Lets face it – there isn’t much point in websites storing your email address. Unless of course you have some sort of newsletter that you send out on a regular basis, or are part of a spam ring responsible for Nigerian scams, then there is no need to store the email address past the registration and verification point.

There is an exception to that rule, and in this case its a case of forgotten passwords. A secret question and answer is a great to avoid email addresses, unless of course you forget the answer to the question. In many ways, its like remembering two passwords, and if you forget the one you enter on a regular basis, how are you supposed to remember the second one?

In my opinion, email address are still a great way to recover lost passwords. But that also means keeping the email address on record. If this was any other site I wouldn’t have a problem storing the email addresses in this way, but for a touchy subject like politics, I believe that privacy is paramount. I think that its important that people feel secure online, and especially with laws like this in place.

By encrypting your email address, it allows me to have no clue as to who you are (aside from your username) while at the same time allowing you to reset your password via email. This might seem a little confusing at first, but its really simple.

Lets say you did forget your password, and you go to the password reset form to get a new one. It’ll ask you for your email address. In the background, the computer also encrypts your email in the same method that it used when you first signed up. If both of these hashes are the same, then it means you entered the same password and I can take the email address you entered into the form (which still remains unencrypted) and email you out a new password.

In addition to the privacy aspects, it also protects your address if ever my database gets hacked. If such a thing was to occur, then the only information they’ll see is a bunch of hashes that make no sense and can’t be reversed. I should also point out that this is the same method nearly all websites use to secure your passwords (although some may be stronger then others).

This form of evil has a name, and its called a CAPTCHA (Or, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and where devised to help keep spambots out while letting humans in. The problem here though is that initially CAPTCHA’s started off relatively easy to solve while power computers where hard to come by. But as computers have gotten cheaper, its become more and more easier for computers to read these words.

It then becomes a cat and mouse game, as the CAPTCHA’s become harder to read in an effort to fend off spam bots, which ultimately makes things harder for us, sometimes impossible. Take for instance the image on the right (taken from Wikipedia). Its impossible to know if that first word is klopsh or kbpsh. It might be easy enough to hit the refresh button and get a new image, but that’s beside the point.

Others have attempted to eliminate reading text from an image by coming up with other creative CAPTCHA’s. These might include doing basic math (what’s 2 * 4), answering a general knowledge question (what noise does a dog make) or requiring a mobile number to complete a registration.

To me, all of those approaches have fundamental flaws. The correct order of operation isn’t known to everybody (2 + 2 * 3 could be interpreted by some as 4 * 3 = 12 or 2 + 6 = 8), a dog can bark, or woof and many people (myself included) have privacy concerns giving their mobile number to random websites. If a CAPTCHA is to be enforced on a website, there shouldn’t be multiple answers, you shouldn’t need to use a calculator to get the answer, and you definitely shouldn’t need to give up your mobile number just to join a website.

A few years ago, I found a program from Microsoft that used a different type of CAPTCHA to separate spambots to humans – images. Basically you were given a series of images (puppies and kittens) and where asked to select all of the certain type to continue. If you passed a certain threshold, you were deemed a human and could continue.

I liked this idea, but wanted to adapt it slightly to suit Polliethink. What I’ve decided to do is show three pictures, two celebrities and one politician. To pass, all you need to do is click on the politician.

While facial (or animal) recognition software exists today, its nowhere near advanced as Optical Character Recognition (the software spambots use to break text CAPTCHA’s). While you and I can tell the difference between Kevin Rudd and Katy Perry above, a computer might only be able to tell you who’s who. It would then need to run a list of names to see who is a politician, and who isn’t. Not the most perfect system in the world, but a lot easier on us then trying to read a water-soaked newspaper.

So last night I wrote a script that got a mix of 2600 people off Bing, some celebrities and some politicians. The next step is to weed through all of these and remove any confusing photos and see which politicians people are having a hard time viewing. If your feeling bored, go on over to my Captcha test site and click on a few pollies. If you see one your not sure about (like a couch in place of Kevin Rudd, hit the Not Sure button and try a different one.

http://captcha.squaregarden.net/

It could be a simple glitch, or I could have stumbled across a test interface for a new Google login. As much as I would like to think it is something new and exciting, the fact that it asks for an @google.com address (that are only given out to Google employees). It also focuses on Google Docs and Spreadsheets (including writely in the URL) and makes no mention of Google Reader.

It’s most likely that there was a post in there somewhere that linked to an document on Google Docs. Somehow the permissions may have been set to employees only and was redirecting there asking me for access.

An even less likely scenario is that are are a little worried about the upcoming release of Windows Live Wave 4 (including Office live) and are preparing to tweak things around a little bit to counter Microsoft. There is some truth to this though, as earlier this week Google rolled out and update to Google docs, and it seems only logical that Gmail, Google Calendar and Google talk (whose logo’s all appear in the clever google bowl at the top of the page)

You might be asking yourself what is Polliethink, and it is a good question with a bit of a story line behind it. The idea came to me last November, after the ISP filtering report from the Labor government was published. Being an opponent of the filter, I wasn’t sure what policies the other major parties had in regards to it.

Now this probably wouldn’t have been important unless there was an upcoming election- and luckily there is. So my option now was to conduct research into what liberal party thought of it, what the greens thought of it and what other minor parties thought of it.

But why stop at just one issue? It seemed rather pointless to conduct my vote on just a single issue. Suddenly, ideas started forming in my head about this magical website that helped make my vote easier to cast. Having someone read through all of the daunting documents and summarise each of the policies in easy to read English, cutting out all of the Jargon.

It’s safe to say that a lot of people don’t like voting. They don’t like the lead up to it, where all we see it TV advertisements and signs that say vote 1 in every second home. It’s a time where politicians spend time in their electorate actually talking to the people (or rather, talking up their policies). Now in between the core-promises and smearing of the opposition, there exists a cloud of hot air where many of their real policies are either hyped up, or ignored completely (depending on whether it’s a popular more or not).

What polliethink aims to do is simplify all of this for you. You still may not be excited out voting, but having one location to get a basic run down on the party you’re voting for seems a good idea to me. Polliethink isn’t just limited to the three major parties either; The Australian Fishing Party can also make an appearance (providing it has a relevant issue on the site).

Polliethink is currently undergoing private testing (along with the research of different issues), but by entering your name in on the website (http://polliethink.com), you will get to be one of the first people to try out the site when I am ready for it to go live.

Symbian started its life as a joint venture between a few companies, with the most notable being Nokia. It is the oldest of the 4 mobile platforms I’m reviewing and has the largest market share, hovering around 47%.

This is where’s its first problem is. Nokia’s first phone to make use of the Symbian OS was the Nokia 7650, released in 2002. It’s now 2010, making this operating system almost 8 years old. In that time, phones have gone from having as little as 4mb of available memory to as much as 32gb. The biggest change perhaps came after the launch of the iPhone, which saw a whole new wave of touch screen phones hit the market.

Desperate to keep up, Nokia did some tweaking to its current version of the Operating System (Symbian OS 94) to enable touch based inputs. This puts it behind its other three main competitors who have an operating system based around touch screen mobiles, whereas Nokia has adapted one to fit. Furthermore, Symbian is the only operating system here that doesn’t have any phones capable of multi touch.

The next thing you need to consider is the availability of applications for your phone. There are countless applications available for the S60 platform, but very few of these would have been released in the touch screen era, and many would have been built for older, less powerful phones. So while iPhone users get to play Plants vs. Zombies, Nokia users get games like ZumZum (which isn’t even compatible with the N97).

The final aspect is of course the hardware. The N97 is approaching its first birthday in June and aside from Nokia’s N900 tablet, it’s currently their fastest mobile phone with a clock speed of 433 MHz and 128mb of RAM. Compared with the Nexus one, which was released in January this year with a 1 GHz processor and 512mb of RAM, this makes Nokia’s offerings rather pathetic.

This creates a tricky mess for developers, and provides a catch-22 to its end users. With such a diverse hardware range, it becomes harder to develop stunning software compatible with a wide range of phones. More phones may ship with Symbian than any other platform, but with a range of screen sizes and hardware, many developers may shy away from it in favour of the other three.

It’s not all bad though, because Microsoft has a close relationship with Nokia. Both Silverlight and Office will one day reach the Symbian platform, which is great news for those planning to read and view documents on the go. One small positive doesn’t outweigh the many negatives though.

Now I have no doubts that Nokia has another few phones ready to be released in the coming months. If it wants to stay competitive in this very volatile market, it needs to stay ahead of (or at the very least, keep up with) everyone one else. There are rumours that we will see a 1 GHz processor in a Nokia phone, but it’s no longer just about the hardware, the software and visual appearance also plays a significant part as well. Symbian may be getting a major overhaul in the user interface department later in the year but for now, it can’t compete with other systems on the user interface or hardware aspect.

My initial thoughts upon seeing the new site was that I had maybe zoomed in on my browser. Resetting it to the default size changed nothing, so my next thought was with the browser. I saw this on Firefox 3.6, so tired viewing it on chrome – with nothing different.

In addition to the larger fonts and logo, the login display picture (which has always been empty to me) now has a rounded border around it and the overall look and feel seems a lot more polished, which is something we are to expect from the new suite of software.

But perhaps the biggest change (and the one that will benefit me, and many others) is that you can now let Firefox save your password, something that was never possible with the old login.

I was now convinced that this was the new login box for Windows Live Wave 4. Over the past few weeks screenshots of the new Wave 4 software have been leaking out all over the web, and it’s been rumoured that it will make an appearance at Microsoft’s Mix event, due to start next week.

But in addition to Windows Live Wave 4, we’ll also see more information on its upcoming Web Apps, Internet Explorer 9 and perhaps most importantly, the Windows Phone 7 Series.

Is there anything else on this login screen that I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments.

As it turns out, writing your own blogging system is harder then I imagined. Looking over at Simon’s blog, it seems to be very simple. No categories, no truncated posts- just posts and comments. It was vastly different to the system I wanted, and I persisted onwards, ignoring the many limitations that would one day come back and haunt me.

One such factor that I wanted to include, but couldn’t implement was trackbacks (or pingbacks). To put it simply, they manage all of the incoming and outgoing links to your blog to create a network of linked posts. The specifications for pingbacks exist, but the documentation is severely lacking. There seem to be no tutorials out there implementing such a feature and the documentation only describes how it should work, and provides no examples to work off.

The admin panel was another point of concern. In many ways, the admin panel needs to be as functional as the main part of the website. Initially working off phpMyAdmin, I quickly grew tired of this and coded up my own admin platform in a weekend. Needless to say it was poorly coded and cost me another weekend improving it.

It still didn’t work properly, and my next option was a little more cleaver. I would use the WordPress database and admin panel, and modify my code to use as a frontend. With the help of a little plugin to clear the cache, I had a brilliant system.

After spending time considering my options, I decided to move across to WordPress completely. I have an upcoming project that I expect to release sometime before then end of March, and over the next few months it will command quite a bit of my attention. While I’m working on this, I still want my blog to be up and running – and outsourcing development seems to be the best thing to do.

That’s not to say that my blog was a complete waste of time. I’ve learnt a fair bit about the optimisation and caching of my code that I’ll be able to put forward into different projects and I’m currently open sourcing the code I have so that others can use/adapt it to their own needs.

I set my alarm this morning for five o’clock. It’s not something I do often, but it’s not every day Apple announce a mysterious, all new product. Fumbling around for my mobile phone I stopped and thought for a moment if I really wanted to give up sleep for this Apple tablet. I reached over and grabbed my netbook from my bedside table, as I had placed it specifically there for this very event. Waking it up wasn’t a problem and its proper tactile keyboard acted as a base for the 10 inch screen, leaving my arms free to remain under the covers.

Moments later I was watching streamed flash footage of the event while engadget gave me a text based stream of events. The predications where right: Apple had announced a tablet computer. I stayed for bit, watching as Steve announced each and every little feature of the iPad. My excitement for the device was starting to wear off and I gave up half hour later, choosing to go back to sleep.

I awoke hours later to find that nothing else had changed. There were no extra surprises; it was exactly what I thought it was, a larger, oversized iPod Touch. It was a joke, and many others agreed with me. At the core level, there are three things wrong with the iPad- the name, the hardware and the software.

The Name
This is pretty much self-explanatory. Remember when Nintendo announced the name of the Wii? It was the butt of many jokes but can finally rest easier tonight as the iPad wins the award for the stupidest name. Before this tablet was even revealed, two names where fighting it out for the top spot, iPad and iSlate. While the iSlate could be (and would have been) interpreted as is late, it’s certainly a much better name then the iPad. It was also reported that fujitsu owns the rights to the name iPad, and as far as I know, it could be a whole Apple-Cisco debate all over again. What would be a rather entertaining outcome is if fujutsu refused to give up rights for the name, making Apple change the name of the tablet. Actually, it might be starting quicker then expected

The Software
In my opinion, running the iPhone OS on it was a big mistake. For starters, it can only run iPhone apps, which of course can only come from one spot – iTunes. Should anyone want to make an application for it, you must first submit it and await a response. If (and only if) Apple like your product, then you get to place it on the store. Should they reject it, all that hard work has gone to waste as there is no second distribution method. Furthermore, should you wish to charge for your work, Apple also get to take a slice of your profits.

While this is nice for some developers to get their work noticed, they can’t distribute their own software on their own website, and to be honest, I find this appalling. There is a long standing stigma that Apple likes to promote that states that Macs don’t get virus’s. Apple knows that this isn’t true, and as their market share continues to increase, so does the likelihood that their operating systems gets attacked. The only way around this is to give a total lockdown of the operating system, something that we’ve already seen with the iPhone and iPad. Time will only tell if this sort of lockdown will come into its main operating system, but I think that it will.

The other obvious shortcoming of this tablet is that it lacks the ability to multitask. Despite equipping it with a much faster processor, we are still limited to just one application at a time. This means that we can’t watch video and twitter at the same time. We can’t use iWork and surf the net at the same time (which can be incredibly handy when researching projects). Basically forget having two windows side by side. Unless your application has been optimised for the iPad, then you can either have the application scaled up to fill the entire screen, or have a black border surrounding the outside of your app. This fact alone makes Steve Jobs’ stab at netbooks pointless. If I had a netbook that could only do one thing at a time (without flash by the way), then of course it’s going to be fast. It will also beat the iPad at whatever it is its doing, mainly because I have 2 gigabytes of ram and a 1.6 GHz processor. At the end of the day, I’m happy with my current netbook running Windows 7.

Speaking of Microsoft, they attempted to do something similar to this with Windows 7 starter, by restricting the number of concurrent programs it would run, but it was met with anger and resulted in them removing that particular restriction. Why is Apple any different? The screen and processor can easily handle two applications at a time, with the possibility for even more, so why didn’t they do it?

The Hardware
Now we get to the biggest downfall of this fabled tablet- the hardware. Inside it does a average job, with a custom made 1 GHz processor powering the entire machine. It comes in 16, 32 or 64 gigabyte models with no mention of ram. It has Wifi (802.11n), Bluetooth and a ten hour battery.

Things start to become undone with the screen. It’s not the OLED that many were expecting, and it’s certainly not e-ink, so staring at it for long periods of time (like we tend to do with books) can become painful. Not to mention the fact that fingerprints and smudges may show up in low light requiring you to wipe down the screen every time you plan to use it for reading. Instead, Apple gives us an IPS screen, which apparently makes it easier to view at greater angles. To top it off, the resolution is only 1024×768; which is at a 4:3 ratio, so watching high definition video (or even a normal movie these days) anything else presented in 16:9 will give you lovely looking letterboxes along the top and bottom of the screen.

There’s no doubt that Apple likes things simple, and in this case they’ve crossed a line. This line was right at point zero, so anything they do now becomes less simple and more complex. The thing I’m talking about here is the connectors (or lack of). There is no USB, HDMI, memory card reader or even mini display port. Everything (and I mean everything) has to go through the proprietary Apple connector that’s visible on almost all iPods or possibly Bluetooth.

But here is where it gets crazy – the number of different docks you can buy for it. In addition to the standard dock (that acts as a stand), you can also buy a keyboard dock – a fully functional keyboard that connects via the dock. That’s right, unless your keyboard is bluetooth, you’ll need to buy another keyboard from apple to use it. Then there’s the camera dock, which allows you to connect a USB keyboard, or plug in an SD card and upload them to your new iPad. It seems another new phrase will soon emerge – there’s a dock for that.

The Potential
This device had the potential to be something amazing. It could have come with a proper operating system that allowed it to be used in many more professions, including Graphics, home automation, board room presentations (wireless display/remote), a front facing camera would have propelled video calls forward and many other ideas. All of those ideas went down the drain when Apple announced that it was running off a modified iPhone OS.

Apple could have easily made it into a netbook, without making it into a netbook. By simply putting the dock on the long side, and releasing a keyboard/touchpad combo with some form of hinge, you could transform a single screen tablet into a proper netbook. And when you’re finished with the keyboard (and its additional USB ports), simply disconnect it and it becomes a tablet again.

All in all, this was a pretty lousy product by Apple, and they should stick do doing what they do best. Instead of trying to create a new market, they need to pick and old one (CD/MP3 players, mobile phones) and come up with a new innovative decide that’s never been seen before.

I promise that this will be my final iPad related post for the intermediate future.

The conference started at 5am in Sydney, where Steve Jobs opened by taking a few cheap shots at Nokia about their mobile income, claiming how they were the largest mobile devices company in the world (it’s awesome how statistics can be twisted, isn’t it). From there he talked about the history of Apple laptops and the iPhone, then stating that we needed a device in between (taking another cheap shot at netbooks along way- he may have been right in that respect).

After months of waiting, the collective groups of Mashable, Techcrunch and any other Apple fan blog in the world took a collective gasp as they got their first official glimpse at this new device. It was called the iPad and is basically a jumbo iPod. Then the selling starts and Steve Jobs had this remark about the Safari Web browser:

He then proceeds to sell the iPad a little more touting features like email, photos, web browsing (without flash), maps, music and video- all of which you can do on a normal laptop or mobile phone (or even netbook for that matter). After an 18 minute demonstration of what this can do, Steve goes back and explains the hardware behind it.

One of the things I noticed is how much they are pushing the IPS display. Until today I had never heard of such a term, and according to Wikipedia it basically allows for a greater viewing angle. Many people were expecting the iPad to contain an OLED screen which allows for richer blacks, eliminates the need for a backlight (saving your eyes from extinction) and thereby drawing less power, saving your battery. Introducing a new acronym allows clueless byers into thinking it’s better for them, while claiming that the Zune HD is inferior because of its OLED screen (which was so 2009).

It’s powered by a custom made 1 GHz processor by Apple itself. This is the first device that uses this custom processor, and I’m sure we’ll see more of them in future devices (I’m looking specifically at the iPhone and normal seized iPod Touch here). On top of this it has Wif (802.11n), Bluetooth, the standard proprietary 30-pin Apple connector, a speaker, microphone and can achieve 10 hours of battery life.

Being a Jumbo sized iPod, you would expect it to run iPod touch apps and it does, but only one at a time. Despite having a much faster processor, the iPad lacks any multitasking abilities at all. For now, your choice is scaling the application up to take the full size of the Window, or having a ginormous black border around the inside of the screen.

Apple also expects us to go reading with this device, with the newly launched iBookstore. In addition to this, Apple has signed up several major publishers and soon we’ll be able to download books for it. When you compare this hand in hand with the kindle, there’s no doubt that the iPad is capable of much more, but the Kindle easily defaults it with is e-ink screen. If I had to choose a device out of the two, I would have to say the Kindle, simply because my netbook easily handles everything else the iPad can do.

Finally, we get to the numerous docks you will soon be able to buy for the thing. This iPad only has one connector, which in turn connects to a variety of different docks. If you want to attach a keyboard to it, you better have a Bluetooth one; otherwise you’ll be shelling out for Apples Keyboard dock. There is no way you can expand on its memory, so that means no flash drives, no memory cards (although you can get a camera dock to plug in your camera) and certainly no portable hard drives.

While many expected it to be priced around the $999 (US) mark, the actual cost (for the base model) goes for $499. The Apple site doesn’t list any Australian prices yet, but I suspect that it will sell for around $800 dollars (again, only for the base model). This makes it more expensive then the cheaper end of netbooks, but less expensive than our some of the top of the line mini-notebooks.

Of course, it will no doubt sell moderately well but it won’t see the spectacular crowds that the iPhone has. The iPad does some things good, but does nothing well and that’s how it will fail.

Special thanks to engadget for their image based time line and images

As part of HTML5, a new set of standards being slowly implemented in all major browsers (Internet Explorer will get there eventually- I hope) a new option exists to play video within the browser and to control and manipulate it through JavaScript. This beats the current method of either using Adobe Flash or Silverlight, two proprietary plugins that have been known to slow even the fastest computers down to a grinding halt. There are two prevailing formats currently competing with each other. Firefox uses the free and open source OGG Theora format, while Google and Apple use H.264 – A very common format that can be decoded /encoded at a hardware level.

Much the same as the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray wars, the winning format will come down to a single player – Internet Explorer. Before I explain why, I think it’s important to explain why Firefox and Google went down separate paths.

On one side of the corner we have Webkit, the rendering engine currently used by Google Chrome and Safari. Webkit was originally developed by Apple as a fork of KHTML (found in Linux) and as per the GNU, required to open source it. Apple has always been a big supporter of H.264, with its first appearance in the Tiger version of QuickTime. H.264 can be found in the iPhone, Apple TV and most recently Webkit, as the preferred method of HTML5 video playback.

Apple is also responsible for YouTube’s conversion to H.264 back in 2007. In order for their videos to work on the Apple TV and the iPhone, YouTube had to re-encode their entire library to H.264. Google, being good partners with Apple (at the time) agreed, and soon had their entire library converted.

The reason why Google chose Webkit (as opposed to Firefox’s Gecko) when building Chrome is stated in this interview:

It turned out to be a perfect decision for Google. It allowed them to keep H.264 as its preferred video format on YouTube along with keeping support for Apple TV and the iPhone. Visit YouTube today in Chrome or Safari, enable the HTML5 experiment and for non-monetised videos you’ll see a neat new player that’s completely flash free.

Do the same in Firefox and you’ll be forever staring at a blank screen. That’s because its rendering engine, Gecko supports the Theora format instead of H.264. Mozilla chose Theora as it is an open source format, free of any licensing terms while MPEG LA (creates of the H.264 format) require licensing fees. Apple must have already paid these fees in order for them to be used in Quicktime, so it made sense for them to continue using it. This puts Mozilla in a tight corner with the largest video site on the internet encoding all of its videos in a competing format.

Now enter in Internet Explorer. Currently, it doesn’t support either of these formats (and I find it very unlikely that they will). Have a look at the following market shares, with statistics being taken off the December 2009 averages of statowl.com and w3schools.com (as both sites show very different details):

Based on this graph, I’m assuming that all people are using the latest version of their respective browser (which I know is inaccurate). This means that Webkit (and as an extension, H.264) has a combined market share of 12.83%, which is still nothing compared to Firefox’s (and Theora’s) 33.61%.

All three of those browsers combined still stand short of Internet Explorers 51.67%, and each one of those users still require flash for their video playback. The success of either Theora or H.264 possibly depends on Internet Explorer and whether or not pigs fly.

If Internet Explorer chooses to announce support for H.264 tomorrow in Internet Explorer 9, you can almost be assured that support for it in Firefox will come shortly. Should the Internet Explorer team chooses to support Theora in their next release, things get even more interesting.

Considering Google’s souring relationship with Apple and its views on open source software, it seems plausible that they drop support for H.264 in favour for Theora, although very unlikely. Should they remain loyal to H.264, one of two things will happen. The first is that YouTube will lose its internet dominance in favour of a Microsoft based Theora video hosting site (and this would make sense if it was backing the opposite technology). The second is that Google will become much more aggressive in promoting Chrome and may even try to get the H.264 format opened up (or at the least pay the licenses for Mozilla), letting Firefox move to it for free.

Personally, I think Microsoft will opt to side with Mozilla and chose to support Theora. This will allow them to launch a Theora based video hosting site to directly compete with Youtube. Throw in a bit of money to lure sites over to it (Netflix, Hulu…) and they’re setting themselves up to compete nicely with Google, but whichever way it turns out things are going to really heat up in the world of online video.