Fran's Blog

It really is amazing what a difference to a service technical support makes and whether the team actually know what they are talking about. Recently I have had to contact 2 company support teams. One for Netgear, the other for Be Internet.

I contacted Netgear because my router was playing up. I wrote full details of the issue and what I had tried to fix the issue. A day later I received a message to reset my router etc. in fact, I was run through exactly what I had said I had done over about 7 messages before they misdiagnosed the issue and blamed it on my homeplug adaptors which the router wasn’t finding. In this case, they didn’t even try to read my initial message, but took me through the script they had and came up with an issue so wrong, as a normal user, I would have ended up with the router still faulty and sending back a second set of homeplug adaptors. I ended up having to suggest it was the router and they replaced it, as it was still under warranty (the adaptors were not) I received a new one, and it’s all good now.

Fast forward to this weekend. My broadband went down. A rare issue for my provider Be. I had forgotten I’d requested a change in my service requiring a different setup on my router. I called, waited a short time, then I got a chirpy Czech (I think) man who had read my message that my router wouldn’t get an IP address. I confessed that I did not have the original Be router, but one made by Netgear. He replied “we don’t support that router, but I know it well, so I can guide you”. See the difference? He went off piste! He actually surfs the internet and uses the products! In about 2 minutes I was back up and running. No ignoring my email and asking me whether my router was on, he’d done his homework before he diagnosed and fixed the issue. And they are consistently like this!

There are a lot of people out there who know how to use a product, and it’s this which makes the difference, not the quality of the script, because that 5% of the time when there really is an issue, you may need to actually know what you are talking about.

I surf the web possibly a little too much. I love discovering new things. I read blogs from comics and programming to ones about Georgian London. Flash and other animation/video tools on the web, though, can be quite expensive on my laptop (and possibly desktop, but really I don’t hear the fan spinning up). The issue, up till now has partially been Flash, as Steve Jobs puts it, being buggy and slow. But the other part is because the main computer processor alone has been used for rendering.

The issue with that is that while you have your browser of choice open and various other programmes, the processor (CPU) is used more intensively. You can generally afford it, but it can slow down your machine somewhat. It is especially difficult to know that happens when you have a decent graphics card (GPU) just sitting there doing very little (it’ll be used mainly for gaming, but not really so much for general surfing). GPUs are also easier to upgrade than a CPU.

More recently. Silverlight, Flash and in future versions, your browser have started supporting hardware acceleration, so instead of your main computer’s CPU heating up. Some of the graphical tasks can be farmed out to the GPU. It’s exciting because it means a faster browsing experience, which everyone loves, but also developers (and let’s not forget designers) can now go a little more nuts with sites and will be able to produce more exciting user experiences (hopefully not too exciting, we all still like browsing speed, obvously).

Google announced their Buzz platform in February to much interest and fanfare. The idea is to allow users to post short snippets of what they are doing etc. Twitter style. The “Buzz” is usually posted via mobile and mapped to a locationg on Google maps.

I jumped on board for a week just to try it out. I was a little underwhelmed because it was like Twitter, but also aggregated your Twitter and other posts to it as well. But then I realised something funny. I Buzzed something similar to “Having tea and cake. Now for some decent ale!”. Fairly mundane I must admit, but I received a reply “tea… cake…. or death”. Lovely. The thing was, I had never even heard of the person who wrote this. It smacked a little of Youtube comments. Irrelevant, often odd, usually inappropriate. Twitter tends to be a great community of people tweeting, asking questions, being replied to in a normal “I’d say this in the same room as this guy” style.

Buzz may well suffer the Youtube scenario because Google products are aimed at everyone. A great thing in some ways, but “everyone” doesn’t know that although you are behind a screen, if you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, you shouldn’t say it online. If you look at Vimeo, the comments are wholly different to Youtube as well. Generally more constructive and friendly.

The other issue is the signal to noise on this platform. It aggregates all content added by users, if they have added a Flickr account, you get their new photos, their new Youtube posts, their new Tweets from Twitter. It makes a very noisy part where, instead of receiving what you want to read, you get everything, all the time.

I think because of Google’s omni present nature, it will be used, possibly more than Twitter eventually as it is built in to just about every Google product already, but I don’t think I need more internet noise, and I certainly don’t want the Youtube commenter community even close to my online activity if at all avoidable.

Well, a few months ago I started using Chrome as my default browser, and I’m still with it. I even switched the little lady to it, with a fantastic Cath Kidston theme (how easy it was to sell it in when it looked pretty).

Anyway, Chrome is brilliant, but it feels wrong. I am now fully tied into Google. Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Maps. Now my browser is Google. So I decided to switch my default search engine to Bing because you can’t knock anything till you try it.

It’s strange to see Microsoft as the new underdog as Google dominate the search market, and what I like about underdogs is the passion to innovate, to really knock the competition. And Bing has that (if you get time, watch this talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/766 about the innovations happening at Bing Maps).

I really like Bing. The results are pretty decent and getting better (it’s only a baby still compared to Google). I love the perpetual results in images (keep scrolling and it will load more pages of results) and the preview in the video section. I also love the image on the front page with some facts each day (possibly borrowed from the old Ask site with some improvements).

The maps are really good with a birds eye view function which make the maps viewable diagonally, it isn’t quite StreetView, but a nice touch. Maps are also rotatable.

Overall, pretty nice and some good innovation happening, but whether it gains popularity over Google with the normal user who uses the term “Go and Google it” will be interesting, if Google can do it with a browser, maybe Microsoft can do it with Bing.

I’ve started using Google Chrome. There, I said it. I’ve been dabbling with it a little at work, but this weekend, I decided to try it for a bit at home, see what it’s like. I have to say I like it a lot!

I, like a lot of web addicts out there am a Firefox user. I’ve loved Mozilla’s finest for a good few years now since version 0.5. But since version 3.0, it’s become a little clunky. The memory leaks (usually reaching 249MB, but going up to 1GB of memory at times), the UI staying more or less the same. When I use Safari on the Mac it feels slick and the Javascript runs like a…. very fast thing.

The speed of Chrome is the biggest good point, you feel like it is reacting quickly with little fuss. You know it has been built from the ground up. But there are some slick features which are barely worth noting, but extensions can be installed without restarting etc. The browser is a very important piece of software, so it should be slick and advanced, but without the bloat. This is the issue (among issues with standards) IE has, which lags behind the competition for speed now.

Chrome doesn’t have the full extensibility of Firefox yet, so Firefox will remain my browser of choice for dev at work. Now, I hope Firefox 3.6 or 4.0 will bare some of the good stuff and get slicker. Till then, Chrome, please stand up!

I saw this video on College Humour the other day and had to post it. I did wonder what the conversation was like in the Streetview car.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1922981

The recent announcements that Adobe are working on a full version of their Flash platform for mobile is making me jittery. Over the years of developing I have been well aware that Flash, for whatever reason, hogs resources. It uses processor aplenty, battery life, RAM. I’ve even worked on some projects where it has slowed my whole browser environment down to a crawl.

I have a fairly new Macbook at home. Using a fully 100% Flash site usually gets it to warm up, start sweating and the fan starts after a while. Not in a small way mind, but full on “OH CHRIST, THE PROCESSOR IS BLOWING UP”.

On a phone, this will be much worse with the lesser processor, less RAM, less cache, less battery life. It isn’t just the Flash platform that gets me worried though. It’s the actionscripter. I have used a fair amount of Android apps now, some are written with memory in mind. But some hog so much system resource I am forced to close it and uninstall to get my phone to work again. This doesn’t even depend on the complexity of the app. A Flash developer tends not to worry too much about battery life etc. as they predominantly develop for a notebook or desktop, as long as it works there, we’re all good. Not to mention the download needed for assets like the HD background to make it all look nice that the designer wants in there. How will the processor cope with that? The designer cares not for battery life or bandwidth.

So those of you with an iphone, thank your lucky stars that you may never have this issue. You may still have the resource hog applications every now and then, but we all have that.

Today something has changed on my site and blog. In fact, all the sites I am hosting myself. I’ve changed servers to sparkly servers up in the sky that everyone is now calling the cloud. The servers are now based in California rather than London. I’ve loved my London based hosts Supanames for about 8 years. They’re cheap, reliable and get the job done (I’ll still be recommending them), but I needed servers that can deal with multiple sites better and allow me more flexibility with SSH etc.

Media Temple have stepped up now. The URL for my blog is now http://blog.whoisfrancisgilbert.com/ though everything should still work as with the old URLs, thanks to some confirguration magic.

For you it should all be the same, for me, it is very exciting!

This weekend something amazing happened. That thing is almost human, it is Wolfram|Alpha (ok, from now on I will stop putting in the |). It is a new way of getting answers, some say it’s like an encyclopedia. They’d be right really, kind of. It consists of a vast database and some very clever algorithms to make it a powerful way of getting answers to almost anything. You can watch a video here:
http://www93.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

I love this but it has baffled some. A lot are comparing to Google, saying it could be a “Google Killer”. Anyone saying that doesn’t quite understand it. Google is a Search Engine, it finds sites, people, possibly sites with answers you seek, but it doesn’t primarily provide answers (it does a little for calculations or “1 USD in GBP” etc.).

Wolfram is a tool to answer, purely to answer, and it does this pretty well (remember, it is an Alpha so is not complete) with a different template of answers depending on your question type. Have a play anyway. The tech channels have been going crazy about it (try 88mph or “how many roads must a man walk down?”). I like the humour on some answers.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I went to Open Hack London by Yahoo this weekend. Anyone who likes programming will probably love this event. As it is a Yahoo event, there is a slant towards PHP which is good and bad. But the main thing is to see what is coming out of the programming community at the moment! I always come away feeling refreshed and with too many ideas to actually execute. A curse about working with computers is that they are always changing, the revolution battles on. The blessing is they are always changing and it is great to be part of the revolution.

Anyway, it isn’t hacking as in cracking machines and making them do your bidding, this is the old style hacking. It is, however, taking every day objects such as a sock to platforms like the web and making them do something. You get an idea, get a team together and work through the night eating sweets, drinking beer and listening to music. I feel like a bit of a fraud as I was one of the guys who went purely to watch the talks and see people like Rasmus “I wrote PHP I did” Lerdorf do talks. Next year I will try to get myself in gear, find a team, and get the hack on! Why not!

And if you want to see some truly happy geeks see: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=openhacklondon&w=all&s=int. I’m in there somewhere.