Organised by CamerJam, this was the first MobileSQUARED Roadshow. I was extremely proud to be ask to represent Vodafone on the "Operators' Panel" - but I'll let others review my slot. I want to concentrate on the four aspects of the day I found fascinating. As ever, these views are my own. Mövenpick As some of you know, I boycott Nestlé. So I was unable to try any of the sponsor's ice-cream. However, what they said about their mobile strategy shocked me. They don't have one. The CEO ta…
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HTML is a complex beast. Especially when it comes to languages. I don't mean the difference between English and French but between UTF-8, Windows-1252, and all the other methods for encoding text. When it goes wrong, you can come a cropper - take a look at this advert for the BlackBerry. Somehow a character has crept in to the text which can't be rendered by the browser. BlackBerry? Advert? Immediately, one gets the sense of a poorly tested advert - one which probably goes to a dodgy s…
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Twitter has a gaping security hole. Changing your password won't stop malicious users logging in as you! I received a rather worrying email from Twitter. Apparently they thought my password had been compromised and needed to be reset. Reset Your Twitter Password After checking to see if it was valid, I went and changed my password. Any site which relied on a cookie to post to Twitter would have been blocked out. Ha! Gotcha, suckers! The OAuth Problem OAuth tokens are not revoked when th…
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It's been a rollercoaster year for Bletchley Park. Studiously ignored by the Government for so long, the British home of cryptography and computing is finally getting the recognition it deserves. However, it is still badly short of funds. Looks like they need.... A Benefit Gig! Thus was born https://web.archive.org/web/20090815094446/http://www.boffoonery.com/comedians.html! A comedy gig to raise money for Bletchley. Starring Robert Llewellyn, Robin Ince, Richard Herring and a host of ot…
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Last night, thanks to the lovely people at SeeFilmFirst, I went to see a free preview of Harry Brown starring Michael Caine. Harry Brown is an unremittingly violent film. Utterly devoid of sympathetic characters, it offers a terrifying glimpse into the fear, violence and sadism on an unnamed council estate. Every scene is wired with tension - nervous tension which often culminates in bloody violence. This is not a thought provoking film. It does not "raise serious issues". It simply exists …
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One of the joys of the Internet is that it is international. Anyone, from anywhere, speaking any language can visit any page on the World Wide Web. This makes life difficult for advertisers. Not only do they have to ensure that what they're showing is applicable in the viewer's country, but also that it's legal and written in the correct language. If they don't, at best they've wasted their inventory, at worst, they're breaking the law. Google runs this advert for its BlackBerry software. …
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When I was a child of six or seven, a kindly Aunt bought me an orange-plastic recorder. I'd never previously shown the slightest interest in music - but I loved that recorder. I joined the school's music lessons, I performed for my parents, I even tried to learn what a treble cleft was and what those splodges on a stave meant. My Key To Musical Genius Then, one day, I lost my recorder. I was gutted. I was a messy child, always losing things. I never found where it went to and so my dreams of…
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