Error Handling

It can now handle internal issues with network communication to the data source and incorrect JSON formatting of retrieved data. Bitcoin Helper 0.11 also checks to ensure the requested ISO 4217 currency code, for conversion to Bitcoin, is supported.

Certain functions in Bitcoin Helper now return a negative integer in the case that an error occurs. Details regarding these error codes can be found in the source code comments of bitcoin_helper.php. The relevant section of commenting is quoted below for convenience.

/* Information about error codes

Certain functions within Bitcoin Helper (0.11 onwards) will return
numeric error codes in the case of unexpected error or failure.

You should make sure to check the returned value for error codes
(intergers less than zero) in your code. The following reference
shows the error numbers and an explanation.

* -1 = Network error retrieving data from bitcoincharts.com
* -2 = Error decoding JSON data retrieved from bitcoincharts.com
* -3 = Currency code not supported
* -4 = Could not write to cache file – check permissions!
*/

File-based Caching

Bitcoin Helper 0.1 would cache the JSON containing currency exchange rates to a file if possible. This caching is now a requirement as of Bitcoin Helper 0.11.

Bitcoin Helper will attempt to write a file named ‘bitcoin_weighted_prices.json’. If this file is not writeable, you will receive error code -4.

If you receive this error, you will need to alter the permissions of the directory to allow this file to be created. Once created, you can revert the directory permissions if you desire and make only the individual ‘bitcoin_weighted_prices.json’ file writeable.

Download Bitcoin Helper 0.11

To download Bitcoin Helper 0.11 with improved error handling, please go to the Bitcoin Helper project page.

Bitcoin is a new currency which has no physical form, but can be considered Internet cash. If you want more information on Bitcoin in general, take a look at the We Use Coins website, which has a great introductory video and articles/links to other useful Bitcoin resources.

Bitcoin Helper 0.1 Released

As part of my interest in Bitcoin, I’ve decided to start a mini-project in the form of Bitcoin Helper, a PHP class which will contain multiple methods to aid web site/application developers in integrating Bitcoin related functionality into their systems. The first function, which comes in Bitcoin Helper 0.1, is a really easy to use converter that can convert non Bitcoin currencies into the equivalent Bitcoin value and return the result.

To see how simple it is to use, see the following code snippet.

include "bitcoin_helper.php";
$bh = new bitcoin_helper;
echo $bh->convert_to_btc("GBP", 10);

This will convert £10 (Great British Pounds) into Bitcoin and echo out the result. The following works for USD and Euros as well.

echo $bh->convert_to_btc("USD", 10);
echo $bh->convert_to_btc("EUR", 10);

The trade data for several other currencies is provided from the external source (see the Bitcoin Charts website). If your currency is listed there, entering its ISO 4217 currency code as the first parameter of the convert_to_btc function should allow you to convert any value of that currency into Bitcoin.

Please note that this is the first release of Bitcoin Helper, so I can not guarantee it is bug free. More checks, validation, improvements and new features will be added in the future versions. Feel free to leave a comment with any suggestions.

I hope this very basic Bitcoin Helper release can assist web developers with some simple Bitcoin conversion in their sites.

Download Bitcoin Helper 0.1

To download this first version of Bitcoin Helper (0.1), please visit the Bitcoin Helper project page.

I’ve written about Spotify on Linux before, however this focused on how to get Spotify links working in Linux, when utilising the the Windows version of Spotify via Wine (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). As of mid July last year, Spotify for Linux is available natively, but is consider to be a ‘preview’ release. I would suggest this is because the Spotify gang do not wish to officially support Linux, but are likely well aware that there is an ever increasing number of Spotify users who are also using Linux as their primary operating system.

If you want to download Spotify for Linux (the preview release), then you’ll have to head to the Spotify’s secret labs page, add the repository and apt-get the file. It has been packaged for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.

It is truly awesome to see how far we have come in terms of the Internet and networking computer communication. It is also slightly amusing to see how out of the loop the media was only 30 years ago, and more specifically how they did not, immediately, see the huge potential of networked computers, and how these system could possibly affect home computer users in very near the future.

A short while ago, I read this from Alex Yumashev’s Jitbit blog:

I just overheard this conversation between two developers at a co-working site:

“I plan [on] creating a prototype for my new XXXX application, whatcha think it should be – a web-app, or a desktop app?”

The answer was:

“90% of your users are idiots who won’t be able to tell the difference”

I think I just found my answer to the ultimate question of life universe and everything and it’s not “42″.

It’s “90% of your users are idiots”.

Now thats a questionable term to describe your customers. I don’t think 90% of my users are idiots. But. That’s the way to think of your users when making design decisions and building your interface.

Jitbit Blog

And he’s very right.

Thinking about some of the largest and most successful software developments, this rule applies – not that 90% of the users of these systems are idiots, but more that they are designed to accommodative for 90% of their users being idiots .

Think about the operating systems environment, in which Mac OS X and the Windows series of operating systems are by far the most popular on the desktop. Both of these systems are developed to heavily guide the user through any process or task that he or she wishes to complete, metaphorically holding the users hand throughout each step.

The mobile market is the same. Up until very recently, iOS (the Apple operating system powering the iPad and iPhone) was very far in the lead in terms of sales and end-user popularity. Android has only recently, in the past few months starting competing well with iOS. iOS is simple. In my opinion, too simple, but people like it and use it, on a huge scale. 90% of users are idiots. As Android has got more and more user-friendly, it has increased in popularity amongst end-users, along with the ever increasing push from non-Apple phone and tablet manufacturers to use Android.

Both user interface and structural application decisions can often benefit from thinking that 90% of your users are idiots.

1. Should I implement feature X in either A or B way? Whichever is easier for those 90%.
2. Should I design the user interface to promote feature A or B most promotion? Whichever is most appropriate for those 90%.
3. Do I design this icon that triggers feature X to represent concept A or concept B? Whichever will make the most sense to those 90% of users.
4. Should I document this little used and/or somewhat obvious feature? Of course – 90% of your users are idiots.

The experts among us do not necessary need or want to be guided though every step of a process with our hands held all the time. Some of us just want to dig into plain text config files and command line interfaces. The developers and the computing enthusiasts, we’re the remaining 10%.

One of the best ways to implement the database storage of PHP session data is via the overriding session handlers built in to PHP. PHP has functions built in to allow you to override the default file based session handlers.

These functions all use PHP’s normal ways of handling session persistence between the client and the server (by default, via the use of a session ID cookie).

In other words, it utilises the same PHPSESSID cookie that the default file based session storage uses. When using functions that override the session handlers, the first parameter for several of these function is the session id. Upon overriding the functions, PHP will automatically pass the session ID (pulled from the PHPSESSID cookie) to these functions.

The code linked to below can be ‘required’ (require “session_start.php”) as a drop in replacement for the default PHP session_start() function. This utilises database access to store and retrieve session information. Note that due to the very early point in which PHP processes session handler overrides, objects are not available for use, hence the use of old style ‘mysql’ instead of OO based ‘mysqli’ (if you find a way around this, I’d be very interested in hearing about it).

Download ‘session_start.php’ for database storage of session data

Required Table Structure SQL

In terms of performance, there is limited degradation to using database stored sessions with most small to mid range sites, based on my experience and observation. However, larger sites may possiblynotice degradation. In such circumstances, this would likely be related to the MySQL database server load and/or high levels of IO on the MySQL server. Issues of database server load can be mitigated via one or more of the following:

• Separation of the site database and the session storage database (seperating each to their own server if necessary)
• File based caching of session information on the web server system (using standard PHP file reading/writing functions, ensuring that the file cache is updated whenever there are changes to the session information in the database store)
• In memory caching (similar to file based caching, but utilising a key to value storage engine which runs in RAM, providing very fast (atomic) access to data) – using a system such as memcached - http://memcached.org/

For building reasonable size websites in which portability is important, the need to load balance is highly probably in the future and where development time permits, I’d  personal recommend database storage for session information, due to the higher level of flexibility this set-up offers.

I hope this information helps anyone looking to make a PHP powered site just that little bit more portable by placing their users’ session data in a database.

Want more information? IBM’s Watson AI software

In 2011, Watson competed on the television quiz show Jeopardy! as a test of its abilities. In a two-game, combined-point match aired in three Jeopardy! episodes running from February 14–16, Watson bested Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak. Watson received first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson’s winnings among two charities. This was the first man-versus-machine competition in Jeopardy!’s history.

The Study of Intelligence

Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but is also observed in animals and plants. Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines or the simulation of intelligence in machines.

Numerous definitions of and hypotheses about intelligence have been proposed since before the twentieth century, with no consensus yet reached by scholars. Within the discipline of psychology, various approaches to human intelligence have been adopted, with the psychometric approach being especially familiar to the general public. Influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin, Francis Galton was the first scientist to propose a theory of general intelligence; that intelligence is a true, biologically-based mental faculty that can be studied by measuring a person’s reaction times to cognitive tasks. Galton’s research in measuring the head sizes of British scientists and laymen led to the conclusion that head-size is unrelated to a person’s intelligence.

Alfred Binet, and the French school of intelligence, believed intelligence was an aggregate of dissimilar abilities, not a unitary entity with specific, identifiable properties.

I feel like a completely moron but I’d never been able to find out where these saved threads were listed until today, when I looked it up. Apparently I am not the only one who has trouble finding it. Many people, including myself, went to my account/profile page on reddit and looked for a ‘saved’ tab of some sorts. It turns out this is not where the saved threads are listed at all.

The link to view saved threads is not stored in your user section, but is shown on the homepage (how did I miss it?) or on the individual subreddit pages. See my screenshot below.

I hope this helps a few people like me, who were looking in completely the wrong place for this link.

Linux posts are by far the most popular. Perhaps this is simply due to the large quantity of Linux related posts I tend to make on this site, although it could be due to the tutorial nature of many of these articles.

Here are the Linux articles which are really ranking highly:

• How to do connection tunnelling via SSH – A reasonably quick and simple tutorial I wrote that briefly explains what SSH tunnelling is and how to make use of it.
• Ubuntu’s Indicator Applet – A now relatively old post which I wrote regarding the indicator applet that came as part of Ubuntu 10.04, and aiding in notifying the user of new email or instant messages and allowed easy response and broadcasting of messages via e-mail, instant messaging or social networks.
• Getting Spotify working in Ubuntu – This post focuses on getting the Windows version of Spotify (a popular streaming music client) working in Ubuntu Linux. This is somewhat irrelevant now however, as Spotify have released a native ‘Linux preview’ version, which tends to work a lot better… ignoring the fact they never made its volume control functional.
• Avatar server farm – Avatar, the film, which I’m sure most readers have seen was rendered with a massive Linux server farm. The server farm’s main rendering machines all ran a version of the Ubuntu. As Ubuntu is my currently preferred distribution of Linux, I figured I would write an article relating to it.

Regarding Internet Explorer, I wrote about an unexpected security feature in Internet Explorer web browser which replaces locally submitted file paths with the unhelpful ‘C:\\fakepath\\’ string. The ‘motivation’ within this post’s title refers to a motivation in the workplace video I posted quite a while ago.

• Internet Explorer’s ‘C:\fakepath\’ security feature – This security feature can easily be worked around for trusted sites via IE’s Internet Options window.
• Motivation within the workplace – An interesting and insightful explanatory video.

In total, the National Archives have released over eight and a half thousand UFO related pages this March. You can download all the documents in PDF format individually. However, for the convenience of anyone reading this I’ve created a torrent containing all the March 2011 UFO files.

Download UFO Files – March 2011 (torrent)

Below is an extract from the National Archives website relating to the release of these files, stating the details about the release and what it contains.

“Over 8,500 pages of UFO discussions, sightings and reports have been released today by The National Archives. Covering the years 2000-2005, this is the largest batch of UFO files to be released so far.

The files document how UFOs became a global issue, discussed by the highest levels of government around the world, including the United Nations, the US Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s House of Lords. This latest release of files also reveals documents on the government’s UFO policy for the first time. [...]

The files reveal hundreds of reports of UFO sightings by radar, ‘UFO crashes’ and other close encounters, including one incident which saw a flying saucer hoax by students which was treated as a potentially real alien invasion of the UK (Catalogue reference: DEFE 24/1986).”

Hope this collection is interesting for those interested in space exploration and the potential of alien life existing somewhere out there in the universe.

Coming back to this year, an appeal from the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has recently gone out. I’ve quoted a part of it below.

I got a lot of funny looks ten years ago when I started talking to people about Wikipedia.

Let’s just say some of the business types were skeptical of the notion that volunteers from all across the world could come together to create a remarkable pool of human knowledge – all for the simple purpose of sharing.

No ads. No profits. No agenda.

A decade after its founding, more than 380 million people use Wikipedia and its sister sites every month – almost a third of the Internet-connected world.

It is the 5th most popular website in the world. The other four have been built and maintained with billions of dollars in investment, huge corporate staffs and relentless marketing.

But, Wikipedia isn’t anything like a commercial website. It is a community creation, written by volunteers making one entry at a time. You are part of our community. And I’m writing today to ask you to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Together, we can keep it free of charge and free of advertising. We can keep it open – you can use the information in Wikipedia any way you want. We can keep it growing – spreading knowledge everywhere, and inviting participation from everyone.

Each year at this time, we reach out to ask you and others all across the Wikimedia community to help sustain our joint enterprise with a modest donation of £20, £35, £50 or more.

If you value Wikipedia as a source of information – and a source of inspiration – I hope you’ll choose to act right now.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder

Naturally, I’m donating again. A £50.00 GBP donation to Wikipedia and Wikimedia UK this time.

I encourage anybody who uses Wikipedia significantly, to put forward a donation, of any amount, if at all possible.

I’m not a Windows user primarily. The vast majority of time my computers and laptop boot into Linux, specifically Ubuntu, as of recent. However, I do have several of my machines set-up with both Ubuntu and Windows 7.

One of my major gripes with Windows, which has always been there, is that after a clean reinstall, you have no programs of any real use installed at all. In comparison, a clean install of Ubuntu gives you a graphics editor, photo manager, fully featured e-mail client, personal information management suite and a full office suite. Of course, you now get the Ubuntu Software Centre, which lets you install find and install full size applications with the same ease as using the iPhone App store or Android Marketplace.

Windows has none of this. A brand spanking new Windows install does very little for productivity without a few essential apps installed.

Usually this involves the labourious task of:

1. Manually searching for and/or heading to the website of the program you want to download
2. Finding the current version/build to download, starting the download and waiting for the download to complete
3. Running the installer and waiting for its completion
4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 for every program you wish to install

Recently, I’ve discovered Ninite, which is a fantastic website/program which lets you cut down the above procedure (which could possible take hours) to a quick procedure that takes a few minutes at most. This is how you’d do the above, with Ninite.

1. Go to https://ninite.com/ and select the programs you want to install.
2. Download the installer it generates
3. Run the installer and wait for its completion.

And then you’re done! No repetition, as Ninite cleverly puts the installation of many, many possible programs behind a single simplistic installer.

It supports installation for the most popular web browsers, messaging applications, media players, imaging programs, document editors/viewers, security software (such as anti-virus and anti-malware software), plug-ins (such as Flash and Java), file sharing applications, general utilities and even certain developer/administration tools.

Basically, after every (annoying) reinstall of Windows that I have to do, the first place I’m heading is to Ninite’s website.

As a final note, I’m really hoping they add official graphics drivers to their list of automatically installed items. That would be very useful for a lot of people I know. Suggesting new apps is a feature they offer right at the bottom of the Ninite website.

Update: Although geolocation is commonly referenced when discussing HTML 5, it is a API which is maintained in a separate specification and is not actually a new feature of HTML 5.

Identifying the physical location of a computer via HTML 5′s geolocation is now incredibly easy and only requires a few lines of JavaScript.

Due to the simplicity of geolocation and its ever growing support in modern browsers, it seems very probable that this could be exploited for malicious purposes. An example scenario of how malware could theoretically track the physical location of infected machine could be as follows.

1. Malware infects system and becomes memory resident.
2. Malware adds malicious website URL to a local web browser’s HTML 5 geolocation white list.
3. Malware launches hidden/backgrounded instance of web browser, navigating to malicious website URL.
4. Malicious website JavaScript utilises HTML 5 geolocation services to track physical location.
5. Physical location is relayed to server via AJAX or other means.
6. Steps 4 and 5 can be repeated as part of a loop containing time delay within the malicious website’s JavaScript.
7. Malware can monitor the memory resident state of the browser within the system’s process list and restart the hidden/backgrounded web browser instance if required.

In this example, the geolocation is all done via a local hidden user agent (web browser) using web technologies. The web part of the system, by its very nature, multi-platform. However, the initial piece of malware which launches the hidden web browser instance will likely be written in a platform specific manner.

Changing this, or writing multiple versions of the ‘browser launcher’ malware would effectively generate a form of malware which could track the physical location of users regardless of their operating system.

Do you think this kind of malware is a reasonable threat now or in the near future? What other potential problems exist for devices that can be identified by geolocation technologies?

In the vast majority of today’s websites, if a program is required to pick out a particular part of a HTML page, such as the main article, the sidebar or the top navigation, it would have to be programmed to do so on a per website and web page basis. This is because every website structures its HTML differently, unless based on an underlying package with a consistent HTML foot print.

Most current websites therefore use a variety of <p>, <div> and <span> tags to surround their content. These tags define style and do not obviously determine whether the contained content is part of the website’s navigation system or whether it is the main article or focus of the web page. The new HTML 5 tags aim to change this by explicitly defining content.

Defining content with specific HTML 5 tags will make websites easier to parse by computer programs. This could benefit accessibility readers for the blind and allow content aggregating systems and ‘mash-up’ websites to easily parse, link to and cite your articles. Content aggregation and automation of web page content retrieval is quite fundamental to some of the newer Web 2.0 sites and social networks. Good examples being Facebook’s automatic retrieval of web page information when a link is entered into a status update, or Reddit’s automatic thumbnail generation based on images found within the linked web page.

Here is a listed on related HTML content tags, as available from the W3C Schools website.

• <article> – Defines a main article on a page. Can include cite (citation) and pubdate (publishing date) attributes.
• <details> – States content details for a specific section. Can include an open attribute defining whether or not the details within are visible to the end-user.
• <figcaption> – States the caption for a figure as defined by the figure tag.
• <figure> – Usually used to group a set of elements.
• <footer> – Footer layout element. This is used to contain the footer content of the page, usually contains the website name, author and copyright information.
• <header> – Header layout element. This tag is designed to contain the top header of a document, usually showing the website logo, page and/or company title and subtitle.
• <hgroup> – A tag used to group together heading tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on.
• <keygen> – A key generation tag which defines a generated (encryption) key that can be associated with a HTML form.
• <meter> – The <meter> tag contains content which is deemed to be a measurement of some sort.
• <nav> – The <nav> tags stands for navigation and is designed to surround navigation links, such as those present in a sidebar bar or navigational header/footer.
• <summary> – The <summary> tag defines the title of a <details> element.
• <time> – This tags contains content which is a statement or measurement of time and/or date/time.

Unfortunately, it is likely that HTML 5 content tags with not be adopted completely for quite some time and there will likely continued use of existing HTML mark up and related styling of <div> and <span> tags for quite some time.

I found this image whilst browsing Reddit, which I’ve come to do quite frequently. Although I can not vouch for its statistical accuracy, the likely truths behind it are quite fascinating.

This makes systems using a model view controller architecture much simpler to maintain, as locating the code relevant to specific logic is significantly easier. Additionally, it makes expansion of systems much less complex, as it avoids the ‘feature cascade’ effect in which the addition of a single feature will result in a knock on or butterfly effect throughout the entire system.

The parts of a model view controller system are referred to as models, views and controllers, which makes perfect sense. The definition of these system parts is also quite intuitive.

• Views – Views are entirely for the presentation part of your application. It contains no brains, no logic, no intelligence to the extent permissible by the programming language used. A view is merely the appearance of your application and nothing else.
• Controllers – A controller handles feedback from the user and logic specific to the application. A controllers job is to receive input from a user, via controls found on the user interface of a view, to process it, communicating with a model if necessary, and then to send output to the user, usually by populating a view with relevant content.
• Models – Models perform business logic. Business logic, in this case, refers to items that are fundamental to the overall system design. For example, if a library application was constructed, the logic which ensured a library card owner only rented up to 5 books at a time, would be part of a model. Again, as part of the business logic, models also tend to control access to application storage, such as database(s), performing CRUD (creation, updating and deletion) tasks on the stored data.

I hope this helps explain the basics of the model view controller software architecture.

If you have any improvements or additions to these definitions or just want to discuss software architectures in general, feel free to use the comments section below.

This behaviour is apparently not too anomalous and has been replicated in many locations and by many different professionals in fields such as economics, psychology and sociology. For simple tasks, standard monetary motivators work, but for anything more complex additional monetary motivations do not work as usual. The video suggests one of the ways around this is to pay workers sufficient money such that monetary motivation is not an issue and not relevant.

Once this has been achieved, behavioural science shows that there are three additional factors that improve employee motivations.

1. Autonomy – The ability to direct the course of one’s own life – the work that is performed.
2. Self Challenge & Mastery – The overarching desire for people to improve themselves, gain experience and get better at what they enjoy.
3. Purpose – The reasons you do what you do. Doing tasks merely for money and profit is not too motivating, but doing tasks to make someone’s life better, to make the world better, to have a well defined purpose to your work and to make money – now that is motivating.

Click the image to view it enlarged, on its own.

The BBC who initially reported this proof-of-concept ‘infection’ stated that Dr Gasson admitted that the test is only proof of concept but believe that there are significantly implications for advanced medical devices. In my opinion, such systems should be incapable of malware infection as a heavily important part of their design. Such real-time systems should not have the necessary capacity to carry and distribute, both in terms of storage space and system capability.

If you are running an (operating) system capable of malware reception* on mission critical systems (and thus required anti-malware measures), such as those used in nuclear power plants or reservoirs to regulate containment, there there is a fundamental problem with this design. This is akin to a school teacher wearing a condom during classes – while this technically provides additional safety, there is obviously something fundamentally wrong with this principle at a more basic level.

* I’m aware there is no system that is 100% secure from malware, but levels of security exist. For example, the mission critical systems discussed here do not require a full Microsoft Windows operating system, nor a full consumer operating system of any kind in fact. Such devices should be self-contained in most cases, with entirely custom code. Lesser mission critical systems may rely on a Linux kernel as the base operating system with the business/operational logic running on bespoke programs running ontop of this base system.

The BBC article and Mark Gasson goes into further details on the  security risks of advanced medical devices which may be subject to malware.

“With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses.”

He also added: “Many people with medical implants also consider them to be integrated into their concept of their body, and so in this context it is appropriate to talk in terms of people themselves being infected by computer viruses.”

However, Dr Gasson predicts that wider use will be made of implanted technology.

“This type of technology has been commercialised in the United States as a type of medical alert bracelet, so that if you’re found unconscious you can be scanned and your medical history brought up.”

We can all hope that security in these heavily critical devices is never designed alongside the principles of many general purpose computers.

Imagine an equivalent of the Storm botnet that, rather than infecting and making zombies of its host computers, infects human medical devices. In fact, that is not even a future I want to consider.

I really think some of these robots are fantastic. They really demo some of the advanced strides in robot motion that are going ahead. Yeap, strides… motions… I made an awful pun.

More so than the physical engineering behind these robots, I really admire and am interested by the software engineering that control these robots. The programming and artificial intelligence structures that must be used to control this motion accurately are fantastic. Artificial intelligence elements must predict necessary adjustments for robotic leg motor must be very quick and accurate to deal with unstable surfaces, such as the walker on ice in the video above.

I admire the guys who engineered and programmed these robots. Legged robotic motion is still one of the biggest challenges facing modern robotics in my opinion, with computer vision and object recognition being the most problematic.

Does anyone else interesting in robotics or artificial intelligence have any other examples of robotic motion? Or how about a great demo of computer vision in action?

1. Press the menu/applications button (bottom left of the phone).
2. Tap ‘Settings’
3. Tap ‘Application mgr.’ (Application Manager)
4. Tap ‘Installed apps.’ (Installed Applications)
5. You will then be presented with a list of all installed applications. Select the name of the application you wish to remove.
6. Tap ‘Options’ and then ‘Uninstall’.
7. You will be asked for confirmation as to whether or not you are sure you with to remove the application. Tap ‘Yes’ if you are sure.
8. The application will then be removed. This may take a while, depending on how large the application is. Repeat these steps for all the applications you wish to uninstall/remove.

Note that for some applications, the ‘uninstall’ option is not available. As far as I am aware, this means the software is built into the system software and thus can not be uninstalled from the phone in any normal manner, without going to the extreme of flashing the phone with custom firmware.

The inclusion of C:\\fakepath\\ is a security feature of Internet Explorer 8, designed to prevent information regarding the file system structure being exposed when files are selected via a file input box. Current versions of most other web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, will return the file name without any path (relative or absolute).

The HTML5 specification states that the browser’s implementation of a file upload control should not reveal the true path to the file via its ‘value’ attribute. Internet Explorer, as always, does this differently than other browsers by including ‘fakepath’ rather than just removed the local path in its entirety.

This behaviour of Internet Explorer 8 can be overridden by added the size to the list of trusted sites within Internet Explorer 8 Internet options window. I’d personally only recommend this if the system is an secure internal and/or Intranet web-based system which requires the use of the full path.

Ideally, existing systems should be recoded to either not use the full path or to retrieve the full path via another method, such as manual input into a text input field.

I hope this post helps web developers who have unexpectedly come across this strange ‘fakepath’ and been unaware of where it was coming from.

You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.

While Apple may tinker with the final packaging and design of the final phone, it’s clear that the features in this lost-and-found next-generation iPhone are drastically new and drastically different from what came before. Here’s the detailed list of our findings:

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×460 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

This information was sourced from Gizmodo’s recent article about the next iPhone. Apparently this iPhone has indeed been reported lost by Apple… and unsurprisingly, they want it back.

So, is this a clever marketing ploy by Apple or is someone at Apple very much fired?

Morality itself is generally deemed to not be answerable by science, and science often has no official standpoint on morality, but why not? There are experts in all other fields of knowledge. Why could there not be experts of morality?

Sam Harris discussed these points at TED2010 and a variety of common morality related questions of good and evil, right and wrong, stating that science can, and indeed should, have an authority on moral issues.

He states that science should be able to logically shape human values and more specifically determine what exactly a good moral life can consist of.

What do you think?

iPhone users now have a choice in their web browsing experience!

I previously ran a post regarding Opera Mini being sent to Apple for approval. I also had a post in the works for how Opera Mini was still not released to the App Store.

However, in a turn of events, it seems Apple have approve Opera Mini for inclusion in the App Store after 20 days, 8 hours and 31 minutes (to be unnecessarily precise). This count is was available on Opera Mini’s website ever since it was sent to Apple for approval. Although not an iPhone user myself, I know several people who will be relieved to have additional browser choice beyond the default Safari web browser which is built-in.

The latest MySQL documentation (5.5) discretly mentions the fact these constraints are unfortunately not supported.

• The CONSTRAINT_TYPE value can be UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, or FOREIGN KEY.
• The UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY information is about the same as what you get from the Key_name field in the output from SHOW INDEX when the Non_unique field is 0.
• The CONSTRAINT_TYPE column can contain one of these values: UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY, CHECK. This is a CHAR (not ENUM) column. The CHECK value is not available until we support CHECK.

Take special note of the final line I’ve emboldened. This is quite a shame that this constraint type is not fully supported yet.

Apologies to readers for the implication that this was functional in my previous post, and thanks to the poster of this comment for noticing the discrepancy.

Check constraints, of course, function fine in many other DBMSs, and to that end, the original post on SQL check constraints is still relevant, but sadly not if you are worked with MySQL.

1. Calculate how much carbon your are using, be it in electricity usage, air flights, driving costs or other.
2. Display the amount of money it would take to offset your measured carbon usage.
3. Donate said amount to Climate Care so they can put the money towards offsetting your carbon emissions elsewhere with one of their projects.

The image below shows the carbon emissions calculator the website uses.

I personally think this website is a fantastic way to deal with carbon emissions, by donating a proportional amount of funds to other projects that attempt to compensate for the emissions that are generated. Here are a few quotes regarding climate change, carbon emission offsetting and global warming from the climate change website.

Why should you take action to avoid catastrophic climate change?

Global warming is happening right now in front of our eyes. Our weather is changing. Every one of the hottest 15 years on record has occurred since 1980. There is now huge consensus among scientists that we face serious climate change – we just don’t know what level of severity it will reach or when.

We probably have about 20-30 years left to sort this problem out and we need to spend our efforts and money on actions that deliver the biggest and fastest CO₂ reductions possible. We all have a part to play and we all need to work together to spread the understanding of this issue and our determination to tackle climate change. Work out your own ‘reduce and offset’ plan today with our useful reduction tips.

What is climate change?

When fossil fuels and wood are burnt they release greenhouse gases that occur naturally in the atmosphere, making the average temperature around 15°C. Without this protective ‘blanket’ our world would be a much colder -18°C

However, the extra greenhouse gases that humankind has emitted have already significantly altered the composition of the atmosphere, adding to the blanket and increasing the average temperature of the Earth. This is causing human-induced climate change. To stop this spiralling out of control, we must radically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Effects of climate change

The real impact of climate change remains worryingly uncertain, with consequences for all communities, species and environments across the world. Effects include:

• Changing weather bringing drought and flooding, affecting drinking water supplies and agriculture.
• Irreversible loss of many species of plants and animals.
• Rising sea levels, threatening freshwater supplies because of salt water intrusion.
• Melting glaciers, threatening freshwater supplies for millions of people who depend on glacier meltwater for their water supply and irrigation.

We will all experience these effects but an appalling injustice of climate change will be that those people in the developing world, who have contributed little towards the problem, are at greatest risk and will be the hardest hit. They have fewer resources for coping with storms, floods, droughts, disease outbreaks, and disruptions to food and water supplies. This is an issue with the welfare of humans at its heart.

What do you think? How at risk are we? Will you be offsetting carbon emissions at all or do you believe the problem is bigger than this?

Google April Fools’ Day Pranks

Google went a bit heavy on the pranks this year, with each department seeming to produce its own set of pranks.

• Google Animal Translate - Google have supposedly released an ever so sneaky version of Google Translate that can translate animal noises in to English! This is a mobile application, suprisingly for the Android platform and is (not) available in the Android App Store. Take a look at the video below.

• Google renames to Topeka – ‘Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.’

• Google Annotation Gallery – GAG is an open source libary for Java that allows programmers to easily express their emotions in the code… ‘The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving messages to fellow developers with the @Deprecated annotation? Wouldn’t you rather leave a @LOL or @Facepalm instead? If so, then this is the gallery for you.’

ThinkGeek April Fools’ Products

ThinkGeek, a huge online store for geek wear, gadgets and generally geeky products released a few extra special products for April Fools’ day this year. This is very typical of ThinkGeek, but this year’s prank products were quite something.

• Canned Unicorn Meat – Which is… well, exactly what it says on the tin, apparently.
• iCade – An arcade machine shaped holder for the new Apple iPad.
• moodINQ – A programmable electronic Tattoo system
• Tell Me Your Secrets Bear – A cuddly bear which had a microphone and camera allowing parents to spy on their children and their secrets.

Your April Fools’ Pranks?

What was your favourite April Fools’ Prank this year, either your own or a prank you saw online?

Anyway – I’ve been talking quite a lot about Twitter recently and general social media.

I’ve said this before of course, but social media truly is great for both driving direct traffic to your website and for general search engine optimisation. Of course, different services meet different needs.

Take a look at some of the following social media related articles I’ve written recently.

Specifically, microblogging is fantastic for driving traffic to a website. The build up of following around a specific niche almost guarantees a visit from your followers, because they followed you, so they are very likely to be interested in what you have to say.

What have your experiences been using Twitter to drive traffic?

A complete success or slow progress so far? What problems have you faced when using Twitter or building up an online community following?

Now, due to the managed element of WHM cPanel systems, it is very likely that any changes made to httpd.conf will be reverted after an automatic WHM cPanel update. To prevent your httpd.conf file being overwritten, you must make use of the cPanel Distiller.

After making your changes, run the distiller with the following command.

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update

This will then ensure that your changes are integrated into the templates which WHM cPanel uses to regenerate the httpd.conf file after an automatic update.

I’ve tested this in CentOS specifically, but it should work in any other operating system, such as Red Hat.

In fact, anything the human brain and its subconscious is capable of is quite incredible in my opinion. Given that the brain is effectively a collection of cells and electrical impulses it is quite amazing that said biological computer evolved as it did, to allow humans the feelings of conciousness, emotion, learning and the ability to achieve first hand experience.

Source: XKCD web comic

The subconscious mind is even more perplexing, especially during sleep when many of the social constraints our society has in place are released. At this point the subconscious and imagination of you brains can go wild. Of course, not everyone remembers their dreams, and even fewer release they are dreaming at the time. Even fewer still can actually control their own dreams, a process known as lucid dreaming.

Rather unusually for me, I’ve been remembering quite a few of my own dreams recently, and they’ve ranged from mild and pleasant to truly horrific. In light of this, and to satisfy my ever unsatisfied curiosity and hunt for knowledge, I have done a bit of reading around the subject. It turns out that not only are there many, many very common (almost universal) dreams amongst people, but that there is also quite a firm amount of evidence that the dreams we experience in sleep somehow relate to our concious waking lives.

This seems a bit superstitious, bizarre and almost unbelievable at first thought, but if you think about it cleverly, it does make sense. Our subconscious has the same memories, emotions and thoughts to work with as our concious minds, so logically, the two states may be somewhat related, if only in a metaphorically sense. So, I looked up common dreams that people have based on a lot of different sources.

• Being naked – Apparently this one means you’re exposed in concious life, or you may feel you’re revealed a  bit too much about yourself in real life.
• Falling – Ahh… falling is probably the most frequent of the negative common dreams it seems. According to many sources the falling dreams refer to you feeling insecure in some aspects of your life. It can be related to not feeling like you have a safety net in life to fall back on in a particular situation, which is quite an interested thought, and related (metaphorically) heavily to the dream itself.
• Drowning – People who are particular overworked, stressed and on edge can feel like they are metaphorically ‘drowning’ in an overflow of information, thoughts, emotion and stress. Drowning dreams it seems, tend to come from these particular ‘stress’ related emotions… phew.
• Lost and/or trapped – Like drowning dreams, this can also be stress related, but according to what I’ve read, this can also mean you are significantly confused or can not understand a certain situation, or feel you do not even have the ability to understand or solve it.

These are many of the common negative dreams. There are of course positive opposite dreams to these, which based on other source tend to relate to the opposite equivalent emotions as well.

In fact, there is quite a lot of information about common dreams available.

So, do you think your dreams are at all related to your real life? Have you ever had these so called common dreams in situations which match up with their supposed explanations?

The British… well, UK space agency will come into being on the 1st of April (here is me hoping it is not an elaborate April’s fool joke) and will take full responsibility for all government policy and budget decisions regarding space exploration, research and travel.

The British Space Minister, Lord Drayson, who initially put forward the idea of a UK / British Space Agency, had the following to say about the announcement.

“People in the UK are not aware of just how good Britain is both at space research and in terms of our space industry; [a space agency] is going to make people more aware of that,”

“But in practical terms, it’s going to make the decision-making by government in all aspects of space policy much more joined up, better co-ordinated – a single point within government which has responsibility for making sure that we get everything in alignment such that the space research we do, the space industry that we’re building, fulfils its true potential.”

Source: BBC News

As someone who is find the idea of space travel fantastic, I’m glad to see Britain getting its own space agency. Hopefully this will push more official space missions.

Although to be fair, the British public are not doing too bad on their own, with a guy called Robert Harrison taking some amazing photos of space, with a device which cost no more than £500!

Take a look at the photo his budget space exploration device below. If you want to, you can browse the entire Icarus Project photo collection on Flickr, or read some more about his space photography ventures.

Are you British? Tell me what you think of the Space Agency. Incredibly cool, or not?

One of its best features being the automatic reformatting of text columns in websites so they fit on your phone’s screen regardless of its orientation. This makes reading on it fantastic, as scrolling left and right continually is just not required, as it so commonly is with the N97′s built in web browser.

Anyway, it turns out the iPhone is getting the Opera Mini goodness shortly.

Well, that is the optimisitic view point at least. Opera have submitted the browser to the Apple App Store and are now just awaiting confirmation that the App will go live. They have even put up a counter stating the amount of “Time since Opera Mini was submitted”. As of typing this, the counter currently stands at just over ten hours.

Apparently, whoever guesses closest to the time at which Opera Mini goes live can win a new iPhone. Interesting. It seems to me that Opera Mini breaches Apple’s own terms which state that submitted applications should not duplicate existing or ‘built in’ iPhone functionality… such as web browsing, which Safari already does.

“Your move Apple” says an article on Mashable, and rightly so. Let’s hope their move is the right one for their users – choice.

What do you think? Is this counter the real deal or merely a marketing ploy and a bit of a stab at Apple? Will Opera Mini really get accepted to the App store?

Graph sourced from Arbor Networks blog entry.

The main reason for Google’s huge increase in general Internet traffic was its acquisition of YouTube in 2007. YouTube delivers huge quantities of streaming video traffic, and the impressive growth of YouTube alone is enough to make a noticeable difference. Other contributing factors are massively increased adoption of other Google applications, such as Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, not only by consumers but also by mass deployment of Google Apps within businesses, as a replacement for local Microsoft exchange server set-ups.

Discretely, whilst doing no ‘evil’ (open to debate), Google has managed to push itself to the forefront of the Internet and is now a household name. Everyone knows Google.

You no longer search the Internet, you Google it.

One of the most simple ways to set up an SSH Tunnel is to make use of the ssh command’s -D argument. This argument allows you to specific a port upon which to listen locally. This causes ssh to act as a local SOCKS proxy server, routing any traffic pointed at this local proxy through the SSH tunnel. More details about the -D argument of ssh is shown below in the form of an extract from ssh’s man page.

-D port

Specifies a local “dynamic” application-level port forwarding. This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the secure channel, and the application protocol is then used to determine where to connect to from the remote machine. Currently the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are supported, and ssh will act as a SOCKS server. Only root can forward privileged ports. Dynamic port forwardings can also be specified in the configuration file.

One of the simplest methods to set-up an SSH tunnel, is the following command in a Linux terminal.

ssh -D 8080 username@example.com

This connects to the computer at ‘example.com’ and attempts to authenticate as ‘username’, asking for a password if necessary. When authentication is successful, ssh will act as a SOCKS proxy server on port 8080 as defined in the command. All you then need to do is configure your software (for example, your web browser) to run through a SOCKS proxy at ‘localhost’ or ’127.0.0.1′ on port 8080.

Additional information on SSH tunnelling is available from Wikipedia’s article on tunnelling protocols. Here’s an extract.

To set up an SSH tunnel, one configures an SSH client to forward a specified local port to a port on the remote machine. Once the SSH tunnel has been established, the user can connect to the specified local port to access the network service. The local port need not have the same port number as the remote port.

SSH tunnels provide a means to bypass firewalls that prohibit certain Internet services — so long as a site allows outgoing connections. For example, an organization may prohibit a user from accessing Internet web pages (port 80) directly without passing through the organization’s proxy filter (which provides the organization with a means of monitoring and controlling what the user sees through the web). But users may not wish to have their web traffic monitored or blocked by the organization’s proxy filter. If users can connect to an external SSH server, they can create an SSH tunnel to forward a given port on their local machine to port 80 on a remote web server. To access the remote web server users would point their browser to http://localhost/.

Some SSH clients support dynamic port forwarding that allows the user to create a SOCKS 4/5 proxy. In this case users can configure their applications to use their local SOCKS proxy server. This gives more flexibility than creating an SSH tunnel to a single port as previously described. SOCKS can free the user from the limitations of connecting only to a predefined remote port and server.

Hopefully this will help you set-up quick and easy SSH tunnels when you need them!

You can click the above image for an enlarged screenshot. If you’re interested, there is more information about the BBC homepage and the new, re-branded Google homepage.

The ‘C:’ device represents the very small, primary internal flash memory present on the phone. The secondary storage device, usually ‘D:’ or ‘E:’ is much larger (in my case 32GB), but unfortunately not everything can be installed to the mass storage. For those applications that truly need to be installed on the primary drive, they can use a great deal of the limited space.

Here are a few tips I discovered on how to help clear out the primary drive’s space. You’ll know if you need to do this if you are receiving constant reminders that your phone is out of space on drive ‘C:’.

1. Any applications previously installed on C: that could be installed on E: should be uninstalled and reinstalled on the larger storage device.
2. Install third party web browser, such as Opera Mobile, to the mass storage and then delete the ‘C:\System\Cache\’ folder belonging to the default Nokia web browser.
3. Change the default ‘Messaging’ storage to mass storage. To do this, open the messaging application and then go to Options > Settings > Other > ‘Memory In Use’.
4. Uninstall any of the uninstallable default applications and widgets that you do not use. I removed the ‘Facebook’ home screen widget and now just use the mobile web version of Facebook.
5. Make sure the Ovi Store is set to install to mass storage by default. To do this open the Ovi Store settings at Options > Account > Settings > Installation Preferences, within the Ovi Store application itself.
6. If you are using Nokia Messaging or Nokia Messaging for Exchange, delete and reconfigure your accounts and this will clear out a significant cache. Alternatively, if you do not mind, remove the Nokia Messaging application entirely and use a web-mail alternative (if possible).

In my case, removing Nokia Messaging was the most helpful. Anyone else had this problem, if so, how did you clear your N97′s main memory?

So, what is new in Contacular since my last post? Quite a bit actually. It is now at version 0.15 and has the following additional features.

1. Fully bespoke, custom contact forms for your websites, allowing to define custom fields for your contact forms
2. File upload field type meaning your users can upload an image or document to your contact form and it will be quickly e-mailed to you
3. Ability to restrict file uploads to specific types for added security
4. Use of a PHP mailer class to increase flexibility instead of using the default PHP mail() function
5. Added multiple preset form types for near instant integrations.
6. Many code improvements and optimisations

For all other changes that have happened in Contacular, take a look at the Contacular change log.

I’m still getting lots of feedback in about Contacular and am continually working to improve it. So tell me what you think in the comments below, or contact me regarding Contacular directly.

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps”

The iPhone apps, when scaled up to iPad’s larger screen, did not live up to Steve Jobs’ expectation, so due to this, they were scraped from the iPad’s release operating systems. Rumours exist that these apps will be added in a later update to the iPad’s operating system. This is quite important too, as the missing applications are simple and rather fundamental computing programs which I would personal expect to be in any modern general purpose device.

Missing Apps on the iPad

The list of applications scraped from the iPad’s operating system is as follows.

1. Clock – Something as important as the clock application is missing?
2. Calculator – Surely a similar app will be released to compensate the lack of a Calculator app?
3. Weather – No doubt a good third-party whether app will take the place of this if no official weather application is released.
4. Voice Memos – Seems it should still be in there? Why remove it?
5. Stocks – Not fundamental to all users by any means, but should still be a nice default.

Questions for existing iPhone users:

• Why would Apple really want these applications removed other than merely that they look ‘weird’?
• If you had an iPad, would you want these applications to be there as standard? If so, which ones?
• Are these applications (on the iPhone) used regularly and important to you already?

As assumed by many PlayStation 3 users, the issue was not related to the PlayStation Network but was, in fact, an issue with the hardware in the (non-slim) PlayStation 3 models. The on-board clock on the PlayStation 3 assumed the date on the 1st of March was in fact, the non-existant 29th of February. At the same time, the operating system clock believed the date was, as it actually was, the 1st of March.

We can assume Sony believed the best option was to merely await this automatic ‘fix’ that occured at midnight, rather than to develop, test and release an emergency update to all old model PlayStation 3 models. This is most likely due to a strict policy on testing such system updates. This choice to delay may be looked at as a bad action by some people, however imagine the dangerous alternative. If Sony were to have released a rushed update to all old PlayStation 3 models… and it bricked the consoles (i.e. made them inoperable) – imagine the up roar then?

What do you think Sony should have done?

Frankly, I think they should have been more thorough in the initial testing of the PlayStation 3 components, such as, perhaps, the on-board clock…

1. Any PlayStation 3 games with associated trophies can not be played.
2. The PlayStation Network (PSN) can not be connected to (error 8001050F), and thus all PSN related functionality, such as the friends list, messaging and the PlayStation store is non-functional.
3. The date of the system is reset to the 1st of January 2000 (error 8001050F) and can not be reset automatically, but can be changed manually.

Sony has recently clarified some of the issues relating to this problem is the latest updates to the Sony PlayStation blog, as follows. It is very interesting to note that Sony is still claiming this is a PlayStation Network issue in the blog posts titles, when it is actually a fault in the synchronisation of the system clocks.

• PlayStation Network Status Update – Original update stating Sony are aware of the issue and are investigating the related problems.

“We’re aware that many of you are having difficulty connecting to the PlayStation Network this evening. Those of you with “slim” PS3s (the 120/250 GB models) appear to be unaffected.”

• Latest info on PlayStation Network Status – A more detailed and recent update on the problem, indicating the symptoms of the issue. This update also admits to the issue is “caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system”.

“We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.

Errors include:

• The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
• When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following
  message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been
  signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
• When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears
  on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install
  trophies. Please exit your game.”
• When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the
  Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date
  and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
• Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the
  PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

I’ve previously written about the PlayStation 3 March 1st 2010 issue when I was first made aware of it.

I want to play Heavy Rain and get it finished. Anyone else annoyed?

It seems that the PlayStation 3, the original – not the slim version, is programmed with an invalid leap year reference for 2010. Due to the fact the PS3 believes this year is a leap year, February is being considered to be over 28 days long in 2010. The PlayStation 3 does not quite understand this it seems and the problem is causing significant issues for many gamers. This leap year problem is causing games to crash (even single player games), connections to the PlayStation network to fail, Trophy information to become corrupted, dynamic themes to fail and the inability to launch certain games at all. Some users are also reporting a variety of error codes including error 8001050F.

It seems all these problems boil down to an issue within the original PlayStation 3′s firmware which is preventing many date and time related functions to fail. Luckily, the PlayStation 3′s system software update relies only upon an Internet connection and does not rely on a connection to the PlayStation network. Sony are apparently looking into the issues, and gamers are expecting a software patch within 24 hours.

There is a basic FAQ about this issue, as quoted below.

“Here’s what’s going on right now: something with the PS3′s internal clock has borked in some pre-slim models. This is not a PSN issue; it has to do with your PS3′s clock. This clock is NOT related to the OS clock. It seems to be a leap year bug. Setting your clock ahead will do nothing. All PS3s around the world were affected at the exact same time.

Does this affect me?

-If you have a Slim PS3, you’re good to go. Continue playing it as normal.

-If you have a “fat” PS3, you may be affected. Some fat PS3s have worked ok, but it seems a good majority have been bugged.

What does this bug mean?

-If affected, your date and time has been set to a random past date. This prevents you from signing into PSN, playing any PSN games, or using any DLC. Your trophies will also not display correctly or be able to sync.

How do I fix it?

-You can’t. Even if you don’t sign into PSN, it won’t help. This is a hardware issue.

So, what do I do?

-Wait 24 hours. Other products that have had similar bugs have corrected themselves after the “bugged” day. On Monday around 6pm central time, all PS3s will automatically correct themselves…maybe.

-If that doesn’t work, we’ll need a firmware update from Sony, which should be a pretty important priority for them right now.

Did I lose my data/themes/etc?

Your save data/games/dlc/themes are fine. They’ll be fixed when the PS3 is fixed. Trophies are uncertain right now, but they’ll be fine if you’ve synced them before the PS3 was bugged. Unsynced trophies are an unknown right now.

If I have a bugged PS3, can I still use it?

It’s probably not a good idea, as I have no idea what will happen to the trophies you earn during the bugged time. Movies/media will work fine.”

…

“The going theory is that the PS3 is storing some form of date in GMT, then modifying that to get whatever you see in the on-screen clock. That modification process seems to be fine–the system can take 2/28/2010, 9PM GMT, add four hours, and get 3/1/2010, 1AM random time zone.

What’s apparently effed, as speculation goes, is when the internal GMT-tracking rolls over to 3/1. It’s either not rolling, or rolling to 2/29, at which point a system tries to add/subtract from 2/29, which it can’t do because the front-end calendar doesn’t have a 2/29/2010, and shit explodes. Seemed to happen around 4PM PDT, which I think is 12AM GMT, so.

And the PS3 launched in 2006; it’s hit 4 2/28s so far. 2007 and 2009 were odd-numbered years; 2008 was an even, and a leap year. 2010 is the first even non-leap-year the system’s been around for. If some sort of base-level math is choking on itself, it may have ruled out the odd 2007 and 2009 successfully, but is convinced the even 2010 is a leap year (this part I’m less sure of, but is why leap year could theoretically come into play at some point.)”

Neogaf Forums Post

I’m quite highly anticipating the release of Google Chrome OS – Google’s net book and appliance cloud operating system. There are a few main reasons behind this.

Simplicity and Openness

Note that I combine the two here. It is very important that both software user friendliness is combined with the nature of free and open source software to prevent device and software simplification becoming a model for restricted development.

Apple do one of these well – simplicity. Apple products are almost always considered to be highly user-friendly and easy to use for all consumers, taking the iPhone and iPad as the latest examples within the consumer electronics market.

However, Apple has a very closed nature to their software models, especially with the iPhone and iPad, where all application acquisition is restricted to a specific Apple controlled ‘App. Store’ and all application developement is restricted to a Apple controlled SDK (software development kit) which is platforme restricted and incompatible with all platforms other than Apple’s own Mac OS X platform.

Promotion of Open Source Software

Since Google Chrome OS is to based upon a Linux kernel, and use many existing Linux systems, not only will this bring improvements to Linux operating systems as a whole due to Google’s code contributions, but additionally it will bring Linux and, more generally, open source software into the light.

The concepts of Linux and open source software are by no means yet the household names of Microsoft, Windows and Apple. Dependant on how Google Chrome OS is marketed by Google, this release could be a great boom for the promotion of Linux as a whole.

Zero Price Operating System

Since Google intends to release the operating system for free (zero price), it will likely also reduce the apparent worth of paid operating systems, such as the paid offerings by Microsoft (Windows) or Apple (Mac OS X). The increased use of web applications and the Internet to do many daily tasks makes Google Chrome OS perfect for the most common uses of computers today. For these tasks, alternative operating systems hold no significant advantages, whilst the advantages for Microsoft and Apple operating systems now lie specifically in the domain of platform restricted software packages, either in the desktop realm, such as Microsoft Office / Apple iWork or the server realm, such as Microsoft Exchange / Mac OS X server software packages.

Even then, with the growth of multi-platform, online productivity and collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Mail, these platform restricted ‘offline’ software packages may become redundant as more and more businesses and enterprises rely upon the Internet and cloud based applications and storage.

What do you think? Will Google Chrome OS be a boom for Linux, and will its competitors’ offerings be hurt significantly by its release?

The Reddit Alien - a great social bookmarking advantage

Some people think of search engine optimisation as being strictly building links and content, and that was very much the case before the advent of microblogging and social networking. Now being social is very important for search engine optimisation. Using social networking, social bookmarking and other such sites can really help boost your traffic, both via increased rankings and faster indexing in search engines as well as the potential for viral marketing and promotion of your content.

Let’s go over the main points. Using social methods of promotion for your website can help:

1. To get your site indexed faster – Promoting your site via services such as Reddit, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and blog pinging services can ensure your site is indexed in search engines as fast as possible.
2. To increase search engine rankings – Although many social bookmarking and similar sites now use ‘nofollow’ rel tags on their links, there are still several services which do not. Reddit, a social news/bookmarking website that I have recently become addicted to, is a perfect example of a social website which does not use the ‘nofollow’ rel tag on any of its links.
3. To virally promote your content – Social bookmarking and news websites are great for promoting websites and interesting or funny website content in a viral nature. This can have a cascading effect for content this people find really interesting. To virally promote content, always ensure you post links to the relevant categories and in a way that makes the content seem interesting, either be being funny, outstanding or highly controversial.

Overall, social networking and bookmarking websites are a fantastic tool for website and content promotion and for improving your search engine results page rankings. Most importantly, you should promote good quality and interesting content without looking incredibly spammy or promote spam like web content… there is enough of that on the Web already!

"Hi! I'm Google Buzz" - Screenshot of the Google Buzz welcoming screen

Like my pun? I know, I know. It is ingenius.

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is a new social networking venture from the almighty search engine. It is designed to integrate well with their webmail service Gmail. Google have dipped their toes in the social networking marketplace before with services like Orkut and Google Friend Connect. Orkut is a big hit in Brazil and India, but is not as large as many of the other social networking websites such as Twitter or Facebook. Google Friend Connect, on the other hand is a system designed for web developers to quickly and easily integrate Google-powered social elements into their websites via iframe’s, Javascript and AJAX.

From the point of large scale social networking, Google Buzz could really be a hit. It has a huge initial base of users, as all of Gmail’s existing consumer user base is automatically given Buzz as of a few days ago. Roll out of Google Buzz to consumers began on the 9th of February 2010 and has now finished being deployed for all standard public Gmail users.

Google Buzz for Google Apps?

You may be wondering if Google Apps users (Business, Schools, Enterprises or Personal) have the opportunity to use Google Buzz? Sadly not, it seems Google Buzz is not available for Google Apps users yet, but Google have promised this will be available within a few months times. The delay is apparently due to the additional complexities involved with restricted Buzz to an individual business or enterprise environment.

What about the Privacy Concerns?

There have been quite a few people heavily concerned about the privacy aspects of Google’s new social networking system. This focuses primarily across Google’s decision to make information about people users regularly contact public by default. This is done to ensure when you activate Google Buzz, you are immediately following your friends and family and they are following you. However, the people you are following is shared public. Twitter has been doing this since the start, allowing anyone to see who is following who. However, Google stores a lot more information about its users by default.

A lot of people are having doubts initially and there has been plenty of bad initial press related to the privacy of service. This is almost always the case and to be expected with all new social networking systems put online. However there are a few genuine horror stories, such as a story in which Google Buzz auto-followed a woman’s abusive ex. Is this a bad move by Google? What do you think?

You can create a table with a check constraint in MySQL as follows. The check in this example disallows values of the ‘P_Id’ field from falling outside of the condition ‘P_Id>0′. In other words, the ‘P_Id’ field’s values must almost be greater than zero in order for the data to be accepted into the table by the database management system (DBMS).

CREATE TABLE Persons
(
P_Id int NOT NULL,
LastName varchar(255) NOT NULL,
FirstName varchar(255),
Address varchar(255),
City varchar(255),
CHECK (P_Id>0)
)

You are probably wondering how to add a constraint to an existing database table. This is quite easy, and uses an ‘ALTER TABLE’ SQL query. See the following example for how to add a check constraint to one of your existing database tables.

ALTER TABLE Persons
ADD CHECK (P_Id>0)

For more information, there are other highly useful example queries relating to SQL check constraints at the relevant SQL check constraint article on W3schools.

“The release of Apple’s ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much all smartphones with the capability the browse the web and with some form of web browser application.

So, why do I think the iPad will slow this development in the mobile web market? The iPad is a mobile device itself is it not?

Well, perhaps not. Apple’s iPad does indeed use an operating system very similar to the iPhone, with backwards compatibility with almost all of the iPhone’s downloadable apps, and yes, it is mobile in the true sense of the word – it can be easily carried around unlike a full desktop computer and much more easily than a typically larger and much heavier laptop. However, the one aspect of the iPad which stands out is its native screen resolution of 1024×768″

If you’re interested, feel free to read the full article on how the iPad may affect the development of mobile websites in the near future.

So, what is Contacular?

Contacular is an open source contact form generator and processor written in PHP. It is designed to be used as either a complete PHP contact form solution, with full validation and e-mailing, or as an initial code base for web development to build upon. I’ve designed Contacular to be really simple to get up and running with and yet still be very expandable. The entire system is object-orientated and open source licensed.

A quick overview of the features of Contacular:

1. Fully integrated contact form solution
2. Simple generation of contact forms
3. Many built-in Contacular contact form types
4. Integrated reCAPTCHA human check / spam protection support
5. Adoption of existing website styling (CSS) wherever possible
6. Form field validation in all forms
7. Automatic validation error reporting
8. Advanced validation – e.g. checking submitted e-mail addresses are from real domains
9. E-mailing form results to one or more recipients
10. GPL licensed, open source, object orientated code base
11. Tested in multiple browsers on multiple platforms
12. Seamless upgrading to new versions – just download and replace the files
13. Easily expandable
14. More on the way…

Take a look at the how to use Contacular guide, and if you’re interested, go ahead and download Contacular. The latest version is always at the top, with that download page also containing the Contacular change log.