Centre of the Universe

If you thought that you are stuck with using Windows Mobile with your Xperia X1, you would be wrong. Of course, the only officially supported operating system is Windows Mobile, but that doesn’t stop you from timkering a little.

XDA-Developers have released a version of Google Android that works on the Xperia X1. It is still missing a few features, such as the GPS functionality, but it works well.

Also from XDA-Developers is a port of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 which gives you full-on Linux functionality on the X1.

It seems these days that we are fast heading to the days of being able to choose whichever OS we like to use on our phones, and that does make the future exciting…

Stackoverflow must be doing something right. It is beginning to see its crop of imitators starting to flourish. Shapado is one of these.

In terms of look and feel, it closely copies Stackoverflow, although with enough differences that you not likely to get confused.

The reason the team that put up Shapado put it up, is that they feel that they do not want to work with a non-free platform, which to me sounds a bit odd, since, even though Stackoverflow is not quite open-source, anybody is free to register and use the site. There is very little restriction surrounding that. Although, in their favour, it does make sense if you want a local knowledgebase type system based on this format.

The second reason they state is that they feel that Stackoverflow is restricted, in that it only caters for programming, whereas they have made Shapado cater for pretty much anything.

The biggest problem of all though is not really technology related, but rather more social. Stackoverflow has significant traffic, with thousands of users asking – and answering – thousands of questions.

Shapado has very, very few of both questions and users. Maybe it is because the site is still new, or it might be that nobody cares. Only time will tell…

Javascript is really starting to surprise me as a useful language. The latest project that has interested me isThe Render Engine, which is a Javascript based game engine.

It is an opensource endeavour and works in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unsurprisingly, I did not see Internet Explorer in the list.

There are a few demos on the site with an Asteroids clone and a few more.

One surprising feature is that it seems capable of creating games which wourk with the Nintendo Wii.

My Xperia, running Windows Mobile 6.1, came preloaded with Internet Explorer and Opera, and I think that both of those browsers are sub-par on this phone.

Internet Explorer, besides just being a Microsoft product, doesn’t always render pages nicely, and flash is often a problem.

Opera, which was my favourite browser on my previous phone, the Sony Ericsson P990i, does not work half as well on the Xperia as it did on my old phone, and in fact tend to favour Internet Explorer over it.

Both of these browsers have been thrown aside now, however, as I now have a new favourite browser. Skyfire is by far the best phone for mobiles.

For one thing, this blog never rendered correctly on either IE or Opera on my mobile, without using a mobile-friendly theme. Skyfire, on the other hand, shows the blog EXACTLY as it would appear on a normal pc browser, and it is readable too.

Skyfire also offers good flash support, and audio and video streaming to boot, and that is not even mentioning the very apparent speed of rendering.

Skyfire simply outshines the competition on all fronts.

I am colourblind, as is around 10% of men and 0.5% of women. Now, before I talk about how this affects computers, let me first explain what colourblindness is and isn’t for the uninitiated.

A normal-sighted person sees colours as they are using 3 different colour receptors in the eye, detecting red, blue and green light respectively. The eye also has receptors which see in shades of grey, which is used in low light levels (which is why you lose colour vision when it is dark).

Do you see a number 74 in here?

Many people aren’t aware that colourblindness comes in several different forms and severity, the most common being red-green colourblindness, where the person sees red and green as the same colour. Colourblindness occurs when one or more of the colour receptors does not work as it should, or does not function at all. So for example, in red-green colourblindness, the red and green receptors incorrectly react to the same frequencies of light, or you may find that the receptor does not work at all, in which case that colour will appear black.

Now how does this affect computers? Well, for one thing, often green is used to indicate that all is ok, and red that an error occurred. A red-green colourblind person would not notice a difference. I was just reading that in games too the enemies are often tagged in red and the good guys in green – so then who do you shoot?

A more subtle problem is when the programmer or web designer themselves is colourblind. For example, it is a rather bad idea to trust my opinion on colour. I have a blue-green colourblindness which means that my colours would probably appear slightly off to a normal sighted person. I once painted our bathroom an avocado green colour because I thought it looked nice, much to the horror of my family who thought I had gone mad.

Implied in the problem about choosing colours for computer applications and webpages is also the problem of sites and applications that look great for a normal sighted person, but become useless for a colourblind person. It is often a good idea to either let the colours be configurable or else choose safe colours.

And before I end, a little interesting fact – most colourblind people will not realise they see the world differently until it is pointed out to them. For us, the world just looks normal.

Drawing graphs has become simpler in Javascript, with the dygraphs Javascript Visualization Library.

This library will plot data supplied in CSV format using a line graph, using time as the x axis. This makes it very useful for drawing graphs of things such as temperature variance of a city throughout the year for example, or something like stocks or exchange rates.

Other features of the library include moving averages to flatten out spikes in the graph, as well as error bars.

But, best of all, the library is only a 45kB Javascript file, which must be included in the page, and a few lines of Javascript, and you got yourself a graph.

I have stumbled across an interesting project called Pootle. This is a web-based application that makes the management of PO-based translations very easy, allowing collaboration and versioning control.

The best part of all though is that Pootle is a home-grown, South African project, which just adds one more to the good software projects to come out of deepest darkest Africa. It was created by Translate.org.za.

Pootle 2.0 is out now, and is written using Django, and is looking really good.

You can check out the offical Pootle server at http://pootle.locamotion.org.