South Africa and England are playing this test series under the new ICC Review System. I sas it in action for the first time yesterday (19th Decemeber 2009). Did it work? I am not sure. England had an LBW decision turned down and they referred it. It looked like it was worth a challenge. The reply showed the ball was hitting leg stump, but the ICC have put a tolerance on the Hawk Eye reply. It must be hitting more than half the stump (leg and off). The reply showed it hitting the outside of leg stump, but not just clipping, but hitting the outer half. This meant it was not out and the review lost.

Here is my problem. The umpire was correct, their was doubt. Doubt goes to the batsman and always should, so not out, but the reply showed it hitting. England were also right. So why do they lose their review? Why can’t they keep the review, but the decision still be not out? If it was missing, they lose the review.

I have a bigger issue in general with technology in cricket and sport in general. I play a reasonable standard in the Saracens Herts League and umpires are provided by the league. The umpires are ok, but not brilliant, but they give up their weekend and umpire to the standard we are playing. We have to put up with bad decisions and no doubt we get more than the next league up and they get more than the county standard. I am sure when players umpire the standard is all over the place. Ever played in a game when a batsman has been given out, he comes out to umpire and everything is out, and the bowler who got nothing and then gives nothing when he umpires?

International umpires should be the cream of the crop and get the tough decisions right more often the not. The ICC should be concentrating of getting those standards higher. Sport at all levels should be played by the same rules. We don’t get video assistance at our standard and I doubt we ever will. If anything it is our standard that needs it most.

In the current series there is no snickometre or hot spot as the host TV company can’t afford it. So in the series you will be not out, but in Australia you would have been out. You can’t play with different rules in different countries. Either everyone has the same or you don’t use it. The ICC needs to pay for this and have consistency.

Imagine a bigger, well funded club in our league being able to have run out video. You can’t have one club have it and not the rest. You are not out at 19 grounds, but out at theirs.

If the ICC do stick with technology then we are going to have to rewrite the record books. All pre technology records stand and we start again. I am sure somewhere in Matthew Hayden’s world record innings or Brian Lara’s Hawk Eye would have said they were out.

In my opinion technology should be used for no balls. The 3rd umpire can look at this and the on field umpire can concentrate on the other end. I would start with that and see if that improves standards.

Recently I got a new Mophie Juice Pack for my iPhone 3GS. I was excited to try it as I have had to turn off my 3g to get the power to last the whole day. All went well the first time I used it, but the second time, the phone charged for a few minutes and then stopped. I pressed the button on the back and the Juice Pack reported no lights, it seemed to think it was flat. I got home and recharged it and immediately got 3 lights and the 4th flashing. It now seemed to think it was almost fully charged, very odd.

I put the iPhone back in the pack and the same thing happened again. I got on to Mophie tech support and were happy to send me a new one. I didn’t even have to send the old one back. This was very handy as I live in the UK. The new one arrived in a few days. I charged it for the 8 hours recommended and then tried again. I was shocked to find this one did the same thing.

Was it faulty again, or was it the phone? I tried it on my wife’s 3G and it did the same thing. I got back on to Mophie and they agreed to send me another one. This time I charged it again, but gave it to a friend to try. Again the same thing happened. He got about 20% extra charge and it stopped, and the lights went out. Charged it again, 3 lights, 4th one flashed. So it wasn’t my phone.

I got back on to Mophie and they offered me a refund. I explained I would rather send them back so they could look into it. I liked the product, I really wanted it to work. After some emails back and forth Mophie are now upgrading me to a Juice Pack Air. Hopefully this will work better. I think you can tell more about a company when things go wrong than when all is rosey. Mophie’s support has certainly been excellent.

Having installed Macintosh OS X on my Dell Mini 9 via the instructions here, the next challenge was to install the 10.5.7 update. Again using the mydellmini.com as my reference I waiting for other to try and install it. Conq was the first to get the steps up on the forum. Here is how to do it. I take no credit for this whatsoever.

Download the installer, don't use Software Update. Install 10.5.7, in my case i downloaded the Combo.

Let it reboot.

At the boot screen use the -x to enter Safe Mode. (You have to press esc on boot to have the option to type this in)

Remove custom dsdt.aml file (this file is on the root of the drive, just drag it to the bin)

After in Safe Mode run DellEFI. (I used version 1.1)

Do a customer install and, reinstall the Mini 9 Extensions, Install custom dsdt.aml file, and fix Bluetooth.

Reboot.

and all should be well.

I had made a new mailing list on my Mac OS X server (10.5.6), but the emails it sent out had the wrong url on them. I popped a question on the Apple Discussion board and Alex gave me the answer. Here is the cli command to fix the issue.

sudo /usr/share/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url mylistname --urlhost=mydomain.tld

Thanks Alex.

After years of requests Your Mac Life Show has now gone free. I have listened to this show for many years via Audible.com for which I paid a measly £10.99 a year. Their have been a few hosts over the years, but one host has stayed constant, Shawn King.

The show has a mixture of regular features like Peter Cohen with the Big Story and Sly, the IRC babe. Shawn covers the latest news in his no nonsense style, but with wit and humour. The new, Pick Your Topic has been a new addition to the show and has gone down well.

Shawn has the ability to get the best out of his interviewee. He puts them at ease quickly and gets the best out of them. He has been a member of the Mac Community for well over ten years and often holds live discussions from the stage of Macworld Conference and Expo. If you are an old hand or new to the Mac I would recommend this show. Two and half hours each week of lively chat, and you will come away with having learnt something new, or certainly something to make you think.

You can download the show for free from the iTMS here. If you like it would purchase it via Audible as I still do or use the donate button on the front page. This show is certainly worth more than free.

For those old enough to remember Blackadder, the BBC TV comedy, here are some paintings done by my work colleague Dave Mullins. He is a great painter and enjoys painting all sorts of things.

His latest project was to paint some of the leading characters. He is hoping to work his way through all 4 series. I know he is working on Baldrick at the moment. The painting above is off Lord Melchie played by Stephen Fry. Click here to see the rest.

Yesterday my wife and I went off to Paradise Wildlife Park near Broxbourne. I had seen sign to it before, but had never been for a visit. What a great place. I was very surprised. We took tons of photos and I hope to have mine up soon. Below are a couple of my favourites as a taster. The one of the cheetah has come out like a night shot, totally by accident, but I think it looks really good and could have been taken on a night drive.

I have been invited to another Ironport CAB meeting in August. For the last one back in the Spring I made a small movie to liven up our presentation. I have now done another one for this CAB. You can see them here.

Last weekend I had to work. We were upgrading to a SAN. At the same time we installed our upgrade of Extremez-ip v5 by GroupLogic. As ever, it was a very simple install. It went straight over the top of v4 and left all shares in place. I typed in the licence code and all was well. For some reason I decided to click on the license button. You can imagine my shock when I saw I had 10 licences. It was meant to be 100.

I was now in a panic. I really didn't want to go back to v4. I tried to call support, but no answer. I wasn't surprised, but I was desperate. I decided to email on the off chance someone would read it. I was shocked. I got an email back within 30 minutes saying they had looked up our account and the codes were indeed incorrect. New ones were in the same email and I was up and running. I even got a call from one of their customer service people. I will have to call them back tomorrow. I missed the call.

I know it was their error, but the service I got to fix this issue was superb. It was late Saturday in the States and I still got a reply and a fix. Well done GroupLogic.

Back in October I was lucky enough to go and see England v South Africa in the rugby world cup final. It was a superb weekend. My boss Richard managed to get tickets. Along with his brother James, other work colleague, Ritchie, we took the Eurostar to Calais and Richard drove to Paris. He had found a cheap hotel about a 45 minute walk from the stadium.

We arrived Friday afternoon. Ritchie and went and bought a rugby ball and tested our skills in a local park. We certainly weren't going to be selected to play in the final! In the evening we did some re-con and walked to the Stade De France. It took awhile, but it was interesting to see parts of Paris you wouldn't normally see. We watched the 3rd place play off between France and Argentina in the fan zone setup outside the ground.

Saturday we had a quick breakfast and made our way into Paris to the world cup village setup just by the Eiffel Tower. After taking in the atmosphere and watching New Zealanders trying to sell their tickets we walked to Garde De Nord to meet Richard and his friends before taking the train to the stadium.

The atmosphere was electric and the fans from both sides mingled together and shared a joke and some banter. It was all very good humoured. It was a good game, but England never really looked like winning. We did think England had scored a try, but it was rightly ruled out. South Africa deserved to win.

Sunday was the sad drive back to England. We had a late train so ended up in the duty free and an Australian bar watching the final Grand Prix of the season. An exciting weekend ended once I got home just before midnight.

Some photos of the weekend are here. Mostly taken with my phone so not great, but certainly gives an idea of the weekend.

I was driving to Stevenage yesterday and I saw a deer in a field. Damn, I thought, I don't have my camera with me. Two hours later on my return the whole herd was there. I raced home, got my camera. They had moved by the time I was back, but I was lucky enough to get some shots. I walked quietly over the hill and got a bit closer. They are very skittish so you can't get too close. I was lucky to get what I did.

I heard this the other day. You always miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That is so true. Always take your camera with you. You never know what you might see when you are out and about.

You can see the rest of what I got here.

This has been playing on my mind for awhile. The iPhone has been released in the UK and the Mac Macs have bought it. How is Apple going to compete going forward? I have to admit, I don't know how the American phone market works, but here in the UK, it seems based on price. I have never heard anyone say, I am saving up for my new phone. The contract they have will come up for renewal, they will look at the phones that are free and pick the best free one.

In the past, I have seen phones that I like, but by the time my contract was up, they were no longer available. I picked the best free one I could get at the time of contract renewal. The Nokia N95 would seem to me, to be the best phone around. It is free on all networks. These are some of the deals I could find.

Three has it for £35/month with 300 free minutes and 150 free video minutes.

o2 has it for £30/month with 400 free minutes.

Vodafone has the latest 8gb, N95 model for free on some tariffs and £100 on a £35/month tariff with 500 free minutes.

So, how is Apple going to compete with this? They aren't going to give away free phones, this would just kill iPod sales. Can Apple prove that if you buy an iPhone they will come up with such great ideas in software updates that you can keep this phone for years? You would basically be getting a new phone and features every few months.

I have a brave idea and I wonder if Apple would consider it. They already have a business model in this space that others weren't brave enough to try. The iPod Touch is £199, the Nano is £99. What if all iPod Touches were iPhones, but the functionality was turned off? When you were ready for your new phone, you could sync it with iTunes and pay to have your iPod Touch be an iPhone.

As prices come down, the iPod Touch might come down to £150, or even less. Could it come with Nano functions and you pay to turn on the wireless functions and then the phone? Of course this would give the hackers a real target: Unlock the phone feature without paying Apple anything.

I wonder how many people have iPod Touches and now wish they had the phone, but aren't going to pay twice. With this model, Apple don't have to give away free phones, they encourage you to buy cheap iPod's and the phone is there when you want it.
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So, Leopard is finally here. I started my upgrade yesterday. First of all I made sure I had a good backup. Superduper did that for me. I had a complete clone and a user files backup as well. I then made sure as many applications as possible were the latest versions. Some have had patches made available even since I did that. 1Password has had two updates since yesterday morning.

All went well during the process of upgrading. My machine rebooted fine. All in all I have to say, a very smooth upgrade.

I have been working through my applications and all seems to be working fine for the most part. Below are a list of my findings so far :-

* Repairing disk permissions just gave me the stripped progress bar. It didn't seem to do anything.

* Quicktime went back to standard version.

* Final Cut Studio 2 had lost its serial number. When I tried to put it back in, it would accept it, but as I wasn't an admin it would not right the file to the disk. I had to log out and do it again as an admin.

* Growl Mail doesn't work. They are working on an upgrade

* Built in VPN doesn't work with the office Cisco VPN and Crypocard, but the Cisco Client works fine.

* Spaces works great, but I think it will take some getting used to. The preference pane could do with being bigger. Once you add a lot of applications, it is hard to see which Space they are in.

I will post more information as I work more in Leopard.