My friend Rob has been kickstarting the Liverpool geek talk sceene, with the guys at his place of work, organising and hosting SWIG. It’s grown from a small meeting discussing WordPress at InterconnectIT‘s office, to taking the upstairs at Leaf Tea Shop in Bold Street.

Rob had been on at me for a while to do something at a SWIG event, and upping the ante, he said they were doing a bigSWIG, and would I like to talk about one of my projects, MegaDrive.me. I’d asked Rob a hundred questions about WordPress – which MegaDrive.me is built in – so I did feel obliged to return the favour!

MegaDrive.me was a project I’d started to catalogue Japanese Mega Drive games, write reviews and comments, and learn WordPress on the way. I also stressed something which as an employer I think is very important.

The talk went well, I was up after my mate Dan Donald, and it was great to see loads of familiar faces from the Speak the Web event and Naconf the week before. You can find the slides from the talk on SlideShare.net.

Good things are happening in Liverpool, and it makes me proud to be part of it. Keep it going, Rob!

My last WordPress update to 3.2 couldn’t happen on one of our older shared servers, as it was running earlier versions of PHP and MySQL. I forget which was the culprit, but it meant I wasn’t getting the new lovely interface and other enhancements. I also run about 7–8 personal projects and friends sites off our company servers, which while they’re not big hitters or bandwidth guzzlers, I have been known to take the server offline while “trying something out”.

Therefore I decided to look at finally getting my very own hosting. Can you believe it? 15 years of making websites and I’ve never had my own hosting! I know a few friends use WebFaction, Melbourne Server Hosting and RackSpace, but I wasn’t convinced I’d need anything too big, or expensive. I run a few blogs, we keep all media on services like YouTube and Vimeo and average page impressions hover in the 30-100 a day per site, with exceptions for houseofninja.com and speaknspell.co.uk.

With this in mind, and already having an Amazon AWS S3 account, I did a bit of googlin’ about Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting. We’ve all heard the phrase “cloud computing”, even my mum has, and it is very much the buzz at the moment. In brief, it’s about providing resizable, scalable, cheap on-demand computing. In my case, about letting me set up a server that operates on an “as used” basis, upping it’s processing power when called upon, pumping out bandwidth when hammered, and I only pay for those occasions.

At the moment on EC2, you can start a micro instance server, and not pay a penny for 12 months in terms of monthly fees. The first 1GB of transfer in and out is also free. Potentially, I get a years worth of hosting for nothing… and even without the free tier, it was working out to $1.08 for the month with 1GB in/out and an elastic IP. Yes, you read that right. one. dollar. eight. cents.

I tried a few instances out, one a Ubuntu instance with WordPress pre-installed, and was going to run one instance for each site… but thought better of that. One micro instance should be able to handle a bunch of sites. Time for more googlin’.

I ended up following this excellent tutorial from Caleb Ogden. Aimed at a mac user, clear, concise, I was up and running in about 30 minutes. There is little point in me re-dressing this for my step-through, just follow it. I have used Ubuntu/Linux a little, and am not afraid of the Terminal, but if you can follow instructions, you shouldn’t have any problems with the tutorial.

When done, you can then follow his walkthrough for configuring Virtual Hosts, so your instance can run multiple sites.

I will add that he doesn’t explain how you get Transmit/Filezilla/Expandrive working with your EC2 instance, due to sftp needing the .pem certificate. This quick reference allowed me in with my usual mac gui tools.

A quick config of my domain’s DNS and boom, this site is now hosted in the cloud.

Notes:

One thing to note, is that if you intend to let WordPress resize images to your defined media settings, you need to install the GD lib, like so;

# yum install php-gd

Then restart the httpd service.

Oh, and you’ll also need to edit the httpd.conf file (in /etc/httpd/conf) to allow the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks to work. Open the httpd.conf file in Vi, and look for this;

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
    AllowOverride None

Change None to All, then restart the httpd service again.

If you update to Lion OSX 10.7, you may not be able to connect with Transmit/Expandrive, so you’ll need to add the certicficate again…

ssh-add [yourkey].pem

My mate Phil sent me a link to this forum thread, which inspired this post…

My SysErr WP install had been stuck on 2.8.5  for a while, due to a bunch of full dbs and laziness, so finally moved things across and sorted it out. Bringing it kicking and screaming to the WP 3.0.x era wasn’t easy, as I had the Automatic Upgrade problem where an upgrade file starts downloading, but the update screen stalls, giving no further information, and the file stays at 0 bytes.

After an hour or two on a Saturday morning, I finally found the solution. So, future me, if you get stuck upgrading a WordPress blog with the stalling of an Automatic Ugrade (that phrase should help me find an answer in Google!), you need to add these 2 lines to the .htaccess file…

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

And it’ll be fine.

(if not, increasing memory might help!)

So maybe it’s over a month, I’ve not kept count. What do I think of it? How have I ended up using it? Pros? Cons? Read on!

My mate Robbo was heading to Las Vegas about a month before the UK launch date of the iPad, and he was toying with the idea of picking one up. “Grab us one, kidda, I’ll sort you out when you’re back.” I says, and he did.

Pretty much everyone’s first question was “What on earth are you gonna use it for?” (except the wife, her’s was more along the lines of cost and current computer count in the house–5), to which I didn’t have a good answer. I have an iPhone and MacBook Pro, but being a nerd, an iPad was a prequisite.

Out of the box, it was a thing of beauty. Typical Apple packaging means you’re in love with the inanimate object before it’s dropped it’s negligé. Weighty, solid, beautiful screen, bezel of a good size for holding and intuitive controls meant it felt like you’d already known about this new thing for a while.

The screen is fantastic, the battery life astounding and the multitude of ways I’ve been using it––equally impressive.

At first I was almost reticent to try and use it whenever, and the fact that the iPhone is always in my pocket meant it was the first gadget I’d reach for. However, over the weeks, I’ve got more used to typing on the flat glass untactile keyboard, and actually quiet like it. The screen makes reading for any extended period a breeze, and I caught myself thinking it was more akin to reading a newspaper whilst on the throne.

The boy loves it. He’s familiar with the iPhone, so when he picked it up and had a go first time I didn’t have to show him *anything*. He ended up in Safari on Vimeo, watching a bunch of my videos, which was amazing as he’d never actually used a web page before that moment. As you can see in the video, it was just purely intuitive. You can hear my amazement!

The amount of games I have for him (and me) on the iPhone means we hit the ground running with loads of content on the iPad. When games are 59p, you don’t mind taking a punt on them, and we’ve got some crackers for him. Clicky Sticky is a current fav, creating his own scenes with aeroplanes and stuff. In fact, quiet often I’m relegated to the iPhone as he runs off with the iPad!

Travel
The other week I went down to London for the D&AD Awards ceremony, which was an honour, and I decided to not take a laptop, just the iPad. First time without the trusty laptop interface to the online world. Would I cope? The train ride down was great. Logged on to wifi, emailing, surfing, chatting, listening to music, watched an episode of Lost. A couple of Oriental ladies were very interested so chatted to them for a bit and let them play with it while I went to the toilet. Loads of glances, and some crap joking from the Scottish rail staff about robbing it. Err yeah, another beer please!

#protip: a banana makes an excellent iPad stand. Non-slip, tilts the iPad a great typing angle, biodegradable and provides a tasty treat when you’ve finished work!

Taking the iPad to the gym has made me a few more friends too. Since I’d had it there before the UK launch, there were a few points and stares, but one guy came over and started chatting. He turned out to be a security analysts and consultant, who loves Apple hardware. Great geeky conversation ensued!

Around the house, these last weeks the iPad has been indispensable for watching the World Cup while moving around the house! Streaming via TVCatchUp has been great. Not perfect, but to wander from room to room and have the footy in hand, supoib!

In summation, I’ve found the iPad to excel when it comes to consuming media. I sit at a desk all day, and most nights, creating stuff. The iPad is a chance to kick back and look at all the wonderful things on the internet, providing they’re not in Flash…

In the living room, when the wife is watching tele, the iPad presents less of a barrier for conversation than a laptop. If we’re sat in there and I reach for the iPad to wiki or IMDB something, it doesn’t put up the same fence as a laptop, which kinda says “I’m busy, don’t interrupt.” I feel the iPad is a lot more informal, and less intrusive.

It’s a fantastic bit of kit, and while it will have it’s detractors, I’m loving every minute with it. And so is Eloy!

So Google bought the On2 VP8 codec for $124.6 million, then open sourced it (hopefully avoiding patent issues), hoping the up-take would make it the de facto codec online. Opera and Mozilla have been quick to support it, IE 9 says it will with a plug-in (err?) but no word from Apple just yet.

Told you OGG was shit.

One thing I really like about talking to some of the Opera guys I know, is that they will take the time to consider another viewpoint. Whilst they’re all about the open web, they realise they need to listen to people who are making and creating content for clients, but face real world restrictions like time and budget. I know. Ridiculous…

I run a business (well, Pete does most the business end stuff, but you know what I mean) and all this talk about HTML5 <video> tags has kinda riled me a little bit, because it’s getting so much exposure, and to be honest I think it’s already shot itself in the foot.

I emailed Bruce Lawson my points of view after we had a rapid fire exchange via Twitter. I was playing devil’s advocate a little bit by countering OGG/h.264 with a flippant “Flash video FTW” type of comment, but that led to a good exchange, with Bruce citing accessibility options in the new <video> tag as a major bonus. However, Bruce slept on it, and asked me the next morning if he could write it up as a blog post, because in his usual musings he doesn’t get to give my perspective much thought.

Currently, the best way to serve video online is via Flash. That’s a given. With the advent of HTML5, a new tag was born to specifically handle video. This would play video natively in a browser, with no need for plug-ins, and allow interaction with Javascript, standard CSS controls and further advancements like annotations etc. It does sound really good, and certainly one of the areas of HTML5 I’m looking forward to exploring. There was quite a bit of coo-ing over this Sublime video page, which is a good indicator of how it’s going, but as Tom Leadbetter points out, it doesn’t work in Firefox. WTF?

This is because there was a small issue of which codec the browser vendors would support for the <video> spec. Apple and Google favoured the h.264 codec, while Opera and Mozilla favoured the open-source OGG video standard.

Of note, Apple faced a similar decision when choosing to create the Apple Lossless codec. They chose not to use FLAC, which is an established lossless format, and opted to make their own. I remember reading at the time that it may be to FLAC not being immune to unforeseen patent issues in the future, which funnily enough is very similar to the OGG video format right now.

Right at the first hurdle, we’re getting shafted, because this means if I want to make video available for all visitors, I need to encode two versions.

If that were for a few videos of my band (what band? I can’t play *anything*) or of my family, it wouldn’t be an issue really, leave ‘em encoding over night, upload and use twice as much space, and reference both files in the <video> code.

But for a business, this means I have to charge a client twice for encoding the same piece of video, and if they’re dealing with a lot of video footage, the time plus storage aspects have just been doubled. This is just crazy. A savvy client will decline the niceties of doing the right thing of going with HTML5 and say encode it once and deliver with Flash. Job done.

Oh, but the iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash!

Think around the problem. Flash can stream h.264 .mp4 files, and the very same .mp4 will run in the Quicktime player on the iPhone, so it appears we’re covering a lot of bases with just using h.264.

Furthermore, the h.264 standard is supported by both dedicated hardware encoders and embedded chip sets for decoding, like in set top boxes or mobile handsets. More on the mobile in a bit, but the hardware encoding is the *only* way to go for anyone dealing in large amounts of video. YouTube anybody? Combined with the smaller file sizes and comparable if not better quality, it’s no wonder Google chose h.264. (I was going to link to Chris DiBona’s blog and the relevant article, but it’s a bad UX with the menu *under* the Google Ads box, and I couldn’t be arsed digging. face palm.)

“Oh, but not everyone is Google.” No, no they’re not. But other people use video too. One of our clients who do use a lot of video is D&AD. A quick look through the 2009 Awards submissions shows not only four or five dedicated video sections, but browsing round other areas, such as installations reveals more video. There’s gonna be a lot of media on there, and that’s just 2009… there’s 323 videos for that year alone, with a total of over 1,500 videos for five years of awards. This figure is only gonna go upwards as the 2010 awards are added, and the years before 2005 are added as D&AD work their way back through previous awards for a more complete history.

Going back to mobile again, this is one area of the internet use we’ve seen absolutely massive growth in over the last few years. The market is enormous, and it’s spreading across the globe and bringing access to those without computers or landlines, with enterprising individuals in Africa renting time out on mobiles for internet access.

A growing number of mobile devices are sporting h.264 hardware chipsets as standard, the iPhone, T-Mobile G1 and Android are notable examples. The explosion of mobile browsing is driving the adoption of the h.264 standard as a hardware spec, and I think that’s going to be quite the defining factor.

I would have thought Opera with it’s Mobile and Mini browsers would be an excellent match up for these new devices, but OGG does not reap the benefits of these hardware accelerators. Opera won’t support h.264 due to “obscene patent licensing costs” (which have yet to be levied for content creators, but it’s still $5 million for a browser to include a h.264 decoder. Thank you for the correction, Bruce), yet they themselves will license out their browser technology to companies like Nintendo… I mean, Firefox, fair enough, it’s open source. Obviously, I do not have the faintest grasp of the in’s and out’s of such dealings, or the figures involved. This is almost thinking out loud from me, and can probably be answered quickly by one of the Opera crowd.

Anyway, if you’ve stuck with me this long you deserve a round of applause. Golf clap. The long and short of it is that I can’t see HTML5 video becoming a real-world standard for online video for a while, until these codec issues are sorted out and there is a clear winner. Certainly for me as a professional dealing with clients concerns and costs, we have to be realistic and say at the moment, we’re going to use Flash. And that’s a real shame, as a lot of work has been done to bring HTML5 into the world, and there’s so much to look forward to, but this situation just boils my piss.

Now please excuse me while I go sell that garden ornament Lawson his hub-caps back…

There’s an uproar at the moment on the interwebs. You may have heard about it.

The iPad will not support Flash.

Just like the iPhone before it, the Flash plug-in cannot and will not run in the iPad’s browser. Apple say it’s because the Flash plug-in is the single biggest cause of Safari crashes. I can’t say I’d blame them for being pissed. The window to the internet on your default install can be crippled by a third party proprietary plug-in. Not cool.

So, because Apple have a closed platform in the iPhone and iPad they can choose who plays ball.

A lot of web folks are predicting the end of Flash. It’s on it’s way out. along with HTML5 putting the boot in and promising to handle streaming video (possibly Flash’s biggest single use online) with acceptable CPU levels on a Mac, there will be a decrease in the plug-in, whilst this may be true, I don’t see a funeral anytime soon.

If you also look at who’s screaming til they’re blue in the face, we see something interesting. It’s mostly (if not all) Mac using standards authors who’re quick to announce Flash’s passing. Mac users. A minority group who’ve been consistently bummed by Adobe and their plug-in technology for over a decade. We’ve been second-hand citizens for years with both the Flash authoring app and the web plug-ins. I know people who, years ago, turned from Mac to PC, because their core skill was Flash, and that was an utter cluster-fuck on a Mac.

Even today, watching a 2.something GHz Mac CPU tilting at 50% when running a YouTube video isn’t fucking funny. It’s obscene, and a slur to all Mac users. Adobe should not be surprised the oppressed masses are now turning.

But really, that’s just the technology, what about the software and possibilities it presents?

I have a long history with Flash, which has to some extent tailed off in the recent years. I remember being completely confused by FutureSplash, before it was acquired by Macromedia. I saw my whole world change with the introduction of ActionScript, not the clicking of option boxes, and the fear that I might not “get it”.  I was invited to the launch of Flash 5 with Subnet, in London with a handful of other companies such as Kerb and Razorfish, teams of young talent who’d been reared on video games and enjoyed creating something new. I’ve written chapters and articles, tech reviewed, demoed and taught Flash. I know it pretty well.

If Flash goes, we’ll lose important things on the web. Diversity, experimentation, inspiration and art. Flash is the single quickest way for a designer to do something quirky, with audio and animation, to tell a story or create an experience, then publish it to the internet. While I’m not Flash’s biggest fan, I still think it has it’s place, and more so now that it’s being used to create elements of a site rather than doing whole sites within Flash.

I don’t think Flash will die, and really I hope it doesn’t, because the bar for entry into web authoring for young designers and coders may be raised so high, and focussed so narrow, it will stop a lot of abstract and creative talent getting involved.

So just be careful what you wish for.

After the initial anticipation, and what seemed an age until invites went out, I’m on Google Wave.

I’ve been on it for about a week now, enough time to start forming some opinions on what Google Wave is, what it isn’t, and what it could be.

Firstly, how I got my invite. Basically it was a sliver of opportunistic luck with a dash of cheek. I’d been to a Northern Digitals meet up in Manchester at the beginning of October, and being an early bird, met with a couple of others before the bar opened. Of these, we struck up conversation with Dave Kinsella, beers were bought and a good night was had.

When he got his Wave invites through, and tweeted to ask who wanted an invite and what was it worth, I bluntly reminded him he owed me a beer. Dave was good enough to invite me to Google Wave!

Anyway, when my invite arrived, around 2am on a Monday, I was up and at it, checking out what all the fuss was about. To be honest, it was a bit of a damp squib initially, as I had about two people in my contact list, both of which were sensibly fast asleep at that unearthly hour.

An interesting point about the initial Wave Preview is that everyone is given a new “email” address of yourname@googlewave.com. I use quote marks because you can’t send a traditional email to this address at the moment. With Wave being part the the big G, as soon as someone you communicate with on a regular Gmail basis signs up for Wave, they get added to your Contact list. This meant that my contact list grew quite quickly in a few days as other nerds I know round the globe got their invites.

I’m guessing that when Wave is rolled out into corporate environments at server level, or you use Wave with your Google Apps, you’ll be able to use your normal email addresses.

So, what the hell is Google Wave?

At first glance it looks like a smoother Gmail replacement. This isn’t a shock, as Wave is the reworking of the concept of email, including everything we’ve learnt since the first email was sent back in 1971.

One to one conversations are straight forward, but look more akin to an iChat/MSN conversation with comment/response patterns in order. Similar to email, very linear, no top-posting… if you’re both online however, it does become more like real time chat. You can see what the other user is typing as they put their thoughts onto screen (I’m expecting this to be a turn-off-able option pretty soon!) and the conversation soon becomes more instant messenger like.

However, when you start adding three, four, ten people to a Wave, you start to get a feel of how powerful/beneficial/fanciful this thing can be. Conversations splinter and trains of thought derail left, right and centre, with people chipping in and starting “blips” in response to specific comments. These are shown inline and indented from the particular post they talk about, but are also marked as unread for you to see what’s new.

Hitting the space bar will cycle you through all unread blips in a wave, speeding up your comprehension of what the fuck’s happened in the last hour and where have these last 30 messages come from and I’m really confused now!

There’s a really cool option called Playback, which lets you step through a wave, blip by blip (I hope I’ve got the terminology right!) showing which bits of text have been edited, who replied to what and when, blow-by-blow. Very good for that post analysis of a he-said/she-said scenario!

The waves can also feature widgets in them. Maps, Yes/No/Maybe polls, weather forecasts are a few available as default, and you can imagine there’s going to be a raft of useful widgets coming soon. I’m very interested in the blog integration aspect, allowing blog comments to be followed and interacted with via a Wave. Push this one step further, can we integrate Waves into our CMS system? Hmm…

So what is Wave? Well, it’s not the knee trembling new messiah that a lot of people hyped expected, but rarely are these new innovations (*cough*Segway*cough*) but with the chance to use the Wave Preview, I have a feeling Google are going to learn a lot about what Wave is by how people start twisting it to their own devices.

Wave seems to be that stepping stone between email and instant messaging, but leaning heavily to collaborative learning. You can leave your message for someone, and they’ll get back to you, or you can chat in realtime, work on a document and see the changes, share media and information via the widgets… in fact, I’m kinda convinced Google know they have something really cool and very positive, but don’t quite know exactly what it is yet. So with the Preview they’ve thrown the doors open to allow us to write the rules of interaction.

That’s what we’re doing, wave by wave.

Hello again.

Since I’ve lost the use of my MacBook Pro for a week or two, I’ve had to fall back to the NC10 for every evening use. Before now, whilst having used it for an hour here or there, but usually a lot less, I’d not really built up a great picture of how good this little laptop really is.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a wait for drivers to be written to support the NC10 specifics, but that really is the last 2%. I’ve been doing some web design front end work, running TextMate, Espresso, CSSEdit, Safari, Transmi, Firefox, iTunes (natch) and even Photoshop in the mix with great success.

Yes, the little laptop would be sweating it’s nuts off at times, having only 2GB and all those apps open. And yes, the screen is a little short (for a stormtrooper) but it wasn’t enough to *not* do any work. I’ve not even tried the virtual desktops of Spaces yet, as I like my workspace cluttered. If you could see my real desk right now you’d understand…

Since the drivers for the audio hardware and the new trackpad drivers have come out, the Samsung NC10 has become a very usable pretender to the Apple throne. For £300, I have a system I can work on if needed, listen to music, watch movies, wardrive with, email, socialise and surf with very few drawbacks.

No. No I won’t be using this for an extended period of time. I’ll get my MacBook Pro back and enjoy the screen real estate, as it usually sits on the desk and doesn’t move too far. But the NC10 has done brilliantly to step up to the plate. I’ll be taking it to Canada with me next week.

The long battery life means I can watch at least 2 films on the plane if the inflight ones are crap, plus I can wardrive from the airport to Guelph, then have a small laptop on hand should I need to do more while there. It’s turning into an essential little piece of kit!

For quite a while, I’ve had a Mac Mini hooked up the TV, streaming DVDs and xvids to the TV, and all my music on for streaming to an Airport Express.

The Mini is on 24/7, also acting as a dev web server for nerding, and running ftp and a few other protocols, allowing me to grab an album from wherever, whenever.

As good as Front Row has been, it’s just not… geeky enough for me. The wife uses it without issue, and my son yells when the selector is on a few of the menu options he wants. But I want more geek.

I tried the XBMC, but it stank of PC design asthetics, like a chavved up Corsa, Plex wasn’t bad, but Boxee so far, has been great.

It wasn’t immediately great, it did take a few months to grow on me, but once it did, I now actually like browsing through videos, and music and finding things I’d missed or forgotten.

So how does Boxee make this an interesting process again?

While Boxee and Plex are built on the XBMC framework, the big difference is the social and online aspects of Boxee.

For example, all your films are scanned, and cover art, reviews, and a link to a trailer are downloaded from online databases.The reviews are brilliant for jogging your memory about the plot, or convincing the other half that it’s not a horror movie and she will like it.

You can also rate the films at any point while watching them, and these rating show up in your online profile. Online profiles? Yeah, the social interaction side of Boxee allows you to search for friends, add them and see their stream of activity. In fact, the first screen of the Boxee interface has four of the 16 boxes dedicated to recent activity from your online mates.

As a side note, I truly believe there’s only about 100 people actually online, as I have the same friends on Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, all the others… and Boxee. Everyone else on the internet must be a NPC.

Boxee also features some great web integration. You can add Flickr profiles to view photos, scrobble all your music to Last.fm, and watch BBC TV through the iPlayer plug-in. iPlayer’s not the only TV content, Joost, YouTube, Hulu, CNN and more, the integration of all the plug-ins is very good, and feels like a coherent whole package. I’ve found myself spending time browsing, reading reviews and rediscovering media I forgot I had.

Another thing that’s made the switch from Front Row to Boxee easier is a plug-in for Front Row that adds Boxee as a menu item, meaning the wife can use Front Row but I can jump from that to Boxee, no keyboard or messing about required. There’s also a free, official iPhone Boxee app due to hit the Apple Store any day now too!

All this through the little white Apple Remote…

ps. Add a comment if you want an invite to the Boxee Alpha!