Sloppy Development

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Screenshot_16_05_2013_10_51I spend all my working day dealing with software development and developers and have done so for the last 25 years. Over that time I have come across some interesting practices and learnt how to do things the right way. The five years I spent with Admiral Computing in particular was an invaluable education in delivering quality software.

So when I come across something like that shown to the left I find it both amusing and perplexing in equal measures. How can a menu item called “Test” make it through to a live system? Clicking the link takes you through to a page with a horrible IIS error message. That said this is a particular poor example of a website that belongs to a brand of a large consultancy firm. The design is poor, inconsistent and difficult to navigate. If it wasn’t for the money off vouchers I keep receiving I would take my business elsewhere.

Have you spotted any glaring errors like this, if so let us know in the comments.

Netflix vs Lovefilm

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201305133_160566-CapturFilesI can’t remember the last time that I bought a DVD having moved over to streaming a while ago so I thought I would take a look at the two biggest services in the UK to compare their content. I decided not to look at streaming quality, price or any factor other than catalogue.

I order to be a little bit objective I decided to look for the top films of 2010 and 2011 as chosen by Total Film Magazine. The results are shown in the table below.

As you can see, in this very small sample, there was no overlap whatsoever, i.e. there was no item that was on both services. This probably reflects the content deals that the two have signed. Unfortunately it also means that if you want the widest coverage you need to subscribe to both.

The other thing that is clear is that with LoveFilm you will have access to more recent content while Netflix will serve you better for classics. Netflix also seems to be better served for UK TV series.

One interesting thing I have noticed with Netflix is that the content changes. So I was re-watching Coupling but found after a while that it was removed for streaming with no warning or reason. So if you are relying on a service as a replacement for your DVDs you may find that problematic.

Netflix have also started creating their own content and House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, has been excellent but I don’t see this as a primary reason for subscribing to these services when there is such great quality content being produced by the terrestrial channels.

So what to do? Well right now I would say that it is a difficult choice as there is no real winner and, as I pointed out, to get the widest coverage you need to subscribe to both. I would say that if you want films then go for Lovefilm or TV then choose Netflix.

Both are fine if you want access to more content than the terrestrial channels offer but don’t want to fork out an arm and a leg for Sky but you are still going to be disappointed when searching for something particular.

Title Netflix Lovefilm
Brazil ✘ ✘
Pramface ✘ ✘
Human Planet ✘ ✔
Drive ✔ ✘
The Tree of Life ✘ ✘
Black Swan ✘ ✘
Blue Valentine ✘ ✔
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ✘ ✔
The Social Network ✘ ✔
The Town ✘ ✔
Toy Story 3 ✘ ✘
Kick-ass ✘ ✘
The Kids Are All Right ✘ ✔
Malcolm in the Middle ✘ ✘
Doctor Who ✔ ✘
The Godfather ✔ ✘
Annie Hall ✔ ✘

RunKeeper for Pebble

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Pebble have slowly been making good on all that was promised when the watch was announced on Kickstarter. This week saw the launch of RunKeeper integration, as you can see from the image below.

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It is incredibly easy to use mainly because there aren’t options whatsoever. When you start an activity the details (time, distance and pace) are all clearly displayed on the watch. The centre button allows you to pause and resume the recording, which is useful, but that’s the lot. It works well.

Since delivering the watches the team at Pebble have been steadily delivering on a number of promises. Firstly we got a couple of updates to the software that has greatly improved the stability. The annoying “permission to connect” message on iOS while not entirely eliminated has been drastically reduced.

Next came the SDK and custom watch faces of which there are a number of great ones at http://www.mypebblefaces.com. However, the watch seems to only be able to store ten faces. Not sure if this is related to the memory of the watch, so would also affect capacity for apps, or just a limit imposed by Pebble.

Now we have the first of the third party apps. I’m now looking forward to some interesting integrations as the SDK matures.

It’s still not perfect, I have had the watch crash a couple of times (but then my desktop does that too!). The largest font is way too small for my eyesight and the CLI doesn’t ever seem to work but given how Pebble have responded to date I think that we can be confident that they will get there in the end.

Changing the Colour of your Pebble Watch

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If, like me, you entered the vote to choose the colour Pebble option and they didn’t pick your colour and had to go with the black or maybe you are fed up of waiting for your colour Pebble to arrive and so have switched to black – good news! You don’t have to stick with it, slickwraps.com make a whole range of wraps just for the Pebble that can quickly change the look of your watch and are really easy to fit.

The video below shows you just how easy it is.

Also check out my video on adding a new strap to your Pebble.

Is Google Keep a Keeper?

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So Google have released a new product roughly one week after axing a raft of others including Google Reader, much to the angst of the general tech public.

Google Keep is a note taking application allowing you to keep important information in your drive for searching and reviewing at a later date.

It is similar in thought to Evernote but without any of the usefulness of it. As it says in the image above Google Keep is just a bit too simplistic right now. All you can do is create a note with a title and some text content and change the colour of the header. You can add pictures (although not through drag and drop as you can on Gmail) but they get oddly resized to fill the available space. And that’s about it.

No doubt Google will improve the service over time but I for one will be sticking (and paying) for Evernote? Why? Because about four years ago Google had a very similar service called Google Notebook which I thought was fantastic and then they closed it down and I moved to Evernote. Given how casual Google have been shutting Reader I think that I will give this one a miss.

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Twitter Patent = Death of App.Net?

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Screenshot_21_03_2013_13_59So Twitter have finally been granted a patent for, well, Twitter. They applied for the patent in 2007 and it has only just been granted given that these things take a while to work their way through the system.

From what I understand the patent is pretty widely worded and could be interpreted as many things and cover all multitude of sins, however, if it covered things that look like Twitter then APP.NET should be worried.

APP.NET looks and feels like Twitter and the only major difference is that it is a paid service with a limited free account also available. The site was originally crowd funded with the mission to provide a Twitter-like site that focussed on the users rather than the advertisers and would achieve this through the subscription model.

I was lucky enough to get a free account recently and my observations on using the service were that it felt like a grey version of Twitter with fewer people to follow and while its aims are laudable I could see a strong enough reason for using it. Yes the ads on Twitter are a pain but they are hardly that intrusive.

For me the threat to APP.NET from the Twitter patent is a real one, it really is a clone of the service to my mind, but I do wonder if lack of uptake might do for the service before Twitter gets round to costly litigation.

What we did Before Google

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IMG_6372I was away over the weekend and spotted this on my in-laws book shelf – The Internet Atlas by Richard Dinnick. A guide to the “best 1,000 sites on the web”.

Even though the book is only a few years old, it was published in 2000, it is a fascinating snapshot on what the web was like only thirteen years ago.

It includes sections on the browsers available which besides Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape also includes the first alpha version of Mozilla.

There is also a section on search engines which includes Altavista and Ask Jeves along with a full page spread on Lycos. Note that this is before the emergence of Google. I remember being an active user of Altavista and wondered what had happened to it and was surprised to find that not only was it still active but that it was owned by Yahoo!

What this books shows is a couple of things. Firstly how much the web has changed in a very short space of time. Things that were popular just a short time ago have virtually disappeared replaced by others. The second thing is that I don’t think that anyone would attempt such a book these days, there are far too many sites to try and curate them and surely these days you would do it as a website.

There are some more pictures below, unfortunately I only had my phone with me so they are not great but they do give a good flavour of both the book and the web at the turn of the millennium.

Documenting MySQL Tables in MediaWiki

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20130370_160381-CapturFilesThe last few companies that I have worked for we have setup an internal wiki that everyone uses to hold information about all aspects of the business including, of course, the technical team. We use MediaWiki for this mainly because it is easy to setup and is also familiar to users through Wikipedia.

One area that we try and document is the database structure. Having this on hand and searchable in the wiki allows new employees to quickly get to grips with it and makes us all more productive.

The issue is that creating the MediaWiki tables by hand is a real pain, particularly with database tables with a large number of columns. In order to make this a less painful process I have written a short database script that given the database and table names will output information about the table in MediaWiki format.

Replace DATABASE_NAME and TABLE_NAME in the script below:

SELECT CONCAT('{| class="wikitable"', CHAR(13),'|-',CHAR(13),'| Column Name || Type
       || Default || Nullable? || Key || Comment')
UNION
SELECT CONCAT('|-',CHAR(13),' | ', COALESCE(COLUMN_NAME,''), ' || ', 
       COALESCE(COLUMN_TYPE,''), ' || ',  COALESCE(COLUMN_DEFAULT,''), ' || ',
       COALESCE(IS_NULLABLE,''),  ' || ', COALESCE(COLUMN_KEY,''),  ' || ',
       COALESCE(COLUMN_COMMENT,''), CHAR(13))
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'DATABASE_NAME'
AND TABLE_NAME = 'TABLE_NAME'
UNION
SELECT CONCAT('|-',CHAR(13),'|}')

Running the script in PHPMyAdmin will output something similar to the following that can then be cut and pasted into your wiki:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
| Column Name || Type || Default || Nullable? || Key || Comment
|-
| id || int(11) ||  || NO || PRI || 
|-
| company_id || int(11) ||  || NO ||  || 
|-
| username || varchar(100) ||  || NO ||  || 
|-
| user_id || varchar(100) ||  || NO ||  || 
|-
| password || varchar(100) ||  || NO ||  || 
|-
|}

The final output will look like:

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If you are finding that PHPMyAdmin is truncating the output when you run the script so that you aren’t seeing all the details you may need to increase the number of characters that are displayed or temporarily turn this off by using the toggle in browse mode.

Keep Your Cables Together and Tidy

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IMG_6293Having multiple devices that need regularly charging and no universal agreement on a standard connector for doing so creates a problem of having to keep track of numerous differing cable types.

Now I know that there is a European agreement to have the micro-USB as the de facto charge cable standard but none of the three items I have to regularly charge conform to this: my iPhone, iPad and Pebble watch.

I’m not going to get into the debate of whether manufacturers should be compelled to meet the standard rather than charging an eye watering £15 for an adaptor that should be in the box for free.

Instead here is what works for me – I have braided my cables so that they are all together when I need them and if I forget one I forget them all! I have found this an incredibly simple yet effective solution to keeping the cables tidy and together.

If you don’t know how to braid you can learn using this guide (alternatively find a Guide, she is bound to know!) I then capped off the ends with a bag tie to stop the whole thing unravelling.

Simple, cheap and effective.

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