If..Else Log

Having just got back home, I am pleased to find my Macbook has arrived.
Normal operations will be suspended until I can get over my gadget lust.

"I love the Power Glove.
It's so bad."

After years of waiting, it looks like The Wizard is coming to DVD; finally, a new generation of kids will get a chance to experience the Power Glove.

The Wizard

Whilst I have no rose-tinted disillusions about the film, I have to confess that I'm looking forward to it's release. Yes, it has it's fair share of cheesy moments, yes it was a Nintendo promotional flick¹ and yes it has a load of VG factual errors. And you can't help but squirm at some of the lines and moments in the film. And it's unashamedly American.

But for a videogames obsessed kid who was growing up, the film managed to hit all the right nerves. As goofy as they were, you empathised with the characters; the simple story was believable enough² that you were able to be carried along in the journey. As silly as the whole thing is, by the end, you don't really care.

It's the sort of film that can only be watched as a young kid; I'm pretty certain that were you to be any age older than twelve, you'd probably find it ridiculous to the point of being unbearable.

"I give you…Super…Mario Brothers…Threeeeee!!!"

There's no doubt that I'd be setting myself up for disappointment if I were to watch it again… but I still can't resist adding it to the bottom of my Amazon rental list.

1. That's understating things; the decision to debut SMB3 in this movie was a stroke of Genius by Big N [back]
2. Bearing in mind that I was probably about eight years old at the time:) [back]

The German magazine Die Zeit show you how to pirate a vinyl record old-school style using silicone and liquid plastic.

"As we watched and waited two seconds for "GUESS!" to show up, Anthony's face lit up again. "GUESS!" he exclaimed, in his best Scary Vampire voice. And then he laughed. And then back to programming. "It should wait a little longer! Maybe seven seconds," as he started typing into emacs again"

I just love the gentle innocence contained within David Bau's story of how his 6 year old kid learned to program a game with Python. In an age of 3D graphics and special effects, it's wonderful reading how much the satisfaction a 6 year old boy can receive from a game that he wrote himself.

Simple roots

I first got into computing in much the same manner; I was a bit older than Anthony, starting at the age of 9 and it was with the less elegant language Basic. But my first game was also a "Guess the Number" job and the pure pleasure of writing a program all by yourself was one I well understood.

Sometimes, in all the talk about Frameworks, OOP and Design Patterns, you can forget what programming is really about. And that is to make a computer do something that we want. Sometimes that is to make a time-saving web app, or a fancy new organising system. But maybe, what it really is, is a guess the number game to call your own.

Where does it say about blogs and comments that having a 32×32 pixel image by your name is a big deal?

Maybe 37Signals should forget about developing Web Apps, Frameworks and just start selling pixels…¹

1. Just to clarify, and similar to the spirit of their entry, this post is meant in good jest; I'm a fan of their products. [back]

It's human nature to want for more; we always look for the best deal, the best bang for buck whether it's shopping for food at the supermarket or using price comparison sites for checking out the cheapest fare or television. And as anyone who owns their own domain are probably quite net-savvy, webhosts are under pressure to competitively price themselves.

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a while now, who's front page pricing of $8 per month for a crazy 1TB of bandwidth and 20GB of storage is incredibly tempting especially when you look back just 5 years ago and compare what you were paying and getting then with now¹. Of course, the announced specs should only play a tiny part in your decision making process² but fortunately, I've been more than happy with DH.

Material needs

However, Podz is quite right in pointing out how little we actually use and need. We give to much weight to numbers and concerns about planning for unforeseen circumstances whereas we rarely even strain the packages that we pay for. So following his lead, here's what I actually use for this site.

• 160mb used by the db
• 200mb disk space used
• 600mb of bandwidth per day or 18gb per month³

In other words, I use less than 0.01% of my allocated storage space and bandwidth. The problem is that, in the hosting market, there's substantial feature inflation brought on by the need for competitiveness. Because of the difficulties in comparing service, inordinate focus is placed on specs.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a better alternative.

But what can we do?

We can rely on word of mouth, though anecdotal evidence carries with it a whole load of flaws such as the limited/non-representational sample size, bias and imperfect correlation⁴. Review sites are even worse carrying with them an awful stench of corruption. How about sites that offer customer ratings? Sounds good until you consider that there's a lot of incentive for dodgy webhosts to add their 'noise' to the system.

Numbers are easy to understand and use. But the simplicity of figures mean that we have to be careful the dangers of giving unfair weight to them. We probably wouldn't buy a car simply because of it's top speed; we shouldn't make the same mistake with hosting.

1. Particulary for us poor UK denizens. [back]
2. Especially when you consider that, like airline companies, most webhosts including DH, also oversell. [back]
3. Actually, this was more than I expected especially since there's no big downloads like movies or music on this site. [back]
4. Not to mention that there is a serious conflict of interest with referral fees that are often offered by hosts. [back]

LocoRoco, which is probably the only PSP game that has piqued my interest, has a cool flash demo on their site. I'm just a sucker for the lovely graphics and music… now if only this was on the DS.

Sometimes, it's worth spending that little bit extra to get decent translators… [via]

Congratulations to Matt and the rest of the WordPress.com team on hitting 200,000 users. Only 800k more blogs to go till the 1 million mark:)

One of the most insane piece of driving I've seen in a long time. Fool's luck indeed…

James Bennett writes about his unusual (but perfectly valid) HTML markup. Quite interesting in a geeky, pedantic sort of way.

Seth Godin writes on the different kinds of traffic and what it means for a business.

Should Jeff Bezos be in mourning? After all, MySpace is killing Amazon in traffic…
The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt. Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.

That's the problem with metrics; in the course of obeying the number, you lose track of what that number is supposed to be for.

If you're looking to run a business, it's important is to be able to convert attention to profit. It doesn't matter how much traffic you receive, if you don't find a way to monetise it (whether that's directly or indirectly), then all you have on your hands is a financial drain.

Community campaign

Swansea North Resident's Association have set up a site to complain about the mess left behind by Tango's Sony Bravia parody.

They've even gathered together a group of links to local press coverage on the whole event…

Advertising campaign

..or maybe not. The site content might have tipped you off; if not, the news stories that were linked to should have set off alarm bells¹. Not convinced? Take a look at the whois entry for swansea-res.org.uk.

Registrant: CHI advertising

Registrant's address:
7 Rathbone St
London
W1T 1LY
GB

Relevant dates: Registered on: 28-Feb-2006

It's none other than CHI Advertising. And who's listed as one of their clients? Tango.

All in all, it's actually a pretty good campaign. The design and language for the sites give an air of believability² and the advert is brilliant. Nicely executed and I can't help but be impressed; just a shame that us brits are a suspicious bunch:) [via]

1. Try to browse off the stories. [back]
2. Where else would you expect to see animated "Under Construction" gifs? [back]

If Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'll probably be Real Madrid; in the same way Real Madrid have managed to sign some of the Galacticos of the footballing world, BDS has managed to bring together some of the big names in the web design blogger circuit.

The likes of Michael Heilemann, John Oxton, and Simon Collison each take us on a guided tour of the major blogging platforms currently in favour. The old favourite of MT and current star WP are covered alongside other blogging choices such as EE and TXP. Rutter even gives us a glimpse of what it's like to roll your own custom CMS solution. So with such names on the front cover, what would the book be like?

After a short introduction, the book walks us through setting up your machine as a local test environment. Blogging is all about communication and sharing, and thus, rightly belongs out in the open but having a local sandbox for testing is an invaluable aid to development and experimentation. That said, the advent of easy to use web server distributions like Xampp are probably a better fit for most people but the chapter is a welcome one nonetheless.

The Blogs, Designs and Solutions

The subsequent chapters are each handled by a single author¹ talking about their platform of choice. Whilst each author brings their own flavour and writing style to the mix, each chapter broadly follows the same format. After a short discussion on setting up the software, a brief introduction to the templating engine followed by the development of a blog design. Following that, these ingredients are brought together to integrate the design with the templating tags to produce a custom blog theme. By the end of each chapter, the reader would have picked up enough to be able to, if not create their own theme, then at least understand how one is made up.

But for a but…

As I mentioned before, if Blog Design Solutions was a football team, then it'd probably be Real Madrid. And like Real Madrid, the combined efforts of the group of talented individuals, sadly, don't add up to the cohesive success that you may expect.

Upon reading the book, there's the unshakable feeling that each chapter had been written independently without knowledge or reading of the companion chapters. There's a strong sense of deja vu as you read about how to mark up and style a page. I suspect that the reader would have been better served if a single design was used by all the authors. As well as preventing the curse of unwelcome familiarity from distracting the reader's attention, it would have provided a better standing point from which to gauge and compare the workings of the different systems.

In fact, for a multi-format book, the lack of any significant comparison between the packages are a surprising omission. It would have been helpful to have seen a chapter dedicated to a more in-depth discussion on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the contending solutions, especially since this was aimed at the blogging novice.

Perhaps, it's the format and constraints of the book which lets it down. By going for breadth in writing about 5 different approaches instead of focusing on one, the authors are unable to dig deep and illustrate the intricacies of each platform. A single chapter isn't really enough for the authors to get into stride and do each blog engine justice.

As a general overview and gentle introduction, the book has merits and if you're totally new to blogging, you'd probably find it informative. However, I can't help feeling disappointed, especially when you consider the depth and breadth of information that can be found on each of the author's blogs.

A quick 5 minute read in a book shop will probably be enough to tell you if this book is for you. However, if you already have your own blog up and running, I fancy that you probably won't find enough in here to satisfy you.

1. Apart from the WP chapter in which Michael and Chris both lend their expertise [back]

David Hellsing has decided to sell the venerable Stylegala.