bennettblog

Or cowboys as I like to call them

Actually, that’s a little bit harsh. Just because you have a tendancy to use your clipboard a little bit more than most doesn’t necessarily make you a bad programmer, although it might shift the odds a little.

That said, copy and paste coding is fast becoming one of the things that annoy me the most during my day-to-day software development job. I’m not going to pretend that I’m whiter than white and I can’t say that I’ve never done it myself, but that was a long time ago and I wasn’t as experienced as I am now. Plus I’ve been caught out by it, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t want it to happen again.

As more and more development libraries and APIs become available, Java developers are fast moving from being a skilled programmer, able to delicately craft and sculpt classes and methods, to a semi-skilled plumber who knows where to find the right libraries and knows a minimal amount of code to connect it all together. The problem is that these plumbergrammers don’t always create those pipe connections to the highest quality, instead choosing to copy the example from the API website or some newsgroup. No big deal, well not until the server room ends up getting flooded, the copy and paste coder doesn’t understand enough to know where the leak could be coming from.

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I’m getting more and more annoyed with the way which Vodafone UK is treating it’s customers with the Google Nexus One. When I bought my Nexus One, I bought with the understanding that all updates to the Android operating system would be pushed to my phone. Not only would I get the software updates, but I would get them first.

A year or so later and my phone is starting to lag behind the official Google releases. When I got my phone it was Android 2.1. Shortly after getting the phone I received the Froyo update to take the phone to 2.2. Later that year (in December 2010) the 2.2.1 update was delivered over the air (OTA) to my Nexus One. This was delivered two and a half months after the official release from Google, so I should have really seen this as a sign of things to come.

And that’s where the OTA updates finished. My Nexus One is still at 2.2.1 even though 2.2.2 (January 2011) and two Gingerbread releases (2.3.3 – March 2011, 2.3.4 – May 2011) have been pushed OTA.

When I put this issue to Vodafone UK, they explained that they couldn’t give me specific information about when software updates would be released, or what the releases would contain. When I pushed them further on Twitter about the updates, they explained that the Firmware would be customised by Vodafone UK and then passed back to Google to distribute.

I’m not alone in thinking that this process is a shambles and feeling that I was missold my Nexus One, there are many threads on the Vodafone forums where many people share the same feelings.

Many users have taken it upon themselves to root their Nexus One and apply the uncustomised versions of the firmware in order to escape the Vodafone UK release process. This is something I’d like to try, but it would (according to Vodafone UK) invalidate the warranty on my phone.

I’d like to see something done about this, with network providers being made to provide software updates to mobile phone owners if they happen within their contract period. I’m not sure that this will ever happen, but it’d be nice to think that operators took their customers seriously.

I recieved a fish tank for Christmas, however it was a hoodless version. After losing one fish (he was a jumper) and having to top up the water email every day I decided to look for a condensation tray for the tank.

The manufacturer doesn’t offer this sort of accessory so I customised a standard condensation tray to fit. It seems to work well and the tank doesn’t lose (as much) water.

It’s not perfect but it does the job!

Recently I’ve been spending some time implementing HTML5 video for the new video channel at work. One of the main requirements was to enable the playback of all videos across the site using the HTML5 video container. The video container allows web developers to insert code into a webpage that will play video natively in the browser, without the need for extra plugins such as flash. This sounds great, apart from when you look at the formats needed to ensure videos will playback across all browsers, using the HTML5 video container where it is supported.

The HTML5 specification shows how videos should be included in a HTML page, however it doesn’t specify the container that should be used to display videos. Unfortunately for developers and content creators the makers of the most popular browsers can’t agree on a standard format either. Apple, the makers of Safari have decided that the H.264 is the way to go, and Microsoft seem to agree, with Internet Explorer 9 only supporting this format.

Mozilla and Opera have opted to throw their weight behind the Ogg Theora video container mainly due to the cost of licensing the H.264 codec and in the spirit of all things open source.

Until recently, Google Chrome had fixed on the H.264 container however they decided to remove support for this codec in future versions of Chrome and will instead back their own horse, WebM. WebM has the backing of Mozilla, and they have indicated that they will add WebM support to the upcoming Firefox 4. In my opinion, this probably kills Ogg Theora as a online video container.

Until all browsers support HTML5 video and the majority of people online are using these new browsers, there will be a need to include a fallback option and most people are reverting to flash in the case where the browser can’t play the videos using the formats supplied.

All of this means that content creators must create multiple versions of their video content if they wish to move to HTML5 video. The big push for content creators to support HTML5 video is coming from Apple. Their iDevices, the iPad and iPhone, won’t play flash video (which is probably the leading way of showing video content online at the moment) leading to sites to move to HTML5 video. There are many gotcha’s in moving to HTML5 video, not least that all content must be encoding twice, once in H.264 (IE, Chrome now, Safari, iPad, iPhone) and then in another format that allows it to be played on other browsers (Firefox, future Chrome releases, Opera). And then of course, you still need to have a flash fallback player for older browsers. So what would I go for? – Well probably H.264 and WebM in the long run but realistically you’re going to need Ogg Theora as well for the time being.

This leads to some very hairy HTML code, and rather than go into it here, I’ll just point you over to Video for Everybody, which has some excellent examples of how to include HTML5 video in your own pages. It also has solutions to most of the common problems when including HTML5 video.

Change of plan. I’m putting songcompare.com on hold for the time being, and focussing on finishing another project I started a while ago around todo’s and tasks. As you can probably guess, it’s a todo list manager. I know that there are plenty of them out there, and used to be a big fan of rememberthemilk.com, but it no longer does exactly what I want it to. I want my todo list manager to be simple, without the option of due dates (which only lead to overdue items). I don’t want lots of different views, just one simple list, with the oldest stuff at the top. I want the freedom to move tasks wherever I want, from todo to done, and back again if necessary. I want the ability to see when I completed something. I want to be able to add wiki style notes to a task. I want a clean interface. I want search.

I’ve only just ported the code, but I’m thinking that the first version should be online to play with in the next couple of weeks all going well. I’ve shown an earlier cut of the functionality to a few people, and they seemed to like it – so now I need to focus of getting rid of the bugs and styling it up. And coming up with a name and logo…

So I tried to buy a can of Lilt from our overpriced vending machine at work and would you believe it, it gets stuck.

Suggestion of how to remove it please, reply to @stevebennett with #getmycanout. Buying a bottle of diet coke (on the row above) is not an option because as we all know, everyone hates diet coke.