LTE Woes


The logo for LTE.

(The author currently works for Telefonica - but these views are his own) Do you remember when mobile phones were in their infancy? The frequencies allocated to Racal's Vodafone and to BT's Cellnet were mutually incompatible. You couldn't simply switch your SIM to another handset, you had to specifically make sure that it supported your carrier's frequencies. As the mobile market matured, "dual band" phones became common. Any phone you bought in the UK would work on any UK carrier's slice of…

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HP's Smartphone Conundrum


The HP logo.

So, a year after throwing the baby out with the bathwater by dumping its Palm WebOS software, HP has decided it wants to get back into the smartphone game. HP's position isn't quite as perilous as Nokia's "Burning Platform" was, but there are definite similarities. Apple sells more iPads than HP sells PCs, their traditional market for printers is drying up, its share price is on the wane, and a series of boardroom scandals have left it weak. Meg Whitman has correctly identified where the…

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Review: Panasonic TX-L37ET5B


After a crappy experience with an LG, I decided to go for a slightly more reputable manufacturer - Panasonic. I went for the cumbersomely named Panasonic TX-L37ET5B 37-inch Widescreen Full HD 1080p 3D LED TV with Freeview HD. Looking at the TX-L37ET5B's specs it's a close to perfect TV. Four HDMI ports Enough miscellaneous ports (PC, scart, component, composite) to be able to plug in just about anything. Freeview HD Passive 3D I'll start with the negative points -…

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I Haven't Quit Twitter - Twitter Quit Me


It's the height of self-indulgent wankery to blog about why one is flouncing away from a social network. So, here's my rant. There are many like it - but this one is mine. Let me start by saying something which I hope is obvious. Twitter belongs to Twitter. It's their game and they can take their ball home any time they like. Therefore, all whinging and whining by jilted developers ought to hold no more weight than kids moaning that it's all so unfair! Still, my blog, my rules. Let the…

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A UTF-8 Aware substr_replace (for use in App.net)


The PHP logo.

So, I stayed up bashing my head against a brick wall all last night! PHP's string functions aren't (yet) UTF-8 aware. This is a replacement for subtr_replace which should work on UTF-8 Strings: function utf8_substr_replace($original, $replacement, $position, $length) { $startString = mb_substr($original, 0, $position, "UTF-8"); $endString = mb_substr($original, $position + $length, mb_strlen($original), "UTF-8"); $out = $startString . $replacement . $endString; return $out; …

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Visualising Conversation Threads In Hyperbolic Space


In 2009, Kosso and I petitioned Twitter to allow us to search for Tweets by their "in reply to" ID. The idea was that developers could created a properly threaded view of conversations. Of course, Twitter being ultra-responsive to developers, did absolutely nothing. Skip three years into the future, and App.net is providing all the API goodness that Twitter doesn't. This means that we can easily create new ways to view conversations. So that is exactly what I've done. You can play with…

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