Free internet for thee

If you ever find yourself at Sydney airport with a laptop that has a wireless network card, connect to the "Cisco" network. It gives you access to the internet for free for some reason. In fact I am making this post from the airport right now. I wonder if this is a permanent service or whether Cisco have made a security blunder here. It doesn't seem right because there is a 'sydneyairport.com' wireless network floating around here, and when connecting to it, you are asked to pay money to connect to the web at ridiculous rates. Well, well, surf's up!

tech wars

It seems that the last few weeks have seen a blitz of new technologies emerging, major players releasing products, and the UI wars are well and truly on. It has been a whirlwind. Not much of it will have major influences immediately and once the dust settles, it will be interesting who ends up standing. Nevertheless the recent events will have some sort of impact on the way that we work and the industry moves.
So, Adobe released their next iteration of their product suite. This includes the swallowed Macromedia's product suite, including the new Flash CS3 of course. Getting stuck into AS3 has been just around the corner for a while, so having a copy of an IDE AS3 compiler will be a wicked learning boost. The framework at work and the general trend is that everything we make will soon be AS3 based. This release of the Adobe suite has also moved the international design and developer community into line. This is ofcourse for those wo can afford it. But indeed if you haven't got the client who is going to pay for the suite and still profit, then you should keep learning with their demos or sell yourself to someone with money or a CS3 sitting on their book shelf. CS3 promises to work well on mac and windows computers and unify the way things are created. It's pretty much got the monopoly there as none can compete realistically anymore.
This will be boosted with the move of the Flex platform into the open source arena. This will be a major boost in how many people use Flex and now that it's open source, the emergence of Flex communities will be huge. At work we are moving onto the Flex platform so that'll bring me across into that arena, bit more importantly it will be a great learning experience, not to mention huge fun.
In the UI wars, Microsoft is flexing its muscle with Silverlight. Java is having a go with JavaFX. Seeing that JavaFX is considered as being a response to Microsoft's Silverlight, it looks like the battle will be fought out amongst those two for the number two position after flash. Both technologies have a long way to go in order to mature and even attempt to bite at Flash's ankles. But you gotta start somewhere, right?
In the dust, you'll see a lot of hype about Silverlight. Heck there'll be well paying jobs to develop Silverlight content. But that's only because Microsoft has wads of cash, but like most Microsoft technologies, it will become segregated to the Microsoft world. It will be interesting where JavaFX ends up, but my prediction is that it will go in the way of its Swing technology. Dead as.
But that's not to say that these technologies will not have any effect on us Flash devotees out there. The repercussions will be in learning what those technologies are able to accomplish and how. Then it's time for Flash to take the good things and discard the useless.

You could never be too careful, the tech wars are'a'brewin.

xkcd a day keeps the blues away

In case you haven't seen the stick-man figure comic strips at xkcd, they are just awesome. I've come across these a year or so back when they were sitting in a dump folder on someone's server. Obviously the dude got his wits together and made a galley of his gems. The humour is actually funny if you're a bit of a cynical geek and it works on other levels too. Great time killer. And with strips like this, you'd be one smirking uber geek.

MVC at WebDU

This presentation by Robin Hillard on the MVC pattern at the latest WebDU. It's a really clear explanation of how the Model-View-Controller pattern works and how it's applied in real applications. Well worth a look. Also as it happens, I'm working on a project that uses MVC, so to confirm what I've been doing is rightwas a relief, as I didn't want to hear that what I've been doing is toatlly wrong at this point.

web and 3D like gum and peanuts ?

The world of using 3 dimensions on the web has reincarnated many times. From the humble and corny animated GIF icons through VRML then in Flash Swift3D and now papervision3D, 3D on the web has never really made it. Why is that? Large part has got to do with the bandwidth required to create the balance between effective 3D animation and enough graphic detail to make it past the teeth-gritting experience of next frame anticipation. The bandwidth thing is getting better though, so what's holding 3D from becoming a comfortable web browsing experience?
I believe the juncture lies in not what the user expects from the Internet, but what the user expects from 3D. The Internet provides information in much the same way that paper provides it. A more-or-less flat surface filled with information. The bonus of the Internet delivered information is the ability to navigate through it in innovative ways. Sure, cool, dwell within human psychology to derive attention grabbing navigation, play with layout and color theory, architect RIA applications till your heart's content. But in the end you just wanna get stuff done or read something useful. Somehow I think that 3D heads away from this purpose into providing an empty experience of floating in a pseudo 3D world.
So it seems 3D interfaces lean towards providing an experience rather than functionality. What does that mean in terms of the web? Well for one it throws the challenge of creating an information-rich and usable interface. It also means that 3D web experience is leaning towards experience-rich implementations like online gaming and other proprietary environments, such as secondlife. So even with advances in the flash player and things like papervision3D, I don't believe that we will see a commonly used effective 3D web interface anytime soon.

shop local or global ?

A few weekends ago, we went to have lunch in a pub with a couple of friends. Not a recipe for civilised afternoon. Amongst the confusion of the afternoon items were lost, including my sunnies.
Bang!
I've had these babies for years, they've been sat on, bent, broken, had screws loose, surviving all the while.

So ok, retrace steps. No glasses anywhere. Being stuck without sunnies is non-optional. So the first instinct is to go and get a new pair. Seeing I liked these so much, I was most impressed by their great grandson that has been trained like a ninja.
So off I go to the nearest sunnies shop to find out that these babies cost AUD$179. Ok, that's reasonable seeing the previous pair was AUD$269. I would have bought them on the spot except that they didn't have the matt black version, only the shiny frame of shame.
So highly disappointed, I take the model number of these sunnies from the shop assistant, thinking that I'll come back and buy these later with my fried retinas in full swing.
But then I look at eBay and spot that I can get the exact pair I want from the UK. With postage included it turned out to be AUD$79, exactly AUD$100 less than the local store's price. And I got these within a week, whereas the store told me that it would take about 2 weeks to get a pair ordered in for me.
Now call me crazy, but why would I ever shop locally for anything like this ever again? All I need to do is go to the store, check it out, play around with it, make sure I like it. Then I'd just jump onto eBay and buy the same thing cheaper. I know that this contradicts the idea of supporting the local economy and helping the corner shop pay rent, but we are not living in a third world country where local support means that much. In this case, it means either saving a 100 bucks or contribute to some unknown shopkeeper's income. Hmm I need the money in the pocket at the moment thanks.
After learning a lesson about global socio-economics and buying the coolest pair of sunnies I've ever owned, my old pair were found behind the couch at a friend's house. Like I said. not a civilised afternoon - but fun!

flamaker.com in 15 minutes

Well it was probably the easiest thing I've done when it comes to setting up a 'website'. I went to the cheapest DNS seller that I could find. In this case it turned out to be australiancheapdomains . I wrecked my brain about a domain name that I wanna use after getting pissed off that my old one, flapture.com expired, and as soon as it came back for sale, someone snapped it up. And all the grand plans I had for that thing... probably something I'll whinge about somewhere else here I bet. So after surprisingly finding some cool top level .com domain names available like flantasy.com or swfing.com, I decided to go for flamaker.com.
I'm really surprised that it's still available as people are snapping up domain names like there is no tomorrow. And with the scar from losing one domain name to someone else, I registered flamaker.com for 4 years for AUD$56. Not bad. And this DNS registrar has a free DNS redirection service, so I pointed it to this place flamaker.blogspot.com.
After the obligatory "Hello World" and some settings changes with the lame photo upload, I have a .com website up and running for at least 4 years, all within about 15 minutes.
Sweet!