Playing with my iPod yesterday, I found a very irritating bug. I have two albums called "Still", one by Joy Division and one by Wolverine. When I select either one of them from the albums list on the iPod, I get both albums smushed together rather than just the one I selected. In fact, despite Cover Flow showing both albums, the albums list only shows one with all the tracks in it.

Tuesday 17th June was supposed to be a big day in Firefox history. The long awaited version 3 of the popular browser was to be released to record breaking numbers of downloads. The world would be in awe of the majesty of ... wait, maybe that's going a bit far.

Anyway, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't download it. I tried, but I failed. There were two things that stopped me in the end. First, the stability of the servers. All the various domains returned 'Http/1.1 Service unavailable' errors in the evening when I actually tried to get it. That didn't help.

The main thing that stopped me, though, was that it was released at 10am on the 17th. 10am PDT that is. California time. Those of us with a vague grasp of world geography will know that California is on the trailing edge of the world timezones. Indeed, by the time 10am PDT rolled around, it was already Wednesday the 18th at the international date line. Being sat there looking at the Firefox 2 link on the 17th didn't do wonders for the world at large's perception of the Mozilla organisation's ability to, well, organise.

In my mind, there were two possible things they could have done to make it not suck like it did. Either release it at midnight GMT (or UTC as people now like to refer to it), making sure that the two extreme timezones have at least 12 hours on the 17th where it is available. This would satisfy the world record download attempt's rules of it only being one day. The other way would be to launch at midnight on the 16th on the international date line, meaning it would require 48 hours before the whole world had seen midnight on the 17th.

Either way, the Firefox site gave no indication of intentions, fell over repeatedly and generally left those further east of California wondering what the hell was going on. Remember, Silicon Valley people, that most of the world sees the dawn long before you do. Without giving us more information than "the 17th" we'll all just get bored and wander off to the pub. Which, in fact, I did.

So I've been a Telewest/Blueyonder/Virgin Media customer for some years now. I've gone up the service chart from 56K modems to 10Mbps internet connections. I've been a customer through all the buy-outs and shenanigans. And only now am I pissed off. Why?

Apparently I'm getting a "free" upgrade to 10Mbps from 4Mbps by the end of this week. So is everybody else on 4Mbps. Whoop-de-doo, eh? Whoop-de-doo ....

... because as we all know, nothing is free. The price for this extra bandwidth? Traffic management.

Traffic management when done right can help a network cope with all sorts of stuff. However, in this instance, it's just a synonym for "punishment". I'm presently being "traffic managed" because I had the cheek, the shear audacity to download 800MB in a five hour period. Damn my eyes.

"But wait a minute," I hear you ask, "surely on a 4Mbps connection you could theoretically grab 9GB in a five hour period?" And you'd be absolutely right. In fact, 800MB in five hours is the equivalent of a 384Kbps connection. So much for 10Mb, eh?

And to add insult to injury, the free support line is gone. Now it's an 0906 number that costs 10p just to call it, and 25p a minute after that. And wouldn't you know it, you just can't hurry them up. I've never known support personnel speak so slowly. They must get extra commission for sounding like they wouldn't know a computer if I hit them in the face with one.

My only problem now is that they're still one of the best of a particularly bad bunch. I mourn the UK ISP industry, I really do.

So I was passed a URL today. This one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm

Have a look, then come back. Done? OK. Are you laughing? I know I am.

So they think that accessing illegal content is worthy of a complete internet ban. Well, let's face it, the punishment must fit the crime. Knocking off an 11 quid CD is surely worth a lifetime being left out of the digital revolution, yes? I thought so.

So hyperbole aside, how many of those people who would be kicked off do they think are current or future IT professionals? I'd wager "a lot", or a figure thereabouts. So when the nation's IT workforce isn't allowed to use the internet any more, and the digital dark age upon us, surely we can reflect on that and say "verily and thus, we may be in the digital equivalent of skid row, but at least we have properly recompensed record label execs ... I mean ... artists."

And aside from the ludicrous idea behind it, let's not forget the lack of any method of enforcing such a thing. If a residence gets cut off, can they sign up for another? Does it somehow stick to the individual and follow them around? What about mobile data plans, public WiFi, pay-for WiFi, hotels and the like? Libraries? Companies?

OK, maybe it wasn't worth a whole blog post to rant about this thing because, realistically, there's no way it could ever be enforced. It did give me the best laugh I've had all day, though.

As I have previously mentioned on this blog, I have a Nokia 770 internet tablet to replace my old Palm T3. While the 802.11g WiFi, bluetooth, hi resolution screen and full screen thumb-board are all welcome, it does have a lack of PDA functionality. Fortunately for me, this can easily be added with GPE. There is an address book, task manager, calendar and other goodies available in Maemo form on maemo.org.

So now I have a calendar on my N770. It's not as polished as the Palm calendar, and there are some niggling rendering bugs, but it works and does the job. Most importantly, though, it does something the Palm never could: synchronise easily with Google Calendar.

Thanks to the wonderful Erminig application, I can synchronise multiple calendars (e.g. my calendar, my friends' calendars, bank holidays) into separate GPE calendars that I can enable and disable at will, but all visible in the same calendar interface distinguished by colour. This all happens straight from the N770, so no PC sync is required as it is with the Palm devices.

So far it's worked flawlessly. It's really easy to use, and it's made synchronisation of calendars a useful tool to me, rather than just a means of backing up my portable device.

In recent weeks there has been a sort of micro-backlash against Firefox and AdBlock+ by the sorts of people who believe it is their right to force advertisements down your throat. The responses have been many and various, but usually with the gist of "If you can't support your business model without invasive advertising, maybe it's your business model that's the problem."

Like many people, I like to dial up using my mobile phone when I'm out and about. I only have GPRS, after my 3G phone got on my nerves with its rubbish battery when using CDMA and silly camera lens cover. That doesn't mean it has its uses though. For SSH and image-free browsing it's great, and as other posts suggest it works nicely with the Nokia 770.

Unfortunately OS X is a little less friendly than the Nokia device when it comes to talking to your favourite bluetooth modem. It insists that you manually specify the correct Modem Script to get it all going, and if you can't see yours then you're pretty much stuffed. Well, that's what I thought.

It turns out that a chap called Ross Barkman has made a massive collection of dialup modem scripts for all kinds of phones and other devices, including some generic ones that I eventually used to get the X820 working. The collection is all here, with instructions on what to do.

Oh, and a word from the not-so-wise; when it asks you the phone number for GPRS, make sure you enter the GRPS APN into the field, and not the strange *9***1# nonsense that other devices ask you for. It's just something to be wary of, although Ross's scripts to include a file telling you that.

In the interests of something to do, I thought it'd be interesting to see what the current top site is for each letter of the alphabet. To achieve this rather nonsensical goal I enlisted the help of the Firefox Google toolbar, which handily recommends search terms as you type. I simply entered each letter, searched for the first suggestion and clicked the first link. This is what I found:

This post is a bit of a cathartic rant, but in as polite a way as possible. Please bear with me.

There have been a few micro-revolutions on the internet of late regarding software development. Not all of them are sane, some are outright bizarre and one or two are just rehashes of very, very old concepts. For example, functional languages are popular on reddit.com, and dynamically typed languages are popular with the web crowd on dzone.com.

One of the most common dynamically typed languages around at the moment in Javascript. It's a strange thing; not in the slightest object oriented, but has a concept of objects. Instead, people seem intent on recreating OO like behaviour using what passes for a Javascript object and piles upon piles of closures and anonymous functions. While this is certainly a step in a pragmatic direction, it seems that this particular paradigm shift sometimes brings with it a bit too much cleverness, and not quite enough sensibility.

Javascript is a bit of a mad beast; classes are defined as closures that are somehow instantiated. Methods are declared as closures within the closure that is the class. It's all a bit mad. This mass of closures within closures within closures is overshadowed by that most heinous of things; mutable types. Heinous? Surely no! I'll have the dynamic language fanbois all over testiculating about the superiority of such things. However, I do have reasons.

So Safari is available on Windows. Whoop-de-doo, eh? While I'm not exactly sold on the "Safari is the best browser out there on any platform" sales schtick I can understand why Apple have chosen to do it. The most obvious reason is because, as has been confirmed, it allows Windows based web developers to test in Safari without having to have a special Macintosh somewhere in the office.

This situation has been around for a while; very few web developers would develop natively on a Mac because, quite simply, the most prominent browser by a good 60% of the browser market doesn't run on it. However, thanks to the rather half-baked nonsense that was Internet Explorer for Mac, and the even more platform specific issue of Safari, the Mac has been something of a second class citizen in the web design world. Indeed, there is a very good reason most Mac users I know use Camino or Firefox; the Gecko engine. Stuff developed on Linux or Windows will work just the same, and that's got to be good.