Webonaut

It strikes me looking at the OnLive service (that allows you to play the most recent, amazing games remotely) that these guys will probably fail - due principally to the current shittiness of broadband connections. BUT - and this is a big but - the fact that they have proved that it is POSSIBLE says to me that in the future this will be completely do-able - in fact so commonplace as to be normal. Companies like Sky will eventually get in on the act, and your cable package will have a "games" option that lets you play anything - literally - without having any special hardware (other than the Sky box that will (irrelevantly) be beefier than anything around today). Sure, you'll buy games for 20 yrs or so but they will start to look antiquated - like DVDs in the face of NetFlix or CDs in the Spotify world. So what does this mean for us here in my little dev studio in Norwich? Well, immediately, I can see that the App Store is not long for this world in the same way - we need

There's a big fight happening right now: Apple Vs. Adobe Round 1: Apple don't allow Flash in their portable browsers Round 2: Adobe get Flash CS5 (released this week) to build AppStore apps directly Round 3: Apple tighten the AppStore acceptance criteria to almost explicitely prevent Flash-originated apps Round 4: Adobe gets the arse and gets Flash CS5 to build (albeit basic) direct to HTML5 Canvas Now I am an evangelist for Apple products (because nothing touches a MacBook Pro as a hacker tool right now) but looks from here very much like Apple being the bully... This fight is not simply spectator sport - it affects all web-developers. What it means is that we can no longer produce a single content rich (i.e. with interactive animations) site/app that will serve all browsers. Until the masses upgrade to IE9, HTML5 Canvas is just not an option and Flash will not run on Apple portable gear. What about jQuery - I hear you cry! jQuery (or any raw javascript equivalent thereo

I've just experienced two completely independent, unrelated servers with totally different web-applications reboot and unable to start the MySQL service, one on 1st April, second on 2nd April. Coincidence? Probably. Is there a Microsoft Windows 2003 server patch killing MySQL? Not found any other incidences being Googled... let's see if anyone finds this post also experiencing the same thing... UPDATE: This appears to have been triggered by a fire at BT on March 31st. Timeline: 31 March 2010 07:30 hrs fire crews attended the fire at BT Exchange in Paddington, caused by an electrical fault. According to Gradwell, a business ISP, 437 local exchanges and up to 37,500 Datastream circuits have been affected. It said the fire was having nationwide repercussions on communications - http://www.theregister.co.uk/ 2010/03/31/burne_house_burns/ It was speculated that the systems would not be back to normal until Tuesday the 6 th of April 2010. The