Monthly Archives: April 2009

Chrome’s border radius CSS feature

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Just a note on how Chrome handles it’s rounded corners.

I found out about CSS3′s rounded corner support for Mozilla and Webkit browsers and happily started using it. Turns out though that Chrome currently doesn’t have the shorthand tag for it like Mozilla does – I’m sure it’s something they’re working on though (or maybe even just forgot).

What I mean is that whilst you can do this:

-moz-border-radius: 2px 2px 15px 15px;

For the radius to be applied clockwise starting from top-left, you can’t do that for Webkit at the moment. So you have to write it out long hand like:

-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 15px;

It’s a tad annoying, but at least Chrome support it, unlike some browsers.

Update: Lots of people seem to be getting to this post via Google, but not staying for long. Comment with what you’re looking for, and I’ll update this post this better information (helping you, and other people that come along later). If you really want to say thanks, you could Flattr this!

I’ll just check reddit one more time

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Realising I’ve been at my laptop pretty much 13 hours a day for the past month, I decided to take a break from it. Granted, the break was only two hours forty minutes, but it seemed much longer and I felt that I’d reached the high point of how relaxed I’d become, and actually felt myself becoming more stressed.

I guess I just don’t have anything else to do… When I’ve not been infrequently out with high school friends from back here I’ve just been bouncing between xbox and my laptop. In fact, whilst at the xbox I usually have my laptop open next to me… Offline hobby seeking required.

Oddly, I only got a 40 on this survey about having an Internet addiction, and I was totally truthful.

A desk is definitely required for productivity.

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Since I’ve been back for Easter I’ve been working by sitting on the sofa, with the laptop in front of me. It was cool to start with; all comfortable and what not, but now it’s getting annoying not to mention painful. I think that’s mostly the reason my concentration has massively been waning more than usual.

There’s definitely a few things that a programmer needs, despite my thinking anyone could do it when I first started. A desk is one of them, with lots of space for my laptop, and a second monitor (lots and lots of screen space), and a notebook (I’m always doodling things that make no sense to most people, but really helps me program).

I can’t even call it “taking a break”, but I’ve given up on trying to work and decided to download Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not even sure if it’ll run on my 8MB shared memory for graphics, but we’ll see I suppose. I plan on deleting and uninstalling it after this month’s subscription dies out, which should be sometime soon.

Downloading it shouldn’t be a problem whilst at my mum’s either. She recently got her connection speed bumped up… I’ve never seen anything this fast before…

I'd much rather take my knife to him, thanks.

I wonder if this'll be constant...

A step in the wrong direction for paid content…

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I think it’s important that new generations look into alternate ways of doing everything – specifically in this post though I’m talking about ways copywriters can make money from their content. Businesses need to seek out people with ideas that don’t stick to the status quo because when people get into a habit or a life style, it’s hard for them to get out of it.

There’s this new company that’s in the talking stages with various websites, Journalism Online, who has noticed that advertising revenues just aren’t cutting it any more, and paper sales of publishers’ content isn’t selling as much thanks to the Internet. That’s a valid and real problem for the media world. Their solution? Charge people to read the content. That’s an outdated monetisation method that just won’t work.

The reason it’s been chosen is that Journalism Online is headed by three people all of which are from the biz. Former producers, former executives. They’ve been around for years and charging people for the content is what’s comfortable for them, it’s what they know. But it’s an antiquated system which doesn’t follow along with the ethos of the Internet; “I’ll get it from some place else for free.”

Ars seems to think this is viable because some other publishers are already doing this and quite successfully. The Economist charges more than $100 a year for subscriptions and that’s where they make the bulk of their money (which is odd in an industry where advertising revenue is the biggest earner typically).

The Economist‘s demographic is high salaried, business minded, career orientated, older people. Eventually, those people will die. Younger people – the people who business always want to target – aren’t getting their news from paper-based publications; they’re getting it from the Internet. For free. And they become to expect that. Users get really annoyed when things change (Facebook homepage update, LiveJournal’s shift to Basic and Plus accounts a while ago, Twitter stopping sending SMSs to UK phones, take your pick for an example), and going from getting our news for free to having to start paying for a subscription for the same thing we’ve been getting for years makes us angry.

Journalism Online‘s approach to changing websites that we use everyday will work for a short while – whilst the people that are used to paying are still buying. But when they stop, you’ll have no customers left.

This crashes my Apache. wtf.

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This may be wrong, but it shouldn’t cause a system failure. Just saying.

<?php

//  A hard coded list of websites for now
$feeds[] = "http://www.reddit.com/.rss";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.digg.com/digg/popular.rss";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index";
$feeds[] = "http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml";
$feeds[] = "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot";
$feeds[] = "http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index";
$feeds[] = "http://www.hecklerspray.com/feed";

//  Pick one, and open it
$chosen = rand (0, count ($feeds) - 1);
$feed = file_get_contents ($feeds[$chosen]);

$dom = domxml_open_mem ($feed);
//  Nab all the items
$items = $dom->get_elements_by_tagname ('item');
//  Pick a random node
$chosenNode = rand (0, count ($items) - 1);

//  And get the <link>
$itemLink = $items[$chosenNode]->get_elements_by_tagname ('link');

foreach ($itemLink as $item) {
  echo $item->value ();
}

?>

Geeking it up together

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After working on Summer09 all day (that’s its working title), I’ve decided to take a break now that the hours can now be called “small”.

I was Vimeo stumbling, happy that I have high speed internet access to watching videos in HD, when I found this.

If you’re too lazy to watch the video, basically what it is is a person once in a while opening their home/office/space to random workers, typically freelancers from the looks of things, in a really casual working session. I guess it’s a lot like a hackspace, but solely for laptop work. I love that there are places like this, and I really wish there were more of them.

I’ve looked through the workatjelly wiki for places in the UK that do these, but it doens’t look like there are any set up at the moment. For the moment I’ll stick with the hackspace stuff.

There’s a meeting on Saturday which I’ve nabbed a ticket for, and am definitely going. I’m just planning on taking my laptop so far, but if I can find the money to, I think I’ll hunt down a Maplins and get a arduino board (which I’m not even sure what it is) and generally geek out. I’m hugely excited if not slightly nervous about meeting a group of strangers.

The state of my market

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After doing a few hours of market research (not exactly in depth, but a quick glance over my market) it turns out there is a definite gap. I’ve found a few websites (two) that offer exactly what I’m offering, and a few more that offer close to my service.

After playing with the former two (they give out two week free trails) it looks like they both designed fairly badly. They’re definitely not easy to navigate and both use confusing terminology. I’m not sure if they’re trying to avoid Microsoft’s names that have been used in their offline solution, but if they are they’re doing so needlessly. They’re not trademarked terms – they’re everyday words in the field – and changing them causes confusion for everyone. Especially when they use one term that’s already used within the field, but they’re using it for a completely different thing!

They’re missing out blatantly obvious features that seem simple to program in my head. I’m not going to mention them here, but I’ve done so in a OneNotebook. (Which is an awesome and under rated piece of software, by the way.) The feature I’m most excited about, and the one that I think business most need, is completely missed out.

One of the competitors I looked into even completely misses out on a vital feature for their service. And they’re the business that’s charging $250 a month for their lowest package, which could explain why my possible customer projections was so low for them.

They’re also imposing limits on their service which are totally wrong. I like to think that a forte of mine is knowing how to monetise services (in fact, it’s a consultancy job I’d love to do, and I plan to do more blog posts on my views for large, net properties), and I definitely disagree with how both these businesses are charging.

I couldn’t really find any other companies that do exactly what I want to offer.  Other companies I did find though are hoping to completely remove the need for my service for their customers. I can see why that’s a massively attractive prospect for the customer. This is a service where a business would just outsource this aspect of their activities. However, there’s absolutely no reason why (so long as I make my product awesome enough) these companies that I see as competition at the moment shouldn’t become my customers.

Sorry about this all being vague. I just don’t want my idea to be stolen so early in the game.

I mentioned Microsoft having a software based application that does what my service does, and I should probably talk about why they aren’t currently competing with me. Microsoft’s version is software based, where as mine would be cloud based. In the future I truly believe software will be completely removed from out computers, in place of a browser (not even a browser, probably) where we do everyone of our activities online. We can already do almost everything (*winkwink*) from Office in Google Docs, and that trend is only going to intensify.

Businesses like the portability of being able to do their processes without being locked into their offices at their desktops, or having to buy separate software licenses for their laptops, desktops, home desktops, etc, etc. The fact that they can access all their data wherever in the world is awesome too, in fact why not even have employees that live on the opposite side of the world? Presentation and meeting applications have been revolutionised by the Internet and web apps and can happen any where. They also don’t have to worry about the hardware, that’d be my job. They don’t have to worry about scalability either! My servers should be able to handle ten times more data than they want me to store and still run perfectly. Tonnes of reasons why web apps trump applications, and I’ve barely started talking about it.

It’s true that Microsoft are moving into that area though. So area Google. So are other companies. That doesn’t worry me. They’re not working on what I’m doing at the moment. Which is integral; why would they start working on their own products if they can just buy business? I’m not saying I want to run this business for a year and then drop it for a quick sum of cash – I’d request to stay on in the company in some influential point (not just “founder”) – I’m just saying that’s an opportunity that I’m not ignoring.

More and more software giants are starting to give a shit about web apps because they can’t be pirated. You can’t crack serial codes for an online account to something like you can for Spore. That means a sustainable score of revenue for them, rather than a short jolt of revenue on release, and then that stopping as you watch the seeder count increase on The Pirate Bay.

Foiled by Microsoft

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It’s taken me about five hours to work out that it doesn’t look like it’s possible for PHP to convert Excel files (xlsx or xls) to XML, or any other plain text and then to XML. I can see why some projects take much longer than they should, and why programming only takes up a little more than half of that time. The hours I’ve spent around Google today are probably going to be reflected in most days.

Anyway, I found a C library that does that, so I’m going to have to use it. That shouldn’t confuse the PHP code too much, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. Do different languages often overlap like that? Scrap that. Looks like that library creates XLS files, the exact opposite of what I want… (I got excited when someone linked to it in IRC, so I assumed.) Back to square one, eh?

The annoying thing is that if I was using ASP, I could totally do it from within the language. That doesn’t make me want to start using ASP though, to be honest.

This update has little point: A secret project I’m working on

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I was looking through a Mashable post on some start-up companies which always gets me motivated. I want to be motivated because I wanna start working on that web app I want to release by the time I get back to uni in October. Seven months should be more than enough to program almost anything, but typically my heart isn’t in it. Hopefully it will be this time though.

I was reading that post and suddenly realised what I could make. I’m not going to release it here (because that’s how cool it is), but I am going to say that it’s focused on business, rather than social which I just assumed it would. Might not even happen, I’m gonna do some research and some screen designs and stuff.

Does it being business orientated mean that it needs to be less sans-serif and more serif? Less curved edges? WordPress looks professional, but more matured because of that. I dunno, I’m not a designer. I suppose that I’ll just make it bland until it looks like a finished product and then get a designer to come fix it up. (I’m more likely to make money from a finished project than an unfinished one, so why started shelling out money when it’s unfinished?)

Kevin Rose apparently draws out screens or something? Hopefully they’ll follow up the video he and Tim did. They’re basically talking about how investing works these days. Hugely interesting and enlightening.

Making an impact

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Today marks a time in my life where I can do even less work that I’ve been doing so far; the Easter holidays. In fact, it’s more like breaking up for the year. The only reasons I have to return to university are two exams in May, after that I’m free to be where I like until October.

I’m not going to set out aims because I never reach them, and I look like someone that sucks at keeping to lists. Instead, I’m just gonna say somethings that it’d be cool to get done.

First thing is making an actual web app that actually does something and release it. My problem here is I always have ideas and then typically seconds later I read on Techcrunch that a start up has had an amazingly innovative idea that’s shockingly like mine. So, I’ll at least try and make a cool bookmarklet over the holidays. It’ll do something cool, honest.

I totally want to make my Tumblr the top search for shamess. It pretty much has everything to do with me; my tweets, my shared RSS stories, even this blog. It’s pretty damn nifty. I don’t know many people that use it though. Tumblr was actually an idea of mine too, which I guess I had an age too late. I was thinking of making an extension for Firefox that’d let me grab a piece of text/image/video and stick it on another site for later viewing. Then I found that’s exactly what Tumblr did, so I started out there.

Another idea I had a while ago was what start.io is doing. In fact, I already have that system on my localhost page, but I think I’ll likely switch to start.io now. Anything I don’t like about it I can just change using a Greasemonkey script (like showing the links in a different order depending on what time it is).

I picked up WoW again today, in all it’s lowest graphical settings, OpenGL glory. I played a hefty amount of hours before I wasn’t having fun. Maybe I should just limit myself to an hour or two playing? That’s the height of fun before I get bored and leave the game thinking “I can’t believe I just spent so long playing this dumb game.” That’s just a downer. It’s just so damn easy to forget that you’re supposed to be having fun.

Same as Tribal Wars, really. My tribe is proper hardcore playing, and up annoyed at me for lagging behind. To be honest, I have been trying, I’ve no idea what has caused me to fall behind so much. But either way they’re acting like I’m a bad person because I’m not up in the tens of thousands of points and have three villages. Really? I play the game till it stops being fun each day, if that’s before I reach optimum pointage, then that’s the way it is.