Devblog

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.

I just went to our main company website, Medicology, and there was a large white semi-transparent block over the top of the entire screen. Since I use something like this for displaying AJAX content I panicked a bit and then dived into my JS and CSS files to see what was going on.

After finding nothing out of the ordinary I searched the entire set of source files for “alpha” hoping to to find a snippet of CSS that was causing my woes. Unfortunately it came back with nothing. I then decided to do the same with the source from one of the pages in Firefox and came back with a div at the bottom of the page with the ID “ga_shade”.

A quick Google led me to find that it is Google Analytics placing it there as part of the whole “content overlay” thing they do. Problem is that I wasn’t using content overlay and as such the menu bar for it wasn’t available and I couldn’t turn it off, let alone click on any links. Not happy. And suprised that Google can make slip-ups of this kind.

Sort yourselves out boys. Don’t just assume that because it works in IE6 it works in everything – try testing stuff in FF for us.

We have several sites we’ve been developing for a range of conferences we are running (Safeguarding and Q, G & E being two) and to help reduce the development time, our designer used a few PNGs so that we could use a standard layout template and then alter a CSS sheet to create a new site. This plan was working well until I finally found some time to do a bit of housekeeping and checked Google Analytics.

I was quite shocked to find that almost half of our users are still visiting us with the rediculous IE6, complete with it’s security flaws, lack of compatibility and other problems. The main problem in this instance is the lack of proper support for PNGs and in particular, alpha transparency. This was causing our nice design with the rounded corners to be displayed as big blocks of light grey all over the place.

Apart from the slight anoyance that the only reason these people are still on IE6 is because they are ignoring or not using Windows Update, and are therefore probably part of a Botnet, it means that IE’s awful legacy is still with us and is likely to be so for some years to come until these PCs finally die. We therefore STILL need to code all our new sites for IE with all the hacks and tweaks we’ve been using in the past.

In this case I found an off the shelf solution that worked quite well for us in the excellent SuperSleight that for us, allowed us to keep most our PNGs with the transparency enabled and just change a few of the core images. I never did look two hard at why all the PNGs weren’t fixed (we replaced the logo with a JPEG) but maybe your site will be fixed without a hitch.

After finally getting all the logins fixed as mentioned in the previous post, it turned out that now two of my four blogs would not allow us to post to them (ironically this one that I posted to saying I’d fixed everything did!). Whenever we clicked on Save or Publish all that would happen is that we’d get dumped to the homepage. It would however save a copy in the Drafts folder. Sensing that this was a PHP issue and not a MySQL issue, and that there may be weeks of tinkering and fixing in my future, I decided that a Wordpress upgrade might be the best way to fix it.

I went and got the latest Wordpress 2.8 and uploaded the files to my server in the folder for the first blog. I ran the upgrade script and everything seemed fine. I was greated with the new styled login page and then got to the dashboard without a hickup. I then found my post in the Drafts folder, hit publish and it informed me that it had been published – nice!

However, when I went to the site to view the post, all I got was the Blank Screen of Death as it’s known. I bit of tinkering showed me that the PHP files were working fine – it just didn’t want to output anything. After a bit of playing around in the admin bit I finally clicked on the Themes and was presented with a message saying my theme was broken.

I loaded up the default theme and now everything works fine! Now I can just tinker with the new version and then find a theme that isn’t so boring…

[Note: I've since changed the theme so no offence to the person who designed this one]

We tried to logon to some of our Wordpress blogs yesterday and even though we hadn’t changed anything at all, whenever we logged in it just sent us back to the login page with no error messages at all. After some checking I was pretty sure that none of the passwords or anything had been changed.

Much Googling later seemed to suggest that people were having the same problem after an upgrade to 2.6 but we were still on 2.1. There were suggestions that the problem could be caused by a plugin incompatability so I thought I’d try disabling them to see if it helped. Since I couldn’t login all I did was FTP to my server, browse to the plugin directory and rename the entire thing to plugins2.

This let me login without a problem so I recreated the plugins folder and copied them back one at a time to see which ones weren’t working. I repeated this for them all and now everything is fine

I’ve just been given an old laptop to re-install by the Boss – you know, to make it faster for 10 minutes until Windows Update has made it as slow as it always was, and in the process of installing Windows came across one of the most stupid ideas that laptop makers have come up with yet.

Putting the Product Key on a sticker on the BOTTOM of the laptop

So, pick it up, read a block of the key, put it down, forgot the 5 digits, pick it up…. die of old age!

Only 35 years left till retirement….