Catching up on a load of pd/vid casts this morning while enjoying a spot of rare sunshine in the garden I came up on an episode of Duane’s world in which he visits Business Objects in Canada.

As many of you already know I work for Business Objects (now an SAP company) and I’m not a little unimpressed that Duane’s visit appears to have gone unnoticed among the developer fraternity outside Canada. Ho hum… such is life in a large organisation, no doubt I’m not reading the right intranet pages.

Anyhow Duane is a pretty cool guy, ex musician and extreme sportsman, and now as an evangelist for Adobe he’s pretty good at sharing key skills to get you up and running as a Flex expert. in Episode 4 Duane visits BOBJ to hear about the new Flex version of one of BOBJ’s key applications and the SDK to go with it. He also shows how incredibly simple it is to hook up a chart to your own data.

I’ve been pretty busy learning Flex and developing a new tool for my company (hence the lack of posts recently) and i’m loving it. It’s not perfect (show me a language that is) - feel free to comment on that btw, but Flex is pretty neat, I’ve tried to commit to sharing the lessons i’ve learned on stuff before and if I can get over a lack of confidence, I’ll try and share what I’ve learned. Someone may get value out of it I’m sure.

Enjoy.

With ove 8 Million downloads Mozilla officially own the Guiness World record for browser downloads in a singe 24 hour period. Firefox 3 is already a great browser, now it’s an official bona fide record breaker.

Dedication oh, oh, dedication oh, oh , dedication, that’s what you need.

If you want to be the best, soar above the rest.

Who-oh Dedication’s what you need

If you want to be a record breaker, yeah.

- from the theme tune that Roy Castle Sang at the end of the show

I got caught out by a very strange issue the other day. I posted a short entry about Bill Gates having a spot of bother with Windows. The entry I posted was copied out of an email I was composing to my brother in-law and this was my mistake. Of course I was using Outlook to compose the email, Outlook in this case is using word to compose the body of the email and add in the fancy rich text effects. What I did not realise was that when you copy and paste from word, you don’t just get the text but all the background XML and styling info as well.

Initially this might not sound too alarming, unfortunately when you paste that into Wordpress, without using the ‘paste from word’ option in the WSYWIG editor provided within Wordpress, the tags and style info becomes active.

The result of the cock-up was that over the weekend I has a blog with the ugliest colour scheme know to man (what you don’t like orange? ;0) All the links were blue, the default styling for most browsers, and IE refused to load the site at all :0(

Thankfully my pal Lummie did a quick search and found out what the problem was while I was trying to figure out how the frack I got all these crappy tags into my site without touching it.

Once the offending article was cleaned up, the universe was returned to it’s previous state and all is well.

There are several plugins available out there to help you clean up if you need to but I advise you either copy into notepad first then copy from there to ensure you don’t get the crud or use the paste from word function in Wordpress.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Paste from Word

…In response to complaints… From BT!?

I’m pretty sure that if you look at Broadband forums as well as many sites and blogs on the web, you’ll find many consumers who have complained about Virgin Media’s appalling service and the never ending changes to their ‘traffic shaping’ policy. maybe those complaints aren’t being made in the right way to the right people?

At least someone finally agreed that Virgin’s latest advertising campaign is a total crock of shit. The BBC is carrying a good article outlining the problems and corrections Virgin will have to make. There are a couple of interesting statements from a Virgin Media Spokesperson too.

One comment made me chuckle

“Our traffic management policy helps ensure the majority of customers receive the quality of service they expect from our fibre-optic broadband product by managing demand from the heaviest users at certain times of the day,”

Considering VM cap ALL users when they hit a download limit meaning

“Customers on its L 4Mbps package could download 60 songs and or two TV shows before reaching caps while those on the XL 20Mbps package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows before their speeds would be subject to caps”

I fail to see how anyone using Virgin Media’s Broadband service can be said to receive great value for money. Basically so long as you pay VM your money and don’t do anything at all with the service they are happy. Try using it and somehow you are breaking the rules and causing much upset in the universe so you must be restricted and policed. (using it would mean, emails with photo’s from family members, video’s shared with family members, Windows Updates, Buying Software online, Buying Games online, Playing online games…).

It’s like buying a car from a manufacturer and being told that you can only do 5 miles a day in it or you will be restricted to 1st gear for the next 50 miles then you get another 5 miles with the full 6 gears then… you get the picture.

It’s Complete Bollocks! If you can’t provide the service and are not prepared to invest in the infrastructure to guarantee the speeds and service at all times to all customers then you shouldn’t offer the damn service in the first place.

Let us not dwell on the negative though Virgin will soon be offering a blistering 50MB service (between 1 am and 1.10 am every day with a DL Limit of 5kb no doubt).

Technorati Tags: Virgin Media, Broadband Speeds