Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more

I just officially registered on stackoverflow (for some reason my own openID was not accepted during the beta period and I was too lazy to fix it).

While filling in my profile I was asked for my birthday in a way that is SO typical of a developer. See the screenshot:



It took me a few seconds to think about my birthday in YYYY/MM/DD format... :)

I just "stole" this image from Gizmodo that is commenting live on the Apple event. The new iPod nano looks A LOT like the first 2 generations. The third generation was clearly the dark sheep with regards to the design and I have to admit... I'm pleased they went back to the original design, it's much better, IMHO.

Initially Nokia announced the decision of using the webKit browser in their mobile devices in the S60 series and they called it S60 Browser (running on the S60WebKit). That was already a landmark, I think.

Apple of course boosted the users of webKit and Safari releasing the windows version of Safari and then Safari in the iPhone.

Google followed announcing webKit in Android and now with Chrome.

MOTOMAGX is a linux platform by Motorola. They use it for some of their PDA's. The other day I received their newsletter that among the other things mentioned widgets for MOTOMAGX and guess what? The official browser is the webkit.

A lot of big companies are jumping on the webKit band-wagon, but I think my original question still stands, Will Apple share ownership of the webKit? It'll be especially interesting to see how Google will contribute and try to take control of the platform as now they have a lot of interest in making sure it goes in the right direction. So far it looks like Nokia did not have much voice in the project, at least from what I see.

More open questions:

I was reading my RSS feed and of course this news item from TechCrunch caught my eye, Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case (includes longer excerpt from the ruling and a video).

I was initially surprised that TechCrunch spoke about transcoders for mobile sites (remember Novarra, InfoGin, Openweb, etc?) and in fact they are talking about video and flash. The ruling is interesting and here is how it starts:

The topic is very different, but if you read this text and applied it word-by-word to what proxy transcoders do, it would still make sense. So I wonder (and I'm not a lawyer by far), will this ruling also apply to mobile proxies?

DISCLAIMER: I agree this is extreme, but not entirely impossible.

The other day I was trying to do some house-cleaning of HTC device names, clones and HTTP request headers for DeviceAtlas.

The result was that I was one step from going crazy. All those devices have names that are almost the same, UAProf or user-agent string refer to slightly different names, different network operators re-brand with *other* different names.

Just to give you an idea, I found a couple of useful sites that talk about HTC devices, platforms, and model names:

One of my favorites is the T-Mobile Atlas, a.k.a T-Mobile Wing, a.k.a. HTC Herald, a.k.a. HTC P4350 and probably some more names. The saint had less alternative identities!

I think it's almost impossible to keep up with all those names and re-branding. If you know a good way or you work for HTC and want to help me, *please* contact me.

My English has improved a lot in the last two years and in most cases I can manage a normal conversation. Speaking to people with slightly different accents can be a problem sometimes, but it seems like after a few minutes I get used to it, and handle it OK.

There is something funny that is still happening to me, from time to time. The other day I went to my bank for a money transfer. I was thinking about the amount of money, the recipient full name and so on. The cashier, who has now seen me a few times in the last month or so, started the conversation with something like "Hello Andrea, how has it been in Ireland so far?". This was not exactly the type of question I expected. Not the type of conversation you normally have in a bank with a cashier. Well, even if the question was quite simple and was very nice of her to ask me, she caught me by surprised with an unexpected question about an unrelated topic. I was baffled and for a moment had to "rewind the tape", think and then prepare a reply.

Nothing bad happened and a few other times I simply asked to repeat the question, still it's funny that if a topic that is not normally discussed in a certain context it appears that I can be caught by surprise and not understand it, even if the vocabulary is simple enough for me to understand every single word of the sentence.

Anyway, life in Ireland has been OK so far, everyone I met have always been very nice and helpful. +1 to the Irish.

I have not been able to change the layout of my blogger site for quite a long time. All I could do was download the template, manually edit, re-upload. All the nice AJAXy interface did not work at all.

Today I had a few spare minutes, I went in edit mode and when clicking on preview blogger told me it could not show me the new page because of a (blogger) widget in the head portion of the page. I cut it and magically everything is working! I can now edit the layout again!! woohoo!

I'm glad they added this new error message.

I now replaced the old widget with a cleaner code so that I can get the page titles as I like them. Slightly changed the widgets on the right-hand side of the page (if you are not reading from RSS, of course). Minor link updates.

Now on to work on a couple of posts I've been thinking about in the last few days.