Since getting the iPhone a while back, while I’ve been surprised by some of the apps that are available, I’m also occasionally surprised by the apps that aren’t available, particularly when it seems like such a good idea.

Among those have been :

1. National Lottery.  You’d have thought that an app for sending out the numbers to iPhones (and other phones) every week would be a no-brainer. Particularly if you could also put in the numbers you regularly use, so it could check automatically for whether you’ve got any matches. I don’t think it even needs the ability to buy numbers etc., as there are plenty of other avenues for doing this already.
2. Eurodisney. Herself’s off to Eurodisney soon, and we both thought that an app would be really useful for this. Being able to (for example) have a map – including “You are here” through the GPS, and a list of the rides/attractions you really want to see, plus being able to see what’s closest to your current position. Again, that seems like a no-brainer. (The really cool version would include ‘augmented reality’, and let you use the phone to see what’s around you, along with labels, routes etc.)

They’re the main two that surprise me. There’s a few others too that I haven’t totally thought through yet, but I’m sure I’ll write about those as and when I get round to it.

After 18 months with my Sony Ericsson C905, it’s time to update my phone again. The Sony Ericsson has been a good phone, and there’s lots of bits I like with it. It’s getting some problems with its keypad and so on now, but it’s been an OK phone all round. I haven’t used the camera on it as much as I thought/hoped I would, and really it’s been mainly used (as are most of my phones in the end) for the basics – calls, text messages and emails, and internet access.

So with camera-resolution being less of an issue, I’ve decided to take the leap and get an iPhone. Herself swears by hers, and the other people I know with one also swear by it. I’m still unconvinced by the touchscreen – I’m used to touchtyping text messages on the normal phone keypad, and it seems a bit weird to not have that possibility with the iPhone. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

It’s going to be an interesting experience. I’ve got reservations about it, but the iPhone is the best of the bunch at the moment, and there was absolutely nothing else that appealed at all, nor anything that’s coming out in the near future. Should be entertaining, anyway.

One of the funniest Twitter things this year was NewlywedsOnTJob , a prank by a best-man, automatically recording every time the newly-married couple went at it – start, stop, times, “frenzy index”, “Judge’s review”, the lot. It was very funny to just get the updates saying they were at it again – sometimes in the middle of the working day – and ended up with twenty-odd thousand followers all told.

Things went quiet at the end of February, when Best Man had said he’d be telling the groom about the prank. I hadn’t heard anything, so today did a quick search and found the end of the NewlyWedsonTJob story at I Am Staggered.

It’s well worth the read – made me laugh, anyway.

It’s been a quiet couple of days here on D4D™, and with good reason.

On Thursday, the database at work died in spectacular fashion. It’s been getting shaky for a while, but this week it keeled over totally, and since then I’ve been putting in silly hours getting things back to something approaching usable.

The problems are many, but basically the entire site – user-facing and company-facing – is database-driven. Without the database, there’s no business. It just grinds to a halt. So it’s been a case of “fix the essential bits, deal with the rest later”.

The other main problem is that the database was originally written as a proof-of-concept, a basic thing that’s then been extended and extended. Think of the original as a bungalow. The current site, all built off that bungalow, is the size of an airport, and all balanced on the roof of that original bungalow.

Because it wasn’t written with “the big picture” in mind, some of it is downright fucking nasty- and I suspect the original developer was also learning as he went along. For example, there were no date columns in there ’til I came along – instead it all used some very dodgy string-handling to figure out dates.

One of the main tables in the database now has 170,000 records in it. Which (in the database scheme of things) is nothing. Well, until you realise that each of those 170,000 records has 180 fields in it. That one database table is 600Mb in size. Oops.

So the last couple of days have been spent in Database Intensive Care. I’m through the brunt of it now, but it’s meant that other things – food, sleep, relaxation, D4D™ – have taken a back seat. I’m still going to be working on stuff around this for the next week, but things should be a bit calmer now that the urgent repairs are done, and it’s now more a case of fixing the underlying issues.

Thank fuck my assessment isn’t next week.

via bsag, I think this slimline plug is an absolutely fantastic idea.

UK 3-pin plugs are pretty sturdy, but if you’re carrying a couple of power cords around – or phone chargers, laptop power bricks etc. – then you quickly become aware of how bulky they are too.

The design of the slimline plug is aimed at getting round that, and seems to work really well. Even better are the adapters that allow three or four slimline plugs to be used in a space similar to that of a normal three-pin plug.

Following on from the post a while back about Toyota Ireland sending out a marketing email with all the addresses CCd in instead of BCCd, I’ve had a couple more instances this week of email fuckwittage.

First of all, an email from a recruiter at Modis International (an Agency I dealt with once) who pimped out an email again using CC instead of BCC to throw it to loads of people. Even better, there were a number of fuckwits who then exacerbated the situation by using ‘Reply to All’ rather than ‘Reply’, and thus ended up spamming everyone themselves.

The second instance is even better though – at work, we’ve been setting up a secure site with SSL, and the company being used for the SSL certificate tried to email the equivalent of me@www.site.com instead of me@site.com . And tried it three times, without understanding what the problem was.

So all told, it’s been a bit of a week for fuckwits.