Devblog

It has been announced that soon in Europe there will be an update released (as part of Windows Update) that when installed will inform users that they have a choice to make – which browser would they like to use?

This choice is completely unbiased – the user is informed on the first screen what they are doing (i.e. choosing their default browser) and then on the following screen will have a first level selection of 5 browsers to choose from (there are additional choices – who knows what), namely Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari.

No since IE currently has about a 50% market share, this is likely to be the portion of the browser market that is up for grabs. Anyone who has already been educated into the choice of browser – i.e. that there is one and that they don’t have to just click on Internet Explorer and use that to broser the web, will most likely have already made a choice and will probably stick with it – this prompt isn’t likely to change their mind much. That plus this is only for IE users – those that have chosen Chrome or Firefox shouldn’t see it.

So what about the rest – the 50% that’s up for grabs? Well to me it would seem that these are the people who are unaware that there are other choices out there or possibly just don’t have a need to change (either they can’t be bothered or haven’t been motivated to through IE vulnerabilities for example). For the people that don’t know about the options, I think that this will be something that will make them stop and consider the options. They aren’t likely to just scan across the list (which is displayed in a random order) and pick IE – they are likely to look and make an uninformed or slightly informed choice. For this reason they aren’t likely to choose IE – if they have limited computing experience they aren’t likely to be fans of MS, more likely they are border of staring at the Windows flag while waiting for their aging PC to boot so they can check their email. Or they’ve heard or experienced the horrors of BSOD – not something that’s likely to make them choose MS’s offering.

So which would they select? My money is on either Chrome or Firefox. Mainly because Firefox is the biggest name in the browser market but even more important, Google is the biggest name on the Internet, making them much more likely to ring a bell with the novice and gain their vote. Secondly – they look and sound cooler than the others on the list. Style is as important as anything else dont-cha know.

It’ll be interesting to see how this affects the browser shares in Europe over the coming months. If nothing changes that just goes to show that I was right and Windows update should be forced on people.

I’ve just read an article saying that Google is going to stop supporting Internet Exporer 6 – the ancient, badly coded security risk that never obeyed the standards of the web, thinking it knew best. Good, I’m glad!

If I was Google then I wouldn’t just stop supporting it so that some of it’s services won’t work “properly”, I’d use browser detection to display a message saying they are using rediculously outdated and insecure technology that is putting themselves and millions of others at risk – along with a link to Windows Update. I’d also not take the cautious approach by starting with Google Docs – I’d start with Gmail or even the Google Search Homepages.

Microsoft has been unable to fix the IE6 problem and the spam, botnets and other problems that the legacy software has unleashed on us all – mainly because they decided that updating the software would be done by the novice home user, not automatically. This now means that those PCs with dangerous software will be sitting there sending out spam emails until the day they die. Microsoft won’t fix the issue – they’d rather the customer bought a new PC. The owner won’t fix it – they obviouly don’t know how or don’t care. But Google can fix it.

Anyone who has an internet connection (and the ones without internet aren’t really part of the problem) will at some point use a search engien and the chances are it will be Google. If Google highlights the risks to the IE6 users and tells them how to upgrade and patch their PC then the spam, phising and other internet scams will start to be resolved. And hopefully Yahoo, Ask and Bing will follow suit and help remove IE6 from the face of the earth.

I’ve written a few articles recently about how I think the technology, in particular computers, will be changing over the coming years with a move towards mobile devices that do everything and dedicated yet versatile multimedia devices in the home – TV recorders, games consoles etc. This does mean that since most people only want a PC for browsing the internet, the desktop PC and in a lot of cases the laptop will disappear from the home altogether as the games consoles and other cheaper TV connected devices will be able to provide the internet experience that most people want – and if someone is using the TV then their phone will do the job just fine.

So, how does this affect the key players in the industry? Up until now the home market has been dominated by the same companies as the business PC market – Microsoft provides the software with hardware being handled by Dell, HP, IBM, Sony and others. However, if everything moves in the direction I think it will the main product there – Microsoft Windows – will go from being the one element that’s included on all the devices sold to a compontent included on some devices – such as a version of Windows being used on some smart phones and obviously Microsoft’s Xbox. This is a major change for Microsoft. If the death of the desktop PC in the home and growth of mobile and gaming devices causes Microsoft to become a minor player in that area then who will become the new major players? Sony? They already produce the PS3 and are a big player in the mobile phone industry. My thinking is no. I think the industry will be dominated by two companies – Apple & Google.

To understand why you have to think about what the customer in the home environment wants – simple, elegant, stylish devices that do everything they want. Problem is “everything they want” is not what it used to be – we don’t want an operating system that allows us to connect extra hardware to perform the functions we need and a million things we don’t. We just want a device that performs functions such as texting, calls, music, camera and as such is small enough to be carried around – anything that this clever little device cannot do is either not worth having or much more likely acheivable through some provider on the internet. Does this remind you of something? iPhone maybe? Apple Inc?

But just because Apple were the first to produce a good, popular mainstream product, doesn’t mean they’ll be the dominant player for years to come. The success of the iPhone has highlighted to the manufacturers you big the market is and as such everyone wants a peice of the pie. So who’s big enough to acheive this? The one company who is innovative enough and is already playing catchup in this area – Google. They have a massive user base both in terms of it’s search engine but also Gmail and it’s other products mean that they have the capital, marketing ability and product design capabilities to make something as good as the iPhone.

Where does this leave Microsoft? Well, the Xbox product line which could become the main living room device assuming they accept the fact that the PC won’t be part of the package, they’ve got the technology to ensure that the Xbox is one of the devices in everyone’s home. That and their dominance in the business software market means they aren’t going to disappear. They just won’t be the biggest technology company in the home.

I personally hope this is the case. I won’t miss going down the pub and being greeted with “Windows has gone and done….”. And I don’t think it will take too long for this to happen – I’ve already got the iPhone and Xbox (and Wii, and Sky) and as such very rarely turn on the laptop except for work related tasks.

Having gotten over the honeymoon period with my iPhone we’ve now settled down together and I’m beginning to see some of it’s flaws. I have to say though, there’s not much wrong with it. Either as a phone, a mobile computing device or a mp3 player it does the job amazingly. OK, but what can’t it do. Well, the first thing is without a doubt the biggest. Flash.

This isn’t a tiny little inconvenience like “My bank has blocked access to my phone” or “I don’t get on with the touch screen”. This is major. If we are truly going to move computing forwards in the ways that everyone is talking about – the TV being the digital center of every home connected to and doing everything, desktop PCs being retired to museums, laptops being used for work and the kids bedrooms and then our phones becomming fully functioning mobile computing devices, then we need Flash.

Adobe, Apple – listen up – I don’t mean a way to convert Flash applications into Apps. I mean Flash within the browser. The Internet is going to continue to be the center of the computing world and if the iPhone or any phone wants be be part of it then it needs Flash in the browser. It’s one of the main technologies in today’s internet along with JavaScript (and thus Ajax).

The bit that annoys me though is not that the iPhone doesn’t have Flash built in – it’s that it should have and almost certainly could have. I think the reason it doesn’t is business politics, not any technological limitation. My thinking behind this? DOOM. Yes, that first-person shooter from the early niineties. The one that ends up in quite a few “Top 10 Best Games of All Time” lists. I know that it’s nothing special now – the graphics, gameplay and everything else are two decades old – but it is still a 3-D PC game – and I’ve got a copy on my iPhone. If this is possible as a £4.99 download, surely there’s a programmer capable of putting one of the most important peices of software on one of the most important computing devices?

Career Progression
About seven years ago now I finished my degree in Electronic & Computer Engineering, had gained a wide variety of skills in building and maintaining computer systems and was becomming a quite capable web developer. I had also had some years of experience in industry from huge multinationals to small companies with a dozen employees to EU funded projects. I was therefore ready to head out into the world of business to start my career and got a job as a web developer in a small training company.

Seven years later I’m still at the same training company although both the company and me have changed a lot in that time. Although I’m still the only web developer, I’m not the only IT person there now – we have a graphic designer and a media guy too. The main change though is that I’ve moved up to an Operations Director role essentially meaning that I can now call the shots. This is unusual in a company that specialises in the way that humans work – it’s not usually the IT people who would thrive in the company. The reason though is simple – business awareness.

In larger companies you have the ability to work in very specialised roles. The IT department may have a developer, a server guy and several support people whereas in small companies this tends to be one person who has some or all of these skills in the right mix needed for that particular organisation. Within the larger company this means that you can remain in your role, maybe being promoted to department head or above, without too much business sense as there is always bosses above you who ensure the services you provide are serving the company.

In small businesses however, there is going to be very little chance of promotion if you don’t develop a very good understanding of your particular business – the way it operates, the market it operates in and the way in which every department in the company (which may be single people) operates. This will make you more valuable – meaning that you can not only provide an IT service, but also that you understand and are capable of making informed decissions in any area of the business – and hence are able to move up the company ladder to the top.

That’s fine. To get promoted you develop a business knowledge. But what about starting out in small businesses in an IT role? What advice could I give…?

Starting Out
With the benefit of hindsight I would absolutely do things differently than I did when I started out. This is partly due to the experience and insight into the business I have in my new position but mainly from one simple fact. In small business resources are very limited – a point that is highlighted in the current economic environment. For the business to suceed everything must be done in a lean and efficient fashion.

During your training you learn to do things “properly” – to make sure code is commented, to make sure your server is the best you can get, to centralise your IT services for easy user management. However in the small business environment, this is all crap. Commenting code takes time and for the most part a single developer can remember which file or function does what, making the commenting a waste of time. Yes, comments will make it much easier for another developer to learn but commenting takes valuable time and due to the time wasted in commenting and the chance that you will replaced as the developer on that particular project within it’s usuable lifetime are relatively small – it’s probably best for the business to skip it and do something that earns more revenue. This doesn’t just apply to commenting but coding also – we’re taught to use a thorough and robust approach to coding and while I agree that this is the best way from a software approach, from a business point of view sometimes just making it work is what will stop the business from dying.

This lean approach also applies to servers and infrastructure – sometimes it’s best to “just make do”. Spending thousands on a Windows Server will ensure that it is easier to manage, runs 99.99% of the time and will live for years and years, but using an old box with Linux on can provide the same services at a fraction of the cost. Yes, it’s harder to fix when things go wrong but once everything’s set up, that’s a very, very rare thing. And if the entire thing does fail, in a company of say, 20 people or less, it won’t take more than an hour to set up those machines to work without the server so the company can continue. Everything can be changed back later when the server is fixed. And most importantly you’ve saved thousands for the company to use for either marketing to bring in more revenue, or even for more wages for a certain IT person… Get my point?

Although I’m the first to admit that this isn’t the best way of doing things from an IT perspective, it is from a (small) business point of view. Yes, sometimes it comes back to bite you in the ass but most of the time it just works. Still need convincing? Well our companies turnover has doubled every year for the last 3 years. And my wages are 3 times what they were when I started.

After 40,000 years the iPhone has finally been released on Orange! I signed up and got mine on the day it was released and have had it for about a month now. So – what is it like? Well, boring money stuff first. To get the phone on the contract I wanted I had to pay £90 ish but that is a hell of a lot less than I’ve paid before (the last one I paid for was a Nokia 8800 when it first came out for about £200). Plus I can recycle the old Nokia 6300 so I’m only really paying £50 for it. As for the monthly contract, it’s £35 a month, less than the £40 a month I was paying. Seriously, who can complain at that?

So, the phone? Well I’ve not had a smartphone before and any “advanced” phone features on the ones I’ve had have been underwhelming. I have seen other peoples smartphones before and even comparable touch screen ones don’t come close to the iPhone. It’s the same as with iPods – everything else is just an MP3 player. The design, the software, the whole package is a combination of what they can do using iPod and Mac technologies and some clever innovations to bring together many technologies and software to provide amazing solutions. An example of this is the Maps App. By using either wireless or 3G connection, existing mapping technologies, your current location and bearing, these are all rolled together to provide something that can simply but effectively provide you with a walk back to the car park when you’ve been out and got lost in the big old city.

It’s not just the fact that you can have “real” web browsing (or email) when you’re out and about as well as when you’re near your own wireless (or open ones), but the way in which it’s closer to being a PC replacement with it’s own operating system and applications (they’re now called Apps apparently). This thing is just so useful that I now rarely use my laptop at home, I do it all on my phone.

Top all this off with the way in which it looks – it’s just like everything else Apple does – it looks absolutely amazing, both in the software it’s running and the device itself – everything else just looks crumby in comparison. Unless someone releases an actual iPhone Killer or Apple manage to screw it up, I’m never going back or going elsewhere!

My company is a fairly small one that has a very simplistic network, a few broadband connections and PCs with mainly Windows Home based machines because they do everything we need them to. This means that we just upgrade the OS when a PC is at the end of it’s useful life or when we get new staff. As a result of our expansion over the last year nearly all of our staff are on Windows Vista. The only exceptions are me (Head of IT) and Mike (Graphic design). Due to our jobs you’d think that we’d be at the top of the list for an upgrade but due to us having much faster PCs to begin with and having a better level of computer knowledge so we can keep them running better for longer, so we’ve stuck with our now aging XP machine. Until about 3 months ago that is.

At that point my Windows XP laptop was starting to suffer from various hardware problems – fans starting to seize and cause shutdowns, network failures for no reason, nasty wirring from the harddrive on occassions. This led my boss to give me a shinny new Vaio (VGN-FW48E if you’re interested) with Shiiny Vista. I would have been happy to stick with XP as that bit everything I wanted and had become stable and reliable to the point where it just ran and ran, day in day out. Unfortunately everyone in the office is on Vista and keep asking “how do i…” and the reply “how should I know – I haven’t got a new PC” apparently doesn’t count as quality IT support, plus XP is quite old now and although I was happy with Windows 98 at the time, things change and you eventually have to get up to date.

So – Windows Vista – what’s it like. Well…. everything has moved around to make it simpler for novices, making it annoying for me since I knew where everything was, plus now I can’t have access to all the advanced settings we used to have. UAC is a bit annoying – it’s like Health & Safety – just because some people are idiots who can’t but one foot in front of the other without having an accident, we all have to suffer.

What else? Ah yes – it’s looks have been overhauled and it does look very good. Gone are the playgroup colours and images, it’s now a lot sleaker looking and modern. But…. if you’re after something that looks good – why Windows? A Mac or even most Linux distros look well better than Windows, can perform the same tasks and in the Linux case – are free. But hey-ho, it’ll do for now.

Anyway, after a month or two of playing with Vista it became time to receive my free upgrade to Windows 7 that came with my laptop when I bought it. The actual upgrade was smooth enough – uninstall this, run that, re-install that. Then it was time to go – so what’s it like. Well, there is yet another facelift but as mentioned before – it’s not all about looks, personality counts too. So what else has changed?

I like the taskbar and quicklaunch changes – that’s a very nice improvement. However, as I have Firefox pined to the taskbar, it took me ages to find out how to pin it back to the start menu and as a massive fan of keyboard shortcuts (Win + down + enter to get Firefox up) this was really annoying.

So, what are my overall thoughts after my swift upgrades from XP through Vista and onto 7? Well, Microsoft – listen up! You’re not a government – you don’t have to force your “Health & Safety” policies on us all! After digging around you can turn all this crap of and find the advanced tab we were looking for, but don’t make it so hard! Turn on the security by default for the novices but have an Experienced user account for the computer professionals that easily lets us use our PCs the way we want.

Be warned – this isn’t a comprehensive review of the game – I’ve only had it for one evening so far. I’ve been a massive fan of the NFS games since NFS III in 1998 playing them all on the various PCs over the years. For the most part they have been great, getting better and better with each new release…. until Pro Street. Up until this release the NFS games had had a great formula: great tracks and courses to drive on, collect or earn great cars and a fairly simple plot that didn’t get in the way of the racing too much.

With Pro Street they have gone down a different path – back to single race events which would have been good apart from a few things:

• The driving was aweful because the physics engine was crap
• It crashed all the time
• There was too much hip hop, neon cars and other crap that wasn’t needed

This was the first release that put me off as soon as I started playing it. It’s also the first release that wouldn’t run on which ever computer I had at the time – whether it was a mid spec desktop or fairly high end laptop, all the rest ran fine on very high settings. Pro Street just about ran on minimum settings on a high spec Sony Vaio for maybe a race and a half before crashing every two minutes. During the short time I’d had to play it had put me off completely I never did anything to try and get a PC that would run it. Onto the next release.

Need for Speed: Undercover looked much more promising so when this was released I bought myself another mid-spec PC to play it on – something that met the minimum specs and should have been able to play it – surely that’s what the minimum spec is for. However, when the game turned up and I installed it, it just crashed Vista whenever I tried to play it. Many a night was spent trying to find out the cause and fix it with no success. Eventually it just went on eBay.

So, back to the present – a new NFS game and a new laptop to try it on. This game kind of snuck up on me – I hadn’t even heard it was being made and then suddenly it was being recommended to me on Amazon. Luckily EA had decided to release a demo with this one so I downloaded it, installed it on my laptop and fired it up. After ignoring the recommended “low” graphics settings and putting them up to “medium” I managed to crash it a few times – it is a laptop with laptop graphics after all, but after putting them back down to low, it ran fine and enticed me enough to lift the EA boycott (Red Alert 3 annoyed me as well but that’s another story).

This did present me with a problem though – I didn’t want to play the entire game on “low” settings so what was I going to do about something to play it on. Getting a decent PC to play this on that would last me a few years to make it worth it could end up costing me over £2000 and apart from the huge cost to play a handfull of games, me and the missus already have laptops so wouldn’t use it for other computing activities, we don’t have anywhere to put it and with the way things are moving in the PC games industry – it might not work on next years games.

So, alternatives? PS3, Wii or Xbox 360. We already have a Wii and while I love the innovative controllers and gameplay this opens up, the graphics aren’t brilliant and the controller for racing games is similar to what you use on a PS3 or Xbox 360. I could have had a look at the PS3 but since I’ve also had my eye on Project Gotham Racing for a while, I decided to take a look at the Xbox instead. I was tempted to save some money and stick with the Wii (there is a credit crunch on) but then I came across the Xbox 360 Arcade edition and as I’m not a hardcore gamer who will be playing on it all night the limitations of the Arcade edition didn’t make much difference to me and the cost was low enough that I just went ahead and ordered one.

So, this got me thinking – does my change from long term PC gamer to having two consoles (my previous console before the Wii and Xbox was a Sega Master System!) mean that things have changed so much that PC games could be on their way out? I think: Yes. With cheap plasma TVs, cheap laptops, wireless networks, cheap networks etc – the hardcore PC gamer who has a top end system that does everything must be becoming something of a varity.

Maybe the PC game is an endangered species….

I’ve been having no end of problems recently due to delivery companies and sat navs. We’ve started ordering our shopping online which is great because it means we don’t have to drag two kids around the supermarket, plus the delivery charge is about the same as what we’d pay in fuel to get there. The problem is that because our house was only built two years ago and essentially nicked the postcode from a farm in the middle of nowhere we normally have to wait until the driver gets lost and then phone us up so we can give them directions to wherever their sat nav might have taken them to.

The problem isn’t just the sat navs (or the owner updating them either) since I’ve just bought one myself and even though it’s brand new, it hasn’t got our postcode in there. This is no great loss as I just told it we lived near where the house is and usually I can find it from there! Mine doesn’t have the postcode in because the sat nav data is based on that released in 2007 by the mapping company and this shows where most of the problems are coming from – utdated mapping data and reliance on the postcode.

Delivery companies are getting to be really bad at this – I’ve had companies where I’ve told them that the house is new and to ring me for directions but they ignore the delivery instructions and just get lost. It happened again with the worst of the bunch – DHL on Friday with the most important delivery of all – my new laptop.

DHL outsource small deliveries to local white van men and while I was at work waiting for my laptop, I’m pretty sure that I saw one of these white van men driving round in circles looking lost and ringing someone on his mobile. I don’t know if that guy did have my laptop and if he did, I don’t know who he was ringing (not me) but once again my delivery never got to me.

If ParcelForce and Royal Mail weren’t so expensive I would try and use them whenever possible as they tend to know exactly where the addresses are and if they can’t deliver something (usually beacus you’re not in) they at least tell you and you just nip to the sorting office to pick it up. You don’t spend the next week trying to get your “next day” delivery sent again.

Firefox is awesome. As I use the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts more than I use the mouse, the Firefox search box is more accessible to me than the Google Toolbar. Problem is that it uses Google.com as the Search Provider and not Google UK, which is useful for some searches, and pretty much the same as .com for the rest and unfortunately FireFox doesn’t provide a way to edit it to .uk.

After years of just doing my search and then clicking on the .com bit of the search URL and changing it to .com, I finally decided to do something about and found this post on Chaos Zone which has a link to let you add Google UK as a search provider. Don’t forget to move Google UK up the search provider list so it’s your default. Simples.