If you’ve been paying attention over the last couple of months, you’ll most likely know of the uproar concerning Apple’s Software Update on Windows, and how it used to include new software (namely Safari) in the same section as software updates (namely for iTunes and QuickTime) as well as ticking the checkboxes by default.
As a result, many people who usually pay very little attention to update dialogs would have just clicked “Install”, thereby updating their software as well as installing Safari, complete with its Start Menu, Desktop and Quick Launch shortcuts.
This caused a big hoo-ha with many users, as well as Mozilla, makers of the competing Firefox browser, amongst others.
Apple have now decided that new software does not count as an update and has released a new version of the Software Update application now has separate sections for updates and new software. However, in their infinite wisdom, the checkboxes for new software are still ticked, presumably in the hope that users will still not realise and click the “Install” button without un-ticking them.
Isn’t it time for Apple to stop treating its users like children and allow them to make their own choices regarding new software? Updates are understandable. Installing new software by default isn’t. If I want to install Safari, I’ll tick the box myself thank you very much. I know better than you if I want the software or not. End of.
The web 2.0 super-blogger is a species seen on the web commonly blogging on his own site about unimportant matters, is usually a member of a tightly-knit clique and has the following traits:
- Name checks other super-bloggers
- Overuses sarcasm, Latin phrases and words such as hiatus and grok
- Carefully dissects views of anyone who disagrees with him in a long blog post
- While dissecting dissenting views, also brings to attention less important details such as minor spelling or grammatical errors to further “drive home the message”, thereby absolving himself of any such errors on his part
- Swears profusely in blog posts and justifies it with “artistic licence”
- Tries to raise donations on promise of a t-shirt, more posts or a “good, fuzzy feeling inside”
- Posts photos of himself with important-looking guests
- Tells other people and large companies what they should be doing
- Always thinks he’s correct and consistently mocks others who challenge this assumption and lose
- Takes the future of one organisation to heart, defending its every action and becoming impervious to any negative comments about it (commonly involving Apple, Inc.)
They say nothing good ever came out of the USA. Well, I think I can just prove all those people wrong with what I have for you today. They are the best source of real-life comedy you can get:
A California-based DRM software company has sent cease and desist notices to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks for not using its product.
The likes of Microsoft and Apple usually love all the DRM they can get. In this case, however, Media Rights Technologies and its subsidiary BlueBeat.com said in a press release Thursday, the four software giants’ failure to implement the MRT’s X1 SeCure Recording Control software is a violation of the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Read the full article and make up your own mind.
Only in the USA.
Yesterday I wrote an article about the “joys” of using ASP.net and its associated technologies as part of my Imagine Cup entry.
After writing that article, I received a lot of help from one of the university’s Microsoft Student Partners, who’s an expert on SQL Server and .Net. With his help, we sorted out most of the SQL issues (apart from a few ones which are related to constraints on the database) and also the form submission problem I discussed in the previous article.
It turns out that Internet Explorer, hard as it may be to comprehend, is actually more standards-compliant in this one aspect than Mozilla Firefox. I had a search form inside the all-encompassing server-side ASP.net form, which it didn’t like, and with good reason, since the HTML standard does not allow nested form elements. However, this does now mean that all form-related elements have to be ASP.net ones, since they need to use the ASP.net server-side form.
I also managed to sort out a weird JavaScript problem which also plagued Internet Explorer. This time, it was to do with mootools’ addEvent function, which doesn’t seem to work in Internet Explorer when applied to any object except window. I resolved this by reverting to code to ye olde style document.getElementById(element).onfocus type code.
Here we go again…
As part of our group’s Imagine Cup entry this year, we have to program our application using Microsoft technologies, which basically means ASP.net, C#, the .Net framework and SQL Server. However, being from a PHP/MySQL background, I inevitably found this a little daunting to think about, but nowhere near as bad as the experience has actually been.
To be completely honest, first impressions count, even with something as geeky as a new programming language, and so far, my initial reaction has been one of horror and disbelief. Yes, it can only be one thing: ASP.net forms.
Just for a second, imagine a normal bog-standard HTML form. It would have an enclosing form element containing input elements and a submit button. When the button was clicked, it would submit the form to the address given in the form element. Sounds simple, no? Well, actually not if you’re trying to recreate the effect in ASP.net.
For some reasons, Microsoft didn’t think it important enough to ship Visual Studio with a built-in form element to drag and drop. Maybe this is because most page have to be enclosed with server-side form elements, but I’m not sure. In any case, I dragged and dropped ASP.net text boxes for a form, and then a submit button. I wrote the code behind the button to submit the information to the SQL Server. Sounds simple enough.
After many problems with SQL Server authentication (which were admittedly our fault), I found that, very ironically, Mozilla Firefox worked fine with the form, submitting the information as I would expect it to, but Internet Explorer didn’t do anything at all when the button was clicked.
I searched on the internet for hours, pulling my hair out trying to sort out this stupid problem. I tried every solution under the sun, but nothing worked. In the end, I gave up and went to lunch, but if this is the direction that everything is going to be heading in, then I can see ourselves getting into major trouble as the deadline looms…
For the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to tame Google’s AdSense adverts on my site. I decided a few months ago to gradually introduce a few non-intrusive Google adverts to the site as a precursor to a course I’ll be doing at university during the summer.
I’m a bit of a standards freak, and I serve all the pages on this site as proper XHTML with the correct MIME type of application/xhtml+xml (except for Internet Explorer, but that’s a whole different ball game). However, lo-and-behold, Google’s adverts don’t work with pages served like this, since they use some outdated JavaScript techniques to inject the adverts into the page.
I searched up and down (ironically using Google’s web search) to find a solution to this problem. The best I’ve found so far is to include the adverts on a separate page marked up as regular HTML and served as text/html, and then include this in your (valid) page using an <object> tag. It seems a little backwards, but it does the trick well enough.
Don’t you think it’s time that Google joined the 21st century and supported valid markup?
Like my friend Andy, I also had the transreal numbers lecture by Dr James Anderson as part of my first year degree course. Like him, I also found it to be utter rubbish, with most of what he said appearing to be rehashed information which has already been available to the public for many years.
For example, the IEEE defined NaN (not a number) to use when the answer to a mathematical equation is not a number (i.e. infinity or undefined) around 20 years ago. James Anderson calls this nullity, denotes it with the Greek letter phi and call it his own.
If you think that’s bad, then have a look at how he proposes to solve the problem of dividing by zero as well as his ideas for a time-travelling “perspex” processor which can, in his words, “go back in time and tell itself to do work in order to achieve 100% CPU efficiency with zero idle time”.
I think Andy gets it spot on with his analysis of the lecture as a whole. Also, have a look at the lecture slides which Andy has posted on the entry for a good laugh.
Format wars are nothing new in the world of computing. Ever since the days of competing buses, different manufacturers and groups have been developing and evangelising mostly incompatible technologies which solve the same group of problems.
The most recent format wars have been and are currently being fought in the area of recordable optical discs. During the CD days, there were some fairly esoteric formats relating to specialised photo and video CDs, but many consumers were unaware of these formats. There were CD-R and CD-RW discs, and that was it.
However, when recordable DVD started being developed, two distinct groups of manufacturers formed, each claiming to have developed a superior version of the next generation of optical disc. One was DVD-R (minus R), developed by Pioneer and supported by the DVD Forum. In many ways, this was an extension of CD-R, especially in naming. The other was DVD+R (plus R), developed by the DVD+RW Alliance. At first, customers were confused as to which format to use, and demanded a single format. Many DVD players and recorders took advantage of this by supporting both formats, as well as the fairly rare DVD-RAM, making most of the fighting and egotistic behaviour by both sides unnecessary and irrelevant.
As if that wasn’t enough, the format wars have been ignited yet again with the release of the next generation of optical discs. This time, the formats are HD DVD and Blu-ray, and are not just limited to the recordable versions of the discs as with DVDs (both plus and minus recordable DVDs finalise to the same format) - these two formats are incompatible even for playback. HD DVD is developed by Toshiba while Blu-ray is developed by Sony, each with its corporate partners. Each purports to be better than the other, but not much can be said at the moment owing to the rarity of players and titles on these discs.
Right now, it’s not possible to say which format will eventually win the war, although Microsoft’s support of the HD DVD format for Windows and the Xbox 360 means that it’ll make significant inroads into the computing and gaming markets. Either way, let’s hope for the public’s sake that the companies get this mess sorted out soon so that we can all know once and for all which players, recorders and discs to buy.
A while ago I purchased a license for Waterfall Software’s Wallet. Normally, these things go quite smoothly, with the key in my inbox in a matter of minutes, and the whole thing working within five. Oh how naive I was…
I waited and waited, but there was no key in sight. I waited some more, figuring that there was some delay in sending out emails. But nothing. I found a key retrieval tool on the website and thought I’d try that, but it didn’t like my email address and told me that I had never bought anything.
OK, I thought. I fired off a quick email to the support email address and expected to get an apology email and key within a few days. You can see where this is going though. I never got a reply to it. A while later, I sent another email to the sales address, expecting it would get a faster reply. But I still haven’t heard anything back.
So just a quick warning for those of you thinking about purchasing a license for Wallet anytime soon…if you don’t get the email within 5 minutes, it’s probably a lost cause. I’m waiting for a reply from Waterfall Software to restore my confidence.
Recently, spambots have been trying to make my life difficult… Whether it’s creating new users and posting spam to forums that I manage or sending spam messages using my contact form, they’ll always find a way to annoy people. But no more!
I received quite a few spam messages last week from my contact form, and that got me thinking about how to stop them. I’ve read that the usual “type the letters you see” trick doesn’t work any more since lots of bots can now read the text inside the images. While I was thinking, I remembered an article about displaying random colours and asking the user to name them. Since spambots can’t (currently) decipher colours and name them, this is an excellent idea.
However, I couldn’t find a script that would do this job, so I went about writing my own. The result is the Random Colour Validator which chooses a random colour, displays it, and then validates the user’s response. I’m going to apply it to my contact form soon, so feel free to try it out for yourself. if you have any questions, there’s always the (now protected!) contact form.
Martin Belam’s hit it right on the head with his article “Do boys even take A Levels these days?”. As well as commenting on the omission of boys from most of the national and local media, however, he also comments on the delusional beliefs of some people (who get far more airtime than their opponents) that A Levels are somehow getting easier. As I commented on his blog:
I think you’ve got this one spot on - I got my A Level results this year, and I was amazed to see that the media still keeps bringing out the old “everything’s getting easier these days” argument every year without fail.
God forbid that any students might actually perform better because of better teaching methods or good old brains. No, it must always be the exams that are getting easier, not the students that are getting better.
It’s ironic that not one person who comes out to criticise exams for being too easy has actually sat one himself in the past 30 years. How would he know if they were getting easier?
Oh, and on the subject of only girls taking A Levels these days, maybe boys aren’t half as interesting on results day :)
Now let’s see some of these people come out and actually sit a modern A Level exam, and then we’ll compare their results with ones of today’s students. I’m sure that’ll shut them up.
If you’re a student or you care about students going to university, you may be interested in showing your support for Coalition 2010, a group set up to encourage the government not to remove the £3000 maximum cap on university top-up fees. After all, how can the government set itself a target of 50% of students going to university when fees are increasing all the time?
If you want to read deeper into the matter, then you can also read Early Day Motion 1397, proposed by Ian Gibson MP.
Recently, I have been trying to raise some money for a relatively new charity with branches in the UK and France. The charity is taking a group of young Armenians from the UK to Armenia in the summer holidays to help out with renovating schools and looking after the students. Medical and care staff are also in the group. Each person has paid their own air fare and living costs, so the charity is looking for donations to pay for the cost of buying materials to renovate the buildings.
One of my friends is going on this trip, and he asked me if I would like to help him fundraise. The fundraising involves a sponsored competition in which small groups of people have to go around London for a day finding the answers to a number of questions. The first group to return will win a prize. I accepted to help out and printed out a copy of the sponsorship sheet the very same day in order to get a head start. However, I did not know how difficult it would be to ask people for such small sums of money…
Continue reading "Charitable or not?" »
Ahh so i’ve been rejected from Google’s Summer of Code 2006. I then found out via Gerv Markham that according to him, Mozilla made some mistakes when setting up the list of approved projects around which applications could be submitted for the Summer of Code. Looking back at my application, I can see that the project that I chose was obviously too small, and so I hope that next time, a little more thought is given to the projects listed on the page so that students can be sure that the listed ones qualify. I’m not going to go around blaming others as I can’t say that my application was perfect (in fact, it was far from it as this was my first time), but maybe other people had good applications but were turned down for choosing an “approved” project which was deemed to be unacceptable.
I recently signed up to the much-talked-about MySpace to see what all the hype was about. I couldn’t understand why it was so much popular than some of its rivals in the form of Xanga and MSN Spaces, among others. I was expecting a site with plenty of wow-factor, but most of all, flexibility to be able to truly make your profile “your own”. Once I’d signed up, however, I was struck by the complete opposite.
Continue reading "MySpace is not pimpable enough" »
