Dream come true

Friday, June 02, 2006

"With icConcept, you can capture requirements both manually and automatically." Wonderful. Let's buy this, then we can just turn it on in the morning, browse the web a bit, have a few coffees, go out for a couple of beers, catch a movie, and pop back in in the evening to turn it off and collect the complete system requirements. IT Marketing - It's a whole new planet.

Bill Gates was right. But he doesn’t know it.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

I was prompted by an article today at The Register to read an old column by Bill Gates, in which he states "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting". It actually looks like he may end being right, although the way it pans out in the Web 2.0 world is probably not quite what he expected. Ironically, this comes in an article reporting Microsoft's rumoured interest in eBay, which it now favours over Yahoo!. Why ? Well, apparently, "Microsoft turned more attention onto eBay recently after Gates decided that Yahoo! was a content company rather than technology company, and that he was not interested in owning a content company". With the growth of open source and / or free software, and cheap or free internet access, it seems to me at least that content, and good technology to search and provide access to that content, is actually one of the few viable long term business models on the web. But I'm not Bill Gates...

Swisscom (Im)mobile

Monday, May 29, 2006

This weekend I again had the opportunity to observe just how hollow the hype of my mobile provider is. I was in Spain, and I wanted to know what the weather forecast was. So, surely my all singing, all dancing 3G phone could help me here? Nope. On trying to launch the browser (I can't really qualify it with "web") I just got a connection error. Even though I was on the Vodafone Spain network, and my provider, Swisscom Mobile, is a Vodafone partner. Really, by now, all this should just WORK! I expect that if I search through the Swisscom website, I might possibly find some obscure document detailing equally obscure things I could try to do to resolve the problem. In fact, a person with my sort of profile might do just that. But most people, and most of Swisscom's customers, have got better things to do. Again, it is sold as a commoditised, mature service. It should just work, and it should work across borders. But even if it did work at the roaming connectivity level, would this have solved my problem in Spain? No. Had I been able to access the Vodafone Live service, what would I see? Er, ringtone adverts, the video clip of the week (so I can justify my video-capable phone to myself?) and SwissFriends Chat, a dating site. Ok, I can see the marketing, revenue driving arguments here, but even these are very, very narrow minded. The phone "knows" where I am, for heavens sake. Why not exploit this to offer services that are so useful that they become second nature, really driving revenue? What about some genuine out of the box, lateral thinking ? Oh, sorry, this is a mobile operator we're talking about. No chance. Of course I could still use the phone as a modem for my Palm, although of course only by foregoing the bright, shiny new 3G service and falling back on direct international roaming rate to my ISP. Being persistent, and having actually gone through the painful process of setting this up in the past, I did so. The speed of the resulting connection would actually put much effective 3G throughput to shame, in fact. I see in an article at The Register today that a bright future is foreseen for "nomadic" software, if only the phone manufacturers play along. Never mind them - the operators are by far the biggest obstacle. Meanwhile, I fully agree with John S. Rhodes' opinion that phones are supposed to be, well, phones.

The AJAX experience ?

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The brave new world of Web 2.0 ... So when do we start seeing "This site optimized for AJAX" buttons ? "Bugger", as Unlucky Alf would eloquently put it.

Nasty bug squashed

Monday, May 22, 2006

I finally managed to track down a very elusive bug which was affecting the photo pages on this site. Basically, if a thumbnails page was called directly, from say a link in a gallery update blog post, or a link I sent to someone, the first time it loaded, the gallery was blank. The second time, it was fine. This seemed to be a PHP session issue: if I discarded all the session code, it worked fine - although obviously everything else that depended on sessions was broken. But when I tried to home in on a specific setting, I got nowhere. Finally, I worked out what was happening - I guess if I'd been using a browser which was less "user-friendly" about JavaScript syntax errors I would have got there quicker, but maybe not. I finally discovered that there was a small difference between the page code generated on first and subsequent entries - it is pretty hard to spot: BEFORE AFTER One extra double-quote was breaking the JavaScript syntax, killing the onLoad event handler. So where did this come from ? Well it seems that if PHP session_start does not find a current session, it rewrites any links it finds in the page to include the new session ID. The problem is, it isn't so clever about what is and isn't a link, and since I am actually writing a JavaScript function on the fly, various escaped quotes and things were confusing it. First, I realised it was doing this elsewhere, although in those cases it was actually harmless. I managed to stop it by using single quotes instead of double quotes. But the line above - where for some reason, no session ID was written, just a superfluous extra " inserted - was harder to fix. Finally, I had to break one string concatenation into several steps, and finally I got the code I was trying to get the page to write, instead of what the PHP interpreter thought I wanted. That has got to be one of the most obscure bugs I've ever had to track down on a web site...