Example: Compress and split a Parallels Image into 1Gb chunks

At the command prompt type:

tar -cvf – path-to-your-file | gzip | split -b 1024m – path-to-where-to-save-the-chunks/prefix

You can change the split size to any size you want, just specify the size in megabytes :1024m is 1GB, 2048m is 2GB, etc.

The files are compressed into chunks as shown below. In this case the files are compressed and split into 1GB chunks, named with the prefix ‘image’ and appended with -aa, -ab etc to denote which part of the sequence of chunks the files is in.

To extract the chunks back into the original file(s)

Make sure you are in the same folder as the all chunks

At the command prompt type:

cat * | gunzip | tar -xvf -

The files will then be extracted from the chunks.

Recently a friend offered me £220 for my 11 month old iPad2 so that I could get a new iPad. I was really tempted since that meant that I would only have to find £179.00 to buy a 16GB new iPad. I popped down to my local Apple store to take a look at the awesome retina display and see the performance increase before I parted with my cash.
I was somewhat disappointed to find that the retina display update, whilst an exciting additional feature, was not enough to make a major difference to the user experience.
OK I know my eyes aren’t the best these days after 20 years looking at a computer screen, but you can only really see the difference when using the web browser and zooming in close so that you can see the smoothed fonts.

Battery life

I have now heard that the battery takes 6+ hours to fully charge, that’s more than the iPad2’s 3-4. The new iPad still has a dual core processor, albeit more powerful. The quad core graphics chip seems impressive however.

Retina Bloat

Another problem is that I can see that all apps, especially games, are going to balloon in size due to the graphic assets needed to support the high resolution display. Some are saying that it is now pointless to buy a 16Gb iPad since it won’t take many apps to fill up the memory. The amount of apps that have had retina updates released recently is proving my point.
Here is a table of recent iPad2 and new iPad app sizes:

source

Bring on the ‘new new iPad’

A nice as it would be to have a shiny new iPad I can’t justify spending the money for not much of an upgrade. If they were to have brought Siri out for the iPad then maybe that would have been a different story and maybe they will do later this year when iOS 6 is released in June. Apple will certainly have to add more more servers to the already struggling Siri service.

Looks like the rule of thumb used by iPhone users to upgrade every other release is ringing true for iPad users too. Bring on the iPad 4, or do you think they will call it the ‘new new iPad’ !

The UK riots this recent week have been a terrible shock to all of us in civilised society. The pattern that these riots mainly involve youngsters of under the age of 21 has got me thinking.  My theory is that this era is the first time in the history of society that  youngsters have had access to smart phones. The apps on them like Facebook, Twitter and BBM are allowing them to form groups whereby their can share their ideas. This has never happened before in the history of society on such a wide scale.

I remember seeing a reality TV show years ago whereby they put a group of youngsters in a house for a week and left them to their own devices. Surprisingly the result was chaotic with mess everywhere with many of the  rooms being trashed.  I think they had to stop the show in the end due to violence breaking out as the situation drifted towards feudal warfare.

This is not a very scientific study, my evidence being based on just one case, but conclusions can be drawn as follows: Youngsters left to their own devices have a disposition for anarchy, rule breaking and chaos. When presented with no rules they do not have the organisation or communications skills to create any. If you combine this with social networking tools so that a group of youngsters can share ideas and start to exert a new found voice, you have a dangerous mixture. What we are seeing with the riots in London, Manchester and beyond in the UK is a manifestation of youngsters tendency toward anarchistic behaviour all coordinated by social networking tools.

Unless government’s take steps to monitor the use of social networking tools, which is something none of us want, this could be the start of a worldwide phenomenon.

Regulation and monitoring is going to be difficult in the case of with  Blackberry Messenger (BBM). If a user creates a pin and then asks their friend to type that pin into BBM then they have a bidirectional fully encrypted messaging system that is not trivial to crack. The system uses a strong encryption method and would take considerable brute force computing horsepower to crack even one message. If a new movement of anarchists move towards the Blackberry platform with a view to using BBM to co-ordinate themselves, society is going to have a major problem on it’s hands.

Edit - Ofcom says that 37 per cent of the smartphone market in poor urban areas is accounted for by BlackBerrys.

The launch of Google+ has certainly gone better than that of their last failed foray into social networking, Buzz. They have learned from the mistakes they made last time round and have shied away from forcing it on all Gmail users. The invitation only model they are currently using has created an aura of exclusivity around the product. This model was used by Spotify, the successful music subscription service that has recently launched in the US, after gaining over 1 million paying subscribers and 10 million users since it’s launch in Europe over the last few years. Rumour has it that Google+ gained over 20 million subscribers in it’s first 3 weeks of launch.

Openness is key
A common question I am being asked by my fellow Google plussers is ‘what do I think of Google’s latest attempt at world domination?’ Well I don’t think that is their aim for Google+, not if we are to believe their ‘don’t be evil’ company motto. The stated ambition of Google is to organise the world’s information and social networking fits right into that slot. Google are certain to announce API’s to Google+ in the coming months and we can be sure that they will demonstrate their ambition to not be evil by allowing transparent import and export of your social graph. They are almost certain to support other open standards such as OpenID and Web Finger. This will allow users to define a definitive web persona which could allow interoperability of social graph information between the popular social networks. If this happens then it will surely shame Facebook into doing the same and if so we will at last be able to:

• Post from any device and allow it to be federated to friends/circles/followers social network of choice.
• Own our own data e.g. posts,  images and social graph.

I suspect that social networks that do not conform to these standards may have their days numbered.

I’m looking forward to being able to use the Google+ API’s. Lets play it forward 6 months and think about the ways it could be used.  Just imagine if you could programmatically access a social circle via a mobile app. I can see the day when we have apps that let us send quick response messages, images or even video to circles. Mobile hangouts are going to be an awesome feature – when it comes! There will be many new innovations in this area, so watch this space.

When the ‘new car smell’ wears off Google+ lets hope it has gained enough traction to remain the social networking platform of choice and not just for the early adopters.

Keith Stephens is a technology blogger and software developer, working for ITRM.