Nintendo Apple merge?

Both Nintendo and Apple are niche innovators. My feeling is it could be a great US-Japan enterprise, bringing Nintendo design ideas to mobile computing and the web :)

Comoditised mobile free software

We've recently reached the point where free software such as GNU+Linux is finally making it's mark in the mobile handset space.

There is a trend, new technology niches need investment and so start off as binary only. When there is increased competition either an open source option will take hold (Apache) or one of the big players will open their source (Netscape, Sun OpenOffice, Trolltech Qt etc) to gain an advantage over their competitors. Also they gain the wisdom of all contributors they gain.

Now we're seeing this in the mobile space, the likes of OpenMoko and more successful Android. Palm also have their webOS distro. They all share a Linux kernel and are built with standard GCC tools.

Symbian is a special case, like Netscape, Sun and Troll they have now also opened up their source code. They've only done this because they are loosing market share like Netscape was. In effect this was something which landed in our lap! I think Symbian could stop the drift of its smartphone marketshare now, but they do need t move away from their own flavours of C++ and cleanup stack, and support a new standard API while deprecating old ones. Like Nokia's newly acquired Qt.. hopefully ;)

Web unified HOME folder and email

Back in 2005 I had a great idea, only found time this evening to write about it due to the snow in UK :)

Essentially we have two folder hierarchies, HOME folder, and email Inbox etc when we only need one!

So currently I have in my HOME folder I have:
Documents
Music
Videos
Photos
Public
Deleted
Tosort

In my Email I have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Deleted
Documents


Take the example of me quoting for some work. On a spreadsheet I calculate my costs, my fees and I email my total quote to client as my tender. Now in a conventional system I could not store that spreadsheet with the email. I need to keep two different directory structures.

So I'd like my email client to operate on the HOME folder, I even have "Tosort" which is basically an "Inbox" and of cause Deleted.

So this means we have:
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Documents
Photos
Videos
Public
Deleted

This allows more flexibility, I can even save a document and photo in the same folder which contains my email about the same topic for future reference.

For true flexibility this unified HOME directory would be hosted on a server, so I can access from any of my netbooks, and weblogins.

500 gram GNU+Linux netbook - £70

Disgo Net Browser 3000 is sells in China for £70 with Windows CE 5.0. With its 7 inch display (800 x 480) it would make an excellent GNU+Linux netbook coupled with Firefox. Buying whole sale would be even cheaper. When the average *new* netbook price is £200, this is an absolute bargain.

So why has no one done it already?

• Needs an ARM distro (OpenZaurus, Maemo, openmoko or other embedded disro might make more sense than a regular Ubuntu distro).
• Only 64MB RAM, bloated firefox would consume that immediately, so Fennec is probably the way to go.
• Only 2GB NAND Flash, distro can fit in that, presumably it is also writable so can be partitioned for a HOME partition.

Digital Subtitles for TV

In the UK both Freesat and Freeview TV broadcast of BBC and other channels feature subtitles. However, I notice how poor the real-time subtitles are compared to the ones on pre-recorded programmes and films are.

Solution is for BBC and other life programs and news to insert a 10 sec delay from capture to broadcast of their live feed to give the subtitlers chance to write and send the text in real-time!

Like other countries have had for years (Japan since 2001 etc), films which on DVD come with subtitles and audio in multiple languages should also be available when broadcast on TV. The UK must be the only country with single audio/subtitle stream broadcasts.

Also I'd like the subtitles available as part of a revised iPlayer open offering, ditching the Microsoft/Adobe requirements.

Time for more HD channels?

In the UK with our free, unrestricted digital satellite service freesat we get 1.5 HD channels. That is BBC HD and the Red Button on ITV1 to switch to ITV1 HD

What I'd like to see is a full ITV1 HD channel schedule, additionally BBC HD being replaced by three HD channels, BBC HD1, BBC HD2 and BBC HD3. During the 2012 Olympics BBC HD2/3 could be completely deadlined to the games, and BBC HD1 somewhat.

In addition the formats and protocols should all be patent and license free like ISO standards and Khronos standards. Ideally also source code of each TV should be published, we could then fix bugs and add new features. I'd like to fix the (Info) button bug on my Panasonic TX37LZD81.

Finally, I would like to see the +1 repeat of BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, ITV1 which currently do not feature on Freesat or Freeview for some reason.

Call to publish freely ISO standards & scientific papers

It is ironic that ISO standards aren't freely available, you have to actually pay to get a copy. So if I wanted to write an ISO C++ compiler that would be pretty hard without paying ISO in Switzerland 102 CHF (£66).

It's now time for ISO to modernise, move with the internet generation and publish ISO standards online for no-charge. Other standards organisations like the Khronos Group (and the previous ARB group) with their OpenGL standards have been published online for decades! This has furthered the adoption of those standards ;)

Scientific papers suffer the same problem, when scientists want to publish a papers they assign copyright to a publishing Journal. The Journal organises the peer-review of the paper, and then charges for the final version in the form of journal subscriptions and one-off payments.

It's now also time for a new paper publishing model too, as Journals have ramped up prices so much it is now financially economical to look for a fairer model which cuts out those greedy Journals! This means we get all the papers in nice electronic form too ;)

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern is taking steps to provide freely all data and papers from its experiments. So we have a great organisation taking the lead, setting the standard to follow!

Redhat ditch RPM for DEB apt-get in 2009?

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Encyclopædia Britannica's missed opportunity

Encyclopædia Britannica must be kicking themselves now, they've all but completely lost their market share to Wikipedia -- if only they had updated their business mode back in the 90s, they could have controlled online encyclopædias, and profited from adverts on every page!

Instead Britannia pages like Brythonic languages, suffer popups which obscure the text every 10 seconds -- that's not going to win them any friends or users!

Firefox 3 fixes needed

Firefox 3 is now released, I've written up a list of the fixes I'd still like to see, to make the browser it deserves to be:

Form buttons that don't "click" properly, and end up just looking like they've been highlighted.

Option to stop sites disabling scroll bars, and block detection of any right clicks.

A decent sized window resize on lower right hand corner (This could just be Ubuntu/KDE/GTK bug).

URL completion doesn't work from the character after http, currently I have to type https:// before it will offer me mail.google.com. At least it offers the SSL site from the history when I just enter mail.google.com.

Some passwords aren't saved always (http/s ones), currently every once in a while I need to log in to my netgear router, but sometimes Firefox doesn't populate the password fields, even though they are stored passwords! AutoAuth is one workaround for a few of the cases :)

Save Page button that I've commented on before. Currently needs a way to save the page as a PDF file!

Quicker (or configurable) time-out on loading iframes, images etc from hosts which are down. let the rest of the page load. The problem is visible on any google cache of a site where the site is presently offline and the iframes/images still try and load!

Native support for common image types like TIFF which is still missing despite many sites using TIFF files in the IMG tag.

When a webmaster embeds an MP3 or Vorbis file into a browser page using the EMBED or OBJECT tag this gives an error if the mimetype isn't supported. The error is at the top of the page "Click here to download plugin.", and there is the green jigsaw icon where the embedded file is. The green jigsaw icon is not ideal, a download link would be much nicer, e.g. "Embedded file not supported, click here to download", or be able to right click on the jigsaw icon and download it is another option. Workaround at present is to delve into the HTML and try and figure out the src URL, or if not generated by JavaScript try and get it from the Page Info (Ctrl+I doesn't work in recent Firefox unfortunately). If there is an EMBED error, my feeling is Firefox should display the mime-type, or a string describing the mime-type so we know it is a "Windows Media Video" file etc, without having to go through the plugin detection wizard to find what format it is.

Unfortunately links stop working on a page the moment we click one, so even though the new page hasn't loaded, all the page is still readable, and links clickable, but none of the links work! Often we click a link, then see another, but we can't middle-click it to open in an additional tab, as would be handy :)

Firefox3 is great as it is though, a great development from Netscape and Mozilla Suite which went before :)

Why web forms are bad (compared to email)

Don't you just hate it when you click on the "email" link on someone's website and it takes you to a tiny web-form which only fits about 6 words per line, cramped into a small box? After struggling to write your message you invariably click "submit" and it says Error.. you click the "back" button optimistically and of cause the whole message is gone. Webmasters got overexcited and tried to run internet messaging through a web page, when really it should be left as standard email or IM.

Short run down of why web-forms are bad for messages:

• Tiny form boxes, pledgebank is a great example, limited to 7 words per line.
• Often arbitrary restrictions on the text that can be written. Lincolnshire NHS trust have a secret blocked character list including ",', and ; then they limit to 255 characters.
• Often fails to "Submit" and when you click back of cause it has lost all your text.
• Leaves me with no record in my Sent folder of what I've written.
• No way to forward the message I have sent to a friend, or another department at the organisation.
  

All these problems make it very difficult to send a website a message telling them one of their pages has broken links or typos etc. Web-forms can always be a secondary contact option, but email should always be the first option as it is the best. See Email 101 for tips on writing to the point.

Firefox3 Intelligent Search Location Box

The smart web location box in Firefox3 will be much more useful when it takes advantage of the stats it has to hand. This is essentially a development of the idea I posted back in 2004 Technique to Facilitate Intelligent Functionality Tailored to Each User. I see the Search box as dupicating space, the browser should really have a single "Location search box". When the addresses in the bar start with http:// then they are URLs, when they are keywords separated by spaces they should be treated as a search query.

One other thing I would love to see is a "Save page" (snapshot) button which just grabbed all the content and stored it in an HTML WebDoc archive, these could be recalled later from a history. A prime use of this would be when I have booked my flights, but my email confirmation has not arrived yet.. I need to either print the web-page.. or hang-on and keep the page open until an email confirmation is processed so I don't use track of the confirmation reference.

These archived pages are static (the generated HTML layout) in that they can't be modified, they can be printed or forwarded as emails in their format as they appeared when the snapshot was taken with the click of the "Save page" button.

In the future, when the off-line file-store, email inbox/sent/drafts and online storage of documents is eventually unified... these snapshots of pages would show up as "Easyjet.com Flight booking -- saved 15 May 2008" in the "Saved" folder. So we can return to the archived pages for future reference should the airline loose track of our tickets! It will even be possible to forward them as the archive Easyjet_Flights.webdoc file I am sure ;)

European travel adapters

Isn't it frustrating countries still use different sockets. The US/Japan ones are rather flimsy and have a trailing earth wire to connect sometimes. The UK ones are great, with a longer earth pin which "unlocks" the live+neutral pin holes in the socket. The Swiss ones are inconveniently slightly differently spaced round pins compared to France and Germany. The UK shaver 2-pin adapters are also slightly larger round pins which wont fit into standard French sockets!

My "European" travel adapter doesn't fit in Swiss sockets, I need to buy a separate 3 pin adapter for while I am there!

Why don't countries support a multi-compatible socket for the moment? Then in the future just standardise on the safer UK design of plug/socket.

Talklets talking web

Talklets is amazing, insert a little bit of JavaScript and you've got an accessible web page which can be played back as a standard audio file!

OpenID security issue

I am very pleased that OpenID is finally taking off, I have too many site logons as it is. However, it does raise a security implication, because once my personal data has been concatenated to the point that it's as dangerous as a leak of enriched uranium waste.. someone gaining access to my bank logins subject me to fraud ultimately. I personally am pleased my online banking all has a different login system for security. if banks did ever unify their login systems I'd hold out to have a separate account for each system, as I would never use my bank login from a web-cafe as I can't be sure if it's secure.

InkMedia Ubuntu laptop

ASUS Eee and OLPC now have a competitor, from Canadian company InkMedia with their Unique laptop running Ubuntu. It is a different in that it runs everything from ROM, and data is saved to an external USB stick which prevents any viruses getting into the system when nothing is connected.

No more Apple iTunes excuses

I've long argued against using Apple's proprietary DRM beast that is iTunes, but I still know people who put up with the DRM and other problems because they like the UI. Now we have Miro, the free software media player which is fortunately a Joost killer. Also we have Songbird, this will suit those still using Apple's iTunes.

A few years ago i saw that VLC was popular, but not mainstream in the way that Firefox had become. We've needed a media player which can complete for a long time, and now we have two! What's a shame is that they both advocate Adobe's Flash format on their screencast pages here and here, that's a bit bad form after your great effort guys!

I myself am still using XMMS, loads in under 1 sec and doesn't take up much screen space. I'd give KDE's Amarok a go, but it takes 6 secs to load! eek.

GMail search improvement request

Advance the search functionality, so it is as good as google.co.uk. Including "did you mean" and other neat additions. For instance, I type "chamnix" and "No messages matched your search", even "broadening my search" didn't pick up on any with the correct Chamonix spelling. Using the "Advanced" search doesn't come up with any either.

The search is just too basic for my needs presently! ;)

AOL moving to Jabber (XMMP)

Looks like AOL has seen the writing on the wall and is experimenting with XMPP for it's instant messaging services (ICQ and AIM). Check out this post with more info. This is great news for the users still on their networks (many switched to MSN), the rest of us went straight to a jabber.org account, or a GoogleTalk as that is already XMPP.

So finally it looks like IM is converging on a decent open standard. Better than a fractured proprietary system with each vendor hoping for a monopoly (like Betamax!). Now all we need is for MSN to addopt XMPP, or maybe all the users will just ditch it and use GoogleTalk or Facebook when they switch to Ubuntu? ;)

Discpace of used by sub-dirs

There are often times when I wish Konqueror or the MS-Windows equivalent could display a column for discspace used by sub-dirs. Unfortunately its necessary to check each directory manually, when really I just want to track back from my ~/ to see where all the used up space is!

Install and restart in Firefox

It is interesting to see that Firefox suffers the same problems that MS-Windows does. Every time an extension is installed it says it is necessary to restart before changes will take effect. Why can't they apply on the fly like most GNU-Linux desktop applications?

What is worse that Firefox's offer to Restart doesn't actually work, I installed Filterset.G Updater on the latest 2.0.0.11 (what's with the silly numbering?) and clicked "Restart" when it offered, and when it restarted it hadn't really restarted, as Filterset.G hadn't run its first-run functions to download the advert block list! I had to close it, and manually restart to get it to download the advert block list.

..so come on Firefox developers, catch up!

Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD format war won thanks to PS3

Compare these prices from dabs.com:

• Xbox 360 £300 (with only a DVD drive!)
• PS3 £300 including one free game (and a Blueray drive).

If you want to be able to play HD-DVD discs on your Xbox you have to spend a further £111.22 for the external HD-DVD drive, yuk! They are even including 5 discs.. guess what is not selling well? They'll be burying them in the desert along with all those ET Atari cartridges at this rate.

Toshiba's standalone HD-DVD player costs £200. Again, it includes 5 of those HD-DVD discs they're desperate to get rid of!

The Xbox 360 having an HD-DVD driver would probably not have made much difference, as it is already available as an option, and many games are downloaded from the marketplace.

The only thing Xbox 360 has going for it is the games. Save your money and buy a PS3 which can already play HD films though ;)

Websites need to aim for mobile displays

I browse the net from my Nokia 770 and also my K800i. What strikes me is that web designers are still not making accessible pages. Often I find there are PDF links which are so bulky they take 30secs to view on the 770, or simply cant be viewed on my K800i. Then there are Adobe Flash files embedded into the pages. Often the pages don't fit on the screen and disabling the images to speed up browsing leaves it looking a mess.

Web designers need to make sure their page will fit the width, my weblog for instance comes in at under 800px, including the scroll bar and window declarations. Image sizes should be included in the HTML, so that when they're not downloaded the page is still layed out correctyly (also helping the layout display while the page is being downloaded).. All obvious stuff, so just need the mobile browsers to catch up, and the designers to take note!

Also would be nice if caches like google included the images as well as the text, because I use the cache links when the real pages go down, but then the cached page references the orginal images and I have to disable the image display to let the page download.

Picture messaging not so good from computer

It's so easy to take and send a picture message from my mobile, so why is it so hard from a computer? Neither my Thunderbird or GMail have a picture messaging mode. It just needs a way to add a photo, resize it and orient it, compress it so it downloads quick for the recipient, and send! Not that hard is it..? My GNU+Linux distro can't even copy an image to the clipboard like MS Windows has been able to since 1995!

Forms and paperwork now expand to fit the net

It seems like every form which used to be 1 page has now increased to about 10 thanks to how "easy" it is to ask for someone to fill it in online. The net could be used to complete the compact forms of old and speed up the process, but it seems it's only made it simpler for organisations to ask for more information! When a new motorway is built to ease congestion, within a couple of years it's also at gridlock.

Google Android 3D and UI

Google's 3D accelerated android looks amazing, (you will need an FLV downloader etc to watch the videos as they are in Adobe Flash format). I love the browser history pages viewed as 3D, maps with street panoramas, and the ability to run games like quake! I'd like to see how they did the panoramas in code, seems to all run in Java from the look of it. There are so many nice touches, like integrated messaging, and the way the title bar is a notification area for incoming messages.

Interesting they chose WebKit instead of Mozilla's Gekko HTML rendering engine too. When you notice who compiled the OpenVG spec at Khronos things all start to make sense... ;)

Perhaps this is what the iPhone should have been? Another missed opportunity for Apple!

Expiring web sessions

I do a *lot* of online shopping these days, the high-street is so far away, and then I have to find parking too. (Even then, when I get back to my car I may find dents in the doors from the adjacent car because the greedy car park company only allows a tiny space for each car!)

So, back to my point. Why do web-sessions expire? Visit confused.com and you'll often get:

We are sorry but your interactive session has expired.

So we have to go back and fill in all the forms again. The reason we have these web applications which don't work is because there isn't a professional UI/widget layout development system like we have on GNU-Linux with Qt and Qt Designer etc. So every programmer tries to do his/her best, redeveloping the wheel. Which leaves things like even the "Exit Confused Site" button not working.

Once we get a better web-server configuration which fits with a standard web application UI/widget these problems will go away, so for the moment we still have to suffer when using websites like confused.com.. oh well, things will improve eventually.

Happy birthday Open Rights Group!

ORG is officially Two years old today, congratulations! For those not already members, please consider supporting any way you can ;)

Regulating CCTV in the UK, Surveillance Protection Principles proposed

From last year's EthiComp Conference, A. A. Adams of Reading University presented Regulating CCTV.

Quotes from the Abstract: "Given that the number of CCTV cameras in the UK is the largest in the world, and given that it is unclear when video data should be regarded as Personal Data (or what rights a blanket definition would reasonably provide to the surveilled) it is claimed that a CCTV Act is needed in the UK"

"Specific proposals for securing data and infrastructure are suggested, in addition to some general Surveillance Protection Principles."

No more WWW prefixes!

The net has changed a lot since I first jacked in back in '96. (I was using an Acorn A440 back i those days!). I remember the telegraph two page diagram I had on my wall then which illustrated what the World Wide Web was an how it was a layer on top of the "Internet" servers and dialup connections.

Things have moved on though, we don't say the World Wide Web any more, or even the WWW in capitals. We just say the "web" and some people even now say "interweb".

Another thing that has changed is we don't even use the www prefix on URLs often now, and to be frank they weren't necessary from the outset, as they are just an alias of the main domain. So take my site for instance, that runs on jguk.org's ANAME record, it would be the same machine that ran on www.jguk.org. I actually set up the www prefixed hostname to redirect after a short pause just so I don't miss any hits though still ;)

Of cause there is the counter view, take this one by HM2K. That doesn't mention that a hostname doesn't need to symbolise protocol information as well, ftp://jguk.org/ already symbolises the protocol nicely, so setting it up as ftp://ftp.jguk.org/ is not necessary. Likewise http://jguk.org/ already indicates that is a website URL because of the http:// prefix! HM2K follows the same logic that some programmers use by prefixing variable names with a string of letters to denote "type", when the development environment knows the type and will show it, and the debugger knows the type. As in programming, a prefix is really only good to denote scope, so internal.jguk.org is obviously not a public URL, and we will know that URL will not work from the internet.

URLs seem to be the wrong way around too (Tim Berners-Lee also said this recently I recall), they go from right -> left, alternate to the directory structure on the tail of the URL. When on the precursor to the internet people did write the other way, so UK.AC.CAM was probably the way Cambridge uni appeared!? (Should find example here!). So if we stuck to that with URLs, my website URL would actually be http://org/jguk/images/K800front.jpg

Returning to the WWW prefix debate, shorter URLs are also better for mobile devices! ;)

Tabbed browsing doesn't work well (yet!)

Problems with Tabbed browsing keep showing recently because websites account for their pages being tabbed.. so when I have two booking tabs open at TheTrainLine and choose my train in one tab, I go to the other tab and the train info has been lost because the other tab overwrote it! (known as a race condition)

The fix is for either websites with login and ordering process cookies and sessions to store and support multiple connections from the same user... or for browsers to neatly disguise each tab as a new session/browser instance. I favour the latter at present, as we're never going to be able to convince all website designers they should code in a way which supports tabs, and it seems neater to do it at the client side.

Personally, I really appreciate tabs for browsing reference information. However, I much prefer to have my web applications in separate windows so I can flick between them and paste text from a web page into my GMail compose window etc, and having different windows on each of my flat panels ;)

Leaky Acrobat Reader

Just needed to use a Windows XP machine, and I have to say, I was startled to find it still comes with some many background processes/applets/systemtray gubbins that eats up so many resources.

Then I noticed that if I clicked on a PDF AcroRead32.ext remained resident in memory using 32MB of RAM after I'd closed down all the applications.... is it any wonder GNU/Linux and Mac are becoming more and more common? ..

My prediction for 2017, a vastly commoditised software and OS market, with polished GNU/Linux distros up from the current 6% to a 30% market share.

iPlayer Linux

The BBC have just launched their "on-demand" internet ready iPlayer beta. It's actually only Microsoft Windows XP compatible though -- no Linux or Mac support! This is essentially the same as if the BBC broadcast in a format incompatible with TVs which weren't manufactured by Panasonic!

Sign the iPlayer Linux petition, and make yourself, the free public heard!

Scaling P2P for the future

We all use P2P like BitTorrent, but the user experience isn't quite there yet. The current generation of P2P doesn't scale from popular to niche downloads. Often we'll be sat waiting hours or even days for a niche track to download, and likewise my potential for uploading will be left unused as no one needs parts of the tracks I have.

The solution is for the super-nodes to hint the niche files which are struggling to be cached by other nodes, boosting the niche file's availability while the other nodes are otherwise idle; a neat balancing trick. Skype uses similar approaches, diverting firewalled traffic via idle nodes.

Seemless streaming media solutions?

In a world of innovation, media streaming is an open field awaiting innovation at present. I'd expected Akamai to have capitalised and launched a streaming/p2p media system by now, and no one else is even that close. Kontiki is around, but only thanks to the BBC.

There are the possibilities for the future, Niklas Zennström (the Skype founder) has his internet TV app Joost in the works... but for the moment youTube / Google video is as good as it gets at present.

When will we see something truly revolutionary? I'm sure we will eventually, let's hope it's soon! We can't wait forever ;)

iTunes and DRM - For better or for worse?

Consumers aren't pledging themselves to Digital Restrictions because they deserve better, they have rights too and shouldn't have to settle for second best. This BBC Digital lock's rights and wrongs article and video make some good points, like the fact that all the current "solutions" have different incompatible restrictions from each manufacturer, be it Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks or any of the others. It's not a joined up solution -- it's a solution to a problem which doesn't exist, a solution which could simply create a lot of wealthy middlemen by taking a cut of the money we spend which should go to the artists. If anyone proposed Digital Restrictions as a business idea to the Dragons they would rip them to pieces pretty quickly.

The largest market share is currently with Apple. Their iTunes software and online shop shouldn't be used because it adds DRM to the tracks you purchase from their online shop, don't be fooled by the cute user interface and features.. read the license agreement, then do the right thing and uninstall it! Pass the world and get at least one other person to uninstall Digitally Restricted software like iTunes too!

Returning to the DRM problem, the music industry execs are currently forcing their artists too loose out on plenty of potential digital sales, which is a real shame for all involved. In the meantime online shops like Lavamus and AllOfMP3 are clearing up in the market. Artist really need to get their music execs to ditch the digital restrictions and sell their tracks in an accessible format which makes them the money they deserve. A lot better than lining Apple or AllOfMP3's pockets each day.

Artists deserve their money ! ;)

The way M$ Windows was meant to be?

Some people are pretty cynical when it comes to Microsoft and Windows, but not me! I take a broader view on what can be learned. The Vista shutdown menu is just an example of how heavy weight development processes have bogged the MS engineers down to the point where things just can't get done. Agile processes eliminate many of those problems ..Anyway, back to my point, some things just aren't right in Windows:

• The way popups are used so excessively, and the way they always display on top of full screen games, films and even VMWare!
• The lack of customisation options, take for example that they could only envisage that users would want a clock as a way to change the time -- so we are stuck with using that widget as a calendar to check the current date or a date in the future!
  
• Then shouldn't a decent email client (with bayesian spam filtering), a desktop calendar and a word processor come as standard with an OS these days?
  

... oh wait... you may have realised too, I've been describing things which work fine (and have been for many years!) in Desktop Linux., developed by companies, and individuals as a group of Free Software/Open Source packages. So the big question, why don't people switch? I'd say its hard to get off the treadmill when its still going at quite a pace, but it is gradually slowing due to the development process problems and also significantly, price! Users should start by switching to Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim and OpenOffice; then follow it with specific applications you need like Picasa or Skype (Not yet free software) -- before you know it you'll be using the apps which are already all available native on the Desktop and you'll be ready to make the move! Of cause these products are all available at no-charge, online community support is excellent, or you can buy a support contract from a variety of suppliers. Finally make sure you get your Jabber.org or Google Talk account setup, which is secure and authenticated so doesn't suffer spam. Then you can communicate with everyone too!

Happy days ;)

2007, the year of software reliability?

A new year is upon us, and everything feels so different! I've been pondering if 2007 could be a year to remember for software. Reliability is definitely one area I can see which has scope for improvement in this year's releases.

Following on from my last discussion: The problem with programming? Do we as software developers really need to expose ourselves and users to crash opportunities as at present? It's an interesting point to debate. C++ gives programmers control over memory resources, direct address access and pointer arithmetic. Invalid data can cause out of bounds memory accesses and likewise programmers are only fallible humans which can make mistakes as well. Programmers shouldn't count on being able to always beat the language at what it does best!

As Bjarne says "People push what they know and what they have seen work; how could they do otherwise?". It's surprising to see people code C++ like they do C, pointers arithmetic, allocating memory and magic globals etc which should be neatly wrapped up in a state system, design pattern or other standard approach.

A few examples of problems in C++ which can trip programs up:

• Memory management delegated to programmer, no built in garbage collection of inaccessible objects/allocations means resource leaks can occur.
  
• Using pointers means NULL pointers will cause crashes.
  
• The type system is not type-safe like Ada, Java, Haskell and C#.
• Direct address access for memory and data means a the program could over or under-run.
  

Would it be better to write non-kernel/system libraries in a language which does not permit these issues? It seems logical to cut down on the opportunity for errors.

In practice I see that performance critical crunching code (like a quantiser etc) really benefits greatly from a C++ implementation which can use the points above; the compiler just can't convert the code into as optimal an implementation itself. Let's only write a more optimal block of code when we really need to though, the profiler shows us when that is necessary ;)

Shouldn't diagnostic tools be included in Flash Memory?

PCs these days all have a BIOS which launches the OS bootstrap from disc. If the disc fails this leaves us stuck scrabbling for bootable CDs/USB Sticks/Floppies to diagnose the problem.

There is a lot to be said for booting from Flash memory, it is safe, quick, and if the disc does fail (I've had nine hardiscs fail in my home PCs in the last ten years!) you're not stuck in a situation where you're unable to run diagnostic software from a compact version of the OS in ROM. Acorn (the UK's last independent desktop computer manufacture!) produced machines for UK and Australian schools which ran Risc OS. They took the approach of putting the whole OS in a 4 MB ROM! It was not flashable, so when a new version of Risc OS came out we needed to buy new chips! This was all back in the 1990s, Acorn sadly aren't around now, but the idea lives on with me today.

Now we don't need the whole OS in ROM (could a modern desktop OS even fit in 4 MB!?), but we could take one aspect of this idea and put essential components in a Flash memory, putting everything supplementary on harddisc as at present. This would give us the best of both worlds, as normal operation would be the same as at present, but if needed they could hold down a key during boot and get access to a wealth of diagnostic software built into their own computer.

So how about motherboards start shipping with a 16MB Flash? My Linux kernel is 1.5MB, and memtest is 86KB, so this leaves space for a ramdisc image with some other utils like fsck.ext3 and badblocks etc. Perhaps this could even be integrated with the LinuxBIOS project? A smart boot manager (GRUB etc), Master Boot Record (MBR) fixer would be *very* useful. Also, if full machine virtualisation takes off proper we'll see Hypervisors on the market, so there is scope for that being in Flash ROM as well ;)

Rich Web Typography - Just around the corner?

It's 2006 and it still feels like we're in 1995 as far as fonts on the WWW go. Time has moved on, we've stopped calling it the WWW and just say the web now. It's integrated into the fabric of our lives, we don't think about what's happening when we access information, it's just something we rely on.

Fonts on the web haven't kept up with the pace of change, the fonts which can be used in web pages are still limited to what ships with peoples computers! When the tech is in place, I want to see web sites providing fonts just like they provide an image or a vector graphic at present ;)

There are ways we can get custom fonts into pages, but they are either tied to a specific browser or require the user to download and install the TrueType Font themselves as administrator of their PC beforehand. Other approaches use Adobe's Flash as the means of rendering Anti-Aliased fonts in a browser, sIFR 2.0 is one framework which takes this approach; it does gracefully display using standard XHTML if the Flash plug-in is not installed, so users should not see any Flash errors at least.

Another key point is that users and companies need fonts they are allowed to distribute, home users might not be able to afford to buy special fonts. This means home users will either have to make their own (a time consuming affair, even more so for Asian languages!), or just put up with the bog standard Helvetica and Times fonts which most Linux, Mac and Windows installs come with (you need to maintain the common denominator between systems right! ;) One popular community produced free font is Gentium, I've also been using DejaVu Sans, check them out!

There is already a way to pull in our fonts, take this CSS example I wrote from the W3C's CSS2 spec, (dropped this from the CSS2.1 spec though!):

/* Define Maxus font to be downloaded if needed */
@font-face
{
font-family: "Maxus"; src: url("maxus.ttf") format(TrueType)
}

The W3C gurus have been discussing fonts too. Here's what I can see needs to be prioritised to get this in place:

• Common browsers need to support a finalised spec, pure and simple.
• As fonts take a long time to make, there aren't as many great ones going for nothing as their could be, so that area needs some targeted work by a collection of vendors, Universities or designers etc.

As a side note, these developments could create a whole market for fonts to be licensed for use on a website, or given away free under a non-commercial licence to home users etc.

So to summarise, let's focus on the open CSS2 specification we have. Plan of action: Web authoring tools vendors like Adobe need to support it, the W3C to promote it and web browsers to implement the support! ... possible? Yes. Will it ever happen? If no better solution comes along first, I hope it will!

WebDoc - A document format for all?

We've had PDF and PostScript for many years, they work okay, but they aren't as accessible as web pages are. What we really need is a format which combines XHTML and images into a single file. I call this proposal WebDoc. It could be a compressed ZIP archive with a .webdoc extension (mime type application/webdoc).

Simple to use, click on the file to open it in the web browser which then displays the index.html within. The reason this is better than a PDF or an OpenDocument file is that existing web browsers will be able to display, navigate, bookmark and copy/paste from the WebDoc, no extra PDF Viewer software such as Adobe Reader is required.

WebDoc is a collection of open formats in a ZIP archive, ergo this really opens the doors to accessibility products, such as screen readers or braille displays for the blind. Also automated translations are possible, keeping the flow of the document, and the result as complete as the original; not as nearly as difficult as dealing with PDF files at present! Let's see where we are with this development in a few years time; a vendor might have popularised their own equivalent proposal by then! ;)

Mobile phone dictionaries

Dictionaries are funny things, never complete due to the way languages change so quickly; but then on the other hand it's surprising my Sony Ericsson K800i doesn't have blog, or colloquialisms such as hey and hiya, or even Mrs in its dictionary for that matter.

If the mobile platform was more open, I'd just be able to edit or import the English dictionary of my choice. David Bartlett maintains the excellent English dictionary which is used by Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Of cause, as the mobile platform isn't yet open we can't use David's dictionary; we just have to make do.

In addition, the K800i doesn't notice that I only type "Hiya!", it always suggests "Hiya.", then I need to select the exclamation mark myself. Adding "Hiya!" to the dictionary is the workaround.. but the phone should really take my input as a training set, to tune its ability to make suggestions based on data!

Future mobile innovations

I wonder what's going to be big in the next couple of years in the mobile arena? We've had basic phone functionality for some time (see my Sony Ericsson K800i to the right), but it's all still a bit clunky and prone to reception problems when we're on trains etc. I think we're going to see a few things appear over the next few years:

• Cheap wireless BB, mobile and computer wireless technology / protocols will converge, providing an open platform with much better coverage.
• Galileo/GPS SatNav and accurate terrain height reading features for mapping.
• VoIP providers and many new innovative ideas will thrive in this mobile arena, think what the open platform of the Web did for computers and consider how many millions more people have their mobile with them at all times!

That's enough for today ;) Post any ideas in the comments section!

Gmail running our email domains

Wouldn't it be cool if Gmail ran our email domains? I've got my own domain jguk.org, that could just forward the email onto my Gmail account, but Gmail could actually run the domain's MX record and then have the ability to better manage spam email. Employing techniques like issuing SMTP's Reject 554 code for hosts connecting which were known to send spam or if the incoming email looks like it's definitely spam.

Sending the Reject code means you refuse to take and pass on this spam email, I prefer this approach to accepting all email and then sorting and storing spam in a Junk folder, as then I've still got to sift through all those Junk emails to double check. I read my email using Thunderbird on my laptop, but that's not as portable as I'd like, and I still get junk mail slipping through like these:

(Thunderbird's Bayesian filters does a good job of classifying junk mail which does get through!)

Therefore, spam prevention and rejection decisions need to be taken during the SMTP session when computers connect, dramatically cutting out the market for spammers. David Mazières's MailAvenger implements these ideas which should reduce spam.

If anyone from Google is reading this, how about adding a feature to host our MX records directly with you? Then there could be a simplified one stop spam rejection system put in place, rejecting connections and emails determined spam before Gmail takes responsibility for them. This would require a performance intensive change to perform tests during the SMTP session, but is definitely doable with one of the clusters Google has!

One final idea, why not use a Domain Ranking system coupled with SPF checks to maintain tuned weights which give an indication of how likely a particular domain is to be sending spam.

Update: Google have already had part of this idea, they provide a Hosting service which could be used. Not sure if the MailAvenger style anti-spam measures idea is integrated h it.

Mobile Payments a replacement for cash?

It strikes me as obvious that we really need mobile instant banking. People live their lives at quite a pace, purchases will be made and completed in minutes, but then people have to wait for the money and their bank statement through the post. It would be so simple to instantly send and receive payments via mobile number. Conventional functions like banking need to catch up with the way people live and work in the 21st century! It could even form the basis of a replacement for the age old system of carrying cash around!

Automated Lip Reading

Frank Hubner has developed some rather clever tech which can produce a transcript of what someone is saying in a silent film. Image processing techniques are used on the video of their lips as they speak, this is then profiled against a database of recognised words to produce a transcript of what was said. This tech could be coupled with existing voice recognition techniques to give more accurate results.



In addition, this opens the way for automatic sub-title generation, and even automatically translated subtitles for all those Japanese films like 男たちの大和 I'd love to watch, but which presently don't have 英語字幕 (English subs).

"Technique to Facilitate Intelligent Functionality Tailored to Each User"

Field of "invention": Humanity.

My invention is a novel technique to intelligently tailor functionality to each user using the apparatus/device use statistics. One example application is contact lists stored on a computer or other device. Traditionally contact lists are stored on a device and recalled when required by the implementation. My novel development of this technique demonstrates inventive step by tailoring the contact list to the user's habits.

Each time a contact is used, that use is counted and stored to calculate importance weights for each contact member. If the user has 5 contacts called "Richard", each with different surnames, the user only needs to then type "R" to be presented with a list ordered with the "Richard" they most frequently call at the top. The same approach applies to subsequent user input, the list being narrowed down and ordered by previous usage statistics. That contact would conventionally have been at the bottom of the list constructed from a tree representation of contact names had his name been "Richard Vergal", because conventional approaches list alphabetically.

So there you have it, someone might have already come up with a similar idea, but feel free to use my idea; enjoy ;)