Alex Hardy

I’m pleased to see that O2 have amended their iPhone tariffs. The miserly allocation of 200 minutes and 200 text messages that was previously in place can only have been putting people off. I was certainly not going to buy one at that rate. The new £35 tariff of 600 minutes and 500 texts is better than what I have now though!

Suddenly the O2 Simplicity deal + new phone (which I would have to buy because my current phone is half-dead) + iPod Touch starts to look like a false economy…

Apple, increase the capacity to 16Gb this summer and you have a customer!

I’ll file this ramble under web standards because it is about standards on the web. The general quality of writing on the web never ceases to disappoint. I don’t mean the subjective matter of how interesting a website is or how thoughtfully articulated a blog post’s argument; I mean the careless way that people write.

You can (arguably) indulge the typical blogger for being an amateur writer. Freedom of expression isn’t just for those with a certain degree of education. I lose count though of how often I see for example, an inexperienced web designer berated for their poor grasp of semantic HTML by others who ought to be more troubled by their own grasp of basic spelling.

When professionals get sloppy, it’s embarrassing. Take the word “schadenfreude” – a German word with no exact English equivalent which means pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune.

What a word for MacUser magazine to misspell in a recent post about Rob Enderle. I can’t deny it’s fun to highlight Enderle’s stupidity, but it’s better still when people trip over their own pretentiousness. I bet commenter #1 had schadenfreude indicating that blunder. I’ll close then with a few tips for those writing on the web:

• Inch marks are not the same as quote marks “ ”
• A hyphen is not the same as an en dash –
• Those little red lines underneath your words indicate misspellings
• Take a moment to fix them

That concludes today’s rant.

Steve Jobs on the Amazon Kindle:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read … Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Let’s put aside the debate that people may read a lot despite buying fewer books. This would be the same Steve Jobs who said that video on a mobile device is “the wrong direction to go” and that less than full-featured laptops are “undesirable.”

With any luck, it will be an iPod Touch / iPhone application.

Via Brent:

Random pretty much covers it. If only all Fridays were Dance Party Fridays…

This is a question I’m asked on a regular basis, so in lieu of a dedicated FAQs page I’ll answer it here. I do not use CAPTCHA filters (as a designer I find them ugly), but I’ll describe the security and anti-spam measures I have in place:

Recipient addresses in database

It’s not unusual for a developer to add the recipient email address(es) to an HTML form as hidden fields. It is a simple matter for a spambot to uncover these addresses. I do not do that – your email addresses are safely stored in the MySQL database.

This also prevents spammers exploiting your website to send emails through your server by overriding the recipients on your contact form.

Server-side validation

Instead of client-side validation that can be bypassed easily by turning off JavaScript in your browser, simpleContact has server-side validation. Form submissions are checked for the following:

• Required fields are completed
• Email addresses are valid
• Character limits are not exceeded

The last point is important. A field’s “maxlength” attribute can be deactivated by tools such as the Firefox web developer toolbar (a legitimate tool that I use myself).

One thing you notice about spammers though is that they tend to submit a lot of text – mostly nonsense. The character limits on fields are enforced in the server-side validation, where they can’t be bypassed. A spambot is likely to fail here.

Escapes submissions to prevent SQL injection attacks

This is more of a database security measure than an anti-spam thing. If submitted data is not processed for certain characters (e.g. ” ) then a hacker could post SQL code through a form to either damage its database or expose data. Wikipedia has a more thorough description of SQL injection attacks.

Suffice it to say, my app is protected from this.

Your password is stored as a salted hash

Simply put, this means that even if your database was compromised, a hacker would not be able to retrieve usable passwords because they are encrypted (rather than stored as plain text).

At the end of the day, noone – not even Google – can honestly claim to have built a 100% spam-proof system. Since last May my WordPress comments form has had about 2,000 spam submissions (thankfully most of which were blocked by Akismet).

What I can tell you is that over that same period I have received one spam email through simpleContact. My clients have reported none at all.

I find that a tolerable amount

I thought I’d mention a Wordpress plugin that I installed today: Sociable. It’s an easy way to add social bookmarking links to posts in a similar way to the good ol’ Beeb.

Choose the networks you want to link to and you can also set the circumstances under which those little badges appear. I’ve set mine to only appear inside a post, because I think it looks tacky to have a page filled with icons.

I took the liberty of modifying the plugin to add support for Facebook and 9rules and have submitted the changes back to developer Peter Harkins for general release.

Via MacUser:

Microsoft have decided to relax their previous stance on virtualisation, where only Windows Vista Business and Ultimate editions were permitted to run inside a virtual environment such as Parallels or VMware.

This may not seem like a big deal since you could run it under Boot Camp. Anyone who has used Boot Camp will tell you that it’s great option for processor intensive activities (like playing games), but a total pain in the ass if you have to regularly restart between platforms when working.

I found this recently when building a CD-ROM using Adobe Flash on Mac OS X and Zinc on Windows Vista.

This won’t cost them anything in the long run. It may help to shift a lot of copies of Windows Vista to Mac users. This is a straightforward response to customer demand and should be applauded.

All I want now is an IE6 testing solution for developers and I’m happy

Via Jo:

A tribute in illustrations to legendary comic book creator Stan Lee. Very cool.

So I was right on one or two things, which is an improvement on last year!

iTunes

Movie rentals seem like a good idea to me. If the service is fairly priced when it hits UK shores then I might use it in preference to the local Blockbuster, if only to avoid the hassle of out-of-stock films and returning discs. As I said previously, this update makes the Apple TV useful at last.

Now that the big four labels (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner) are all on board with Amazon MP3, I’d like to see Apple play hardball and say “drop the DRM, or you’re out of the Music Store” to all labels.

iPhone and iPod Touch updates

The refinements to the iPhone and iPod Touch are welcome, and make the ‘Touch much more attractive to me. It’s not surprising however that the upgrade tax on ‘Touch owners is causing controversy. $20 won’t exactly break the bank, but the inequity of it is a problem.

If it were completely free, the complaints would be coming from iPhone owners, unhappy that they are subsidising software development for a device they don’t own. As it is, people who rushed to buy a ‘Touch prior to this update feel exploited.

It should be free for all, or not free at all.

I don’t think it would be a problem if these apps were designated outside the scope of a standard ‘Touch, and had to be bought regardless of when you got yours. After all, that will be what happens when developers are using the SDK to build their own apps. Perhaps Apple could sweeten the pill with some free downloads from iTunes?

MacBook Air

Very very nice, but not for me. Honestly I think it’s aimed at countries like Japan, where consumers are well known to favour small form factors. The size reduction wouldn’t benefit me though, and I’d be inclined to either save my money and buy a MacBook or go all the way and get a MacBook Pro.

Time will tell whether the non-replaceable battery unit, lack of optical drive and impressive thinness (and its effect on heat dissipation) were wise decisions.

All this makes me wonder when the MacBook will be refreshed. The last update was a bit of a yawner, and it’s now the odd one out in Apple’s range (white plastic, LCD screen etc). I’ll eagerly await the next MacBook.

A thought provoking post by Stephen Fry called Social networking through the ages. He observes that many of the modern social networking websites constitute a return to the old fashioned closed networks (like AOL) of years ago. For what is Facebook, but a Friends Reunited for the Web 2.0 generation?

I guess that’s why they’re called revolutions – they always come round again.