Monthly Archives: July 2006

WordPress 2.0.4

Posted on by

Hi all,
MacHeadCase mentioned that WP had been updated again and I think I missed doing the last update
If you notice any glitches let me know because I did the update at 4am and did it the quick and dirty way. The correct way to update Worpress is to backup everything, disable all plugins, delete the old version of WordPress off the server and upload the new one. Apart from me being lazy there’s two reasons why I couldn’t be bothered with this
1) My Server’s rubbish and uploading files (especially multiple ones in nested folders) takes forever. I really should move to a different provider but I paid for 2 years and it was cheap
2) It’s a pain in the neck restoring themes, plugins & addons from the backup and would mean downtime for the blog

Anyway, I made a slight mistake that meant I couldn’t create or manage posts 1st time round, but reuploading the wp-admin folder fixed that and everything seems hunky dory. Like I say, if anything seems broken let me know – thanks

While I was uploading files I remembered that wordpress has an import feature for other blogs. My first blog was on blogger and I had never tried copying posts from there so thought i’d try using the blogger-worpress importer. If you look in the archive back to around August 2005 (this blog Started in about November I think) you’ll find all the old posts. What’s cool though is that it’s tweaked the blogger database too so when you go to my old blog you get an out of service message and a message saying you should try a better blogging tool — hyperlink to wordpress site
It’s only 6 posts which I transferred, but the comments need cleaning up as blogger doesn’t seem to record everything in the right place or that wordpress does. Prob gonna have to dive into the MySQL as none of them have proper usernames/gravatars/IP addresses and stuff like that. If you look, it seems like everyone who posted comments is from the UK from the IP2Nation plugin.
I left blogger because someone already had a blog with the same name and also because it was rather lacking compared to proper blogging tools. Oh and Phil said WordPress looked to be the best out there!

Whatever Happened to…

Posted on by

I don’t know what provoked me to start thinking about this sometime but it all started with me making a mental note of things that were going to be huge (particularly in the 1990’s) and then died a death. It started with a couple of things, and I sat down today and wrote a list. I also took the liberty of doing a google search for “whatever happened to” which has over 12 million matches.

Enough with the preamble
1. The first one that got me thinking was computer Voice Recognition
speech recognition
It sounds like a great idea to alleviate RSI and by telling the computer what you want to do as opposed to typing it or using a mouse seems much more userfriendly. Apple Computer developed a technology in the early 90’s as an extension to System 7 called plaintalk. It is now part of the system preferences of OSX and simply called Speech Recognition. It enables you to use a hotkey to talk into a microphone with certain key phrases and it will follow your instructions. I had mixed results when trying it, mainly due to the fact that it assumes you speak with an American accent. My impressions aren’t very good and it doesn’t like British English too much. IBM developed a program called ViaVoice which was supposed to be very good but expensive. I think the big reason why the whole thing never worked was it looks like you’re mad talking to yourself and doesn’t work well in an office environment. Just my 2 english pence!
Having said that you still get glimpses of it used in telephones for speed dials and I always think of the Odeon cinema hotline that asks you to say the name of the Odeon that you want to book tickets for.

2. Next up we have the paperless office!
paperless office
Having worked for the UK health service for 3 years I can categorically say this is nowhere near to even being a possibility, in fact the opposite has happened thanks to email allowing people the ability to forward pdfs and other attachments eg. this article. The internet now has more information out there than ever before and expectations are high on how much of that information we have at our finger tips. Net result, my desk looks like a pig sty and i never get to the bottom of any of my piles. So much for fax software and handheld scanners for electronically storing any letter or other piece of paper received by non electronic means. I am yet to meet anyone who seriously uses fax software, you can’t buy handheld scanners, those paper port scanners never scan things in straight and if you decide to use OCR you can get some unexpected results sometimes.
office flyer

3. Removable storage (Data, Music and Video) – what on earth happened with this! I originally had them all separate but they’re kind of related.
removable media
Let me list a few:
Floppy Disk replacements such as the SuperDisk (LS120) and Zip disk
Sony’s “SACD – Super Audio CD
Laserdisc
Mini Disc
Just to name a few! I’ll start with the floppy disk replacements because i was so close to yelling at my co-workers when he burnt two files to cd which totalled 1mb onto a CD-R when the computer was a wintel box and had a floppy drive. But i restrained myself and said nothing. My point is that since Apple released the iMac Rev A which was the first commercial computer not to have a floppy disk drive (and others have followed suit though in more limited numbers often having an interchangeable floppy & CD drive) people are more confident that a computer will have a CD drive than a floppy drive. It is ridiculous to waste 99.9% of a CD’s capacity, and there are now more variations than is needed. Iomega came close with the zip drive until they hit a snag with the click of death problem, and Imation tried to market the LS-120 but it was horribly slow. I tend to email/ftp files these days and tend to bank on being able to get an internet connection as everywhere there’s a computer there seems to be broadband internet! Occasionally i’ll burn a CD or for larger files i’ve got my Firewire/USB external drive that i should use for backup but don’t as I haven’t had the time to use any backup software (whoops!)

SACD – what the heck is that you are probably asking. Basically it was meant to be higher quality than a CD and instead of an album taking up 500-700mb it would be 4.7Gb – so a DVD. Thought up in 1999 by Sony & Phillips. I have never seen one in the shops and doubt I ever will – it was a complete disaster as it came out just before a program called napster appeared. There’s also a format rivalry with DVD-Audio and like all Sony Products it uses some copy protection which I wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole – oh, and i’d hazard a guess that i wouldn’t be able to notice any difference since i can’t tell the difference between a 192kbps mp3 and the original CD!

Laserdisc – this was originally patented in 1958 but didn’t appear till the 1970’s but you could still buy them when I was young. I don’t know anyone who owns any or even the player. The nearest I’ve got is a DVD that was made by being copied off a Laserdisc of Star Wars Episode IV with Chinese subtitles. Haven’t seen anything laserdisc related for about 20 years.

Another audio format the minidisc – you still see them around for recording purposes but record companies did try and sell albums on mini disc. It must’ve lasted about 2 years at most, and I haven’t seen them since. I like to record gigs from time to time but record on tape as that’s all i’ve got. I thought about minidisc but they’re expensive and it’s still a pain to transfer to mp3 because sony never made it easy to do so as they are incompatible with Magneto Optical drives and vice versa which use the same technology

4. My final one comes from one i saw on the google search above… Virtual Reality
virtual reality
William Gibson predicted it in his book Neuromancer in 1984 though the credit on wikipedia seems to go to Damien Broderick for his 1982 book The Judas Mandala. Pure and simple – what happened to it? It died a death somewhere in the mid-90s and hasn’t been heard of since

Digital Magazines

Posted on by

I was surfing around today waiting for the tennis to start (Federer vs Nadal) with the prospect of watching the football world cup (Italy vs France) this evening, when I stumbled on something I must’ve missed: Digital Magazines

I know it’s something that’s been around for ages, but a company now looks to be properly distributing it called Zinio
They offer a broad range of magazines which you can buy either as back issues or subscribe to
About the same price as buying off the shelf, and it’s pretty convenient if you want a specific issue and don’t want to go down to the shops. Plus since you pay in US Dollars, the exchange rate works to my advantage eg. MacUser UK is £3.95 per issue over here, but only $3.50 from Zinio
An annual subscription works out at £62.46 by direct debit for a real copy
From Zinio it is only $49.95
When you consider that there’s $1.85 to the pound, it works out pretty cheap

On the downside, the digital version comes in Zinio’s own format, (.zno) and has to be viewed using their viewer. The viewer is available for windows & OSX, though isn’t universal binary yet (but has been confirmed as in development)
It uses some form of DRM called contentguard

A reader program is required to access the magazines, which utilize a combination of technology licensed from Adobe and Contentguard

and if you print anything it puts a pale grey watermark on the page

They offer a free sample section, so i took the opportunity to try it out. The freebies are a little lacking though oddly you can get MacWorld Sweden as well as the US version
You can only view one magazine at a time, as the viewer doesn’t seem to support multiple viewing of documents, and while it is based on Acrobat reader, it lacks a lot of the features you’d expect to have such as scrolling
I suspect you wouldn’t get anything to replace the free CD/DVDs you would normally get though they may have a way of having online links to the content.

The downloads magazines in OSX are stored in your users folder/Zinio Library/
The site itself is a little confusing, as there is an international section, but MacUser UK appears in the US section but not the UK, and there are some publications that they sell which don’t appear on the main site as they are acting as agents for the distributors.

Finally, they offer a US textbooks section for students. It’s a little lacking on variety, and since it’s US textbooks they won’t have scientific books that use metric units like Peter Atkin’s Physical Chemistry the defacto standard text for most university chemistry courses.

They say there are plans for adding interactive features into the digital versions of magazines and books to make them more attractive

Overall i kinda like it, but can’t see myself buying through it – and they do need to add some scrollbars to the viewer.

Myspace

Posted on by

Myspace was launched in April 1999 and was one of many sites such as friendster, livejournal, bebo, orkut, faceparty, friendsreunited to name a few which attempt to be internet social networking sites.
MySpace is apparently number 4 in the top 500 sites according to Alexa (after Yahoo, MSN and Google).
There’s an interesting one at number 45: 72.14.203.104
Which is the IP address for google

Anyway, back to Myspace. The original site was then sold to Tom Anderson, the founder of 2003’s Myspace and a group of programmers and at some point in the next year it became huge. This was further exemplified when a British band, the Arctic Monkeys reached the number 1 spot in the singles chart without being signed to a record label – their fans created a myspace site to share their music in around 2003-4

Myspace was part bought by Intermix Media inc which was acquired in 2005 by Fox Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch’s Company)
Where am I going with this? There’s nothing new here and you can find all this out with a google search or on wikipedia
– This is just the preamble

I created a profile in December 2005 ish, i think but did nothing with it. Around February next year people started asking me whether i had a myspace because everyone has one. I said something to the effect of “yes, but i don’t really use it”. What happens? they find me and add me as a friend, so now i have to put something up. I quickly add some basic info and kind of get into how it works, but it’s rubbish!
It’s a blog, info, dating, comment leaving, music sharing mish mash of web space. And it does none of it properly!
If you want a blog, use proper blog software such as wordpress or moveable type which you can install on a proper webhost. You can change the php, add themes, maintain the sql database from your webhost, ftp files etc…
What has myspace got? a profile where you can append a bit of inline css in the profile. This does allow you to change the page design, but it’s a nightmare and not very intuitive. Is myscpace W3C compliant? Let’s find out… surprise surprise, even the front page has 103 errors. I put the url from my myspace and it had 255 errors including the classic no doctype found which is very lazy programming. Nice one myspace, get everyone producing non-compliant pages as per W3C on the internet – as if there wasn’t enough out there already.

You can edit the blog entries when you’re logged in but you can’t have anywhere near the control of a proper blog. You can’t add plugins, or customise things.
If there’s a link on the page there is no way you can change where it goes to or remove it (eg I can’t link the blog on myspace to this one), and it has lovely ad banners all over the place which you have no control of. It’s all coded into the core part of the page which everyone has to have.
The dating aspect of it is just an added encouragement for the are wannabe porn stars and models trying to get some money out of you

The music concept is slightly more interesting, but only if you set up a band page. A regular profile doesn’t let you upload files, and you can only have music files from another myspace band profile. The band profiles are quite good in terms of being able to promote themselves and getting your music heard. You can choose whether to have the files as streaming or downloadable or both.

Bulletins are a feature where people send something to everyone in their myspace friends list, but the only way you can view it is to go into your members area where a tiny box showing the last 5 broadcasts will appear. It will not email you to say that someone has broadcast something. In contrast to invitations which will email you but are also difficult to find if you don’t click the link. It would be quite possible not to know that you have received bulletins unless you looked for them

There’s the overall bit that I can’t stand – the horrific use of shockwave – every page uses far too many shockwave elements that slows things down to a crawl – i find it intolerable.
The site has never managed to remember my username and password despite me telling both keychain and clicked the remember password every time i’ve logged in. It will not let you view parts of other myspace sites unless you’re logged in, and when you do enter your details it takes you back to the main home page. If you have multiple tabs open with myspace sites in each, and then login on one it will not make you logged in on the others when you click links – the logged in status is only valid for that tab/window which is ridiculous and suggests serious problems with the cookie system.

Having said all that the thing that annoys me most is the comments feature. Most of the people i have on my friends are people i know in the real world. They mostly have my email address, aim screenname, msn name, mobile number, some have my home number and possibly my work number. But how do they choose to contact me usually involving a question? By leaving a comment on my myspace – this is stupid on more than one level. Firstly it is unreliable about whether i will get an email telling me that someone has commented and even then i may or may not want to put myself through the pain of looking at my profile to read the message (as unlike wordpress the notification will not contain any portion of the message). Next, comments are a bit like a mix between a forum and a guestbook with a twist…. you can’t add comments on your own myspace!
So what people tend to do is reply to that comment on the person who posted it’s myspace. This makes it doubly ridiculous for someone else reading a comments section, as it will make no sense. Each comment will be a potential continuation of a comment on another myspace so has no flow and serves little purpose after it’s been read.
Some are learning that I don’t like using myspace for communicating, but not everyone

I’m not the only person to think there’s problems with myspace:
myspace sucks and so do you according to Katie McIntyre & Casey Primeau

I haven’t factored in any of the hotlinking problems some websites are having due to the increased bandwidth. This is a direct consequence of myspace not letting users host files on their space so everyone hotlinks.

There’s the more sinister side where myspace ruins lives as it is a honeypot for pedophiles and child molesters around the world

It is a bit reminiscent of Microsoft – the most popular site for social networking and it’s horrible – most users doesn’t mean best.
40 million people using it so it’s gotta be good! right?
Approximately 90% of computer users run Microsoft Windows and a large chunk of them probably think it’s the best operating system to use or have never used anything else so it’s gotta be the best, right?

In conclusion – myspace waste of space – some of the ideas of it are good, but the execution is poor