Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

As you may know - assuming you use facebook yourself - there are various fun and amusing little applications available on facebook that, amongst other things, test you in various ways. I recently stumbled across one such application that tested one’s ability to see through optical illusions. Most of the illusions were fairly standard ones, but the last one really caught my attention. I’ve reproduced it below:

Question: Which square is darker?

(1) Square A (2) Square B (3) Neither

The correct answer is (3) Neither. Apparently your brain compensates for the shadow and so square B appears brighter. I answered (1) as square A looks so much darker, I assumed it a trick question (a number of previous questions’ correct answers were that they were the same). So I loaded it up into a graphics program and checked the RGB values of the squares. What amazed me was that not only were they the same, the effect of the brain recolouring square B is so strong, that the square itself looked a completely different colour to that shown by the dropper tool as shown below:

Which all leads to a rather obvious conclusion: do not trust your eyes or brain to show you what is really there!

Are you a Java developer? Do you fancy winning yourself $25,000+ of prize money for writing a Java application? If so, get yourself across to the Android Developer Challenge, and get developing!

The amount of prize money on offer here really does put the likes of the Ebay’s “design us a Flash widget that we then own”  competition to shame.

Apparently IE8 will be featured at this year’s MIX08 in March. Read more on the MIX08 blog.

I often use MySQL behind the scenes for the websites I design for my GhostFish customers. As I’ve also regularly used SQL Server Enterprise Manager/ Management Studio in the past, I find the likes of phpMyAdmin horrible to use. So, after much searching, I bought a copy of PremiumSoft’s Navicat MySQL a few years ago. Since then, the product range has grown and my license morphed into an enterprise license. That is all very nice, except that I don’t need the extra features of the enterprise license. In addition, when the new version 8 came out, the upgrade price reflected the cost of the enterprise license cost, and was a lot more than I wanted to pay.

Initially I resigned myself to being stuck with v7. However I decided to try my luck and emailed PremiumSoft to ask if I could upgrade to v8 standard edition at a reduced rate. The email back was a very pleasant surprise. Not only were they happy to let me upgrade to the cheaper license, they felt that swapping from v7 of the enterprise license to v8 of the standard license was a fair swap and so upgraded me for free.

This just goes to show that if you are unhappy with something, it is always worth saying so. Keeping quiet gets you nowhere in life.

I used to use the search facility built into Windows XP a fair bit. I’d often want to hunt for some obscure file that I’d cunningly stored in some equally obscure place. It was slow, but it worked. Since switching to Vista, I’ve pretty much given up using search as it no longer takes a long time, but it rarely finds anything as a result.

Sometimes I forget how hopeless Vista’s search facility is, and I try to use it. I did so today and happened to notice the “words of wisdom” that it offered at the end of a search:

There are undoubtedly some very intelligent people working at Microsoft. There are also undoubtedly some really stupid people working there too. Whoever it was that thought “Did you find what you were searching for?” was a sensible question to pose when “No items match your search”, clearly fits the latter category!

For a while now, I’ve been carrying the Singularity logo on this blog, curious to know what it was all about.  Last weekend Aral Balkan revealed it to those of us who’d help promote his project. I was both excited and sceptical about it, but we were asked not to say anything until the project went public. Today, it has gone public and so I can start publicly commenting.

If you haven’t already looked, Singularity is a web conference planned for later this year. It’ll be a large multi-day, multi-track conference involving 100 speakers. What is different though is that  the whole thing will be completely web-based. There’ll be no travelling expenses, no hotel costs, no food costs (though cheap-skate events like Flash on the Beach didn’t both providing food either, so maybe that isn’t a valid advantage) and no event hire. Of of this should keep the costs - and so ticket prices - low. Due to the lack of travel, the event also scores “green points”, as it will have a low carbon footprint.

There are downsides to all this though. At a “real” conference, there is a buzz that will be near-impossible to recreate online. The crowds; the venue itself; the speakers on stage talking to; and responding to, an audience sat before them. All of these things set the scene. Then there is the face to face contact with other delegates, the chance to talk to product suppliers, potential customers and the speakers themselves.  Finally there are  products to try, books to browse and freebies to collect. Compare all that with being sat at your desk at weork, headphones on, watching a podcast and communicating via twitter or comments on someone’s blog. There will be none of the buzz, just interruptions, distractions and boredom will easily set in. Just as sitting at home by oneself watching Lord of the Rings on a 12″ portable TV will never be comparable with going to watch it in a packed cinema, so online events will never be comparable with real conferences.

Of course there is a big advantage to an online conference too. With a normal event,  typically one or two people from a company attend due to the costs. With a webcast though, a whole department can sit in a meeting room with a laptop and projector and watch the speech. Whilst real conferences often put videos of the speeches online, the speaker spoke to the audience, not the camera and the video often doesn’t work very well. Speeches designed for online broadcast from the outset ought to work much better.

So all in all, I am cautiously optimistic about this event and will be watching its development over the coming months with interest.

According to the tech site iFixit.com, users can replace their own MacBook Air battery. The user “simply” needs to remove 19 #00 Philips screws to do so. As iFixit.com puts it:

Replacing the battery is straightforward, but not something you’ll be doing when your battery dies mid-flight.

This of course shouldn’t be a problem. After all if you are rich enough, and stupid enough, to buy this piece of pointless eye candy and then try to use it as a real computer, you are likely to just employ a man simply to replace the battery mid-flight for you…