Author Archives: Steven

About Steven

Steven Jackson is a web developer based in the North East of England

Carsurvey.org is having problems

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The Carsurvey.org webserver started having problems earlier today; it was frequently rebooting itself for no obvious reason.

I’ve raised a trouble ticket with hosting company, and while I’m waiting for them to investigate the problem, I’ve managed to disabled the posting of new reviews and comments, and the members area, so at least no one can waste their time posting to an unstable server.

As soon as I realised that the server wasn’t well, I grabbed a backup of the database (my last known good backup was several days old), and I’ve been able to restore this new backup onto my developement server (not publicly accessible), so if the problem turns out to be serious, very little data will be lost.

Annoying that these things always happen at a really inconvenient time. I fancied a night in front of the TV with a cold glass of white wine, but instead I’ve got a night in front of the computer with as many caffeinated beverages as I can stomach 🙁

Anyway, apologies for the downtime, and hopefully things will be back up soon. Once things are back up, I’ll probably leave keep review and comment posting turned off for a while, just to make sure things are stable.

Nokia N95 Review

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In September 2006, I posted my thoughts about the announcement of Nokia’s N95.

A few weeks ago, I actually bought one, so I thought I’d follow up with my thoughts in my usual format. So you’re aware of my background, I’m coming to the N95 as my first S60 device, having previously used a Samsung D600 phone, paired with a Dell Axim X50v PDA.

Negatives:

  • The build quality isn’t stunning. The slider wobbles a bit for a start. Nowhere near as good as my old D600
  • The screen feels like it would be easily damaged by coins or keys in a pocket. This is in contrast to my D600, which after 18 months of abuse, is still in almost perfect condition
  • For complex PDA work, the N95 really feels like it could use an alternate form of input to the numeric keypad (slideout keyboard or touchscreen)
  • The battery life isn’t great (two days of normal use for me). But to be fair, I didn’t expect anything else
  • The range of software is rubbish compared to Windows Mobile, and having to deal with unsigned apps is a pain
  • My N95 had a loud hiss on the headphone socket, and has just been sent off for replacement. Hopefully I’ll have a replacement soon

Positives:

  • The connectivity is wonderful. Having 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 in one device is a revelation. This is the first device where I’ve ever felt properly connected wherever I go
  • The builtin web browser, is the best mobile browser I’ve ever used, with the exception of Opera on my N800. Browsing on my N95 is better than Internet Explorer or Opera on my Dell Axim
  • It’s a very good phone. Not a PDA with some passable phone functionality, but a genuinely impressive phone, with great reception and voice quality
  • The size is just perfect; small enough to never be a burden, yet large enough to make it useful PDA
  • Great quality photos and video from its camera
  • While I had issues with its headset socket, I’m blown away by its speakers. They sound great, and are very loud for a portable device. Obviously they can’t perform miracles, but I’ve happily wandered round my house getting ready to go out, whilst listening the N95 play my favourite MP3s from the pocket of my jeans
  • The N95 uses a nice big d-pad to navigate its menus, rather than the horrid tiny joysticks used on lots of phones (manufacturers: please note that I refuse to buy any phone with a tiny joystick)
  • It syncs beautifully with my iMac over Bluetooth 2.0. Calendar, tasks and contacts all sync across. Who needs an iPhone?
  • Google Maps over 3G is great. If they could just add support for the builtin GPS, it would be almost perfect

Conclusion:

It’s far from perfect, but it’s the best smartphone I’ve used yet. I had planned to carry my X50v along with the N95, but so far I’ve been happy to leave the X50v at home. Wikipedia and Google Maps in the pub, and Gmail while queuing at Marks and Spencer are my current killer apps 🙂

And as for the fabled iPhone, I’ll consider it when Apple bring out a 3G version with third party app support, but until then, I’ll be sticking with my N95

Simplified pages for adding comments

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For Carsurvey.org and related sites, I’ve just revised the pages for adding new comments. Basically:

  • More concise guidelines, so less text to read
  • Fixed a few silly bugs
  • With the reduced guidelines, I’ve been able to reduce the number of pages from 4 to 3

Less pages and text should hopefully make for a more pleasant experience. Next week I plan to make similar changes to the pages for adding new reviews

Improved review filtering and sorting

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Carsurvey.org (and related sites) have just had some minor (in code terms) changes made to them, which hopefully will make the sites more pleasant to use.

Firstly, I’ve disabled the filtering of reviews into well written and other reviews. The filtering was based on the votes by visitors and members, and while the data was usually good, there were lots of cases where the voting didn’t seem to correlate with review quality. The filtering of reviews into two pages (well written and other) also complicated the navigation, so I’ve decided that the trade off isn’t worth it, and I’ve disabled filtering in favour of simplicity.

Related to the filtering issue, is the fact that on pages listing reviews for a specific model, the reviews were ordered by year of manufacture (if appropriate), and then by date added. The date added order wasn’t obvious, and anyway, there’s a sidebar and RSS feed for people who want to see the very latest reviews.

Although the ordering by year of manufacturer still remains, I’ve now replaced the date added order by a word count order. The longest reviews will appear at the top of the page or year grouping. I personally prefer the new ordering, but please let me know if you think otherwise.

I’ve also made the sites slightly more aggressive about splitting reviews into pages for each year, as some of the pages were getting a bit too long for my taste.

XHTML links and comment RSS feeds

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I’ve just fixed a small bug in the Carsurvey.org comments pages, which may result in old comments reappearing in RSS readers.

Basically XHTML (which Carsurvey.org is), doesn’t allow for the name attribute of links (used to jump to part of a long document) to start with a number. The previous numeric name attributes have now had the letter c added to their names, which makes everything valid, but may cause RSS readers to treat the updated feeds as if they contain new comments. Apologies to anyone who gets caught out by that. It’s a one off change, in order to make the pages fully validate.

This change also applies to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.

T-Mobile web’n’walk (UK)

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About a month ago I switched my mobile contract away from O2 to T-Mobile, lured by their web’n’walk data packages, and so far I’m absolutely delighted by the service.

Unitl recently, mobile data in the UK has involved slow speeds (GPRS mostly), high charges, and walled gardens.

Rather, than tying myself into a contract with a branded phone, I went for £7.50 a month sim only deal, with 50 minutes of calls a month, and a one month minimum term (note that I’m not a heavy voice or SMS user). OK, I have to provide my own handset, but the service is cheap, and I don’t have to put up with any carrier branding.

Next I added web’n’walk plus for £12.50 a month. That gives me 3Gb of data (including 3.5G HSDPA), with the only restriction being a ban on VOIP applications.

The experience has been a revelation. I can now get connected almost anywhere I want, without concerns about the cost, and often at very high speed. No problem with connecting via a laptop or my N800.

At long last, the promise of useful 3G connectivity seems to have arrived in the UK.

Apple should release a $449 (£299) Mac mini

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As a Mac mini owner, I’ve been left rather cold by all the hype surrounding the Apple TV.

The Apple TV is just a crippled Mac mini, without a full OS X license.

Some of the most useful apps on my Mac mini aren’t available unless you install OS X, and that usually means paying for a new OS X license.

VLC, Safari, Firefox, full iTunes, MacTF, Google Earth, YouTube. All these apps run beautifully on my Core Solo Mac mini, and are far more powerful than Front Row.

There’s also an awful lot to be said for having USB and Firewire ports, so that it’s easy to connect to external devices.

Rather than having people hack their Mac minis, Apple should reintroduce the Core Solo Mac mini, with 40Gb of disk space, and sell it for $449 (£299), exactly halfway between the price of a Core Duo Mac mini and an Apple TV. It’s not as if the hardware inside the Apple TV is going to be significantly cheaper to manufacture, so $449 should be a completely achievable price point.

Until Apple do this, I’d recommend a used Mac mini over a hacked Apple TV.

As a related aside, I’ve discovered that a trackball works much better than a mouse when you’re sitting on a sofa. No more leaning forward to move a mouse round my coffee table. However, the fact that I care about this is pretty damning…

Updated layout and ads for Carsurvey.org

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Nothing major, but I’ve altered the left column width to allow for slightly wider ads there, while removing the header and footer ads from most pages. This should make for a cleaner site.

As long as the ad revenue doesn’t crash, I’ll make the same changes to the mobile phone and motorcycle sites in a few days time.