One of the problems inherent with remote control software being the requirement for the end user to connect to some remote support web site and download a remote control application (applet) in their browser. You wouldn’t typically want this software to stay running on the user computer for security reasons and some users may be outside your area of desktop management policy – because of this the applet is downloaded each time the user requires support.

When downloading the applet, quite often the browser will interfere asking all manner of questions of the end user such as “Open or Save”, “Do you really want to run?”, ask the user to take some action in the yellow bar at the top of the screen (which really isn’t that visible)  and son on. These are, of course, all valid questions however when trying to talk a user through what could be a relatively simple fix – just connecting to the remote control solution can eat into valuable time.

The new update handles the customer applet download slightly differently to the way it has previously and it really is much better. The user goes to the support site (which now also has a much easier to remember address), enters the given pin code, clicks Connect to technician then clicks on the Download button – that’s pretty much it. Hopefully a future enhancement might link the functionality of these two buttons together to make it even simpler.

A number of additional enhancements have has been implemented including remote control screen capture, unique clipboards, customisable technician surveys, windows mobile branding and more.

You can learn more about the new features on their website: New Features for June 2009

At its simplest level, search engine optimisation is the process of preparing your website for submission to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) in such a way that your website gets the most chance of being found by your intended audience – and it is this last bit where the SEO activities can be found. Let’s use an example to illustrate this: Imagine you have prepared a knock out presentation about your chosen subject and you trying to raise awareness of your upcoming event. You want a packed audience right? Maybe – you could get a packed audience by offering free gifts to every attendee but other than a packed audience where will that get you?–What you really want is a packed appropriate audience. In order to do this you will probably need to ensure things are in order and everything you need is where it should be and that you are dressed appropriately, are giving a presentation which meets audience expectations, and that you are making the best use of the facilities available. You also need to provide way of allowing potential audience members to hear about your presentation. Using careful upfront planning there are a number of things you can do to help your presentation reach the appropriate audience – optimisation in where you announce your presentation effectively and efficiently, target your summary so it reads positively about your presentation and you will also focus on the quality and accessibility of your presentation. Search engine optimisation techniques start out by ensuring things in your website make the best of the facilities the search engine has to offer and that your website is best prepared for it. Btw, if you have a better metaphor I would love to hear it

In the early days of search engine technology the tools for search were pretty much simple directories which listed addresses of websites much like an index in a book. This worked for a while but it wasn’t long before enhancements made their way into these directories to help providers stand out from the crowd. Some of these extras included website descriptions and keywords describing websites so the index listing became more like a bibliography or a yellow pages (yellow pages in the UK is a phone directory for businesses). Many search engines manually typed in website details so it wasn’t long before automated tools were created to help pull information out of the websites (leading to title, description and meta tags for web pages). Later, search engines started indexing words in websites so they could be used to enhance search results. The natural extension to this was to allow for primary keywords that would more generally define a site and these became known as “meta tags”. Meta tags are basically just keywords whose purpose is to ‘describe information’ and, for a long time (and to a certain extent still do), they played an important part in the development of search engine technology. Search engines are slowly evolving to take this idea further into what is becoming known as the “semantic web” – but that is a story for another day.

These days there are literally hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of web sites, blogs, and other internet based sites out there so when we type a search into a search engine we are often deluged with results – but how does one website stand out from another? There have been many attempts to get this right and these algorithms are still evolving today, from the early alphabetised and interest based lists to first come first served listings to sites based on click through rate, link popularity, link backs and PageRank.

Even today it is difficult for a website, regardless of content, to stand out from other, similar, websites. Take this blog for example, www.jasonslater.co.uk which is a technology blog based in the UK. If I type the word technology into Google it returns 794 million entries so what chance does a site like this, which has been around for a very long time, have of grabbing the attention of a potential new visitor? Perhaps I could refine the search for “technology blog” which using Google (.co.uk) returns just over 204 million links – but lets think about the potential visitor for a moment. If I am searching the internet for a particular technology tip or how-to I might rarely use the word “blog” as, at this point, I am goal oriented and I don’t really care what the format of the website is – as long as it returns the answer I need. Now, as a webmaster and assuming my site has the answer to the problem in question how do I ensure the visitor sees my result in the list of links returned in the browser? I need to optimise the web page in question to ensure it is likely to be indexed in the right way by the search engine. If I get the optimisation wrong, miss an important keyword, or include an inappropriate description the visitor might miss it, or simply not bother visiting may page and guess what – I’ve just lost my potential new audience!

Talking of the list of links returned by search engines, there are often too many to appear on just one page so they are paginated showing just a handful of links on what is known as the “first page”. If you search for tips on search engine optimisation you will read much advice indicating that you really need to be in the first few pages of results in a search engine to really get noticed. Personally, I would also argue that the last few pages are just as important – I often look at the first page and the last page of results and ignore most of the ones in between.

So, you have worked hard on your website and have something really important to say and you are ready to connect to the audience – but how do you do this? This is where search engine optimisation can help – it isn’t a complete answer of course because there are many aspects to SEO, which many professional SEO companies may be able to help you with, but ensuring each page of your website is properly optimised for a search engine should certainly help to raise your visibility amongst the millions of other sites available.

I mentioned at the outset about sites promising guaranteed Google listings – if you want to submit your website to Google go to their website submission page at http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ – they also have a section of advice and tips for webmasters.

I will be writing more about search engine optimisation techniques with some practical examples, and using my search engine development project to test algorithms and theories,  so make sure you subscribe to the feed to ensure you don’t miss out. One of my academic interests is in search engine technology so my aim in this investigation is to share some technical understanding and experiences of optimisation techniques and hopefully connect with others who have similar interests.

Further Reading

21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques
Number 7 in this list “include a site map page” can help point search engines in the right direction when they index your site. Google Webmaster Tools can help you.

Top 10 Google Dont’s – Things You Should Never Do for Search Engine Optimization
Search engines are really only interested in good quality content and they are constantly trying to root out loop holes. Number 6 – text hiding is a big no no.

SEO Best Practices: 20 Questions – ClickZ
A list of questions to ask yourself to ensure you are adhering to best practices for SEO.

Illegal SEO Techniques
Good outline of some of the techniques to avoid. It can be easy to get swept away with SEO so always try and remain grounded that your aim is simply to connect to readers with similar interests.

Digital Web Magazine – SEO and Your Web Site
Think about the structure of a web page and consider the impact of add-ins like Javascript.

The best advice as always is to focus on producing well researched and referenced good quality content. In this way you can aim to become an authority in your chosen field you will then be well prepared to gain the best value out of search engines.

Update So Far

Progress has been a little slower than I would have liked as I haven’t had much time over the last few evenings to work on the project. However, the game is now at least playable – check out the end of this post for a playable progress so far beta version. I have been working on two issues with the pairs game which have taken a little time to resolve.

The first is object management, I noticed too many object instances were being created (e.g. starting a new game, randomly sorting the cards) so I have restructured much of the code to keep the number of objects to a minimum – this also makes the code flow much better. For the cards, I now create the twenty instances just once at the beginning of the game and use object variables to handle any particular functional requirements.

Secondly, now the basic game framework is up and running I have been working through some of the core logic of the pairs game trying to figure out some of the best ways of handling the mechanics. This goes as follows

• At the outset the player can click on any one card – once clicked the engine needs to remember this card
• If the player attempts to click on the same card again – return it to its face down position and forget this card
• If a player clicks on a second (different) card (if there is already one remembered card and it is different) we need to remember the second card and take some action
  • If the two cards match remove them both, increase the match counter, and forget about them
    • If all cards are turned (match counter reaches 10) then end the game
  • If the two cards are different return them to their face down position and forget about them

Regarding the last point – “if the two cards are different return them to their face down position and forget about them” needs a little extra thought. This is because we don’t want to return them to their face down position immediately – there needs to be a short pause (around 2 seconds) for the player to get a chance to remember them. I have achieved this by creating a Timer in the Card object but now we need to make some decisions:

Can the player click on another card during this pause or do they have to wait?

The ideal scenario would be to allow the player to continue to play. However, this opens up a few other questions:

• What happens if the player clicks on one of these remembered cards again during the pause?
• What happens if the player clicks on a different card during the pause?

The preference here would be to return the two cards instantly to their face down position if the player clicks on another card – allowing the player an opportunity to shave a second or two off their time. However, this means we cannot forget about the two cards immediately but instead we need to add a check if the player clicks on a card whether there are already two remembered cards with a timer running and if so cancel the timers and immediately forget about the two cards.

The flowchart for this logic follows:

The current action script 3 code for this logic is as follows:

var aCard:Card = event.target as Card;

// if player attempts to click on another card whilst they are both turned
if ( iCard2 != null )
	{
	// face down
	iCard1.doneTimer();
	iCard2.doneTimer();
	// forget about them both
	iCard1 = null;
	iCard2 = null;
	}

// if no cards are turned
if ( iCard1 == null )
	{
	iCard1 = aCard; // remember the card
	iCard1.swapImage(); // put the card in the face up position
	iCount++; // increase the play counter
	}
// if the first card is already turned
else
	{
	// if the two cards are the same
	if ( iCard1 == aCard )
		{
		iCard1.resetImage();  // face down the first card
		iCard1 = null; // forget about the first card
		iCount++; // increase the play counter
		}
	else
		{
		// if the two cards are different
		iCard2 = aCard; // remember the card
		iCard2.swapImage(); // put the second card in the face up position
		iCount++; // increase the play counter

		// if both cards face value match
		if ( iCard1.getCardValue() == iCard2.getCardValue() )
			{
			// remove the cards from the stage
			stage.removeChild(iCard1);
			stage.removeChild(iCard2);
			// forget about the cards
			iCard1 = null;
			iCard2 = null;
			iScore++; // increase the score
			iFound++; // increase the pair count
			// all pairs found? if so, end the game
			if ( iFound == 10 ) { endGame(); }
			}
		// if both cards face value differ
		else
			{
			// start the timer to return them face down
			iCard1.TimeDown();
			iCard2.TimeDown();
			}
		}
	}

The First Beta Release

This should at least be playable – just remember it isn’t finished and there is still a bit of logic to figure out. If you spot anything please let me know in comments.

Catch Up Reading

Developing An Application In Flash And AS3 Part Two

Developing An Application Using Flash and Action Script 3

The book, at 272 pages, consists of fourteen chapters and covers aspects from why you should use WordPress to using plug-ins and troubleshooting and maintenance (although I would have liked this chapter to have been a little more extensive). After reading the book several times I can’t help feeling the title of the book seems a little optimistic – certainly the “Building a WordPress Blog” is more than covered but the “People Want to Read” part indicates to me there should be more advice about how to go about building a readership and optimising and publicising your WordPress Blog (perhaps using some of the useful WordPress plug-ins which are available), which isn’t covered in any detail.

The tone of the book has a friendly feel, well supported by images, and although much of the information could probably be obtained from many of the online tutorials and how-to documents which can be found online it is useful having this information in a compact form which can be easily carried around for reading on the train. What is useful is that purchasing this book also enables access to an online version giving more reading flexibility.

The Installing WordPress chapter takes you through the important elements of downloading the software, setting up the MySQL database, editing the WordPress configuration file and troubleshoots two common issues related to installation (no PHP enabled and MySQL database connection issues). If you have never used WordPress before this chapter will be particularly beneficial as an outline to how to install WordPress. So too will be the chapter on Preparing to Post which breaks down the elements of a post such as the title, permalink, and the formatting toolbar. The section on adding media including images and video, and building a gallery, is particularly useful as it can take some getting your head around the first time you encounter it in WordPress.

For the plug-ins section it would have been useful to highlight some of the important plug-ins available for WordPress but if you need a refresher on the various field in WordPress or want to understand WordPress more before you go ahead with implementation this is the book for you.

Hopefully Scott may follow this up with a book containing more words of wisdom on dealing with WordPress issues at a more intermediate level.

UPDATE: I just noticed the online version of the book is apparently only available for 45 days.

Palm Pre(TM)

So close, you can almost feel it.

The new Palm(R) Pre(TM) phone is coming soon on the O2 network.
Palm Pre. Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing

Included within the email is a link to learn more information about the Palm Pre.

As my phone is due for renewal within the next few months I am starting to look around at the options which currently include the Nokia N97, the iPhone, an Android based phone, a Windows based Smartphone, and now the Palm Pre. Some of the key factors of my replacement phone will be a full keyboard and a data tariff as I am increasingly using my phone for internet based activities. One of the things which appeals to me about the Palm Pre, aside from the Palm heritage, is the slide out keyboard, although the keyboard seems to slide out from the narrow base of the phone rather than being a side slide keyboard such as that on the Nokia N97. I am still not yet entirely convinced about the iPhone, though it seems to be improving all the time, and I do have a love for my Nokia N95 8GB which replaced my previous Sony Ericsson. One thing is for sure things are looking pretty exciting on the mobile phone front.

One of the first things to notice is the distinctly difference visual interface. Fortunately, the key elements are still there and the darker colour scheme is much easier on the eye. I still have to find a way of hooking into my Wacom graphic tablet – looking at the Wacom product support page it does say the product supports both Pressure and Eraser settings whereas Photoshop supports Pressure, Eraser, Tilt, ToolID, and Airbrush.

Whilst the application now leans more towards a camera work centric perspective there are still a useful number of features on offer including the object removal tool, media recovery software, layer styles and the make over tools. X2 Ultimate adds a number of features of X2 including the creative extras pack, photo essentials 4, the media recovery software, Raw format camera support and several other features. Paint Shop Pro Photo is currently up to version 12.01.

Looking ahead – I am still undecided between Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw – I like Illustrator but the price is too high for me. If all goes well with Paint Shop Pro I plan to revisit Corel Draw, currently up to Corel Draw Graphics Suite X4, a product I was quite fond of a number of years ago and I also plan to take a look at Painter and Sketch Pad. It has been a while since I have used Corel products but it is quite timely as I am actively looking for a vector based graphics application for my cartooning work.

So, in the spirit of sharing, I have two pieces of advice to share with you today – this advice reached me from two people who played important parts in getting me started in my working life.

The first piece of advice, which actually came to me from Jon, the general manager, when I was working as a trainee manager in a nightclub (many years ago!), was “Always check the obvious things first”. This piece of advice has saved masses of time over the years. From making sure the door to the wine cellar at the nightclub is locked to double checking the correct cable is plugged firmly into the correct socket.

When you just cannot see what the problem is, take a deep breath and double check the obvious things.

The second, and one of the best bits of advice was from one of my early bosses, Roger, who told me on my first day working in information technology, “Never assume anything”.  Keen to make a good impression at the time I took this advice to heart and this one piece of sage wisdom has since helped me avert many a disaster, from ensuring a computer is actually switched on (after being assured it is) to making sure I read through the contracts I am asked to sign – you really never know what is hidden in the small print.

If something just doesn’t add up – ask yourself if you have made any assumptions.

Why do I mention these two pieces of advice now? I had to go out of the office and when I got back our ERP printing was not working properly. Whatever we seemed to do the printers were simply not printing and the print queue daemon seemed to be hanging. For a short time we couldn’t figure out what it was but something just did not feel right as it has worked just fine for many years and there have been no changes. Let’s not make any assumptions here – but instead check the obvious things – how is the rest of the network? I headed to the DNS server and there was the problem – the machine had failed (the backup DNS seemingly hadn’t kicked in but that’s another story). Shortly afterwards the problem was fixed.

What is the best bit of advice you have received ?

When you launch a print job, it’s usually almost impossible to stop it.  The "stopped" job hogs the print link and you can’t print anything else. 

The first times this happens the usual remedy might be to press the cancel button under Printers, remove the paper tray or attempt to delete the print job. The next resort might be to switch everything off and on again and disconnect and reconnect various cables – not something you might want to do with a big print run.

One of the ways you could deal with this would be top stop and restart the print spooler (Click start->run, then type services.msc, locate the Print Spooler then click Restart the service in the actions bar).

If this happens regularly you could create a little command line file and possibly put it on the desktop as an icon. The command line file should contain the command to stop and start the spooler (net stop spooler and net start spooler). You could also add a line to delete the .SHD and .SPL files in the spooler folder (located under your windows folder, then system32->spool->PRINTERS). Be warned however this would likely remove all the queued print jobs.

A typical script might look like

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.SHD
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.SPL
net start spooler
exit

Save it in a file, for example canceljob.cmd

If I find any alternative ways of dealing with this problem I will post them here.

Weighing much lighter than even a number of small net books I have experienced and yet with a comparable size – the fully blown performance of the R600 laptop with its small portable form factor is something to behold – the particular machine I saw contained the latest multi-layer 512GB solid state drive for storage which should lead to improvements in boot up speed and general drive operations.

Do not be fooled by its size – this is not a cut down laptop or super enhanced net book even though it has one foot in the small form factor door – this well engineered powerhouse contains an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo Processor with a 800 MHz front side bus, DVD Drive, WLAN, Bluetooth and 3GB memory. Battery life is up there with typical every day use – for maximum battery life Toshiba quote eight hours use.

You would think to pack in this sort of functionality the components would be tightly packed leading to highly sensitive internal workings however this machine has also been built with durability in mind. From the physical flexibility of the screen, the spill resistant keyboard, fingerprint security device and shock protection mechanism. I particular liked the way the screen could be folded down securely without the need for a specific catch. For an example of durability I saw one machine thrown across the room and remain in working order – I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a regular basis but it helps drive the point home.

You can get all the specs from the Toshiba site shown below but some of the points about the R600 which caught my eye include the 12.1” Transreflective screen offering a pleasantly lit resolution of 12800 x 800 backed up by an Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics adapter. I didn’t get long with the machine but the time I did get showed me it really has something to offer – it will be fascinating to see what it makes of Windows 7.

Go to Toshiba to learn more.

Images from Toshiba

Now I have a pretty reasonable grasp of the basics of ActionScript 3 and its object nature the next step has been to take a step back and write down the plan for the project in order to frame the scope– remember this is going to be a simple pair matching game.

Project Outline

• Pairs use a grid of 10 pairs of cards (20 cards in total) arranged in a 5×4 grid.
• At the start of the round the cards are randomly shuffled and the timer starts counting in seconds.
• Player clicks one card which flips over to reveal its face, the player then clicks another (different) card which flips over to reveal its face.
• If the two cards are the same the pairs are removed. If there are no more pairs the timer is stopped, the game is over and the final time is presented to the player.
• If the two cards are different they are returned to their face down position after a short time (a few seconds for the player to remember them).
• Add a front information screen prior to the game starting and hook this into a menu button on the game.

Project Wish List

With many projects it can be tempting to start adding cool new features before the primary development is complete. To provide a forum for these ideas but frame them outside the primary development cycle I am employing a Wish List – anything interesting but not essential is included on the Wish List:

• Animate the cards flipping over
• Play an animation when two matching cards are found
• If the player clicks on another card whilst two cards are face up they are immediately returned to their face down position
• Add a pause facility which will stop the timer, return cards to their face down position and disable flipping cards until the game is un-paused.
• Count the number of times the player flips cards.
• Add a score to count the number of successful flips.
  • If add a score add a combo for successive matches in a row
• Add a game over element if too many flips are made or if the timer reaches a certain time
• Add a scoreboard feature to record the time and number of flips
• Keep an ongoing record of the players best time and number of flips – perhaps using a cookie?
• Add a high score table
  • If add a high score, allow user to enter their name
• Add a title screen
• Add a high score screen

Development Questions

During development a number of questions may be posed which require further discussion – these questions, so far, are included in this sections.

• Best practice question: Would it be better to place an EventListener on the Engine Class or on each card instance?
• What object deconstruction and garbage collection is required

Progress So Far

This section aims to provide an update to the development so far. The next step in the project has been to provide some simple pairs of cards together with their backs. Initially only the backs will be shown in the game but for now I will show them face up (to make development simpler). The current cards are pairs of simple black rectangles with the numbers 1 to 10 – you can see them in the image lined up (they have not been randomly organised yet).

You can also see I have added a Timer and a Menu button. The button does nothing so far however the timer increases approximately once per second.

Once I got the cards placed into an Array it was a case of creating a new empty Array then cycling round the original array twenty times, choosing a random position and adding that to the new array (then reducing the size of the original Array). Finally the the new array is copied over into the game array and we have a fairly random distribution of card pairs.

That done it was time to place the cards face down. All the cards are defined in a single symbol with 11 frames. The first frame is the back card and the next 10 are the game cards. All I need to do is set the draw routine to show the first frame for each card and we have the backs as shown in the next diagram. Be amazed at the current card design – I know what your thinking – simple yet effective

The last step for now is to add the logic so when the player click on a card it flips over to reveal its face. This was done by adding a mouse event listener to the card which turns the card and despatches an event to its parent to let it know what has happened. Now we have the beginnings of a game.

The next step will be to record the turned card in the parent class and perform some action upon the second card turn to establish:

• Has the player clicked on the same card
  • If so, reset the card to be face down
• Has the player clicked on a different card
  • If so, do the two cards match? If Yes, remove them and If No, reset them both face down.

That’s it for now, hopefully next time we can start including some analysis of the code so far and an outline of the various classes which have been created.