Chris Worfolk's Blog

These days, its trendy for companies to control the entire mobile stack – Apple, Blackberry, Nokia (until recently) and several other companies all make their own hardware and mobile OS, claiming that it provides a better user experience.

However, I have to wonder if this is always the case. As mobile becomes the dominant form for computer use (in many sectors, mobile use already exceeds desktop use, in others it is rapidly catching up), it may well be that the market matures in the same way that the PC market did.

Think back to before you knew what a computer was (I originally said before you were born, but we’re probably getting too old for that now). All the PC manufacturers produced their own operating system and shipped it with the computer. It was a nightmare, nothing worked with anything else and there was no consistency – you switched hardware, you had to switch software too.

Then a young man came along, named Bill Gates (and Paul Allen of course). He had the idea of an operating system that would work across everything. Thanks to that, today, you can buy whatever hardware you want, load Windows onto it and you have a consistent experience across all hardware configurations, and all your software works on it.

It can be argued that mobile is currently in a similar fragmentation at the moment. A recent report suggested that there were now 4,000 Android devices – and that was published in May and they’ve been growing since then. Add this to the number of Windows phones, iOS devices and many other smaller operating systems (Nokia still have a huge market share in the developer world, RIM are still in there too, Samsung have their own operating system, the list goes on) – that is a huge range of devices to support.

No wonder so many companies fail to provide a consistent mobile experience, or end up saying “we’re only going to support iOS.” It would help if everyone implemented web standards to the letter, but what we really need is a Windows equivalent for the mobile world.

In a few months, the Public Speaking World Championship qualifiers begin. Last year’s winner, Ryan Avery won with a talk entitled “Trust is a Must.” The talk combines superb use of language, a strong moral message, gestures, humour and many other techniques to form a phenomenal competition speech.

Trying to get ImageMagick and it’s PHP extension working on OS X Lion is a frustrating process. It will often fail and even if you try to configure it manually you may get an error like the following.

checking ImageMagick MagickWand API configuration program...
configure: error: not found. Please provide a path to MagickWand-config or Wand-config program.

First of all, install ImageMagick via MacPorts.

sudo port install ImageMagick

Now install the imagick PECL module.

sudo pecl install imagick

Very importantly however, make sure you specify the path when prompted, to be /opt/local, do not let it auto detect! Once this is done it should compile successfully and you will be prompted to add imagick.so to your php.ini file.

The sixth project in your Competent Communicator module is all about vocal variety. So I decided to do a retelling of an old classic, the one about the man who prays to god to save him from the flood, then goes on to ignore all the help god sends, expecting a miracle instead.

This worked well for the project as it allowed me to use a quiet slow voice when the man is praying, and a fast loud voice when his would-be rescuers are trying to convincing him to come to safety.

While I personally thought I was well beaten by one of our Distinguished Toastmasters, who gave a brilliant speech about how he was trying to play the blues harp (also known as a harmonica to those outside the trade, so I’m told), the voting went my way and I ended up adding another Best Speaker ribbon to my collection.

Turns out they’ve added two new things to Twister – a hands on the air result, and a “twister’s choice” result. It’s not like when we were young…

For the fifth year in a row, there was only one place to be to properly ring in the new year. We had cocktails, sausage roles and Twister!

Recently, some of the great people got together at Sky Bet and auctioned off their hand made Christmas decorations – Princess Leia and Darth Vader sock snowmen – to raise money for the Humanist Action Group’s homeless programme. Brilliant idea!

Last week, we tried to get Elina’s bank account sorted out. When she originally set up the account with Lloyds TSB, they would only give her a cash card account, which is a weird account that has limited functionality, including not being able to use Link ATMs. They kept saying they could eventually change it, but they never have, despite nagging.

So we went into HSBC as I bank with them and have generally had less bad experiences than other banks. They weren’t too happy about doing it at 2:30pm on a Saturday, but eventually agreed to see us. However, they then moaned that we only had two months of bank statements, not three, and so couldn’t continue. So we stormed out of there.

Next we went to Lloyds TSB and once again asked them if they could upgrade the account. They said that their old system that isn’t 100% accurate said no, they couldn’t give her a real current account, but they couldn’t check for sure as their new system wasn’t working. They couldn’t give us a reason either – just “computer says no”, so we left there too.

The next bank along the street was Natwest who aim to be “Britain’s most Helpful Bank”. That is an admirable aim, but then, when you think about it, it’s really like being “Britain’s most gentle rapist” = admittedly more gentle than other rapists, but still ultimately a dick that abuses everyone who comes near it.

So we decided to skip that one and pop in to Nationwide, who are a building society.

They closed at the same time as HSBC, but were willing to set up the account anyway. Indeed, our account manager Shabana actually kept the branch open for us for an extra half an hour while we sorted everything out! She talked us through all their accounts and they immediately accepted Elina for a proper account.

I was so impressed, that I left with a new current account for myself as well! Of course, time will tell whether they continue to deliver on customer service, but so far it has been an incredibly refreshing experience.

Linux has a great tool called whereis that allows you to find the location of an executable. For example, if you want to know what PHP binary you are using, you could use the following command.

$ whereis php
/usr/local/php

However, if you run this on Mac it will often return you a black result, even though you know the command works!

$ whereis convert

The solution is to use which instead, which does the the same thing, but actually returns results.

$ which convert
/opt/local/bin/convert

Great for finding those extra mysterious programmes.

Due to the increasing number of people that tell me I need to relax more, which while was initially just friends, now includes doctors and therapists, I have decided to start playing Warhammer once again.

Having played a lot of 40K when I was a child, I’ve decided to go with some Fantasy this time and have begun once again building an army to wage war – photos on their way. In the mean time, if your a fellow player, or intrigued to give it a try, now is the time! Norm has already started building a band of Chaos Warriors and by the tim this is published, I’m fairly sure Fonze will be building something too…