Blogs

Successful Farming magazine is the first to launch a new technology that embeds video into traditional magazines. Another example is CBS who has 40 minutes of video that will be delivered to selected Entertainment Weekly subscribers. The advert comprises a lithium-ion battery and a small TFT LCD screen to deliver the video. It can be configured to be interactive and users can recharge the battery via usb. The CBS advert has buttons on the advert page that let the user choose which television show that they want to see previews for.

According to a Science Daily article, young people identify with an online community almost as much as they do with their own family. The study was authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland.

I saw a tweet saying that the Dell CIO Jim Stikeleather claimed at the Nasa IT Summit that open source as we know it is being replaced by software as a service (SaaS) solutions. He said that there would be no more "Apache-like" projects. I understand his sentiment but don't agree with his conclusion because modern SaaS solutions require quality open source projects to support them.

We have been updating and maintaining a third-party piece of software for a client for over seven years now. Recently they have started releasing new versions every couple of weeks. As a SaaS solution, we tend to release new versions of Zingzam every couple of weeks but generally that imposes no new work on you, our customers. On the other hand, I won't buy another phone from HTC because they were too slow to update the firmware on the HTC Hero. So where is the perfect balance?

Reboot.

I'm not joking. I wish I was but I spent all evening trying to get my wifi speed to go above 8Mbits/second with no luck. I tried the old windows method of rebooting and I now get 29Mbits/second download speeds. Unfortunately this is still slower than the old IBM 1.4 GHz Celeron laptop running Windows XP, which clocks in at 43Mbits/second.

We have a vBulletin installation for one of our customers. (I hope this doesn't surprise you. We use the right tool for the job even if it's not our tool!) After the upgrade to 4.0.4 our performance monitoring tool reported over a 500% increase in our page load times.

I thought that Balsamiq Mockups might not live up to the hype but after using it for about 45 minutes and clearing many tasks out of my backlog in the process I've decided to become a fanboy too. The principle behind it is that it's a mockup tool and it does that well. After a while I started thinking that it would be nice if there were templates or some sort of folder structure so that I could really build a prototype but if you add all of those things it loses the beautiful simplicity that makes it so great!

As a team we were pondering on the number of test Zingzam communities we have created as part of our development and testing since January...

Well I've cleared out the test communities on my desktop machine 3 times - each when I got to around 300 communities. So that's at least 900 for me.. we reckon team wide (and in staging environments) it's around about the 4000 mark since January 2010. Wow! 

We made a video from our time and Internet World. I couldn't find a filter for the constant background noise but I'm just getting started in video editing. We hope you enjoy it. It's pretty reflective of the team.

Giffgaff is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO for those who like acronyms) with a customer community focus. They rely on their members to do advertising for them and even to answer support questions. They enable this model by paying real money to customers for performing different activities. Each point you earn is worth a penny of real money and here are some of the rewards you can earn: