For over five years, I’ve held a bit of an open secret: I’m an alien from fluidic space.

Err, wait, let me start that again.

For over five years, I’ve been working for Telstra. I started off “on the phones”, working in a service call centre. Due to me being a smart-ass (and critical of some very inefficient systems) I was taken off the phones after about two weeks, to write some reporting tools.

From that first app in Excel 97 using VBA to generate charts, I converted to a full-time employee, and went on to bigger and better things. When I wrote that there’s a reasonably good chance of my code having touched your life in some subtle way, I wasn’t joking. The software I wrote helps people in Telstra do their jobs: Routing messages, generating reports, storing data, and keeping an eye on other applications.
I’m proud of the work I’ve done, despite it not being world changing or highly visible. Sure there’s some icky bits (VBA, Oracle, MS Access, Classic ASP), but overall I hope that it’s made people’s lives better, and/or their jobs easier, in some small way.

Today, I resigned from my position at Telstra. It’s not something I did lightly, but, after consideration I’ve decided I need to move on.

For those that are curious, I’m not going to be unemployed - Today I’ve also accepted a contract role to a digital media company in Sydney. I won’t say who, yet, until I’ve had a chance to speak with them some more, but suffice to say it looks like a great company to work for, doing interesting things and meeting interesting people.

Oh, and yes, this means that I’ll be moving from Newcastle / Toronto. I’m still at Telstra until the 26th of October and then I’ll be off to Sydney and new things.

I’d also like to throw a quick shout-out to Nick Hodge for putting in a good word for me, and listening to me rant a little about work; Jack Greenrich for plenty of coding advice and guidance; Ian Ward for getting me hired at Telstra and started down the software development path; and both Markus Hafner and Greg Dwyer of Happener Recruitment for helping me to get this new position.

Exciting times ahead, for sure…

Delicate Genius points out the recent Sydney Morning Herald article about Virgin Mobile Australia being sued for using Alison Chang’s picture in their advertising campaign.

Another girl who’s likeness was used in the Virgin Mobile campaign. Credit: Jason Meredith “It’s fine to text about someone, just don’t send it to them by mistake” says Virgin Mobile.

Some quick facts, for those of you who aren’t aware of the background on this:

• Virgin Mobile Australia ran an ad campaign called “Are you with us or what?” earlier this year.
• The ads used pictures which were obtained from Flickr - a photo sharing service.
• The photographers who posted the photos on Flickr marked them with a Creative Commons licence of some variety - although apparently not all of them allowed commercial usage.
• Model releases were not obtained by Virgin Mobile/Advertising Company/Photographer - Which is required for commercial use (with some disclaimers) , but not non-commercial use (such as posting to Flickr)
• Neither Virgin Mobile nor their Advertising/Marketing agency contacted the photographers to let them know their photos would be used.
•  Some of the pictures were not exactly flattering, and the captions (added by Virgin Mobile) could possibly be offensive to those pictured.

I find it interesting the viewpoints of some of the people commenting about this.

With the exception of someone shooting with the intent to use pictures commercially; I don’t believe it should be the responsibility of the photographer to obtain model releases for all those featured in a shot.  Many apparently disagree with me, for example the first comment by ‘wjkocik’ on this photo 

There’s also some confusion about the role of the Creative Commons folks in this. The Sydney Morning Herald says “Creative Commons Corp, [is] a Massachusetts nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos”.  The Creative Commons folk simply provide a way for people to use a pre-prepared licence for their works which clearly states what the work can be used for.

I’ll be watching the lawsuit to see what happens.

Last weekend I installed Windows Mobile Device Centre, and it asked me if I’d like to download some additional updates/applications.  I said yes, and was asked to create an account and fill in a survey about where and when I got my Windows Mobile powered device. 

Obviously Microsoft’s improved their user tracking technology, and know I’m actually a time-lord in human form (Those Chameleon Arches are really something!).  

For those wondering why Microsoft chose to stop at 2015? Well, lets just say that after the great Mobile Device Wars between the Googlites and Microsoftians, many lives and OSs were lost.

PS: WTB, 1x [ TARDIS ]  Pref. with Chameleon Circuit active. You know where to contact me.

This is me, I work on the Web.

If you’ve lived in Australia in the last 5 years, there’s a reasonably good chance my code has touched your life in some subtle way, but you’d never notice it.  The stuff I do for a living sits quietly in the background and helps to ensure things continue to tick over and make the world just that little bit better.

I started down the path of becoming an IT Geek by simple curiosity. In May/June of 1993 I saw this magazine, with the headline “Intel’s Rocket in a Socket: Pentium 60″ and “We review the 486 DX2/66″, and convinced mum to let me buy it.

My first computer (An Acer 486 DX4/100) I managed to ‘break’ within 20 minutes of having it all plugged in and running, much to the horror of my family. Nevertheless, I quickly learned how to reinstall DOS and Windows.

Access to the ‘net a few years later lead to my first involvement in helping to create the web. A joint project with a friend from School (Hi Phil!), complete with Liberal use of Frames, Animated ‘Under Construction’ images, and even a little Javascript to do mouse-roll-overs for the graphic menu links. It took Macromedia coming out with Dreamweaver Ultradev for me to get into creating data-driven sites, and learning ASP. 

For the past five years I’ve been working for a large company here in Australia and I’ve had some pretty unique opportunities to be part of some fast-paced and exciting things. Things you probably wouldn’t find in too many other companies around the world.

In my own time, I help to run a small collection of community sites and projects under the ‘plebian.net’ banner/domain.

So, what’s your story? Do you work on the web? 

See more people who also work on the web.   (No, I don’t have a flickr account)

Okay, I’ve settled on the changes and new features for Smitter for Release 3.

I need to clean up the code base, and change how certain things work. So, it’ll be a few more days - possibly Saturday/Sunday before Release 3 is ready.

New Features:

• Automatically convert long URLs you send, into short URLs with urlTea (Intercepts pasted URLs)
• Minimise to Notification Area (”Task Tray”) Icon.
• Balloon Alert when your Twitter ID is mentioned in a tweet, or when you recieve a Direct Message (Configurable in Settings)
• Replies Tab
• Direct Messages Tab
• Automatic Check for new Direct Messages (Default: Every 10 minutes)
• Links Tab - Gathers all URLs that appear in new Tweets.

Changes:

• First Start shows the full settings page,  enabling you to set the proxy at the same time.
• Option to use proxy server from Internet Explorer
  (NB: If your proxy requires a username/password - you may still need to specify it)
• Longer Image Cache period (4hrs)
• Refresh Times for Friends List
• Limit of 50 Tweets kept
• Fix multiple “Loading…” messages, and displaying of errors (errors go to an Logging tab)
• More obvious seperation between Tweets
• (Updated) Now responds to Mouse-Wheel scrolling

Known Issues which won’t/can’t be fixed yet:

• Dynamic resizing of tweets
  (I need to figure out a fix for this - resizing + Flow Layout Panel = ugliness)
• Proxy detection from Firefox
  (Not sure if I can do this correctly - esp. difficult if using Auto Detection and/or a proxy.pac config file.)

Moving to a WPF Front end and .NET 3.0 are off the cards for the moment.

The good news is that I’m feeling fairly comfortable with C# now - I’m missing not having certain things that VB just does for you automatically.  The whole “sprinkle in some curly-braces and semi-colons” thing is getting to be natural though.

I’m currently working away on improving Smitter R3, and part of that is improving the way proxies are handled.

Currently, there’s four situations it supports quite fine:

- No Proxy
- Proxy, without Authentication
- Proxy, with BASIC Authentication (using specified username/password)
- Proxy, with NTLM Authentication using your current Windows Account (aka Windows Integrated Authentication).

The problem comes you’re in this fifth situation:
- Proxy, with NTLM Authentication using a specified username, password and domain.

Initially, I was using code like:

WebClient client = new WebClient(url);
client.Proxy = new WebProxy(proxyurl, true);
// if proxy-auth required:
client.Proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(proxyusername, proxypassword, domain);
// ...etc


But, this fails with “407 Proxy Authentication Required”
The crazy part is that it actually is doing NTLM authentication, but it appears to be attached in the headers for twitter.com (!?).

So, I tried using WebRequest, and also HttpWebRequest and specifying proxy-keep-alive.
I also tried setting the .NET Default proxy to my specified proxy or just adding authentication credentials.
But, still nothing appears to be working.

Almost all the solutions online are using the DefaultCredentialCache - but that really doesn’t help (I tried), because I’m not logged in as the user that I want to authenticate as. Cretaing a new CredentialCache and adding the details to that - still no help.

All in all, very frustrated!

If you want to have a crack at solving it - download the SmitterR2 source and check out Smitter.Core.TwitterService.GetStatuses (in SmitterClasses\SmitterCore.cs).

There’s currently a line like:
using (WebClient client = BuildWebClient())
Ignore/remove it and create your own WebClient/WebRequest/etc to test on. That’s the first (network) function called when Smitter starts up, and is pretty quick to return a result one way or another.

Just make sure you’re using a proxy which requires NTLM / Kerberos Auth, and isn’t on the same domain as your current account. Any other situation seems to work A-OK.

If you can solve this, I’d be much in your debt.

Smitter, Release 2  is out now.

Changes

• Better error handling (please report any bugs)
• Proxy Support
  (NB: ClickOnce deployment may not work with Proxies requiring authentication!)
• More efficient posting (no refresh necessary)

Requirements

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Installation

• ClickOnce (See “ClickOnce Notes” below), or
• Download it and install yourself. 
  Note: Download the zip file, and extract it to a new directory. Then run “Smitter.exe”.

ClickOnce Notes (updated!)

• By Default, only works with Internet Explorer 6 and above, with the .NET Framework 2.0 installed
• Does not work correctly if you have Internet Explorer configured to use a proxy requiring Authentication (eg: Corporate Firewalls)
• Firefox users can run ClickOnce applications by installing the FFClickOnce addon, and then going to the normal installation page.

Upgrades

• ClickOnce automatically updates next time you run it.
• Manual Install: Download the zip file and replace the existing files.

Source Code:

• Smitter R2 Source.

Application and Source Code Licence

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Please give your feedback in the comments, or add me on Twitter.

Features Confirmed for R3 (updated)

• Minimise to Notification Icon (”System Tray”)
• Balloon Notifications (optional)
  If Smitter is minimised or not visible, and your @Username is mentioned in a new tweet. 
   
  Note:  To deploy the above two features, I need an icon for Smitter.  On the screen-shot above, I am using an icon borrowed from Iconfactory’s Twitterific client icon in the   Litho Extras Volume 5 collection.   Due to licensing rules, I can’t distribute this icon, so it’ll remain for internal testing at the moment
• Minor bug fixing (removal of the “Loading” messages if it errors, and fixing of the hammer-prevention so that it allows you to refresh)
• More?

Smitter R2 is out, go to the announcement.

What is Smitter?
It’s a Small Twitter client, for Windows.  It’s also an excuse/reason for me to start writing software in C#, since I’m used to writing in VB.NET. (Boo, hiss, etc).

What’s with the “Battleship Grey”?
I’m not a designer, and fiddling with Windows Presentation Framework / etc wasn’t in my list of things I needed to learn right at the moment. 

What’s cool about it?
Nothing particularly, it’s pretty much all functional. But it’s the only windows twitter client I know of that shows you the source of messages.

How do I install it?
If you’re using Internet Explorer, just click here, and then click Install.
This is the recommended method as it will enable automatic updating when I release a new version. 

Alternatively, You can download the zip file. Just extract all the files to a new directory, and run Smitter.exe

I’m behind a proxy - it doesn’t work for me.
I’m adding proxy support shortly, but I wanted to get this out there as a first release.

This broke my system, who do I sue?
This application is provided on an ‘as-is’ basis, and at your own risk. Do not use this on “production” or important PCs if you’re particularly nervous.

Can I look at the Source Code?
Yep, that’s available too.  Download the source code here.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Can you add feature x?
Maybe - Add a comment here, or send an email. Alternatively, if you’re good with C# - you can have a crack at it yourself.

You do realise you did {giant, list, of, things} wrong, and the structure is crap?
The structure is crap because I went with the Twitteroo .NET API at first, but that doesn’t support certain functionality (like for example seeing if a message is private, what the source was, and being able to specify a proxy server). 

There are probably a whole number of violations of best coding practices here too. Again, this was primarily created so that I can learn the C# syntax and slightly different event modeling, etc. When I start off with a proper project spec, and don’t shift around on your a whole bunch, things work out a lot nicer.

Credits, Mentions, etc

FAMFAMFAM  - For the Silk Icons used within the GUI. (Creative Commons License)

Karsten Januszewski for this great pointer on how to generate classes from well-formed XML using XSD.   (nb: On Step 2, you need to use the ‘/classes’ switch.)

Paul Jenkins, for making me feel guilty for not actually knowing C# when he asks for advice/pointers about .NET stuff.

Last night, Nick Hodge had a rant about slow broadband, a lack of competition and government interference in the whole mess.

The broadband debate is something that I find simultaneously very interesting, and very frustrating.   It’s interesting, because I love the technology involved, and the idea of having a faster internet connection instantly has me thinking of ways to utilise it.  It’s also incredibly frustrating because I know that without major changes to the pricing and regulatory structures - the current debate is merely an expensive waste of everyone’s time.

To understand why I think it’s a big waste of time, you have to understand what is involved in providing you and me with an internet connection over a technology such as ADSL.

Just for the physical network components, you’re paying for:

• A copper phone line (probably pre-existing network, since you needed to have a valid phone service), back to:
• An ADSL DSLAM (at the the exchange typically), which is connected to:
• A private fibre optic data network, which is connected to:
• Your capital city’s data centre for the DSLAM Operator, which is connected to:
• Your ISP’s Point of Presence (routers) in that data centre, which are connected to:
• Fibre optic connections to Your ISP’s data centre(s), or wherever they host their core network, which is connected to:
• Your ISP’s core routers, which are connected to
• Fibre connections to your ISP’s network peers and/or ‘upstream provider’ (aka: Your ISP’s ISP)
• The servers required to do the Accounting, Authentication, and Authorization

Note, the points in italic are not applicable if the DSLAM Operator is also the same as your ISP.

Then, of course there’s the non-network components - which comes down to basically two things: Staff to run all the above, and transit data costs.

What is transit data? Wikipedia describes it best on this article on Internet Peering:

[I]n order for [data from your ISP] to reach any specific other network on the Internet, it must either:

• Sell transit (or Internet access) service to that network (making them a ‘customer’),
• Peer directly with that network, or with a network who sells transit service to that network, or
• Pay another network for transit service, where that other network must in turn also sell, peer, or pay for access.

It’s this last one, that costs the majority of ISPs significant amounts of money. It’s also one of reasons why your ISP will generally limit you to transferring a certain amount of data per month. 

This is because most Australian ISPs are either Tier 3 or Tier 2.  Again, Wikipedia gives a great simple definition of what the different tier levels are.

• Tier 1 - A network that peers with every other network [at this level] to reach the Internet. [This network will also charge Tier 2/3 customers for access to their network.]
• Tier 2 - A network that peers with some networks, but still purchases IP transit to reach at least some portion of the Internet.
• Tier 3 - A network that solely purchases transit from other networks to reach the Internet.

Both Telstra and Optus (amongst others) are considered Tier 1 within Australia, even though on a world-scale they still pay for connectivity to other ISPs. The reasoning behind Telstra and Optus being classified as so is simple: They peer with each other, but sell transit to many other ISPs in Australia.

This massive imbalance in the local market is why I think that the whole debate about who’s proposal is the best, is a giant waste of time.  At least, I think it will be for those who choose not to use Optus or Telstra. 

It is also not a new occurrence. Almost exactly 10 years ago, Bill St. Arnaud wrote a paper about this subject.  Bill’s paper is demonstrates that in all these years, we apparently haven’t figured out how to solve the issue of imbalance in cost sharing. 

In Short: You simply won’t be able to afford to use any really high speed connection as intended for any length of time, because data costs are atrociously high.  I can’t really see the point of having a 100Mbit connection to your house, if you still have to pay the equivalent of $0.15/MB for the data you download.

What do you think? Is there some solution that I haven’t heard of for fixing these problems? Should be just concentrate on getting faster connections, and worry about the data costs later? Should I be banned from writing and publishing long blog posts at 2:30am?