sxa's Technical Musings

[Short link to this article if you need it:  http://goo.gl/Hx4bA  - or retweet me ] It's been just over a year since I wrote my initial article with my first thoughts on Google+. So how have things changed in that year, how does it stack up to the competition, and where do I see the social network positioned? I realised it was about time to write this post after a couple of discussion threads such as this one that I was recently posting to. This blog is split into my top 10, and then some more comments. I'll start with a summary of my major original gripes and their status: Sadly, post to "Circle A excluding Circle B" still hasn't been implemented as an option. For this reason, the privacy model is still not as it should be. Given Google+'s approach of "Circles by default" this is a silly omission, and something that Facebook manages to do properly, so despite a focus on Circles in the UI, the control not as advanced as the competition. The lac...

[Short link to this article if you need it:    http://goo.gl/rJYd6  or retweet me ] Recently (actually in the last 24 hours it seems) quite a few people have suddenly started spotting Facebook's "Social Ad" feature and are recommending people turn it off. If you haven't seen it, facebook's adverts at the right of the screen can show, alongside the advert, which of your friends have "liked" a particular product. The issue is that it's seen as an endorsement, but let's take a rational step back for a second and look at why do people "like" facebook pages in the first place? I think it's down to one of these reasons: To follow what the page/brand has to say To share a witty phrase or saying (seems to be dieing out now) with their friends To express approval of something/someone and tell their friends about it. In cases 2 and 3 the purpose is very much "to tell others" and it appears on your friends' stream whe...

[Short link to this article if you need it: http://goo.gl/t2vbt - or retweet me ] This is an article that may date badly, but what the heck - will be fun to read it back in a year's time? It's about various things - the HTC Sensation's choice of screen resolution, the importance of screen resolution and screen technology in general, and where the mobile industry is heading with the current crop of premium handsets. I think we may have reached a point where there's not much more to give, and if we're lucky we'll see more higher-end handsets appearing at lower prices... I know a few people who purchased one of the HTC Sensation handsets. I never quite understood why. The only reason appeared I've heard involved an obsession with numbers. I've often heard comments similar to: "The screen resolution is higher so it must be a superior screen." And I don't buy it. Do a blind test between a Sensation (or for that matter any iPhone) and any...

[Short link to this article if you need it - http://goo.gl/Id4dW - or retweet me ] Let me start by saying I'm a big supporter of the Raspberry Pi project and have been following it with a lot of anticipation for a while, and I love the goals of this project and what they've done so far. Technically I think it's brilliant. However I'm afraid to say that the release of the first batch of devices to the public hasn't really gone as expected. It's also worth pointing you at the OSNews article which is very positive to the company, and less so to the two distributors. They had said earlier in the week that they were going to make an announcement at 0600 GMT today (29th February 2012) and indeed they did - they changed to a static page (which stayed up - yay!) telling people that two distributors, the well known RS Components (Current Pi link is here ) and Farnell Electronics (link here ) were going to be shipping the first batch of 10,000 model B boards between th...

[Short link to this article if you need it - http:// goo.gl/uJWKM - or retweet me ] Since this is " Safer internet day ", one thing that always surprises me is how many people use their cards online without properly understanding and appreciating the implications of security and encryption online. I've mentioned issues with SecureCode/VerifiedByVisa before and a lot of people don't even do security well enough to get to the issues I mention. Let's take one example of SSL certificates. What would most people do when they see things like this dialog? I suspect most end users would just try and find the most effective way to dismiss the dialog i.e. accept the invalid certificate - and firefox doesn't help by having the "always accept this certificate" checkbox selected by default.. Which is exaclty the sort of thing that leaves you open to talking to a different server from the one you think you are. How many people would actually know enough to even ...

[Short link to this post if you need it: http://goo.gl/ayGcB or retweet me ] Yesterday @lewispeckover published an article about the fact that O2 were putting an HTTP header (x-up-calling-line-id) with the user's phone number in place on every non-encrypted web request put through their network by their proxies. This also affected MVNOs using O2, such as GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile. The proxies are used, amongst other things, to reduce image quality to improve page load times and other things. The injection of the HTTP header with the phone number is something they do to give the number to "trusted parties" who provide certain age-related services, where they can verify the number with the provider. This only happens when using O2's data network where the proxies are used, and not over any other connection such as your home wifi. Also some browsers, such as Opera and the BlackBerry ones make use of their own proxes and bypass O2's ones, and will therefore not be s...

[Short link to this article if you need it: http://goo.gl/Q1E2H or retweet me ] As I've said before I'm happy to pay for music streaming but this week I've seen an increase in issues for streaming services such as Spotify and We7. This has been bubbling under for a while and the primary issue is that of the per-stream royalties that an artist/label/publisher gets when their music is played through spotify. However the whole concept appears to have blown up recently with some high profile acts like Coldplay shunning streaming services claiming "the album needs to be listed as a whole and not as individual tracks" and distributor STHoldings finding that over 98% of it's represented labels wanting to avoid having their music on spotify. There are valid arguments on both sides. Lets take three typical scenarios: I've mentioned elsewhere that I've bought more music than I did before getting my (paid for) We7 subscription, because of the amount of new musi...