I have been weighing up the options over the past week or so, ahead of the 50Mb broadband being installed. I have also run CAT6 cable from the attic (where the media server will be) down to the living room.

Looking at the options it seems there are a few issues to consider:

1. The living room TV currently is CRT and doesn’t have HDMI input
2. Do I want a central media centre that outputs to two TV’s, or two media centres?
3. Do I use a PC with a media centre OS or a dedicated solution?

With these issues in mind I have decided to take the somewhat baby step of buying an xtreamer system. This little box will sit near to the bedroom TV and connect via HDMI to the TV and by ethernet cable (down through the ceiling) or by wireless to the media server.

The cost of the unit is £107 delivered so I think it is a relatively cheap way of serving media to the bedroom TV, although the interface does not look as snazzy as the XBMC or Windows 7 MC systems. When it comes to upgrading the TV downstairs I think we may go for a bit more of a “grown-up” solution.

So, hopefully it will be delivered this week and I can get it in place. I don’t have massively high hopes of an all singing all dancing solution in the xtreamer, but as far as this piece of kit goes all it needs to do is stream hi-def video smoothly and consistently and I will be happy.

It also has a cute little iPhone interface for controlling it. I may try converting it into a proper app, as at the moment it is just a web page, but it does look cool.

I find myself quite often typing something into twitter and going over the 140 character limit. I think have to work out how to re-word what I said, cutting down the length of what I type but still making sense. Ok, quite often I end up with something akin to Newspeak from George Orwells book 1984, but often I find that there is actually a far more effective way of saying something using less words.

Of course some people end up replacing “to be” with “2b”, but that aside it at lease makes you think about what you are typing, even if you do end up butchering it afterward.

When I say reasonable speed I am referring to something in the region of 8Mbps or above, I am not greedy. The problem is the distance I live from the BT exchange (damn me for choosing a house more than a mile away!) means the maximum speed I can get out of my line is 3.5Mbps. In this day and age for anything other than email and a bit of web surfing it is just not fast enough.

The installation is due on the 17th of this month… Whether the engineer will turn up on time we will see, and if he does will he have the correct kit? Maybe I am too cynical in my old age, but my experience of Virgin in the past has made me that way.

As for the package, it looks reasonable. I am replacing my existing ADSL (with O2) connection, my Sky+ box with sports package and my BT line and shipping it all to Virgin. I am saving a few pounds a month off my bill, losing sports (never really used it that much) and getting 50Mbps Internet in replacement to an ambitious 3Mbps.

I will promise to post my experience of the (hopefully improved) Virgin service once it is installed. I do hope I don’t regret it as O2 have given fantastic support since the beginning and if only ADSL wasn’t such utter crap I would dearly love to stay with O2. Alas as Virgin hold the UK cable monopoly I am forced to sell my soul for a Virgin!

Google have a sandbox environment, open for all to see on the Internet. Just point your browser to www2.sandbox.google.com and take a look at their development environment. If they change the way results are presented or how predictive searches are built then it should manifest itself on the sandbox site.

I actually came to use the sandbox site last night as for some reason my connection to Google went astray but I could access the sandbox fine.

I have found a few times that Google make changes to the iGoogle pages on their sandbox site first, so it is worth checking every now and again if you are interested in seeing what’s around the corner.

Both managed and unmanaged hosting have good and bad points but it is important to differentiate between the two and choose the option that is right for you.

The following list is typically what you should expect from the different types of hosts. Not all hosts are alike though so please be sure to check before signing up.

Managed hosting

The good points

• You have a point of contact on the end of the phone
• If there is a problem with the server they will fix it
• They will take nightly backups
• If you accidentally overwrite your files they will restore from the backups
• If you get stuck configuring your site they will assist you
• If you need products setting up they can advise and assist

The bad points

• They are sometimes a little more expensive than unmanaged hosts
• The level of service is dependent on the particular host

Unmanaged hosting

The good points

• You usually have a control panel so you can configure your site yourself
• Sometimes cheaper than managed hosting
• Setup time is quick

The bad points

• If you need help you usually have to work it out yourself or log a support call and wait
• If things go terribly wrong the fix time can be slow
• You sometimes have to tell your client “I am waiting for them to answer my call”
• Backups are sometimes taken but access to restores is usually not available unless you have total failure

Which is the right hosting for you?

That entirely depends on the individual. If you like to get your hands dirty with configuring sites then unmanaged is the way forward. However, when things go wrong having someone managing things for you can be invaluable.

A case in point is reseller packages. In this case you have all your eggs in one basket. If something goes wrong you need to know you have the technical skill to restore backups (if you have access to them), configure email and web access and get things working again, fast! In this situation having someone at the server end working for you to restore normality can be a life saver (and a client saver!).

Generally my recommendation would be to use an unmanaged solution if it for a personal site, it is a great way to learn, but think twice about it if you are hosting a business site. The few pennies you save by not getting a managed solution could one day lose you a client.

If I analyse the amount of questions I get, both in work and out of work, on various topics (mostly technical) I think only 60-70% of the time I have the answer. The rest of the time I go away and find the answer. Most of the time I have some form of internet connection to the first port of call is to fire up Google and see what I can find.

if the problem was for example an error message, I would ask the customer/friend/colleague exactly what the error message was, word for word. I would then type this into Google (in quotes, to make sure Google knew I wanted to search for all the words in that particular order) and hit search. Most of the time the first page of Google is filled with helpful articles and forum posts with people having the same issue.

Sometimes there are pages of people having the same issue but there is no resolution, but most of the time (>90%) there are suggested answers. Sometimes there is the odd red-herring in that the question was asked in 2001 and things have moved on, but Google now have the facility to search for recent posts, so I you just search during the past 12 months then most of the answers are relevant.

I do not consider this to be rocket science, or some kind of secret code I enter into Google. I simply looked at the error and typed it into Google. Surely this is something the village idiot could do? Why then do very intelligent people come to me rather than asking Google?

The obvious answer is “why have a dog and bark yourself?”. LOL, ok, I asked for that! Seriously though, I don’t think that is the issue. Most of the people who ask really would not bother me with their issue if they knew they could get the answer from Google.

Could the issue be they did not know about Google? I find that hard to believe too. Google is so big it has become the word used to describe the act of searching for something on the web. “searching” has become “Googling”. That’s pretty impressive!

I can only therefore imagine that people are still techno-phobic. The scary thing is some of these people are not old, they are in their 30’s and really should know better. Maybe it is how I was introduced to computers at an early age, wanting to break and repair to discover how things worked, but for me the absolute last option is to ask someone else. Even reading the manual comes before that (and being a bloke, you must realise we just don’t DO that!).

One of these days I will write a simple (hopefully non-patronising) PDF that I can give to these people to print out (that’s what these people like to do, print!) which shows them step by step how to search in a smart way and how to filter their searches. Firstly though, I must get over the shock that most of these people simply don’t seem to even think about trying to find the answer themselves.

I have tagged this post as a “rant”, but it isn’t really. I don’t tell people to go away and Google it, I do help them. Maybe I should get a job as a researcher, I don’t know. I like helping people and that’s why I do it, but that still doesn’t help me understand why people seem not to want to help themselves.

When I started the site in 2007 the initial design was the phpBB bulletin board plain theme, with the logo in the top right. It stayed like this for a month or two as we got the membership started. After a while I gave the forum a graphical touch and some colour…. a few people liked it but most said they preferred it how it was. This should have been my first clue.

The new design was in my opinion (obviously!) much better. It separated our forum from those other plain ones out there and gave a bit of branding. After a while things calmed down and people got used to it. New members never knew the old look and so appreciated it for what it was then, not what it used to be.

Even in those early days the backlash was surprising, yet we only had around 50 members. Now we have nearly 3000 members, so I guess if the same percentage had something negative to say now as did back then, then that will be 60 times the amount of people…. oh boy, did it feel like it!

Why?

Looking back on my experience it is quite clear that in general people just do not like change. I could have suggested any design change, or got the best design house in the world to work for us and still there would be a significant amount of people upset that I changed “their” forum.

It’s not just me

Looking into it further I found it is not just me. This should be obvious, of course, but the best example I can find is Microsoft. I have yet to find anyone who opened Office 2007 for the first time and said “wow, this is great”, at least not someone who uses Office every day. It seemed awkward, different, unfriendly and unfamiliar. People were up in arms about it and could not understand the change. Thinking back the same went for old variants of Windows too. People always have something to say and it is the negative people who generally get heard above the rest.

So what’s the point?

The point of this post is really to say that if you get negative feedback about your changes then don’t lose heart. It does not necessarily mean you are “wrong” per se. It may be worth taking these peoples views into consideration if they are constructive, but generally trying to please a community in a design sense is futile to say the least and you will end up with bland.

This is a party political broadcast by the design party

Think of your role as designer for your community like you would a politician (this doesn’t mean steal their money and buy flash cars and houses!). Politicians are elected to make decisions on behalf of the people, some who voted for them and some who didn’t. If a political party had a public vote for every decision they made, not only would the country be in chaos, decisions would not get made and even more people would be disgruntled.

So why change?

The easiest thing to do would be to simply not change, right? Give the people what they are happy with (or not complaining about) and have an easy life? Maybe. That is certainly one option, but as I explained earlier it is a sure fire way for your design to get stagnant and stale. Most people see community sites from a usability angle. They want it to be familiar and see any change to the look and feel as an attack on “their” site. Providing you don’t make the site more confusing or laborious to use, stand up for your design principals and go for it. The fact you get complaints is more a sign you have done something bold than you have in fact done something wrong.

Re-design 101 – Get a thick skin!

The lesson I have taken from this is not to care too much what people say. People (especially internet folk… just look at YouTube commenters!) tend to go overboard, especially with an audience. I am quite sure most of the people who slammed my redesign would not have done it to my face, and the fact it all calmed down in 24 hours also means that it can’t have been that bad. In 6 months time I will likely do another re-design. Will I worry about the negative comments? No… Will I expect them… Hell Yeah!

Bring it on!

What is the cloud?

The easiest way to explain this is to look to our old friend, Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet”

One of the most popular and famous cloud providers is Amazon. To simplify it, they basically charge you for what you use in terms of data and in turn you get to back on to their infrastructure.

The benefits:

Their servers are super resilient
Their servers are very fast
The infrastructure is completely scalable
You never run out of space, you just pay for what you use
Bandwidth is immense, and wont be brought down by stumble/digg traffic

In real terms it means as a small development organisation (as an example) you do not need to worry about taking into account the server infrastructure behind your online application. Providing you have a business model that supports the usage of your app then you’re good to go.

What does it cost?

Cloud computing has a relatively low cost in normal use. You pay on a monthly basis for the space you use. You also pay for data transfer in and out, and for the number of requests and manipulation of the data. This all sound a bit complicated, but the figures are quite small. For example Amazon currently charge around $0.18 per Gb of data storage, and similar for transfer. When you look at the infrastructure behind it that cost is not too bad.

Who uses it?

You probably already use site that use cloud computing. If you post images on twitter you may use the twitpic image hosting service. Go to one of your images on there and view the properties of it, you will see it starts with http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/. The image is actually hosted in the cloud, on Amazon’s servers.

Lots of companies are taking on this model in order to rapidly deploy their environments. It is great for them because although their initial traffic is very low, it is completely scalable. In “the old days” you would have to invest up-front for huge servers in anticipation of the traffic you will get 18 months down the line!

The million dollar question!

One thing I have notices over recent years is lots of companies that seem to have a flawed business model. Companies such as Brightkite, an image hosting service combining traditional image hosting with geolocation services (a google map). This company does not charge for it’s services, it’s iPhone app is free. There are no adverts on the site either, so no obvious source of revenue either.

Perhaps Brightkite is looking to build a userbase and then sell out to one of the big boys, or perhaps they will introduce advertising or premium services at a later date, who knows? They are not alone in this though, lots of sites that have sprung up in recent times seem to be “free”. Although cloud computing is relatively low cost, it is not free, so one must wonder what their end-game plan is.

How are they going to turn their good idea into profit?

Don’t drop the phone!

My first impression of the phone is it feels very very slippery. The smooth screen and the smooth plastic back make it feel like it is going to jump out of your hands. This is not just my opinion, everyone I have passed it to has handled it like it is made of crystal.

With this in mind my first purchase was a leather slip case from Ikonicedge. Without going into details, fantastic product!

Usability

I must say the new 3.0 features are really rather good. Push notification is coming to a lot of my day-to-day apps and it really is welcome. I can have IM+ active and will receive an alert when a new message arrives. I have seen a noticeable decrease in incoming SMS since that has been active, in favour of shooting over an IM instead.

The wifi works REALLY well! When I walk into the house it auto-connects to the wifi network, which is great for receiving calls on skype etc, and great if your house isn’t in a 3G area.

Features and Apps

Just like the adverts suggest, for most things you would need to do day to day there really is “an app for that”. Not all of them are free, but most of them are quite cheap and generally very good quality.

I like the way the app store auto checks for updates, and when I wake up in the morning I click update and several of my apps update to the latest version… slick!

One thing to beware of it I have found myself loading the phone with small cheap apps for 59p, then finding that 59p + 59p + 59p + 59p etc does add up! (yes, to £2.36!)

Addictive!

Oh… my… word… If you want your productivity levels to remain what they were before you bought the iPhone do NOT install games, specifically Flight Control. This is positively the most addictive game I have ever played and I just can’t put it down! You have been warned! BTW, if you buy it (just 59p at the moment) my high score is 74 on the default map.

Phone + email

As a phone it works great. The contacts list is slick, the interface is great and the call quality is fantastic. I can’t fault it one bit. If it had a blacklist feature (you can get this only by jailbreaking it) then it would be perfect.

Email works really well too. I don’t use push email so I have yet to experience that, but the standard 15 minute check works for me. If an email reply cant wait 15 mins then the sender really should have called me! The interface to mail is very nice. There are a few features I would like to have seen like the ability to “select all” or select a group of messages without having to click them individually, but for a mobile app it does the job and does it well.

SMS

The sms functionality is nice too. I used an N95 before which was nothing short of embarrassing… really!!! To have an SMS app that didn’t display the time the message was received, well, enough said about that!

The iPhone deals with SMS’s as conversation threads. When a message is received and you open it you also see the previous messages sent too and from the individual. I tend to send my SMS via JellySMS and clickatell (Internet SMS provider) as international SMS messages are much cheaper that way, consequently I only see half the conversation. For general use though, it works well.

Conclusion

I love the iPhone! Not in a physical way, that would be wrong(!), but as a phone/gadget it really is great. The camera in the 3GS is great (no flash, but you can’t have everything) and there are very few frustrations with it. Battery life would be one I suppose, but the N95 had the worst battery in the world, so even that seems good to me. With normal use it could last a couple of days.

I am still in the honeymoon period with this phone, where I am taking great care of it and making sure it does not get scratched/bashed etc. I imagine this will last a bit longer than it usually does with my phones, especially considering how much I paid for it.

I will no doubt post more updates as I go, but for now I am very happy with my purchase. As a phone is it value for money… hell no… not as a geek gadget does it make me smile when I use it, absofreakenlutely!

Recently I have noticed a sharp rise in twitter spam. Squarespace, a blog (amongst other things) hosting company in the states recently announced they were to give away 30 new iPhones to people who included #squarespace in their tweets. This took off like wikd fire and at one point they were generating 170 mentions PER MINUTE! Well worth it from their point of view.

Unfortunately this campaign resulted in innocent bystanders getting flooded with tweets by desperate, greedy twitterers trying to get a free iPhone at the expense of pissing off the people who are following them.

My guess is in the next month or two we will see the major players in the twitter game producing 3rd party products to filter the spam from twitter. Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck would be where my money goes. Twitter is manic enough once you get enough people in your follow list, without having half of them generating veritable white noise.

I guess this was inevitable really. Every service that comes about (mass mail, email, sms etc) gets abused, and someone always fights back against it. It is just a bit sad that a form of communication which started out so simple will soon require plugins just to filter the wheat from the chaff.

There are two things I have learned from this. Firstly, that while this constant spamming is inevitable, where people get irritated there is usually a solution around the corner. Secondly, Squarespace will not be getting any of my money, ever.