Author Archives: Wayne Horkan

About Wayne Horkan

I’m a technologist and engineer, typically working in enterprise architecture and systems engineering.

links for 2008-09-06

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links for 2008-09-05

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Tabs, Used Right: The 13 Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) Tabbing advice from a Web Guru… …..

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links for 2008-09-04

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Bored of Internetshire By Tim Caynes Simply the best blog I’ve ever seen, Tim Caynes rejection of the Blogosphere. …..

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links for 2008-08-31

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welcome to vue cinemas – the ultimate cinema experience Our other local Cinema – ‘Star City’ in Nechells, although we don’t go too often as it went through a spate of being ‘stabbing central’ at night and hasn’t shaken off that image well so far. ….. 1 Trackback

links for 2008-08-30

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My banana yellow Yamaha V-Max

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And a series of posts about motorbikes wouldn’t be complete without my own current ride, this lovely banana yellow Yamaha V-Max.

www.flickr.com


That’s right, it’s just a big ol’ engine and a pair of wheels, lol…

Horkan – Hungarian for ‘snort’

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I’m not winding you up on this one, check this out from Dictionary.com:

Horkan - Hungarian for 'snort' from Dictionary.com

I should think that a number of you will be more than a little amused.

A pint after work…

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Kieron, Darren, Ian and Graham at the Fine Line.

www.flickr.com

Three pals bikes; a BSA low-rider, a Yamaha Genesis EXUP Streetfighter, and a mint Honda VFR

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Keeping with this weeks motorbike theme, here’s some photos of three pals bikes that I helped them sell on ebay last year.

First up is Bob’s wonderful, but insane to ride (unless you were Bob), BSA ‘Low Rider’.

Second is Martin’s Yamaha Genesis EXUP ‘Streetfighter’ (mainly fairing removed).

Third is a friend of a friends bike, in that’s it’s Ricky’s brother Joe’s bike, an almost mint condition Honda VFR.

www.flickr.com


And yes, they all sold double quick…

Graham Helsby and his *BIG* sandwich

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Here’s my mate Graham with a very large sarny…

www.flickr.com


Now that’s a *Big* sandwich…

What do Facebook, del.icio.us, and last.fm, all have in common this month?

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Yes, that’s right; they are all suffering from functionality issues due to design flaws introduced in their last look and feel upgrades.

Looks like this is the month for it, because in rapid succession we’ve seen changes at all three of these web2.0 stalwarts.

So how have these changes effected functionality, and what’s the real problem at hand ?

  1. Facebook
    If your a Facebook user then you will have noticed the option to use ‘new’ facebook, which, although keeps the quite fixed layout (and color theme), moves applications onto a seperate ‘page’ (or tab rather, although it behaves as a page).
    The major problem with this is settings between the new and old Facebook layouts don’t appear to be compatible, which points to access control being about the UI and not about the data itself.
  2. del.icio.us
    So del.icio.us have introduced a ‘richer’ look and feel, but appear to have lost some of their elegant simplicity. A shame, because for a service like del.icio.us I’d rather have function over form.
  3. last.fm
    Similar to the issue with del.icio.us, but in this case their is a huge user community hankering for backwards compatibility with the old look and feel, who want a similar ability to the recent Facebook refresh in being able to ‘swap’ between the two UI designs.
    Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea, because like the current Facebook issues, who’s to know what settings and access controls are locked into the UI and not the user data.

Along with the recent problems at Twitter around “outbound SMS messages” it’s turning out to be quite the month…

Castle Bromwich Hall Church Fete

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Our local C of E Church, St. Mary and St. Margaret’s Church, in Castle Bromwich, just before the arrival of our new Parish Priest, Gavin Douglas, and family…

www.flickr.com

A visit to the National Motorcycle Museum

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Yep, it’s Dad boring the poor kids senseless with the absolutely wonderful National Motorcycle Museum; we live that close that we’ve been so often they’ve only just let me take them there again…

If you like Bikes, no scratch that, if you *LOVE* bikes, then it’s definitely the place for you.

www.flickr.com


And that’s right, I’ve tagged this ‘Heaven’.

Last years photos from Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference 2007 (CEC 2007)

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Found these the other day, posted up to Flickr…

www.flickr.com

Microsoft’s very public “Blue Screen of Death” crash out at the Beijing Olympics

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First reported by RiverCoolCool on his blog: https://rivercoolcool.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D6F05428A2B8CB48!1570.entry

Then by Gizmondo: https://gizmodo.com/5035456/blue-screen-of-death-strikes-birds-nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting

Now it’s at the Register: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/olympics_blue_screen_death/

But what’s genuinely amusing about this is the comments that are coming up, they range from the obvious to the really quite odd.

There are the standard comments lambasting Microsoft, but I think these should be disregarded; basically because they are boring in the extreme and especially given how interesting some of the other comments are.

Comments at the Register can be found here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/olympics_blue_screen_death/comments/

The comments seem to be breaking down into a number of camps:

  1. The “Are they genuine?” camp
    There’s the camp that are questioning if the images themselves are real, or if they’ve been “photoshop”ed.
  2. The “Is it a hooky copy of MS Windows?” camp
    Plenty of people seem to be questioning if these are valid versions of Windows. Now this is just disingenuous; by implication (and directly, sadly, such as “it is in China after all”) it is being insinuated that this is what should be expected of China. I think this is pretty base, and hope it receives the contempt it deserves.
  3. The “Is it a Hardware error?” camp
    This group state that it’s a hard ware error that no OS could have responded to. Many add that at least you get this specific H/W error message with Windows.
  4. The “Have Microsoft done this on purpose ?” camp
    Now really this is like coming home to find that the life has turned into Bizarro World. Some of these conspiracy theorists note that one of the blogs in question is “supported” by Microsoft, others suggest that it is a ploy to get people to upgrade and move from XP to Vista.

Frankly what’s so very wrong with the idea that the pictures are genuine, that it is a valid copy of Windows, that there hasn’t been a hardware error, and that, just perhaps, software goes wrong occasionally?

It just takes a little application of Ockham’s Razor to see the truth here.

Follow me on Twitter, you know you want to…

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Seeing as I’ve been blogging about Twitter and it’s new lack of support for outbound SMS for Europe, the UK and the rest of the World (well, apart from the US, Canada and India, that is)…

And seeing as it’s generated a ton of page hits…

I thought I’d take this opportunity to invite you all to follow me.

Twitterfollow Wayne on twitter

You never know I might even follow you back.

Here’s what I’ve been Twittering (or is that Twitting, lol) about.

    New Sun and SCC Partner Website

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    Check out the new Sun / SCC partner website here: https://www.scc-sun.com

    Specialist Computer Centres (SCC) are one of Sun’s main partner organisations in the UK and you can learn more about them, and Sun UK’s reseller partners here: https://uk.sun.com/aboutsun/contact/partners/

    This has been out a little while now, but I wanted to make sure I brought it to your attention. There’s no nepotism here, even if SCC are based in Tyseley, Birmingham, and I once lived opposite the Greet Inn pub (not only sadly closed, but flattened as well), just round the corner to the SCC headquarters.

    SCC’s main web page is here: https://www.scc.com/

    And SCC Exchange, SCC’s direct retail site “exclusively aimed at small to mid-size businesses and public sector organisations”, where you can also get Sun kit from, is here: https://www.sccex.com/

    No outbound Twitter SMS for Europe, the UK and, frankly, most of the World

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    I received the following email this morning, apparently they’ll be no more outbound Twitter SMS for Europe, the UK and most of the rest of the World. The only countries to be keeping the outbound SMS service are Canada, India, and the US. Apparently it’s all down to the charges that our mobile network operators charge us for SMS delivery, which initially Twitter had been subsidising, however they can’t afford to do that any more and have begun to “rein in the cost” by disabling the service. I can’t blame them, however I think it’s a shame that they set a precedent by enabling this functionality, only to take it away.

    Oh, and good luck to them as they “negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas” but I can’t see this service coming back any time soon. And I wonder how long it will be before people are trying to find a way round this decision, potentially by spoofing a US, Indian or Canadian address, given that each of the solutions they have suggested have a cost to the user (either to deliver the SMS itself or to contribute to the datalink to the WAP service)

    Changes to Twitter SMS

    Hi,

    I’m sending you this note because you registered a mobile device to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

    I’ll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

    Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

    Before I go into more detail, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you’ve been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.

    Why are we making these changes? Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times–that’s because we’ve been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

    Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries. We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. Since you probably don’t live in

    Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter updates via one of the following methods.

    Twitter SMS by The Numbers

    It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

    Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way. We’ll keep you posted.

    Thank you for your attention,

    Biz Stone, Co-founder

    Twitter, Inc.

    https://twitter.com/biz

    Roller Weblogger blog post tag link code for blogs.sun.com, technorati and del.icio.us

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    Here’s some code that produces tag links to four popular tag destinations, your blog, blogs.sun.com, technorati and del.icio.us (for your Roller Weblogger based blog, as the code is velocity).

    It also ensures that the links are marked as tags, so that crawlers that look for and index tags and tag data will pick them up (microformat and semantic web focused applications, like the ‘Operator’ plug in for Firefox also pick them up of course).

    I only add it to individual entries, rather than collections, which is what “#if ($model.permalink)” checks for.

    Best to add just before or just after the Comments section in your main Roller template.

    The code also includes some functionality to replace ‘-‘ and ‘+’ with ‘ ‘, so as to make the text fit in the table (this does not affect the tag).

    You can see this functionality here, on my blog, and on Bill Vass’ blog, however you will need to look at an individual blog post to see it.

    If your on bsc you’ll need to replace ‘eclectic’ with your bsc blog name, or if your not on bsc you’ll need to replace “https://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/” with your entire blog URL.

    Here’s the code:

    
#if ($model.permalink) <!-- BEGIN TAGS: $entry.title -->

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 #set ($mytags = $entry.tags) #foreach ( $tag in $mytags ) #set ($tagText = $tag.name) #set ($tagTextNew = "") #if ($tagText.length() > 0) #set ($toDo = $tagText.length() - 1) #set ($number = 0) #foreach ($number in [0..$toDo]) #if (($tagText.charAt($number) == "-") || ($tagText.charAt($number) == "+")) #set ($tagTextNew = $tagTextNew + " ") #else #set ($tagTextNew = $tagTextNew + $tagText.charAt($number)) #end #end #end



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