Recently in Techno-bollocks Category

Well, not exactly... I wish Nokia all the best, but I've got a couple questions:

• In my experience, v1 Nokia Symbian firmware is always rough (I suspect there is internal pressure to release new devices from groups that think more in terms of hand-feel and physical device than software-led user experience). Both my N73 and my N95 were essentially unusable out of the box (unusable = requiring a hard reset more than one per 15 minutes). They do get better but if you want to go after iPhone customers you're going to need the software to work pretty much straight away. In the case of the N97, an early-ish 2009 launch in restricted markets (USA) means that in reality, us Europeans won't have a good N97-based user experience until Q1 2010 by which time Android will have a wider developer pool and Apple may well have come up with even more challenging goodies
• I'm surprised to read that Nokia can't use multi-touch and that Apple has a patent on the process. I thought the system was developed by Jeff Han at NYU and later developed into a shippable product by his own company? I guess not, if anyone can fill in those blanks I'd be curious to hear.
• How social is the social? I'd love to hear more about the value-creation network Nokia is proposing to set up with the N97 as a hub. Also, will the social survive the firmware? I guess we'll see.

Well, this is one way of becoming an internet business ;-) So I wonder what those clever chaps at Nokia are up to?

OK one last post before bed... I've just been reviewing the impact my mucking about with the templates has had on old URLs and came across the old splorp post with the "powered by Newton" gif.

I click on the link and ta-dah! the Splorp Newton server is still running, still reliably serving both static and dynamically generated pages - not sure why that makes me so happy but it does :-)

I'm repeatedly amazed at how Google maps manages to generate an accurate overlay to satellite photography. I wonder is the photography manipulated in some sort of matrix to make its xy coords mathematically predictable? I have zero maths skills so will live in wonder and confusion but if it is projection based (mathematically projecting a sphere onto a flat surface), how cool would it be if Gmaps let you select your projection? My current fave is the Peters projection which shows accurate areas (and a high shock value) and goes some way to helping us find 'our place' on the planet (I would say a few specks is a truer assessment than a Conquering Horde)

Well you can't, or at least I can't:-(

Instead, I have to tether my device to a master file system (my PowerBook) using a funny white stringy thing that need to keep in my bag (my usb cable).

Both my laptop and my phone are running FreeBSD, an advanced, Unix operating system the runs rsync (a native unix application all the more fabulous for its power and simplicity) out of the box. Both my laptop and my phone have advanced networking features with options to create or open sockets across a wide array of transports (IP over Firewire anybody?) so why doesn't this just work?

Rsync could run as a cron job and every 15 mins it would try and connect to a known host over the air (including connecting to the host via IP over the cloud, not just bluetooth or 802.11 lan) and voilà! A lovely synced up iPhone without the hassle.

I mean how hard could it be?

Way hey! 8 minutes 43 seconds for an all-template all-entry total rebuild. My guess is this could be further optimized by redoing my templates (still using the 3.33 ones) and turning off a few templates that don't really need a refresh every time.

Considering the size of Donkey's database, the fact that it's being published to three parallel blogs (multiple template mappings for shufflebox, list apart and current) this is beginning to look really good, so congrats to everyone involved:-)

Disclamer: We've had a bit of an ongoing debate on this one with Anil fanning the flames as he tries to support the MT cause. I should disclose that I'm a member of the Six Apart Professional Network and also a 6A partner for the Paris office just so's you know...

While I'm a long-time Movable Type fan and user, I remember the first time time I installed Wordpress. What a treat, the thing was completely painless and took no time at all. I was way impressed and have been since. Added to functionality, the open-source community around Wordpress has spawned a huge templating and design resource with hundreds of very high-quality designs for the lay blogger to chose from. In fact, for many a year I considered switching to Wordpress and was only prevented by the thought of having to maintain security on a php installation and how I would handle any serious load should one of my client's projects really take off.

Now I've pretty much stopped worrying about this in much the same way as I've given up on the flash/no-flash, mac/pc, tomato/tomahhto arguments—they seem a bit pointless and on average both options/solutions have their merits.

I had an experience of doing some migration and configuring last night which brought to light some issues I hadn't yet come across in any Wordpress v. Movable Type discussions. I was trying to replicate behaviours from an MT installation into a series of WP ones and came across the following difficulties where Wordpress let me down:

• I couldn't perform a search and replace of strings across blogs and their pages, entries, comments and templates. To get the job done I had to edit template and entry data outside of the WP environment
• I couldn't use my global templates. I use these to configure global variables that several blogs can then share (in particular, I use primarily to manage root path across different systems and to avoid multiblog-calling-itself errors)
• I couldn't re-use my user configurations across blogs and if I wanted to set up an admin to cover more than one blog I couldn't re-gen their password
• Cutting and pasting, or generally moving data between templates across blogs was very unproductive (ended up jumping between Firefox tabs)
• There were two other things that got up my nose and I'll get them down here as soon as I remember them...

Before the WPfanboys jump on me, YES, I understand there are workarounds, upgrades, plugins and other fixes to the above and of course I'm going to struggle working in an environment that isn't my first choice. I simply wanted to list these experiences as I hadn't seen them outlined anywhere else.

You know it doesn't get more cutting edge than this. First, after much stress and waiting, I jailbreak my iPhone and go in search of hot software. Great, open, free liberating productivity apps here I come and lo, I end up with the iFart, which pretty much does what it says on the can...

So yeah, post Jailbreak briccups (handset would cycle instead of turning off--made reseting impossible), have replaced iPhone and wait patiently for the 2.0 firmware to be delivered via proper channels and sync away with itunes and visit the app store and yes! I know have the iPhone light-saber app installed.

Surely our parents could never of conceived of such a wondrous world;-)

I think the nice man who went in search of my Identity theft woes last week would have liked me to update my previous post.

So here goes: according to his findings there is nothing wrong with either his payment-processing software or hardware and a review of staff at the branch revealed nothing untoward.

So just to confirm: all is well at Eat. You can pick up your soup and sandwiches safe in the knowledge that these guys pay attention to detail, act fast when required and are just generally a bunch of excellent people!

eat.co.uk

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)