Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Pretty gutted that after seven months of having my Sonos Playbar, it died.

Sonos were very good about it. I spoke to them on the phone and we tried a few things to no response. After that they send me through a return request that came with a pre-paid UPS sticker, so I just had to wrap it up and schedule a collection from UPS. They even shipped me a new one straight away, though that did require a credit card pre-authorisation.

Pretty annoying though, if that happens just after the warranty runs out, I will be very unhappy.

Unfortunately it is also the world’s most useless USB drive as it it failed to register the first time I plugged it in and then died when I tried to copy a file to it.

Recently my iPhone had stopped charging properly. Every time I would plug the lightning connector in, it would either not start charging or start and then immediately stop. I had to plug it in over and over again until it started working.

After having a search around, someone suggested that it might be due to an accumulation of crap inside the lighting connector port and that you could get it out with a toothpick.

I straightened a paperclip and had a dig around to see what I could find. It is amazing how much lint came out!

Last month I attended a Leeds PHP event where the guest speaker was Konstantin Kudryashov, author of Behat. He made a great case of how using BDD can really help you stay on track with the agile process.

Unfortunately I was sat directly behind a massive dan boy who spend the entire time enthusiastically nodding to everything that was said. I am sure he is a nice guy, it was just very distracting.

Richard had a very different opinion. He described most of what BDD did was nonsense. It works fine on your Symfony2 stack, but it just adds massive overhead for little benefit he argued, citing an example of how the company he is working with at the moment has just ripped years worth of it out.

I know what he means. It does work great on some stacks but become difficult on others. Also, I was working with a company that had done half their unit testing in it. I will not mention which mayor subscription TV company that was, but it was a great example of applying Behat to the wrong use.

However, on the whole I think BDD really can add a huge amount of structure and benefit to a product. You can knock “value” as a buzzword, but actually it just means actually focusing on what makes a product better and that genuinely is all that matters.

I’m really enjoying my Sonos system. Being able to play music throughout the whole house is amazing as I regularly move from room to room.

However the support for Audible audiobooks is not very good. The way it works is that you link your Audible account to your Sonos. Then, every time you buy an audiobook, you have to download it, load it into your music library and then you can play it. It then just treats it like a song so it does not remember your place or understand any of the meta data.

Compared to the Audible software, where new books just appear on the list and download and playing with one click, it is just an unusably bad experience. Audible also has chapter and marker supports and remembers your place in each audiobook that you are listening to.

Luckily, there is a solution. If you have a line-in on one of your components, such as the Sonos PLAY:5, and an Apple AirPort Express, you can take the line-out from your AirPort Express and then feed it into your Sonos.

Once this is done, you can use AirPlay to direct the output from your iPhone, iPad or Mac and it goes into your Sonos and plays through all of your Sonos system – not just the one you fed it into. This means you can use the Audible software and still play it across your entire Sonos.

There is a definitely delay added by the latency of the two systems combined. It takes a few seconds between me pressing play or stop on my iPhone for it to actually happen. But that seems to be the only drawback, and is not really much of one.

Using AirPort Utility, you can name the AirPort Express line-out anything you want. I have now renamed it to Sonos, so that is what I get on the list on AirPlay.

Being without a proper internet connection I needed to go mobile for a while. I went to O2 and bought a dongle, but it didn’t work, as they never really do. I don’t know if it is the dongle, O2 or a combination of the both, but they are a mission to get working and usually end up never working at all.

So I went to EE and got a 4G wifi hotspot.

My experiences so far have been really good. You literally just turn it on, it connects to the 4G network and you connect it to as a wifi hotspot. The speeds are really impressive too – 20mb down and 10mb up – way faster than you get on a fixed internet connection in Leeds city centre! Unfortunately the data is quite pricey but as a short term solution it has been wonderful.

I also ordered an Asus 6-in-1 router that lets me connect to the wifi hotspot and then gives me a network port to connect my router in. So my router, which has all my wired devices connected into it, was then connected to the Asus, when then connected to the hotspot. Complicated but it got all my devices online with no connection problems!

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

Last weekend I headed over to Manchester for PHPNW13.

I really enjoyed last year’s event and came away having learned a lot from it. This year was also quite interesting, though on returning home and reviewing my notes, there is only really one new thing that I want to look into.

There is a saying, “don’t read the bottom half of the internet”. It refers to the fact that while you might get polite and intelligent content at the top of the page, you’re unlikely to once the comments section opens up.

This is a good lesson for live. People are dicks on the internet.

A lot of people don’t seem to have spent much time on the internet though, and are then surprised by the unfriendly comments that they find. Even Richard Dawkins didn’t know until 2010.

But some people think they are unfairly targeted because of who they are. Some people may be of course, but I think it’s important to remember that regardless of who you are, the background hate of the internet generally runs pretty high. Here are some of the comments I’ve picked off my YouTube channel:

All those chicks have no taste though man. SO FUCK U.

There is nothing ‘cool’ about a camera which does a good job of showcasing that face.

what a tard you are

Ur an Idiot Get urFuckin Fact Straight u White Retard

do ur homework u white piece of shit.

umm you looked kinda like you on drugs but yeah i loved that movie and you did a good job

You’re on the right track, kid, but you need to get your hair washed and trimmed.

im reckoning by your dodgy mullet that this is common in your family?? you wouldnt be out of place deep deep south playing a banjo

Fucking idiot.

xmeltrut  ur fucking a dick ibet zain buksh whould fuck ur ugly face ur video sucks and u look like a girl u dickhead

they did die ur fucking dumb

oi u fuck face they did die

Damn you’re ugly.

You look like Trevor from the Trailer Park Boys….

fuck all athiets i hope you will enjoy getting your maginas ripped off in hell death to the athiests

Lmfao, get a gf. Shag her and get a life

you look like a monkey

this guy in the video is an idiot

Lose the drug culture look and maybe i’ll watch the video next time…….Nobody will take you seriously looking like that.

peado’s say i will touch you and you will be healed

haha killing jews lol kill six million jews and burn there corpses lmao

You’re probably thinking that I’ve picked off the worst, most abusive comments. But I haven’t. In fact, the majority of the comments on my YouTube account have been deleted, because the accounts they were posted from have since been flagged as abusive or threatening. What you see above is actually the nicer disparaging comments that get posted.

The take home message is that everyone gets verbally abused on the internet. It’s sad; I wish it wasn’t the case. But for the moment, it is. And much like an insect bite, if you scratch at it, chances are it will get worse.

Here is an inaccurate meme to help you remember it.

It’s inaccurate because posting abusive messages online is not trolling. It’s just being a dick. But that is a different rant.

You may get an error similar to the following in phpMyAdmin.

PHP Fatal error: Class ‘PMA_Message’ not found in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/libraries/Message.class.php

This is caused when Apache is unable to create a session – perhaps because of a permissions issue on the session folder, or perhaps because you have run out of disk space.