iPhone rocks, but looking forward to new revisions

So I got my iPhone activated two days ago. It is excellent as everyone says. Its also not prohibitively large compared to my old Nokia 6230.

One very interesting thing I find is that because it is so good, you expect it to be perfect. You expect so much more out of it than you did for previous phones, not so much because of the hype but because it is much more like a personal computer than a phone.

As a result there are lots of things you can do now that you couldn’t do before easily, but a lot of desktop-OS glue is missing. For example:

• Mail does not show/allow flagging even for IMAP mails that already have it.
• Mail does not have a search facility
• Mail does not have a junk filter (understandable… but problematic means you need it on your server now)
• Mail does not work in landscape mode.
• Mail always top-posts
• No copy and paste – e.g. can’t get links from Safari into an e-mail you are sending
• No multiselection in any of the apps, i.e. tracks or emails or bookmarks. Easily done as the paradigm for this is set with the "Edit" button in Mail – an alternate list view that does not show items when clicked but allows actions to be performed on them
• No apparent way to delete photos from the "Film roll"
• No ringtones available in UK iTunes Music Store (?!)

Other pet peeves so far is the inability to put DivX videos into it even though Quicktime+iTunes play them on the desktop, and the complete lack of SMS distribution lists, Bluetooth OBEX for exchanging vCards and no Bluetooth GSM Modem.

Don’t get me wrong, the phone is a quantum leap and I love it. It’s just interesting that they put it out with so many standard phone features missing. Hooray for updates is all I can say… let’s hope there are some good ones in the pipeline.

Dillinger Escape Plan “Ire Works”

I have just spent 6 hours in the car driving to and from London. I listened to Ire Works, Dillinger Escape Plan’ new album no less than four times, three times back to back. It has completely blown my mind. It is just unbelievable. There are some reviews out there that say its no progression from the previous, "Miss Machine" but they are just fuckin’ naysayers man!

I always find their stuff hard to assimilate at first, but after four or five listens I’m in. This album is much more detailed than previous stuff. Lots of little scratches and buzzes buried in there, and my oh my Gil Sharone on drums is just insane. I thought Pennie leaving was a disaster, and Pennie is an amazing drummer, but Sharone has more of a groove rather than being completely robotic.

"When acting as a wave" is just stunningly spastic – check out the drum’n'bass sinewave bombs (you’ll need it loud with decent sized speakers) in that track, they had me laughing out loud in the car when I noticed them. "Horse Hunter" is just completely mayhem for the first 20s or so, how they do it I do not know. The final track is the biggest surprise… latin rhythms in metal? You bet. It shouldn’t work at all but oh my god it does. Possibly the best track on the album.

Get it. Listen to it loud. At least FIVE times before you make any judgement.

Thank you Ben Weinman and co.

The madness of teaching 4 year olds phonics, reading and writing

Sometimes you just feel like the whole world is going mad. How did we end up here?

In the last few weeks there has been a storm brewing. It turns out that in 2006 the UK Labour government introduced the Childcare Act 2006 which no doubt includes some sound aims.

In it however, it includes a duty to implement the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. What this does is legally require providers of care/teaching to 4-5 year olds to lead them in adult led play and teaching to learn the basics of reading, writing and phonics, from age FOUR.

My four year old daughter is currently very happy doing NONE of this and I am very happy that it is this way currently. Childhood, it seems, where you are free to play and hence free to learn according to your desires and abilities, ends at 4 according to the government.

"We… must… produce…. more…. robots…." I can hear them thinking it. "More parents at work!" "Start teaching the children when they are babies they need a head (Sure) start". "Boost productivity!" "Increase GDP!" "Fight off the threat from China!"

What a load of utter nonsense. There are going to be a lot of seriously outraged parents writing to a lot of MPs and a lot of very well respected, long established, and good-performing schools threatened with closure unless the government realises that it cannot dictate to everybody how their children are educated when there is no evidence of any problem.

With this in mind, I have started the Save Childhood website with a view to organizing campaigning around this theme of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and maybe in future the longer term issues with assessment and testing in later years, and the frankly horrendous proposal to fine children who are not in further education or training if they have left school before 18.

Alastair Darling… I left school at 16 willingly, to work full time. How dare you propose that I would not be able to do the same again if I were a child now – shame on you.

Testing controllers with command objects

Since Grails 1.0-RC1 it has been trivial to test controller actions that use command objects. You just supply parameters to the request and it will automatically do the command object work for you when you call your action with no parameters:

Given a controller using a command object:

class AuthenticationController {  def signup = { SignupForm form -> ..... }}

You can then test it like this:

def controller = new AuthenticationController()controller.params.login = 'marcpalmer'controller.params.password = 'secret'controller.params.passwordConfirm = 'secret'controller.signup()

Grails automagically sees your call to signup() as a call to the action and populates the command object from the mocked request parameters. During controller testing, the params are mutable with a mocked request supplied by Grails.