Adapting to a new MAC

Recently I got an email at work saying that my laptop was due for replacement. The email asked me to choose whether to get a Lenovo laptop or an Apple MAC,. I am not really a fan of Apple products due to their habit of ignoring standard interface conventions. Nevertheless I was persuaded by some co-workers that clicking the apple button was the right choice. The new laptop was delivered very promptly after I clicked on the button and suddenly I had a shiny new MacBook Pro sitting on my desk and I had no choice but to become friends with it.

• On the positive side
• The hardware is impressive  The laptop is slim and light and the screen is crystal clear with a very high resolution. It can even be read outdoors on a sunny day.
• It comes with a solid state disk drive which means that it is lightning fast.
• The CIO office in IBM has set up a process http://setupmymac.ibm.com which  makes it trivially easy to setup all of the essential applications most people need in IBM in one go. This meant I was productive very quickly.
• On the negative side:
• As many of you know, MAC uses the command key for most  situations where most normal computers expect  you to press the control key. This is quite annoying at first, but I am surprised how quickly I managed to learn the new key sequences. This inventing of their own UI conventions is not ideal, especially for people like me who have to regularly use a variety of different operating systems. However, I think I will learn to live with it.
• What is really annoying is that Apple is into minimal design and hence they decided to remove any keyboard keys that they think are rarely used. One of these is the break key. Many users rarely if ever use this key, but in Lotus Notes there is a convention that you can use ctrl-break to abort any operation which is taking too long. Unfortunately this is a key combination that I find myself wanting to use frequently. A Google search threw up a few suggestions for MAC compatible alternatives, but none of them seem to work.
• Another missing key is the escape key, but this is compensated by the Touch Bar.  This is a cool strip which contains virtual keys that change depending upon what app is running. For example, whenever an application is running that can accept the escape key, a small esc appears in the touch bar. Likewise whenever Spotify is playing the touch bar has virtual keys for play, skip etc.  (even if it is running in the background).  This is a nifty idea, but most applications don't take advantage of it yet (probably because it is only available on newer MACs). You can also customise the touch bar so it works the way you like.
• I am a big fan of Bluetooth and I (wrongly) assumed that a modern laptop like a MacBook Pro would have excellent Bluetooth support. To be honest I find the poor Bluetooth performance to be the most frustrating thing about the new laptop. Initially, I connected a Bluetooth mouse and it worked except that I need to turn the mouse on and off every few hours to make my laptop realise that it was still there. Then I connected a Bluetooth keyboard and things got even worse, the laptop looses connection to either the mouse or the keyboard about once per hour (it can be even more often). Finally I added a Bluetooth headset and this seemed to overload the laptop's Bluetooth sub-system completely. The different devices seem to conflict with each other. For example, if I turn off the Bluetooth keyboard (which I often have to do),  the sound on my headset is likely to go up or down. Overall it makes me want to go back to wired devices (if the laptop had proper sockets to plug them into).

Overall I have to say I am still undecided about my decision to go down the Apple route. I am not (yet) looking to take my old Lenovo Linux laptop out of retirement, but I am a still a long way from being converted into an Apple fanboy.

Irish Revenue Online Service is an example of the wrong way to implement an online service

Most citizen's don't particularly enjoy paying taxes, because nobody  like parting with their hard earned money. Therefore, the tax authorities should try to make the process of filing a tax return as painless as possible. In fairness the Irish tax authorities have done a good job  of making the paper forms and associated documentation quite easy for the lay person to understand, so when I recently started using  the revenue on-line service  I was expecting that it would be equally simple to use. Unfortunately I was very disappointed and found it very frustrating.


This service was originally developed to be used by tax professionals who spend most of their working life dealing with tax issues and is it is optimised for this type of user. It was only in recent years that they opened the system to "normal taxpayers" and they have been surprised that the system has not proved more popular. However, from my experience (which I will describe below) I can totally understand why people are sticking with the much more user friendly paper based system. I understand why the tax authorities would prefer people to use the on-line system, but they will have to adapt the system significantly if they hope that a large section of the population will be willing  to switch.

The first hurdle that users must battle with is the registration process. They need to be careful to avoid fraudulent registrations, but the system they devised is almost guaranteed to take about over a week to complete and hence relatively few normal taxpayers will have enough patience to do it properly.

1. When you initially register on their web site you will in a normal enough looking web site registration form. However, when you complete this form you are not really registered you have simply applied for a ROS Access Number (RAN) which is required to progress to the next stage. For security reasons this RAN is printed on a physical piece of paper and then posted to your home address. This is done to ensure that the person applying for access to your tax records is really you (or at least has access to post delivered to your home).
2. However, the need to print and post the document ensures that there is a delay of several days before you can move to the next steps which is to apply for your Digital Certificate. When you apply for the certificate, they don't issue it to you straight away, but instead they generate an access password which must be printed out and posted to you. This second postal interaction doesn't really increase security, because anyone who can intercept the first letter will probably be equally able to intercept the second. 
3. In any case, you must wait until your password arrives in the post before you can retrieve your Digital Certificate and begin using the system.

Although this system seems quite straight forward, the delay involved effectively stopped me from using the system the first two years I tried. Like many citizens, I normally only need to interact with the tax system once per year when filing a tax return. As soon as I have collected all of the necessary information to complete a return, I like to complete the return straight away so that I can then relax and forget about the tax system for the next year.

The first year I decided to try filing my tax return on-line I was full of enthusiasm. When I had all of my documents ready to file a tax return, I was disappointed, but not surprised that I had to wait for the first postal step. However, when the letter arrived with the revenue access number I was frustrated that I could not complete the form straight away and so I completed the return on paper before the second letter arrived.

The next time I thought about the ROS system was when it was time to file a return for the following year. I found the old letter in my file with the access code to retrieve my certificate. Unfortunately when I tried using it I was told that the password had expired. Therefore I went back to using the paper system for another year.

The third year I decided that I should be a little more patient and so I completed the registration system from scratch. This time I encountered technical issues when I went to retrieve my password. The system gave me the unhelpful message "Something has gone wrong. Please contact the ROS HelpDesk". In fairness, the people operating the help desk were very responsive and did their best to help. However, it was hard for them to diagnose the cause of the problem from this generic message.

1. Their first suggestion was that the browser I was using might not be a supported one. They supplied me with a list of supported browser versions. I tried three of the browsers on their list but all of them gave me the exact same error message.
2. The next guess from the help desk people was that it might be an issue caused by the operating system I was using. They suggested that I try again on a Windows system. Since I would never destroy a good PC, by installing Windows on it, I was forced to create a Windows virtual machine image that I could use exclusively for accessing the ROS system,
3. Unfortunately when I tried accessing the system from the windows system it was still telling me "something has gone wrong". When I told this to the help desk, their next suggestion was to try updating the version of Java installed on the machine. Luckily this suggestion worked and after a delay of 3 weeks I was finally able to use the ROS system.

Since I am using a virtual machine to access the tax system, I should be able to keep a backup of my exact environment and use this to access the site next year. However, many users will be constantly updating their environment and it is likely that they will encounter fresh issues each year.


I think that there are a few simple changes that could be implemented to make the ROS system easier to use for non-professionals:

• If they abandoned the use of private digital certificates it would simplify the registration process and also allow them to be much more fussy about the details of the software used to access them. Most banks think that normal SSL encryption is secure enough for their web interfaces, so surely the revenue site should go along with this concensus.
• It would be helpful if the web site gave more helpful error messages. As a software developer I appreciate that it can be difficult to generate meaningful error messages, but surely they could do better than the simple "something has gone wrong". 
• It would also make life easier if they added an option to summarise the user's environment and email it to the help desk people so that they could see all of the relevant details at one glance. The  help desk people were simply guessing in the dark about what might be the cause of my problem, because there was no better way for them to diagnose the problem.

In summary the process the system seems to be quite fussy about the computer environment users have when trying to access the site. Tax professionals who spend quite a bit of time accessing the ROS site will probably be willing to install specific versions of software to enable them to access the site. However, the majority of citizens who only want to access the site once per year will be much less willing and hence will probably stick with the paper system unless it is made easier.

Bright future for Ireland with Coder Dojo

I had heard about the Coder Dojo initiative to encourage young people to learn computer programming skills when they are young and have not yet acquired negative prejudices about the difficultly involved. This is a great initiative and so I offered to help run the local Dojo in Dublin 15, but for various logistical reasons I wasn't able to attend out until this Saturday (which was the last in the current series).

There was an impressive turn out of 45 students on a rare day of bright sunshine when I could easily see that the alternative possibility of a trip to the beach might have seemed to be more attractive than spending the day indoors working on your laptop in a poorly ventilated room. The lecturer went through a short course on HTML and CSS while and a batch of about 10 mentors (including me) were available to assist the students as they attempted to complete the exercises. The students ranged in age from about 8 to 12 and they all seemed to be very keen to engage with the materials. Obviously there was some variation in the ability of the students, but none had any difficulty in completing the exercises with minimal support from the mentors.

My friend Speedie blogged about how the Galway Coder Dojo was helping to promote father/son bonding. It seems that it is mainly the fathers who take on the responsibility for bringing children Galway event, but thankfully the gender bias does not seem to be quite as strong in Dublin 15.  I did a rough tally of the gender profile and estimated that the male students outnumbered the female students by about 60% to 40%. The gender bias was slightly higher among the accompanying adults (roughly 75/25) but the mothers were certainly well represented. I was a little disappointed to see that all of the mentors were male, but maybe the gender bias will be receding when the current batch of students grow up and start becoming mentors themselves.

Overall I must say I was very impressed by the event and re-assured that Ireland's computer industry has a bright future.

Can you run 64bit Virtual Machines on a 32 bit host operating system

I was recently trying to use VMWARE Player to run some 64 bit virtual machines which a colleague had built for me. I used Google to find out if it would be possible to run the 64 bit guest OS on a 32 bit host - unfortunately the results seemed to be split almost 50-50 between saying yes and no, so I had to try it for myself.

When I tried to power on the virtual machine I got the following error screen. I went to the link suggested by the error page and I downloaded the utility to see if my CPU was capable of running in 64 bit mode. The tool from VMWARE told me that my CPU was not capable of running a 64 bit operating system. This puzzled me because until recently I was running a 64 bit operating system (RHEL6) on the same laptop.

I still thought that the problem might be that it is not possible to run a 64 bit guest operating system on a 32 bit host operating system. Then I remembered that I still had kept the boot partition for the 64 bit OS, so I booted this partition and tried again to run the virtual machines. Puzzlingly I still got the same result. The VMWARE test utility was also still telling me that my CPU was not capable of operating in 64 bit mode which was deifnietly not true since it was running in 64 bit mode when I ran the test.

I did a bit more digging and I found a utility from KVM which is supposed to check if your system can run 64bit virtual machines. It also told me that I couldn't, but it gave a very different error message. As the error message suggested, I went into my BIOS settings and enabled support for "Intel Virtualized Technology" and hey-presto I was able to run the 64 bit virtual machines. Unfortunately I don't really know what "Intel Virtualized Technology" is, but this article seems to have a feasible explanation.

BTYSTE project about Smarter Energy kicks-off

Yesterday I visited Mount Sackville primary school to help get them started on their Smarter Energy project for the BT Young Scientist &Technology Exhibition. I introduced them to the concepts behind the IBM Smarter Planet campaign using a set of slides that had been specially adapted to be understandable by that age group. I was delighted to see that they had no trouble in understanding the message.  They were very enthusiastic and seemed excited to be involved.

I also helped them use the lighting efficiency tester that I developed as part of the recent Hackday to measure the efficiency of a number of different types of light bulbs. The device was very popular. Children of that age love to get hands-on with technology (actually when I think about it men in their late 40s still love to get hands on with technology).

My colleague Fred Raguillat joined me for the visit because he has experience from running a similar project with Dunboyne national school. After we left the class we configured the Current Cost meters that they are going to be using to monitor their electricity usage for the duration of the project. All went smoothly, once we figured out how to work around a problem with the bridge not interacting properly with the DHCP server on their network.

I look forward to seeing their results at the exhibition in January.

Where did you hear about Steve Jobs passing away?

People of a certain generation always remember where they were when they first heard the news that John F Kennedy had been assassinated. I was only 14 months old when JFK passed away, but I still know where I was when the news came through because my father said that he had just come home from work and I was sitting on his lap when he turned on the TV news.

Hearing about the passing of JFK was a real shocking moment for Irish Americans of my father's generation. In many ways the passing of Steve Jobs was an equally tragic moment for geeks of my generation. Apple computers was founded around when I was finishing up in secondary school and was learning about computers for the first time. When I was in college I followed with envy the exploits of the two Steves. I was personally more of a fan of Steve Wozniack than Steve Jobs, but I must admit that I would have loved to be more like either of these giants in the computer industry.

I use Google Listen application on my phone to listen to a selection of Podcasts on my commute to and from work. On Thursday morning I was reviewing the podcasts that had been downloaded overnight to see which I should add to my Listen queue when I noticed that the TWiT network had just published a Steve Jobs Special episode. I suspected that the reason for the special episode was because he passed away, so added the episode to my Listen queue and then I checked the RTE news app to see that there was indeed a short story about Steve passing losing his battle with cancer..

Listening to the show was a great review of a wonderful life. Steve Jobs was 7 years older than me and Steve Wozniack was a further 5 years older than him, but their growing up closely mirrored my growing up and the growing up of the computer industry. I know Steve Jobs would have probably preferred if I had been listening to the program on an iPhone rather than on an Android phone, but it was nevertheless a tribute to his contribution to the change in the computer industry that I was getting my news through a podcast from the other side of the globe rather than a local TV or Radio program.

Why the colour of you USB connectors does matter

Recently I was one of the lucky IBM staff who received an updated Laptop. The current policy is to supply software developers with a W510 Lenovo Thinkpad. Unfortunately, the employees getting these new laptops have not been totally happy. While the laptops are very powerful and have impressive specifications, most people (including me) have experienced some problems. It seems the laptops do not work smoothly out of the box and the users need to spend some time updating their BIOS and device drivers to get their laptop working satisfactorily.

When I got the laptop first, one of the things that puzzled me was the fact that two of the USB connectors at the side were blue while the third one at the back was yellow. Initially I thought this was simply a matter of aesthetics, but after a while I noticed that some devices behaved differently depending upon which colour port I plugged my device into.

I did a little bit of research on the internet and it seems that this is not just an arbitrary colour scheme. The blue USB ports implement the new USB 3.0 standard. Although this new standard offers the promise of dramatic increases in speed, there are not many devices in the market yet which use this standard. While USB 3.0 should be mostly backward compatible with USB 2.0, the yellow USB 2.0 port is supplied just in case there are any incompatibilities. In addition, the yellow connectors also have a neat feature in that they allow you charge up you USB devices even when the laptop is turned off (see here for details).

Many people seem confused by the different port colour and not everyone sees exactly the same behavior depending upon their BIOS configuration  (e.g. this query in the Lenovo forum). My own personal observations are as follows (your own mileage may vary):

• If I have a USB mouse or keyboard plugged into the blue USB port when I turn on the laptop it will fail the power on self test. However, if I plug a USB mouse or keyboard into these ports after the laptop has booted they will work fine.
• If I have a bootable USB key the laptop will only boot from it if it is plugged into the yellow USB port.
• My mobile phone can be charged from any of the USB ports, but it seems to charge up much quicker when I plug it into the yellow port as compared to when I plug it into a blue port (this seems to conflict with some information on the web which implies that USB 3.0 has higher power capabilities)