No Piracy Legislation for the UK?

I wrote about this subject nearly a year ago, so I thought it was worth of note that the UK Intelectual Property Minister David Lammy has stated that the government have no plans to introduce legislation against piracy. The original interview was with The Times.

This change of tone suggests that the Digital Britain report due at the end of the month, might have less bite than originally expected.

My Blackberry is Dead

My Blackberry died last week after the charging port on my 8800 became “wobbly” and would no longer charge. After accepting that this was something that would take sometime to fix, and that I was due a contract renewal anyway I came to terms with selecting a new device. I should say, that my Blackberry served me well. The push email connectivity really made me feel more connected to the world.

The main use case I wanted to address with my new device was to smooth up my podcast work flow. I was finding myself getting frustrated with my morning “download and sync” of my favourite podcasts to my iPod Nano. It was taking 5 to 10 minutes out of my morning to get organised and sometimes the sync didn’t have completed as I had expected.

The obvious choice was to look at the iPhone. My brother owns one and I have always been impressed by the quality of the web browsing experience, mainly due to the multi-touch interface. I was also excited to learn that apple had updated iTunes on the iPhone and iPod touch to support podcasts. However upon investigation I discovered that podcasts on the iPhone are limited to  up-to 10MB in size.

On top of this, there has been a lot of controversy regarding independent applications, in particular the podcaster application that apple rejected from their application store. Having fiddled with the iPhone SDK I was already familiar with the whimsical nature that governs which applications are approved.

Needless to say, these points were dealbreakers for the iPhone. The other negative for the iPhone was the lack of a physical keyboard. That left me with two options the new Blackberry Bold or a G1. Both have WiFi, 3G and an application that supported my desired workflow of syncing podcasts over the air.

After considering the deals on offer, I am now the owner of a G1. After a week of use i am fairly happy with the device. The G1 has a few flaws:

1. The keyboard is not to the same standard as either the Blackberry Bold or the 8800. The general form factor when typing feels flimsy, but it is servicable. I also find the ‘chin’ to be on the warm side. I don’t ever remember feeling that the 8800 was running warm.
2. The lack of multitouch support on the android operating system is a let down. I am getting used to the zoom buttons but it lacks the iPhones slickness. I am encouraged that the hardware supports it, hopefully we will get an operating system update that introduces it.
3. The shutter speed on the camera is shockingly slow. I wasnt able to get any good photos of my fidgity kids out of the native camera application. I;ve played with a few developer applications and SnapPhoto seems to take better photos.
4. Battery life – although this is a general smartphone problem.
5. The lack of a built in headphone jack. Although, i have acquired a mini-usb to 3.5mm jack. The supplietd headphones are shockingly poor.
6. No native touchscreen keyboard. I prefer a tactile keyboard, but for those times when you just want to hit a couple of letters or numbers. Although this will be fixed in an update this month.

With those three short comings in mind, the star features of the G1 are:

1. It has very tight integration with gmail. I had the gmail application on the 8800 and it was ok. The G1 is far superior, i put it down to the navigation by touchscreen and the fact the UI is optomised for the device. The email experience on the blackberry is its strength and it sets the benchmark. The main weakness in android at the moment is in bulk processing items. Also, there is no way to access gmail tasks.
2. The syncing of contacts with my gmail address book. Assuming I stick with android forever, I will never have that annoying task of reentering/importing/exporting my contacts.
3. The Android market. This is what makes the phone better than the Blackberry. The over-the-air experience is superb on the G1. As good as the iPhone. I will give a more detailed review later in the week. But if you’re just starting out, check out SnapPhoto, PicSay, Locale, Scoreboard and DoggCatcher. They are all awesome.
4. The fact the operating system is being continuely worked on and that an update has already been released, with more likely at regular intervals. It is awesome to see that my major gripe with the software might well be sorted in the next week or so.

In summary, the G1 is a good phone that is taken into a different stratosphere due to an awesome, snappy operating system and a list of fantastic applications that is growing daily. While discussing Windows 7, the BBC quoted Steve Balmer:

“I believe our digital lives will only continue to get richer,” said Mr Ballmer. “There’s no turning back from the connected world.”

That future is already here with the G1.

It Matters!

I wanted to give a quick shout out to the people behind Matter. Matter is a service from the Royal Mail where you are sent a box containing weird and wonderful advertising merchandise you’ll want to keep. In the last edition of Matter that I received a few weeks ago the stand-out item was a DVD of a roaring fire from Bell’s whisky. The next edition is due out in February so sign up now if you don’t want to miss out.

Update: Link fixed – Cheers Mike.

Awesome Demo of Silverlight Deep Zoom

Courtesy of Scott Hanselman and Scott Stansfield.

I could care less…

Incompetech tackles one of those misused sayings with a neat diagram.

Amateurs and Credibility

Jeff Atwood has openly responded to some criticism of his blog Coding Horror by Alastair Rankine. I get where Alastair is coming from. But I really enjoy Jeff’s posts and I find him credible. Sure, he misses the mark sometimes but generally I find a quite high signal to noise ratio. He talks about technology from a developers perspective, his articles are well researched, it’s original content and it’s written in a comparatively humble style. If anything, some of the professional bloggers could learn a thing or two from Jeff and Alastair.

I’m not even an amateur blogger, not even a hobbyist blogger, I’m an occasional blogger. Alastair Rankine does gets this point right in his blog on credibility.

Professional bloggers deserve more scrutiny than dabblers…

In the spirit of scrutiny, Industry leader TechCrunch are on the verge of hitting my Google Reader “deadpool”. I generally enjoy their posts, but I’m tired of the increasing noise level and abrasive manner. The latest example is a fairly abrupt post questioning Twitter’s architecture

• Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
• Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?
• Is it true that the only way you can keep Twitter alive is to have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail?
• Is that why most of your major outages can be traced to periods of time when former Chief Architect/server watcher Blaine Cook wasn’t there to sit and monitor the system?
• Given the record-beating outages Twitter saw in May after Cook was dismissed, is anyone there capable of keeping Twitter live?
• How long will it be until you are able to undo the damage Cook has caused to Twitter and the community?

This obsession with twitter and it’s internal workings lacks credibility, TC aren’t authorities on how to architect applications for scale and performance. Bonus points to Twitter for responding to TC in such a detailed manner.

When 64 bits isn’t enough

Google have been running a few “treasure hunt” challenges; and with a half hour to spare I decided to give one of the challenges a spin. Now, as the challenges are still live I’ll spare you the details of my solution but naturally I worked a number of subsets of the problem in my head and immediately began to think how I’d represent my solution as an algorithm. I’m most proficent with C# so off I went hacking together a few lines of code and I cheerfully submitted my answer. After a short wait I was informed of the real answer and that my answer was many factors short. I don’t like to be wrong, then it struck me… integer overflow! What a sucker I am!

When developing most line of business applications it’s standard to stick with 32 bit integers. After all, 4,294,967,295 unsigned integers cover the vast majority of common issues. The solution to this particular problem can’t be covered by an unsigned 64 bit integer either. Which leads to two questions:

1. Why does C#/.NET not throw integer overflow exceptions?

It does throw integer overflow exceptions, however it is not enabled by default. You can check this in two different ways, firstly via a compiler switch (/checked) and secondly via the checked keyword.

It’s not a default because there is a significant performance penalty for carrying out the check. In reality though, there is probably an arguement for this to be used at the very least for initial builds to QA/Test environments for applications doing serious number crunching.

2. What do you do when 64 bits isn’t enough?

Now this is the first time I’m genuinely disappointed with the C# language/.NET framework. There is no support out of the box to deal with more than 64 bits. Now granted, this is an edge case for businesses, but it becomes more important in crypto and science.  The BCL team had inserted a BigInteger class into System.Numeric for 3.5 and it was present throughout the betas. Unfortunately, it got pulled for performance and compatability reasons. It doesn’t appear to be in the beta for .NET 3.5 SP1 released a few weeks ago, so we’re probably looking at 2009/2010.

Another suggestion is to use the BigInteger implentation supplied in the Visual J# runtime and although sensible, it sums up how idiotic it is that there isn’t a BigInteger implentation in the actual framework! I also read that F# has it’s own BigInt – talk about “red rag to a bull”.

Luckily, there is an answer from the community at Code Project.

Incedently, I was able to confirm my approach was correct by using floating-point instead (checking the most significant bits). Despite my faults, it leads me to the conclusion that this is all a bit poor by MS, even if I had recognised the integer overflow before submitting my answer there is nothing in the framework that would have helped.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last year I panned Facebook’s first foray into online advertising.  I think Facebook is starting to demonstrate to me that they can get advertising right. I live in the UK, my wife is Canadian and I have a lot of Canadian friends on Facebook. Could it be that I’m being targeted by an airline that flies to Canada from the UK?

I might be reading too much into this – it might just be a regular campaign targeted at UK residents. It is much more difficult to infer if a Social Network advert is targeted or generic. With Google Adwords everything is out in the open, with Facebook it’s kept away from our prying eyes! I’ve flown with Zoom before, so the evolution of this would be whether I could be included or excluded based on my email address.

Actually, I just got this Ad – so it’s obviously pot luck for a married guy in his 20s like me!

ISPs Might Levy “BBC Tax”

More whining from Internet Service Providers here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7336940.stm

PS. The mere suggestion that the government should get involved to broker a deal is ludicrous.

ISP: Net Neutrality, Legislation and the Food Chain

I’ve previously written about my thoughts about gripes that ISPs might have to enforce legislation to show that users aren’t downloading illegal content. I had intended to follow up with more thoughts on the legislative threats to firms that make their bread on the net. However, I’m growing tired of ISPs crying wolf in the press. Most recently, the news that Internet Service Providers want to get in on the advertising game with Phorm. Merely a service say the ISPs – to give users more relevant ads, yeah right say others.

It has also came to light that a number of Service Providers are upset with the BBC and the extra traffic that the BBC’s iPlayer is bringing. I found this amusing as in the US, ISPs have to pay ESPN a fee so that the ISP’s customers can access their ESPN360 service. UK ISPs shouldn’t be bitching about how the BBC is costing them money due to bandwidth or trying to kick-off a debate about net-neutrality; they should be thanking the BBC for not charging them a fee to access premium content.

Internet Service Providers forget their place in the food chain; you’re about “the tubes” and doing it in such a way that doesn’t invade our privacy. The reason that I pay for my internet connection is that I want to get some content, the reason I have broadband is because I want it quickly and without any new adverts “injected”.

One more thing, Internet Service Providers should not jump into bed with a company that has developed root kits in the past… it doesn’t inspire confidence that privacy will be respected.