The digital domain of Rick Curran
I’ve now got the Adobe CS3 Web Premium Suite installed on my Mac, very nice it is too!
I’m planning on writing some more about some of the new features once I spend a bit more time with the suite as a whole.
Other news is Alyn’s website seemed to get hacked yesterday somehow, but it’s all fixed now. Oh wait, that reminds me, AJ has gone into labour! ;)
~Rick
If you are visiting this site on the 5th of April then don’t worry, the site isn’t broken! If you’re visiting after the 5th of April then you won’t see what I’m talking about. The reason this site looks (or looked) ‘funny’ is because all of the stylesheets for the site are disabled to promote Web Design according to Web Standards.
“CSS Naked Day ’07” is a concerted effort by a whole heap of people online to promote the design and development of web sites according to Web Standards. The initiative was started last year by Dustin Diaz who explains it by saying:
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.
Hopefully my site looks ok in all of it’s naked CSS glory :)
If you don’t know anything about CSS or Web Standards then go take a look at these resources for a quick starting point:
Anyway, that’s just a few links for starters, there’s lot’s of good stuff there. The “Designing with Web Standards” book is a great introduction to the whole concept, and the last two books are great for taking your skills further forwards. All three are really well written and are essential books to read in my opinion.
~Rick
The recent SimpleBits LogoMaid logo debacle made me imagine what kind of blog template ripoffs might be out there so I started to make a few just for fun!
If I was on the ball then this would have made a good opportunity for an April fools gag but unfortunately I didn’t think about it until later on!
I hope Dan Benjamin and John Gruber don’t mind me using their sites for this little bit of fun!
~Rick
It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted the first part of this series of articles comparing the UK and US web hosting scenes. There was a quick flurry of activity in the comments of the last post. A few commenters seemed to get the wrong idea that I was primarily focused on the price of US hosting compared to the UK, that I thought hosting was cheaper in the US, Whilst I do think hosting is cheaper in the US there are still plenty of cheap options over here if you want to get hosted on a budget 1 and 1 Internet, Fasthosts, Webfusion etc etc all offer very cheap webhosting packages. However, the focus of my comparison is more to do with overall quality of hosting, the unique and specialised hosting options available in the US at a more competitive price than would be found in the UK.
In my last post I complained about the fact that I have 3 different hosting setups to provide what I need, a Fasthost Reseller account, a couple of WebFusion VPS accounts and a Fasthosts Dedicated server (read the previous article for more on why I have this setup currently). Well, to add to that mix I have since signed up for a hosting account with Mosso.com. I am basically planning on moving everything that currently runs on the VPS accounts over to Mosso. Why did I choose Mosso? Well, here’s the basic feature set / price point:
Basically for less than the cost of the two VPS accounts I get all that capacity, now, you need to go and read all the tech spec on the Mosso site to fully understand the setup but it’s basically a load-balanced cluster setup, they describe it on their own site like this:
Put succinctly, The Hosting System is advanced, enterprise-level hosting technology and easy-to-use software that beats the pants off of running your own server?and costs less, too.
That pretty much sums it up. It’s not cheap hosting, but it is great value for money. The fact that they’re based on the Rackspace network is encouraging. Rackspace have a very good name in hosting, they’re one of the companies that has made the jump ‘across the pond’ and does provide high level managed hosting services in the UK. However, it comes at a price, you probably won’t get a server for anything less than £300 a month from them, but the quality service they provide also serves Mosso so this makes $100 a month seem like a bargain.
As I’ve said, I’m not looking at the lowest price, but more along the lines of the pseudo-equation above. It’s the features offered by a webhost and the quality of them along with the amount they cost that represents the best option. I just think the services offered by US webhosts such as Mosso (The Hosting System), MediaTemple (GridServer) and TextDrive (Accelerator) (and EngineYard if you’re looking for Rails hosting) offer a better answer to the equation than you will find in the UK.
I’ve not really written about what I had planned for Part 2 of this series, mainly because of the point I wanted to clarify since the comments on the last post. However, hopefully in part 3 I’ll get down to doing a bit more of a closer look at the three hosting options provided by Mosso, MediaTemple and TextDrive.
~Rick
There’s been a bit of a storm going on recently on the net due to the disregard for intellectual property shown by various companies. First there was the ripping off of both the Joyent website and Corkd (see Dan Benjamin’s Flickr picture for the resulting hybrid ripoff!), now there is a big stir about LogoMaid and their use of several well known logos amongst some of their logos for sale.
The main stir at the moment relates to Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits logo and this one by LogoMaid:
In an ongoing Flickr discussion thread LogoMaid insist that they’ve done nothing wrong (they even hinted that they’d consider suing Dan Cederholm for his use of his logo!), overall it’s pretty crazy.
Here’s a few other dubious examples from LogoMaid’s catalogue:
I agree with the sentiment of the article I just mentioned, so I’ve written this post to help raise some attention to this kind of abuse of ideas and images. If you’re planning on purchasing logos from somewhere like LogoMaid then it’s worth being wary. LogoMaid claim “Over 3600 unique and non-unique logos to choose from”, the problem is some of those logos truly are “non-unique” and were created by someone else. You may find that you get an unexpected surprise when the rightful creator of your new logo takes action to protect their creation from being abused.
Caveat emptor
~Rick
This is a bit of a rant really, I’m just wondering when are the US companies going to come and give the UK hosting scene the shake-up it needs?
If you use US based hosting you get the following advantages:
I started using a Fasthosts reseller account which I’ve now had for the last 6 years or so. It’s quite a good service, I can host as many accounts as I want, Windows or Linux, no bandwidth or disk space limitations. It’s a service that has been very useful. The downside to it is that I have to pay extra for features like Spam filtering or virus protection, these features are also enabled on a per mailbox basis so it get’s expensive very quickly for clients who have a lot of mailboxes. MySQL databases, Visitor Statistics, user control panels, password protected folders are all additional costs to have on a site too, so adding all these costs onto a site really mounts up. On the plus side though is that Fasthosts Tech Support is very good, they offer 24/7 support and they do the job very well. I’m always confident they’ll get any problems sorted very quickly. In addition to the Reseller Account I also have a Dedicated Server which I use to provide live audio and video streaming for a client and also to host some additional MySQL databases.
Due to the high price of all the additional features on Fasthosts and also the inability (at that time anyway) to use Apache .htaccess files for mod_rewrite I had no choice but to get an additional hosting account elsewhere. I’ve used two different VPS accounts since then, the first with Designer Servers and the second with Webfusion.
The Designer Servers VPS was reliable but had an unrealistic and unusable diskspace allocation of 300Mb which for a reseller VPS was just way to small. In this age of GMail accounts approaching 3Gb it wasn’t enough. The cost involved in getting a more expensive account just wasn’t worth it.
I then switched to Webfusion as the price was a bit lower and had a much better disk space allocation of 10Gb. The VPS comes with a 100 domain Plesk Control Panel which is quite easy to use and provides a good interface for clients to use to manage their own email etc. It worked quite well until late last year (2006) when it started to run quite slowly, and despite my best efforts to optimise what’s running on it and moving most of the MySQL databases over to my Fasthosts Dedicated Server it’s still not running very well. It kind of feels like a Windows machine does when you know it’s time to reformat and get a clean install and start fresh. Only this is a linux server hosting several of my clients so there’s no way that’s an option.
So that kind of brings me to where I am now, frustrated with having to deal with three separate hosting setups to get what I want. In the midst of this frustration I noticed a lot sites using US companies like MediaTemple for their hosting so I started to check out the US companies some more, and I was really surprised by what the features were.
I’ve already mentioned some major benefits in my previous bullet points, besides the cheaper prices and bigger diskspace and bandwidth allocations there is the actual technical setup of the hosting itself. There’s just nothing like it available based in the UK, not really for any price at the moment!
In the second part of this series of rants posts I’ll take a closer look at the following US hosting setups:
End of part 1
~Rick
Although Apple have for some time had games available for the iPod many people have wondered if Apple would release games that would be playable on the Mac itself. Although not always considered the greatest gaming platform, due to the smaller amount of games available, the Mac has never the less had some great mainstream games available. But Apple has never developed any games itself for the Mac.
If you’re new to the Mac platform you may not be aware that Apple has in fact dabbled in the gaming market before, just not for the Mac itself!
Apple actually developed a games console in the mid 1990s called ‘Pippin‘, it was intended to be a platform that they would license to third parties instead of releasing it themselves.
Unfortunately it wasn’t very successful due to the more powerful Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 which were available at the time. Bandai were the only games company who licenced the Pippin and they only sold a few thousand units at the time.
It’s interesting that a licencing model was the goal for the Pippin as it was at this time that Apple also ran their first and only official Mac Clone program which allowed other companies to develop and sell their own hardware which was capable of running the Mac OS.
Another interesting thing about the Pippin is that it ran a cut down version of Mac OS as it’s operating system, if you’re familiar with the buzz around Apple’s latest release the AppleTV and the upcoming iPhone then you’ll know that they both1 run essentially a cut-down version of Mac OSX.
Another perhaps little known fact is that Apple have also developed a prototype set-top box for delivering interactive TV once before. Simply known as the ‘Apple Interactive Television Box‘ this device preceded the Pippin by 1 or 2 years, it was never actually released for sale though and was cancelled at a very late stage of development.
Although far from having the capabilities of the AppleTV it does show that Apple have had a long standing interest in becoming part of the home entertainment ecosystem within people’s houses.
It was likely that this unit was intended to deliver content via the cable providers of the time such as standard TV shows but allowing play and pause functionality. The intention was also to provide interactive content in the form of quiz shows and educational content.
Both of these concepts had some interesting ideas at the core, but due to bad timing they never amounted to anything. It’s interesting to note that both of these concepts were developed during the period in Apple’s history when Steve Jobs was not in the company, whether these concepts would have been developed under Steve Jobs’ leading is hard to say, but the previously mentioned Mac Clones program was swiftly closed down upon his return to the company in late 1997. I think it likely the Pippin and Interactive Television Box would not have seen the light of day.
AppleTV: Game onSince the announcement of the AppleTV there has been a lot of speculation as to its capabilities, did it have some hidden functions that hadn’t been announced at the time? The possibility of additional functionality seemed likely and it didn’t take long after the release of iTunes 7.1 before people had a snoop around in the resources of the software to look for clues to any hidden purposes for the AppleTV.
Inside the software there are strings of text used to display the various messages and alerts shown whilst using the software, interestingly amongst these strings are these:
“4309.161” = “Are you sure you want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV ?^1? will be replaced with games from this iTunes library.”;”
4309.162″ = “Are you sure you do not want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV ?^1? will be removed.”;
The presence of these strings clearly shows that at the very least some of the games available for the iPod will also be playable on the AppleTV. How much more sophisticated the games available will be remains to be seen, when you consider the possible input device(s) that could be used with the device then there’s no reason why these games have to be as simple as the iPod games. There’s a whole range of ports on the AppleTV including the USB port which so far Apple has said is purely there for ‘maintenance purposes’.
In an interview on Wired.com, Greg Canessa – the Vice-President of PopCap games – specifically mentioned the AppleTV as one of the target platforms for their development:
It will be about taking the stable of franchises and games out of PopCap’s studio and adapting, customizing it for different platforms — adding multiplayer, new play modes, HD, customizing the user interface and display for Zune, ipod, Apple TV, Nintendo DS, PSP.
Notably missing perhaps from that list is the Nintendo Wii console, whether this is intentional or not is hard to say but given the runaway success of the Wii despite it not being as powerful as it’s contemporaries the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 shows that gameplay is not all about raw power. The AppleTV may not have the raw power of the XBox or Playstation but it may offer something close to the capabilities of the Wii, or perhaps even more given the Wii’s lack of HD playback capabilities.
Great design and application is something that Nintendo and Apple both share, it may be that Apple are looking to take advantage of the increase in popularity of the casual gaming market that Nintendo have cornered so well and to take a slice of that for themselves. The old ideas of the Pippin and the Interactive Television Box look like they have re-emerged from the ashes to a far more opportune time.
~Rick
1: The iPhone definitely runs OSX, the AppleTV is rumoured to do so and it seems very likely that this is the case.
2: Sorry, this post was full of Apple related puns, not all of them intentional originally!
Recently Virgin Media and Sky have been having an ongoing disagreement about the amount that Sky want to charge Virgin Media for receiving the standard Sky TV channels such as Sky One, Sky Two etc. It’s basically now come to a head and Virgin have refused to pay what they perceive as the excessive amount that Sky want to charge for these channels. As of midnight on the 28th of February, Sky’s basic channels stopped airing on Virgin Media.
I’ve been aware of this impending stalemate over the last few weeks. From my point of view as a consumer I feel like I’ve been used like a pawn in a big power game. On one side there were the ads on the Sky channels saying that Virgin Media (or Telewest/NTL as they were still known at the time) were threatening to allow the removal of all Sky channels, they were asking for people to call and petition Virgin Media not to get rid of the channels. On the other side there was Virgin Media saying that they want ‘Fair play’ and that the reason these channels have gone is because Sky wanted too much money for these channels.
Now, I’ve no doubt that Sky by doubling the amount of money they wanted for these channels was imposing a pretty big price hike, no one likes raises in prices. However, there’s one very big, important fact that Virgin seem to have overlooked here:
The Sky channels were one of the few that actually contained anything worthwhile watching. Period. End of story.
I’m of course not including the standard terrestrial channels here, BBC etc. If you’re not familiar with the offerings on Cable TV then perhaps these lyrics of the Bruce Springsteen song (n.b. I’m not a Springsteen fan, I just remembered this song and thought it appropriate) will help:
“Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched ’round and ’round ’til half-past dawn
There was fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on…”
Basically most of it is just rubbish, really terrible rubbish, repeated frequently. If you’ve got 57 channels of mostly rubbish and you take away the ones that are at least half decent, what do you have left? Not much of value.
What I can’t understand is that Virgin Media actually offer a free TV package, as long as you have broadband and phone then you can get a basic package for free. I basically have this free TV package as the only other non-standard terrestrial channel on it that I watch was included with this package. Which channel was that? Sky One. And what was so special about Sky One? It is the channel that is now showing Series 3 of Lost, 24 as well as Battlestar Galactica and the Simpsons!
I think that Virgin are grossly undervaluing two things here: the value of these programmes to their customers, and the value of their customers themselves. These four shows above represent some of the most sought after shows on TV, regardless of the channel. They’re just pretty hot property in many people’s eyes. I think this is what Sky realises and this is what they’re wanting to be paid for.
Forgive the bad pun. Sky plan to drop their basic channels from the terrestrial Freeview service as well, but with this there’s a faint glimmer of hope as the end of the article talks about Sky’s plans to potentially offer subscription channels over Freeview from this Summer. Although there is no indication as to whether they would include Sky One and the aforementioned shows at all. There’s only one problem with that for me. I can’t get Freeview where I live, despite it being a highly populated area. Don’t get me started on that issue either! It’s one of the other reasons I went with Virgin in the first place as I had no other choice, it was either them or Sky, and at the time they were cheaper!
There’s an article on the BBC News website ‘BSkyB channels taken off Virgin’ where another Virgin user echoes my own thoughts:
…I’m really angry about the whole situation. I signed up with NTL for the package, largely based on Sky One because I’m a big fan of all the American shows…
That kind of sums it up, I signed up for the service based on the shows I could get, I wanted to get the various channels I couldn’t get for free due to the lack of Freeview coverage and there was the added channels such as Sky One that were of interest. Since Sky picked up Lost Series 3 instead of Channel 4 it just made it all the more an essential channel for me to watch.
Virgin Media, I’m afraid I think you’ve underestimated the value of these shows to your customers. I think this is now a dealbreaker since Sky are offering a good deal, and I’m probably going to take them up on it.
End of rant.
~Rick
Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.com recently came out with the bold statement that “the BBC should be dissolved“. The BBC’s Backstage Blog has a bit more information. He was taking part in a panel debate, ‘European start-up culture: playing catch-up to the US?’ at the Future of Web Apps conference on 22nd of February in London. He claimed that the BBC’s activities were harmful to the startup culture in the UK, he specifically mentioned a project called ‘CBBC World’. His opinion was that the BBC launching CBBC World was harming the efforts of at least three startup companies trying to get into the virtual world space, that the BBC is basically anti-competitive to the open market due to being funded by the licence fee.
There was an article published on Techcrunch.com by Michael Arrington in January titled ‘BBC Announces?What?‘ which was all about the CBBC World project. Interestingly he opened the article saying “As much as I love the BBC…“, which is a link to the ‘CrunchNotes’ blog discussing the Top 11 sources of referral traffic to Techcrunch.com. The article gives the initial impression that he’s a big fan of the BBC. However, with the BBC being the 5th largest source of referrals I think he’s perhaps more a fan of the BBC due to the high amount of traffic (or ad revenue!) brought in by the BBC! ;) His comments at the Future of Web Apps seem to indicate that he doesn’t love the BBC at all!
I’m definitely a supporter of the BBC, I support the licence fee model, the TV production output and the value I get for it, more specifically I like the commercial free environment it provides. I left a comment on the ‘BBC Announces…What?’ article at the time:
My experience of US / Canadian broadcasting is a huge quantity of channels but dreadful quality, the same is true of what?s available on the Cable and Satellite channels here in the UK. I just yesterday cancelled my full TV package that I have with Telewest primarily due to the poor quality of shows and endless repeats (and they thought it was ok to ?increase? the price for that?!!).
The BBC channels give much better programming than the commercial channels. Speaking as a parent of a 4 year old, the CBeebies channel is excellent as my 4 year old is not barraged with adverts every 10 minutes like it tends to be on the commercial channels.
I hold really strongly to that, the commercial channels just have a whole other feel to them, they may be ‘free’ but the exposure to all the adverts, including all the constant breaks is a bad user experience to put it mildly!
Ok, I know the context Michael Arrington was speaking was more related to online web application development perhaps more than traditional TV programming, however, I still think the whole ethos of the BBC is a positive thing.
The BBC’s Backstage Blog writes that some points of clarification were made to Michael Arrington afterwards, namely:
The BBC’s remit is that at least 25% of production of their New Media (web & online) content has to be provided by external companies. The BBC are actually a great source of opportunity for many external companies rather than being a competitor. Additionally, the remit of working with external companies is something that is spreading through all areas of production, not just New Media. It’s a big cultural change that is spreading through the BBC.
Taking a good look around the BBC Backstage website also shows a great deal of interesting innovation going based around open standards. The ‘More about BBC Backstage‘ page states:
backstage.bbc.co.uk attempts to encourage and support those who have provided most of the innovation on the internet – the passionate, highly-skilled & public-spirited developers and designers many of whom volunteer their time and effort.
In the past the BBC has not always encouraged such “amateur innovators”, however public-spirited their intentions and products. backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to foster a newly constructive and open dialogue with the wider development community using BBC content and tools to deliver public value.
So I think Michael Arrington perhaps needs to do a bit more research!
The Backstage Blog also writes that they would like to discuss his comments with them:
We would publicly love to invite Michael Arrington to come in, talk with people and for us to talk about some of his comments, as its obvious he has the wrong end of the stick.
In light of the ignorance of the BBC that Michael Arrington has shown with his statement I hope that he’ll take the opportunity to do so, I look forward to reading the TechCrunch article all about it ;)
[Incidentally, where is the TechCrunch article all about the BBC iPlayer plans? I’m surprised there’s not been anything written about this on TechCrunch.]
~Rick
With all the recent hubbub about DRM and downloadable Music tracks it has perhaps comes across as purely rhetoric by a lot of the record labels.
Some people have called into question Steve Jobs’ motives over the whole ‘Thoughts on Music’ letter as being simply a smokescreen to deflect the grumblings within various European companies.
Whatever your opinion on the matter there is some positive movements happening within the Music download industry, money being put where their mouth is so to speak.
iPodObserver.com reports that Puretracks.com has announced the removal of DRM from their music files, starting with the Independent labels and adding more DRM-free tracks as time goes on.
Interestingly PureTracks previously used Windows DRM for their files which means the tracks would have been in Windows Media Audio format files, this move indicates that it will make use of pure MP3 format files as PureTracks have indicated that the will work on iPods. It does appear there will be a mix of both DRM’ed and DRM-free tracks available depending on the Record Label’s preference.
I’m playing devils advocate here I guess but I’m wondering if there’s no way that the iTunes Store couldn’t offer a mix of track types? My original thought is that Apple would prefer to keep the user experience simple, so offering some tracks with DRM and some without would be a bit confusing for the user. However, John Gruber of DaringFireball.net wrote an interesting article “Would Apple Mix DRM and Non-DRM Music at the iTunes Store?” which has some interesting points. Maybe there’s scope for a mixture after all?
Rick Moynihan left a comment pointing to an article by Cory Doctorow regarding Steve Job’s call for removal of DRM from music tracks. I also came across an interesting article on the LA Times website which gives another interesting perspective on the call for removal of DRM, both definitely worth reading.
~Rick
