Category Archives: Web Technologies

Vertography Blog

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VertographyI’ve just launched a new blog, with the goal of providing information to help you live a greener life, without compromising on its quality. This is not information for the hard-core tree hugger, but information for everyday people. Yesterday looked at eco-friendly lighting options; today a search engine that plants trees for every 1000 searches performed (and produces great results too thanks to Yahoo!).

In addition to simple tips for greening up your life, it is also going to cover some cool green technology that is being developed or tested. Today included a post about plugin hybrid cars. And there’s lots more cool, green technology out there for us to cover!

Blue Share

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As a little learning exercise, I created a plugin for WordPress that adds a small Twitter icon to the bottom of each post. When a reader clicks on that icon they are prompted to enter their Twitter username and password, and a short message (the title of the post and a link to it) will be added to their Twitter feed, allowing them to share the post with their followers.

If you’d like to play with it (and I emphasise at this point that this is still a work in progress), you can download it. Instructions for installation and customisation are after the jump.

Continue reading →

Twitter Load

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It has been a bad couple of weeks for the folks over at Twitter (and perhaps not a great time for me to start playing with it – I don’t think there’s a connection). Looks like they’ve become a victim of their own success.

The main reason I starting playing with Twitter though was the XMPP/Jabber capability, making it possible to keep an eye on the musings of the folks I follow, as well as being able to post my own messages without needing a web page. Using the OctroTalk app on my N95 allows me to take all that with me too. Sadly, that’s the one thing that is still not working.

Schmap iPhone Guides

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Alexander & BaldwinTried to blog about this a couple of days ago, but that was when Flickr was having problems, and blog posting seemed to be one of the things that wasn’t working!

Schmap have now launched a version of their online city/region guides formatted for the iPhone. This is a very handy tool since you can access it over the iPhone’s cellular connection while you’re actually traveling (I don’t normally carry my laptop around when on vacation, but I do take my mobile phone with me).

No special URL needed (though I’d like it if one was available); the site will automatically give you the iPhone version when you visit from Mobile Safari.

Flickr Problems Today

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Looks like the folks at Flickr are having a busy Monday! There have been site problems all morning as they try to stitch everything back together. The top of every page currently reads “Seeing various site problems? We know! Check this forum topic.” And the forum starts with this information:

Lots of people blaming the recent addition of video support to Flickr, though there’s no evidence that this is actually related so far.

Update: The forum thread about this makes for some interesting reading for those thinking about operating a large consumer facing web application. Kudos to the Flickr staff, especially Kevin who is posting the Flickr updates to the thread, for their restraint!

The Price of Abstraction

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Jason Kester has a very insightful post up on his blog this weekend about the use of the terms “magic” and “smart” to describe software tools & frameworks. And more importantly perhaps, about the features themselves, which are often anything but “magic” or “smart.”

The problem is that these features hide the real operations that are going on under the hood. It makes what are potentially complex, time-consuming and performance killing operations seem like a simple thing. They also make it next to impossible to work out when that is the case and when it isn’t. Since I’ve been looking at Ruby on Rails a little at the moment (it seems to be the most popular choice of web development language at the moment), I was interested to see Rails being listed there as well.

In my past I have seen similar problems with C++ (unexpected calls to copy constructors and conversion operators) and had to create coding standards that helped to catch these sorts of problems at compilation time rather than letting them get into executing code where it becomes next to impossible to track them down. That’s harder to do with things like Hibernate where the problem is caused by the abstraction itself, and it not just a symptom of powerful language features.

Location Tagger, AT&T Wi-Fi and Twitter

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Starbucks, AlamedaI installed a new app on my N95 the other day from the Nokia Beta Labs: Location Tagger. This is one of the things that should have been built into the camera application from day one on a GPS enabled phone, but I’m glad to see they’re catching up.

The photo on the right is my first test of this new feature. The photo was automatically geo-tagged (so, if you visit the photo’s page in Flickr, you can see it placed on a map). Flickr seems to be confused about the city (it thinks Alameda is Oakland!), but it shows up in the correct place on the map.

Why was I at Starbucks? Well, I stopped by to see whether AT&T had disabled the free Wi-Fi for iPhone users. The special free login page has indeed gone, replaced by the older iPhone login page, though it did still let me on using the iPhone credentials I had stored in my Devicescape account 🙂

Finally, I finally signed up for Twitter, and added the Twitter feed to the left column on the blog. Since it is connected to my IM client (Adium, for those wondering), I can send it short messages about what I’m up to, and they’ll end up here on the blog as well as on my Twitter page.

Microsoft Leap Issues

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In case anybody was in any doubt about the suitability of Microsoft products as servers, of any kind, The Register is reporting this week that something as simple as handling the extra day in February this year passed them by. Most amusing perhaps is that the technology preview, released just two days before the leap day, was affected.

Nonetheless, the SQL Server 2008 “community technology preview” was brought down by the dreaded Leap Year Day bug just 48 hours after Microsoft unveiled it. “We have recently discovered an issue with SQL Server 2008 CTPs that result in SQL Server 2008 not starting on Feb 29 GMT only,” read a statement from the company. “We recommend that you do not run or install this CTP on Feb 29 GMT to minimize any impact in your environment. You can install starting on March 1 GMT.”

The advice given by Microsoft? Don’t install it or run it on that day. Great solution guys. Would that answer be the same for production software? No reason to think otherwise since they left UK users with the wrong time on all their machines for a week not that long ago when they got the daylight savings rules wrong. So, that web site you run with SQL Server as a backend – just turn it off for a day to “minimize the impact” of their poor quality software. I’ve got a better idea: spend that day upgrading to a real platform (try Linux or FreeBSD).

But it gets better:

And there was a very similar problem with Windows Small Business Server. On Leap Year Day, Windows SBS was unable to issue itself certificates because it stamped each certificate with the date February 29, 2013. So, it failed to recognize the correct date. And it replaced the correct date with a date that doesn’t exist.

Not only did it fail to understand the leap day in the date, it then compounds the problem by producing certificates with a non-existent date on them instead of just saying the date is invalid! But since it is only a small business product, no problem just leaving it that way. They won’t sue Microsoft after all – they don’t have the cash to do that.

Backslash?

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Backslash?Why is it that people just cannot get URLs right. The backslash in there between nchs and nhanes.htm is wrong. It shouldn’t be in the URL, and even more bizarre in this case: they only got one wrong. Didn’t anybody think that was odd?

It works, presumably because the CDC is also stupid enough to have fallen for the ‘Windoze can be a server’ lie. Windoze just about passes as an office automation suite. It is not an OS, and it certainly isn’t a server OS. Anybody who installs it as a server OS, or recommends it as a server OS, should be fired.