So many applications can’t (or won’t) be installed to SD Card. It doesn’t take long before one needs to uninstall applications to make space for updates or other apps. Crazy really.

It’s not like it would add ‘that much’ to the cost. grrrrrr……

So what are your options here if you want to do some F#? You can (a) Buy a commercial version of vs2010; or (b) use VS2010 Shell (integrated) and the F# August CTP.

The VS2010 Shell is basically just an empty shell for visual studio that comes with no languages and very basic functionality. Read more about it on the download site. It’s also free. The F# Aug CTP provides a language integration with F#. Simples.

Instructions:

If you have an expired demo of VS2010, uninstall it, then download the VS2010 shell. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8E5AA7B6-8436-43F0-B778-00C3BCA733D3&displaylang=en. Install it.

Get and install the F# August 2010 CTP. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f8c623ae-aef6-4a06-a185-05f59be47d67&displaylang=en . (Note you will need to uninstall all traces of previous F# and F# CTPs or it will complain and refuse to install).

That’s it!  You should now be able to use F# as per VS2010 Professional.  In a sense this is probably better than Visual Studio 2010 F# Express … if it actually existed!

Note that if you already have VS2010 (i.e. a commercial version) you don’t need to do any of the above as you should have F# working fine already.

Fortunately (very), Izzo are quite renowned for building these machines using quite standard parts. As such I’ve been able to do my own repairs with minimal fuss.   So while it’s annoying that things go wrong, its reassuring to know that most of the bits can be fixed at home. Now I’m hoping my boilers and pump are fine – those would be beyond my abilities!

So what went wrong? I thought I’d document the symptoms and solutions here. Most of these are quite common, so I hope this helps someone.

Firstly:

Please note that this post conveys no warranty. Do your own repairs at your OWN risk and always remember to switch off and disconnect the power.  I am no expert and this is merely a summary of what I did.  When in doubt – ask your machine’s vendor or get it repaired by a professional.  I accept no responsibility for any injury to you or your property based on your use of the material in this post.  Please also note that doing these repairs at home under warranty would likely void your warranty!

Issue One: Steam Pressure needs a kick start

For this problem the symptoms are quite obvious. You get the machine fully up to operating temperature and pressure. Pull a shot (fine) and then go to steam some milk. The steam pressure (which is showing as being ‘in the green’) suddenly drops to zero and the boiler switches on.  Steam pressure rises again and this time it’s real pressure not a trapped pocket giving a false reading and tricking the pressure stat.

The solution: Clean / descale or replace the thermo-breaker. This is very easy to do. The part costs less than £10 also. I still get this intermittently but it’s not a critical issue – but it is fairly easy to sort out should you need to.

Issue Two: Hissing Sounds inside the machine

One day after a pretty big and aggressive descaling operation I noticed a hissing sound coming from the internals of the machine. Wonderful. Opening it up, I found a couple of leaks. One on the steam tap inlet – which also was dripping on the electronics(!) and ultimately shorted out my whole house! – which i fixed by tightening -  and another on the security valve.

In the pic below you can see the original security valve. The big long protrusion from the steam boiler. Notice all the green copper tinge on the boiler. That’s the oxidisation effect from water spraying all over the copper / bronze.

The valve was leaking from a point in the little oblong vents at the bottom.

A machine can work with this fault but not efficiently and It’s never a good idea to let such things go.

Replacing the valve was very easy. It came out with minimal force and the replacement was quite cheap.

The replaced valve can be seen in the following image:

Notice it is different – a new model valve. To it’s immediate left in the picture is the thermo-breaker from issue one.

Problem solved…. for now!

Issue Three: Steam pressure at max! Security valve kicks in!

The next issue to assail me was to suddenly hear what sounded like a huge steam expulsion from my machine – think really loud steam pressure hissing – water going everywhere!  My new security valve had done it’s job and was releasing pressure from the small bomb known as the steam boiler. You can imagine what might happen should this not work properly!

This problem manifested in a most non-subtle way and I was at a point where I considered sending it in for repairs.

Fortunately, doing some research and consulting Bella Barista, I realised it was the pressure-stat (pstat for short). This device monitors pressure and tells a solid state relay (SSR)  if it should switch the steam boiler on to get the pressure up to a configured point. In my case the pstat failed, and was happy to tell the steam boiler to keep on going until max pressure was hit.  At this point, it literally ‘let of steam’ in a quite violent and loud manner.

In the new (Mark II) Duetto the pstat configuration is quite different and apparently much harder to repair, (it’s inline), but  fortunately in this case it was quite straight forward. In the pic below, the pstat is the part at the front with the cables coming into it from the right.

Unlike the other connections, the factory doesn’t use tape to seal this part. Instead it uses a thread-lock style glue so it is very hard to get this off – and you MUST be careful as it is attached to quite thin, and very soft copper / brass tubing.  There are few options here other than plain brute force applied in a sensible fashion!.

First I disconnected the power – I have learnt the hard way for not doing this in the past!

Using two size 17 wrenches – one with a thin head and the other with a standard head – and turning in opposite directions I could get the required torque to break the seal and get the bad pstat off.  Don’t bother trying to use one wrench or your hands. It’s damn near impossible.

Whenever replacing any of these items use Teflon tape or similar to ensure that a) the seals are good and b) if you should need to replace these again they are easy to remove and less likely to get fixed by scale.

A new pstat cost about £18 and was very easy to replace once the old one was off.  Just make sure to get the connections on the right way!

When the new pstat is replaced,  ensure you can access the top of the pstat with a flat head screw driver. Notice the round bit on top on the pstat.

You can turn it with a screwdriver and it configures the pressure level for the boiler. You need to fire up the machine and see where it ends up. Mine was still over pressure – that is past the green section and into the red. Wind it back, let off some steam, then let the boiler kick back in. It will settle at a new setting. Keep this up until you arrive at your correct steam pressure. Mine is approx 1.25 bar.  You should now be able to put everything back together again and enjoy your machine once more.

Summary….

Now I no longer have any of the above issues. Apparently these are quite common problems but they are simple and relatively inexpensive to sort out. The best way to avoid repairs is to keep your descaling schedule up – don’t let it slip like I did – especially in London or other extremely hard water areas. Scale is the mother of all evils for prosumer espresso machines.

I hope this helps someone.

So why so upset about the Android?  The friends I mentioned previously who had the HTC had all upgraded from fairly old ‘normal’ mobile phones. None had the IPhone, and most were sceptical of Apple and its ability to provide a good product for highly technical people. The Android, must be better because it is ‘open’.  Having had the IPhone myself, I immediately noticed a few clear problems:

You have to ‘manage’ the device. On Iphone I never had to switch off Wifi, GPS, 3G, Auto-Sync etc – EVER!.  Battery life was generally very good. With HTC and Android, it seems that if you leave any of the above items running you are likely to have to get a spare battery.  People tell you: ‘ Switch of this, that and then this and then that, then install a task-manager to auto-kill background processes and you won’t have a problem’. WTF!? I just want the thing to work! I don’t  want to have to manage it – or buy more apps to do it for me! It is truly a geek’s OS where they can tinker with it and love the fact that it is not as simple as for instance – the Iphone OS which ‘’Just works’. I don’t care that the iphone battery is not user accessible  – the thing works.

The User experience is very inconsistent, and unproductive. The Android OS is of course written on a Linux kernel. It appears to have been written by people with no user experience skills. There are several UI inconsistencies. It is non-obvious how to do simple tasks. also, you can’t control pretty much the whole phone with a single key + touch as with IPhone OS. You have about 4 mostly pointless buttons and a completely pointless joystick like toggle button in the middle (where you would have the immensely powerful iPhone single button normally).  After using an I phone – it is so obvious just how poor the UI is in comparison.  IPhone OS is consistent throughout, is almost always obvious in intent, is natural, fast and productive. Android + HTC Sense is definitely none of these things.

The Android App-Store is Dire! This is the thing that tipped things for me.  Comparing the Apps store on Apple, to the Android equivalent is like comparing a high end sports car to a second hand Hyundai.  Apple sets clear standards and doesn’t let any crap apps into the store – this is the ever criticised and so called ‘closed model’.   Android has no obvious standards – including copyright by the looks of things – and is full of poor quality and expensive applications.  The ‘open model’ seems to be just a way of saying ‘do what you want – we don’t care’. I can by a console quality game on Apple’s store for 59p – in fact i can buy many of them.  I could not see a single game – free or paid – on android that was worth even looking at.  The same goes for almost every other category.

The really good apps for Android seem to be almost exclusively written by Google. The Google apps are awesome and show what could be done on this OS. Unfortunately the Android store is full of junk – including many, many cheap knock offs of  popular iphone apps, and lots of dodgy wallpaper.  I downloaded a couple of reasonable looking free apps – and experienced Adware.  The so called ‘open model’ is a junk-yard.

The Multi-Tasking is a bit naff and the platform hardware is not fixed: Android multi-tasks in a similar way to a normal computer, with background services etc. The Iphone 4 and other models use a different strategy which is more battery friendly. They more or less freeze each app’s state when switching and prevent many things that circumvent the ‘closed’ nature of the model. Of course apple hard-ware is consistent – there are a few models and they ALL have the same hardware – so an app will not even get to the store if it chuggs on the Iphone.  With Android – there are no such requriements and there seems to be wide spread reports of lag. The hardware is progressing at a different rate to the OS – so there will be a huge amount of inconsistency in functionality and overall performance with this moving target.

I think anyone who has never experienced an Iphone would be happy with HTC/Android because you don’t see the sheer quality difference in apps.   If you’re using an Iphone – i would strongly suggest sticking with that model or considering the new Windows models.  Android is no-where near ready for prime time (imho) and is definitely not (yet) a general consumer OS. Geeks will love it of course! They first need to set some standards for apps – or it will fail miserably with a dumping ground of an app store.

The HTC Desire is a nice phone – the screen is i must say sensational. It is big and clear and responsive. You can tell that the Desire has some serious iphone 4 beating hardware behind it.  It is a pitty it is wasted on this OS. The battery issues are quite serious. Also the phone gets rather warm – i wonder if this is where my battery life is being spent. I have already mentioned the pointless buttons – but that is an android requirement so not HTC’s fault exactly.   The camera seems very good. Overall build quality seems rather plastic and flimsy – compared to the Iphone 4 which is a ‘very’ solid and quite heavy beast.

IPhone’s just work – and that will be why closed or otherwise, the Iphone will prevail over an inconsistent and non-general-consumer friendly platform like Android. I hope this OS get’s better in time – but even if it does, Android will not get far if its apps are so far below the quality of those offered for IPhone.

I wish I’d stayed with Apple   I would actually prefer my dated Iphone 3G to this very pretty looking Brick known as an Android.

As you can see it’s also beautifully gloopy – superb mouth-feel.  I havent tasted a better single estate espresso and I’m wondering if i have tasted a better blended espresso… maybe not!

Get it while it lasts! Available at Hasbean.

I think this course sadly suffers from the curse of academics who don’t understand how things work in the real world. We go into infinite detail about mathematical methods and intricate time series models but as an experienced programmer, I know the way I learn technical models is to get the basis down and then pick up a book and learn the rest.  What this course lacks is practical relevance.

It’s not just how you value an option analytically which of course is very handy to know. But what about the rest. If I want to value interest rate options, what market data do I need? What are the different types of yield curves and market theories I need to know. To be honest they haven’t ever really sufficiently explained to the non-financial students what an option is!  This is of course not a difficult idea to teach but there has been minimal attention given to it. Instead we see highly analytical mathematical methods for analysing black scholes.  It’s all very fascinating but how many ways do you need to dissect that particular beast?

The bottom line is most people are not doing the course to learn how to solve the heat equation. They are doing the course to learn how to price and model derivatives in the real world. I’m not saying its not an important idea, but you would hope a course like this would want to balance the highly mathematical with the highly practical.  There seems to be a high bias towards the academic side, such that the academics can endow us with their own obsession towards pulling abstract models apart, rather than give us the tools to enter the real world and know what we are doing.

Then there is the econometric side. I quite like econometrics but it is a huge subject. I see little need to get bogged down in highly academic arguments at the lowest level. If you try to teach 100 things in extreme detail then most students will end up knowing a tiny bit about a lot of things, and feeling that they just didn’t pick up the detail of any one topic.  Is this the most efficient way to deliver a graduate course?

It would be far better to ensure students are highly confident to a high-intermediate level – with practical examples and exercises – rather than dumping huge volumes of ideas on them in a constant stream so they feel overwhelmed and unsure.  

Universities need to understand that they are not there to solely produce academics, or to show how good (aka tough) they are by having the lowest pass rates (something i am quite sure many UK universities espouse to).  Academics need to understand that they having paying customers who want value for their money – and this means listening to course feedback and to practitioners.  In many senses i can understand why governments hold back on education spending when universities are so inefficient in producing graduates with the ability to hit the ground running when they leave.  Universities need to enter the real world, ensure academics act professionally and that they are offering the types of courses that offer real value. How about the following course titles for example:

•  Applied financial engineering for instance??
• Applied Computational Finance
• Computational Derivatives Pricing

Any other ideas?? 

Finally, with the recent financial crisis, this also highlights that the models the academics are teaching are simply not good enough. There has to be a better way.

Hasbean have also now got one of my all time faves back in (2009-2010 crop) Brazil Fazenda Cachoeira. Must get me some of that as well.

hmmmmm coffeeee.

• DGML. I don’t know lots about this technology but it looks cool. Think a high utility platform for describing things (such as architecture) using directed graphs (DG’s). DG’s are very useful things – and have lots of nice properties – particularly in distributed computing. Looking forward to using DGML as I use directed graphs on a near daily basis.  I only heard about this feature when the RC came out and I am really happy i did!
• F# improvements. F# is looking like a real highlight of the 2010 release. Better support in general through the IDE as well as it just being a really cool and solid language of the first order.  I mean it’s a functional / imperative hybrid language with OO and everything in between – very cool. The newly released F# power pack makes things even better with some excellent support for F# quotations, mathematical and scientific computing primitive types and so on. Awesome.
• Built in profiling support!! (Yay!)
• Parallel Extensions (PFX) coupled with Reactive Extensions (RFX). The big deal of this release for me is the parallel computing support. First class stuff.  In fact for me this stuff is probably the most important.
• Code contracts, MEF, etc.. loads of high utility class libraries and tools.
• Expression tree support for full statements – not just expressions. Bring code gen into a new level of awesomeness.
• IDE Performance.
• IDE Look and feel. It looks better – finally. A new cool feel to the whole thing. VS2010 really feels like a wholly new product.
• Covariance / Contravariance support (finally!) in .Net 4.0. Hallelujah!

I can say with absolute surety that the best coffee I have had in London comes from my kitchen. I have pretty good  gear (well very good by most people’s standards), but so do the big chains – some of which use machines and grinders from the best manufacturers. It goes to show, that to make espresso well you need some interest and understanding for what you are making. I guess that goes for any profession. Some would balk that making coffee is a profession at all. Like a good chef, the best baristas are passionate about what they do and make a superb product.

The problem in London, is that it is not a coffee culture (actually compared to many other places it is not really in general a foody culture).  It’s also a transitory city with lots of people passing through – where making coffee is seen as a lowly role by many, and one fit only for students and foreign workers. Of course this is not the case at all, but you can see why ‘baristas’ are often not very interested in what they do when no one takes an interest in the product they make. Many people i talk to in London seriously can’t tell that the undrinkable watery mess they are drinking is actually very poor.

I grew up in Australia – specifically Adelaide and Melbourne where they take food seriously, and there are loads of Italians. There the coffee (and food) is of a much higher quality (generally – not always!) and you are much more likely to get good coffee even from a chain store.  It’s one frustrating part of living in London. It’s not that there aren’t any good Coffee places – its just that there are so few that have the passion.

For example Monmouth coffee in the West End IS amazing – and this is quite obvious form the line perpetually forming out their front door. There are several others.  For example Taylor St Baristas who just happen to have a store near me in Richmond. They do excellent coffee and also impressive late art.  If they can do it so effortlessly then I really can’t see why the chains can’t? Maybe its for the best – I’d like to see the good coffee shops profit from their passion, as well as the high quality coffee producers they buy from.

It’s very similar to the likes of Hasbean coffee who sell freshly roasted specialty beans online and are owned by a hugely excited (about coffee) guy who visits coffee growers all over the world before he buys their top notch product, encouraging quality producers, and also giving us the consumer the chance to access a growing specialty coffee market from home.  As a result this small set of top quality coffee professionals are getting a big cut of the market that DOES exist in the Uk for the quality product.

So that coffee chain who claims that ‘7 of of 10 coffee drinkers prefers their product’ should be slightly worried about the up and coming breed of quality coffee professionals who I hope will take their market out from underneath them for producing such a rubbish product, and making such a stupid claim.