Here are Rob's Blog entries for August 2005.
Blog entries for other months can be found in the main blog index.
I'm pleased to announce that Jasmine Charlotte Price arrived at 19:08 on Thursday 18th August 2005.
Mother and baby are doing fine.
Here's her first picture as it's never to early to embarrass your children.
Can you guess her weight? ;-)
Here are a few of my photographs of this year's Red Arrows display at Eastbourne Airbourne 2005.
Here are a few of my snaps from tonight's fireworks over Eastbourne Pier celebrating the end of Airbourne 2005.
I mentioned about mobile barcodes last week, and that the BBC is supporting them.
This week, I came across another mobile barcode technology called Shotcode.
Shotcodes are round barcodes that can be photographed using the camera built into a series 60 phone from any angle.
Once the code has been photographed, the Shotcode application opens an internet connection to translate the shotcode into a URL. This means the data encoded in the Shotcode is smaller than the real URL, a mobile barcode equivalent of TinyURL.com I guess. The downside is it always needs a network connection, but if you're scanning a URL, you probably want to visit the site anyway.
The Shotcode application can be downloaded here if you have a series 60 smartphone.
If you need a Shotcode to test, here's one here encodes the URL for this lovely website
But like me Murpheys, i'm not bitter.
Due to the amount of spam trackbacks, I've made a little change to the Perl script that handles the pings.
Now when a trackback is received, I visit the URL supplied in the trackback, and look to see if my website is mentioned. If it is, then the trackback is accepted, if not, an error message is returned, but the ping is still logged in the database for future reference.
I was originally planning on using Jay Allen's MT Blacklist Moveable Type plugin and ripping out the monster regex that looks for bad sites, but decided it was less effort to just scan the referring page directly.
This method isn't fool proof, but I'm hoping the number of casinos and nubile young ladies wishing to trackback to Symbian barcode applications may fall now.
If you are having trouble trackbacking to me because of this spam, contact me and let me know, and I'll see if the script needs changing. If you are one of the nubile young ladies or casino's, still get in contact, but with details of a free account and plenty of credit included in your email.
It really seems that trackback spam is on the rise, and it's a real shame. At least I'm not like Loic who was getting one trackback spam every ten minutes.
For those interested, the snippet of code doing the dirty work looks like this
use LWP::Simple;
## some other code...
my $trackbacked_page = get $trackback_url;
if ($trackbacked_page =~ /robertprice\.co\.uk/) {
## we're mentioned!
} else {
## we're not
}
As you can see, it only looks to see if this site is mentioned anywhere on the page. A better way would be to use something like HTML::Parser and extract the links on the page making sure at least one includes the domain robertprice.co.uk. But hey, the world isn't perfect, and this is just a quick hack. :-)
I bought a copy of Nokia Smartphone Hacks earlier.
I'm looking forward to the journey home and a good read on the train now!
I hate those shock press releases that state the obvious and try to destroy a successful market.
The current winner in this field is Qpass with it's press release on "Mobile Shoplifting".
So what is "Mobile Shoplifting"? Basically it's taking advantage of the capabilities of modern mobile handsets to play a wide range of media files such as .wav and .mp3's. The user visits the ringtone or media provider's website, previews the tone and then just right clicks with their mouse to save the track to the computer. This is then transferred by data cable or bluetooth, thus providing a free ringtone.
Now, this isn't exactly rocket science, and it's something some users and all ringtone providers were aware of. However, the base of users with the skill to do this was not that widespread. As most newspapers in the UK have picked up on this over the past week so there is no harm in me covering it here now.
Qpass's research suggests that over a third of sites are insecure and allow this sort of downloading, and two thirds offer segments between 15 and 30 seconds long, i.e. a ringtone. Unsurprisingly, they offer to plug the gap by selling ringtone proiders a streaming service that is harder to rip. However, without going into details, it is possible, it just makes it that bit harder for the average user.
Of course no press release is complete without some staggering statistics, and "Ringtone Shoplifting" doesn't let us down.
Apparently, this is costing the industry 50 million a year, and after their press release they estimate losses could reach 336 million between now and 2007.
The moral of the story is that if it's out there on the web, someone will find a way to use it beyond it's original purpose. Press releases condemming piracy of content and then explaining how to do it is just irresponsible and damaging to the whole mobile content industry.
Time for the Crazy Frog to leap aside, Crazy Babajee is coming.
Crazy Babajee is being released by Xcentrica and features an old Indian man dancing to bangra beats.
It will be advertised in a similar way to Crazy Frog, blanket advertising on Indian Satellite TV.
With an estimated 1.2 people of Indian origin in the UK, it seems a ripe market to tap into.
All this makes me wonder, how come we've not seen that much mobile Bollywood content yet? Time to fill that gap in the UK market before Crazy Babajee makes us all sick to death of it.
Don't forget the native market as well! There are 55 million subscribers rising at a rate of about 1.5 million a month in the subcontinent, according to the Cellular Operators Association of India.
I'm at the Great British Beer Festival 2005 at Olympia in London.
Hundreds of real ales, plus Chas 'n' Dave playing live.
Excellent!
