Angus Thinks…

Got a package this morning delivered by DHL and an interesting thing happened.

I recognised the delivery person and the delivery person recognised me. Which was nice. 🙂

I think they must work a particular route, because the same woman tends to deliver most of my (DHL) packages.

I get tired of filling in captcha fields on forms.

Wouldn’t it be handy if there was a facility in web browsers to fill them in automatically.

🙂

This says it all really.

(Though saying that there are still some smart shows on tv. I just wanted to link to that page)

I’ve been watching educational stuff on the internet recently.

One of the things that I really like is Google Tech Talks on Google Video.

These are talks given at Google on different subjects and many are now available online.

Amongst the really good ones I’ve seen:

• Inbox Zero – Merlin Mann – How to handle lots of email
  
• Everything is Miscellaneous – David Weinberger – tagging vs organization

(And there are lots of others, these are just ones I could find the links to easily!)

I’ve been reading stuff recently about creating native (non-java) mobile phone apps.

The key thing is application signing.

In an attempt to prevent viruses and malicious code from being run on mobile devices, the major platforms require that applications are signed using a cryptographic key before being distributed. The two platforms have different requirements, but this signing process is expensive and difficult in both cases.

Things range from really hard (if you have time and money) to almost impossible (if you lack either time or money).
Windows Mobile:

“I can’t emphasise enough, just how bad the current code-signing mechanisms are in WM5 / Smartphone”

[At WindowsMobile Team Blog]

Symbian

“Having your application, which you’ve slaved over and spent countless hours perfecting, stuck in the signing process for over a month is unacceptable.”
[At SymbianGuru]

Apple iPhone

Apple of course don’t publicly allow any 3rd apps to run on the iPhone. However by comparison it seems simplicity itself to run whatever you like using unofficial methods.

Java

Java application aren’t native. But to fully access all of the features without warnings requires a code signing certificate too.

Code Signing Certificates

Code signing certificates are very expensive. Often costing several hundred dollars. Which is ok if you charge several hundred dollars per copy, or you sell thousands of units. But it’s really bad if you charge nothing and give away the source code. It’s also bad if you are a very small company trying to sell relatively cheap software.

I think that if I own a device I should be able to do what I want with it (within the limit of the law).
Buying something and then being told that I can’t run my choice of applications on it seems really bad.
Charging people who want to give away stuff is bad too.

It looks like I won’t be buying Symbian for my next mobile phone. 🙁

I really hate the abbreviation “ICT”. Somehow every time I hear it I get slightly annoyed with it.

Fortunately it looks like other people don’t like it either. 🙂
ICT which stands for Information and Communication Technology is usually the phrase used by the public sector in the UK to talk about computers and telephones.

The good news though, is that Register readers don’t like it either. 88% of responders in a web poll wanted it banned. (57% said yes without conditions, 31% wanted it banned but with the condition of more Paris Hilton stories)

If I’m really lucky perhaps this abbreviation can be removed from usage altogether. 🙂

“I would argue that the fact that there are 100,000 people in China who are paid to play the boring parts of World of Warcraft is evidence of serious flaws in the game’s design.”

Brandon Berg
[link] (in the comments)

This is in response to an article condemning MMORPG gold farmers.

Graham Miln at Dssw has an interesting article talking about adding legally required information to emails using headers instead of using signature blocks. He also talks about a defined microformat for the data.

This is interesting to me, because I’m already doing something similar with some emails sent by the new MalcolmHardie Solutions order processing system. Most orders don’t involve sending any emails at all, the work is done entirely by swreg, who have their own arrangements. However educational orders go through an approval process which involves sending an email. Including all of the legally required information in the body is clunky and inefficient, because most of the time it won’t actually be used; but it has to be present. It appears that we both developed the idea in parallel because I did the coding on this last week and I only read the article today.

The dssw headers aren’t the same of course. More options are specified and it seems more optimized for automated processing. My headers are perhaps slightly more optimized for humans. The strings are the same as the strings that were formerly in the email signatures.

MalcolmHardie Solutions headers:

X-CompanyInfo: MalcolmHardie Solutions Ltd, Registered in Scotland Number SC283129
X-CompanyRegisteredAddress: Office 22, 196 Rose Street, Edinburgh EH2 4AT

Dssw headers:

X-Company-Address: Dragon Systems Software Ltd (DssW), 3rd Floor Suite, ***** Hereford, ******** United Kingdom
X-Company-Registration: EnglishWelsh-3397***
X-Company-Directors: G.C.***, E.A.*****
X-Company-Secretary: J.E.*****
X-Company-About: http://www.dssw.co.uk/about/

(I have replaced some data with stars to slightly reduce the amount of personal data)

I will have to see how to reconcile the two formats, but I think most likely I will use a combination of the two.

I particularly like the X-Company-About header which I think is useful and very functional. The machine parse-able X-Company-Registration header is also a good idea, although I like having the complete human readable string as well (X-CompanyInfo) at the cost of an additional line. It might be worthwhile having both a registered address and a company contact address as many smaller businesses do this. Another heading that might be useful would be X-Company-VatRegistrationNumber which is required if you have one.

Possibly a X-Company-Logo header could indicate a path to a small copy of the company logo which could then be displayed next to the email address in suitable clients.

Note that MalcolmHardie Solutions doesn’t add the names of the directors as a policy decision. My understanding, based on information from Companies House, is that displaying this information is optional, so we don’t.

While the details may differ I definitely think this is the way to go on legal information in headers. Structured data should be stored in a structured format and not appended randomly to unstructured data.

Hopefully we can work towards some kind of common standard, which could then be included in email programs and other tools. Think how much easier it would be to comply with the law if it was a simple preference in your email program and the program asked for the details when you install and displayed the information in the headers section when viewing emails.

It looks like Apple is not moving into any kind of virtualization or emulation of Windows. Although Boot Camp is said to be included, it doesn’t appear that it will work noticably differently to current arrangments (ie. dual boot).

This is probably good news for Mac developers. I seriously believe that if you could run windows apps natively within Mac OS X without extra software then people would start buying windows software not Mac software in some cases. Look at what happened to OS2, it offered windows compatibility as standard; users asked why bother? Then they switched to Windows proper. Although OS2 also had other difficulties which may also have affected its future, supporting the applications of the main competitor probably had an effect on the number of OS2 applications released. Similarly I think Windows apps natively on Mac would affect the number of Mac apps in certain categories.