Today I set myself a challenge: to use no other device except for my iPad. Purely as an experiment to see how well it can handle the busy-ness that is my life. I will put to test the range of free and paid apps that I have at my disposal and see which ones excell at helping me with vital day to day goals.

8:56am – Pages – £5.99

I am writing this on the Pages app by apple themselves. It is brilliant. It has everything I feel I need to document this day and well worth the £6 I paid for it, basically a feature filled word processor for days like today. I was actually expecting the typing experience to be a little slow on iPad but I can tell you now, it isn’t. Writing this in landscape mode with my smart cover taking the load, typing is rather fast. I can almost say it is just as fast as a normal keyboard but there’s something about not having a physical key to press down on that is somewhat limiting to the speed at which you can type.

9:38am – Mail

The mail app let me check my 36 emails that I received throuought the night and it offered me a truly new way to browse through my mail by way of touch. I can find no faults with this app as I can do everything that I normally do on my desktop even with some features I can do better with the large touch interface.

11:03am – Koder – £3.66

I found myself needing to complete a C# server program that I have been working on for the last couple of days as a function just popped into my head that I can use to solve a performance problem that I was having. I remember a post I read on Gizmodo a while back that featured an iPad app that allowed you to code with colour formatting on the device. After downloading the app I realised that I needed to setup FTP access to my server back home so I can edit the files on the fly. A quick app store search and review reading later I found a decent vnc program that supports RDP so I can connect to my server 2008 machine back home. Overall I think the Koder app is great value as you can quite easily spend £50+ on some specialised IDE for the desktop. I can only think of two drawbacks to this app. Firstly is the fact that some of the commonly used symbols are hard to reach via the iPad keyboard which slows progress dramatically. Second is debugging, if I was working with PHP, HTML or CSS I could push up to the cloud in realtime and view my changes on safari. But with C# you cannot test without running the code that I have just written something that I can only do at a computer. And as all of you programmers know it’s very easy to miss out a semicolon or a double function in an IF statement, something that you can only fix either by spotting the mistake or by the compiler shouting at you.

14:36 – Safari

Currently there is no official Facebook app with iPad support so I turned to simply using facebook in the safari browser. While this worked perfectly I missed the chat and had to resort using the messages that they have integrated with the chat system. One drawback people seem to mention a lot with safari is the lack of flash support but using safari I. Ould not name one instance where I needed to use it, YouTube has HTML5 support and it’s own official app so no problems there. If you’re the type who likes to play flash games on your computer then I will simply quote apple by saying: “theres an app for that”.
Another thing that I would like to mention about safari and the general “on a whole” experience with the iPad is the smoothness of the animations and the transactions that are implemented into all of the apps on the iPad. You only need to watch a video of so done demonstratng maps or safari to get a feel of how smooth and clean the zooming and scrolling animations are.

17:52 – Battery life

I’ve just glanced up at the information bar and noticed that the battery percentage is at 58% which is startling as I have been bashing away at this thing for most of the day now and I’m only 40% down the battery life is truly outstanding for such a large display (my brightness is at 50%). Although apple advertise the battery life at 10 hours I think I’ll get a little more.

Overall I believe that this day journal has turned more into a review over anything else. I have reviewed a few of the apps that I will most probably use on a day to day basis and overall with my few days of experience I can safely say that the iPad is well worth the money and may even replace my current netbook and laptop for my day to day tasks.

This small script will read a single line of text from a .txt file on the inter-webs (untested with multiple lines). It will save the data as a string and then can be converted to an integer for later use.

This is a very “mock-up” way of doing this as I am currently learning Java and have not as of yet found a better alternative. I don’t recommend using this in a large project as it could become unstable under high load. I use this particular script in a small software package that only me and a select few of my friends use on a day to day basis and does the job that I need it to.

In this example we will be reading the contents of http://lukehaynes.ath.cx/javaTXTreader.txt

This script requires the following imports:

import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

try
        {
            URL Vurl = new URL("http://lukehaynes.ath.cx/javaTXTreader.txt"); // Set the source of the txt file
            InputStream inputstream = Vurl.openStream(); // Open the url we defined earlier
            InputStreamReader inputstreamreader = new InputStreamReader(inputstream);
            BufferedReader bufferedreader = new BufferedReader(inputstreamreader);
            do
            {
                data = bufferedreader.readLine(); // Read the data we need
                if(data != null) // Make sure not NULL or causes runtime errors
                {
                    SomeString = data; // Finally save the dynamic variable into a local one
                }
            } while(data != null);
        }
        catch(MalformedURLException malformedurlexception)
        {
            // error handler - cannot find URL
        }
        catch(IOException ioexception)
        {
            // error handler - runtime error
        }

The above is just an example of the code that you may implement into your program, below is the full runnable Java file.

import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
 
public class main {
 
	public static void main(String[] args) {
 
		String data = null;
		String SomeString = null;
 
		try
        {
            URL Vurl = new URL("http://lukehaynes.ath.cx/javaTXTreader.txt"); // Set the source of the txt file
            InputStream inputstream = Vurl.openStream(); // Open the url we defined earlier
            InputStreamReader inputstreamreader = new InputStreamReader(inputstream);
            BufferedReader bufferedreader = new BufferedReader(inputstreamreader);
            do
            {
                data = bufferedreader.readLine(); // Read the data we need
                if(data != null) // Make sure not NULL or causes runtime errors
                {
                    SomeString = data; // Finally save the dynamic variable into a local one
                }
            } while(data != null);
        }
        catch(MalformedURLException malformedurlexception)
        {
            // error handler - cannot find URL
        }
        catch(IOException ioexception)
        {
            // error handler - runtime error
        }
 
        System.out.println("OUTPUT: "+SomeString);
 
	}
 
}

As I cannot output the result of the script in real-time here is the theoretical output to the console:

OUTPUT: There we are then! We just read this file using java!

If you are working with integers here you NEED to convert the String to an Int before doing any mathematical jargon with it! Here is how you would do it.

Int SomeInteger = Integer.parseInt(SomeString); // Convert the string to an int

Note: the SomeString must actually contain a whole number, eg you cant magically convert "Hello World" to "2982".

Google has removed more than 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine index.

Google has modified its malware detection system to identify sub-domain level services which have been used by criminals to register thousands of domains and host malware and fake anti-virus software. As the result of these changes, Google has removed more than 11 million .co.cc websites from it search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are simply spam or low-quality.

According to a recent report by Anti-Phishing Working Group, the .cc top-level domain hosted around 5,000 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010. This number is almost twice the number of any other domain extensions.

The .cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google’s changes.

British police are currently dealing with a digital crime have arrested a 19 year-old in Essex who was accused of participating in LulzSec’s recent attack of online accounts. This marks the first time that someone has been nabbed since the group set up in early June.

The investigators, working with the FBI, ZDNet reports, arrested the teenager under charges from the Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act. Presumably tying him to LulxSec’s wave of leaks, DDoS attacks, and yesterdays joint declaration of international internet war alongside Anonymous, the first target of which was the UK’s Crime Agency. The BBC reports that “Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material. These forensic examinations remain ongoing,” who quoted a Scotland Yard rep.

Nowadays hard drives are all about how much data you can shove on to them and how fast you can do so. And this soon-to-be announced Phase-Change memory is expected to up the ante quite a bit.

Students from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering are getting ready to show off their new type of SSD that they have nicknamed, “Moneta”. But Moneta isn’t just a regular SSD. Instead it’s a Phase-Change memory (PCM), this new type of memory uses a metal alloy called Chalcogenide and, according to its makers can perform up to 7x faster than any flash-memory based SSD that is currently on the market.

To store data the PCM uses a heat application through an electrical current to switch the alloy between two states – crystalline and amorphous. Reading data entails using a smaller current to determine what state the alloy is in. This new drive reads at 327MB/s and writes at 91MB/s, but we’ll probably have to wait till after its unveiled to see how it fairs up with user testing. I wouldn’t expect this any time soon as it’s likely that this sort of thing wont be available to consumers for some time.

via: UCSD

When it comes down to choosing storage for your PC the mechanical drives score top marks for capacity and price but are let down in other areas such as stability & read/write speeds. But the SSD has taken the lead on the speed factor, and now Buffalo along with others has made the switch to Solid State memory.

Buffalo’s first jump into the SSD market is a bit of a monster, they have produced a 256GB 2.5″ drive that has a 6Gbps SATA-III interface. That combination means a read speed of up to 405MBps and a write speed of 223MBps.

You may be wondering about the price? Yes, the Buffalo drive is expensive, comming in at about $890 (£540), but for someone who wants some serious performance with a substantial amount of space, it may not seem like too much.

The Buffalo SSD-N256S/MC400 will be available later this week in Japan, and hopefully it shouldn’t take too long before a few companies in the UK & USA get their hands on them and begin shipping. Although most probably with a superior price attached.

via: AkihabaraNews

First unveiled by Xi3 last year, the ChromiumPC is ready to ship this summer, with a unique architecture designed for ChromeOS.

Xi3 has been working on this for awhile, and even got some praise for it during CES. The computer itself is housed in an aluminium case that holds three modules that determine the functionality of the machine. These modules are interchangeable, meaning that the ChromiumPC will be able to run other OS’ other than ChromeOS. This been said Xi3 designed the system with the cloud in mind, allowing the user to be up and running online as fast as possible out of the box. It’s their hope that, as people begin to move to the could in greater numbers, they can follow them there with the help of Google and Chrome.

Pricing for the ChromiumPC has not yet been announced, but Xi3 has it up for a 4th July release.

Via: Business Wire