I’m optimistic that batteries are finally beginning to offer longer life again. In the last few weeks I’ve been on some long calls using my N95 8Gb and a Samsung bluetooth earpiece and the performance has been excellent. In one instance the tiny ear-bud Samsung had not been used for six weeks but gave 75 minutes of service. For the same call, the N95 did not show any change in the battery level. Similarly, my Canon 450D sits in my home office for weeks at a time unused and then cheerful takes hundreds of pictures before showing signs of battery fatique.  

Nokia CA-100C

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

I should have bought one of these years ago, and I’d recommend anyone with a Nokia device who travels to get one. It’s a USB charger for your phone and weighs only a gram or two.

Perfect example of specialisation - it does exactly what you want, no more, no less.

It’s still November, but everyone from Piano Covers Online to Screwfix are firing out gift ideas for your nearest and dearest. Although I don’t think my wife would like a Belle Minipac Compaction Plate for her Christmas, the tasteful tones of John Lewis direct marketing might provide some inspiration. And I receive an endless stream of special offers from several suppliers of desirable photographic equipment.

Having been reading about social objects this morning, it dawns on me that these carefully prepared, relevant and targeted e-mails  are ideal for starting dialogues. Perhaps with the retailer, perhaps with my friends and family.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that these promotions, when appropriate, do actually work.

A classy week for Google’s QA department, if it has one. Two cracking problems this week. We can only assume it does, but borrowing from the world of mobile they are overridden by marketing and others to launch anyway.

The one I came across was an awful Catch-22 on the Outlook/Google calender sync application. My Vista machine asked it I wanted to run a file called Gooupd.tmp (or something like that, it started Goo and end in .tmp). Instant reaction was that this was some kind of inept virus/trojan trying to install itself. Checking on the path to the file it was in the Goosync directory. So I let it run. It wanted me to exit Outlook to run the update, fair enough, but Outlook 2007 on Vista at least runs as a background process all the time. The only way to exit is it logout and in again as simply killing it with task manager leaves the data file in a mess. But of course, logging out kills the update. And there’s no other other way of making it happen. Catch-22.

The other problem is now called the root console bug. When I first  heard that text keyed on the G1 keypad went straight into a root console I thought it was a very fresh urban legend.  However it’s not - there’s an official release to fix it. While not many people are going to SMS rm -rf / to their mates, it’s still an amazingly sloppy piece of releasing.

Part of our release process is always remove all debugging. Even stuff that you “know” won’t ever be visible, take it out. Clearly the Android team did not apply this simple rule. Perhaps they had been on a death march and were asleep on their feet. Perhaps marketing (and T-Mobile) decreed that it had to go no matter how broken.

Sigh. Mobile rules apply again.

Most people will have already consigned it to the scrap pile, but according to the BBC, support for Windows 3.1 has finally been withdrawn. I can’t imagine that many people are still using it for desktop computing, but having worked in operating systems in the past I know that people continue using systems long beyond the expected lifetime. Worse, businesses and business critical systems become dependent on it, along with source-less software and hardware so old it is literally falling apart. When doing new stuff with technology isn’t your main focus, pretty much anything that gets the job done will do!