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New Internet businesses to generate thousands of jobs according to Google

Jordan Hall — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:12:05 +0000

A boom in Internet businesses could open hundreds of thousands of jobs in Britain within five years, a Google chief has claimed.

Philipp Schindler, the London based vice-president of Google Europe, predicted that despite the economic downturn 365,000 jobs could be on the cards by 2015 as more online firms emerge and grow.

Daily Mail article

Could new Internet businesses such as e-commerce websites start a new wave of employment in the UK, generating thousands of new jobs based around these businesses?

This is what Philipp Schindler, the London based vise-president of Google Europe seems to be suggesting.

If you’re starting up an e-commerce website or would like to do so and need some advice, feel free to contact us for advice and a quote on how much it would cost to get your new e-commerce website or idea off the ground!

Preventing namespace clashes in PHP

Jordan Hall — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:09:07 +0000

The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions.

There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This is has been most prominent with Word press or any system which has generically named functions. It’s often unavoidable to prevent function clashes as it requires knowing any other external system definitions which of course isn’t always possible.

Keeping generic function names in a class is a possible option to reduce the problem; however this brings about the requirement of instantiating a class before being able to use the function. Another way to get around this issue is to use the scope resolution operator to statically call functions or even properties. In PHP this can be achieved using the scope resolution operator, otherwise known as the double colon operator.

Example:

class foobar {

public static function call_me() {}

Usage:

foobar::call_me();

The scope resolution operator should be used wisely. It is often best practice to only use static methods when they are stateless in nature, i.e. basic helper functions that do not modify any external state beyond their own contained execution.

No related posts.

Video streaming records broken for the Royal Wedding

Jordan Hall — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:53:39 +0000

A variety of Internet firms have stated that online video streaming records have been broken over the course of the UK’s recent royal wedding.

“The royal wedding has broken records for the biggest ever live streaming audience online, according to a internet firms.

…

The BBC website meanwhile wobbled under the strain this morning as huge numbers of Britons accessed its coverage.

Visitors were intermittently greeted with an error message saying the website was experiencing “abnormal traffic” around the climax of the ceremony after 11am.

A spokesman said: “We are experiencing some technical issues with BBC Online due to the sheer weight of traffic, which may cause the site to be slower than normal in some cases.”

Other major websites appeared to be cope with the royal wedding, an event that was widely expected to break traffic records.

YouTube’s live stream, which was expected to attract 400 million viewers, ran smoothly.

…

Akamai, a major traffic carrier, said that its own record of 1.6 million concurrent live streams during the World Cup was broken.

And Livestream, which provided online video for the Associated Press and CBS, also said the royal wedding was its most popular stream ever.

It is likely to take several days before a complete picture of how many watched the royal wedding online emerges, however.

Network upgrades by mobile operators along the royal wedding route were successful in ensuring that well-wishers were able to call, text, tweet and update Facebook.

O2 and Vodafone installed temporary network base stations around Hyde Park and St James’ Park to double capacity. A spokesman for O2 said it was braced for 65 million royal wedding pictures to be posted online from smartphones.”

The Telegraph

Net Neutrality Fears from the ‘creator of the web’

Jordan Hall — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:43:53 +0000

The inventor of the web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed.

He been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype.

Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow.

“If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate,” he said.

“It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law.”

Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Net neutrality is an important issue in Internet related politics. Without net neutrality, Internet service providers could offer packages in which certain online services, such as video streaming websites, e-commerce websites or certain web applications have increased priority over other web services.

The concept of net neutrality is such that all data traffic on the Internet is treating in an equal manner. This is already becoming an issue in the case of Internet services providers which shape traffic of certain types. This is often done to curb data usage for high-use customers. However, when other traffic is prioritised and ISP to Internet/web company partnerships come into existence, this could mean that we see ‘packages’ of Internet access which allow faster access to certain websites while leaving other sites (who may not be able to partner with ISP financially) out in the cold.

BT Fibre Optic Packages Revealed

What are the differences between MyISAM and InnoDB?

Jordan Hall — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:21:47 +0000

Wait… hold on. Firstly, what are MyISAM and InnoDB?

MyISAM and InnoDB are the two commonly used MySQL engines for database tables. MyISAM is the default database engine for new tables created in MySQL 4 and 5.

So, why would I want to use one over the other?

Good question. Perhaps it is best answered by going through the differences between the two database engines.

InnoDB is a more modern database engine than MyISAM, so some could say MyISAM is more reliable due to this, although there is very little evidence to support this.
However! Even though InnoDB is newer, it has much better error recovery. Corrupt tables are (with all hope) quickly restored to a functional state when the InnoDB engine is in use, however recovery of MyISAM powered tables is significantly slower and less reliable. Corrupt MyISAM tables have been known to hold up the starts and restarts of the MySQL daemon.
InnoDB supports foreign keys natively, meaning you can enforce referential integrity at a database level rather than ensuring integrity at the application level.
Insertions and updates in InnoDB utilise row level locking, whilst MyISAM only supports full table locking. This means that mass inserts and updates, MyISAM table access can become significantly slowed down as MySQL has to wait for the database engine to release the lock on the table caused by the insert or update. InnoDB defaults to locking only the rows which are affected by the insert or update query, meaning the rest of the table can still be accessed without waiting for a lock release.
MyISAM supports full-text indexing. This means MyISAM tables can have text fields indexed, which significantly increasing SELECT queries which contain text type fields. The InnoDB table has no support for full-text indexing.

It looks like there is no clear winner?

You’re right. Even though InnoDB is, as said, much more modern, both database engines still have their place in modern database structures. In fact, your choice should be dependant on how you anticipate the table will be used.

So, when would I want to use an InnoDB table?

If data integrity is important to you, multiple related InnoDB tables inherently take care of the data integrity between tables due to their support of foreign keys and enforcement of referencial integrity. Additionally, if your table will be used for intensive write operations (inserts and updates) the InnoDB engine can handle this much better than MyISAM, due to row level locking.

InnoDB does fall down however in the fact that it does utilise more memory than MyISAM and as previously mentioned it lacks full text indexing.

InnoDB sounds great. What need do I have for the MyISAM engine?

You don’t need to deal with referential integrity or building DBMS enforced relationships between tables with MyISAM, simply because the engine does not support it. One could argue this makes MyISAM tables quicker to create and useful for smaller, quicker tasks as well as initial system prototyping.

MyISAM also tends to be faster at many operations, especially large scale SELECT queries returned many results. For tables which will be used mainly for data retrieval with less in the way or inserts or updates, the performance of MyISAM may be a deciding factor. As well as this generalised speed, the MyISAM engine supports full-text indexing, which would be useful for large tables that contain textual data that needs to be fully searched and/or sorted on a regularly basis.

Okay. So, which would you suggest? Give me a quick summary.

InnoDB should be chosen where data is written reguarly and data integrity and security is critical.

MyISAM is the best choice for tables in which there is large amounts of data, especially textual data, that is read from significantly more than written to.

Thanks!

No problem.

HTML 5 Content Tags

Jordan Hall — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:54:14 +0000

HTML 5 introduces several new tags which focus of defining the content of a page in a machine readable fashion.

In today’s websites, if a computer program attempts to pick out a particular part of a page, such as the main article, the sidebar or the top navigation, it would have difficulty. This is because every website structures its HTML differently, and most modern websites use

and tags to surround their content. These tags generally define style. The new HTML 5 tags define content.

Defining content makes websites easier to parse by computer programs. This could benefit accessibility readers for the blind and allow content aggregating systems and ‘mash-up’ websites to easily parse, link to and cite your articles.

Here is a list of some of the HTML 5 tags that define content.

– Defines a main article on a page. Can include cite (citation) and pubdate (publishing date) attributes.
– States content details for a specific section. Can include an open attribute defining whether or not the details within are visible to the end-user.
– States the caption for a figure as defined by the figure tag.
– Usually used to group a set of elements.
– Footer layout element. This is used to contain the footer content of the page, usually contains the website name, author and copyright information.
– Header layout element. This tag is designed to contain the top header of a document, usually showing the website logo, page and/or company title and subtitle.
– A tag used to group together heading tags such as
,
,
and so on.
– A key generation tag which defines a generated (encryption) key that can be associated with a HTML form.
– The tag contains content which is deemed to be a measurement of some sort.
– The
tags stands for navigation and is designed to surround navigation links, such as those present in a sidebar bar or navigational header/footer.
– The
tag defines the title of a
element.
– This tags contains content which is a statement or measurement of time and/or date/time.

More information about HTML 5 tags is available from W3Schools. See the HTML 5 Tag Reference for more details on these tags and the other new tags in HTML 5.

Nokia releases first open-source Symbian device

Jordan Hall — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:03:49 +0000

I previously posted on how Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system and the advantages this will bring to mobile web developers. Nokia has now released their first mobile device based on the open-source version of Symbian, the Nokia N8 phone.

It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February.

The Foundation – which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung amongst others – gave away the code to developers for free in the hope that it would help speed up the pace of improvements. Any organisation or individual can now use and modify it.

The software in the N8 allows the phone to have multi-touch and multi-tasking, meaning more than one application can be open at any one time.

The device will be Nokia’s flagship smartphone. It can be plugged into home theatres and supports surround sound as well as high-quality video.

Social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be displayed on the home screen in a single application.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was “stoked” that Nokia had chosen to use the operating system on its phone.

BBC News article

The Nokia N8 will ship in the third quarter of this year, 2010. Hopefully the improved software will bring advantages both for its end-users, and the software ‘app’ and web application developers.

DAT 595 – Faulty McAfee Anti-virus update disables computers

Jordan Hall — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:18:43 +0000

A recent automated update to McAfee Anti-virus software caused the software to mistaken detect a key Windows system program as malicious and move it out of its proper location to a McAfee anti-virus quarantine. Due to the critical nature of the quarantined system program, ‘svchost.com’, affected computers failed to start correctly and were sent into a rebooting loop.

According to Microsoft, the affected file ‘is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries’.

McAfee responded to the problem by withdrawing the definition update and later releasing a clean one. The security giant also published advice on how to manually fix affected computers. The influx of interested parties trying to look up this advice through McAfee’s forum caused the site to become unavailable for a short time on Wednesday evening.

Source: The Register

McAfee had the following to say on the matter.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to this release. Corporations who kept a feature called “Scan Processes on Enable” in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise disabled, as it is by default, were not affected.
Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update was quickly removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumers.

We recommend the use of ESET Anti-virus products including NOD32 Anti-virus and the Smart Security Suite. If you are interested in a secure, reliable anti-virus and computer security solution for you business, please feel free to contact us for more information.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has been released

Jordan Hall — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:36:25 +0000

WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten which comes with custom background and header options built-in.

The official WordPress development blog gives the following information about what to expect in WordPress 3.0.

You Should Know:

The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.

The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.

We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.

Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!

WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

April Fools’ Day Jokes across the Internet

Jordan Hall — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:02:11 +0000

Firstly, happy April Fools’ day to you!

There have been a crazy amount of April Fools’ jokes flying across the Internet today. Here are a few of the best from some of the biggest names.

Google Animal Translate

Google have supposedly released an ever so sneaky version of Google Translate that can translate animal noises in to English! This is a mobile application, suprisingly for the Android platform and is (not) available in the Android App Store.

Take a look at the video below or visit the ‘official’ Google Animal Translate application.

Firebox Do It Yourself Carbon Freezing Kit

Firebox is heavily known for its extravagant and crazy gadgets and gizmos. However, this one is quite a kicker – take a look at Firebox’s DIY Carbon Freezing Kit.

‘The freezing process itself is simple: just remove your clothes, lie down in the chamber, set the timer and…well, the next thing you know it’ll be 2040.’

Google goes into Nuclear Power Production

As part of a green initiative by Google, they intend to start producing super efficient nuclear power plants as soon as possible via a newly acquired company. Surely you will be able to Google Search the nuclear isotopes soon enough.

‘Google has acquired a company that has created a new process for highly efficient isotope separation, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The primary use of this technology, say experts we’ve spoken with, is uranium enrichment.

Enriched uranium is a necessary ingredient in the creation of nuclear energy, and one source we’ve spoken with at Google says that this is part of the Google Green Initiative. The company will use the new technology to enable it to design and possibly build small, mobile and highly efficient nuclear power generators. “Google has already begun building an enrichment plant,” says a high ranking IAEA source.’

Sourced from an ‘exclusive’ TechCrunch article.

ThinkGeek iCade – An Arcade Holder for the iPad

In a bit of funny move from ThinkGeek, they have released a product called the iCade, which is effectively and arcade machine shaped holder for the new Apple iPad. Over recent product releases include:

moodINQ – A programmable electronic Tattoo system
Tell Me Your Secrets Bear – A cuddly bear which had a microphone and camera allowing parents to spy on their children and their secrets.
Canned Unicorn Meat – Which is… well, exactly what it says on the tin, apparently.

Plenty more…

It is still April Fools’ Day here and as such there are plenty more April Fools’ Day jokes and pranks going on worldwide on the Internet. If and when we find more hilarious pranks, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date.

Google renames to Topeka – ‘Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.’
Google Annotation Gallery – GAG is a open source libary for Java that allows programmers to easily express their emotions in the code… ‘The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving messages to fellow developers with the @Deprecated annotation? Wouldn’t you rather leave a @LOL or @Facepalm instead? If so, then this is the gallery for you.’
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future – He’s a time traveller from the future apparently, come here to stop the LHC experiments. When asked which country he came from, he answered: “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

Happy April Fools’ Day!