Ok, so it’s not a big announcement because the app hasn’t actually launched yet. But I’ve launched the holding site.
Read the rest…
Announcing “reactor”
13.11.2009Going Green Is Hard Work
02.10.2009Now I know you disagree… all you have to do is become exposed to gamma radiation and get real angry, right? Wrong. You are not Bruce Banner, and you’ll never turn into the Incredible Hulk. Plus you don’t play with gamma radiation do you? Be honest now…
That’s not the kind of green I’m talking about. It seems for the past couple of years a lot of people have gone crazy about being eco-friendly, saving the planet, greenhouse gases and whatnot.
Here in the UK, the government has set up and continues to fund the Carbon Trust and various green initiatives (which we should have been doing years ago). For most consumers this means changing lightbulbs from incandescent to fluorescent, with obvious benefits all round.
But there’s an even better solution to CFLs: LEDs. That’s right, those little plastic light bulbs you messed about with at school! A lot of research and development has been put into manufacturing LED lamps that match the usefulness of fluorescent bulbs.
There are some amazing benefits:
- They last even longer than fluorescent bulbs (much longer than the old incandescent ones)
- They give off a better quality of light, brighter and whiter
- They come on immediately
- They give off very little heat
- They consume a quarter of the power of fluorescent bulbs
- They don’t buzz
- They don’t contain any mercury
- They are 100% recyclable
Now I don’t care who you are, that’s amazing! These are the ideal. So what’s the catch? Well at the moment they’re ever so slightly more expensive… but once you’ve got them, you’re saving money!
For commercial environments (particular suspended ceiling office spaces) this is a big winner. Couple these babies with some intelligent lighting systems and you might never have to change your bulbs!
Saving money + planet = the thrifty super hero… still not quite the Incredible Hulk though!
This is all from research that I’m doing for a new client. They’re into supplying, fitting and testing these bad boys. More details coming soon!
3G vs LTE-Advanced
27.04.2009Does it make any sense to you? It didn’t make any sense to me either a few years ago. But this little snippet from Wikipedia makes it all very clear:
LTE provides up to 326.4 Mbit/s for downlink and 86.4 Mbit/s for uplink. LTE-Advanced, in development as a minor update to LTE networks, supports maximum download rates of over 1 Gbit/s.
Basically, I want LTE-Advanced now. Interesting that it’s only a “minor update” to existing LTE networks. Apparently there’s only one of these planned and in production at the moment… in Oslo. I’m moving to Norway, b’bye!
Dipping My Toes In The Deep End
04.03.2009Since the beginning of February I have been working long hours and putting in extra time to configure two servers (one virtual, one real) to function as the testing and live environments for FlipStorm’s client projects.
This has involved setting up a VPN, opening all manner of ports on the firewall, learning how to do cron jobs, writing linux shell scripts, going back to command line interfaces, editing conf files, generating RSA keys… the list really does go on.
However, my crowning achievement is the 4-hour marathon that it’s been for me to get a backup cron job to run from the live server (a VPS). My goal was to create a single tarball that held that day’s changes to databases and files in the www root (aka Everything). Then to FTP that to the testing server automatically. Well, to cut a long story short, I managed it. All sorts of exciting things had to happen, but it was worth it. And more importantly I didn’t screw anything up in the process! Bonus!
Safari 4
In case you haven’t heard/hate Apple products, they released Safari 4 a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been using it… and then not using it. I’m back on Firefox for proper again.
While I like the “let’s copy Google” stance, it’s still not quite as good as Chrome. And thank heavens I’m not using Safari 4 on Windows… yuck! Can’t wait for Chrome on the Mac. That aside, there are some definite, noticeable improvements.
Still, it’s broken Gmail so that’s minus-a-million from me… that’s a deal-breaker. It’s probably not Apple’s responsibility, but until Google sorts it out I have to use Firefox for Gmail now.
UPDATE 18/04:
Found out that GMail wasn’t working because I had set up Gears Offline functionality in my GMail accounts and Gears hasn’t been updated to work with Safari 4 yet as it still in beta.
And I’ve moved the tabs back to where I am used to them being in Safari. So I have been using Safari 4 more regularly again.
Finally something worth waking up for!
22.02.2009Well well well… it is a funny old life. I got made redundant last month. Yes that’s right, it’s taken me a month to write about it! Basically I couldn’t be bothered: big news everyone, another hard-working Joe gets punted. Shame.
Also (and slightly more importantly) I have been extremely busy. Finding a new job? No! Starting up my own business. You see, my previous employment taught me many things, and the parting words of my old boss gave me the needed incentive. I can do this.
The point of this post though is completely different to that. I just wanted to throw it in there as I think it needs to be said. These are interesting times, hewing out new opportunities. Hopefully I will have a lot to say for myself when I’m done.
So without further babbling, I wanted to point out that I am now available for all sorts of web work, software development and would welcome a challenge. If you think you can make use of my humble services, check out my new venture: FlipStorm
We’re going to be offering a wide range of services, but the focus is on high-performance web apps that are completely managed by “the team” (a.k.a. moi) for meeting any and all business needs. Starting a new business that needs a web site? Got some interesting ideas for web app but don’t have the needed skills to do make it a reality? Come to FlipStorm and see what could be done.
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Zend Server
Zend Server Public Beta was released recently. I took it upon myself to find out what road Zend are going down with this new product. It appears that they have managed to licence an Apache/PHP stack that will run on Windows/Mac/Linux with the latest builds of all products, tuned to a fine major key, in two flavours – one for the enterprise and one for the community (with pricing accordingly, i.e. free for the community sans some whistles).
So it seems they are creating a halfway house between Zend Core and Zend Platform, probably with the intention to merge the product lines and consolidate their offerings, thus making for easier upgrades and slightly less training.
It’s also given them a chance to rethink the web management console interface (something that was in need of much attention). Managing the loaded modules in PHP on the various platforms is now easier than ever. It seems likely that upgrading will be much simpler too.
This is really great news for all PHP developers, but I find it particularly useful for me on my Macbook. You see there has been fewer and fewer decent stable builds of the latest released versions of PHP floating around, so I’m having to “make do” with 5.2.6 (the Apple-adjusted version). It’s not bad, but there’s no clear upgrade route and I like to try latest and greatest… especially in anticipation of a stable release of PHP 5.3!
So it looks like I may be retiring the built-in Apache/PHP stack and moving over to Zend Server as soon as it reaches a stable release. Goodness all round!
HTML 5, XHTML 2 – Web 2.5
28.12.2008I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on HTML5 and XHTML2. I know neither of these technologies are anywhere near well-supported enough to start using in production. However, we should all be starting to get our heads around the changes – if not only to be ready for the shift, but also the benefits it will bring.
There has been a lot of hype in design and developer circles for a good few years surrounding all of this, especially for proponents of the so-called semantic web – the supposed natural evolution of the web.
However, Tim Berners-Lee (seen by many as the father of the web as we know it today) has already suggested that this semantic web will only make up part of what we will come to call Web 3.0. How much of it will be the semantic web is yet to be seen (if much at all given it’s progress!)… more to the point, how much of an impact these impending technologies will have on the semantic web is a little hard to judge.
It strikes me that whenever we reach this next phase in syntactical changes for the web as we know it – in terms of it being an officially approved and ratified recommendation by the powers that be (some time around 2012) – and the point in time when it can be considered as globally adopted – probably within 4-to-5 years following that recommendation, similar to that of XHTML1.0 – will be half an evolutionary cycle.
If it does bring us anywhere close to the intended semantic nature of the web, it will, at best, be only half way there. So I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that sometime in 2015 we will confidently say we have reached Web 2.5.
Of course this is assuming we’re still here in a fashion. And that this stuff moves on apace. With the current fairly good awareness of standards and best practice, I believe that a small nudge from some big players may impact things for the better. Say Google adjusts various search algorithms to favour HTML5 sites in search listings… we all know that clients will notice and designers and developers will have to pay heed!
So it really is best to start now. Most of the changes (particularly towards HTML5) aren’t major. In fact, as can be seen, they should simplify our lives an awful lot! The problem is that there’s a lot of web out there to change. You can’t just change tags and roll – the implications are far greater: you have to consider CSS, the impact on any server side scripting used, browser rendering and their differences (especially for the new controls)…
This all sounds a little painful. For those using any kind of Web App platform with a good templating structure, this should be fairly easy: set up a new HTML5 template. The only complication to consider then is script-generated mark-up. And that should be tackled by the vendor.
Of course this is somewhat subjective as browser support is sketchy at best, so it’s hard to test any development in this area. Looking forward, we should be seeing greater support of these technologies in coming months. For now it’s probably best to glean what you can from the WHATWG and if you’re a developer building a CMS or other Web App you can probably start writing some test cases and replacement libraries just to stay ahead of the curve.
iPhone 2.0 Apps Could Alter The Way We Engage
19.06.2008Dear Judy,
Since the Jobs-note last Monday (9th), a lot of media attention has been focussed on the App Store and the coming features of iPhone 2.0.
Sadly, orders of magnitude more media attention has been focussed on the 3G iPhone – the highly anticipated, but hugely underwhelming revelation that it is.
The iPhone’s new little (big) brother does address some of the more than glaring ommissions that the original was left wanting. And in my view it does finally justify the hefty price tag. But even this has been reduced! To the shock of all!
I shall definitely be getting a 3G iPhone as soon as my existing contract expires (especially as my handset is slowly falling apart).
There are still some issues that I have with the iPhone. These are more correctable with firmware updates than hardware changes, and save for any major improvements in carrier networks’ hardware I don’t see that there’s much need for adding to the tech specs of the 3G iPhone anytime soon.
In my opinion, most gadget ‘freaks’ want the best of all their gizmos in one – the Buddhist (as i like to call them): one-with-everything types. This was (and still is) true of me… to a point. I’ve come to realise that it’s not always best. So I care little about the quality of the camera in the iPhone. It’s sufficient to know that it has a camera.
Little touches are more annoying: like the lack of a light, which I always find no end of uses for, besides for taking photographs. Or a non-removable battery – what the hell? These are about the only physical changes that would make the iPhone my perfect gadget (besides any changes to improve battery life and reduce cost of manufacture whilst improving end-user experience).
The real focus of this post though is the facility that we as end users are all being equipped with: a touch-screen interface. Here MultiTouch isn’t such a big deal. Arguably it does provide a few more natural ways to interact with the operating environment, but it still has its challenges.
However, just having an all-purpose piece of touch-screen kit on the open market (and at a good price) presents some potentially new and exciting ways for us to interact with our other gizmos.
Many are already exploring the possibilities of controlling other devices using the iPhone and iPod Touch. What I would really like to see are practical applications for the majority, not just experimental things that are restricted to specific enterprises. I’m talking about controlling household appliances from my iPhone/iPod Touch.
I realise that it would require that any device that you want to control with your super-phone would need to be connected to the IP network and configured accordingly. But if manufacturers of these devices can be persuaded to see the potential, there’s all sorts of wonderful possibilities.
Aside of my finger-marked status symbol becoming a universal remote control, it could provide interfaces and readouts for numerous appliances.
The real beauty of it is that a touch screen is not limited by what it can display. There’s no fixed set of commands. You don’t have to provide overlays to provide the right input. It’s all customisable and application-specific. It’s intuitive and easy to learn.
The iPhone is the start of many similar devices making their way into our homes. If we can come up with some useful applications it may be the only one we will need!
WWDC and the Air-Thickening Anticipation
07.06.2008Dear Sharon,
It is the last 48 hours before WWDC and it seems as if the tech world is afire with speculation and anticipation over exactly what Steve and Co will be revealing to Mac lovers near and far.
I wish I could attend this conference. Being just a young developer, such a show would provide a great experience. I would be “at home” to some extent… I would sigh with glee as I chortle at the techie jokes, which would bring a certain sense of satisfaction.
I’m not a reporter-type and I wouldn’t be looking to glam up the overemphasised product releases and developments. Not being a big Mac user (at the moment!) I’m perhaps not as enthusiastic. Which brings me back to why this woulld be a good experience.
Having none-to-little knowledge of Macs as a development platform I’m eager to breach into something new and it seems as if I’ve picked the time for it. Rumours are flying that, as Apple is starting to consolidate it’s products into a unitary platform, a complete development stack for its products may be on the cards.
This would allow developers like me to write applications that are accessible and transferable between the entire range of the consumer-hardware giant’s offerings.
Further excitement is also fueled by the onslaught of tech hopefuls whose presumptuousness and lasciviousness demand that there be some sort of hardware release.
In fact it is almost certain that there will be some annnouncement (not necessarily a release) of an iPhone 2. This will probably coincide with the release of a new firmware for existing iPhone and iPod Touch users adding a whole host of functionality and applications, thus adding essential value to the enterprise market.
It would surprise me greatly to see a release of any other hardware – whether that be an update to an existing product (such as a much hoped-for MacBook Pro update) or an entirely new and as-yet-unseen offering.
Only time will tell. When it all kicks off tomorrow afternoon (here in the UK) I will probably try to catch a few updates now and then around lunchtime. Yes, I’m excited, but I’d be more excited if I was there in person.
Now there’s an idea for a seasonal gift! // HINT HINT!
Google Friend Connect – the answer to a programmers prayers?
22.05.2008Dear Tanya,
Google Friend Connect was officially announced last week. It has since come to light that this is no ordinary social network. In fact in the truest sense of the term, it isn’t a social network at all!
Friend Connect is a social tool. It seems the lovely people at the big G have been working their socks off finding a way to help us all connect a lot more easily. This fantastic tool is still only in preview, but from the fairly sketchy detail proffered by Google, it seems that even now it has a very wide appeal.
In order to place a perspective on what Friend Connect allows you to do, imagine: you are the only software developer on the planet. You, and you alone, have developed each and every web site in the world and you had to build each site from scratch.
So that means no code sharing. No data sharing. This means for every user who visits a web site that requires authentication they will have to register and verify their details. Then they will have to maintain them. This is the kind of data duplication that would make a data analyst’s butt clench.
By now you would have won plenty of awards… at the very least you would be long overdue some much-needed shut-eye.
The solution would seem obvious: extract the common data structures (in this case the individual member’s details) into a central pool that each site can get access to. That is what Friend Connect does!
You can close your mouth now.
As well as being a social connector, it is also a social enabler. What I mean is that a site that is not a social network (DamnILoveChocoDip.net for example) and never intends to be can still benefit from the viral nature of social networking. The social aspect of visiting a web site and sharing your experience is made even easier.
Yes as the modern social surfer you no longer have to re-register the same details you saved with the previous web site into this one. Simply log in with the same credentials et voila you’re in. Your data isn’t copied or duplicated. You keep the one central piece up to date and Friend Connect does the rest (as they say).
Beautiful! Adding to this is the entire social aspect. In theory (because I haven’t had a chance to test it yet) you can see who of your friends are registered with this site. They will see when you do things on the site (that you explicitly allow).
So all of a sudden, for the majority of web sites we visit, we can now see who else is there. It’s like all of the other patrons visiting this virtual shop/bar/resource centre become visible.
You could actually “bump” into someone who you know from another web site. As you seem to share a passion for at least two things, you might pluck up the courage to strike up a conversation, perhaps opening with an oft-hounded ‘chat-up line’.
It would be the equivalent of walking around the town, bumping into that cute girl in two different shops, suggesting you go for coffee, then quickly cut to 3 years later and you’re story is being told in some horrible romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks.
There are some questions on security and integration, all of which I’m sure will be answered in time. If you’re a programmer like me, I’m sure you will see the benefits though. I’m drooling over some of the possibilities. Least of all not having to build a registration engine every time I build a site. A close second is the speed with which people will discover a new web site.
Also in this orgy of social debauchery is OpenSocial. Now application developers have an opportunity for their applications to make it onto millions of web sites, not just the few major and accessible social networks.
The issue at the moment is that not all networks are supported, and indeed not all will want to jump on the bandwagon. But when things become this easy for users, where do you think the majority will go?
So then the key lessons from all of this are… build a site that can make use of this centralised platform! If you’re building an application, build it for OpenSocial as the chances are it will lead the way in terms of mass integration.
Is this a sign that Facebook may slip into Microsoft’s online “I just don’t get it” pit? I wonder why that could happen.
