Have the rains started already? That will put a damper on next week's Songkran festivities, although I will just stay home as usual. This week, the second part of my look at iMovie.

iMovie '09 (2): Editing and Media Tools

A couple of events for me during the week to show just how fickle technology can be: a misbehaving ATM machine; and a dead modem/router.

It started on April Fools Day, of course, and I am usually busy enough on Wednesdays with the podcast and other things. As I was leaving for lunch, I decided to withdraw some money from the Siam Commercial Bank ATM that is at the entrance to our faculty. As is not unusual, it grinds away, sometimes for a few minutes, then comes up with Transmission Failure. So, after lunch I took out the cash I wanted from another machine outside a branch of Kassikorn Bank. When I checked the balance, there was some missing. This meant a trip to the bank to check the book and there I found that, although the Siam Commercial ATM had not given me the money, it had been deducted from my account.

At the bank, a phone call was made. I set out the circumstances two or three times and the process was begun. I was lucky and 24 hours later I had two SMS messages -- one in Thai -- to tell me that I was in luck and I got the money back.

While talking to the security guard, I heard that another teacher had lost 6,000 baht the month before and we were just too late to save a student the experience of Transmission Failure. Poor kid went immediately to check her account balance at a working ATM. When I went in on Friday, another teacher had lost some money. This is more than a pattern: several other ATMs on campus work fine, but ours is a menace.

I was working at home on Thursday and decided to play around with the Airport Extreme Base Station. If you have it set to Automatic, it will choose a different channel each time; so I decided to fix this and changed it to Channel 8. A reboot and it was fine.

About 3 hours later, a message came on screen telling me that the Airport Extreme wanted my attention. No internet. When I tried to reboot the router, nothing happened. Upstairs where I keep the equipment, I turned everything off and powered up again. Nothing. I took the wifi out of the equation and connected the computers directly to the router by cable. Not connected.

As I went through checking power, connections, cables and all, it dawned on me that the culprit was the router that I had had for over 4 years.

The next day at the office, the technician confirmed this, so I went into town. At the new Siam Discovery iStudio, they had none and a check of their Paragon branch also proved negative. So I tried the IT store on the 5th floor of Siam Paragon and bought a D-Link modem/router for about 1,300 baht.

At home, we started the process. There was a fast start CD for Windows users but for me, instructions were pretty bare and I had to go through the set up from memory. After a couple of tries, I saw that we had some connection, but True was not letting me out into the wide world. A check with the help staff -- and let's hear it for True here as I am usually critical -- when one does find one of their personnel who understands what is what, it makes everything much less painful. My public thanks therefore to Suphitsara.

She talked me through the set up and confirmed that the user name was wrong. This had been changed a couple of years back and I found four in Keychain Access that were possibles. After some confirmation process, she sent a new one using SMS and we were online pretty quickly. She also helped with the confirmation of one or two other settings. Good stuff.

After I had played for a few minutes, I put the Ethernet cable into the wifi and crossed my fingers. The light changed to green, so it had access to the Internet, but I had to wait a bit for the computer. I had been using manual settings in the 10.0.0.x series, but the new router used 192.168.1.x. I changed to DHCP and waited for a moment or two and then all was set.

A theory I had had for about 24 hours concerning the service problems and wondering if the old router had been the problem, was soon found to be in error. I am still getting massive latency: at times we have to wait for ages for any response from the server; while the MSN service I connect to also dies far more than it ever did before.

A user in the north-east of Thailand had some problem with marks on the screen of his iMac which did not appear to be actually on the glass itself. He took it into the local iBeat, which is like a smaller version of the iStudio, and they sent it along to the service agent in Bangkok, Maccenter, who did the fix, apparently on 1 April, which he hopes is not significant.

We now have a happy user in Esaan.

A less happy user lives in Phuket. He is a better photographer than me and while I work with Aperture, he likes the Adobe Lightroom. He tried the beta at the same time I did and stuck with it. He was pleased when he was able to pick up a copy of version 1 in Bangkok and now that version 2 is out, he wants that.

Not so fast. Here is a situation that a man wants to spend money and no one is interested which reminds me of the situation when I first bought a PC down in Hat Yai over 20 years ago. There, or in Bangkok, it was impossible to buy legitimate software as the companies would not sell to ordinary folks in Thailand, thus laying down the foundations for what is now a thriving pirate industry. Even when I tried to buy from foreign sources then, the moment I said I was in Thailand, the deal was off.

It is like that now for our man in Phuket. He tried his usual source for books and photography equipment in the UK and they sort of failed to answer his emails. When he phoned, they told him that they had problems with mail to Thailand and customers did not like the pricing: as Phuket man was paying mail costs, this argument does not hold much water.

Adobe will not sell over the Internet (unlike Apple of course), so after a while, he managed to contact Adobe in Singapore who provided him with several addressed of agents and distributors in Thailand, but the stage he is at now is that, although he tries to get in touch, no one bothers to reply. If anyone is interested, he has the cash waiting.

On Tuesday evening the Apple online store was offline with its "back soon" page showing. Sure enough, I checked the Thai store and that too was the same. This is a pretty safe indication that something is coming. . . .

What did appear, although the online store top page was unchanged then but was updated the next morning, were two new versions of Apple's XServe which now use Intel's Nehalem. One of the real advantages of the Xserve which starts at 119,900 baht here, is that they come with an unlimited client version of the OS X server software. Compare that with what Redmond offers.

I will be a happy user if the iPhone ever fits my budget and my credit cards. I was interested to see on Monday that True had taken a couple of pages in the Bangkok Post main section and were advertising new rates and conditions.

More credit cards are listed and there are now 10-month payment schemes (2 months after the 1 year schemes were offered, I note). With two, users buy the phone outright and pay 599 baht a month over 12 months (Yes, I know the periods do not match), and the other two include the price of the iPhone in the monthly fee. One of each payment method also includes an up-front payment of 6,900 baht, reducing the later payments.

I wonder if this latest push is why I am being sent a review iPhone?

And the page the podcast page links to is the English page, but you could have fooled me.

Another week, another iTunes update. On Tuesday morning here I found that iTunes version 8.1.1 was available for download. The file I downloaded was 68MB, so that was best done in the morning.

There are also a lot of rumours this week about the next iPhone, which some expect around June. That would not surprise me either with the Developers' Conferences on then. Some of these float around the camera, and suggest first that it will have 3.2 million Pixels (Mp): that same report from The Register also suggests a 5Mp camera for another Apple product later this year.

Some rumours would not be the same without screenshots, even those that are made using Adobe Photoshop, but The Boy Genius Report, which has a good record on rumours has some that suggest video is coming to the new iPhone (probably not backward compatible) and other tricks such as voice dialling.

Also related to this new iPhone is the news that AT & T, who let the side down a bit at SxSW in Texas last month, are rolling out a big upgrade to its 3G network, as they expect an increase in traffic. Tenfold increase was the term I read.

And if the rumours about the network upgrade are true, new hardware is coming.

Another network operator, this time in the UK, took a massive hit in the embarrassment stakes last week when a borer went through a tunnel owned by BT in London and hit the cables that provided service to 70,000 customers. As the tunnel is some 32 metres underground, it is safe from nuclear explosion but not from Murphy's boys. Services hit are homes, mobile cell sites and the traffic systems, so this is also causing major traffic chaos.

Back to Apple rumour stuff and we hear that the iPod touch is in for some spin-off technology as well with the wifi for both this and the iPhone rumoured to be boosted to 802.11n for faster transfers, if you can find a faster network. That will not be an upgrade for current devices as the hardware needs changing. Another addition to the touch could well be a camera.

For a long time, the Irish group U2 has been associated with iTunes and iPods, but that looks as if it is about to end as in a long article on the Technology site, Simon Avery looks at the news that U2 is switching to RIM -- the Blackberry. Bono is quoted as saying that RIM will give them "what Apple wouldn't — access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular." And there is speculation that this means an application of some sort. Avery continues the item with a good analysis of both RIM and Apple in relation to their recent visibility and where things might go. This is worth reading.

Late last week, the well-known VLC video playing software was updated to version 0.9.9.

And with a vague association of ideas that made me wonder what had happened to the 10.5.7 update to OS X. It is still in the "coming soon" stages although getting closer (obviously) and with a name, Juno. To support this news were reports early this week that another build, with only a few changes, had been sent out to developers. Also there is an upcoming Security Update but this affects mainly users of Tiger.

Going back to my network connection at home for a moment, I spoke to someone who has the new 8MG link not far from here -- new estate with the newer phone lines -- but he tells me that the same delays occur. This takes me back to my original theories: DNS servers, cache servers or the gateway. Australia, however, whose government has an ambivalent attitude to online access is doing the right thing with its announcement of a 100MB -- fibre to home -- link to cover the whole country. And with the big gaps in the middle of the land, that is going to be quite some undertaking.

Kenlee at Macresearch has written a nice little app that will have a limited audience, but is a nice example of what can be produced. His guide for LaTex will produce blank looks for a lot of people, but this is a strong Unix utility used for setting up text (as the name suggests) and is particularly useful for thesis work in science and maths disciplines.

Along with all that sneakiness from Redmond, there must be an admiration for what Apple has done. Microsoft does well out of sales of Windows for Boot camp installations and for the Mac version of Office, although I personally avoid this like the plague.

A rumour that came near the end of the week involved Office for Apple devices, but this was a version for the iPhone. At the web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Stephen Elop of Microsoft discussed the way people use applications like the Facebook app on the iPhone. I have this for the touch and it works nicely. When someone brought in the idea of no one using Office on the iPhone, according to the Register's Cade Metz, Elop said, "Not yet, you're not" [I have corrected the original English on the Register's page]. Tongues began to wag.

A late note on today's iMovie article. Apple pushed out information on iMovie camcorder support a couple of days ago and this includes a table of cameras that work and any problems associated with them.

We, and others, had a lot to say about the first of the new Microsoft advertisements featuring someone called Laura who claimed to be a student. The second ad, may prove to be a little more difficult although the so-called Giampaolo, which I think should be Gianpaolo, tells us that he wants "portability, battery life, and power." Then he buys a Hewlett Packard computer, just like Laura, eh; and this one is almost 4 and a half cms thick and weighs in at just over 3.3Kgs. Those PC users must have amazing shoulder muscles.

And as for battery life that is one of his criteria for his $1500, the HP gets under 3 hours. Well, at least with the software he now has to buy and install, he will be busy for a while.

After what surely must be a coincidence with two of Microsoft's spontaneous buyers who got their cash back of course, both going for HP machines, we find another amazing coincidence that Microsoft is allowing HP to wipe off Windows 7 and be able to replace this with XP right through to 2010.

Is that one or two votes of confidence for Windows 7?

Mind you, Kelly Fiveash in The Register tells us that Microsoft is now going to allow XP downgrades from Windows 7 to Anybody. This is to help users plan their migrations to Windows 7 apparently, although I cannot quite figure out the logic of that statement. Perhaps some users may want to go back to Windows 3.

After the sales dip in February, which Ballmer used to prove that Mac sales were dead, March sales have risen somewhat and is now a hair's breadth away from that psychological 10%. A more measured analysis of the figures and their significance is carried out by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.

Despite what we heard a couple of weeks ago, the proposed acquisition of Sun by IBM will not now be taking place apparently which is understandably creating some confusion among Sun's customers. Sun may still be looking for a buyer.

If you use Gmail or the Google calendar and have an iPhone or iPod touch, you may want to have a look at these pages using the browser. Both have been updated and improved considerably and make these services more user-friendly.

And up from wallowing in the 80s last month, Apple share prices are showing $115 today.

Too Good to Have Hanging About on my Desktop for Long?

With that as context, I came across a program last week called One Million Monkeys, or OMMs for short. I downloaded this from VersionTracker.

The utility comes up with what seem random inputs by millions of monkeys but output is controlled by mathematical functions, for example pi or a number entered by the user. No major works yet, but we will have to check some more.

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