hintofsarcasm
am i still ill?
December 19, 2008 at 01:02 · Filed under Technology
The BBC has launched a new version of their iPlayer. Previously only really available for Windows (though we could watch using a flash video player in-browser), it uses Adobe Air, which is cross-platform. This brings the iPlayer to Mac and Linux, finally!
The iPlayer desktop; currently still in labs, but now available to the public, can be run on any platform that is supported by Adobe Air, which is most. Adobe Air has been revolutionising application development of late, bringing innovative programs to Mac, Linux and Windows users without having to create three completely seperate distributions. My favourite other application that can be found on all of my computers, Windows, Linux and Mac is the Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics, is a great example of how Air really is making cross-platform programming a reality.
Bringing iPlayer content to more platforms will guarantee the BBC a bigger audience. Their rivals are nowhere near as advanced as they have been forced to become by the BBC Trust. Channel 4 and Sky are still stuck with Kontiki and ITV have their in-browser flash player which you have to be online to watch. Hopefully the new Adobe Air based ‘iPlayer desktop’ will coerce the BBC into seeing their Kontiki based player for the memory-hogging, cpu-munching bohemoth that it is and drop it completely.
Innovation is what has driven the BBC for the past 6 decades and the release of the iPlayer desktop is the proof that there really is somebody in the organisation that is still thinking ahead; still thinking that they don’t have to be limited to a bought-in ready made package that is limited in so many ways (not just that it is Windows only).
So, Linux, Mac and Windows users (yes, you can join in too!) rejoice at the release of the iPlayer desktop. Download it. Show your support. We have whinged and moaned and campaigned for this for long enough, now that we have it, use it! Windows users download it too, embrace Adobe Air and kick Kontiki to the curb, your processor will thank you for it.
Download iPlayer desktop
Opt-in to iPlayer labs
December 15, 2008 at 12:22 · Filed under Technology
You may have noticed some very odd things going on around the site over the past week or so. This is because I have moved this website from a Linux box, which has been very good to me over the past 4 years, to the dedicated Windows server that I got up and running a few weeks ago for Pineapple Boudoir.
December 3, 2008 at 15:50 · Filed under Technology
Pineapple Boudoir is a startup that sells lingerie, candles, sex toys and other products, aimed largely at women.
The first challenge was to design an infrastructure to support the web-application and cart.
Having previous experience with Windows and the .NET environment we decided to follow this route, based on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0Â and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. At launch we are running SQL and IIS on this single server, although we intend to run SQL on a separate server in the near future, as growth should warrant.
The server is a Dell PowerEdge with 2Gb RAM and an Intel Itanium processor. It’s racked at BlueSquare 2 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, a brand new facility that went live in May 2007 with a 20GBit resilient Ethernet ring. The server also sits behind a Cisco hardware firewall.
A shopping cart application was next on the list to be found, or else designed bespoke.
A small open-source project called nopCommerce came to our attention. It ticked all of the boxes and the support is very good, as the project is still small enough to receive personal responses from the developer.
The cart software is written in C# with ASP.NET 3.5. It uses DAL (Data Access Layers) and modules for payment gateway integration, including Paypal, Moneybookers and Authorize.net.
It has an impressive back-end which can handle products with multiple variants, some of which are required, like size or colour and some of which are optional items which go with the product, such as batteries.
With knowledge of C# and ASP.NET this cart is extremely easy to customise and modify, either to add custom code to change how the page displays, like the Lightbox effect on the product pages, or to change what functions are performed in the background, like showing ‘featured products’ on the homepage.
Pineapple Boudoir launched on December 1st 2008.
November 19, 2008 at 21:19 · Filed under Comment
To: ukinfo@starbucks.com
Date: 19/11/2008 10:32
Subject: Eggnog
To whom it may concern,
Why why why are Starbucks not selling eggnog latte this year? It is as much a part of the festive season as Santa or Jesus for many people.
I received the email telling me that ‘The red cups are here’ but when I walked into my local store there was no sign of the familiar yellow cartons labelled ‘eggnog’. With the state of the world this year I thought that Starbucks could at least be trusted to bring some cheer to this festive season.
With disappointment,
Nathan Collins.
Reply from Starbucks received 20/11/2008:
Dear Mr Collins
Thank you for taking the time to contact Starbucks Coffee Company.
I am sorry to learn of your disappointment that eggnog is not currently part of our Christmas range this year. You will be delighted to know that eggnog will be available for a limited time in December in all stores. Egg nog will be in store on the first of December.
We look forward to welcoming you into a store soon.
Yours sincerely
Lindall Kidd
Customer Care Specialist
November 17, 2008 at 16:41 · Filed under Anything Else?
With Christmas coming up and the recession well and truly moved in for the holidays I felt that I should let my readers know about a great untapped resource that for some reason seems to be a big secret.
I haven’t seen them advertise, they don’t have banner ads and neither do they link on price comparison sites, but I always find that the Book Depository manages to undercut everybody else on the internet for prices on books and delivery is free too (worldwide).
Let us compare like for like:
Life of Pi - ISBN10: 184195392X
Amazon Price: £4.99 - Delivery: £2.75 - Total: £7.74
Book Depository Price: £6.40 - Delivery: £0.00 - Total: £6.40
In the two years that I have been using them my orders always come the very next day and the books are brand new (not used like from Amazon Marketplace). Great for christmas presents.
This message has not been paid for by the Book Depository. I just think that it is a great unknown website.
October 26, 2008 at 17:47 · Filed under Personal
With everything about the economy being as dire as it is now it is infrequent that good news comes out where money is involved, so when it does I feel compelled to document it.
The pound is currently very weak against the dollar. This must be bad, you would think from the phrasing. Weak is generally perceived to mean not good, but it can be beneficial. If you are selling goods or services in USD then you will receive more GBP for your dollar.
In June of this year you would get £1 for every $2. Today you will get £1 for every $1.50. So, if I was to receive $200 from a client and convert it to pounds, in June I would have received £100 but now I will get £133.
This is particularly important for me as I do freelance programming and a lot of my work comes from across the pond in the United States. Paypal does the converting from dollars to pounds and with it being as it is right now, I am earning approximately 1/3 more than I was 6 months ago.
Of course, it’s the total reverse if you’re converting your money from pounds to dollars. You will be spending 1/3 more than you would have 6 months ago. $200 spending money for a trip to the USA will now cost you £133 whereas 6 months ago it would have only been £100 and of course buying goods in dollars will also be more costly, this will affect businesses who buy stock from the United States.
October 2, 2008 at 20:42 · Filed under Technology
Apart from the Windows Cloud stuff there were some other speakers and demos that interested me, including a neat use of Silverlight at the Hard Rock Café website which you may have seen before as it has been bounded around as the pièce de résistance of Silverlight 2 since about March this year.
When you click that link you are presented with the Hard Rock Café memorabilia website, in the middle you will see an image that can be ‘Deep Zoomed’ into and each different node (item) can be interacted with separately. The resolution on the pictures of the items is amazing and the detail to which you can zoom in to is awe-inspiring. I have just spent a few minutes reading a contract drawn up for a Beatles performance in 1965, the text is so clear and takes no time at all to load, according to the speaker (whose name I forget, sorry) image optimisation has been a big part of the development of ‘Deep Zoom’ in Silverlight 2 in an attempt to deliver the best quality content to the widest range of users, narrowband and broadband of all speeds. This is definitely something that I can applaude as when I find myself on the road and using my 3G data stick I still want to view high resolution pictures in order to send them on or post them to the web but find myself hanging around, usually having to start again more than once after passing through tunnels, for what seems like an age for rich content to load, which is more than mildly frustrating.
The hot topic of the day however was Hyper-V and OS virtualisation.
All but two Windows Server 2008 editions come with Hyper-V services built in. If you don’t know what Hyper-V is, let me try explain it as quickly as possible so that we can move on;
You have one server. Hyper-V can then split this server into two (or more) “virtual” servers which means two servers running on one piece of hardware. To anyone but the sysadmins they respond and look as two completely seperate pieces of kit, but they aren’t. (Something VMWare has actually been doing for years)
The whole point of all this is that, if it suits your business model, you could potentially chop your server and datacentre spend into tiny little pieces and make huge savings. Servers these days are so powerful and often only a small percentage of that power is utilised, so one could easily gobble up three others and still have power (CPU, RAM, etc.) to spare in an emergency.
For example, if you had four file servers each running pretty steadily at 10% utilisation, why buy 4 pieces of kit that are only going to be using 40 out of 400% when you could buy one piece of kit that would use 40 out of 100% and do the same job? It’s the choice between paying £10,000 for 1 server or £40,000 for 4, in the end they’ll both be doing the same job. The green freaks amongst you too will be happy, because only 1/4 the power is being consumed.
OK. Maybe that’s a little simplistic, but you get the gist of what I’m trying to say, right?
Of course, it ends up introducing other problems such as single point failure, but even if you ran it as a high-availability cluster then you’d still be saving 75% on your hardware bill by only buying 2 servers instead of 8.
Also, by happy coincidence, Microsoft Hyper-V Server (notice no ‘Windows’ as there is no GUI) was released yesterday, October 1st as a free download and is free to use by anybody. It doesn’t support clustering, it doesn’t have a GUI, it doesn’t support high-availability clustering, in fact, it doesn’t support very much, but, it would be great in a development or testing environment.
During these times of recession and depression and smaller purses Hyper-V may have just come at the exact right time for Microsoft to maximise profit. Way to go Steve.
October 2, 2008 at 16:51 · Filed under Technology
I travelled across to London yesterday to attend the Microsoft Technet event, ‘Technologies to change your business’, the keynote speaker was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.
He came on stage at around 13:15 and proceeded to do his usual thing, he’s a great public speaker and very knowledgeable about the company that he is running and what they are doing now and what is coming from them in the future. He must have to read hundreds of updates daily from the R&D labs just to keep up with it all.
During the proceedings, between talking about virtualisation and Windows Mobile he mentioned something, for what I think was the first time, about a new operating system that was going to be announced in 4 weeks, which is going to be called Microsoft Windows Cloud, or as he put it, ’something better than that’ by the time the announcement comes out.
Tied with the announcement today of Amazon’s intent to run Windows Server on their EC2 service it looks like Microsoft may be entering the supercomputer OS market for the first time, is this where ‘Windows Cloud’ comes in? This was all brought up in the Q&A including the the need to have datacentres across the globe if the service really did take off, Steve B did say that partners would need to be sought to provide the datacentres as Microsoft building and running them all would not be viable, which is probably true.
We wait to here further information about ‘Windows Cloud’, I’m just glad that I was there, in the second row, to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
August 22, 2008 at 08:46 · Filed under Anything Else?
I’m tired of complaining about the farce that gets published in the South Wales Echo, so, we’ll just have a laugh at this one, because seriously, is this a real campaign? Plus, the part that is comical appears to be a quote, rather than something that their crackpot pseudo-journalists have cooked up, for once.
Residents in a South Wales village say their peace has now been shattered by delivery lorries.
A Tesco One Stop shop opened a year ago on Sully’s South Road bringing, claim its neighbours:
An increase in shoppers seeking bargains …
Oh no! An army of David Dickinson wannabees! This is all that the area needs after the nearby cannabis factory was closed down.
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