Category: Uncategorized

I’m one of *those* geeks!  Yes, the ones who want the latest technology and become all obsessive about getting it.  The ones who make the lives of those around them miserable when waiting because they keep saying “When I get my X I’ll do Y” or “I just read that there’s now an awesome app for device X”.

Back in the day (4, or so years ago) I was a Vodacom customer, but I swapped to MTN to get the iMate SP3.  I then stuck with MTN at my next upgrade to get the HTC TyTn.  So when it came time for my upgrade this year, I looked around and found nothing really cool in South Africa.  But there was hope for the iPhone and with the possibility of one of our networks releasing an Android based phone.

Last month MTN released the HTC Dream, and there were rumours that Vodacom were going to release the HTC Magic.  Last week (on around the 12th of May) a number of local news sources reported that Vodacom was indeed going to be launching the HTC Magic and while most of them just repeated a press release, a few offered extra info like MyBroadband’s “Vodacom to launch Google G2 phone”.  They mentioned that it would be available next week (aka from the 18th of May).

Long story short, I spent over 3 hrs waiting on hold to speak to someone from Vodacom Direct only to find out that they knew nothing about the phone.  Neither did any of the 4 Vodashop’s that I tried to contact.  Everyone kept saying “It will be out mid June” despite the fact that there had been the press release and articles and even despite the fact that a Vodacom brochure outside each of the Vodashop’s had an ad for the phone saying “Launching May 2009”.

I was ready to write a really peeved post about how terrible Vodacom’s communications were (Did you know? They even got the phone number for Vodacom Direct wrong in their press release!) until a Vodacom representative (vodacom3g) replied to a post on the MyBroadband forums saying:

They are in the warehouse but we’re busy updating the firmware. (Otherwise you all bitch and moan again! )
So speak to your local shop (they all order their own stock). I’d venture it should be in the shops in the next few days.

[Link to post]

Soon after that they responded to a few other questions.  Suddenly I knew why there was a delay (although it didn’t explain why the various channels I’d tried earlier hadn’t known) and I was happy with the reason.

Hopefully the phones will have started shipping out to my local Vodashop in the next day or two and I’ll finally get my hands on one of these babies within the next week.

In the past few weeks I’ve been playing around with Silverlight, WCF, ADO.Net Entities, and more recently some Java based in Eclipse and the Android SDK.

The Microsoft Side

Starting with Silverlight, I have had some frustrations with how “klunky” the interaction with designing UI’s is. Silly things like adding a tooltip with a number of controls on it  to an item, and using databinding to specify the text on the tooltip just doesn’t work.  If I used the Tooltip.Text=”{DataBinding Name}” attribute, it worked fine.  But if I tried to create a composite control to display in the tooltip, the databinding just didn’t work.  Googling didn’t help.

Additionally,it seems that when databinding does not quite work correctly when viewing a silverlight aplication, the entire silverlight canvas would just go “white”.  This happened not only on my sample applications written and run both on my laptop and on my PC at work, AND when using demo applications written by very respectable .Net component creators and authors.

Entities were just as frustrating.  Creating Entities from views ended up with entities that had a primary key containing EVERY single column from the view.  Trying to remove all the non-key columns using the UI required a right click and then un-ticking an option on EACH column.  There was no clear way to select all of the columns and just do it once.  Worse than that, after doing that extremely manual process, there were endless problems getting the entity model to “compile” without errors.  Eventually I had to edit the model in notepad to correct the numerous errors.

On my PC at work, when viewing the model, the entities would randomly disappear.  The only way to bring them back was to zoom in once, and zoom back out.  After doing that, the designer would display without any further errors.

I’ve heard many people praise Visual Studio.Net and especially 2008 as being incredibly stable and reliable. But from seeing these few, yet irritating, issues I can see that the starting points of their software is not always great. But given that Silverlight 2.0has been released for a while, it seems that even some of their released products are not above reproach.

One thing that I do admire though, is that the tutorials, video’s, documentation and samples available to get me started in using these technologies was really great.  There’s plenty of bloggers and resources out there to help anyone get started.  With VS.Net 2008 Express has helped make this possible. My laptop at home was using the Express editions, while my PC at work has a licensed copy the full edition. Both were able to work really well with all the new technologies.

The Java/Android/Eclipse Side

I got interested in Android a little while ago (issues with Windows Mobile mainly, and the inability to write apps for my phone if I bought an iPhone).  Android 1.5’s SDK was recently released, and so I downloaded it, and looked at their site and got some tutorial information. 

The installation instructions pointed to Eclipse and a plugin to enable integration with the Android SDK. That work all happened pretty easily. One of the first things I noticed was that the SDK documentation and surrounding pages had very few links to community sites.  Microsoft’s was teaming with links.

Then came time to run through the official Android “Notepad” tutorial.  There was a sample project to download and a bunch of steps.  The steps weren’t really logical, the code sample contained a LOT of errors that needed correcting, and I spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing instead of actually understanding what the code was about.

As a new developer to Android, this could easily have put me off. If I was new to Java and had not recently played with XAML, it would most definitely have.  Perhaps I didn’t have the right starting points for getting to know Android, but starting at Android.com, should have given them to me.  Silverlight’s main site (Silverlight.net) had links to loads of great resources, but I didn’t find any real alternatives on Android’s site.

What did impress me, however, was how well the Eclipse IDE worked.  It had some impressive refactoring, and intellisense abilities.  And where Microsoft “borrowed” features from Java, Android had “borrowed” from Silverlight.  Their UI design is very much similar to XAML, and the UI editor in Eclipse was pretty fully fledged.

A few of the small things that I had seen as “new features” being implemented in VS 2010, were already working in Eclipse,and I really liked some of the ability to infer creation of fields and properties on a class.

When I last used Java, there were no real IDE’s worth using (please bear in mind that this was about 9 years ago, so no flames please)  I haven’t really visited the Java world since then, so this was quite a pleasant surprise.

Two things that needed doing – the first one was that I’m a windows guy, so my site is on windows and IIS.  Apache has a nifty “mod_rewrite” add-on which lets WordPress do the cool url’s like http://blog.digitaltinder.net/2008/12/exporting-blogml-from-subtext-21-and-importing-blogml-into-wordpress-27/ instead of having a link to http://blog.digitaltinder.com/index.php?p=3746.

So I’d found a WordPress URL Rewriter which worked well (as long as PHP wasn’t running as an ISAPI module).  But it needed me to add the url rewriter as an ISAPI module and I kinda wasn’t happy with having to make manual changes to my hosting setup because then upgrades/domain moves might cause issues. I wanted to have the solution I used only require me to change stuff in the plesk control panel, and not directly on the server.

With that limitation, I decided to go with the “fake 404” page solution which is mentioned in a few blogs.  Basically this works because you tell IIS that if someone requests a page that doesn’t exist (like the pretty perma-link) then it should redirect the user to the index.php page with the correct settings in place so that wordpress shows the related blog entry.   This works pretty well!

The final bit of my wordpress migration was that my old site had it at http://digitaltinder.com/blog, while the new site is at http://blog.digitaltinder.com (or http://blog.digitaltinder.net)

A basic sample of what I used can be found http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2007/07/30/pretty-wordpress-permalinks-on-iis/

So I decided to modify my little 404 page to include some redirects and I found the code below:

function redirect($url, $type=301)
{
  if ($type == 301) header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
  header("Location: $url");
  echo ‘This page has moved to <a href="’.$url.’">’.$url.'</a>’;
  exit();
}

And the proof is the fact that the blog should just be working at the moment, regardless of what URL you access it on.  Of course that’s assuming that its all still working now, which probably thanks to the demo god’s will fail miserably now that I’m using it as an example.

Not sure if anyone has seen or heard about this new ARG.  Its designed by the creator of “I Love Bees” and a number of others that I’ve not really looked at.  I just read about it in Boing Boing, who link to a CNet Interview at SXSW and eventually to the main site itself The Lost Ring.  Basically the ARG is built in association with the International Olympic Committee and McDonalds and is meant to be truly global and some kind of a run up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

The premise of the story is as follows (as CNet puts it):

“The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they’ve been tasked with some great mission.

Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport. ” [Taken from CNet]

Now for those of us in South Africa, the cool thing is that the main character (well, the woman from the introductory film clip) was found just outside of Johannesburg!  So its an international ARG that might actually require some involvement from someone over here in deepest darkest africa.

It took the Live installer about 3 tries to get the installation right, so hopefully Live Writer will actually work first time.  Since I’m writing a “test” blog, I might as well say something other than “testing.  So here goes:  “I don’t like Vista, its a painful thorn in my side that I can’t wait to get rid of every evening when I leave work.”

Copying files is now a hellishly long procedure, my windows explorer crashes at least 5 times a day, applications keep hanging, the “Start bar search” is useless, I have to delete a folder twice if I actually want it to get deleted (first time it just deletes the contents of the folder and not the folder itself), explorer keeps on showing me stuff in “Photo” view instead of the standard view, it also keeps “grouping” stuff instead of sorting by the column I want, and just the other day I installed an application from Microsoft that popped up a dialog box that said:

“This app requires Windows XP or greater to operate.
Please visit www.microsoft.com/windowsxp for upgrade details”

So now I have proof that even Microsoft think that the Windows XP is an upgrade to Vista.

I’ve had to re-install my PC at work due to some hardware issues and Oh My Goodness(!!) some software installations are up to crap!  A few quick lessons:

1. Microsoft – if you ship an MSDN DVD with an installation for VS.Net 2005, please make sure that the installation can actually work?  I sat installing and got to the point of requiring “Disk 2” and the whole thing just died.  There was no way for me to tell the installer “Disk 2 is in this folder here, right next to the one you’re installing from”.  So I had to uninstall, and find an older version of the MSDN disc which actually had a working install
2. Trend Micro – Just give up on UI design now! 
3. I installed Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2007, all went fine (from previous experience I did not install their firewall, since the old version was useless).  I ran their main console and its filled with “warnings”… The biggest one (which window’s reported too) is that is database is out of date…
1. Rule 1: Tell your users what went wrong or how to fix it
   So I click on the big “Update Now” button, it greys out as if something is going to happen, and then becomes clickable again.  But no updates have happened!
2. Rule 2: If you tell me something, then make it so
   So finally I figure out that the Updates are not happening because I haven’t registered the software.  So I go and register it via their ui (which pops up a window WAY too big for the form I’m filling out). At the end of the process I get told that the registration was succesful. 

   Then it turns out that I can’t update my antivirus database until they have flagged something in an online system somewhere that says that I do actually have a license.  Why the crap didn’t this happen during the activation process?  Why didn’t they tell me that this was going to happen?  And why in the name of all things holy does the bloody update button not just pop up a dialog to tell me why it isn’t doing its job?

3. Rule 3: Give UI cue’s if you’re going to perform a long running process
   While waiting for trend to activate my installation in their central database, I decided to look at the features.  I thought I’d try turn on their “SPAM Protection” feature.  So I click on the “On/Off” drop down and choose on.  The whole application hangs.  The cursor shows me the regular mouse pointer, no indication of what its doing or how long I should expect to wait.  Finally it starts responding again.  A little later I’m showing someone else how silly it was: I click on the drop down, and click away from it… Again the long pause with no UI cues to tell me what its doing.  (Even though it shouldn’t be doing anything since I didn’t change anything).
4. Rule 4: If you’re supposed to be doing something in the background then do it in the background
   I expect any antivirus software to automatically update itsself… I’d like some small cue to tell me that it is doing so, but I do NOT expect it to pop up a window randomly, taking focus away from my active application, to let me know that it is going to start an update now.  I applaud their attempt at keeping me informed, but please! I work on my PC… I don’t want to keep having to alt+tab away from your darned update window. 
5. Rule 5: Make it easy to turn off “friendly” notifications
   Following on from rule 4, I had to search through the settings before I found the option to stop it from popping up the “I’m updating now” dialog.  But there’s two more annoying popups that I can’t get rid of.  One is when you start up the main console.  They open a “Trend Online” window on the right, which basically tells me that I can’t use any of their online services unless I buy a better subscription.  Its really of no use to me, but I can’t find the place where I can turn this bloody thing off!  It’s irritating! 
4. Microsoft & Trend: If you need me to reboot my PC, just ask me once!  For goodness sake, I’m not an idiot. So reminding me every 15 minutes that I need to reboot my pc in order for the recently updated components to be applied is just going to piss me off.  At the very least give me an option to postpone the next “warning” for a few hours or a few days!

Admittedly, Trend’s 2007 interface is WAAAAAY better than their older one, and their firewall looks a little more usable than the last version. So they have done some things right. 😀

A few weeks ago I found out about Diarist2. Its a .Net CF application that lets you post to your blog from your Windows Mobile phone. It took me a while to get .Net CF v2 on my phone so this is my first test.

Yay!

Where I work, we’ve had some experience with PDF converters.  Mostly abysmal. But we’ve found one crowd that seems to be on top of the game – WebSuperGoo.  Most of these converters totally mess up HTML to PDF conversion, especially when you have CSS involved.

We have one client that we have written the HTML to PDF converter for and we have had so many problems with other PDF converters we have eventually changed to using ABC PDF.  We’ve had some minor hassles, but WebSuperGoo have been excellent at responding to the questions.

In my small hosting business (DigitalTinder.com), I have written a simple acounting application that keeps my billing going.  Up till now I’ve been creating HTML files, printing to PDF and e-mailing them off by hand.  Today I downloaded a free copy of ABC PDF to test out an automated e-mailing of invoices as PDF after they have been created.  It was great, took about 15 minutes to do what used to take me about 2hrs previously.

The only down side is that as a small business, I can’t afford the $325 (R2500) for a license. Its actually pretty easy to use it, I still have to wait to see if the PDF’s get through the firewalls and mail filters and spam filters, or even if they make a better impression on my clients.

There’s a fine line between efficiency and and customer contact.  It saves me time ot use the PDF generator, but I lose the ability to have a personalised message for each client.  I can try and make a mail-merge’d email sound personal, but I don’t want to become an “impersonal machine” of a business.

My last post mentioned Grant from FusionReactor and how he’s got a great handle on PR in the web 2.0/social networking world.  I don’t have the same customer base that Grant has.  The majority of my customers actually don’t know about the inner workings of the technology underpinning their websites, whereas there are a number of tech savy people who use FusionReactor’s services.  Not that I’m saying that my customers are “clueless”… most of them are great entrepreneurs.  Their focus is on their businesses, not the technology and blogging/social networking is not at a mature enough phase for people like them to be using those tools.  In fact, in SA I doubt that there are many great businesses blogging and seeing business value coming from their blogs.  Its probably in the process of changing as I type this.  But I think it will be at least 6-12 months away.

So for now, I’ll have to keep some “offline” way of connecting with them.  Possibly SMS’s, or phone calls.  Keep efficiency up, but maximise personal contact with my customers. 

Its a learning curve for me and I’m looking forward to the journey.

In 1 week’s time we’ll be in our new place. We’ll be minus iBurst and DSTV… mainly it is for cost saving purposes but I’m sure it will also have plenty other benefits – less sitting passivly watching tv, typing on laptops (like I’m doing now) and more talking and socialising.

The big pitties are the cool series that are starting on DSTV, and missing our PVR.  (Pausing live TV is such a life changing feature for any Series watchers)

And since I’m in a linking mood, we’re using SA Movers for our move, MortgageSA for our bond, and ABSA are our new lords and masters (aka the bank that gave us the loan).

More linking – my connection to iBurst is organised via FusionReactor. I LOVE their service, although I’m not always quite as fond of their Account’s section (late invoicing of purchases plays havoc with nice neat budgetting and forgetful memories).  Recently Grant from FusionReactor recently posted a comment to my blog about their new service – In Page Ads.  His comment went along the lines of suggesting that I’d possibly like it since I’ve raved about their services before.

My official comment is that its an old concept redone… You put their system on your site, and every time a user clicks on a link they get shown an advert before they get taken ot the new page.  Its been done before, and has failed, so I’m not sure what is different about their system.  But Grant is a bright cookie and seems to know his social networking/web 2.0 pr implications, so I’m guessing there is something that I’m missing.

So since he’s been great to me, I thought I’d link to their In Page Ads system, and maybe someone who reads this blog can comment on it?

Just got a call from MortgageSA to say that we have had provisionally had a bond approved (pending a valuation of the property).  We had a nice response from ABSA and Nedbank, no response from FNB and a really crappy response form Standard Bank.  ABSA’s response just beat Nedbank’s so we’re going with ABSA.  (No rude comments, please… I know “My Bank” is crap, but hey, I’m going to be paying the least amount of money if I use them, so I’m going to use them)

Now we just need the valuation to be ok (it should be), and we need the body corporate to approve of our cat.  The cat should be fine as long as she is spayed and wears a collar, and our cat is spayed and will get used to a collar.

So, everything is looking good for us to move in on 1st April 2007!