Category — Technology

Everyone knows @likeomg and me created a new species for Amnesia Razorfish in the Velociroflcoptersaurus recently. That ballooned into a social media competition spanning across Twitter and the search engines and is somewhat of an urban legend now.

At the last count, there was around 7,500 results in Google and 15,600 in Live Search. That’s pretty impressive for word we made up!

So, @delicategenius interviewed @likeomg, @eunmac and @gregory_brine to find out more about how and why it came into existence. You can watch it over at the Delicate Genius Blog: DG TV: VELOCIROFLCOPTERSAURUS. Enjoy.

Article Links

• @likeomg
• @eunmac
• @gregory_brine
• Delicate Genius Blog
• Amnesia Razorfish
• Velociroflcoptersaurus
• DG TV: VELOCIROFLCOPTERSAURUS
• Google
• Live Search

Following on from my previous blog outlining the pain I went through getting my iPhone working after doing an update, I used the newly release Pwnage 2.0 hours after they released it…. And this was after I said I wouldn’t do it till a few more people had successfully used it - I figure that the 900 odd comments that appeared in that time saying how well it worked, and with my previous experience, I’d do it.

It went almost flawlessly… Got it wrong first time as I ticked a wrong box. Mine’s an American iPhone in Australia. 2nd time, it worked perfectly! Well done guys! Seriously, they’ve been working so hard to do these for free - I hope that UK company has been shut down now - and have done such an amazing job!

So, now I have it, I dived into the iTunes Apps Store. Bad idea… I now have the following installed on my phone:

• Facebook - Great little app, which gives you all the main features of Facebook, and works almost flawlessly.
• Last.fm - I’m a big fan of Last.FM and used the original App a fairbit (for reference it plays really well on an iPod Hifi).
• Phonesaber - Pointless but great fun.
• Remote - Apple’s free application for controlling your iTunes is a work of art really. Pair it with your iTunes, and it’s like browsing your iPod but it’s the collection on your computer.
• Shazam - I used this service in the UK regularly, and now it’s out on the iPhone. Hold it up to a speaker and it will tell you what the song is playing (most of the time).
• Crash Bandicoot 3D - The Bandicoot crashes onto the iPhone in an addictive little game where you control the character using the phones accelerometer to steer, and a
• iPint - this takes the biscuit for a waste of time, but somehow it’s amusing. Slide a beer down the bar, then your iPhone fills with beer which you then drink by tilting your phone.
• Sudoku Unlimited - I had a version of this on Nano and got quite quickly hooked. Reading the reviews this a down to earth version that lets you simply play Sodoku. What more could you want?
• TwitterMe - Yep, it lets you post tweets on Twitter
• Super Monkey Ball - Everyone saw this in the keynote speech, and it is as good as it looks - although it does take a little getting used to.
• Texas Hold ‘em - Apple’s take on the most popular card game is worth the price. It does exactly what you’d expect from a game of Hole ‘Em
• myLite - erm, it’s a torch that does torch type things. Yep, it turns your phone’s screen into a bright light.
• AIM - allows you to use American Online Messenger and .Mac/mobileMe messaging on your iPhone.
• Pinball RC - I love pinball. This is fun, but it’s a little chuggy at times. Good fun though.
• BrainChai - Brain Training similar to that on the Gameboy DS. Good fun!

In conclusion, the upgrade was a great thing! If you’re not afraid it might fail, then Pwn your iPhone now!

I made a small mistake and jumped on the iPhone 2.0 firmware a little too quickly, forgetting that my 2G phone came from eBay and would need a little work to fix. Add to that, that my phone had the 04.04.05_G firmware - something I discovered later on was a real issue.

So, booting it into DFU mode, and downgrading my iTunes to 7.5, I just couldn’t restore it running in OS X. It was giving me permission errors on the phone. I followed every guide, and still nothing. So, I booted into Windows XP, thinking that Microsoft’s approach to security might work in my favour. It did!

With a flashed phone, I set about jailbreaking and activating it. No problems there - although I did find that sometime Pwnage failed a couple of time due to permissions and required another restore (I think I restored the phone something like 30 times over the weekend).

Next up came installing my freshly created install. No problem. Then loaded it up and watched bootneuter (error 5) appear repeatedly… Nooooo….

So, I tried Liberty+ and Ziphone (I since found out that the latter may have been a bad idea… Search for “Ziphoned”) Nothing would unlock it. Further searching, and I found that you need to delete the bootloaded on some iPhones. Did that, went through the steps (again, and again), always hit the same problem.

Further searching, and I found that potentially ziphone had done something to my phone - I actually don’t think it was this, and was the iPhone 2.0 firmware. But, that did lead me down the final path to success. There are modified version of that program that will remove the bootloader and downgrade it.

Tried that. Nooooo…. turns out my phone has a version that nothing removed. Version 04.04.05_G. Nothing removes it, till I found a link on a YouTube video to Kiphone. My heart raced as I watched it purge that evil bootloader and install a downgraded one.

After that, everything worked flawlessly and I now have a fully working 2G iPhone again. And, this worries me a little, but after 3 days of not having it, I realised even more how much I like it, and had missed it!

Anyway, for those in the same position, 2 links for you:

Modified Ziphone to remove older bootloader:
Modified Ziphone for bootloader removal

iclarified’s tutorial on using kiphone to remove firmware version 04.04.05_G:
Remove and downgrade iPhone 04.04.05_G with kiphone

Updated in response to Stu’s article.

Since I wrote this article, I have learnt a lot about .NET and indeed it is a framework - Stu and some of the many talented .NET developers I have worked with demonstrate this concept brilliantly. My original point was that since people have been working in the associated language - C# and VB.NET for example - they have had an ignorance of the what is going on around it and instead relied on it providing everything they need. This often leads to the solution being created not being over complicated and as a result, affecting the end-user experience.

That was merely my point. No-one can be a master of everything, and shouldn’t expect to be. But to ignore what’s going around you is foolish, especially given how complex websites are these days.

Sorry if anyone took this the wrong way, it was never my intention.

OK, so a slightly long winded title, but I have to express a concern of mine. Recently I’ve been trying to hire web developers for my team to build web site, but I’m hitting a continual brick wall… Most of them actually don’t know how to build a web site!

These people know .NET, which is obviously a good thing, but they don’t seem to have any awareness of the other elements of the website. If it’s not in .NET code, and if it’s not a built in .NET control, then why should they need to know it? That’s the way it comes across to me.

When I started learning web development, I tool the approach of learning HTML mark-up first, then moving to server-side code in the form of Coldfusion. It seemed logical to do it that way, as ultimately what the end user sees is HTML. When CSS came along, I jumped on that bandwagon, and loved it. It helped me breath new life into my code. Then I changed from Coldfusion to Classic ASP and Microsoft SQL. All this enabled me to take a Photoshop file and deliver a complete website with a database driven back-end - incidentally built using the CMS systems I have developed over the years.

Recently, I started learning .NET and I’ve realised what a lazy language it is. Everything about it is geared to not really needing to think about anything! Everything is done for you, to the extent where you just need to start typing and Intellisense kicks in and tells you what you probably meant - and most of the time it’s right. I think that should be a good thing as it gives you more time to focus on the HTML, CSS and JavaScript side of things, delivering a great looking, functional website which validates if possible.

This also gives you more time to ensure the other elements of the site are more polished and included, perhaps affording you time to improve your RSS feed to include the most up to date information. Looking at a new technique such as integrating the Open Search for people’s toolbar or including microformats. Carrying out those last checks such as ensuring the Google Analytics and sitemap code is included and working.

However, that’s not how it works now. Apparently, people that know .NET are exempt from knowing anything outside of .NET when it comes to building a website, which to my mind makes them an Application Developer, not a web developer. Recently, we had an intern in who said he was good at html and CSS, but when you say that’s good and can he turn this PSD into a site, he says know, that’s someone else’s job as if he’s more important than that because he knows .NET.

Why has this happened? It’s a single language, so why do these people place so much value on this one skill over the other, in my opinion more important, elements of the site? I think it’s the banks. Think about it. Banks have recently built massive systems and brought everything online over a period, paying people lots of money for that period and then letting them all go once that task was completed, flooding the market with people who thought they understood the web. It’s a shame, but it affects smaller companies the most ultimately.

Add to that that they don’t seem to understand the idea of a good user experience, and are happy if what they build works. They don’t care if it works well, and don’t even seem to notice if something doesn’t work as well as it could. If a page is slow, doesn’t matter, it loads. If a page is hard to use, doesn’t matter as it works doesn’t it? I find that a strange attitude.

We’ve been talking internally, and are hopeful that a change is afoot and that the days of the true web developer will return again. The developers I place highest value on can be given a PSD and produce an entire website, optimised and including all the elements that make a website great! And I really hope that hope comes true.

I’m relatively new to using Wordpress to completely manage my site, but I have found a few plugins of particular use in getting my site to a point where I feel it is really usable and enjoyable for everyone that visits. In this blog, you’ll find the 5 I’ve found most useful to help me do that. I have more but they’re for a different purpose and a different blog.

Flexi Pages Widget
If like me you’re using Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) to manage other pages about you, then you’ll quickly come to realise the standard side menu doesn’t work so well because it shows everything all the time. The plug in gives you a large degree of customisation, allowing you to make your menu behave like the one on my site, with everything collapsed until you go into that section.

NextGEN Gallery
I love taking photos, and have explored a few options in this area. There’s several that integrate with services such as flickr, and one that works off you Facebook account. But none of them were quite what I was after. The NextGEN gallery allows you to manage galleries within your site’s folders rather than using a 3rd party. I find this approach more appealing as it means my site is almost completely self contained.

Redirection
The site you’re looking at used to be www.gregorybrine.com. That had a lot of links, and folders within it, each with a pagerank and some valuable traffic. You can do a simple URL re-pointing, but you risk loosing this traffic. Instead, you should do a 301 redirect for all key URLs on your site. This plugin has allowed me to control all traffic to the new www.gregory-brine.com URL, as well as some some of my original URLs that were valuable but of no use in the current site such as my old Personal Blog and Travel Around the World URL - thanks to Cheb for pointing me to this one.

WordPress.com Stats
It’s always good to know how much traffic your blog is getting, and this tool allows you to get some basic information back about who’s reading what on your site, and where they are coming from.

Google XML Sitemaps
You’ve gone to all the effort of writing fresh content for your site, and the pinging service within Wordpress goes a long way to spreading the word, but a Google sitemap takes it one step further, which is especially useful for those using the CMS features of Wordpress.

I’ve been a bit late on watching this. I read the summaries, but didn’t watch the presentation. So, what was I missing?

It turns out a great deal! Now I know the iPhone can do a lot already thanks to Apple’s work and 3rd party developers, but what they showed off in that presentation makes you realise how much it’s capable of!

First off, the new business features are kick-ass and will really make it a phone for business users. The new Cisco VPN is something I’m very keen on as most of our clients use Cisco equipement. But the Exchange server stuff was really something else, especially given as it’s new software from Microsoft. It looks like Apple’s gone and integrated the Exchange software better than anyone else has been able to.

But then when Scott Forstall came on and started talking about the APIs built into the iPhone, you suddenly realise that Apple’s been holding back! It’s got full 3D technology built in yet nothing uses it yet. The accelerometer is 3 dimensional - and incredibly sensitive, install Labyrinth and you’ll see how sensitive!

Demonstrations by EA Games and Sega showed game controlled by tilting the iPhone, and the control and graphics were so clear and so precise. And with major game developers like these developing for the phone, things can only get better.

The business applications will also turn the iPhone into more than just a toy. It will become a tool for businesses. The CRM software shown by salesforce.com opens up a host of opportunities. Imagine the possibilities… That piece of software worked so seamlessly, and was so easy to make, how long will it be until we see other main stream tools coming to the platform?

I think it’s an exciting time to own an iPhone, and it’s only going to get better!

I’ve been a big fan of feedreader on Windows, but I’ve yet to find something comparable on the mac. Obviously there’s the on-line tools, and there’s been a few shareware ones around which were OK.

But, feedreader has a beautiful simplicity. It’s on of those programs that does exactly what you need, and could want and doesn’t try to do anything else. The mac ones I’ve seen either did too little, or fell into that trap of trying to be everything. The elegance and simplicity that using Mac OS X is known for just wasn’t there.

Thankfully, whilst hunting around, I came first across Vienna. A project on Sourceforge that does almost exactly the same thing as feedreader with it’s simple 3 pane layout. You can create groups of feeds, when you click on a feed or group, you get a list of all the blogs in that group in the top right pane. Click on a blog, and you get the summary of that blog in the pane below. Double click on the blog’s title and it opens the full URL in you browser. Everything’s nice a quick, and always accessible. You can change the layout to be horizontal if you prefer. Whenever feeds update, you get a message on your desktop - which you can turn off if you like (amazing how many programs forget to give you that option!).

Then, as if a blessing, along comes another program. Newsgator has just released their NetNewsWire program for free. Working much the same way as Vienna, it has 2 other tricks up it’s sleeve. First off, when you double click the feed, it open a new ‘tab’ in the application showing the full page - you’d be amazed how much difference this little trick makes. And, and this is the kicker, you can connect it to your Newsgator account, synchronising the feeds you add here with those on line, and vice versa. This means all your feeds are available anywhere, any time.

Vienna, great, but NetNewsWire is one step better… Give them a try, you won’t regret it!

This came from having one of those random, geeky office conversations you tend to have for no particular reason. You know the sort… What would happen if you swap the ‘n’ and ‘m’ key round on the new person’s keyboard. Do you remember Dungeon Master on the Atari ST? What would life be like if it were more like a video game? Would the internet of come about quicker if macs were the dominant computer? More to the point, would the world be a better place if macs ruled the PC market?

I digress. This blog is aimed at the humble fax. Our friend. Our enemy. The source of endless cheap printer cartridge refills - which incidentally you need as all the cartridge offers use up the ink! The butt of many jokes (think that classic scene if Office Space).

But a lot’s happened in the world. We now have that amazing thing called the internet. You can send anything - well, anything that can be converted to 0 and 1 - to anyone, anywhere. Add to that, the way that most photocopiers are now attached to the office network, so now you don’t even need your computer to send that file. Just stick the paper in the copier, enter the email address, and hey-presto, the other person gets it - and in probably less time than the fax.

So, with all this technology, why is the fax still going strong? Well everyone, I’ve great news for you! I think I’ve cracked it!

I’ll start with the problem with emails. In the original days of email, it was a special event when you got one. Nowadays, you get so many emails, that, to be honest, you don’t read all of them, often missing vital things. It’s not malicious, but to get your job done, you often have to skim read the title and ignore some of them. About now, some people are saying no I don’t do that. But think about it… Really think about it. I bet you do!

Now, with faxes, you see a lone piece of paper on the fax machine, someone will inevitably pick it up and read it. Even if they don’t finish it, they’ll still pick it up and read it to point. You have to! Faxes don’t have titles do they, so you’ve got to find out what’s on there somehow.

You also have the advantage now that they’ve passed of the spammers radar, so the faxes you generally get are actually useful. Think about that for a second. The one tool we used to curse for the amount of rubbish you got on it is suddenly really, really useful again!

Now, put the fax machine next to the secretary in the office, and suddenly anything really important has an almost guaranteed way to get to you. That’s why we use it for sign-off documents. That’s why anything you have to sign has to use the fax. It is useful and is a prime example of how you shouldn’t dismiss technologies too soon. Email’s still a child in a grown-ups world.

Has anyone noticed that their friends aren’t using Facebook as much now? I don’t know if it’s just me, but the number of messages with update I get from friends has dropped dramatically. When you log in and check, the updates they’ve been making has dropped dramatically too.

It’s a strange phenomena. The theory behind Facebook is superb. Let you and your friends share everything. Put photos up, let them and their friends know they’re in it. Set up events and groups that they might be interested in. Bring them all together in one place. Send your friends messages and videos from sources such as YouTube.

And the way the user interface has been built is a true demonstration of form and function giving you the best user experience of almost any site. The User interface is so polished and simple. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. There’s no excessive Ajax calls. You see what you need, when you need it, and it’s quick and clean. The essence of Web 2.0.

You can find groups about just about anything. People that walk slowly, how cute cats are, my favourite drink, bring back Firefly. All valid groups and all things we might be interested in. We should be subscribing to them and sharing our opinions.

Then there’s a the Facebook Applications. A brilliant idea! Open up your service to keen people, let them share their ideas and their passion. Bring the people who love similar things together. Let them take quizzes and see which character from the Simpsons or Family Guy you are. All great fun.

I know there was a time when I was very active on Facebook, joining groups left right and centre. Installing applications for fun. But then, recently, I suddenly decided to remove all those applications. Un-subscribe from those groups. But why? I couldn’t figure it out initially.

Then I started looking and talking to other people, and they’ve done the same. Then I started thinking about why. Why did I feel the need to remove all those Applications that once interested me? Because, to be honest, they were fun once, and the fact that every time one of my friends uses the Application, I get told - repeatedly.

I haven’t removed all of the Applications though. Some are still there, like the places I’ve been one, and Wiliam’s RSS feed reader. They seem genuinely useful to me, and something my friends can use to find out useful things about me and keep in touch with me.

So what am I trying to say? Facebook, please, please, please, don’t ruin the brilliant idea you’ve built! Focus on what it did so well originally! Connecting friends and people with similar interests, and not watering down the experience.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s gone wrong, but if it’s not fixed soon, one of the best websites of recent years will lose the people that it most appealed to originally and end up like MySpace.

So the domain has now been re-pointed to my new site. It’s not designed still - won’t be for a while. Bits and pieces are drifting into it the site. I’ve done a lot of work on the PHP behind the site, and I’m working to unify a few more pieces, then we’ll start on the site design. It’s getting there.