Rob's tech blog...

Hands up if you studied IT, ICT or IS at high school in the UK.

Keep your hand up if you found the experience rewarding, enjoyable or useful.

Finally keep your hand up if you regularly apply what you were taught in your day to day job as an IT professional.

At this point there is one guy in the entire country with his hand still raised and he's the lucky dude who got a job programming a turtle to draw spirals on a big sheet of paper :)

IT in UK schools sucks. In fact it sucks big time. Don't take my word for it, the UK government's Secretary for Education says so as well. In fact he refers to the ICT curriculum as "demotivating and dull" - ouch!

I think we can all agree that the current system of just teaching the next generation how to use applications they either a) already know how to use or b) have no interest in using anyway is incredibly limiting and is definitely hurting the UK's ability to play a larger part in the digital world.

Read the rest of this post »

If you don't know what BitCoin is read the official blurb or more of the same from Wikipedia

At the last of our recently christened "bi-monthly, beer-fuelled BitCoin argument" sessions (aka geek ups) the issue of security as a barrier to BitCoins continued viability was raised and, shockingly, was acknowledged as a valid issue by the group's biggest BitCoin proponent.

Read the rest of this post »

A new year has started, a fresh 366 days (only 357 shopping days left till Christmas folks!) and so I want to share my techy resolutions for the coming year:

1. Get up to speed with unit testing for all platforms

I've been behind the curve on unit testing for a while now and I'm aware that I really need to put some time into working into my daily development cycle. I'm not talking about becoming a TDD zealot but I do understand the need for unit testing in producing consistently high quality code and this will be the year I actually get off my butt and do something about it!

2. (Re) embrace the Pomodoro Technique 

This year I plan to really embrace the Pomodoro Technique for at least 3 days out of 5. I've found it to be an amazing way to keep focussed and there's really no excuse for not using it more often.

3. Get my JavaScript up to speed both on the client and the server

I'm still not entirely sold on the evented approach used by Node.js but I'm definitely planning to get my JavaScript up to a new level. Looking at what's continuing to happen in the JS world I would be foolish to not devote significant time to a very exciting and ubiquitous technology ... and whilst jQuery will do a lot good JS development will hopefully serve me in good stead.

4. Release at least one mobile app 

For Android of course but I'm definitely going to push out at least one app. Who knows - it could make me a millionaire by this time next year ;)

5. Finish some of the cool ideas I have kicking around

Like any developer I have a load of projects on the go and I really want to use 2012 to get some of them out of my brain and into the world. 

6. Contribute to at least one open source project

My open source contributions have dropped off lately and I'm hoping that I can find a project I can contribute to (suggestions welcome) ... or maybe one of my ideas that can start a whole new project!

So that's me - how about you lot? Got anything groovy planned for 2012?

In some ways the content of this post is related to the recent Flash / Mobile snafu. Specifically because Adobe have made a big point of throwing their weight behind HTML5 in place of Flash on mobile platforms. This post is derived in part from personal experience and in part from a lively (and occasionally heated) debate with a colleague. In short it deals with my concerns over the dropping Flash support in favour of HTML5 and the common perception that anything Flash can do HTML5 can do (better).

Read the rest of this post »

Firstly I'd like to make clear that I am in no way affiliated with Adobe either in the Flash or CF sense – I am a user of both products and, like so many others, work for a company who has based its business on the Adobe development stack.

I have no idea what prompted Adobe’s rather rapid dumping of Flash on mobile devices but the immediate impact on me and my employers should be minimal. That said, I wanted to take a look at how Adobe managed this announcement and the wider impact it could have on the community.

Read the rest of this post »

User Experience is an increasingly big deal in web apps. I use the Google product suite for pretty much everything these days and, when exposed to that kind of usage, a lot of WebApps UI's start to show the strain.

Generally, Google Apps have great UIs, clean, fast simple and intuitive. But even they aren't perfect. Take this example from the new Gmail theme:

In a normal mailbox view the "Delete" button is at the far right of the main action buttons:

In the Spam view, the "Delete" button is on the left of the cluster:

Now compare the positions to the end user (the red indicates the position of the normal delete button):

What Google have done is a classic example of poor UX - same button, same action, two very different locations.

This is a rarely used button in the system and, as such, I normally end up marking Spam as Not Spam (and having to undo) when I actually meant to delete the damn thing.

It's a simple fix but seems to have been overlooked by the Google team this far.

I've just resolved what must be the oddest telecoms bug I've seen in a long time.

Our work network was recently upgraded to include a new, completely separate 2MB ADSL circuit for use with our VOIP teleworker system. This is in addition to the 4MB circuit used for general internet stuff.

Both circuits are connected via two Draytek Vigor PPPOA / E modems which require a PPPOE capable client to actually dial the line. This is because it allows our WAP IPs to be assigned directly to a device instead of requiring we NAT everything (not so important for internet, v important for our VOIP setup).

Now the 4MB modem is wired directly into the router's WAN port whilst the 2MB modem is wired into the general network switch due to a lack of hardware NICs on the VOIP server (which is actually one of 2 VMs on the same single NIC host machine).

The 4MB modem is also wired back to the switch to enable SNMP monitoring of traffic and status.

Since installing the new 2MB line, our 4MB circuit has dropped to 2MB speeds... an obvious correlation but one that had me baffled.

Both modems were passing through their correct IP addresses and, according to our telecoms provider, both circuits were trained up at the correct 4MB / 2MB speeds. This would suggest that each modem is operating independently of each other and yet our 4MB circuit was only getting 2MB throughput. 

After growing frustration I eventually tried pulling the second patch from the 4MB modem to our switch (figuring it's been online forever and the main indication that something's wrong with it is a complete lack of external internet access) and lo and behold (after a quick reboot), our speed jumped straight back up to 4MB.

I'm still completely baffled as to how these two modems could interfere with each other on the bandwidth level whilst maintaining their respective circuits / IP addresses.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks to Christopher Vigliotti for pointing me at Nathan Strutz... there are some great CF Zeus (Adobe ColdFusion 10) previews coming out on Twitter:

• Reverse ORM to create business objects from your database ... could be epic! Could also be a disaster.
• HTML5 charts ... ok ... good to see Adobe moving with the times.
• CFRest ... CF fracking REST!!! Based on Jersey in JaxRS and powered by application.cfc. This could be pretty much the most awesome thing ever! In fact combining it with bi directional ORM probably makes for the fatest API build ever!

All of this is completely unfounded but with SOTR possibly not running this year I gotta get my Zeus info where I can!

Anyone got any more? Any news on jQuery as a possible replacement for Ext / Yui? Bang em in the comments.

I've been using Dropbox for 2 years now and it has become one of those apps that is integrated into my daily computer usage in a huge number of ways.

I wanted to share my top 5 uses in the hopes that others can get as much out of it as I do:

Read the rest of this post »

The Posterous Wordpress importer is a little lacking at the moment. Sure it handles basic posts but doesn't do a very good job of maintaining white space  and it's left all my comments behind.

That said the API looks pretty snazzy and the Wordpress export file is XML so I figure I can rustle up a quick CF script to handle the import for me and do a better job of it. 

Until then I'd ask that you bear with the shocking formatting of my posts and rest assured that your comments are completely safe and will be back in due course.

Rob