Life is grand

If you look real close at the side of one of the Honda F1 cars this weekend in the French Grand Prix, you’ll see my name… all thanks to MyEarthDream.com.

We just took delivery of a Nokia N95 as a target phone for one of our projects here at the TSSG. I can’t go much into what we are doing but we wanted a desktop-web and mobile-web experience complete with all the Web 2.0 goodness you have come to expect. I was not terribly confident the mobile-web 2.0 bit would work. So when I loaded our desktop-web site in the N95’s browser I was thrilled to see it worked. Not just full CSS and HTML but JavaScript and Ajax (I assume it implements its own XmlHttpRequest object.)

Apart from the small screen format you don’t have to develop any differently for the mobile browser (obviously file-size etc. is still important) on the Nokia N95. With the iPhone running a version of Safari, this Nokia N95 and the Opera Mini 4.0 browser I think we are rapidly moving towards a mobile web that is technically very capable.

Another sad day has come to pass in the Flickr community. Now users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are having their Flickr experience censored. Any image marked as unsafe is no longer displayed to users from these countries.

Not to be a fan boy but I can’t fully blame Flickr. This is the cost of being popular and of being part of a larger corporate. They chose this route and while many of us have paid to use Flickr there were never terms that said “We shall never censor.” In fact from the very beginning Flickr has had censorship, the main difference now being that where before the individual could choose to view “unsafe” photos now the company is deciding for the user. So we will rant and rave a bit but only because we are sad of our changing, for the worse, community.

The difference between this change and the Yahoo! Login change is that now I see people being forced to use an alternative service. Many of my contacts on Flickr are considered “unsafe.” Flickr is their outlet, where they express themselves and they can no longer do it as they see fit.

A shame. So things change though and so shall we, moving onto new pastures.

Running Safari on Windows inside Parallels on Mac OS X is a bit odd.

Steve Jobs just finished his WWDC keynote. Nothing too amazing was revealed. The “One More Thing” is porting Safari to run on Windows Vista which I’m puzzled by. What is the Apple strategy in that I wonder? I used iTunes when I was a Windows user and I still use iTunes as a Mac OS X user. But I don’t and never have used Safari as my main browser. It is a decent browser but Firefox is my choice, Windows and Mac OS X.

More importantly is the news that 3rd party apps will be supported on the iPhone through “web 2.0 ajax” (read; HTML, CSS and JavaScript) running in Safari. There will be hooks for web-developers into the internals of iPhone; contact list, voice call initiation etc. A nice solution for us web developers but I’ll bet mobile phone developers and desktop developers are not going to be convinced.

Time Machine looks good though. Wireless backup is a nice idea. Also Leopard will be fully 64bit. EA and iD committed to releasing games on Mac OS X which is nice. Boot Camp will go RTM in Leopard which is nice. Spaces (virtual desktops) is handy. Upgrades to the Dock and Desktop (something called stacks which I’m not sure is really useful.)

No mention of ZFS or Windows apps running alongside Mac OS X apps.

There was a good Vista joke:

Leopard shipping in October. Basic version, $129. Premium version, $129. Business version, $129, Enterprise version $129. Ultimate version, $129.

Decent price and just one version. Take note Microsoft.

Frankly I am happy with the news. Nothing revolutionary, nothing really new. We don’t need more new stuff, we need to work on what we already have.

Clearly, what straight men and lesbians find sexy in a woman is a little bit different.

For a group - lesbian - that is horribly stereotyped to stereotype another group - men - is rather sad. Frankly I find their list of 100 hot women to be far better than anything I have ever seen from the likes of Maxim and FHM. I’m glad they put the list together and highlighted women with a bit of class but there is no need to class all men under the Maxim/FHM reading banner. I find lad mags to be on par with tabloids and women’s mags that parade size 0 models as paragons of beauty.

An unavoidable though still slightly disappointing aspect of the list though is the predominance of “she is a lesbian so I’m voting for her!” results.

And to all the 16 year old boys out there; get over the lesbian thing already. Beavis and Butthead can snigger, you don’t need to.

If you are applying for a programming job don’t explain what the acronyms in your CV stand for. Seriously, I feel belittled reading “I have experience in JSP (Java Server Pages) and ASP (Active Server Pages.)” If I don’t know what JSP or ASP stands for then applying for a job with me isn’t going to be such a good idea.

And get JavaScript right, please. It is not Javascript, Java Script or JAVAScript.

Sitting amongst 20,000 Scots in Murrayfield while on a stag weekend with 10 Irish lads and cheering for England is an interesting experience. First there is the whole stadium booing the English Sevens Rugby team as they run on and then the distracting noise each time England gets the ball. Then there are the generally obscene gestures you get for shouting for England and the threats of “Right, no more pints for him!” from my own Irish friends.

I did have a reason for supporting England in this game though. Ordinarily I wouldn’t support England but they were playing Australia and us South Africans (I was wearing my Springbok jersey) have an ABA policy; Anyone But Australia. Australia could be playing a team compromised of Saddam Hussein’s relatives and we’d still be cheering against those Aussie boys. They don’t need our help, god knows they do well enough.

Much to the delight of the three English supporters in the entire stadium and much to my delight, Australia were beaten this time around.