Webmarshal Blocks Bing for Porn
I was amused to see this morning that our company webmarshal was blocking Bing for porn!
You may have heard all the fuss about this but you can look at pictures and video in Bing without going to the sites themselves, which makes Bing a proxy for porn.
I have to say though that blocking a search engine because you can find porn on it may be a bit harsh! Mind you it is Bing, so are you bothered?
iPhone OS3.0 – A Good Upgrade for iPod Touch Owners
A quick post to let you know that I have been playing with the iPhone OS3.0 on my 1st Gen iPod Touch for the last 24 hours.
I got the update for copy and paste really, but there is a lot of other stuff in there that makes it well worth the price.
Search is great, it is fast, suggests what you may be looking for and you can refine your search as you need. I can’t really work this out. How come on the Windows XP machine I use at work a search takes about an hour, but on the iPod it is instantaneous? Go figure!
iPod Touch owners also missed out in the 2.1 upgrade, as one of the main features, maps with street view, for some reason didn’t make the cut for the iPod. Well it’s in this time, and I have to say it works very well.
As for stability, so far everything is very stable with no crashes or any significant problems I can see.
CSS text spacing, Internet Explorer and Dreamweaver templates
I have been setting up a site using a dreamweaver template to set areas of text that a client can edit. There were standard titles which I had put into the template and editable areas for copy between the titles.
To style and space the text I was adding into the css styling such as h2 + p then adding some padding. This worked great in firefox but when I came to test in internet explorer it completely broke.
After a bit of investigation it seems that the problem was the dreamweaver commenting that opened or closed the editable areas. The comment was coming between the h2 and p for example and ie was seeing them as not following each other. Firefox interpretes how you would expect of coarse and ignores the comment! Anyway take out the comments and ie works okay too.
This unfortunatel was the only way I could get the pages to work in ie and therefore broke the template.
This may also be of interest if you are adding commenting into your code and noticing copy spacing in ie is not right.
What Speed Will We Get From the NBN?
I have just been reading an article on the capacity of the data cables going from Sydney through to Guam, and then on to the US. Currently it stands at 4Gb/s but with the new cable from Pipe Networks that should increase over time to 6Gb/s.
Trouble is that doesn’t stand up with a 100Mb/s NBN. When you look at the figures: -
The totally capacity coming into Australia when this is up to capacity will be 6Tb/s. The NBN will provide data connections at 100Mb/s or 0.1Gb/s. That means that just 60,000 connections at a full 100Mb/s, or assuming that maybe 20% of households are on the net at the same time connecting to the US (20% of 8.5M households is 1.7M connections) gives just 3.5Mb/s per connection.
Okay I know that there will be local caching, but this is going to need to be huge in order for us to see more than a connection at roughly the same speed as ADSL.
No Audio on Macbook (and red light in headphone port)
I have recently had the misfortune of having the sound on my Macbook going off after about 10 minutes, and a red light appearing in the port.
After much research I found out that this is actually a VERY common problem (c’mon Apple you should fix this up). It seems to relate to plugging non-Apple plugs into your headphone port. Mine certainly happened when I started plugging in a lead to go to some external speakers. The problem is caused by a little switch inside the port which is there to sense whether they plug you plug in is optical or not. The larger plug size seems to cause it to somehow waver between detecting it as an optical port and not.
The standard advice to fix this is to ram your plug in and out a few, or to stick something in there and fiddle around at roughly the 7 o’clock position. I tried this and it worked for 10 minutes, then went off again.
What has worked for me is the advice from Macriot (sorry I can’t put the link in as Safari 4 crashes when I try, but it is http://www.macriot.com/article.php/20080718032528619). They say:
f you have these symptoms, we recommend a very gentle and minute tinkle of WD-40 into the audio output jack, followed by gently inserting and removing the audio input jack a few times. At least until the sound is returned to normal and red light ceases to glow from the audio output jack.Remember, we said “tinkle” not spraying into the jack like there’s no tomorrow…”
This seems to have done the trick for me and I have now been complete with audio for the last 4-5 hours! Hooray!
Apple iPhone Rumour
I am going to start a new rumour that the iPhone will include an HD video camera as per the Flip MinoHD (just bought by CISCO as the next big thing) and the new cameras from Kodak/Sony etc. The video will synch straight into iMovie to give the iApps integration and will synch with iTunes.
I’m not sure whether this will actually happen, but it makes sense and would be very cool! C’mon Apple…..can’t wait until June!
NSW Schools Lenovo Netbooks with Photoshop!
I have just read that the NSW OLPC for schools system has approved Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbooks with Adobe Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver on them, as well as ‘free’ versions of Windows and Office.
I have to say that there are a few issues I can see here. Firstly free software from MS!? There is no such thing as free! Even if it is provided free, the cost is that MS will expect a return by pushing the user, and the school down the Windows route rather than Mac or Linux. Not that good for a department of education to get suckered into that one!
Second issue is Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver running on a netbook with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics card on a 10″ 1025×576 screen![b] You have to be kidding me![/b] Maybe you could get them to load up, but do any work! Checking Adobes website for PS CS4 they require a 1.8GHz or faster processor and a 1024×768 screen, Flash recommends a bigger screen and Dreamweaver requires a 1280×800 screen. Obviously these netbooks don’t meet this requirement.
This is not good for Adobe or the students. The students will get frustrated with the UI and slow or none existent performance and Adobe will lose customers as they will think their software is buggy. Oh, and I should add that we will pay for this too.
IE8 InPrivate Filtering, A Google Killer?
In the final release of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) there is a feature called InPrivate Filtering. What this does is as follows: -
Today websites increasingly pull content in from multiple sources, providing tremendous value to consumer and sites alike. Users are often not aware that some content, images, ads and analytics are being provided from third party websites or that these websites have the ability to potentially track their behavior across multiple websites. InPrivate Filtering provides users an added level of control and choice about the information that third party websites can potentially use to track browsing activity.
Although this would seem like a good idea, and to be fair has to be enabled on a per session basis, is this a thinly disguised dig at Google Analytics?
Most sites these days tend to use Googles Analytics stats package which puts a cookie in the browser to allow the package to track repeat visitors etc.
Although Google don’t specifically say much about what they get out of Analytics the last code update made it fairly clear that site owners could track across domains, so it seems likely that Google are too.
Obviously this information is valuable to Google for advertising purposes, but it also ensures that potentially all of us are being characterised probably without any identifiying information, but characterised all the same.
InPrivate filtering seems to be Microsofts approach to reducing the amount of data Google can collect. By blocking Analytics cookies you are essentially also blocking Googles, and the individuals websites ability to track you. A smart move on Microsofts part.
As mentioned earlier this has to be enabled on a per session basis, so is it a shot across Googles bows saying that if your not careful, we’ll block 65% of the information you receive?
What is my feeling on this? As a site owner, I would hate analytics, or any other stats package to break. This helps me improve my site for others and is an invaluable tool. However I am concerned that information on my browsing habits could be being collected on me to serve me ads., or for some other purpose I would hate to consider.
On the other hand I don’t see MS as a fighter for our rights either. Seems to me that this is just good business for Microsoft, and if they can make it seem like they are doing good at the same time….
E-commerce Systems
I have been developing an e-commerce system for my company over the last few months. We decided to use a canned system so I looked at Goodbarry a content management system that allows you also include e-commerce.
I have to say that the site setup in Goodbarry was relatively easy, but it got frustrating when you wanted to change things that were locked in their code. The dreamweaver tools didn’t help much either. I have to say that their support was a little slow too, and their link to email support was very well hidden. In fact I only found it when I bagged them on Twitter!
I was trying to stick with goodbarry though until I got to a real problem. In Australia they really don’t have a delivery solution to products over 20kg. They do have a manual option but without the necessary control to really work.
After running into this road block I looked around for an alternative and eventually settled on gate13. These have been quite responsive to requests for info and have even uploaded special pricing from our standard delivery company. I must admit that the way you had to do this was a bit odd though. Instead of a basic and per kg weight, you had to upload prices for each weight for every postcode. In our case we have products to about 50kg and that meant nearly 300,000 lines on a spreadsheet (btw reply to me if you want a copy of the spreadsheets we put together to automate this).
The other thing that I think will be good for us is the configurable discounts. You can add affiliates, create users that see special discounts, but also create complex discounts based on combinations of items. This is great for us as we normally sell through wholesaler chains and this may help to keep them happy if they don’t like us selling online.
Things I haven’t liked are a couple of the system messages, you seem to struggle to move items like the add to cart button and the design seems to be table based (which I don’t like in my carefully coded css based design).
Gate13 are a lot more expensive than Goodbarry ($115 compared with $35 per month), but so far I have only got frustrated a couple of times!
In short for e-products or light weight goods you can probably get away with goodbarry, otherwise gate13 could be a reasonable choice.
Btw the site is http://www.broverstock.com if you want to take a look. It does need more work, but it is usable for our target market!
Frist Day at School
It’s my sons first day at school tomorrow and I am really nervous!
Don’t know why really as he has been at kindy for a while. I guess that you have just bought them up to be someone you really like, and there is a chance that school will change them to something different. Of coarse this is actually a schools job, but as a parent it’s a frightening thought.
I have to say that he doesn’t seem to be worried at all. Went to sleep faster than normal, and didn’t do the after dark chatting he usually does.
Oh well, we shall see tomorrow!