New track feature on twitter

You may have seen some references in my twitter stream about the new track features that twitter introduced last Monday. I've been playing with the feature for a couple of days now, and I think it's pretty cool.

First track let's you add a search to the general public twitter stream, and any time someone writes a post that matches your track, the post is sent to you.

So if you tell it to "Track London" you'll get a copy of every tweet that mentions London. I tried this during the week, but found that London was much too general for this feature. I was getting forty or fifty tweets a day this way, and my phone was buzzing constantly.

So, I changed my track to start tracking things in London I really care about. Like "Circle Line", now I get tweets whenever someone talks about the Circle Line, which is the part of the London Underground that I have to take to work.

There is some room for improvement in this new feature. I'd like to see the ability to include more complex search terms including standard operators like "-" and "+". Also, you can't manage your tracks from the web site, which seems like a real oversite. Finally, I'd really like to be able to subscribe to a track as a feed, so I could still watch high traffic tracks like "London".

Overall, the new track feature is great, and as twitter becomes more popular it will become more useful.

Apple can keep the 1.1.1 iPhone update

Apple released an update to the iPhone last week that supposedly enhances the functionality of the phone, but in reality just makes it harder for people to use the phone they way they want to.

Luckily, you aren't required to install this update, so if you have installed third-party applications on your phone or if you have unlocked your iPhone so that you can use a different carrier, then you should hold off on installing any update from Apple. Engadget has a rundown on the news so far with this update.

It seems to me that this path is going to lead to trouble for Apple. As they play, "cat and mouse" with iPhone developers, they will be encouraging early adopters and thought leaders to disregard their updates. That makes it harder for Apple to get the word out about new features and innovations in the platform.

When it becomes difficult for a manufacturer to generate positive buzz about their innovations, then it's a sure indicator that they are going to eventually have problems with sales.

Facebook was totally worth it

I have been, largely, ignoring the entire social networking thing. Yes, I have my requisite Orkut, and LinkedIn accounts, but I had never gotten into either to any large degree.

After GTAC, someone started a Facebook group for the conference, so I joined up and found a few of my friends. After awhile though, I started to get connected to some of my old friends who I haven't heard from in years.

One in particular, has a very active blog called Bathtub Junkie. It's been great to catch up with Lisanne in a virtual way. Seeing a small glimpse into her family and life almost 13 years after the last time we were regularly in touch is one of the great benefits of the internet.

Apple voiding warranties for hacked iPhones?

Engadget is reporting that some people have been turned away from the Apple Store when trying to get warranty repairs on an iPhone with some thrid-party apps installed on it. The phone was also apparently running on T-Mobile.

If you are planning to take your hacked iPhone back to the Apple Store for some service, you might want to restore the firmware before you do it.

Recently on Culture Shock

My wife and I write another blog called Culture Shock, about our experience living in London. Here is a quick list of some of the recent topics covered over there:

• Football and the Tottenham Hotspurs


• Stonehenge


• Jabs not shots


• The London Tube Strike, twice


• A map of London Airports

Google Print Ads

Several of you know that I've changed jobs inside Google recently. I moved out of my role in the Test Engineering group to take on a new role in one of our development teams. After much deliberation, my team and I decided that the right project for us would be on Google Print Ads.

I'll talk about this more over time, but I saw that the Google Inside AdWords blog, has an article on Google Print Ads today, so if you are interested to know more about what I'm working on, head over and read about it on the blog.

If you want to get more in-depth information, then you can read up on Print Ads at the Google AdWords Help Center.

Canon Powershot G9

The Wired Gadget Lab just did a review of the new Canon Powershot G9. In their words it's "Small. Powerful. Perfect."

I'm really excited about this camera because it's got a 12.1 megapixle digital camera that has the option of saving images to RAW.

I switched to shooting in RAW exclusively a little over a year ago with my SLR, but have only been able to use JPEG on my point and shoot until now.

How will the iPhone handle firmware for multiple carriers?

Earlier this week Apple announced that the iPhone carrier in the UK will be O2. That's great for me since I'm already an O2 customer, but I'm wondering how this will be handled in firmware for the iPhone.

As you may know, the iPhone firmware is set currently to only allow SIM cards from AT&T. If you don't have an AT&T SIM you are "officially" stuck. You can't use your iPhone. In the next few months Apple will be releasing iPhones in the UK and Germany. With O2 and T-Mobile respectively.

The easiest way to handle this from a programming point of view is to change the list of allowed carriers in your firmware to support SIM cards from all three carriers. If that is the case, then it may also be the case that any iPhone can use one of the official carriers once it's been updated to the latest firmware.

Of course, Apple may take the alternative route, which is to have a country specific firmware. That would allow them to ensure that the AT&T iPhone only works with AT&T, and the O2 only works with O2. However, maintaining a bunch of country specific firmware is a real pain. It introduces problems all over the development and supply chain, and makes it impossible for your company to respond to regional spike demand by cross-border shipping.

Feed URL

Some of you have been reading this blog through the transition of at least three blogging systems. Back in 2002 on Blogger, then moved to Blosxom, the moved to WordPress, and now have moved back to Blogger. In that time I've had to update my various feed URLs.

I've been maintaining a somewhat complex set of http redirects using mod_rewrite on my apache server, but I would like to start retiring parts of that machine as I move my remaining sites over to Google Apps.

Awhile ago I setup a feed for this blog on FeedBurner. You can find it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/LettersFromExile. Please take a moment to make sure that your reading the correct feed. I'm going to be turning off old feeds in the next few days.

Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in - Part II

Back in July I wrote about the Übermind Aperture to Picasa plug-in. At the time I mentioned:

Overall this plug-in works great. The only issue I've seen is that it takes a long time to get your initial album list, but once that is done the application is very responsive.

I got a comment on that post from someone at the company saying:

We're close to releasing a version of the plug-in which super-charges the album loading process.

This morning I got around to playing with the product again. I downloaded the new version 1.2.1. Wow, they have done four releases since the last time I looked at this. I wish they had an RSS feed so I could keep track of these (I know they have a mailing list, but I already get too much mail).

The new album loading code is much faster than it was in July, although it's still a blocking call. I would love it if an application like this would cache the album list from the last time it ran, and then refresh it in the background.

I had one small problem with the plug-in. I happened to be running Aperture when I installed it, and after the install Aperture was completely frozen. I had to force quit Aperture. It would be prudent if Übermind could add a check to their installer script to see if Aperture is running and inform the user that it needs to be closed.

So, if you are looking for a good way to get your Aperture photos into Picasa then take a look at this plug-in.

Presentations in Google Docs

Yesterday the Google Docs team released Presentations as part of Google Docs. I'm really excited about this launch. As a manager at Google, I end up doing my fair share of presentations. The twist is that these are almost always collaborative presentations.

In a recent example I needed to do a project status presentation to a group. I wanted each of the engineers and the product manager to have a chance to speak to the group. So,we used the Presentation feature of Google Docs.

To get this to work, I created an basic outline with a slide for each person and some suggestions for what they talk about. Then I shared the link with everyone on the team and asked them to start putting together their individual slides.

Since the application shows changes immediately, I could leave a window open watching the presentation go together. As people added stuff, I could chat with them about their slides and how the transitions would work.

When it came time to preset, it didn't matter whose laptop we used since the authoritative version of the presentation was on the web. So, we sent the URL for the presentation to the last guy who presented, and we were up and running.


Finally, when it came time to distribute our notes, we just marked the presentation as viewable by anyone at Google, sent the URL out to the team, and included a link in the notes blog.

Next year at GTAC, we'll be using Google Docs to put together the lightning talks, so that the job of collecting all the slides ahead of time is dead easy.

Recognized in the street

If you follow my twitter stream you probably saw this entry from a few weeks ago:

A guy from the conference just recognized me on the street and asked for a picture with me.

That might not seem like much if you don't know the circumstances around this. First the particular street was Fifth Avenue in New York City. I was on my way to the Apple Store there after GTAC had ended. I was surprised that someone I didn't know would recognize me randomly on a street in New York City, but I wrote it off since I was right outside an Apple Store (where else is a geek supposed to go?).

Well, it happened again last night here in London. I was walking down a street in Kensington when I heard a guy yell out, "Mr. Hutchison". It turned out to be someone else who had attended the conference. Sadly I didn't remember his face, and was a little shocked when he called out my name.

This time I had the added bonus of being with Jenna when it happened, so she now belives that I'm not crazy.

I'm flattered that people both remember and recognize me in the street, but it is a bit disconcerting. First, I don't think of the testing community as that pervasive, and second when I'm walking down a street in London or New York, I feel totally anonymous.

While it seems that the anonymity that I feel is possibly fictitious, it's still a little jarring to have that fiction destroyed regularly. It also gives me the smallest insight into what a celebrity must feel.

I'm not sure that I would ever want to have this become a regular thing, but I do have to admit that it gives me a little secret thrill every time it happens. Maybe that is the nature of the driving force behind a person's drive for notoriety and celebrity.

Shots for Africa

There is a somewhat frightening list of immunizations that you are supposed to get before a trip to Tanzania. Jenna and I went to our local clinic today to get the first round of these shots.

I was really surprised to learn that they can do almost all of your immunizations with just two injections today. The last time I looked into this it was four or six and you had to come back for a booster. On Saturday we have to head to another clinic to get Yellow Fever shots, and then we are done with the shots. We will still have to take the malaria pills before, during, and after our trip. Our Doctor also prescribed three different kinds of antibiotics for our traveling pharmacy.

The CDC has all the health information you need about travel to Tanzania.

Spelling

Lately, because of GTAC and other things, I've noticed an increase in the traffic to this site coming from search engines. One of the problems people have in finding me is that my name is commonly misspelled.

I've learned, since moving to London, that Allen is usually the spelling for a surname and that Alan is the common spelling for a given name. I've also learned that my last name has a regional spelling. In England most people spell it Hutchinson, while in Scotland it is spelled Hutchison.

In my logs for today, I see that people are trying to find me with the following spellings and variations:

1. Alan Hutchinson
2. Allen Hutchison
3. Allen Hutchinson
4. Alan Hutchison
5. Allen Hutchinson Google
6. Allen Hutchison Google
7. Alan Hutchinson
8. Allen Hutchison'
9. Google Allen Hutchison
10. GTAC Google Allen Hutchison

Over the years I've grown used to people misspelling my name, and it doesn't really bother me much. I do wonder, especially when people link to this site, how you manage to misspell my name in your link text when the URL uses my name spelled correctly.

Anyway, no matter how you spell it, I'm Allen Hutchison. I work for Google, and one of the things I do there is organize a conference on test automation called GTAC. Thanks for stopping by, and hopefully this entry will help you find me.

How to buy a new car without getting screwed

One of the things I love about living in London is the fact that I don't own a car. I hate driving to work and I hate driving in cities even more, so the ability to walk / bike / take mass transit to work is great. Add on top of that the ability to walk / bike / take mass transit to do anything in town and you've found a place that is heaven for me.

Someday, I'll have to move back to California, and that is a place where you really can't walk or take mass transit to do anything. The last time I tried to ride a bike on a regular basis there I ended up with a broken shoulder, so thats out for me.

All of this means, that when my wife and I finally move back to California we'll have to buy some cars. This vide on YouTube, gives some great hints about how to avoid getting screwed by car dealerships.

iPhone unlocked and working on O2

I was able to use the steps detailed in the Free iPhone Software Unlock guide to unlock my iPhone this morning. The whole process took about 30 minutes, and I was ready to make phone calls.

Since my phone had already been activated with an AT&T SIM before I started this process, I ran into a slight problem the first time I rebooted my phone. After that reboot my iPhone was no longer activated. To fix that I used iASign to re-activate my phone.

I ran into one more problem, which was that my iTunes purchased content stopped working on my phone. To fix this I plugged it into a laptop that was enabled on my iTunes account, did a sync and that cleared things up.

I'd suggest that if you are going to do this on your own, start with a fresh iPhone (either new or just restored).

Reading Books on the iPhone with Books.app

Awhile ago I wrote about using eReader.com content on my Palm TX, and how I would like to do the same thing on my iPhone.

There has been a lot of development work in this area in the last six weeks. Today it's pretty easy to read a book on your iPhone using the excellent Books.app. There are even iPhone formatted titles available from manybooks.net.

The only issue I see with Books.app is that it requires you to copy books from your mac to your iPhone with a script. It would be great if it could work with some of the online sites like manybooks to allow you to download books straight from the Books.app interface.

Update: I've posted a review of some iPhone 2.0 Book applications here.

99 cents for a ringtone?

I'm watching all of the apple liveblogs from their event tonight. The first thing that was announced at the event was a ringtone service for the iPhone. It's supposed to be released later this week, but from the way it's described, I don't think it's going to work well for me.

First it looks like you can only make a ringtone from music in the iTunes store. That really sucks. I make a lot of music with Garage Band, and I wanted an easy and supported way to write my own original ring tones.

Second, only 500,000 of the 6,000,000 songs in the iTunes store are available for this service.


Finally, you have to pay $0.99 for the ringtone AND $0.99 to buy the song? That isn't going to work for me.

Luckily, there are already several ways to make your own custom ringtones, and I'm sure that this development will spur developers to make the process easier.

Reason not to shop at Circuit City

Michael was shopping at a Circuit City in Brooklyn Ohio. When he failed to show a receipt to the Circuit City door-minder, he was arrested:

Of course Joe wasn’t able to name the law that gives him, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City employee the right to examine anything that I, a U.S. citizen and Circuit City customer am carrying out of the store. I’ve dealt with these scare tactics at other stores in the past including other Circuit Cities, Best Buys and Guitar Centers. I’ve always taken the stance that retail stores shouldn’t treat their loyal customers as criminals and that customers shouldn’t so willingly give up their rights along with their money. Theft sucks and I wish that shoplifters were treated more harshly than they are, but the fact is that I am not a shoplifter and shouldn’t have to forfeit my civil rights when leaving a store.

This is one of the major reasons that I don't like shopping at big box stores. It's also one of the reasons that I, increasingly, refuse to shop at Circuit City and Best Buy (the two worst offenders of this type, IMHO).

I don't understand how a business can think it's ok to treat it's customers like criminals. They have driven me away, and I used to spend a great deal of money in their stores. I wonder how many others are being driven away.

I recommend that people keep this incident in mind, and next time just shop online. Who needs Circuit City anyways? Personally, I've decided not to shop at any store that requires a receipt check on the way out. If I find myself in such a store, then I'll return my purchase right there, and take my business to a more customer friendly establishment. I encourage like-minded people to do the same.

Stuff

Paul Graham is writing about stuff. The piece is worth reading, but there was one paragraph that really struck me:

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.

I've had a very similar experience. When Jenna and I moved to London for a "temporary assignment" we left almost all of our stuff in storage in California. We moved our clothes and a few essentials like computers and some books.

It's been a year and a half since we moved, and I can't even remember what we have in storage. Of course, I remember some of the big pieces of furniture, but other than that I have a very hard time thinking of what other stuff I could possibly need.

Of course, the flat we moved into in London was furnished, and that displaced the need for us to bring any furniture. Besides furniture though, we had a bunch of other stuff. I watched it get loaded on a truck by the movers.

When we finally move back to California, we're going to have to be careful about what stuff we allow back into our lives. Our flat in London is fairly uncluttered, and I really enjoy the sense of space that allows.