There was a little note on the JQuery blog on the 28/09/08 announcing that both Microsoft and Nokia are adopting JQuery as a “native” Javascript library for their web run-times.
In my mobile AJAX paper, which I wrote for Symbian, I detailed the lowest level workings of AJAX. I also pointed out that writing code which deals with layout and animations is extremely fiddly and that it’s almost always better to adopt a good Javascript library to do it for you.
While the iPhone has been graced with several Apple look and feel libraries such a s iUi, there have been limited options optimised for S60 form factor and input method.
Since JQuery is open source, a developer can already include it in a mobile web page or package it along with a widget installation. But as is, there are no guarantees that the framework will work perfectly with the S60 browser/engine. So the good news is that Nokia will take the burden of testing JQuery and will no doubt provide a load of s60 look and feel controls on top.
This was pretty interesting though:
“To start Nokia will be moving a number of their applications to work on the run-time (such as Maps) and building them using jQuery. jQuery will become part of their widget development platform, meaning that any developer will be able to use jQuery in the construction of widgets for Nokia phones.”
I think this is wrong on a couple of counts.
Why would Nokia throw away native Maps applications with thousands of man hours work already paid for?
I’m pretty sure that the 3D tracking view of Nokia maps would be impossible to reproduce using the widget framework as it is.*
Performance: Google’s native C++ apps on S60 are few and far between. But gmaps is the one which has had significant investment
I can imagine that some sort of 2D maps control/view could be provided, but I don’t think the widget library is mature enough to tackle a full navigation app just yet. Once you get over a couple of hundred lines of code, it really becomes difficult to test and structure your code.
I would be happy to be proved wrong though.
Further reading – what exactly is JQuery:
Over at the JQuery For Designers web site, there are a number of tutorials on using JQuery which are fairly accessible. The screen casts provide a good intro if you just want a flavour of JQuery.
Given the recent spate of nationalisations in the UK and accross the pond, I couldn’t help but be amused at the apparent role reversal of the former cold war arch-enemies.
Laissez faire capitalism is flourishing in post Soviet Russia while the US engages in one of the biggest nationalisation projects of all time.
Just finished watching The Wire Season 5: The final season of David Simon’s master work which builds on existing coverage of the key Baltimore city institutions (the police, the gangs, the unions, administration and the schools) by focusing on the media, or more specially: the daily news paper and the decline of the aspiration for quality in modern journalism.
Again the paper is portrayed as a dysfunctional institution where practitioners are ultimately let down by those in charge. “Do more with less!” is the motivational slogan of senior management when announcing the job cuts and the systematic replacement of the experience staff with the cost saving journalism graduates.
The newsroom story revolves around a reporter who gets front cover column inches by fabrication, embellishment and downright lies, and is reminiscent of the Jayson Blair Times plagiarism scandal.
Aside from Simon’s career as a journalist, I can see why he would have been attracted to the Blair story in the context of the Wire:
‘The Times moved to uncover how management had allowed a young reporter with what appeared to be obvious problems to rise so quickly through the paper’s ranks. The Siegal committee, after a months-long investigation, found “a series of management and operation breakdowns” and “a stunning lack of communication within the newsroom.’
I did some digging around and found this gobsmacking 10 page retraction from the New York times. It’s a fantastic read; The words resonate like an organisation brought to its knees. I can’t imagine how much care went into that piece.
I also found out that the show’s much derided ComStat* system of accountability by targets and key performance indicators not only exists pretty much as described in the show (the system in Baltimore is called CitiStat), but in its effectiveness at reducing crime rates and improving public services is seen as a model worthy of reproduction in other cities. So much so that pilots of CitiStat were run in several cities in Scotland in 2005 and 2006.
Systems such as these start with the idea that at a low to medium level of the hierarchy, the staff should be given clear targets, but how they met those targets is not specified and certain amount of discretion and understanding of the situation in a local context is expected rather than total adherence to a bureaucratic generalised system.
While the sentiment is sound, the following clip from Adam Curtis’ “The Trap”, like The Wire draws attention to the problems endemic in a system which rules by targets alone:
The Wire is ultimately scathing of our ability to organise ourselves into institutions and concedes that the even those attempting to ‘do the right thing’ only do so when they have nothing to lose. No one remains morally clean by the end of the show.
I deal with money as part of my voluntary work at the hospital and was once asked by a patient if I could change a £50 note. I’d never seen such a high banknote before and so had no idea about the distinguishing traits of the note, or who the hell John Houblon was.
Even though the high value of the £50 means it deserves more scrutiny than say a £20, it’s unfamiliarity means that it’s hard to recognise give away faults.
The patient was insistent that she had no change, and being bed bound had no means of getting any. This make it hard to pay for a TV/phone card or a pack of fruit pastels, so I popped down to the cashier’s office for some advice. The cashier said that most business flat refuse to accept the notes due to high incidence of fraud. But, his curiosity was peeked and he tried the two tests that he knew : Tearing the note to reveal the metal thread, and rubbing the note on a white piece of paper (the ink is always a little wet on a genuine note).
After a couple more tests, the cashier was happy and we changed the note for her.
The bank of england web site details the counterfraud features built into the notes.
The gaff of the journo is tragic, but we can sort of sympathise imagining him scouring the intenet for something to write for a deadline, his wife on the phone complaining about another late night and the kids haven’t seen him all week. It’s possible that a simple silly edit may have gone undetected.
But then if you read down the page, this was in no way a subtle wikifiddle, as illuminated by one of the perpetrators:
Dear David (and could the mirrornews email please be forwarded to the sport/football editor),
Thank you for your article in today’s Mirror (18th September 2008) about Omonia Nicosia. The bit I enjoyed most was the following paragraph -
“Despite City’s raised profile, they must make do with the UEFA Cup this season and Hughes will not tolerate any slip-ups against the Cypriot side, whose fans are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes.”.
Why? Well, shortly after the draw was made, a friend and I made a few alterations to the Wikipedia page for Omonia. The “Zany Ones”, “hats made from discarded shoes” and the “song about a little potato” are, as you may have discovered in Nicosia, completely fabricated.
The clues were there in the rest of the article.
They have a new sponsor – Natasha Kaplinsky – and their former players include Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman. My favourite is in the Board of Directors section…
# Governor of Football: Nikos Charalambous
# Governor of Basketball: Petros Souppouris
# Governor of Volleyball: Photos Ioannou
# Governor of Hitlersball: Albert Hall
I hope you take this in the spirit it was meant, and hope this reminds you not to trust everything you read on Wikipedia.
Any donations to our Friday beer fund would be most welcome. Perhaps your editor would like to contribute your fee for the article, as you evidently didn’t do any fact checking.
This article discusses the practice of screenscraping (web scraping), and includes some advice on screen scraping troublesome ASP web pages.
Screenscraping, the art of automatically grabbing pages off the internet and extracting useful data for your own use, often offers a compelling problem to solve.
No one would argue that screen scraping fulfils some revered place on the comupter science mantle piece: Screenscraping is the pragmatist’s tool for getting stuff done today knowing that the solution may break tomorrow.
One of the biggest rewards I gained from learning Python was the ability to quickly grab data from any old source and make it useful now. Within an big company or organisation which has dozens of disparate tools and database, the skill of scriptin and scraping can save you hours a week in routine admin work or report generation.Â
Two really useful features in Chrome are “paste and go” and find within a page.
Paste and go is a right mouse click option on the address/search bar. It simply pastes the clipboard an activates the bar (as would happen when pressing the return key).
The screenshot below illustrates it:
The other feature I have found myself using is the “Find in page”. Google have got this spot on, providing a realtime incremental search* which highlights all occurences of the word as you type. As well as this, the page scroll bar on the right becomes peppered with horizontal lines which highlight the location of the search term elsewhere in the page.
Finally: one negative. I suppose it’s an obvious side effect of the launching a process per page but my process list is full of indistinguishable “chrome.exe”.Â
*Incremental search is briliant when it’s done so as to avoid jittery jumps around the list. As a side note, the Nokia 9210 had the best contacts search I’ve ever used. It searched all contact data incrementally and very fast as well; It’s such a shame that a search which worked brilliantly 8 years ago, is still missing from S60 (though I’ve not tried the recent phones).
Despite Symbian being recently snatched by the Finns, a couple of delegates went to receive an award from Queenie for being a “British success story”, as Nigel Clifford CEO put it, in recognition for the services to British exports.
Sounded like a rather drab medal pinning ceremony at first, but I didn’t count on Philip being in the house to meet and greet Steve and Thomas chambers(CFO):
In Steve’s words:
“We were browsing the art (oh look, a Rembrandt) when Prince Philip came over with a fantastic opening line “you must be the eggheads.” Originally thinking he was referring to our software background at Symbian, it turns out he was highlighting that three of us were follicle challenged”
Google have brought their useless ad technology to YouTube, and it’s less than subtle. On viewing some end of the world hysteria relating to the LHC (Large hadron collider), I was presented with the following ad:
I wonder if the Emergency Survival Kit includes a gravity wave proof jacket.
I found this LHC video informative.
Just a quick plug for Ben Goldacre’s spleen which was published this week(available on Amazon). The book is an extended essay based on the reporting of science in the media based on his weekly column for the The Grauniad. If you can’t stomach the Grauniad, then Ben’s blog has all his articles. You can still buy the fabulous t-shirt I designed for the Bad Science shop here. In a similar vain, I’d like to draw your attention to the excellent series of articles on the BBC by Michael Blastland on the topic of statistics in the media. The short and snappy articles are spread over six parts and offer a simple primer in interpreting the bollocks and scaremongering that’s projectile vomited at us via the media every day.
will be available on DVD in time for Christmas 2008, or you can start with 
