Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The other morning the postman tried to deliver a couple of parcels. This morning I walked down to the Post Office to pick them up. There were two, identical cardboard boxes that were quite large, but very light. I opened one and found a giant (and I by that I mean really really big) paper clip. Oh, and a URL.

Who'd sent it and why?

I went to the web page, and just got a teaser announcement for something due at the beginning of March.

So time for a little detective work. My favourite online Whois service came up with a domain owner, and Google quickly found their site. There was a list of clients, many familiar, and one new one.

I suspect the newest client - the font on the web site looks like one of theirs - but I can't be sure. I guess I'll find out in a few days when I get a followup email or phone call.

With the tools around I wonder how difficult it is to run a teaser campaign like this. You'd have to know that it's easy to find out that you set up the domain (in fact I was surprised that it was in a company name - I'd thought that a simple cut-out by having a member of staff register it in their name should thwart most look-up attempts), and you'd have to know that the client list on your web site would be the first place that someone would look...

Following a link from supergee, I came across this rather lovely Flickr pool: HTML jokes.



Enjoy!

Here's my round up for The Register of last week's Future of Web Applications event in London.

Carson Systems' Future of Web Applications (FOWA) conference returned to London this week with an impressive lineup of speakers – and a very Web 2.0 look at the world.

Sessions covered everything from finding venture capital to Amazon's developer platform, via building effective online communities. Once you got past the feeling you were back in the days of the dotcom bubble (with startups pitching ideas from the stage), there was plenty to learn – and several significant announcements and demos.

Read more here.

The budget 4GB CF cards I ordered from 7Dayshop.com have just arrived. Not the fastest I've had, but still a lot faster than the slowest - and as I usually take landscapes or macro shots rather than action, I'm not too worried about speed.

However, I am now flush with capacity.

My camera reports that it can now take nearly 900 full resolution low compression JPEGs, or over 200 RAW images. As I'm learning more about Photoshop (there are some lovely features in the CS3 beta) I'm taking more RAW images, so that amount of space should be quite useful.

Smile, now, please...

I thought it might be worth documenting the out-the-box experience with my new BlackBerry Pearl.

E-mail worked right out the box - and one of the first things I had to do was setup my account with T-Mobile's Blackberry service. This has to be done using the phone keyboard, so remember your username and password carefully. Luckily my default choice of usernames was available! Once setup you should complete the customisation at the website. I've hooked up my Gmail and sandm.co.uk email accounts.

T-Mobile's provisioning for Blackberries on Web'n'Walk is slightly broken - expect to wait 12 hours or so to get online fully with an activated Web'n'Walk account. Once online you'll need to manually switch the browser from the somewhat broken default T-zones configuration to the much more friendly Web'n'Walk version. This will let you use the Blackberry Help site - so you can download additional themes, games and applications from RIM.

There are versions of Google Maps and Yahoo! Go 2.0 for the Pearl. However they won't work until you manually set the APN in the Blackberry's TCP settings to "general.t-mobile.uk". Again something that isn't provisioned by T-Mobile.

More notes to come.