So, I decided to do something about it. Some of you might have seen some of the marvellous single purpose websites floating around the internet such as:

• Lets turn this f***ing website yellow
• Is the Apple Store Down?
• Do websites need to look the same in every browser?
• Is Lost a repeat?
• and Yet another useless website.

All are simple, single purpose websites, which generally do exactly what they say on the tin (or in the URL as is the case here) and as we know: The information they give must be true after all: “I read it on the internet, so it must be true”. So, late last night I got thinking..

May I proudly introduce to you, the Delphi community’s new and hopefully favourite single serving sites:

• www.isdelphidead.com
• www.isdelphidying.com

Next time you see someone on a forum, in the newsgroups or on stackoverflow asking the most dull and tedious of all the questions I could possibly hear: Is Delphi Dying? or Is Delphi Dead?,  point them to one of these sites.

Is Delphi Dead? Is Delphi Dying?

I should point out that the people who like to bring up this particular topic are normally quite persistent. In order to dissuade them from rehashing the same tedious and dull discussions time and time again I have cunningly built in an API.

People who are concerned that that answer might change without them being informed can build an application based on the API which spits out your choice of XML or JSON. This way, the aforementioned doom mongerers can simply build an application (in Delphi, of course) that sits in their tray and periodically polls the service and reassures those greatly concerned of the answer.

The API is very simple, you merely need to append

/API

to the isdelphidead.com or isdelphidying.com domain of your choice and then request either format by querying for XML (default):

/API?xml

or JSON:

/API?json

It’s that simple.  So go now and spread the word so that the rest of us can carry on in peace.

[Update 01/11/09]: Russian Delphi programmer Valerian Kadyshev has posted below to inform us that he has in fact made a tray monitoring application (in Delphi of course!) so that concerned people can download his pre-made one if they don’t even want to goto the trouble of making it themselves. You can find version 1 of his “Is Delphi Dying Monitor” over on his site. Marvellous Work Valerian!

The Dialog Chrome gives me when I visit Delphi3000.com

The more advanced description of what Google claims to have found can be viewed on their Advisory page but the short version is that it seems that the site could’ve been hacked 3 days ago (when Google first detected it) and a whole host of nasties implanted. Here’s what they say they found:

Malicious software includes 12 scripting exploit(s), 1 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 5 new process(es) on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 20 domain(s), including [redacted], [redacted] and [redacted].

Hopefully the guys at Delphi3000.com will notice this soon and will clear up their server (if anyone knows the maintainers then please let them know). In the meantime I would advise that anyone browsing avoid this particular site until it’s cleared, especially if you’re using earlier versions of Internet Explorer which might be more susceptible to exploitation.

On a separate note: I’ve been pretty busy of late and will be a guest on the next episode of the Podcast at Delphi.org with Jim, marc hoffman and Steve Kamradt which is due to appear on the site in the next 24 hours talking about a new project. I don’t think I said very much, mostly because we discovered my microphone has an uncanny habit of picking up background noise! oops. None-the-less, it was great fun to be on the podcast finally and I enjoyed taking part and contributing. I’ll be posting in greater detail about the subject of the podcast when it becomes available.

A logo for homecamp, created by @ribotminimus

I spent all day last Saturday at Homecamp at the Electrical Engineering building at Imperial College London. Homecamp is effectively a hack-day about Home monitoring, home automation reducing energy and energy resource requirements in your home.

Previous to hearing of the day, I had become interested in these subjects because I had seen Andy Piper‘s Current Cost posts and the associated IBM’ers who had been doing some fantastic work on providing code libraries for accessing the Current Cost data. The CurrentCost unit is a great little electricity usage monitoring unit that is available to buy on eBay for about £40. Whilst a large amount of our discussion from that day did revolve around the CurrentCost unit, it was not the limit of our discussion in anyway (discussion around this was easy because it’s a cool little unit that is low-cost and easy to extract data from!).

The Day began with Dale Lane and Chris Dalby who had organised the day distributing name labels and wireless keys and asked us to give suggestions for sessions. We also had a quick word from James Govenor (@monkchips) who was generously sponsoring the event via his GreenMonk consultancy. 

The First talk of the day was from Andy Stanford-Clark who is a Master Inventor at IBM. As one might expect, Andy’s own house is a geeks dream (it even twitters!). Almost everything that can be is monitored and automated, even to the mouse traps that are set in his loft which text him or his family when a mousetrap is set off or the cheese used as bait has gone off. He measured his water usage by requesting a new meter which had a magnetised needle, thus allowing him to setup a device which gets a signal every time the needle rotates. Andy was also a big advocate of the MQTT protocol which he uses for client projects with IBM and as the central messaging service for his house works. MQTT is a Publish-Subscribe protocol which makes it ideal for things like the house networks that we were talking about. He also mentioned the use of X10 and ZigBee in controlling almost device or system in the house. You can see Andy’s full talk in the video that Andy Piper made.

Photo credit: Andy Piper

Joe Short and Phoebe Bright then did a talk on Dynamic Demand. This is essentially about smoothing out the hour by hour and minute by minute variations in power demands on the national grid. This is important becuase peak time power requirements mean that power companies have to bring very expensive and very environmentally damaging types of power generator online. We discussed about how this requires social change and we discussed dynamic energy pricing as a method of bringing about this change. In Italy for example the government required dynamic pricing smart meters to be installed in every house. This means that people are rewarded for putting their tumble dryer (if you needed a tumble dryer in a hot country like italy!) on at 3am in the morning when electricity is considerably cheaper. The general message here seemed to be that we have limited scope for activity here until we can push suppliers for dynamic pricing. This will take some time but once this is done, you can for example program washing machines to automatically start when the national price of electricity is at it’s cheapest throughout the day (very cool).  

Dale Lane took us through some of the ways in which the IBM Hursley users of the CurrentCost units have been trying to address the social aspects of getting people to use less electricity. They have been working on a realtime site for sharing and contrasting data from their units and would like to start creating some XBox live style point scoring awards. This would mean awards for biggest 1 day improvement or lowest house rest point. 

We also had a talk from Nicholas O’Leary who gave an interesting talk about the potential for Arduino use in the home. The Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that allows the flexibility to program and build low cost sensor inputs (light, heat, magnetic etc) to interact with a number of outputs. Nick showed us an ambient orb that he had built to show the amount of power his house is using at that particular moment. It glows green, yellow or red depending on whether the house electricity usage falls within certain limits. You can buy arduino units and shields from a number of sources but I am planning on getting a starter kit which should be back in stock soon at tinker.it. 

There was discussion in both Andy’s talk and Nick’s talk about how you could end up consuming more power by measuring and monitoring your home by the time you’ve got a server plugged into all manner of electrical monitoring devices. We discussed the Viglen MPC-L device which runs on a rediculously small amount of electricity usage (there was some discussion of costing you approx £10 per year on electicity usage). The Arduino can be powered with a normal 9V battery.

We also had a presentation from the Patchube (Patch-U-Bay) folks who were explaining about how you can get data in to the site and the various ways you use and share that information. I could see a lot of potential for this site but first I need to generate some data to share!

Photo Credit: Andy Piper

Overall I had a very inspiring day and met some extremely interesting people from all manner of backgrounds, interests and areas. It was nice to meet so many people who I had interacted with on Twitter and some who I had never met before but whom I shall certainly be looking forward to meeting again soon. I will be ordering all sorts of kit to play with as a result of the talks given at Homecamp and so the day will almost certainly cost me a lot of money in gadgets and time in the future but at least I will have a lot of fun doing it! The first thing I will be doing is writing a native Delphi library for the CurrentCost unit and contributing that to the Google Code Repository. There is another Homecamp planned for March which I hope that I will be around for again and this time able to contribute some ideas and projects towards it.

Thank-you to Chris Dalby, Dale Lane and James Governor for their work in setting up the day and to everyone who presented or otherwise contributed to the day. I can’t wait to share what I do as a result of the inspiration that the first day gave me!

http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/podcastatdelphi

This allows you to get them in RSS form or view links by episode if you missed any from the podcast. I shall slowly be increasing the amount of Delphi content on this blog and have plans for quite a few things (including finding a more suitable theme!).

My initial impressions of the AppStore are pretty good, the process is very smooth and the Applications that are currently available seem to be of a pretty good calibre. A Couple of things still annoy me immensely about the whole iPod/iTunes operation and the first is that it still requires a long and painful snyc of everything, even when I’ve only added a single app. The Second is that iTunes is so determined to send me an invoice email even for songs, applications and videos which are absolutely free, there is already so much unnecessary email in the world, why worsen the problem!

After the update and small reboot, I was greeted by the welcoming icon of the AppStore being added to my homepage where I promptly set about adding 4 of my most desired applications.

The ones that I have added so far are:

• Facebook application – The only notable features of this is that it allows you to chat to facebook chat users via the application, this would be incredibly useful (or annoying) to an iPhone user. The other notable feature is the addressbook facility which for some (most of my friends don’t keep their number on there) would be extremely useful to an iPhone user.
• Remote Application – Does what it says on the tin: Allows you to control iTunes remotely. Amazingly useful if not a little buggy sometimes!
• Twitterific – Currently the only Native twitter client which is annoying because the interface is confusing and frustrating.
• NetNewsWire for iPhone – The iPhone RSS client produced by Brent Simmons of Newsgator who created the best RSS Reader for macs by the same name. This syncs all my news and feeds with FeedDemon, My Blackberry client and every other Newsgator client that I use. Utterly useful.

The only problems that I encountered where a slight problem with Syncing my NNW feeds from Newsgator. If you are having problems with NNW hanging then goto Newsgator online and reduce the number of feeds that the iPhone version is subscribed to. It’s not a problem for me because I certainly don’t want all my feeds clogging up my iPod and would only want to read a slightly smaller subsection of my total feeds.

I haven’t yet paid for any applications but as I’ve just been given a nice shiny iTunes gift voucher I suspect that I will branch into some of those ones very soon.

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. The idea behind such a device is to prevent scripts, spammers, search engines and other unwanted automated visitors from getting behind your page, the most visited sites on the internet implement some kind of CAPTCHA (yahoo, facebook, myspace, hotmail, gmail etc).

Sounds sensible does it not? It is highly sensible except that it has developed into an arms race of sorts as news of the recent crackings of Gmail’s Captcha, Yahoo’s Captcha and frequent crackings of Hotmail’s Captcha show. What this means to the end user is that CAPTCHAs increasingly get harder to solve. Facebook was caught out by a particularly unfortunate CAPTCHA bug as shown below.

There are various alternate solutions being banded around such as Client Side Javascript CAPTCHAs and verbal reasoning (via 37Signals) tests. The prize for most imaginative so far has to be the image based effort by alipr.com which can be quite to be dificult to grasp the concept of first time around.

I don’t think any of the above efforts have yet proved to be a viable replacement and sadly I can only see the arms race waging on for a couple more years yet. Still RapidShare has sucessfully implemented the worst CAPTCHA I have ever had to deal with on a regular basis so far! Where will the madness end?

It began with a disgruntled rant from Zed Shaw who was responsible for the Mongerel engine for rails. Zed seems to be disheartened with the Rails development community on the whole and whilst his rant is a little bit immature in places, it is worth a read as with every argument there is elements of truth and elements of fantasy. The basis of this rant was the allegedly poor attitude of the Core Rails Dev team towards the deployment of Rails apps.

Recently a provocative post appeared on the DreamHost blog titled How Ruby could be much bettter. Its an interesting piece which lashes out at Rails for its poor performance as a platform for Shared Hosting environments. I would have to agree with most of this post. I very much enjoy writing Rails applications, it is very good at simplifying data driven web apps and I sometimes wish that PHP had something similarly easy out of the box (yes I know about the various 3rd party frameworks) however after deploying my first production rails app I quickly relegated it to a pure hobby language. Was it really that bad? In a word: Absolutely. Almost anyone who has tried to deploy a rails app on shared hosting will agree with me, it is 50 times more complicated to deploy than anything else I’ve ever toyed with.

DHH then responded and stated that people should quit whining and get involved. I agree with this, DreamHost and other Rails hosts should spend more time and energy working with the core rails team however I don’t agree with DHH on one thing: He states that there is no motivation for him to improve this himself.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. DHH as the “public leader” of the Rails community is always pushing the point that Rails is the “quick and painless” way do web development. If he wants this to be true then he has to realise that the majority of the web is composed of small sites. Sites which cannot afford nor justify a dedicated server. Sites which must be served on shared hosting. I would argue that Rails can never be taken seriously as a language unless it is easy to deploy whether that be on dedicated equipment or on shared hosting and no-one who has tried rails can argue that in its current state it is easy to deploy on either.