I've been tracking the use of Firefox on Ecademy. I've just seen a really dramatic acceleration in the last few weeks. For June so far the figures look like this.

Name Visits Percentage
1. Internet Explorer 83,445 69.76%
2. Firefox 30,419 25.43%
3. Safari 3,639 3.04%

This is the first time I've seen Firefox over 25% and IE below 70%. Maybe it's a statistical anomaly but it surely looks to me like IE use is now in free fall.

This has interesting implications for systems like Alexa that are IE only. Or sites and developers that use technologies like ActiveX that are IE only. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've given up trying to rate my music or organise it into playlists. With > 70Gb now, it's just too much like hard work. But the random shuffle functions in Winamp and my Creative Zen just aren't good enough. So, Lazyweb, here's what I want.

A Winamp plugin that makes it easy to just say "Play any track" and launches a random shuffle of the entire collection. I then want three big buttons in the style of Last.FM "Love, Skip, Ban". When I hit these it should automatically feed back into the random shuffle algorithm. Love tracks should get higher priority. Skip tracks get skipped and get moved down the priority. Ban tracks get moved to the bottom of the heap and get played almost (but not quite) never. The system should remember what I've listened to between sessions and try to cover the whole collection over months. It should give priority to tracks I've recently added to the collection.

Ideally I should have exactly the same functions on my personal media player. And when I plug it in it should swap statistics with the desktop system.

As an aside. My Creative Zen Xtra has had an 80Gb hard disk added. At the moment I've got a complete copy of the main collection on the player. I switched to PFS-MTP MS Windows firmware whihc was a mixed blessing. It's made drag and drop possible (although not as a USB Mass storage device). But 'm desperate for a way to better integrate it into Winamp. There is a plug in but it can't yet play music off the player through Winamp.

Where should I get my music?

Do I use the P2P nets where nobody gets paid and I run a small risk of being found out?

Do I buy my music from a bunch of Russians at AllOfMp3.com who may not be paying anyone. Or at least nobody involved in producing music.

Do I buy from iTunes where many artists report that they're seeing $0.07 or less from the sale of their music on the iTunes Store, so all your money is doing is lining the pockets of the same recording companies that are busily suing grannies, little kids and everyone else they can get their hands on And of course merely paying off the advance they received from those same people.

We had a brief outage this evening.

Our servers are hosted in a Globix facility. Their main and backup A/C chillers for the main datacentre room failed. Shortly after that their main routers handling the pipes to the outside world shut down as they overheated. This took out every customer hosted at that site and quite a number of them had to shut down their whole operations until the A/C came back up, to avoid overheating. We were comparatively lucky and our servers kept going and came back online as soon as the network was restored.

I understand there were a lot of rather unhappy engineers queuing up to get the keys to their racks. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Skypecast of the Ecademy event is running now 19:30 BST.

Details of the Skypecast can be found here.
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=9403

To listen in you need a copy of Skype, preferably the latest Beta. [from: JB Ecademy]

We're going to attempt to Skypecast the Ecademy event this evening starting at 19:30 BST.

Details of the Skypecast can be found here.
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=9403

To listen in you need a copy of Skype, preferably the latest Beta. [from: JB Ecademy]

In the last couple of weeks we've started getting a weird support problem. A few people seem to be unable to save their profile or to save blogs. What happens is that they wait for 60 seconds or so and the browser then comes back with 400 Bad Request.

Now I haven't done anything likely to make this happen. And a 400 Bad Request should be pretty much impossible because it's the Server saying "I couldn't understand what the Browser told me." These are bog standard POST forms with nothing unusual about them. It's very hard to see how a browser could screw them up and send bad data back. And it's clearly only happening to a few people.

My gut feel is that this is either an IE6 update that's gone wrong. Or it's a browser add on such as Google Web Accelerator screwing up[1]. Or it's an ISP transparent proxy that is failing to pass data back correctly. I think it's IE6 only, but I'm not even sure of that. I haven't yet been able to find any common pattern to the people with the problem.

Any ideas? Because I've run out of them and I'm not sure what to look for next.

[1]Incidentally, Google Web Accelerator seems to be broken. It frequently returns a link to a RedHat Linux Apache initial installation screen rather than the target website. I have no idea where it's getting *that* from. [from: JB Ecademy]

And I'm pleased to say that after all that Cory isn't too busy to offer an opinion on the great Web two point oh trademark debacle. Boing Boing: Can anyone own "Web 2.0?"

What I don't get is why messrs Canter and Winer felt the need to goad him into it. I'm sure there's more to this than meets the eye and thinking that it was petty spite by them is almost certainly unfair to those two fine gentlemen.

Whenever I see some example of hubristic excess I ask myself:-

What would Cory say about this?

And then I ask myself

Why hasn't Cory said anything about this yet?

And then I realise,

He's probably busy.

If we can't use Web two point oh, I vote for Web 0.92

We have had an outage from about 5am to about 10am this morning.

It looks like the problem was with our main datacentre and connectivity provider Globix. We're currently working with them to try and track down exactly what happened.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Sharman Networks End User License Agreement for Images

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For All Uses of Images:

This image is only available for the members of the media for use in media publications. It is not for distribution.

Credit for this image must be given to:

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You may not disparage Sharman Networks or any of its products in your use of this image.
You should not use our images, photos, application(s), corporate name, logos, screen shots or other copyrighted material in a way that would indicate Sharman Networks' sponsorship, affiliation or endorsement of Your Product(s) or Service(s).
This image can only be used as is, and as provided by Sharman Networks, you may not alter the screen image in any way. The image must appear precisely as is does on this site.
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So, saying something disparaging here about free speech, censorship or a P2P company bringing a libel suit against a website that promotes P2P would be absolutely wrong and I won't even consider it.

Actually I think she's quite a babe. Schwing!

Help Jon beat the lawsuit

The next stage in my Google Maps experiments has just gone live. We're now plotting all Ecademy subscribers on a Google Map using my automated bunching code. I think we're the first social or business network to do something like this.

If anyone's worried about data security, we're only showing members who allow their street address and postcode/zipcode to be shown on their profile.

The Geocoding was done from an open, non-commercial database of the first part of people's UK postcodes or US Zipcodes. They can then fine tune this.

The infowindow popups contain a link to their Ecademy Profile, Company web site and their main IM system, such as Skype. The Skype links are active and show their current status if they've enabled "Show my status on the web". I'm also using the latest Google Maps V2.x to show tooltips when you hover over an point.

Here's a fun punctuation variation in a post from Uncle Dave about the Da Vinci code.

Yeah it was worth seeing, if only to understand how dead, popular culture is.

Yeah it was worth seeing, if only to understand how dead popular, culture is.

Anyway. Just before that are two great posts about RSS and the dangers of centralising a decentralised technology. And it does amaze me when I see Typepad, Wordpress and Blogger users using Feedburner. So it's equally puzzling to see yet another feed processing system.

I'm attempting to Skypecast the ecademy event tonight. Details here.

https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=5230 [from: JB Ecademy]

ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Invasion of the Robots Contest

Skype should do this.

More work on automatic bunching.

I've now sussed working across the international dateline. The problem was that the dataport coordinates were ending up with longitude either >180 or less than -180. To get the wrapping right, I needed to either subtract or add 180 respectively.

Official Google Base Blog: Create ads for your itemsIf you're familiar with Google AdWords, you'll be happy to know that we're now enabling you to create AdWords ads for individually posted items in Google Base, right from the Google Base edit item page.

Very interesting. I've thought for a while that eBay should get into this business. Create Ads for a fee from eBay listings and then place them context sensitively on blogs. Of course, Google is better placed to do this. The next question is whether there's an API so you can do this automatically when you create the Base entries. Anything to improve the quality of Google Ads is welcome. As is anything that increases the inventory of much more specific Ads. I'm sick to death of "Node. Get best prices on Node at eBay" just because my main page is called node.php

Let's think about this a bit further. eBay could really benefit and pass that benefit on to their posters by teaming up with Google to automatically create Adwords Ads from eBay listings. And they should be able to get their posters to pay for it as well rather than spending huge amounts on generic Ads.

We'll even geo-target your ads to the most appropriate location. This is also significant and begs the question of just how good Google is at getting the Geo coordinates of the viewing browser. I'd really like to see this worked in with a service like Plazes that allowed the users to specify exactly where they currently are as well as just working off the IP address. If that's what they're doing.

More work on bunching and display in Google Maps.

I've currently got both a "Viewport" in Google Maps and a "Dataport". The Viewport is what you can see, the dataport is the area for which I get points to plot when I do a refresh. The dataport is twice the size (4 times the area) so that if you scroll the map a short way I don't need to do a round trip to get new data.

What I'm now doing with bunching is this. I've divided the dataport into an 8*8 grid, which implies a 4*4 grid for the viewport. I get the data for the whole dataport. If there are more than 64 points in total I iterate through the cells of the 8*8 grid. If a cell has more than 2 points, I mark the first one as a bunch. I take the average of the others and compute a centre point for the group and apply it to the first point. I then mark the others as "deleted". When I've gone through all 64 cells, each cell has at most 2 points so in the worst case there are 128 points to be mapped. I then go through the remaining points and if there are 2 with identical locations I spread them slightly by adding a small random offset.

The next problem is dealing with the international dateline where the viewport and dataport straddle the transition from longitude 180 to -180. The best solution I've found so far is to work out which side has the most visible and to ignore the other side. So the dataport edge is fixed at 180 or -180. This seems to work well except at one zoom level and map centre. I think this where the dataport actually straddles both 180 and zero. Still working on this.

Apart from the dateline problem there's one last glitch. This happens where there are more than 64 points at a single location. In my dataset this almost happens for "London, UK". The problem is that no matter how much you zoom in, there will always be more than 64 points in total and they are all in one cell so will be bunched. The other limitation is going to be dealing with very large numbers of points, say bigger than 10,000. At some zoom and centre values, bringing all the data into an in memory array and iterating though it repeatedly is going to slow down too much. At that point it would probably be more efficient to do 64 SQL queries rather than one large one and then 64 runs through the data.

So I'm closing in on a set of algorithms to automatically bunch points and to keep speed up by limiting the total number of points that are actually mapped. It works really well!

There's a new beta of Live Messenger 8.0.


Why have all the major IM suppliers forgotten how to ship early, ship often? Skype is shipping a major release every qtr. The rest of them have a release schedule measured in years. The most annoying is Googletalk. It's now 8 months since the LibJingle announcement. Where's the code that supports it? Where's the next big release, because it still looks like Alpha code.

None of them (with the possible exception of AOL) seem to understand that voice, video and conferencing (both chat and voice) are important. Skype is stealing a major march on them here. And what about the 3rd parties. Where's Trillian and Gaim's voice and video?

And none of them really understand the importance of an API and things like showing status on the web with a simple URL scheme to launch chat/voice.

So this beta was good because it finally lets you send a message to somebody who's offline, delivered when they next appear. And it was good because it prompted an upgrade automatically. But it was bad because the install required a reboot of XP. *WHY?* And the shared folders is clever. but why is there still all the adverts and that stupid "Billing Information" menu choice. And did they finally lift the 150 contacts limit on the directory size? And does voice and video actually work? I use Skype Voice every day. But I almost never use MSN voice and video because it hardly ever seems to work.