stuart midgley

A new theme - some new knowledge

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:49:07 +1100

Just finished educating myself about XHTML and CSS - thoroughly recommend the book ‘Head First HTML with XHTML and CSS’ for anyone else trying to understand the underpinnings of web design.

In celebration I’ve given this tumble blog a new theme. The old one has been in use since I first signed up, nearly two years ago now. It’s also amazing to see how far tumblr has come - at that time there were only a dozen themes to choose between, now they have hundreds.

Now, all I’ve got to do is learn basic programming, then learn the popular server and client-side languages, and then I can finally relaunch my business website!

Should all happen by 2015…

Walking the Coast Track

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:21:06 +1100

I made the most of the fine weather we had this week and got out into the Royal National Park.

Leaving my motor scooter at Wattamolla car park I headed south along the Coast Track to the broken, rocky inlet of Curracurrang. A hidden gem there is the natural waterfall-fed swimming pool about 200m upstream of the cove. Delightfully cold, yet the water cascading down the waterfall is warm from the heat of the sun-exposed rocky stream bed above.

I’ve seen up to a dozen Water Dragons at this swimming hole in the past, sometimes sunning themselves on the flat rocks that people swim off but mostly inhabiting the shelves of the waterfall rock-face.

This time, as I sat reading my book quietly in the shade for an hour, one particular dragon got very curious about this strange creature sitting on her rock, so she slowly proceeded to get closer and closer to investigate. By the end of the hour she was sitting only eight inches away from my face as I lay on my towel, peering into my eyes and watching me watching her.

Eventually I continued my walk south to Curracurrong and the spectacular cliffs and waterfall at Eagle Rock, before a hard slog up the hill over the Curra Moors Trail to the main road and a return to the carpark.

An adult echidna, cliffs, ocean, native flora… click on any of the following photos to see the full gallery. Enjoy!

Eagle Rock at Curracurrong

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:07:48 +1100

Eagle Rock at Curracurrong

A highly inquisitive Eastern Water Dragon

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:05:40 +1100

A highly inquisitive Eastern Water Dragon

Curracurrang water hole

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:03:08 +1100

Curracurrang water hole

Merry Christmas to all! Enjoy your time with family, enjoy your...

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:03:06 +1100

Merry Christmas to all!

Enjoy your time with family, enjoy your holidays, enjoy being alive!

Best wishes to everyone!

The new AEA office.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:37:04 +1100

The new AEA office.

Moving into my first Office

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:34:48 +1100

My business, AEA, has grown enough that the time to leave the spare bedroom at home has come!

The spare room has served me well since February 2008 - although of late it has gotten altogether too crowded for comfort! Stock in cartons everywhere, two desks jammed in, several bookcases of files and catalogues and a big rack of hanging stock in the corner. Also, too many customers and deliveries are now coming to the house each week; a more professional look is required.

After several weeks of searching for suitable premises (and there isn’t much out there at the entry level, let me tell you) I found a newly-refurbished building in Marrickville that ticked all the right boxes.

It’s cheap, clean, carpeted, well lit, solid brick construction, the landlord is friendly and - bonus - the old air conditioner in the window still works. A lease was duly signed, phone and internet connections are underway and the moving day is fixed for this coming Friday. (Try and have friends with utes if you can - it makes life much easier!).

It’ll be sad to say goodbye to the old office after almost two years. Still, onward and upwards!

I sure am looking forward to working in air conditioning this summer.

Photo

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:49:37 +1100

America's Cup yacht unveils world's largest hard wing

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:48:54 +1100

The 33rd America’s cup has been bogged down in legal challenges for the last two and half years but both sides have been building ever bigger boats in preparation for the eventual one-on-one showdown that everyone knows is coming.

The American challengers - Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing Team - built a 90 foot long carbon-fibre trimaran only to be outdone by the Alinghi team’s 90 foot super-lightweight catamaran two months ago.

Yesterday BMW Oracle struck back, unveiling the largest hard wing sail ever seen. 53 metres tall. Exotic composite materials. And the speed… yesterday they puddled around San Diego harbour… pushing 30 km/hr in 12 km/hr winds.

Today they took her offshore for the first time. These are the photos. Check out the one below that shows a crew member half-way up the wing for scale.

Holy crap.

BOR 90 with the new monster hard wing sail on the open ocean...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:41:58 +1100

BOR 90 with the new monster hard wing sail on the open ocean only 24 hours after first tests.

Auckland from Mount Victoria, taken in September 2009.

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:41:00 +1100

Auckland from Mount Victoria, taken in September 2009.

Software for Small Business

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:03:00 +1100

My small business has grown to the point where the processes I started off with are getting annoyingly cumbersome. Manually copying information from our contacts database into our sales and accounts software for each sale, accessing product information from printed materials, supplier catalogues and online websites… the busier we get, the longer it takes.

So the search is on for a good, all-encompassing software system that will cover all area of our business operations - in short, an ERP system.

And what a revelation this process is to me. Business software is complex, difficult to install, takes a long time to customise to the needs of any particular business and, in the case of commercial packages, damned expensive.

Examples of failed ERP implementations are everywhere. $100 million law suits from major companies against their ERP vendors (such as SAP or Oracle) seem not uncommon, and smaller companies seem to be avoiding the whole area as much as possible.

When I said all this to a good friend (a software engineer) he simply replied, “Welcome to software”.

I’m proceeding very carefully.

Quick Updates

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:26:50 +1000

- Sailing has started again. The opening regatta for the summer season was held last Saturday. A non-pointscore race, with a pursuit start. Our yacht, being known as fast, was given a crippling 54 minute handicap - in a 2 hour race! Needless to say, we didn’t do very well. Serious racing starts in two weeks time, Friday night twilight racing (for all those friends I’ve promised a ride to) starts in October.

- Business: software development is ~~fun~~ hell. Trying to create an integrated DB system for tracking my accounts, sales, stock, contacts, customers, payments and supplier stock information. Success is not assured. Grey hairs are.

- Motorbike: finally repaired, after 3 months in the workshop. Still being held by Aprilia as we are now in dispute over who should pay. Arguing over who pays for the damage - acceptable wear and tear or fundamental design fault? I say one, they say the other.

- Travel: Had a quick four days in Auckland two weeks ago, for a family birthday party. The Great-Aunt celebrated 95, so all and sundry attended. Nice to see family, also found time to wrangle two sails with boats at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. Photos will follow.

First Day of Motorcycling for Friends

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:22:00 +1000

Saturday dawned clear and bright… which was a good thing too, as I had organised a motorcycling run down through the Royal National Park with two friends who had just gotten their L-plates.

It was a great day, the run through the park was fantastic - Gymea Lillies abounding, birds tweeting and the sun and shade making fantastic patterns on the road. Heaven!

The photos are of myself, Joanne and Andreas.

Photo

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:17:34 +1000

Photo

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:15:23 +1000

Sailing - Audi CYCA Winter Series - Race 2

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:28:58 +1000

We sailed well. We missed a mark. We were forced to administratively ‘retire’ after the race, just before we would have been disqualified anyway. Grrr.

Ah well, at least it was a nice day on the harbour. Grrr.

Sailing - Audi CYCA Winter Series - Race 1

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:27:21 +1000

The Audi Winter Series run out of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia has begun. The first race was the 3rd of May, and this last Sunday was the second.

Race 1 proved a less than auspicious start. Tigger sailed very well, placing second out of about 16 boats. A great achievement, sullied only by the 3-boat collision that we were part of about half-way through.

Tigger was hit on the starboard quarter by another boat, which impact spun us around and forced our bow into the port quarter of another boat. The first contact caused little damage but unfortunately our bowsprit punched a hole clean through the side of the other boat in the second impact.

Protest flags all around, a hearing that went late into the night on Thursday, witnesses from other boats and a reserved decision while the protest committee worked through all the details with their decision not made until 5pm the following day. Tigger - disqualified. You don’t have to like the protest committee, you just have to accept their decision.

Apple and their build-up of chip design expertise

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:13:00 +1000

This is a post I’ve just put up on MacRumors website - it’s long enough to become a blog post as well. Here goes:

I’ve just read through this thread and the related one from a couple of days earlier Apple Personnel Moves: Former AMD Chip Executive Hired, Papermaster Finally Begins Work.

It seems to me that we’re all looking for justifications for Apple’s actions that involve current issues. Most suggestions revolve around Hackintosh/secrecy/iPhone ripoffs/power consumption etc. They’re all concerns, sure, but none of them are about looking ahead, to where the puck is going to be.

Almost certainly Apple want more control and better design over the chips in their mobile devices - iPhone, tablet, whatever. That category is growing and developing and Apple want to own it and dominate it, and the quality of the designers they’ve employed promises great improvements in these products. However, I’m going to suggest that this is only half their reason for bringing chip design in-house. Sticking my neck out, I reason that the other half is embedded devices.

Embedded devices are all around us and they are, at the moment, uniformly crap. The electronics in my car, the menus on my plasma TV and the electronics on my air conditioner are poorly designed, sometimes buggy and never pretty. The embedded electronics industry is crying out for the Apple touch of style and reliability.

We’re now moving into the era where we are ready for our personal machines to be properly networked and to share our personal data. The air conditioner needs to know what time we’ll be home so it can cool the house down in advance. The plasma tv wants to be able to play the second half of the podcast we half-watched at work during our lunch-break on our iPhone. And our car wants to integrate our music playlist, incoming phone calls and our list of contacts into its onboard GPS nav/audio system.

At the moment this is still a pipe dream. Most people consider themselves lucky if their car stereo has a 3.5mm input jack, and going from watching something on your iPod to finishing watching it on your plasma is hopeless. All the ways that have been tried to date are poor.

We all know why this computing development is important - the first company to really make everything in our life seamless will dominate the computing industry for years to come. The question is how should a company go about it?

Many companies have tried the obvious - consumer entertainment electronics. Windows media centre PC’s, Apple TV, Sony products - all have been failures. Their crucial fault is that they aren’t truly integrated. Not really, not totally. You still have to play with a Sony TV that can’t talk to the Apple TV box, which can’t talk to the Yamaha amplifier. And so-on. Three remotes are still required. The wife is still confused.

Not until one company makes the software that drives all the devices in the cabinet will it become truly seamless, but getting to that position seems impossible. Sony, Panasonic, LG or Samsung aren’t going to invite Apple to design the systems that run their products - they see Apple as a potential competitor and doing so would reduce them to contract hardware manufacturers for Apple. Yet neither are they capable of taking over the computer side of the equation. A stand-off ensues and the result is that we all suffer from incompatible devices.

So what is Apple to do if it ultimately wants to be the dominant designer of computing across all the devices in our lives? Well, they could start with the car.

There is a rumour doing the rounds that Apple is designing a car electronics system for Mercedes. I think this makes a lot of sense. If Apple start offering embedded control systems to car manufacturers it would be the first step in expanding the iPod/iPhone lines into a true Apple ecosystem that involves all facets of your life.

Think about it: drop your iPhone into the slot on the dash and your car plays your music, puts the calls through the audio system and offers your list of contacts on the GPS nav screen. Seamlessly. Add the Apple design touch for the other functions (climate control, audio, etc.) and you’d have a winner.

For people without any Apple products the control system would still be nicer and cleaner than the abominations that most car companies currently provide. Add an iPod and they then get flawless audio integration. Buy an iPhone and the car suddenly becomes a seamless extension of your computing life. Suddenly, people who aren’t Apple users but have a new car have a compelling reason to buy an Apple mobile computing product.

The car systems would encourage iPhone uptake like iTunes encouraged iPod buying. It’s all about extending the eco-system and making people really want to buy-in to the Apple universe of devices.

There are many other areas of embedded-computing that Apple can and no doubt will pursue but I think cars would likely be the starting point. They’re high-value, so the systems will likely return a profit in and of themselves. They’re ubiquitous, so everyone will be exposed to the new offering. And we spend a lot of time in them, so we want them to work really well for us.

If Apple can get a stronghold in embedded systems in cars, and they continue to build the strength in mobile computing that is the iPhone then they might develop a linkage between the two that would allow them to dominate for decades. Apple’s embedded and mobile systems could become as ubiquitous in our lives as Windows was in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s.

If Jobs is looking into the future and trying to own the world of distributed computing then he needs custom chips with low power consumption as well as great software teams. Apple already had the latter and they’ve been busy buying the former.