This is another test post, please ignore.

(We are changing our MySQL DB location, that’s all..)

Thanks

Riaan

Travelling between the UK and Singapore one can’t help but be impressed with efficiency of the Singaporean setup, and how geared they are towards making life for not only the foreign, but also local traveller really easy.

Singapore Changi airport is enormous, with vast open spaces, a calm and cool atmosphere, row upon row of immigration official desks staffed by smiling, friendly staff who even offer you a sweet as you arrive.

Heathrow is hell on earth compared to that. Narrow passages, miles of walking, endless construction, warm and stuffy.

In Singapore, taxis are affordable and air conditioned. And they think of everything, including how to make a taxi Q comfortable. Notice how the barrier is also a seat, ensuring that the wait for the taxi is at least bearable.

Riaan

Singapore

I recently encountered the challenge of allowing a customer to have sections of a form repeated based on a mixture of scenarios, most of them out of my control.

I knew I could do something with the DOM and add to a form, but it seemed quite a job, especially keeping track of the fields created and their unique reference ID’s.

To the rescue comes wForms, “a Javascript Extension to Web Forms”.

It works really well, and allows you to present a clickable link beneath a section of a form which will instantly repeat it, as well as allow a user to remove it again. Highly recommendable.

Another piece of great Javascript work I discovered referenced in “AJAX, the definitive guide“, by Anthony Holdener. It makes use of Prototype, which I’ve used before, but essentially it’s a very easy method to iterate through every element of a form and it’s values. Given that with the wForms script I allow my end user to extend the form fields an infinite amount of times, the “get_params” script documented well in this book came in really handy.

Again, if you’re a serious Javascript / Ajax coder, I can highly recommend this book.

- Riaan

Frustrated with layouts showing differently on different browsers?

It certainly has been a major frustration for me, and yes, I realise there are many, many tools available that will do browser and even screen resolution detection, but then I came across a really useful set of scripts from Yahoo utilities.

(Updated much, much later on the same day..)

I had so much grief trying to get this work within my Wordpress post I eventually gave up, which is quite unusual for me. Instead, I wrote the entry in a page outside of this blog.

You can view it here. Comments, if you have any, back here in the blog, many thanks.

- Riaan

Self confessed Geek and avid Windows Live fan Jamie Thomson seems to really enjoy the fact that he can not only Twitter from within InsideMessenger, but also watch a video at the same time. (Without all the usual Youtube clutter around it, might I add.)

Cheers for the post Jamie.

- Riaan

Twitter today recognised InsideMessenger as an official application.

That means if you now use InsideMessenger to send a Twitter status update, it will automatically say “from InsideMessenger”.

- Riaan

Did some updated coding tonight, and you can now send a simple Twitter message from within InsideMessenger, which runs on the MSN Windows Live Messenger network.

Handy?

If you think so, give us feedback…type ‘feedback’ in your chat with InsideMessenger (chat@insidemessenger.com, requires simple registration).

- Riaan

A recently released report by Nielsen Online looked at the top 10 internet activities by UK users.

Windows Live Messenger came out at the top of the list, with UK users spending an average of 2,626 monthly minutes in the UK chatting away on Messenger, whilst Facebook came in third (behind eBay) with 1,406 monthly UK minutes (4.8%).

This is an astonishing lead for Windows Live Messenger, especially in light of recent reports suggesting that Messenger might be losing user time to Facebook.

- Riaan

If you are a Galileo Web Services customer, please note the URLs you are submitting your requests to will be changing on 27 June 2008.

For production queries, the changes are:

From

http(s) // ws.cendant.com/…
http(s) // prodws.galileo.com/…
http(s) // ws.travelport.com/…

To

https // emea.webservices.travelport.com/… (For customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa)
https // americas.webservices.travelport.com/ … (For customers in the Americas)
https // apac.webservices.travelport.com/… (For customers in Asia Pacific)

For access to the copy system, the URLs follow a pattern of:

https // emea.copy-webservices.travelport.com/…
https // americas.copy-webservices.travelport.com/…
https // apac.copy-webservices.travelport.com/…

Note that only https (SSL) connections will be accepted.

Requests to the current URLs will stop working from 28 June 2008 onwards, so make sure you do that change soonest, if not done already.

- Riaan

No, this is not a comprehensive comparison about the differences between Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Rather, it is about one particular aspect which is the display of country and city names in the local, native language first, and then in smaller print, in English. In a recent demonstration we did for a customer, he was quick to point out that in our demonstration, where we were using Google Maps, countries like Germany appear as “Deutschland”, with (very) smaller print below it showing “Germany”, and cities like Rome appear as “Roma”.

Personally, I’ve never really noticed that, and it’s never bothered me, but the customer is always right! Once he pointed it out to me it was very interesting to note all the places Google put down and in what language they show them. Initially I thought I could override it with a locale setting of sorts, but it seems one cannot. (If you know any different, please feel free to comment.)

We then looked at Microsoft Virtual Earth, and they’ve decided to show it all in English:

So, problem solved for this customer.

- Riaan