My iPad News folder has ABC iView (good for catching up on Q&A) and my Media folder has TED, Wired and Adult Swim (good for catching up on Robot Chicken and Morel Orel). I use 2Screens for displaying powerpoint via my ipad to VGA adapter, it integrates with some cloud storage providers and can output web pages, videos, web pages (including HTML5) to the VGA out cable. There are very few apps which do this BTW.

Osforra HD is my current twitter client of choice, I use MobileRSS as my RSS reader and Amazon WindowShop is my latest discovery for browsing Amazon and buying new kindle titles, updating my wishlist and looking for reviews. Essentially the bulk of these applications allow me to pull information from the Internet and interact in a minor way.

But what about creating documents, editing business files and replacing my heavy MacBook Pro with a much lighter iPad? Is it possible to travel with just an iPad?

I’m yet to find an app which allows me to create a folder for a meeting inside a client folder (‘client A/2011 03/05 – discussion on requirements’ for example) in which I can store word documents, powerpoint slides, PDFs and photos as well as create new files for notes (which might be typed, spoken or drawn). And what about actually editing documents?

DropBox goes SO CLOSE to this allowing me to add videos or photos, but not edit, create or upload a document. Evernote could solve the creation of notes issue by adding DropBox support I guess, and that’s something I’ll take up with them.

What if you want to edit a Microsoft word doc or powerpoint slide?

Microsoft products have always had a difficult time with Apple products. Even the Microsoft produced Office for Mac has serious shortcomings in terms of cross compatibility and on the iPad you’re left in an even worse situation. On my Linux desktop it’s worse again; I run a whole Virtual Machine inside my Ubuntu 64 desktop so I can run Microsoft Office (don’t get me started on OpenOffice, it sucks for many of the same reasons I’m about to talk about).

Face it, unless you’ve created your document in Apple’s iPad app iPages from scratch, and don’t need to share it anywhere else other than Apple’s iWork suite (with massive limitations), iPad is all candy and no roughage. Read this fanboi review and then continue onto the comments for real world feedback.

Some of the issues importing Word Documents into iPages include:

• maintaining fonts (you can’t install fonts on your iPad) so massive font swapping takes place
• font sizes get mangled
• tabs and indents appear to be converted to wrapping text, all merged cells are unmerged
• background images (of any type) are removed
• background text linked to headers and footers may get moved
• table styles are rearanged and sometimes collapsed
• all 3D objects (charts, for example) get changed to 2D
• document tracking doesn’t exist, no tracked changes are maintained
• all document links (except web links) are removed
• text background colour isn’t maintained
• there’s no save as, so any change you make over writes your document with your new iPages formatting

Microsoft, together with a large number of other companies including Citrix and Google, would have us believe that the hardware you’re using to access the Internet and your files is slowly becoming irrelevant. The idea is that you will be able to access your documents from anywhere with any device, which includes your iPad, your iPhone, your Adroid tablet, your desktop computer or a public Internet connected kiosk.

This Microsoft ad is focused on Windows 7, but really they could be advertising Google Apps (multiple people can work on the same document at the same time) or some other shared folder solution (like, well, dropbox). The concept of accessing the rich environment of Microsoft Office word documents, powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets is what I’m trying to highlight here.

Does anyone else think the other waiter in the restaurant looks just a bit too similar to the ‘I’m a Mac’ guy? And with the “can I come?” question maybe Microsoft is hinting that the future of cloud may not include devices which have an Apple badge on them?

Actually I think this is partially true, Microsoft have released exactly five iPhone apps and only two of them are useful. None of them allow Microsoft Office functionality, although OneNote for iPhone allows syncing of data back into a Microsoft product on the desktop (via the cloud, of course). And the Android environment isn’t any better.

There are no iPad apps written by Microsoft Corporation at this time of this blog post although there are rumours there are iPad apps coming. Accessing Microsoft cloud storage is possible however, using a client which will link to Microsoft SkyDrive or Microsoft Live Mesh like iSMEStorage. This allows you to download a file and open it but you’re still restricted by how iPad apps import (or view) Microsoft Office files.

So what’s the solution? Perhaps you need to take your application into the cloud as well as your data? The tech term which refers to this change of where the application (Microsoft Word, for instance) is run, is called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

The idea is simple.

Install one application on your iPad, iPhone, Android tablet, Ubuntu linux desktop, Windows 7 desktop, Vista desktop, Windows95 desktop, or your Mac (other operating systems are also covered) and that application connects you to a remote server which runs your windows desktop with all the applications you need. This application is often called a ‘receiver’ and is hardware independent (yes, it’ll run on an iPad2).

Companies like Citrix, VMWare and Microsoft already provide the tools to create this environment, and companies like Enspire here in Australia have implemented an example called GoDesktop. Respectively it’s Citrix XenDesktop, VMWare View and Microsoft Desktop Virtualisation. While it’s a bit of a sales pitch, the following video is a good example of how it all works.

In the wild it’s a very similar experience. I logged onto the Enspire website and signed up for a demo account. Tiffany from Enspire got back to me within a few hours and provided me with a username and password. GoDesktop uses a Citrix XenDesktop environment, and I already had the Citrix Receiver software loaded on my iPad. I fired up safari and browsed to www.godesktop.com.au.

Once I logged in, I clicked on the ‘desktop’ icon and was prompted to open the Citrix ICA file in my iPad Citrix Receiver software. I was automatically logged into a Windows 7 image, with Microsoft Office pre-installed. Simple!

Using the Citrix Receiver to navigate is pretty straightforward once you get used to it, I especially like the three finger tap to bring up the keyboard and take it away. I found using Microsoft Word easy, and using the web interface to my cloud storage could easily download files and save them again in an environment which maintained the formatting of my Word and Powerpoint files.

The citrix receiver has help built into the application, such as the following.

And what about speed I hear you ask? The below is taken at Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building using a Telstra NextG connection via bluetooth from my iPad to my iPhone. And it worked just fine.

To the cloud!

(follow up: if you’d like some help looking at solutions such as GoDesktop please drop me a note or leave a comment, I’d be happy to assist.)

The theme for 2011 is: “The Cloud: Silver Lining or Storm?”

No one can take full advantage of cloud computing without first becoming familiar with the latest issues and trends. The 2011 SAGE-AU Conference will ensure – through an intensive five-day schedule of training workshops, keynotes, general and breakout sessions, and the trade exhibition – that all attendees leave with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging the Cloud, helping them to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scalability of their endeavours.

Some of the topics could include:

• Infrastructure Cloud
• Software Cloud
• Application Cloud
• Business Cloud
• Service-Oriented Architecture in Cloud Computing
• Virtualization of Hardware Resources
• Virtualization of Software Resources
• Cloud Computing Consulting Methods
• Design Tool for Cloud Computing
• Maintenance and Management of Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing Architecture
• Cloud Applications in Vertical Industries

This year’s conference although focussing heavily on cloud computing, could also feature:

• Benefits of / interactions with / impacts of standards based frameworks such as ITIL / COBIT / ISO/IEC 20000 on the world of SysAdmins.
• MS SharePoint, Active Directory, SQL 2008
• AD upgrades from 2003/2008, Windows 7 and Office 2010 mass deployments
• Disaster Recovery / BCP
• Grid
• Power, cooling, and other physical issues
• Cyber Security

In addition, do you have a case study to share which doesn’t exactly fit the topics above? Whatever it is, we would like to hear about it.

Your presentation/talk should be designed to fit within the parameters of the following:

Training Program (Tutorials) 19-21 September

• Three days of training workshops
• Three concurrent streams.
• Three hours (half day) or six hours (full day) in length each.
• Optional Vendor training sessions for SAGE-AU sponsors

Technical Program 22-23 September

• Two concurrent streams of 45 and 90 minute presentations (although extended 90 minute sessions are limited).
• Keynote sessions featuring world acclaimed presenters.

Contact me for more information including the Presenter information pack and Conference Guidelines.

I made the mistake of updating iTunes and when I plugged my iPhone 3GS in iTunes decided I needed to either blow away everything on my iPhone and start afresh, or restore from the last backup (which was yesterday, before I installed the iTunes update).

That was 9am this morning.

And so we wait.

There are many great dive locations in Sydney and the water is generally between 13C (August) and 25C (depending on the currents, December to March). When in the Eastern Suburbs North Bondi and Shark Point at Clovelly were easily my top dives and night diving at Camp Cove, Fairlight and Watsons Bay Pool were also favourites.

“Night diving? In the dark?” you ask. Sure! All you need is a little light! In fact the world of shallow night diving (to about 15m) is rich in weird animals, bioluminescence and night time only behaviours. Tens of 10cm wide sea slugs marching in squadron formation across the sand in search of sea grass, seahorses swimming with each other, squid feeding on small fish they catch using herding techniques and anemones using their tentacles to catch tiny plankton and other matter floating by.

Of course to see all of this you need a torch, and in the same way I need to have my tanks serviced once per year I generally update my dive torch every couple of years. My last torch had already seen its last dive (xeon bulb, could only be turned on underwater because it got so hot, eventually the batteries leaked) so I decided to upgrade to the latest in underwater diving torches, something with an LED bulb and made of aluminium.

There are quite a few excellent online dive shops and my local FrogDive also sells gear at reasonable prices. Looking through the options, I wondered whether the $150 torch was any different to the $99 torch, and so I hopped over to www.amazon.com for some reviews.

It should come as no surprise that Amazon had a range of underwater torches and after much reading and comparing of statistics I found the torch I wanted; a Dorcy Dive II, 220 lumen underwater torch with an 8 hour run time and guaranteed to 100m. Available from two sellers, it was on special for $45USD. Perfect!

Except, not so perfect. For no reason at all Amazon (who blame Dorcy) have decided that this particular torch (unlike other diving torches, or other normal torches in fact) can’t be delivered internationally. In a response from the very prompt Amazon customer service team I was told I could have the torch delivered to a friend in the US, and then they could send the torch to me. Their second suggestion was to find a different torch I might like to buy, and included a link to

amazonglobal.com

This amazon.com entry point is for international customers who wish to search only for items which can be shipped internationally (although Amazon doesn’t remember this setting, so bookmark amazonglobal.com now).

Essentially it adds an ‘International Shipping’ option to the ‘Department’ pull down box. A quick check for a couple of interesting items (such as the awesome but illegal in many many ways Stone River Gear SRG1STLB Ceramic Folding Hunting Knife with evasive to x-ray Titanium handle) saw Amazon successfully filter out items which it couldn’t ship.

And there were very few things on the Post Apocalyptic Survival Kit (for after the zombies attack) I could buy. Not even the ultra cool Wiley-X SG-1 safety goggles were available, which is a shame because as a piece of protection equipment (protection from the sun, shrapnel, the occasional splattered zombie, exploding zombie, popping zombie, spittling zombie, and if the government decides to nuke a nearby city, your eyes wont get harmed by the flash) they rock.

Still wanting the Dorcy torch (the non-diving version of the same torch is number 13 of Amazon’s Top 100 Internationally shippable items) I did a search for Dorcy in Australia and found they have a local distributor…. who doesn’t carry the dive torch. I think this is a little stupid for a country which has the longest tropical reef in the world and a very healthy scuba diving industry… but I digress.

Eventually I found the torch at another US site which is happy to ship internationally and it was only a few dollars more than Amazon. It’s scheduled to arrive mid next week, which is better than my last Amazon order which had an expected delivery time of 2 months (and the items were in stock!).

So what other online buying tips do I have?

Well, to summarise my points above my first three suggestions are:

1. Amazon is a great place to find your item, and reviews can be very helpful but look for ‘Other Sellers’ as some of these non-Amazon stores have no problem shipping internationally and will ship immediately.
2. It’s worthwhile making sure the deal you’re getting online is better than the deal you can get locally. It’s often the case shipping or a currency conversion impacts the total cost. Buying things from eBay (and being forced to use PayPal) adds extra complexity as PayPal makes money out of the transfer as well. In almost all cases JB hifi will be a cheaper place to buy that DVD you’be seen on eBay.
3. Don’t go looking for items which you know are restricted, the Australian Customs site has very clear documentation for almost every kind of restricted item and if you convince a seller to send that crossbow you’ve always wanted don’t be surprised to have it confiscated and possible criminal charges brought against you! Obviously any food products are out and alcohol importation is a whole world of pain.

Keeping those things in mind, the way you pay for an item doesn’t need to be restricted to your Australian credit card, PayPal or a direct bank transfer.

One way of dealing with exchange rate fluctuations is to use a travel money card (available at ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, TravelEx, and many other places) which allows you to hold a specific amount on a MasterCard debit card, and transact in up to 5 currencies. I hold Euro for my European trips and USD for the purchase of highly critical tools of trade (that’s how I got the dive torch past the wife, although I’m not sure she completely fell for that line).

Transfers from your Australian dollar bank account into the Travel Money card in US dollars are done via bpay with a small fee, and then you provide the Travel Money mastercard number when purchasing. So when the Australian dollar is strong against the Euro, I transfer some currency over and count it towards ‘holiday savings’ or ‘toys seen on coolhunting.com‘.

Having a fixed amount on the card also limits any serious ‘over charging’ (your maximum loss is just the value you have loaded on the card), and you can simply cancel the card if you find yourself the victim of credit card fraud without affecting all your automated credit card payments from your regular credit card accounts.

Other payment vehicles to look at include GoogleCheckout. I quite like GoogleCheckout as it keeps track of all your orders, fronts the payment with the store (so if you’re using a credit card the store doesn’t accept GoogleCheckout will allow you to use the card with Google, and pass the payment through) and there’s a certain amount of protection included.  Using GoogleCheckout your credit card details are never provided to the store, and assuming you’re ok with Google having those details, there’s less chance of your credit card being compromised.

Finally, it’s well worth your while going a quick search for coupons when buying items in the US. Many sites have ‘seasonal specials’ and ‘clearance items’ but coupons may give you that extra 5% (or even 25%) to compensate for delivery. couponchief.com is one I use a fair bit, and http://www.retailmenot.com/ is often exceptionally current (old codes usually don’t work so they key is to be ultra-recent).

Got any tips for buying safely and cheaply online?

And find that old friend the moon.

Close your eyes and hear the chink of a toast

With beer bottles or that special wine

Ricocheted half way around the world

From us to you.

-

Luck and courage guide you well, and your postcards

Are annotated with wild stories, amazing people you’ve met

And walking around the old cathedral in the rain.

-

Soon though things strike up a memory of home

Pottery galahs at a market in Spain, gum trees flowering in SanFran

You take photos and post them to flickr with the comment

‘All this seems a bit out of place’.

-

You tire of short days and remember

Daylight savings at the beach and watching the ocean till 8.

Foreign places become alien, tea tastes sour and while the

Louvre has many special things, you miss your own sheets

Your own pillow, checking the mailbox and watering the garden.

-

We’re waiting for you, I’m out the back cooking salmon

On the BBQ. Walk up the side, mind the gate it’s getting rusty

‘Hey it’s our traveler returned to us, would you like a drink?’

There’s the chink of a toast from beer bottles and

Someone has a special wine to share

-

‘Where are you off to next?’

Some say the delicate leaves of

Having a few odds and ends which I knew worked 100% got me and the company I was working for out of a lot of tight spots.

Since then I’ve always held onto a few things which have proven useful regardless of the job I was doing- a 3G data USB stick for when Internet connectivity wasn’t available (or wasn’t allowed due to security policies) and I was doing a live demo, or a range of serial headshell adapters (colour coded for straight thru, console cross, cisco console, etc) and a USB serial dongle for when I was supervising the install of an appliance. The serial cable almost always goes missing and few laptops have a built-in physical serial port these days.

At certain points in my career the “extra” stuff in my laptop bag weighed more than the laptop (think about this, 10 years ago laptops were *heavy*) and even today in my largely ‘hands-off’ consulting role today my extra adapters/cables/security locks and other technologies fill the side pockets of an average laptop bag.

But what do I take with me when I travel for holidays?

Well the 3G data USB stick still travels with me almost everywhere; most countries now offer a prepaid data SIM which gives you 3G data access without having to pay (through the nose) for hotel wifi and here in Australia I have a number of SIMs which I can charge as I need to (avoiding networks which have lacklustre coverage for example). I’m finding myself using more Telstra (expensive but great coverage) and less Vodafone/Three (cheap with very flexible network capabilities for incoming connections) these days.

Recently while in Belgium the hotel wifi was 29 euro a day on a 64k connection with a daily bandwidth limit, and a local prepaid 3G data SIM was 12 euro for 2Gb of data at 3G speeds and a 30 day expiry. The deal is largely the same in the USA, New Zealand, France and Germany- and I’m sure many other places.

I travel with a notebook (MacBook pro running linux), an iPad and my iPhone so if I want all of these devices connected at the same time (or I want to stream from my notebook to my iPad to watch movies using AirVideo) I need a travel router which accepts a 3G USB dongle and has wifi. Luckily there are now a number of them on the market.

The one I have is the netcomm T1 travel router which suits me as it’s very light, supports a very wide range of USB dongles, is battery powered (you get about 4 hours and a second battery is easily found at Battery World), has a WAN link fallback and the wifi-n is secured.

Playing movies and watching your own content brings me to my other device- a universal remote control. Over the last few years hotel chains have realised that people connect their laptops to hotel room TV’s and watch their own content, instead of the (crappy) free to air or (even crappier and often expensive) PayTV. So many hotels have gimped the TV so you can’t select the AV input with the remote in the room. You can’t always avoid these hotels (although I try to) and staff often don’t have any idea about the TV when you ask.

This is where a universal remote comes into play. Mine is a 55x35mm device which plugs into my iPhone or iPad and the application (from iTunes) has lots and lots of remote control settings built in. So no more fiddling with the hotel room remote, simply set the app for the TV in your room (fiddle a bit with the settings), plug your video cable into the TV and select AV on the universal remote. Done.

Controlling the sound at the local RSL, the channel in the pub or turning every X-brand TV off in a department store can be fun too.

Power.

Some airlines offer in-seat power to all passengers (how it should be) but there are still airlines who would rather you buy your seat, buy your food, buy your entertainment and pay for any baggage you’re taking. If you want power you need to be in business class or First. No names, of course. Sometimes you can’t choose your airline though (or you’re on the train) so you need extra power options for your iPhone and/or iPad.

The solution for the iPhone is simple- almost any external iPod battery like the Cygnett GroovePower Now. It offers another couple of hours of charge for an iPod or iPhone. I have two of them.

Unfortunately the iPad requires a “high-power” connection (more than 1100mA at 5V) so the Cygnett doesn’t cut it. Enter the HyperMac Micro.

With a 5V/2.1A USB port it offers 5 extra hours on your iPad or can fully recharge the iPhone 3 times. As the charging port is a USB port, it will also change mobile phones, my travel router and anything else which needs USB style charging. What’s more it’s amazingly lightweight.

A mate of mine in the UK put me onto the HyperMac Micro, so I should thank him.

A good security lock with a key lives in my computer bag, and I think it’s a pity there’s no room for a little security hole on the iPad (although it fits nicely in most hotel safes). I also usually travel with a power board, as many hotels and rooms have power on only one wall, or there is only a single point near the desk.

So what am I missing?

Well I’d like a micro projector but the quality of most of the low end ones (ie, cheaper models) appears dubious. A speaker system is the other thing I’d like, and the recently announced Razor Ferox look like they might be a good choice. There’s little worse than having to run your iPod through the TV just to get music in your room.

They might be a little heavy however, which is always a consideration when traveling. For that database backup I now carry a 750Gb firewire+USB2 external hard drive as well as a number of 16Gb and 32Gb USB drives.

What else am I missing?