Ben Gillam's posterous

An iOS user on stock android...

I thought i'd put outa quick few words about this and it wont really fit into a tweet or two.

I've been an iOS user since 2008 and am very happy, i find its flow a lot better for me than android and i am quite heavily invested in the ecosystem.

As part of my work i have to support and work on a number of android handsets, in my time ive had exposure to HTC, Samsung and motorola phones, and each of them felt what i can only describe as "wrong" and felt kind of backwards to use but until today i had not had a chance to use an android phone which was running a stock rom or stock(ish) rom.

Well today i decided I'd had enough of my work Galaxy S phones annoying habit of getting stuck in standby when using exchange active sync with push enabled and the phone app crashing. It seems that the most recent update applied (gingerbread) was the latest available for the galaxy but wasn't without problems. I figured the best move would be to install the latest Cyanogen Mod stable for this handset as id heard a lot of good things about it from friends.

The rooting and flashing process wasn't too hard, at least not when i found a guide which made sense and didn't contradict the last one i read! and within 30 mins or so i was up and running with Cyanogen Mod 7.1 which is basically a modded 2.3.7 gingerbread but without the god awful touchwiz interface.

WOW is all i can say. What a difference a lack of skin makes. Not only does the phone run much better and without all the problems i had before, the use of android is a lot smoother and less irritating. I actually enjoy using it now.

Its never going to pull me from iOS (at least not right now) but i have a lot more respect for android than i used to. Im shocked at the amount of work that the likes of htc and samsung are putting in to ruin a perfectly good operating system. In itself android needs a few tweaks here or there to bring it closer to the polish that iOS has but i can now understand what people meant when they say custom roms or stock roms are that much better!

Two Faced Clegg & Moron Students

For those of you who follow me on twitter, you'll probably know that I strongly believe that democracy is a total illusion designed to keep the stupid quiet. Since I’ve been old enough to understand anything of politics it was immediately apparent to me that politicians made a habit of lying to the public, especially during elections when bold promises are made for our votes only for them to turn around after getting into power and go against the pledges they were elected for... like our "friend" Mr Clegg who pledged NOT to raise student fees but has now decided that his election promises do not matter anymore. I’m sorry but that’s just plain fraud!! if you or I were to defraud the government you know exactly where we would end up...behind bars. I disgusts me that along with the US we fly around the world trying to force our vision of democracy on them, especially when we cant work it out ourselves!

Now let’s look at the students, I think its great to see students standing up against these changes, especially as a lot of their votes went to the lib dems, its good to see more people exercising their right to protest. But when the "element" of the protestors decide to start smashing things up, graffiti and attack the royal family they do absolutely nothing to help the cause, in fact they turn public opinion against the students even when the vast majority turned up for a peaceful protest. But on top of that you get these complete muppets who turn up on the news being interviewed and they blame the violence on the police for containing them. But the more violent you are the worse it gets, why not be the bigger people and not rise to it.

Its all too late now it seems and the vote has gone through, sadly another example of who protesting is pointless these days as the government simply don’t care, they got their power by deception like all governments and now they will plough ahead with whatever the hell they like even if it means making everyone poor!

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I would like to stress I’m not calling all students morons here, just the ones causing the trouble.

Eventful sunday morning

Now that its warming up again and I'm still in the mood to get healthy I've been trying to get out on the mountain bike and get a few miles under my belt. The ultimate plan is to get back into shape and to take on the london to brighton ride again next year and this time make it up Ditchling Beacon without getting off my bike or succumbing to cramp.

Anyway,

I have been doing a smallish route recently which goes around the outskirts of Uckfield and takes in most of the nearby villages and works out to about 15 miles or so and thats what i was planning on sunday morning, but about 2 minutes into my ride a woman walking her dogs waved me down asking for help, she had found a cat who'd got himself stuck on some barbed wire and wasnt sure what to do.

I jumped off my bike and over the fence into the field and ran down to take a look, the poor moggy had tried to jump over the top of the fence which was barbed and didnt quite make it and got myself caught. He was quite distressed and trying to free himself but ended up wrapping himself around the wire and just making things worse.

I got on the phone to the RSPCA (just! thanks o2 and your crappy signal everywhere!) who then dispatched one of their team but was at least an hour away.

We didnt know how long he'd been hanging upside down for (all night for all we knew), so I comforted him to calm him down and then put my arms though the fence and tried to cradle him so he wasnt hanging from his skin any more, in the meantime the woman went home to try and find a box or something we could rest him on until the RSPCA peep turned up.

Whilst I was waiting the land owner turns up thinking that im trying to steal his fencing! I explain what had happened and he ran back to his house and got some big clippers and a box and fairly soon we had free'd the little lad albiet with a big piece of barbed wire through its skin all twisted and entwined with his fur.

At this point we were able to move him so decided to get him to the nearest vets, the lady from earlier had returned with her car and i followed on two wheels and he was taken in at Starns and Gatward vets in Uckfield. (bear in mind it was still before 9am on a sunday, so big thanks to them).

I went back to the area we found him and started knocking doors trying to find his owner but wasnt getting very far. But then got a call from the vet. Luckily the poor chap was chipped so they were able to contact his owner fairly quickly.

After an hour and a half in the operating room young Chilli all fixed up with a nice big 6 inch wound/scar to show his mates and His owner picked him up that evening.

Later that evening I got a call from a very thankfull owner (who had actually looked me up on google and found me via twitter earlier) on and said he wanted to thank me and brought round a bottle of wine which was very nice of him.

Chilli is doing well and just needs to be kept in for a couple of weeks to recover and then he'll be out getting up to mischief again!

So health wise I didnt do too well last week, i'll have to make up for that this weekend!

(Apologies for any typos, i type quite quickly and theres no spell check on posterous!)

A good Xmas

Christmas over for another year! Had a great time this year, Tracy cooked a delicious dinner for us on Xmas day (i stayed away, useless cook!) we had her brother and girlfriend round in the evening which was nice. Went over to mum and dads this afternoon for lunch with them and my uncle, aunt and nan. My brother was boasting his new 3gs he got a few weeks back, rather jelous how much faster it is than my 3g. Got some really nice presents so thankyou to all my family and especially my Tracy for a wonderful meal.

The only setback was when Shai (youngest cat shook her head and flicked her slobber in my eye which promptly went bright red and had thick layer of gunk on it, eye bath did no good but had some anti biotic eye drops so used those a couple of times and by this morning it was all clear just my eye still a bit bloodshot. Very odd though!

Hope everone had a great Christmas and here's to great new year!!!

A rant at the anti-jailbreak misinformation portrayed in the blogosphere

Being a bit of a techie, I read a lot of tech blogs, listen to tech and phone podcasts and follow some prominent figures in the tech blogosphere.

It seems lately that the vast majority seem to have taken it upon themselves to declare jailbreaking your iphone as being a really bad thing, a massive security risk will make your phone really unstable. I could go on. But it seems to me that anyone making these statements surely hasn’t ever run a jailbroken device. My iphone has spent most of the last 12 months jailbroken and I had one crash which as it happens turned out to be Apples fault (the coma problem in 3.1). So stability is clearly not an issue with a Jailbroken device, its the software which you then add to the device that can cause problems. If you jailbreak, install winterboard (themeing engine) and every other mod you can find then yes you'll probably end up with a crashy device which is no different to installing all those nice freeware programs off the internet onto your computer, they are not verified by microsoft/apple and can potentially crash your computer. If you are sensible with your jailbroken phone you'll be fine.

Which brings me to the iPhone virus shenanigans. Yes if your phone isn’t jailbroken, there is no current way you can get infected but as has been said pretty much anywhere, jailbreaking is done at your own risk you should not do it if you haven’t read up on the subject or taken good advice. But the root issue is people who have installed OpenSSH which allows terminal access to your iPhone. Open SSH is not a pre-installed option with any current jailbreak method so anyone installing it would have installed it for a reason and its their own stupid fault if they don’t set a new password. Would you buy a pc and connect it to the internet via a usb modem with no anti-virus or firewall and with no password set? no. So anyone with half a brain shouldn’t be connecting to public wifi connections, with a jailbroken device, with default passwords with openssh installed and enabled!

At the end of the day its down to user education, not the iphone being insecure or the jailbreak itself causing problems. If I agree anywhere with the anti-jailbreak mob its maybe that the large majority of users just pile in blindly into something they don’t know enough about.

A good step people should be taking before jailbreaking is reading as much as you can on jailbreaking, and then read some more. Just use a little effort.

Otherwise get a good eBook like "Not Your Average iPhone Book" from the founder of www.funkyspacemonkey.com. >> http://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/book which should give you a fairly good grounding about what you are getting yourself into.

In the meantime would high up people in the blogosphere actually try these things out before jumping on the "anti" bandwagon. How about a good balanced view of the facts? If you don’t want to jailbreak your iPhone that’s great for you!, but don’t push people away just because you haven’t taken the time to research the subject in more depth. The developers working on Cydia apps help drive innovation with our handsets and in some cases apple has clearly taken inspiration from them and added features to the main firmware. I just wish they'd do it with SBsettings!

Adblock - A good thing or a bad thing?

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I just came across the Adblock plug-in for Firefox today when browsing the recommended plug-in page. I thought id give it a shot and see if it worked (having recently had a site i wanted to read with about a billon ads), and it does... very well.

But i also caught wind of the backlash against it, and rightfully so.

The general feeling is that the honest blogger with a few ads on his site won’t get any exposure for their ads and thus make no money which will affect them and I can totally understand this. Unfortunately it’s not them that’s the problem, it’s the websites that have 75% adverts and 25% content. Now whilst you can argue just don’t use the site, sometimes either the content is not available elsewhere or a good and reputable site simply has too many ads making it hard to read actual content.

I came across a site like this yesterday, i thought i could avoid them by using RSS but turned out to be a truncated feed which then sent me back to the site full of ads that made it hard to read, so in this case i would probably turn a plug-in like this on so I can actually read the content then switch off.

As i see it i would rather the plug-in would reverse its way of working, whereby it defaults to being off, but in the case of a problem site you can switch it on. That way the site adverts will at least get a chance to load once before you block on a problem site, but normal sites and blogs that rely on the income wont have their unobtrusive ads blocked automatically.

I would be interested to hear your views on this. So please leave a comment.

Thanks

(FYI I am not pimping this plug-in nor flaming it, interested in your views)

My thoughts on last weeks question time/nick griffin shenanigans

We all knew it was coming up, Nick Griffin the pathetic excuse for a human being had been invited to appear on the BBC's Question Time, and I expected there to be a lot of people against it and being quite verbal.

Then Tuesday afternoon my twitter timeline when into overdrive with most posts being about the program and the protest that had built up outside, and that people were now breaking into the BBC.

Reading some of the tweets and hearing what people were saying when interviewed by the TV news, a lot were saying what equated to

"I have the right because of free speech to protest that Nick Griffin shouldn’t be allowed free speech"

Now correct me if I'm wrong, we live in a "democracy" and we believe in free speech so the above seems very hypocritical, at the end of the day as a human being he has every right to free speech just like the rest of us, even if he does talk shite. People complained that he shouldn’t have a platform, but that’s not what it was or ever could be, question time is not a party political broadcast. If anything it was worth having just so that he was shown to be the racist arsehole that he is, and anyone worried he would poison minds is assuming that the rest of us are stupid!

Give us credit, we can see a dangerous man with racist policies for the man that he is, we don’t need to be protected from it!

But alas it was all fairly pointless anyway and he didn’t really say anything much as our real politicians chose to spend the whole time interrupting each other, had anyone let him finish a sentence he would have been able to dig himself and even bigger hole.

So after all that, we had the BNP no better off (Good) and the BBC broken into (Bad) and the massive £100,000 cost of policing the protest and all its associated red tape being paid for by the tax payer!

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I want to make it clear I do not in any way support the BNP; in fact I currently have no confidence in any party, maybe nearer the election one of the "real" parties might give me a compelling reason to vote. My views are mainly about the craziness surrounding what was essentially an asshole making a fool of himself on national television (not even at prime time either). He only dug the hole he is in, even bigger.

Trying out Microsoft Security Essentials

I decided to give the new Microsoft Security Essentials a go as I couldn’t afford to renew NOD32 right now, was very impressed at the small download size and the quick installation. I will try it out over the next week or so and probably post up a quick review on the main blog.

If you want to give it a try just go to http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ and download. Its free!