Next battle was fighting MySQL Workbench to get it to create an ER diagram for me. Eventually I managed to work out how not to trigger its “pure virtual function call” – you need to ensure that you close the bottom panel before opening a new table. I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing it one day. MySQL’s GUI tools have historically had problems for me. MySQL Query Browser rarely manages to let me graphically create a table without crashing. Yet I still try. I think I’ve managed to work out most of the error conditions to avoid them but it is sad that such easy to trigger bugs exists. In any case I managed to get the diagram modelled correctly which will be useful for future reference as well as for the Faculty of Business who were chasing it. Hopefully it is of use to them.

The afternoon was spent fighting with our EQUELLA instance and trying to work out why it was misbehaving. I didn’t work it out and ended up purging the item in question instead and starting on a new item. I’m not sure what I did to get it so grumpy but the item is purged now so it isn’t going to cause me an issue. The institution in question is going to be wiped out again in a part of testing. I managed to create some cool tools as a part of working out how the system works which should make some future work easier. Also finished work on an interface as well. I went home perhaps a little bit too late but it gave me the chance to concentrate on getting things worked out in peace. I found a minor quirk in Joomla! that I’d found previously but now I have a reasonable solution to get around it.

More work, more juggling but the wheel slowly turns.

Sedona doesn’t appear to offer any form of integration services so the fact that they could integrate with ePrints via SWORD (deposits) or OAI-PMH (harvesting) is sounding impossible even though it would be a great standard way to send data around. The suggested synchronisation involved FTP but details are light on the ground.

Apparently the system doesn’t work properly with Chrome to the point that it won’t let you login claiming you need IE, Firefox or Safari. The system isn’t normalised as well with the author names fields (first name, middle name and last name) being stored as individual fields in the database (e.g. fname1, fname2) and limited to five authors. For overflow there is an “et al.” multiline textbox. The system does have a method of adding co-authors however this is distinct and is again a multiline select box. There is another free form box for citations which makes sense as they limit the list of periodicals (drop down select list) and lack enough information to build most citation types from the data that the system stores.

The system does appear to have given some thought to an export with an Access database being generated with appropriate tables. Access, whilst not perhaps my preferred database system, is perhaps one of the better choices for data export and certainly beats sending CSV or XLS files around. There is the proprietary aspect to Access but there could be no option at all and at least maintains type data better. It also appears that this form of export is the way of adding extra fields that might be required by the University to store extra information. It wouldn’t surprise me if an Access database isn’t the preferred synchronisation tool though that personally scares me. But at least they have thought about it which is a good start.

Overall I look at the system and think we could integrate it into ePrints and increase the overall value of our data anyway. We could handle the few extra fields that Sedona appears to add with the extra item types. The extra datasets are exactly that: datasets. ePrints has workflow to handle editing items to do what it needs. It would be less limited and give us more power to do what we need.

Reports appear to be the systems strong point. There is a prebuilt CV and various other rather trivial reports for a member. There is a set of aggregate reports that I haven’t looked into and there appears to be a rather picky way of formatting things for the AACSB requirements (including printed CV’s in a particular format – I hope AACSB doesn’t cover IT related areas given the backwards requirements).

The fun task I ended the day with was returning to work on the monstrous PHP application I’ve been fighting with all week. The particular point I’m at is adding plugin functionality to a section of the code base. Since I’ve been incorporating the Joomla! Framework into the system, doing this turned out to be relatively trivial. At the point where I wanted the plugin trigger I load a file called ‘notifier.php’. This loads in the Joomla! framework bootstrap file which defines a while bunch of things (JPATH_BASE, JPATH_ROOT, etc) that Joomla! uses and loads the relevant files plus a few other files to get the system started off the bat. The ‘notifier.php’ file also defines a class aptly named ‘Notifier’ which extends JDispatcher. JDispatcher is the work horse of the Joomla! event subsystem from which plugins derive. The Notifier constructor loads up a particular directory and opens all of the files in it and tries to create new classes in the format plgNotifierFilename similar to how Joomla!’s plugin infrastructure works. This then registers those classes with the notifier class for use. Then in the original file I use JDispatcher’s “trigger” method to send a message to all of the registered plugins and the integration is done. In the original file there is only 4 lines of code added to load the file, create the class and trigger the message – plus a comment summarising this as well. It is one of those things where the framework makes life really easy to extend systems in a flexible manner. Now if I want to attach multiple plugins to extend that particular bit of code it is easy to do and with the framework it is easy to define multiple plugin triggers.

After the demo one of the most painful parts was the fact that we rely upon the CMS for a significant amount of content. The main problem with the CMS is that it is horribly unfriendly for mobile devices. At one stage the home page had a Flash banner which didn’t degrade properly which left a frustrating image that said “click here” but wasn’t actually linked to anything. So I spent the middle of the day working out how to strip out the USQ home page template so that we can embed it else where. I managed to get it sorted mostly though as I’m abusing an XML parser it’ll barf on poorly formatted pages or with HTML entities not in XML. Most of the CMS pages are fine but some legacy ones aren’t so lucky. I’ve put in some minor checks to clean things up but hopefully it isn’t too much of a problem.

The afternoon rounded out with a meeting before leaving early so that I could return for my evening of debates. Life in the fast lane.

The piece of code in question is a data mapping system. It takes an array as an input and then transform it eventually into XML and feeds this into a web service. The list of valid keys is stored in an array (in the global scope) which is filled in with the values from the input array. I couldn’t work out why there was a function that basically appeared to clear what was an empty array until I realised that the global was being filled with data and so if the code path was reused it’d have the old data in it. Nasty work around for a problem that should have existed.

So the functions related to the mapping and the two arrays that were living in global scope were shifted into a class on their own. The relevant functions were adapted to work properly with the variables not being global and I’ll work on eradicating the other situations where the variable was still used but the particular purpose I need it for is cleaned out. At the same time I pulled into the class some extra functions that were related to the system but weren’t located with it (curiously enough!).

But working through the mapping functions I noticed another quirk. Just as previously the global was being altered even though it was supposedly a template, another one of the functions decided that it would alter the input array that it was given before setting that value in the output array. The field in question, a format field, is reset if the field isn’t set under a particular condition in a loop. This means that the loop goes through a few times and this variable is undefined and the items checking this behave one way. Then an iteration occurs which triggers this code path and the variable is changed. The lines that were previously run would have checked that and possibly taken a different code path as would the following items. Why this approach was taken baffles me and could potentially be a source of a few bugs. It is unlikely this has been a concern as the code spewed out copious amounts of undefined index errors due to insufficient checking to see if the values were there and just hoping they would be there. Fortunately I managed to clean up the majority of it though a few undefined index errors remained. The solution mostly was using Joomla!’s JArrayHelper::getValue function which will work out if the value is set and give you the option to filter the value to a particular type and also set a default value if one isn’t there. Handy little function cleaned up the majority of the errors.

A few other changes were made, globals were annihilated and I progressively removed dependencies to clean up the system and all was right with the world. And tomorrow? Fix another part of the broken.

Suffice to say the entire system lacks at form of standardised testing which makes refactoring even harder. Given the intermixing of HTML outputting all over the place I think it would be hard to quickly put in a unit testing framework to ensure that the system behaves sanely.

Whilst it immensely frustrates me that I have to deal with it, I’m hopeful that I can start cleaning it up and improving the overall quality. Shifting functions around and centralising items in ways that makes sense as well as clearing up old cruft and the elimination of the immense plague of global variables that this application has. I thought Drupal was horrible with all of it’s global variables (it was seriously the most global’s I’d seen before at around 20 of them) but this one at over 50 and counting takes the cake – it really is global domination.

From here I set apart removing extra components until I got down to what I felt was the absolute minimum. I’ve actually been a bit lenient and included a few extra components I wasn’t quite willing to part with. In the administrator area I’ve killed almost all of the components except for content, frontpage and media. The admin modules are gone as a lot of the front end modules. The search plugins are mostly removed except for content and the XMLRPC layer is dead. A few of the templates are dead and I’m asking a friend to make a simple one as a replacement for rhuk_milkyway. I’ve also cleaned out some images and I nuked a lot of legacy junk that isn’t required any more.

I’m calling it Pine Tree as a difference though since I don’t really take apart the framework it isn’t that much lighter than a normal Joomla! instance. A copy is available on my JoomlaCode project, check out at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5353. It is slightly branded though not a lot. There is one minor bug fix but on the whole it is a copy of 1.5.20 with a whole heap of stuff removed. Oh and don’t bother with the sample data or migration, either option will likely fail (will probably remove these later). There is also no administrator so don’t bother clicking on that either. Pine Tree template design and quick logo done by Making Digital Design. Let me know what you think.

But I feel the worst thing about all of this is the distraction it is causing. She’s not focusing on writing the document, she’s fighting to style the document first. This breaks up her mental workflow because now instead of thinking about what she should be writing she’s off being bothered about the formatting and style. Eventually I convince her to stop fighting with Word to format it the way she wanted and just get on with writing the document. But how much time is wasted getting a word processor to try and do what you need?

I ponder this at times when the USQ course material publishing system went from a semantic based system into a system driven by OpenOffice.org and Word. I wonder just how much time our academics waste trying to get the format right when eventually it probably is going to be trashed anyway?

As a LaTeX user, this is food for thought.

But I’d like to take a step back and detail one of the projects I’m working on at the moment. At USQ we’re working on a media repository to store our media files for course materials and lecture recordings. One of the aspects is mediating connecting the raw recordings (done in Camtasia Relay) with the courses which are in Moodle. Camtasia’s support for Moodle is a bit awkward and we’d like to improve it a bit more or build an interface that at least mediated things so that we can choose to put things into Moodle (our learning management system) or the new media repository. So we need a bridge of sorts. Being a PHP person and PHP being one of the most preferred programming languages at USQ (see Moodle) I figured I’d do it in PHP. Then I realised I wanted to do it properly and needed authentication integration plus a few other tricks. I also figured I’d like to have a controller, view and a model for stuff. Then I figured I’m going to need some database drivers, particularly Oracle but for initial testing I’m going to need to do it locally outside of the normal development framework since its essentially a skunkworks project.

The choice I’ve taken is to use the Joomla! Framework and strip out the majority of Joomla! to put in what I need. In this particular case I’ve picked up the authentication plugins, user plugins and user component from Joomla! and left all of the content stuff behind. I’ve started adding my own extensions to the project to handle the aspects required, pulling in some of the DAV support work I did for Joomla! a while ago and including that into the libraries. So the pieces are slowly coming together and eventually I’ll get everything up and running properly. I’ve also ported Joomla! in a small part to an SQLite3 database where I’m putting stuff for the time being. I’ve grabbed a stock joomla.sql file for MySQL, modified it to be SQLite friendly and then I’m using that base database to handle everything. It has more than I need in it table wise but that doesn’t necessarily cause concern but perhaps wastes a bit of space. I’ll hook up everything and get it to work, perhaps a bit heavier than it needs to be but also immediately portable back into a Joomla! instance later if this is the path I want to take.

Perhaps at a JoomlaDay somewhere I’ll demo it.

So I tried at home on my favourite Windows XP VM and it installed fine. Fine is of course subjective because it required three restarts to actually install itself (one for .Net 4.0, one for Windows Installer 4.5 and the final for Visual Studio Web Developer Express) – I’m not quite sure why these couldn’t have been bundled together into one restart (which is reasonable) or even what VS Web Dev Express was doing to require a restart. But I’ll live. I fired it up and did a Joomla! install and everything worked nicely. I tried the VS Web Dev integration and found it loaded everything up except that Web Dev doesn’t do PHP – back to the drawing board. As an aside why Microsoft doesn’t support PHP in VS Web Dev directly is a wonder – PHP as a language appears to be more popular than either of Microsoft’s according to langpop.com’s view of the world. To be fair, langpop.com is a mildly biased view towards open source areas (Google Code, Slashdot, IRC, Ohloh, Freshmeat) which would explain the dominance of languages such as PHP or Python. In any case, it worked and it had a funky editor with highlighting and not a lot else as well as a database editor that handled MySQL – and all in one package.

So I try to install it at work. First hurdle: I need Windows XP SP3. Ok, bummer. File a job, wait for ICT Service Delivery (yes that is their real department name) to get back and install SP3. They call me back in a week and say “when do you want this? is now a good time?” and I say sure. A few hours later and 64+ updates my computer has SP3 on it. Let’s try Web PI 3 beta again and see how we go. Much better, we’re off installing WebMatrix and all sorts of shiny. I ticked the Joomla! box as well and that is also installing. Everyone is happy. It then goes to try and configure IIS on my XP box. It pops up a component install view window and eventually gets to the point of asking me for an XP install CD. Except this is a corporate box and I don’t have one. I don’t have an i386 directory handy to just copy files from. I have local admin so installing stuff isn’t an issue but I don’t have those files. Bummer. I go hunting for them and I can’t readily find them locally and I don’t even know where to find them on the network. Sheepishly I hit cancel and WebPI keeps installing without configuring IIS 5 on my local machine. I thought I’d selected to use the WebMatrix server so I’m not entirely sure what is going on anyway. .Net 4.0 installs uneventfully (no restart this time) and Windows Installer 4.5 requires a restart. This time I’m not installing Web Dev so I don’t need to restart for that, yay! The rest went relatively smoothly which is good however at the end it complained IIS5.1 failed thus items dependent upon it (e.g. FastCGI for IIS5.1, PHP5.2.13, WinCache 1.1 for PHP 5.2) failed to install. MySQL Windows Essential 5.1 didn’t work because a service entry couldn’t be created, possibly because a MySQL service entry already exists. Joomla! didn’t work either but since both IIS 5.1 and MySQL failed to work I’ve got a selection of options.

Curiously I had an XAMPP install of MySQL set up and WebPI didn’t detect this properly opting to install its own version, perhaps a check on port 3306 to see if something speaks MySQL would be more appropriate to check. Improvements for next time.

So I fire up WebMatrix Beta and use its installer to install Joomla!. This one works better. It presents me with the same dialogue and insists I can’t have a blank password (my insecure XAMPP MySQL install insists otherwise but I secure it and both my security office and WebMatrix are happy). Joomla! appears to install perfectly fine now. Go figure. It also appears to have used the XAMPP MySQL install which is nice.

So some quirks in no particular order:

• Requests has an images filter which is nice but if you enable it, go from requests into something else and back again the filter button is depressed but the list isn’t filtered. Clicking on it filters the requests but messes up the state.
• Requests has an images filter which is a good start but no JS filter or CSS filter.
• The built in DB tool connects to MySQL fine however if you try to create a table with a column as both an “identity” (Microsoft SQL Server version of “auto_increment”) and a “primary key” it complains about multiple keys. Setting the field to just be identity appears to resolve the issue
• Perhaps most annoyingly the font choice is harsh, at least for me. Compared to Monaco on my Mac, it just looks disgusting. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way to change it either. After coding for half the morning in Smultron whilst my desktop was updating, WebMatrix was just garish and jutting in comparison.
• Whilst there is no autocomplete for the PHP as far as I could see, it would be nice to include a reasonable formatter. At least something that fixed indentation by default. Mind you, Smultron doesn’t have this but I do miss it at times.

I also at one point managed to get WebMatrix to terminate however you need to remember that WebMatrix is still in beta as a product so it is understandable that there might be some issues that will hopefully get fixed. All in all it looks like a good tool. As a cut down editor it seems to fit the bill quite nicely as well as being one of the easier ways to get up and running on Windows with a web development environment and PHP.

The money is normally taken out automatically from your pay like withholding. This means that you don’t ever see that portion of money. In my case I lose $200 per fortnight to my HECS/HELP debt. This means that per year I knock off roughly $5.2k from my debt with the Australian Government. Funky.

The trick comes in is that this amount isn’t paid onto my loan until after I’ve done my tax. So all the money I’ve paid thus far this year doesn’t get counted and interest is charged including anything I’ve studied up until May the same year. Since semester 1 starts in March and “census” date is in April (the date at which course fees are paid) and semester two starts in July (next financial year), you get interest calculated on both semesters (plus in my case a summer semester, semester 3) not including the amount you have already had “withheld” over the same period of time.

So when it comes down to it, it is better to opt not to have your employer withhold your HECS/HELP debt, save the money in a high interest account somewhere and then a few months into the new financial year pay it as a part of your tax debt. Of course the problem with that is that you pay tax on the interest you accrue from the bank account however you’re at least earning money and not losing any money in the process.

The question of course becomes, who earns the interest on the withheld money? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I’m an Australian, we have a rather solid belief of just getting the job done. Just do it may be the Nike saying but it does reasonably well for describing Australia. I don’t particularly care for all of the noisy people crapping on about things who are ranting and raving about community. I care about people pulling their finger out and just doing it.

Get out there and do it. The community is anyone doing something positive for Joomla!. Fixing bugs, writing patches, porting to MSSQL even. Organising events, organising JUGS. What IRKS me is that some people don’t seem to be interested in contributing unless they get some form of massive recognition out of it. I’ve seen that recently and it disappoints me that the Joomla! community has people who work on those terms.

Perhaps it is just me, but you do something not to be known but because you enjoy it. I was asked the other day what my get rich quick scheme is but I don’t have one. I do what I do because its intellectually stimulating and a challenge. Why do you do it?

After this I had a flick through Slashdot, tended to my inbox and looked through my Twitter stream. One of the stories in Slashdot that I noticed was the CEO of Crytek saying that game demos were a “free luxury” that isn’t afforded in other areas such as movies. A curious statement and at the time I didn’t see a need to follow up with it.

In the afternoon I headed to the local shopping centre. My aim was to get a replacement for the Nokia phone charger with the European plugs (turns out I’m not the only one to get it, I remember at Council a Nokia phone coming through having a charger with a European plug, my hatred of their plug style is blog for another day) that now has a dint in the charging bit. I’m not a fan of this style charger (appears its an AC-8 charger) as the plug into my Nokia N80 is hardly connected and easily comes out. The new “high energy efficiency” charger cost me $37 for a Nokia genuine charger. Not sure where they get $37 out of that but whatever. I popped past EB and figured I’d pick up a copy of L4D which was being sold at $25. I hadn’t bought it previously on Steam when it was on sale and I figured it was about time I got a copy of it. So I grabbed a copy of it. I prefer boxed games because it saves me having to download around 4GB of data which at the moment for me on a wireless broadband connection will cost me around $60. Yes, twice the amount that I had paid for the game to just download it.

So I head home and look forward to a bit of zombie shooting. I put the DVD in and nothing happens. Ok, this isn’t fun. It’s opening up a terminal when I double click on it. So I spawn a terminal and run the command manually. “Program too bit to fit in memory.” Wonderful. A quick Google reveals that this is an encryption problem and restarting Steam would appear to be a solution. Ok. I try that a few times and no joy. I restart the computer, again, no joy. Why the Setup.exe file would be encrypted seems a tad strange which leads me to believe its probably corrupted. Re-examining the search results I get some suggestions that it might be corrupted. Looking over the disc at some of the files reveals apparently empty looking files. Great. After an hour of futzing with things I can’t get it to work and this isn’t fun. This isn’t what I paid for – to have something not working.

So it brings me back to the article where the Crytek CEO is whining about piracy. At this point in time I want to just shoot zombies not have to fight with antipiracy software. Fortunately I can activate the game and find an active install to copy the resources off to save me the download. But at this point I might as well have gotten a pirate copy off of someone anyway. If I have to download the entire thing off the internet then I might as well have pirated it and cracked it. This is starting to remind me of what happened with CNC4 – I got to the point where downloading a server emulator off the web was required to let me play the game. I could have again pirated the game to get it to work just as well.

There in lies the problem. If I can pirate the game for less than it costs me to buy the game and gives me a significantly better product (in this case, one that works) – of course piracy is increasing. But even that is a true statement given the industry keeps posting year on year profits that are increasing you wonder what they’re missing. Antipiracy measures are making life harder for those who want to pay money. The recent issues with Assassin’s Creed 2 and the Ubisoft DRM servers going offline demonstrates the issue for legitimate user is screwed whilst the pirate can continue to play the game. In this case 100% due to failure on the vendors part. But this raises the more worrying issue – what happens when the vendors decide they want to switch off the server?

But it puzzles me that what we are in is a DRM arms race. We have companies spending lots of money to try and protect their assets and an army of people trying to break it for nothing more than reputation. And the people breaking it are winning. I was recently listening to a podcast from Richard Dawkins which comments about an evolutionary arms race with the comment that when you’re in an arms race something else loses out. Thinking back to other arms races around the place there wasn’t any winners but arms dealers, weapons suppliers and perhaps some scientists. All of the money spent on this not being spent on other items such as making the games better. How many millions are wasted on ineffective DRM that people are paying for?

The other curious happening in the Crytek article that I saw was the idea that people could monetise computer game demos because demos are “prohibitively expensive.” Demos are a marketing tool and making people pay for either your marketing or your beta without something useful in return isn’t going to go down well. At the moment demos are maybe the tutorial and the first mission. I fail to see how this is prohibitively expensive, some extra QA to ensure that your first few levels work fine? Releasing a product that actually works instead of patching something on release day so that it works properly? This depresses me. I could see paying for a demo as being good so long as I get the demo portion of the game off. The demo would have to be comparable value. For example I can go to the movies and see Avatar for $10 which is 3 hours of entertainment guaranteed (quality is another question and a problem in both film and gaming) – if I’m going to pay that for a demo, this is what I’m going to be expecting. And more than perhaps the first level, if its 10%, then 10% of the game I should get.

But at the end of the day this doesn’t stop piracy and barely slows it because its trying to treat the symptom, not the problem. As to the actual problem, that is something they need to work out before it is too late.

This is contrasted to the UNIX methodology (as seen in Linux/Mac OS X amongst other recent operating systems) where there is a special user ID and username for root across all system. This user inalienably has god rights. It can bypass almost all file system permissions (NFS does deny root typically) and you can run everything that might not necessarily be permitted such as binding to a privileged port. Linux has the same sort of feature that Windows does as privileges except they call it capabilities. Whilst privileges in Windows are additive (you give someone privileges), capabilities in Linux are more subtractive – you start with everything and spawn processes until you lose them.

Joomla! 1.6 is itself going to have a root user as well. However it isn’t going to be a normal part of its operation. Root for Joomla! is going to behave like it does in Linux, it will have everything and the idea is that it has the ability to fix the access control lock out that you have created. Jooma! has the middle ground here between Windows and UNIX – not only do you have a super user who can do everything (if you really need it) but you also have the regular access control model which can add administrators as well. In some respects its the best of both world.

So much for the real thing. I want to spend money on supporting things but Firefly and Dollhouse is proof that doesn’t matter either. The fact that it takes ages for a Region 4 DVD to come out (compared to Region 1 and 2) so I can’t at times legally buy something anyway. Let alone the fact some things never get released in Australia anyway. Rather depressing at the end of the day.

But I feel there is a curious middle ground to be made. Each year increase the minimum age to buy cigarettes – or simpler, those born after a particular year cannot buy cigarettes. This way older smokers aren’t threatened and eventually dissipate and it is hard for newer smokers to get started. A curious example is that of slightly older members of social groups or families being able to supply cigarettes to younger people who can’t buy it yet. As the age increases, this will become increasingly hard to do and slowly this impact will dissipate. This strategy also gives the ability for those companies producing cigarettes to diversify into other areas.

The main complication with doing this is international travel. If one can reasonably travel to another part of the world and become addicted then this poses a problem. Ideally there would be a global ban like this but I don’t foresee that happening.

A simple thought on a weekend afternoon.

So Apple lately have been doing a lot nifty stuff. They’ve released the iPad, their tablet PC. In the announcement the other day they said they’d sold 450,000 of the devices. To be honest that is impressive. That is a lot of tablet PC’s sold, probably a significant portion of the market now are Apple after a week. They also announced iPhone OS 4.0 which has some curious things.

The first change with it isn’t technical but legal. They’ve changed the Terms of Service section 3.3.1 from:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

To:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

So basically if you’re not writing Objective-C, C, C++ or JS (HTML5/CSS/etc) then you’re not welcome. Bye bye CS5′s funky Flash Export to iPhone App feature. I’m not going to comment on this in general however Apple have consistently said those four languages are it. Using or developing tools to get around it was seriously tempting fate given all of the announcements Apple made. I’m not surprised, I’m not sure if it is a good or a bad thing (Flash shares a special loathing in my heart) but given Adobe have lately made their Flash player on Mac a piece of crap and not improvement (don’t get me started on Linux support), I can see where Apple have come from. Some argue that there way it handles it’s fast switching blah blah won’t work with quasi emulated apps because it doesn’t know data structures blah sounds to me like crap. The observation that Adobe’s write once run anywhere CS5 deployment could mean that Apple’s extra features aren’t supported until Adobe deem it to be included is a problem. That would mean any cool features would be unavailable to a portion of the developer community potentially never. It would potentially give Adobe control over the platform in a way Apple may not like. At the end of the day Apple is a public company and what makes them a profit is why they are there, so this is where their decision takes them. And whilst many claim Apple owe Adobe for their heritage, it is clear that recently Adobe haven’t been supplying a good experience for Mac users of their software anyway. Titanium keeps being included in the list of tools that might be excluded but I’m not entirely sure, it is certainly a border case.

The other interesting feature they added is multitasking. But nowhere do I see that people are understanding that it isn’t multitasking, it is just services. Apple aren’t giving people the ability to run what they want in the background, they’re offering services that will handle what they need for them. Other comments like the platform can’t support true multitasking and Apple’s design is flawed have come up in a few places which miss the point of the services. Apple doesn’t want your trashy code chewing memory and CPU, potentially going rogue and killing the users battery like it can on other platforms. That is unfriendly. The iPhone OS runs a system more than capable of multitasking it is just Apple prohibiting access to do so. The services they’ve got seem to meet the criteria and also permit reasonable flexibility. Will it be enough? Perhaps, but it is a start. They’ve got seven services: background audio (Pandora), VoIP (Sykep), background location (anything that watches your location), push notifications (yawn), local notifications (think alarm clock), task completion (the closest to true multitasking, example is a photo upload takes a while) and fast app switching (my old Palm worked like this in some respects). I think these will work well and solve a number of needs on the device and bring it up.

The other features announced included folders (better categorisation really) which reminds me in part of how stacks works as well. The next was improvements to mail for a unified inbox. Apple Mail on the desktop has this and I’m not a fan of it (I use the per mailbox inbox). Other Mail enhancements included threading and opening attachments in other apps. The last useful feature is the multiple Exchange account functionality, this will mean I can use Google’s Sync toy with my work’s Exchange account whilst still retaining some other identities I have. I have things sort of working but it could be better. Their book app is also coming to the iPhone which is more than predictable.

From the enterprise front they’ve beefed up support. Some of it already sounded familiar but the wireless app distribution is going to be useful for work (the current method involves connecting it to a desktop and loading the apps manually or App Store, this is a third option). Game Center seems interesting and a bit late to the game but better late than never as they say. They’ve also got an advertising framework built in. Not sure how this is going to play out but we will see. Hopefully they won’t nuke the third party advertising frameworks but I don’t see them as making that mistake, a regulator would surely snap them for that. Including it in the framework will probably mean the demise of most alternatives and they’re doing it in a way that can be relative unobtrusive compared to how it is handled now. Time will tell.

All in all there are some things that people don’t like (TOS Change) but I can see the Apple progressing slowly and improving. They’ve got a head start over every other platform and it appears that only Google have been able to come close to match them. Microsoft have pulled out all stops with Windows Phone 7 to create something that looks cool but they’ve almost left it too late, those burnt by Windows Mobile are perhaps wary of the next operating system. The Apple ad with the PC going “Trust me” over the ages rings true. My iPhone will miss out on a lot of the cooler stuff with services because of it’s age which is annoying but life. How application developers will handle this will also be interesting.

Of course now the iPad is out, maybe they will update a whole heap of other things.

I went home, spent most of the afternoon crafting my assignment together. And then submitted it. To do this I need a TurnItIn originality report. Easy enough. I do all of that, wait for the report to come up, download the report (0% copied!) and upload it and the assignment to EASE. I have the sneaking suspicion that I had forgotten something and re-read the specification. I had, it was an introduction and a conclusion. I was close to writing one but didn’t because I forgot to put it in the original outline (I had everything else mind you). So I write up an introduction paragraph and a conclusory paragraph, regenerate the PDF (using LaTeX, NeoOffice on Mac is just a hog, is slow and non-responsive. TeXShop on Mac is fast and lets me write what I need with minimal fuss. Random style is hard but such is life) and resubmit to TurnItIn. Since I’ve already submitted they’re telling me I will need to wait two days. This really annoys me that I need this to submit, my university is paying anyway plus if we used the Moodle API we wouldn’t have this problem. In some respects it is a form of extortion because they want a material support to release it in some respects (signing up again with a new account would obviate the problem). In any case I submit anyway with the old report. We’ll see how we go.

Just recently I had issues with Outlook Web Access doing stupid things. I think my mailbox was over quota because when I emptied the trash via Apple Mail, everything started working. The weird thing is that when I clicked “Check Names”, it nuked the entire email for some reason. Curious behaviour. Anyway, email sent with mild frustration. Another day passes.