OneAndOneIs2

Maybe it's because the first language I could sit down and program in was C.. but I've generally found it phenominally easy to get stuff done in PHP.

So why, in discussions on sites like Slashdot, do I see so many people sneering at it? Elitism? (or should that be l337ism?) Familiarity breeds contempt? What's the big problem?

I recently began a determined effort to get into , an open-source content management system. I've been impressed with what I've seen so far - so much so that I'm considering sitting down and working through the necessary database headache that would be incurred in transferring this whole blog across to Drupal.

But that's some way off yet. In the meantime, I've got pages and pages of notes I've been making as I work through books, articles, online resources, and just churning through the code itself.

I can either leave it in my own personal shorthand, which does the job as a one-stop at-a-glance resource for my ever-failing memory. But if there's any interest, I'll consider transcribing the notes across into blog posts in a slightly more coherent form than my existing scribbles.

Anyone..?

So following my last post on how Firefox has been annoying me by being buggy lately, I came across something I didn't know about FF version 3 that I thought was worth commenting on.

Because of a misbehaving extension, Tina lost all her bookmarks. In the hopes of restoring them, I took a look at her profile, and didn't see the expected plain-text bookmarks file. But I *did* discover a directory called "bookmarksbackup"

It turns out that FF saves backups of all bookmarks on a daily basis. About a week's worth. So you can always go into the bookmarks manager and restore your bookmarks from yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that..

And that was handy, and something worth knowing, and I was quite impressed, since that never used to be a feature - if you lost your bookmarks, you lost your bookmarks.

But what I found even *more* noteworthy was that, when I was looking for where Firefox stores bookmarks now, I found that it was stored in a file named places.sqlite

Yep.. as of version 3, they stopped using a plain-text file for bookmarks, and shunted them into a database instead. And not just bookmarks: Browser history, favicons, and even input history - when you type something into the awesomebar, it makes note of it for future use.

You might think it's a bit pointless, putting bookmarks into a database - who has THAT many bookmarks?? And I'd tend to agree if that were all they'd done.

But putting HISTORY into a database.. that I can understand. I keep quite a long history (90 days) and I visit quite a lot of websites. So there's a *lot* of data. And when you think about it, your browser needs to be able to check through your history *every time* it loads a web page: Many pages render links differently depending on whether or not you've visited them.

So a history database makes perfect sense: It can be big enough to justify it, and it needs to be FAST for a page to be loaded and displayed quickly.

And if you've got a database anyway, you might as well shunt as much stuff as you can into it. Like bookmarks.

Like so many things, this is one of those features that's completely invisible to the end user: I'm on version 3.5.7 and I only just discovered that FF has been using a database for history & bookmarks since 3.0.0 today.

But the combination of FF keeping bookmark backups; and the fact that it uses a database instead of plain text for all this stuff; I was impressed by. It's two very good ways of doing things, that probably took a lot of work on Mozilla's part and yet would have gone completely unnoticed by 99% of their users. So kudos to them for that. I'm impressed.

No, but this is an answer!

:o)

Anyway. I saw this question on the NYtimes: Why is it that Microsoft "no longer brings us the future"?

The writer, being an ex-microsofty, has some interesting insights into some of the problems MS has to deal with - internal sabotage being one that, I suspect, suprises nobody.

But it puzzles me, because an an ex-MS employee, I'd expect him to know their past product line pretty well. So can somebody tell me: When did MS ever "bring us the future"?

I'm serious. My basic view of MS is that their general strategy is to see what the rest of the world does, and then copy it & try to make it better. Their most successful software is Windows, Office, and IE. But they didn't invent the GUI, the PC desktop, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the browser..

So, seriously, what products is this guy talking about when he talks about MS being the innovators? I'd like to know.

Anyone?

As it stands, the iPad disappointed me and even the most positive article I've yet seen (two posts down) relies heavily on "unforeseen improvements"

And I think it's perfectly OK to rely on those, within context: The majority of what we use computers for today was completely unforeseen even five years ago. It's reasonable to assume that within the next few years, someone'll have thought of some killer apps for a tablet that we can't imagine today.

But what COULD Apple have built into their tablet to make it something I'd have said "Wow, I want one?"

Well.. vague things like "a better interface" don't help much..

But here's one thing that would have made it a killer gadget: A combination of the technology in the virtual keyboard and the laser projector.

A laser projector is small, has low power requirements, and is always in focus; By using IR sensors such as the keyboard has, a projected laser screen could feasibly be built that could do multi-touch on the projected image itself.

A tablet PC still isn't that big a screen. But if it could PROJECT a screen, that objection goes away. If it was clever enough that it could project a screen and have the tablet screen become a large keyboard, you have a big screen and a big virtual keyboard. And the screen could be manipulated by more than just one person at a time.

Or, the projector could show a film on a big 16:9 widescreen whilst the little 4:3 tablet became a big, easy-to-use video control.

If you were particularly clever, you could even have tablets built so that they could detect other tablet-projected images and interact with them: Two tablets could project onto the same surface for collaborative work. e.g. writing a document or designing a diagram: If every tablet pointed at the screen automatically grabbed a copy of the document file and you could all work on the projected version, you could have multiple people work on a document and then all walk away with a copy.

But that's all window-dressing on the basic idea: The technology exists for a little tablet to be able to create a large virtual multi-touch display. If it were done dual-head, so the virtual screen and the physical screen could be different sizes and display different things, you've opened up a huge world of possibilities very quickly.

So there's MY idea for something within the realms of current possibility that could be done to make a tablet REALLY appealing. Anyone else got any others?