Mino HD Review

flipminohdI got my Flip Mino HD at the end of March and have been playing with it for a little over a month. I recently took it on holiday and found it a perfect extension to my SLR when I did not have the video camera around; I found it a real moment device, as its fast to get out and use.

Anyway, onto the device which can record an hour’s worth of 720p high definition video at 30 frames per second on its 4GBs of internal storage. It is small weighing in at only 3.3 ounces and no are cables required.

Size
It’s extremely lightweight for its size, and feels fragile, although I’ve not dropped it yet other reviews say it can stand a drop.

The USB connection flips open via a switch on the side and you can plug it directly into a PC or Mac, but I use the cable provided through fear that I will snap it off.

The Flip Mino HD’s form-factor is only slightly thicker than my iPhone and just over half as wide (Measuring only 1.5 inches corner to corner). The lens on the front is small, but shoots well if held still. I tried it out in recording a dodgy guy eyeing up the house next door and did not get beaten up, so its small enough not to get noticed.

The viewing screen is admittedly a bit small and the speakers sit on either side of the screen are not great, but thats not really an issue, although headphone jack for monitoring the audio would be nice

There’s also a plug for the included TV composite cable adapter and a standard thread for attaching to a tripod.

Controls
The controls are really simple and you can just pick it up and go without even thinking about reading the manual,

Video Quality
The Flip Mino HD records in 720p 16:9 aspect ratio video, so it is capable of recording very highly detailed video. But only is you keep it very, very still and there is enough light, as even the slightest movements when filming can appear very jarring. However, don’t be put off as the quality outside is still really good, but a tripod inside is needed to avoid a grainy and slightly red look.

Battery Life
The battery has not let me down yet it can easily last through an hour of recording at HD quality and play back for about 45 mins to the TV.

Bundled Software
The Flip Mino HD mounts as a flash storage device on both PCs and Macs, so getting the video files off is simple. There is some standard software that launches when you plug it in, but I have a mac and it integrates well with iMovie.

Conclusion
Everyone who has seen the camera is impressed, there are some alternatives on the market and more are coming out. But at the moment the size, and charge and go nature of the Mino HD make it a winner. I brought mine at firebox, but its now cheaper at play.com

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May 12, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: gadgets, technology • No Comments

Cookie Sniffing and Trading

What does that mean?
There are networks of  companies  who create cookies on your machine and use these to track  your behaviour  across multiple websites.
                       
And in English?
You will see ad  based content on one site based on  your activity on another and you won’t even  know it  happened.
                       
Who invented   it?

Netscape invented cookies to allow state to be maintained  between  HTTP transactions. However Microsoft filed for  a patent  in 2000 which  was granted in 2006. So it’s been around for many years.   It’s typically  used to authenticate or identify a registered  user of a website without  requiring them to sign in again, provide a  personalised view of the site or  track pages visited and use this data  for marketing purposes ( that is  refereed to as cookie  sniffing)
                       
What does it mean for my  business (what  are the marketing implications)?
It’s very likely you’re   already using the technology, but are likely not part of a network of   companies who share the  gathered information.  But, be  careful as  storing cookies on a users machine opens privacy issues. So  speak with you IT  team/tracking vendor to get more information   before going for world  domination through a proliferation of  cookies.
                       
What do I need to do  about it?
I you want to  opt out of tracking cookies from some of the  larger players follow the  little advertised link (surprise, surprise)
http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
                       
How   or where do I find out more?
Speak to an expert or get talking  to the  players on the list found in the above link.

 Is it a paradigm  shift or just another  TLA?
Its nothing new cookies where  invented partly for marketing  purposes. But, lets face it cookie  sniffing and trading sounds   better.

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May 7, 2009 • Tags: , , • Posted in: misc, technology • No Comments

Strategic Design- The good, the bad and the ugly

Not all of a large system will be well designed and this can pull your attention in multiple directions.  The goal is to have the most important part s of the system well designed - strategic design.

Take two loosely coupled systems that have grown independently, but are starting to move toward interaction.  The decision was to move towards a new system, by

A series of steps -  But, it’s never going to work like that. Why?  as the old business logic is taken there will be more and more parts of the old system that take inadvertent amounts of time.  This will lead to just porting sections of code, without re-design and this cannot be well tested.  Which, means your new system ends up partitioned into old and new sections - coupled with changes to the original system can mean the project will just end. What are the alternatives:

Refactoring - keep the system running and change parts by increments.  You have the danger here that the best people work on the new items and the others work on system updates, but do everything they can to work on the potentially good stuff.

Note - the real mess is made by the 2nd worst dev on the team , as everyone is watching the worst like a hawk.

Lets Hack - this will just end up in an almighty mess

But, whichever of these 3 approaches is taken you are prone to end up with the Lets Hack endpoint.  So is there a potential solution? How about Domain Design and the core principle  ‘Distilling the core domain’.

Break it down into 4 categories (which are not trivial to figure out)

Often the core domain is  often left to last, as all the infrastructure and rework is done first and sometimes this is never completed. Therefore, the fundamental goals are never achieved.

There are always multiple domains so they are inherently always wrong The blind men and the elephant by John Goderey Saxe example of how multiple domain models can come about.  Your aim is to find a model that is takes into account the core domain and is consistent within the context of its boundary.  Within this boundary you should be able to achieve a ubiquitous language that is usable by all team members. You should also have no duplication within the boundary which defines a unified context.

So to skip to the core domain rather than build all the supporting layers first you could form an Anti-corruption layer - isolate from the other parts forming a platform on which you can start to build the core domain.  The anti-corruption layer will not be pretty, but it gets you to a point where you can move forward with the fundamental goals far sooner than the alternative route, that often never gets to the core domain, let alone completing the legacy migration.

you should aim for:

Remember to:

and as a responsible designer you should:

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March 13, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Qcon, technology • No Comments

Phases in a developers life

Phases in a developers life

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March 13, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Qcon, technology • No Comments

A story about a technical architect - Pimp my architecture

A great architect will:

Prologue

An architect often turns up to find a bit of a mess. A classic is SOA gone bad, with clients coupled to WSDL, WSDL coupled to methods and multiple  duplication of methods across the services.  This could all be deployed upon a flaky architecture; a particular version of a software stack, with known issues rectified in later versions, with a crazy bit of EJB.  To add to the problem you may find yourself with smart developers in silos.

The Story

Start by doing nothing, listen, listen and listen some more.  But, take into account that all you hear may no be true.Now it’s time to set a strategy for the future (give yourself air cover), once you have a strategy:

Note: pairing is just helping, easier to sell in.

Epilogue (1)- Technical aims

Epilogue (2)- Learnings

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March 13, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Qcon, business, technology, web 2.0 • 2 Comments

When is open source and standardization right?

Standardization is essential for certain parts of the stack, those items that change least frequently i.e lower in the stack. Higher in the stack needs to change frequently and here standardization kills innovation.  We need to remember it take a lot of time to get to a standard and also Open Source will always be easier to engage with as a develop than a standard.

Open standards can also help open source, as many companies are not interested in using an open source project unless it has a sponsor or is part of a well know organization i.e Apache.  However, it really needs to start open source and move to open standards, just trying to become a standard often leads to the wrong group of people getting involved in the standards process; it all gets a bit political and horse trading occurs over functionality.  But moving toward a standard can also be impossible for small companies and individuals to get involved in a standard, whereas it is easy for Oracle  and others (who have staff with this as there sole responsibility). Also standards can feel like they are dictating  how we should be working and this can grate a little when we are already working well ; Is the JPA better than hibernate - No.

Standards should consolidate the gains made in an area of technology - in effect locking in the gains made and stabilizing prior to further innovation.  The value in standardization in that it can facilitate multiple versions of the technology that can inter operate; innovation.

Ruby has now figured that without some form of standards and specification it is not possible to have multiple implementations that can interact and is now looking at moving in the standards direction.  Without a standard interoperability between systems becomes very difficult.

For smaller projects i think it’s more about blessing by association with the standard(s).  This allowing the potential user to have some confidence in the implementation they are about to try out.

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The evolving Guardian.co.uk architecture

What were the challenges faced and how they were overcome.

Digital History

But by 2007 had outgrown there existing vingnette architecture. So entered a 18month re-design.

Issues to deal with

Travel had been completed, load testing was performed and they selected other sites that were similar to travel, this allowing re-use of code and mitigating risk.  To further mitigate potential DB issues built in graceful degrade back to flat files.

More performance testing was carried out before moving onto the more complex sites with 200k articles.  After due to underestimating because of database problems the decision was made to move to a simple REST system for integration with 3rd parties; this providing them with a level of control and leaving the guardian just having to know the model for the data, rather than hold the data.

Finally the news site was migrated, this has 1 million + content pages.  This would lead to issues with related content and tags, as the database would not be able to handle the load.  Solved by using the search engine and database to determine which tags were the most used (this points to the most content).  The search engine looked at the database to find the tags - the database hold each tag and how many items it is referenced by - and returns the content ids back, this reducing the load on the database.  This was still not enough, but an Oracle consultant optomised the queries and performance increased (classic).

What does the future hold?

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March 12, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Qcon, technology • 2 Comments

Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform

Focus on the power of people and today’s network opportunity.  Your customers, competitors and all the ideas and innovation is on the network.  There is very few things the browser cannot do, but its still not a great place to develop software.  however, its much bigger that any operating system.

Now we are seeing that no small system can withstand sustained contact with a larger system without being changed. This has been amplified through the move to SOA, but these principles do have complexity problems - there are many frameworks to follow.  The complexity has been addressed in part by REST which is at the heart of the new acronym WOA (Web Orientated Architecture), but there is still a way to go. In effect software architecture needs to be updated to mirror where we are now; everything is connected in the age of network singularity.  And its not the enterprise that houses the biggest systems:

‘ my website is bigger than your enterprise’  the biggest applications are no longer in the enterprise i.e Google, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon …

These are highly distributed and federated systems which often have a social architecture driving there popularity - high network effect.  They move quickly utilizing cutting edge platforms, productivity oriented development tools - Ruby -  and are experts in there ability to scale globally. An example you may not know  clickatell sms and messaging gateway up and running for you in 3-4 minutes.

So what are the design elements of Next generation web 2.0 applications:

What are the production elements around web application development 2.0

Also Innovations primarily coming from the on-line world:

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March 12, 2009 • Tags: , , • Posted in: Qcon, technology • 1 Comment

Situation normal, everything must change - How IT is changing with the advent of cloud computing

How IT is changing with the advent of cloud computing.

Why IT is changing

Not all IT is the same, not all IT has value as some had commoditised. This occurred through the warfare of technological advantage and copycatting.  Anything new is a chance of competitive advantage anything common is a service. Follows the same path as many other industries i.e electricity innovation -> national grid.  If this happens to IT, does it still have strategic value?  Yes as not all IT is commoditised it is always moving along the innovation -> commodity curve, when they get there the are ready to turn into a service.

How this impacts IT

Benefits and risk of the cloud

If we view it as a term to show the disruptive force in moving from and innovation to a service based world (commodity).

see many of my other posts for the benefits.  some of the main risks:

Managing the risks

Assuming the platform you are based on disappears.  You need to ensure your providers support the same standards ,this is not the case at this time. It is almost like the commodities (services offered) are in effect the innovation and we find ourselves basing our decisions on trust.  This  will no doubt change with time as the providers increase and the customers demand more from them in an increasing competitive market place.

Why open matters

encourages commoditisation by removing the barriers. Competitive markets depend eventually on open standards, but it is worth noting that vendors push the boundaries and extend these.

What we need

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March 11, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: Qcon, technology • No Comments

Cloud Data Persistence

is this a renaissance for the database?

today we have new problems and new challenges, but the computing power we now have provides alternatives.  This in turn is changing the approaches that are being taken. the following provides examples of the alternatives in the cloud database area.

Physical limitations and computation complexity are driving implementations into new area that we are not use to.  Similar to when multi-cores first came out, many thought lots of software would take account of the multi-cores, but this did not happen that quickly, it’s still happening now.

A regular solution to a social network with large database use is to Shard (divide into chunks across multiple servers).  But remember this has changes for the developer, who now needs to look-up over multiple shards - you cannot use an SQL JOIN across a shard and you cannot guarantee uniqueness and integrity. We are also seeing developers resorting to unnatural acts to deal with the issues of large data sets i.e turning MYSQL into a keyless store (Friendfeed).  good solution for them, but now the DB is no longer a DB.

The Cloud can be views:

And can be broken into loose types = the *aaS Model

All sounds great, so what’s the catch? Safety, geo-graphical availability and commodity hardware.  Also believe it or not the speed of light, which in data terms is still slow when transferring over geographical locations.

Two alternatives to the relational model that can cope with massive datasets in the cloud

Google BigTable

data tables are sharded into tablets and served via a single server, each tablet server can have 1000 tablets.  these table servers have a master and this can be removed and the system will still work for a limited period.

You cannot use BigTable yourself but there are some open source alternatives Hypertable Apche HBase.  Also Big Table via Google App Engine, you need to use Python and there is something in-between (although the speaker had not worked out what it is).  But you are getting the benefits of Big Table in a round about way.

Amazon Dynamo

projects Voldermort and Cassandra use this idea.

And for the lighter touch the smaller alternatives

Amazon Simple DB

MSFT’s Azure SQL Services - in test

Apache CouchDB - looks pretty good for JavaScript apps.

Other things to watch:

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