Rantings via Weblog (Click here to go to the Home Page!)

I upgraded my mobile life with an HTC Desire Smartphone a few months back. I was reticent about making that leap from a phone with real buttons that you have to push to a slidy-tappy thing resembling the tricorder that Commander Data wields on Star Trek TNG. I did not know if I would get enough traction (literally) with the new way of working.

I've not really looked back. Sure, the greater sensitivity of the screen interface to my accidental swipes and mis-taps is annoying sometimes, but it's background noise.

The software world often defined by the die-hard fans vs the haters of one technology or another - e.g. Microsoft vs Non-Microsoft, Windows vs Linus. Interestingly, Techie people often have a dislike for some Microsoft products (specially Internet Explorer) yet they typically use a PC with Windows rather than a Mac. It's more hardcore.

The same demarkation is hapening with smartphones - here it is iPhones vs Android-based phones. It seems that techies tend to favour the HTC or other Android phone to an iPhone. The possibilities for apps is apparently greater with Andoid but Apple have focussed on the user interface and probably boast the better user experience.

Here is an interesting article I found about market share and the future of the different mobile OS technologies:-

http://technologizer.com/2011/01/27/the-end-of-the-zero-sum-game/

This morning when I unlocked my workstation I was greeted with a bizarre background image:-

At first I thought I was the victim of a prank by my workmates, but no - it was a browser window that I must have left open yesterday. It was the Google homepage. I guess it must have refreshed all by itself. It's quite a cool picture, actually, even though it does a complete 180 on the famous Clean Homepage ethos.

There was a message and link, asking:-



I'll let the lack of a full stop slide for now. The link takes you to a page where you are invited to create your own background image for your Google homepage. It announces:-



All you have to do is:-



Oh, I get it. If I do not like this new background image, I can put my own on there but only if I sign in.
As I write, the background image has changed. I suppose they have it set to refresh with a new image every so often.

I actually find this one distracting and it obscures what text thereis on the page. But it's okay - I can change it, if I let Google track my every movement.

I'm not opposed to sharing information that Google can use for marketing in return for an optional piece of functionality or an enhanced user experience. Not in principle, anyway.

But when it is forced on me like this, I don't like it.

==
Related article at the Guardian:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/oct/28/google-mobilephones?CMP=twt_gu

Open Source and Microsoft - never the twain

For most of my professional life in software development (say, the last two thirds of it) I have been in the Microsoft camp. I started out using Solaris/Unix, Vi, LaTeX and shell script, and I awked, grepped and sedded merrily away. But nowadays I am used to VB, ASP, VBScript, Access and Microsoft SQL Server. For web applications, the world tends to split into two camps - the Open Source LAMP Stack Gang (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP), who use free gear, and the Microsoft Bunch (Windows + IIS + SQL Server + ASP.NET), who have historically paid considerably more than nothing for their software development tools.

I understand that the LAMP Stack Gang far outnumber the Microsoft Bunch, and a major reason for this must be cost. You can get all the pieces of the LAMP Stack for free, which is great if you are are a solo developer or small outfit with little spare cash to capitalise your software projects. Isn't it the case that the vast, vast, huge majority of web servers in the world are Apache systems, almost certainly run on some version of Unix? I think so, although it may be that the split of 98% to 2% split has moved somewhat in the direction of the IIS/Windows combination in recent years.

The twain rarely meet. It's cool to be a Microsoft Hater. Dude. Let's face it, it is quite easy to find yourself cursing Microsoft when stuff does not work the way it should - say SQL Server Management Studio just crashes on you, or Excel does the same in the middle of some complex formula definitions, or Word just hangs forever.... I could go on, and indeed I might on another occasion. It's easy to criticise the Open Source School too, though - focussing on the myriad of versions, lack of coherent documentation and support.

It's a bit like the adage: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand Binary and those who don't."

It's pretty entrenched.

Well, as of a few months ago, I have been programming web applications in PHP with a SQL Server backend - which I guess is a novel, mixed aproach, and it gives the lie to the "Never the Twain" motto. PHP is indeed a powerful language and I quite like it. Some of my colleagues are ace gurus with it and I have lots to learn yet.

Installing PHP was a bitch, however. Which version should I instal? What changes are there between versions? There is a decided lack of concern for backwards compatibility. What extensions should I enable. What else do I need to tweak in IIS to make it work? It is really fiddly and as a developer, I'd rather be focussing my mental energies on solving problems of design architecture, not farting around with configuration details.

My work installation has been stable for months now so I don't worry about it any more.

But this weekend, I have had cause to want to investigate WordPress in some detail. (WordPress is a great blogging engine, by the way, but that is not imporant here.) Now, WordPress is written in PHP and sits on a MySQL database. So I decided to get personal with the installation process and instal WordPress on my laptop. Yes, it's a Windows laptop - XP Professional SP3 if you want to know; and it has been a trusted development box for some years.

That's where my problems began.

MySQL

I'd installed MySQL on my laptop some months before, to see what it was like, but I had not got round to doing anything meaningful with it, so I decided to uninstal it and begin afresh with the latest download.

Watch out! MySQL does not uninstal properly. It leaves stuff behind that you have to remove by hand; otherwise it gets in a tangle when you re-instal. When I can find the online article that showed me the workaround, I'll post it. Of course I did not get this the first time round. At first I figured it was me doing something dumb, so I did the obvious thing and went through the uninstal-instal cycle another once (or was it twice?). So that turned out to be the "something dumb" that I'd been doing.

PHP

O god help me! PHP for Windows is about the most disjointed deployment I have come across. There seem to be differing distributions and options (e.g. PECL library for Windows, whatever that means) and its easy to find that the installation does not support some other PHP application because it needs this or that DLL. You can also use either CGI or ISAPI as your interpreting engine within IIS. How do you decide? There is no definitive answer, it seems, as there are strong advocates of both. Then you can find that certain DLLs need to be copied from your C:\PHP folder to your Windows or system32 folder, which means your PHP installation files are spread around the box, which is not so good if you need to upgrade cleanly or uninstal.

WordPress

WordPress is a great blogging engine that has come of age and can be enhanced to act like a proper CMS. It's really great. However, it is written for Unix/Linux systems, not Windows. As long as you can put PHP and MySQL on the box first, you should be okay. Installing WordPress still felt a little allien to me, possibly because I have been brainwashed by the Microsoft experience

The WordPress folks boast about their so-called "Famous 5-Minute Install". Their target installation audience is users who have hosting provided by a thrid party with the necessary environment pre-prepared, admittedly. Nevertheless, this claim was a joke for meand it took ages; I kept getting an unhelpful error message announcing that something (it did not say what) was not configured correctly for WordPress. Hours of googling got me the answer eventually: I had to move some DLLs or enable some extensions in the php.ini file. The thing is, the WordPress.org web site does not feature much information to help Windows folks doing a local instal like this. Am I such a freak?

Microsoft's Answer

I did get a WordPress installation working on my laptop, and it was a good learning experience. What I found out very soon afterwards is that Microsoft have themselves taken on the challenge to make available smooth installations on Windows servers (and XP boxes). They have a thing called the Web Platform Installer (WPI), which claims to do it all for you, and not just WordPress:-

www.microsoft.com/web

Microsoft have realised just how popular a number of online tools have become, with many hosting providers offering one-click instals. Some of them do not use any Microsoft technology to work and are free - such as WordPress and Joomla - and I guess Microsoft want a piece of this action.

They have gathered a bunch of platforms and apps together and made them available through the WPI. This clever application instals on your Windows machine and then you can use it to select your favourite web app (say WordPress). The WPI figures out the dependencies (in this example, MySQL and PHP), then it fetches them for you and and instals them. Then it instals the app that you chose. You are guided through this process by a wizard that asks you for passwords and so on.

I have to sing qualified praises for Microsoft here - praise because the thing actually works, or at least it worked for me; qualified because it's not full-proof and gets stuff wrong if you have installed an app already by hand, say. Oh, and hangs sometimes for no excusable reason. I have found out that the WPI has been around for some months now, so in my view these glitches are very poor show by Microsoft. The WPI also appears not to include an uninstal feature for the items installed using it, which seems to be half-heated to me.

In my case I tried to use it to use the WPI instal WordPress again on my laptop - this time the "Microsoft Way". I had to totally uninstal my instance of PHP as it used ISAPI and the WPI wants to use FastCGI and it got all confused. Uninstaling PHP was tricky - again, I had lots of help from Google to delete the right files and remove objects from IIS. And I uninstalled MySQL too (remember that that is not straightforward either). This way I ensured that I gave Microsoft the power to choose exactly which version and build of each item to fetch and instal.

Eventually it all came together. It is impressive to watch the WPI working through the process and it is relaxing also not to have to instal all the dependencies myself, although I'll remind you that I did go through the exercise first, just to prove my chops.

So in the end I used a Microsoft solution to instal Open Source, non-Microsoft applications on my Windows machine. In the UK we now have a coalition government made up of Conservatives and Liberals, which is a historic pairing of political rivals. And we also have this blurring of the distinction between two software worlds that once divided the web development community.

It is a brave new world.

Do you buy computers from Dell? I do. I have bought them for myself and for my friends, family and clients. Why do I do it? Because they are reputable and supply reasonably reliable machines and what you get for your money is pretty good value.

But I have *never* bought online. Online is - I believe - the preferred sales channel with Dell. I have always ended up speaking to a sales rep on the phone and cutting a deal in person.

I hate the Dell web site. It is shockingly difficult to use and unpredictable. It is also flaky. I have to share here with you the result (two tries was enough) of my attempt to chat with a sales expert about the spec of a laptop I am considering buying.

This sort of crap really annoys me. Am I asking too much?

I found a useful resource today, and I'd like to share it:-

I was (and still am) a big fan of Microsoft Photo Editor, which is a handy litle application that ships with Microsoft Office 2000. It enables you to do rudimentary editing of graphics files. It also lets you save a file originally in one format into a different format, so you can convert a JPEG into a GIF, for example, really easily.

Along came Office 2003 and this version of the office suite included a product called Microsoft Picture Manager, which was the replacement for Photo Editor. This new, improved, application does not include the simple transformation functionality between JPEG, BMP, PNG and GIF that Photo Editor offered so effortlessly. Also, to my mind at least, it is a much less straightforward application to use. I have never liked it.

On my own laptop I have the history of having instled Office 2000 and then Office 2003 (yes, dear reader, that side-by-side migration is not without its gotchas, but that is another story) and despite technical posts out there that tell you that Office 2003 uninstals Photo Editor, I have somehow managed to keep it installed. Can't remember how. But at work they gave me a brand spanking new box to work on (well, the hardware was new; thankfully it still had XP rather than Vista [bleh] or Wndows 7 [jury still out]), which had Office 2003 as a clean instal. Of course I I found myself needing to knock up an image as a JPEG and for some reason all I had was its GIF equivalent. So havinig fought with Picture Manager and conceded defeat, I searched online and found this:-

Cool Utils - Free Online Image Converter

It does what it says on the tin - i.e. it converts an image file from one popular format to another. This is really handy if you find you do not have the necessay tools on the workstation that you are using.

There appear to be a bunch of other utilities on that web site. I cannot speak about them as I have not checked them out, but this one simple - and free - utility saved me a bunch of effort, so I am happy to pass it on.