Category Archives: internet

internet, search, software, software development, web authoring

Tafiti: search as a rich internet application

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Tafiti is fascinating. Imagine what Google search would look like, if re-designed as a Flash application. This is it, except that it’s Live Search, not Google, and Silverlight, not Flash.

Let’s start with the good stuff. I ran this on a machine without Silverlight installed, and the installation of the plug-in was fast and smooth (though it restarts IE without remembering the open tabs, which is mildly annoying). The Tahiti app looks good and scales nicely. I searched for Silverlight, and results came back fast. You can easily filter the results, or drag and item onto a “shelf” for future reference, and the shelf persists between sessions.

The best feature is a carousel at bottom left. This modifies the search by different types: books, news, feeds, web or images. The layout of the search results changes to match the type of search, so you get book covers and a print-like font for the book search, big headlines for a news search, and so on.

What’s bad about Tafiti? The biggest irritation comes when you actually want to navigate to a site you’ve found. The generic problem here is that you typically want to keep the list of results as well. I normally solve this by right-clicking and opening the site in a new tab. But this is an application, not HTML, so when you right-click you get a single menu option, “Silverlight configuration.” If you left-click it is even worse:

Tafiti is trying to show the site you chose. Please disable your popup blocker to see your selection.

It wants to open the site in a new window, see, and that triggers the popup blocker. Easily fixed with “Always allow popups from this site”, but still a jarring experience.

These are actually minor quibbles. The more fundamental issue is, do you want search as an RIA? The problem is that search is a basic utility. What I want is quick results and easy navigation, never mind the frills, so I will take some persuading. Still, it could work if the application adds real value. Maybe a way of displaying more results on a page, without clutter, or categorising the results in some sensible way. It’s difficult, because attempts to be helpful often end up being counter-productive – and Microsoft is a specialist in over-helpful UIs, sadly.

Despite these reservations, I think Tafiti is a great Silverlight demo, because the technology is nearly invisible. On my system at least, it just works, and at this stage that is what counts for most.

PS: I am not sure what Tafiti is meant to mean, but according to Wikipedia it is a dialect of a Polynesian language and means the strangers, or people from a distance. Perhaps Microsoft is talking about its search market share vs Google?

Update: in the comments here and on the official faq it is said that Tafiti means “do research” in Swahili, and that the app is specifically aimed at “research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions”.

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internet, multimedia, software, web authoring

Flash gets hardware-accelerated H.264 video

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart reports on H.264 video support in Flash, including hardware acceleration. Another report suggests that Flash will get DRM, but not quickly. Part of the interest of these two reports is that superior video quality and DRM support are key features of Microsoft’s Silverlight, so this represents Adobe’s determination not to get left behind.

Silverlight’s video story is not just about quality. I reported earlier on how Microsoft is wooing media providers with cheap or free hosting, encoding and streaming software. Another facet is that Silverlight allows video content to be used as just another graphics brush, giving programmers great freedom over how it is presented.

Either way, it looks like high quality web video is getting easier to show in the near future. I only wish the BBC would use either Flash or Silverlight for its troublesome iPlayer – I suspect either one would offer a much better user experience.

Playing with a new Smartphone has reminded me of the downside of Flash and other proprietary web content. Its web browser does not support Flash, and in fact even visiting Adobe’s site makes the browser seize up temporarily with a Javascript error. This is the tension between richness and reach. Looks like we are heading for richness.

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internet, software development, web authoring

Amazon FPS – is this the micropayment revolution?

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Amazon.com has announced the beta release of the Flexible Payment Service, an addition to the range of web services which already includes on-demand computing (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Simple Storage (Amazon S3).

At first glance, this looks like big news for the Internet. It bears all the Amazon hallmarks: low price, developer-friendly, and easy to adopt. Here’s the pricing:

For Transactions >= $10:

  • 1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
  • 2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
  • 2.9% + $0.30 for credit card

For Transactions < $10:

  • 1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
  • 2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
  • 5.0% + $0.05 for credit card

For Amazon Payments balance transfers < $0.05:

  • 20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025

There is no up-front fee. All these prices are reasonable, but the last one deserves particular scrutiny. If both buyer and seller have an Amazon Payments account, then you can receive a tiny payment at a realistic cost. You could even pay me a single cent, three-quarters of which I would get to keep.

Now look at PayPal’s fees. $0.30 fee plus a percentage for any transaction. Google Checkout? Complex, because Google wants to hook you into its AdWords advertising by giving free transactions up to a proportion of your AdWords spend, and because it is subsidizing the service to buy market share from PayPal. But the fees include $0.20 per transaction plus a percentage, which means you cannot do micropayments.

Amazon FPS is based on web services, so that developers can easily build it into their web applications.

FPS is interesting to me as a writer. It means I could self-publish and change a small amount per article – maybe just a few pennies. It is also interesting as a means of monetizing web services. A neat feature is that buyers can limit their risk by specifying both transaction limits and the total amount transferred over a period, for a particular recipient.

If Amazon FPS takes off, then Amazon becomes a major identify provider (because you will use your Amazon ID for payments to third-party sites) as well as becoming an Internet bank.

I think Amazon is a sufficiently well-trusted name that this could work. I should add, though, that nobody is sure of the significance of micropayments – we’ve just speculated that they might be a key enabler of (ugh) Business 2.0. See Wikipedia for a discussion and links. So far, it has been advertising rather than micropayments that has changed the game. But that was before Amazon FPS. What do you think?

PS – see Jeff Barr’s post for more information and early adopter examples.

internet, software development, web authoring

PHP Zend Framework will go visual

I spoke to some of the guys at Zend on the launch of the Zend Framework, a class library for PHP. I wrote this up for The Register.

The Zend Framework is a non-visual library, but I asked whether it will handle visual controls in future. I was told that it will: Zend’s Zeev Suraski spoke about a forthcoming “Visual Component Model” along with “WYSIWYG tools” (though WYSIWYG is always a stretch with web applications).

Of course I was reminded of Delphi for PHP and its Visual Component Library. If Zend achieves its aim of making the Zend Framework something of a standard in the PHP community, that will be a blow for CodeGear’s product, unless somehow it could be re-worked to become a Zend Framework IDE. It seems to me that Zend’s framework has better chances than CodeGear’s. The documentation is incomparably better, and my early experiments suggest that the quality is good.

It is also interesting to see that the Zend Framework has built-in support for Google services.

internet, security

Hot news: the Internet is as insecure as ever

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I’ve been writing about the Internet for years, and some of my earliest articles were about security problems. I’ve written about why anti-virus software is ineffective, how application insecurities leave web servers open to attack, and why we need authenticated email combined with collective whitelisting in order to solve the problem of spam and virus-laden emails.

What depresses me is that we have made little if any progress over the last decade. Email is broken, but I have to use it for my work. Recently I’ve been bombarded with PDF spam and ecard viruses, which for some reason seem to slip past my junk mail filter. Said filter does a reasonable job and I could not manage without it, but I still get false positives from time to time – genuine messages that get junked and might or might not be spotted when I glance through them. The continuing flow of garbage tells me that anti-virus software is still failing, because it comes from other machines that are already infected.

And what about comment spam? Akismet is fantastic; it claims to have caught 43,000 spam comments to this blog since I installed it in October last year. In the early days I used to glance through all of them and occasionally I did find a comment that was incorrectly classified. Now, the volume of spam comments makes that unfeasible, so no doubt there are some being needlessly junked.

Security is a huge and costly problem. Even when everything is running sweetly, anti-virus and anti-spam software consumes a significant portion of computing resources. Recently I investigated why an older machine with Windows XP was running slowly. It did not take long: Norton anti-virus was grabbing up to 60% of the CPU time. Disabling NAV made the machine responsive again. Nevertheless, the user decided to keep it running. What is the cost to all of us of that accumulated wasted time?

We have become desensitized to security problems because they are so common. I come across people who know they have viruses on their PCs, but continue to run them, because they have stuff to do and would rather put up with a “slow” machine than try to fix it. Other machines are compromised without the awareness of their owners. Those PCs are pumping out viruses and spam for the rest of is, or are part of the vast botnet army which is now an everyday part of the criminal tool chest.

I actually write less about security that I used to, not because the issue is of any less importance, but because it becomes boringly repetitive. Desensitized.

The frustration is that there are things we could do. Email, as I noted above, could be made much better, but it requires collective willpower that we seem to lack. A while back I started authenticating my emails, but ran into problems because some email clients did not like them. Users saw attachments and thought it might be a virus, or could not reply to the email. I had to remember to remove the authentication for certain recipients, and it became too difficult to manage, so I abandoned the experiment. That’s really a shame. Authentication in itself does not prevent spam, but it is an essential starting point.

Do we have to live with this mess for ever? If not, how long will it take until we begin to see improvement?

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internet, software development, web authoring

Salesforce.com + Google + Adobe Flex and AIR = New Internet platform?

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I spoke to Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at Salesforce.com, about the new Summer 07 release. This includes the first full release of Apex Code, a server-side programming language which lets you customize and extend Salesforce.com applications. Currently Apex Code is only available in the high-end Unlimited Edition.

Gross told me that Apex Code has acquired some interesting new capabilities since we last spoke about its preview release. This includes the ability to make outgoing web service calls, a capability which is particularly interesting because it enables mash-ups with third-party web applications that also expose a web services API. Salesforce.com is a big user of SOAP, by the way, in contrast to all the negative press that SOAP seems to get elsewhere. You can develop Apex Code in Eclipse, though debugging is still fairly painful.

The mash-up idea is compelling. One of the key challenges of hosted applications is integration with local applications. Things like complex Outlook connectors are common, along with the ability to export data as Excel or Word documents. That friction can be reduced by moving more of your data online. For example, Gross told me that developers have already devised ways to export Salesforce.com reports directly into Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets. From there, you could easily share it with colleagues. In fact, the same application could email the link to a list of recipients. That makes more sense than exporting to Excel, attaching it to an email in Outlook, and sending it out again. Note that Google and Salesforce.com announced a strategic alliance in June, but this focused on AdWords which is less interesting.

Another key Salesforce.com partner is Adobe. Gross tells me that he sees wide take-up for Flex and AIR among Salesforce.com developers. There is a Flex Toolkit which simplifies the development of Flex or AIR applications that call Salesforce.com APIs. “The take up of the Flex Toolkit has been breathtaking,” says Gross. “We are already seeing companies create offline applications written in AIR, even though that product is still in beta.” He also praises the productivity of Flex – apparently some developers use it for that reason alone.

The offline aspect of AIR is vital, as it addresses the most obvious weakness of the Salesforce.com platform. Google Gears could be used for this as well, though I got the impression that Gross sees more take-up for AIR at the moment. He says there will be further announcements on both at the Dreamforce conference in September.

The vast majority of Salesforce.com usage seems still to be CRM, though there is no inherent reason why the platform should not support ERP or other application types. Its strength is the vast amount of pre-built functionality. Concerns include the cost – especially if the company reserves key features like Apex Code for its high-end edition – and the risk of vendor lock-in. See here for a good overview of the Salesforce.com platform.

internet

From BT to VOIP

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I have two BT (British Telecommunications) telephone lines, giving me the convenience of two separate numbers. I’ve known for some time that I could achieve greater flexibility at lower cost by using VOIP (Voice Over IP), but changing over was never urgent so I left well alone. That was until this month’s BT bills arrived, featuring a new “payment fee” – an £18.00 annual charge for paying your bill. That’s right, you now pay BT for the privilege of paying. You can avoid the new fee by switching to Direct Debit, but instead I treated it as an incentive to get on with the switch to VOIP. I still need one BT line, for my ADSL connection, but I’ll be scrapping the other and transferring the number to my new provider, Voipfone.

We currently use DECT wireless handsets, so I’ve also purchased a Siemens Gigaset wireless SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) handset and DECT base station, in the hope that I can re-use our existing DECT handsets. The Gigaset is also able to work with an old-style fixed line, so it is ideal for the transition.

Why not Skype? Well, Skype is massively popular and I do use it occasionally, particularly when calling from overseas. Unfortunately it uses a proprietary protocol, whereas SIP is an standard with lots of open source energy behind it, including of course the Asterisk PBX.

It’s going OK. The biggest problem I’ve had is trying to get it working behind ISA Server, Microsoft’s firewall. I’ve had partial success, but only with the X-Lite softphone running on a PC with the ISA Firewall Client installed. I can’t install this client on the Gigaset, so I’ve connected it directly to the ADSL router, bypassing ISA. This is actually a pretty good solution, though if anyone knows how to get this working through ISA I’d be glad to know. Incidentally, call quality is much better on the Gigaset than in X-Lite.

I should save some money, but what’s more important is that VOIP opens up many new possibilities and I’m looking forward to some experimentation.

PS – as chance would have it, Danny Bradbury has a post bemoaning the low quality of some VOIP calls. It’s a fair point, and another good reason to keep at least one POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) line to hand. Still, my experience so far is that the VOIP phone is fine for everyday use. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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internet, microsoft, search

How to buy market share in search … or not

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Microsoft gained remarkable market share in search last month, up from 8.4% to 13.2%. At last, competition for Google and Yahoo. Or is it? It turns out that most (not quite all) of the search gain was thanks to the Live Search Club, an online word game which links to Live Search. Remove its 3 million hits, and the gain is just 0.3%.

It gets worse. The Live Search Club lets you win points by completing games, and then exchange your points for prizes such as a Zune or Windows Vista. Very nice. But some dastardly individuals devised bots that complete the games for you. Result: product to sell on eBay. A low trick.

Personally I’m not chuffed with Live Search Club. I completed a game of Chicktionary without using a bot, won 20 points, but when I tried to register the site had gone offline. Drat. Still, perhaps Microsoft is coming up with some anti-bot measures.

It strikes me that Microsoft is being a little naive here. On the other hand, here I am writing about Live Search. So as a PR effort, I guess its working.

internet, multimedia

Loudness wars article remixed

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In January this year I wrote an article for the Guardian on the CD loudness wars – the tendency for today’s CDs (and digital downloads) to be mastered for maximum perceived volume at the expense of dynamic range. It’s a subject of continuing interest. Now I see that someone has created a YouTube video which includes several of the quotes I got for the piece, combined with others from around the Net and including most of an earlier YouTube video on the same subject. Great stuff.

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drm, internet, microsoft, multimedia

Will Windows DRM spoil the BBC iPlayer party?

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I am intensely interested in the BBC iPlayer, set to launch on 27 July. It’s a landmark in the convergence of the internet and broadcasting.

This is a convergence I welcome. I missed most of the Glastonbury 2007 broadcasts, but I’ve enjoyed the BBC’s watch and listen page which gives you immediate access to most of the sets*, despite the relatively low quality (225 kbps video, 64 kbps audio, according to the player). Just click a set and it plays, no chit-chat, no messing around with programme schedules or having to decide in advance what to record. The iPlayer promises bitrates of perhaps 750kbps to 1Mbps – effectively full broadcast quality. The immediate advantage is time-shifting, but longer term there are other interesting possibilities in internet broadcasting, such as greater interactivity and the ability to customize what you view. We saw some great demonstrations of this (using Silverlight) at Microsoft’s Mix07 earlier this year.

The iPlayer is also an important example of commercial use of peer-to-peer technology, using kontiki.  

The problem is that the BBC needs to restrict playback to seven days after first broadcast, otherwise it runs into copyright difficulties. I am sure people will put their energy into trying to bypass these restrictions, and may well succeed, but the BBC has to at least make a serious attempt to enforce it. It is this that pushed the BBC into the arms of Microsoft’s DRM, to the understandable upset of Mac users and Microsoft haters, although a Mac iPlayer is promised at some future time.

This aspect bothers me as well, not only because of cross-platform issues, but because I question whether Microsoft is able to deliver DRM that just works. See here for an amusing account of how a tech-savvy Windows user struggled to purchase and play an audio file using this system. The iPlayer appears to be based on Windows Media Player, which is notorious for its cryptic error messages and intricate, hard-to-solve problems. Here’s an example plucked from the windows.media.player newsgroup:

I just tried playing both some new songs I had just downloaded, and when those wouldn’t play, some older ones that have been on my computer awhile, but each time I try to open the songs, I get the following:  “…cannot play the file because a security upgrade is required.  Do you want to download the upgrade?”.  I click “upgrade”, but absolutely nothing happens.

I took a look at the iPlayer beta message boards, and there’s no shortage of folk with similar problems. I realise that that you must expect problem reports on internet forums, but my impression is that problems with Windows Media Player and Microsoft DRM are more prolific than they should be.

I can readily believe this, because Microsoft has woven so many dependencies into the fabric of Windows. This is what makes patching a Windows system so frustrating. You start off trying to fix a problem with, say, Microsoft Office, and end up having to install updates to seemingly unrelated components like Internet Explorer, “Genuine Advantage” ActiveX controls, or Windows Installer, some of which inevitably require restarting the system. It’s bad enough when it all works as expected, but when something fails it is truly a challenge to recover.

I’ve not yet had an opportunity to try iPlayer myself. Nor do I know if the BBC intends to move from WMP to Silverlight, though I believe it may do since this would bring Intel Mac compatibility. I suspect it would also be more trouble-free, since Silverlight does not have as many dependencies – I was told at Mix07 that it has its own media player and does not try to embed WMP.

What chance is that that BBC iPlayer will have a smooth and untroubled launch when it goes public on 27th July 2007?

*PS on Glastonbury 2007: If you have time on your hands, watch the Iggy and the Stooges performance. It has amazing energy, particularly considering the man’s age, and you also get a hilarious stage invasion which has even the Ig pleading with the audience to back off and give him some space.

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