At work today we launched the new Air New Zealand website, Home Sweet As.

If you’re a Kiwi living in Australia you can highlight your ’sweet spot’ and have it added as a edible dot to a virtual cake in the shape of New Zealand. This follows from our previous campaign last year we just won the Creative Showcase for.

Here’s the video we made promoting the site:

Technically the site enabled me to play about with a few new ideas. Geographic clustering is a completely new area for me. Because of the rise of Google Maps, clustering tends to be done in the browser front-end. This offered no benefit to me as the whole purpose for clustering in this instance was to reduce the data load being downloaded by the client.

I settled on the DBSCAN algorithm, which was simple enough to implement and clustered the data pretty well. It does fall down in that the epsilon value is predetermined in the code, and does need some ‘tinkering’ to get the best results. However, it seems to do the job. At the time of writing this (17th July) the current live version of the site doesn’t use any data clustering. We’re planning on releasing an update to the site later this week.

Also, we LOVE how on the day of launching a new site, Mozilla launches FF3. It’s a Flash site, so we’re not expecting any issues at all, but we would still have preferred not to launch a site on the day a new browser is aggressively launched with a world record for the most downloads firmly in its sights.

The site’s been up for a good 12 hours now and traffic seems to be flowing in quite nicely.

I have to admit to being sucked in by Steve Jobs and his church. It’s easy to succumb to temptation, bowing to him, filing myself somewhere deep within his flock.

It’s because I think owning an item made by Apple of California will make my life richer, fuller, happier. I start to believe that the shine of my iPod is not a refraction of the light, but an angelic halo. The design It’s as if the clouds have parted for a ray of God’s light to embrace me and love me and tell me everything is going just great.

Then my iPod will display a fucking unfixable error over and over just days after the one-year warranty expired, and apparently the only thing to do is to buy a damn new one. Also I keep sitting on the stupid white headphones as I like to keep my iPod in my back pocket. The weight of my left buttock forcing the $50 designer earphones into little white pancakes. Reality sets in. My life is no better. I am no closer to enlightenment. Maybe I need an iPhone?

The initial iPhone wasn’t released in Australia (with exception to the unlocked iPhones that were abundant). This next version is going to be everywhere, including the land downunder. Australia isn’t known for its embrace of the mobile web, Vodafone (my provider) likes to charge extortionate amounts for Internet access and refuses to let me onto a data plan. Telstra whilst not so keen in the Internet, does encourage subscribers to watch television on their mobile, but who the hell wants to watch television on their mobile? It’s like being sat on your neighbour’s lawn watching their TV through the window.

The new iPhone is cheaper in terms of the initial outlay, but with a more expensive contract involved the actual cost is a bit more. It does include GPS, although what’s not clear to me is whether GPS navigation is extra, as it is on Nokia phones. With my N95 I get GPS location for free, but if I want to use it to navigate anywhere I need to pay a recurring fee. Pretty crap really, especially considering the number of times my N95 has suggested I drive the wrong way down a one-way street, and turn into non-existent roads.

If an iPhone is to replace my phone, iPod and a GPS it had better do all those things better than the stand-alone gadgets can do by themselves. Except the chances are that it won’t. And I’ll still sit on the damn earphones.

Yesterday I launched my latest project, Study2U.com. I’ve been involved with that project for about 6 years, launching various incarnations of the site during that time. It seems with each version, search engines either take an immediate like or dislike to the site, and we have to build upon wherever we start out.

The version before last did really well with ‘tail-ends’. Rather than attracting an audience to check out our online MBA degrees, we did rather well on the odd courses we listed then in subjects like ‘knitting’. We decided that we wanted to concentrate on the audience by listing accredited online courses only. That basically wiped out our entire audience.

This new version, possibly the 5th version of the site (I’ve lost count), might work. We’ve gone for a simple design with quality content. We’re going to be adding online courses as we go, so the site should expand at a reasonable pace.

If you are incidentally looking to study an online degree, check out Study2U.com

Michael J. Schmitz posted two comments on my last post, about celebrities and programming languages although his comments included how Paris Hilton should read his blog about climate change so she could save her hotels. His idea for solving global warming entails a fleet of boats spraying frozen saltwater and cold air on glaciers to prevent them from melting further, and perhaps returning them to a pre-global warmed state.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it’s one of THOSE lists.

Edit – Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET aren’t languages: I did know that. Apologies – I added these last and didn’t update the post title. ‘Kermit isn’t really a celebrity’ – thank you to those who pointed out that HTML isn’t a programming language, but I thought the hint in the text indicated that. I’ve had a great response to this post, so thanks again to those who’ve taken the time to comment and pass it on.

Ruby on Rails Paris Hilton Flavour of the moment and very simple. Able to turn her hand to many things, but the results won’t be anything groundbreaking.

ASP.NET Tom Cruise Unpopular with some because of his social views, but completely unavoidable. A juggernaut of the industry and will always get the job done and make buckets of money for his backers.

C Al Pacino He’s been around for a while now but is still the best at doing what he does: possibly the best performer in the industry. Has influenced more future stars than anybody else.

Actionscript Peter Jackson Achieves some really nice visuals and will deliver the ‘wow’ factor like no other. Appears to have had an entire rebuild for his most recent release.

PHP Jennifer Lopez Love her or not, she’s still favoured for her back-end capabilities. Most people are familiar with at least one of her projects.

Coldfusion Michael Jackson Still has some fans left, but most have jumped ship. Was the super star of his day, but those days are long gone. Will probably try to make a comeback at some point, but nobody’s got high hopes.

JavaScript Ashton Kutcher Often plays roles where he appears dumber than he really is. Has a reputation for ‘punking’, can offer a few nasty surprises when he decides to pop up.

Erlang Eddie Murphy Likes to play multiple roles at once, but nobody seems to know what to use him for.

LISP Quentin Tarantino Has done some intelligent work in the past, but hasn’t been put to much good use recently. Probably not destined to kill Bill, but would like to reduce him to Atoms one day.

Java Renee Zellweger Has played roles requiring some bulk, but can just as easily shed that weight for other roles requiring something more lightweight.

*Updated* HTML Kermit the Frog Kermit isn’t really a celebrity. He’s completely flat when he hasn’t got somebody managing him through the back-end. He’s easy to understand and is accessible to all with the right script.

Others Of course I’d have liked to add Python, C++, Pascal and others but have just ran out of imagination. Please use comments to add more.

This is a trick vulnerability I learnt about from a talk I went to by Rasmus Lerdorf called ‘Exploring The Broken Web’. He took delegates on a 30 minute whirlwind tour of security vulnurabilities on the internet, specifically what can be done with XSS combined with a bit of social engineering.

He only briefly skimmed on an area that interested me. He exposed how a developer can check a user’s browser history, by just asking for it.

The trick is to use a small (and very simple) JavaScript code along with some CSS to find out which websites a user has visited from a list you provide.

Rasmus mentioned the script as something of use to phishers (they can find out which banks you bank online with and send you the appropriate phishing emails). I saw a less immoral use for it (although I won’t deny it’s still immoral): purely for marketing statistics. If I had a site selling t-shirts, like www.bensfunkytshirts.com I could use this script to find out if my visitors had also been to threadless, bustedtees and designbyhumans – or any other site.

Here’s the CSS:

#links a {width: 0px; overflow: hidden;}
#links div {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
a {position: absolute;}
a:visited {left: 1px;}

Here’s the JavaScript:

onload =function() {
var links =document.getElementsByTagName('a');
var visited =new Array();
for(i =0; i<links.length; i++) {
if(links[i].offsetLeft==1) visited.push(links[i].id);
}

//reveal on page the results
for(i =0; i<visited.length; i++) document.write('You have been to ' + visited[i] + '<br />');
}
</script>

Finally, here’s the HTML:

<div id="links">
<div><a id="Yahoo" href="http://www.yahoo.com/">.</a></div>
<div><a id="Google" href="http://www.google.com/">.</a></div>
<div><a id="BBC-News" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/">.</a></div>
<div><a id="SlashDot" href="http://slashdot.org/">.</a></div>
</div>

I’ve put an example of the script working up here:
http://www.hostengage.com.au/dev/historyInquisition/

If I were to use a simple piece of Ajax, or to stick the sites I know you’ve visited into a simple hidden form, I could easily learn far more about your browsing habits than you would want me to know.

Update (2008-06-12)
I’ve finally got round to putting together an example of this working.

waterfall-abseiling

Originally uploaded by The Feds

We went canyoning in the Blue Mountains last weekend. It was amazing. We put on 5mm wetsuits (thick) and followed a stream down through a canyon: jumping into rockpools backwards, sliding down rocks and finally we abseiled down a 50 foot waterfall.

We did it with High n Wild in Katoomba. They really knew their stuff. We did an abseiling day with them in the winter, so after two trips with them we’d definitely recommend them.

Possibly the best/worst web innovation I’ve ever experienced is StumbleUpon. Once you start hitting the little green button you can’t stop. You come across a few of those ‘free movie download’ sites that aren’t free and sites by bad designers trying to promote themselves as good designers, but you don’t care. You hit the friendly little button again to feed your hunger for web comics, lists of things you never needed to know and movies of car accidents, pictures of funny looking people and I was just looking at photos of a vampire slaying kit. I don’t need to see that. I don’t need to see any of this stuff, but I’ll click again because hell – my cursor was over in that direction anyway. What does David Lynch say about product placement in a video interview? Do I care? I do but I don’t know why!

It’s an addiction. It has to end.

CTRL + F11 switches off the StumbleUpon toolbar. It was beginning to be a major distraction from work, so making the toolbar disappear has made me more productive (so I can then spend more time writing on my site. Nice one Ben). Now I can switch it on during my lunch break and when I’m on the phone to someone who talks too much. After these I switch it off, and get on with work. Perfect.

Then I press CTRL + F11 again! Damn! It’s the same button to switch it on as it is to switch it off! Who thought of that?! I need a hard way of switching it back on. Something where I have time to stop and think ‘hey, Ben – do you really want to do this? This is the next 30 minutes wasted!’, and then I’d stop switching it on.

Someone needs to write a StumbleAddiction plugin and write it soon. Thousands of Stumblers are at risk. The economy will suffer. The markets will crash. The developed world will fall to it’s knees. Is StumbleUpon doing the work of Al Qaeda?!

It’s a problem. Can somebody fix it?

Sitting in the sushi bar the other night I was furiously trying to use my new phone’s ‘Barcode Scanner’ software to scan the barcode in from a can of beer in front of me. It didn’t work. According to my girlfriend it wasn’t exactly my finest moment, but on the bright side I’ve now found out that the standard barcodes don’t work. The phone reads these different kinds of barcodes that are of a format called Data Matrix 2D. An example of which is on the right (you can scan it in if you’ve got the right software on your phone).

There’s an online tool you can use to make these barcodes here:
http://www.mobiledigit.de/dmcreator/index.html

I’m not sure what use to me this will ever be, but scanning barcodes off the computer screen with my phone fulfills the geek in me that little bit.

Apparently this type of barcode is pretty big in Asia where the kids wear barcodes on their t-shirts. Those crazy guys.

More information on Data Matrix codes here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datamatrix

Sushi in world square, sydney

Originally uploaded by The Feds

The sushi bar Went to the sushi place in world square with laura