The Beta Blog

The glamorous world of web development

In films, advanced computer users often spend their development time spinning round in their chairs, cracking their knuckles, doing handstands and other things aimed at, I don’t know, increasing blood flow or something (yes Swordfish I’m talking about you).

The reality is somewhat different, or course; certainly in our office. Here, a 30-minute spell of advanced development is compressed into 90 seconds, and the cookie-eating and conversations with the rest of the team (both in the office and remotely via Skype) are revealed.

Is Bing copying Google’s results?

According to this Google Blog post, “Bing is using Google web search results”. Essentially, what is happening is that Microsoft is tracking what their users search for, and what links they subsequently click.  So if you have the Bing Toolbar installed and search using Google, the result you click on will be logged by Bing, which will add it to their own results.  Google are not happy that their search results are being used in this way.

The effects are most noticable at the fringes, in rare or misspelled search phrases, where Google’s excellent results are easily seen on Bing.  Microsoft, for their part, responded pretty clearly:

“We do not copy Google’s results”

Strangely, given everything mentioned above, I think that this is true.  (Also, it’s clever obfuscation by Microsoft, as Google definitely does copy websites – it provides a cache of its  latest crawl in the results – which has caused trouble in the past.)

Bing collects data from its users; it is those users who are collecting the data from Google (and presumably other search engines, both global and site-specific) and passing it on. 

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Import movies into your Netflix queue

So this post is a little different from the usual – think of it as market research.  I have it in mind to write a little app that lets you import a load of titles into your Netflix queue.  So if you have a subscription with, say, Blockbuster and you want to give Netflix a try, you could easily add the movies from your Blockbuster queue into your Netflix queue.

So the question is: is this worth doing?  Would people actually use it?

If you would, leave a comment.  If 50 people say ‘Yes’, then I’ll get started…

Firefox overtakes IE, but Chrome is the big winner

I see on StatCounter that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the most-used browser in Europe.  That must be the first time IE has lost the top spot since it first overtook Netscape in the mid-Nineties.  However Firefox has not increased its user base; the reason for IE’s decline is that it has lost market share to Google Chrome.

In fact, Firefox has also lost 2.5% of the market, and IE a whopping 7.5%, while Chrome has gained pretty much the full 10% that they lost between them.  Other browsers, such as Opera and Safari, have remained fairly static (although Safari, installed mainly on Macs, did gain 1% of the market, which is impressive given that it started with just 3.5%).

It will be interesting to see if these trends continue; according to my rough projections, Chrome is on course to overtake IE in the middle of 2012 and will become the most dominant browser in Europe in Early 2013.

I think that the reasons for the shift are threefold:

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My lovely new Canon Powershot S95 has a problem with its LCD display

I’ve never seen an issue like this before so I thought I’d put this post up and see if anyone else had seen anything similar.  Essentially, the LCD display shows strange red smears in dark areas of the image.  It’s not the lens because, when viewed on a PC, the pictures are perfect.  But both while shooting and reviewing images, the red smears are visible on the camera’s display.  It’s not smearing on the surface of the camera, either; I cleaned the display with a soft cloth and it had no effect in the slightest.

The Times paywall, discipline and game theory

So today’s the day that thetimes.co.uk starts charging for access.  You can still access the front page without paying, but if you try to read any stories it prompts you to pick a payment option (£1 for one day’s access, or £2 for a whole week).

Now I have to be honest and say that I was all set to pay my £2.  It’s a legitimate business expense, and I reckon we could manage £104 per year; I know I’d use it, too, because I currently visit The Times once a day, and often more.  However, perversely, this is what put me off.

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I’m not an expert on Parkour, but…

…even so, I’m pretty sure these guys have taken it to a new level.  Watch this video (it gets going at 0:45) and you’ll begin to believe that gravity is actually optional.

Can’t upload a Word document? You need to close it first.

If you are a savvy web developer, you almost certainly won’t allow users to upload any old file to your site in case it’s a virus or other malware. You’ll probably use MIME types to restrict which files people can upload.

The trouble is the for some reason, when you have a Word document open, it reports a different MIME type than when it is closed, which will scupper your upload routine.  Since the type reported makes it look like an executable file (and therefore potentially dangerous) your code probably won’t allow it, and rightly so.

The solution, therefore, is for your user to close the document before they try to upload it.

I’m not sure whether this is specific to Windows/IE (I wouldn’t be surprised) but if you have trouble uploading Word docs, this could provide to solution.  (When I have time I’ll test how other document types behave…)

It was late. I’d been up for 21 hours…

… and I was halfway through this article before I realised what they were up to. Do they have a special commissioning department for this stuff?

Yes, you could get in trouble for that

I presume you’ve seen this:

And you may have read this.  But did you spot this?

Williams then alerted the emergency services on her mobile phone. “I wasn’t on hands-free, but I figured I wasn’t really driving the car,” she said.

Now I know why she didn’t come forward immediately; probably getting legal advice…