites that we run.

The site in question is an e-commerce site that uses an off-the-shelf shopping cart package. When first loaded, the site validated but once we started putting data into the system we found it no longer validated. The reasons? We’d used “&” in some of our category names, and W3C didn’t like it. Apparently, rather than use “&”, you’re supposed to use “&”. Trouble is, when we tried that we found that the category name didn’t display properly in the browser title bar. So, we left it. After all, it’s only an ampersand.

Of course, that sort of niggling little thing preys on my mind and I couldn’t let it alone. I originally thought it was a problem with the title bar not being able to decode “&” for some reason, but it turned out it was a problem with the way our shopping cart package was written. I found the right bit to change and that web site now validates (at least for the home page – the product pages still need a bit of work).

And this seems to be the way of things with standards compliance. It’s either a little tiny thing, like an unencoded special character which can be easily fixed if you want to, or it’s a seemingly huge problem that you have to be Einstein to figure out.

Even armed with all that knowledge, though, I still decided to try and make The Wolfs Howl validate successfully and last night I sat down to have a go. First of all, I thought I’d just try and get the home page to validate and see where that lead me. It didn’t, but with not many errors, so I decided to have a go at fixing them.

True to form, I had an “&” error; this one was in the code that creates the flyout windows for my Amazon links. Changing it to “&” seemed to solve the validation error without breaking the code, so I ran with it.

Another popular error is when the “alt” tag is missing from an image, and I had a number of those. So I fixed those too.

That left me with a bunch of errors that I couldn’t solve; the validator didn’t like some of the code that was attached to my PayPal button – which was basically a form, which linked to a donation page on PayPal – but it was PayPal’s code and I didn’t know what most of it did so I just removed the button (no-one’s ever clicked it anyway). I had similar problems with the Amazon widget, so that got ditched too – which was going to happen anyway.

After all that, the home page validated. So I moved on the the other pages (SOTD, Also see…, etc) and they all validated first time, except for a missing “alt” tag on an image. Then on to the posts.

With something like 480 posts on the blog, I wasn’t going to look at each one individually but an easy way round that was to change my blog settings to show 500 posts on the each page. That basically made the whole site just one page, which could then be checked in one go.

As I went through adding in all the missing “alt” tags, there were also a number of errors centred around the YouTube videos that I had embedded. Apparently “embed” isn’t a valid command, but it’s what YouTube give you and, it seems, it’s what Flash produces code-wise. So I figured I was stuck; if people like Amazon, YouTube and Adobe aren’t producing standards-compliant code for web pages then, really, what is the point of having them to begin with? (I’ve just done a quick check and google.com, microsoft.com, youtube.com, amazon.co.uk and news.bbc.co.uk all fail validation).

Helpfully, by following a couple of links from the W3C site I was able to find a work-around for my YouTube video problem. You can find the full explanation at A List Apart by following this link, but the basic upshot is that the code YouTube give you for embedding video has to be changed from this:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://linktothevideo.com/”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://linktothevidoe.com” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

to this

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash data=”http://linktovideo.com” width=”425″ height=”344″> <param name=”movie” value=”http://linktovideo.com” /></object>

As far as I can see, it works fine and it’s a much simpler piece of code. But why does there need to be all this jumping through hoops to make a web page standards compliant?

I’ve learnt a little bit more about web page coding, and I’ve learnt a bit about standards, so in that respect it has been a worthwhile exercise making The Wolfs Howl compliant. But the whole issue seems a bit cock-eyed to me; there’s a set of standards which are ignored by the world’s most popular browser, as well as by some of the world’s most popular websites. Surely, then, the standards aren’t worth having?

First off, I’ve started playing about with virtual machines on my iMac. In case you don’t know, a virtual machine is way of running another operating system in a separate window, with no need to partition your drive, re-boot, etc. For the Mac, the market leaders are Parallels and VMware Fusion but I’ve been using an open source alternative called VirtualBox.

The ease of use means that setting up a virtual machine is a question of a few clicks of a mouse and then finding the install disk for the guest operating system. Once it has loaded, you’ve got a fully functioning Windows (or LInux or whatever) machine that’s accessible from your normal desktop.

There’s also a variation on this theme called CrossOver, which allows you to create what it calls bottles to run individual programs without needing to install the whole operating system. So, for instance, I can run Internet Explorer 6 to test web pages or Word to edit documents but without the Windows desktop environment.

Neither of these ways of running Windows programs gives you the full Windows experience – virtual drivers can only do so much – but if you have an occasional need to run a Windows program, they’re an excellent way to give yourself the option.

For instance, I was doing some work on a website the other day and was able to test it on FireFox 2.0 and 3.0, Opera, Flock, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 on three different operating systems using just one lot of hardware.

So what are my three operating systems? OS X, Windows XP and (fanfare please) Windows 7. I’ve never had the chance to really play about with Vista, so have no idea whether it’s as bad as people say (the brief use I have had, it seems fine to me) but so far I’m loving Windows 7. The problem is, I don’t know what is new to Windows 7 and what is already available in Vista.

I can’t test some of the more advanced graphical stuff – like the Aero interface – because the virtual machine does not support it, but I am quite liking the Windows 7 desktop experience. It’s crisp and clean, easily readable and uncluttered. In many ways, I’d say that Windows and OS X are moving closer together in the way that they present themselves to the user; for me, as someone who prefers to use OS X but has to use Windows at work, I think this is a good thing.

I like the changes to the Windows Explorer, presenting me with the information I need and hiding away the stuff I’m not interested in; I like the new Start menu; I like the fact that the whole system seems more security conscious.

Some of the things I’m used to using in Windows seem to have been moved about, particularly in Control Panel, but still seem to be there. So far, all the software I’ve tried to install seems to have worked fine. I haven’t yet found anything that is too annoying to live with, which seems to be a major step forward for Microsoft.

Over the next few days, I’m going to carry on geeking out with Windows 7 and I’ll let you know if it all goes terribly wrong!

Update 3: not sure how sound an idea this is, but I’ve now re-loaded beta 3, but with the comment-template.php from beta 2. It seems to accept comments, and I haven’t found anything else broken so far, so we’ll see what happens.

Update 2: the culprit file – comment-template.php – seems to have changed quite extensively from beta 2 to beta 3. Beta 2 does not give the same error, so that’s what is currently powering The New Wolfs Howl comments. I’m loathe to give up the much improved dashboard of 2.7 and return to 2.6.3, so I’m gonna go back to beta 2 for a while.

Update: well, couldn’t work out what exactly was causing the problem but looks like it was something to do with WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 because now that I’ve gone back to 2.6.3 the problem has gone away.

It may not be the beta software itself that is causing the issue; it could be an incompatible plug-in or theme but I wasn’t able to find an obvious culprit during my testing, so I’m putting it down to the beta curse!

Original: Thanks to Gareth for notifying me of this.

If you try to comment on any posts, you’ll probably get the following error (or one very like it):

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: htmlspecialchars_decode() in /home/wolfieb/public_html/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 802

Your comment will still be submitted, though, and if you refresh the page everything should go back to normal. I’m currently looking into the issue and it’s probably either a problem with the beta version of WordPress that I’m using, or it’s an issue with my theme not liking the the beta software.

I’ll keep this post updated with changes as they occur.

One of these might be of interest to my fellow bloggers – the beta release of WordPress 2.7. Coming as quickly as it has on the heels of 2.5, which was a major re-vamp of the software and introduced a brand-new dashboard, you wouldn’t expect 2.7 to bring too many changes. But boy, would you be wrong!

2.7 is hugely different from 2.5 – but in a good way. The dashboard has again been completely re-designed. This was, I think, in response to the negative comments that attended the 2.5 dashboard which seems to have been fairly universally disliked. The 2.7 dashboard, on the other hand, is a joy to work with. Its left-hand navigation menu is simple to use, and it’s more obvious where everything can be found. And it’s there whatever screen you’re looking at, rather than changing from one screen to the next.

In general the layout of screens has been overhauled to make everything more obvious and make the whole dashboard easier to use and less of a fight to get the simplest thing done.

Other changes that I’ve found so far that are really useful? Quick Edit lets you adjust categories, tags, time and date stamp, etc on a post without having to open the post and you can now reply to comments from the comment screen without needing to add any plug-ins (why hasn’t this always been part of the WordPress software).

If you haven’t checked it out yet (and are prepared to be adventurous – this is beta, after all) why not go and download WordPress 2.7 now? Have fun….