Moonfruit flash

Moonfruit seems to be a way to build websites entirely from Flash.

It’s a good thing Google now indexes Flash!

But how good is Google’s Flash indexer, really?

BBC Olympics mobile site

I thought I’d see if watching video on my mobile phone via the BBC Olympics mobile site worked. Predictably, it didn’t work at all.

I was using the following technology stack:

• HTC Touch Diamond
• Windows Mobile 6.1
• Opera Mini 9.5 (build 1184)
• Windows Media Player 10, Version 10.3 Build 19591

The error was:

Server or data time out; tap play to reconnect.

HTC Touch Diamond, personal review

I got a new mobile phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

The good

• It comes in a nice black diamond shaped box. So shiny!
• The handset is very slim and light. Its case is great.
• The Teeter game using the accelerometer is so much fun!
• The camera images look really good, and it has auto-focus.
• Google maps with GPS… Wow! I could use up my 500Mb allowance in no time playing with this.
• Using Wifi & GPRS to browse websites is awesome, and it’s really easy to save pages for offline viewing.
• Hidden magnetic stylus that I didn’t even realise was there.
• It’s small and light enough

The bad

• The “TouchFLO 3D” menu is very slightly more jerky than I’d want it to be.
• The speakers are very tinny and too quiet, even on  loudest volume setting is pretty quiet.
• View emails and texts through the TouchFLO menu takes too many steps (there may be a shortcut I’m not aware of, but I have not been provided with a user manual, even after asking Orange for one).
• Shell32.exe crashed already. Within one day of using it! Didn’t actually have any bad effect though.
• HTCAlbum.exe also crashed. Again, no noticable effect.
• mbutton.exe crashed too. Okay that’s 3rd party, but it never, ever crashed on my SPV M3100.
• manila.exe crashed. [update: I complained to Orange about this and was told “Windows isn’t even stable on the desktop. We can’t investigate isolated crashes”.
• The on-screen keyboard irritatingly pops up and obscures forms and emails so you can’t read what you’re typing. The M3100 also had this problem, but then its on-screen keyboard was a lot smaller.
• I’m really feeling the lack of a hardware keyboard. It takes a lot more concentration to type.
• When on a phonecall, the screen switches itself off after 5 seconds of inactivity. I suppose this is a feature, but I wish I knew how to disable it.

Mini review of Sun’s NetBeans IDE 6.0.1

We used the NetBeans IDE in a Java course I just took.

It seems like a pretty helpful IDE, but as usual, I can see its disadvantages much more clearly.

Disadvantages

• When you start adding new code, loads of ‘errors’ immediately appear in the margin. The whole syntax checking mechanism *should* wait wait several seconds after you’ve finished typing before it checks your code. Otherwise it’s just distracting.
• Despite checking your code too much, there are circumstances where an ‘error’ icon stays stuck on your class file icon in the Projects tab, but there is no error marked in the file. it goes away when you do a clean and compile, but I still consider this a bug. [update: is this a notification of a compile error?]
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to add an existing file to your project (update: There is. You have to right-click copy it from the files tab, and paste it into your project. I was looking for a drag option).
• The auto-suggest-methods doesn’t work if you start typing the first few letters of the method too quickly after the dot.
• There are too many colours and flashy things.
• It doesn’t fix the case for you like .NET

Advantages

• It does all the hard work of renaming and moving files between packages for you.
• If you make any structural changes or rename key files/classes, it automatically refactors the code for you, even allowing a preview so you can see the extent of proposed changes.
• Integrates with JUnit, and produces a set of automatic tests, based on all your existing classes and methods. Sweet!
• Ctrl + the arrow-keys counts capitals as word boundaries for easier navigation (e.g. BufferedWriter).
• If a class is not imported, type Ctrl-space with the cursor at the end of it, to import the relevant package (does not work if cursor is at any other point!)
• You can click on the run-time exception in the output window and be taken to where it occurred in the code.
• it has cool WYSIWYG / .NET-style forms building stuff for all your GUI needs. It then ‘protects’ the GUI code so you can’t change it by accident.
• it has a Windows | Services menu where you can browse databases, start Tomcat in debug mode, etc.
• Easily add in abstract methods required when implementing an interface.

What is the best mobile phone for playing videos?

Or more specifically, which smartphone can play mp4 video and divx movies without skipping?

My SPV M3100 cannot, and apparently neither can the HTC TyTN II (which looks startlingly similar to the M3100). They both run the Windows Mobile operating system.

Does anyone know the answer?

I don’t know much about video formats, so I don’t know if there can be much variation between mp4 formats.

Windows Vista is really annoying

• When you put in a blank DVD and choose to open it in Explorer for writing, the default setting is some kind of Windows Vista filesystem, that can only be read from Windows Vista. I have to change it to “normal filesystem” every single time. Not such a great job done on making Windows more user-friendly.
• When you drag files onto the blank DVD, it tells you if they will fit or not. This would be a great feature, if only it worked consistently. Half the time it says they won’t fit straight away. The rest of the time it lets me put the files there and then errors later on, after I tell it to burn.
• Ordinary file operations, like deleting files have become much slower. Also, a confusing information box appears, where the progress bars bear even less relation to reality than in previous versions of Windows. I didn’t think this was actually possible, but they have made some of the most common Windows operations even less pleasant.
• If you go to the Properties of a hard drive and turn off “index this drive for faster searching”, it has to apply some kind of attribute *to every single file on the hard drive*. This takes forever. Idiots.
• There’s a new bar at the top of Windows Explorer, that I don’t understand. It often makes a ‘progress bar’ move across from left to right behind the current directory name. Often the bar gets slower and slower as it moves, until it seems like it will never reach the other side.
• It’s always popping up an error message saying that “COM Surrogate has stopped working”. Yes I know people have described ways to “fix” this, but I’ve tried them and they don’t work for me. And anyway, that isn’t the point. I shouldn’t have to fix it in the first place.
• Also, sometimes when I drag files onto a blank DVD, the “copying” dialog box just stays there on the screen and doesn’t go away, as if the files aren’t getting copied. The progress bar area is just blank. I left it overnight once, and it didn’t disappear. And when I click the cancel button, nothing happens - the box is still stuck there, except now the cancel button is greyed out. Totally useless, and very typical of Windows.
• Oh yes, and when that “authorisation” system kicks in, where the screen goes dim and you have to click to allow certain programs to change windows settings — why does the entire screen go blank for a second before the dialog box appears? It makes it feel as if the monitor has a loose connection or something, instead of making a smooth transition.

Memetastic!

These are the commands I’m running. Great idea!

 

$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    184 ls
    118 cd
    117 vi
    116 less
     54 tail
     43 ps
     41 perl
     31 rm
     27 for
     23 grep

Vista is worse than XP

You know in Windows XP when you tried to move a folder, but you had one of the files in that folder held open by some other program? You couldn’t do it, right? You got a standard error message.

Well now in Windows Vista, you still can’t do it, but instead of the standard error message, it tells you:

You’ll need to provide administrator permission to move to this folder

Okay, great! Click “continue” — the screen dims dramatically, “Windows User Account Control” — “File Operation” it says — Windows needs your permission to continue. Brilliant, you have my permission, go on… So I click the Continue button.

Oh oh! “Destination Folder Access Denied” — “You need permission to perform this action”.

What the hell? I just gave it permission! Click “Try Again”, it just comes back with the same error. Grrrr!

I click cancel, it flashes up quickly “Moving item, time remaining 8 mins 5 seconds…” And then the window disappears, and of course the folder has not been moved!
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! In XP I could have figured out what the problem was in half that time. Instead Vista leads me down the garden path, asking for my permission, totally failing to tell the difference between an open file and a file I don’t have permission for.

And even after that, it shows a dialog estimating the time it will take to move the file, even though it has no possibility of moving the file!

Isn’t software supposed to get better with each release, not worse?

I really cannot understand how Microsoft can mess up such a simple thing that worked perfectly well before.

Windows Vista

For god’s sake Windows Vista.

I downloaded installed a program to view my cache.
Windows tells me “this program wants to access your computer: Cache Viewer, do I let it?”
Okay fair enough, even though it doesnt say what that access actually *means*.

So then I run the program and it doesnt work. I go to uninstall it in the control panel.
Then pops-up another window saying

“This program wants to access your computer: Unidentified Publisher, do I let it?”

…what?! It *knows* what it’s uninstalling, it only just installed the damn thing.
And why does it need special access to *remove* a program?
What the hell is the point in having that safety feature, if it can’t give me any information about what I’m allowing access to what?

It’s actually much worse than not having it at all, because its teaching people to just click “ok” when they dont understand what’s happening.

Safari is fast!

I’m very impressed with the speed of Safari on Mac OSX. I’d previously been using Firefox 2, which despite its name is as slow as a dog! Safari seems to execute javascript much, much faster, and just be more responsive overall.