Monthly Archives: February 2006

Testing with a local SSL certificate for free

Posted by on February 27, 2006 4 comments

It used to be that creating a self-signed certificate for local IIS debugging was a pain. Without a certificate, anything starting with “https://localhost” was bound to cause an error. There is a simple, two-minute fix that will work for most cases, however.

  1. Download and install the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit from Microsoft.
  2. Run the newly installed SSL Diagnostics program
  3. Right click on your local website and choose “Create new cert”. It will install a two-week locally signed certificate on your machine that is not technically valid, but will at least allow you to test SSL activity.

Read more »

Mobile IM is hot

Posted by on February 24, 2006 Comments Off

Since the CEO has gone public with this, I can only add that we’re really jazzed about mobile chat and have a soon-to-be-finished project that will put multi-protocol chat inside of Skweezer. Needless to say, excitement level = high at GW HQ about chat. Coincidently, there was a post on Techcrunch today about a company/product called Mabber that looks very interesting. Is Mabber mobile’s messenger Meebo‘s murderer? (Sorry, couldn’t resist…) Who will get mobile chat right, and quickly enough to matter? Well Skweezer, obviously.

Mobile Porn

Posted by on February 23, 2006 2 comments

Techdirt Wireless commented today about an article that claims that quotes Google research saying that 20% of cell phone searches are for porn. Sounds about right. A cursory look at our search query logs proves that the demand for mobile porn is alive and well. It seems there are people who can’t be away from porn for a few hours. It sounds crazy, but replace “porn” with instant messaging, eBay, MySpace, gaming, blogging, etc. and it turns out that there are a number of internet activities people can’t be without for even a few hours, and they use their phones (and Skweezer) to quiet their urges until they can get back to a computer.

While I’m on a subject I don’t plan to revisit soon, we have gotten complaints occasionally that Skweezer shows everything but porn images, as if Skweezer filters objectionable content. We don’t filter content (I think we’re currently “unavailable” in China), but there are several reasons why images may not show on a given page when viewed through Skweezer: Read more »

Quality Open Data

Posted by on February 21, 2006 Comments Off

Thinking more about the IP/Country database that I found recently, it reminds me of the frustration of the quality of open data on device profiles. The problem is that when a browser hits your site, how do you know what it can do? Is it a phone, PDA, or a desktop browser? If it’s a phone, how large is the screen, and most importantly for Skweezer, how much data can it handle before it chokes? For non-mobile sites, there are tools such as Browserhawk that can help you determine what your visitor can and can’t do, but the mobile solutions for this are pretty bleak. Microsoft has half-heartedly tried exposing mobile browser capabilities, but this has historically been problematic, and going forward won’t do us much good on the mobile side anyway.WURFL Logo

The best freely available all-in-one solution right now is an open data repository called the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL) which is maintained by volunteers. The WURFL is an XML file of user agent strings. By matching the UA header to the XML, you can get a lot of information about the device. Many phones send an extra header that points to an XML file somewhere that may or may not be right (UAProf), and the WURFL people have done their best to remove errors from this manufacturer-supplied data, but this task is sisyphean. The trouble is that devices and mobile browsers are coming out all the time, and if it’s not in the WURFL, you’re blind.

On one hand, we don’t want to be in the business of maintaining a user agent database. On the other hand, I don’t see how we can avoid it.

ESPN’s MVNO misfires on browsing

Posted by on February 20, 2006 2 comments

Quick item while I debug: Walt Mossberg rips on ESPN’s new mobile service (found via Techdirt Wireless), for what I consider a wonderful and insightful reason:

ESPN has crippled the phone’s Web browser by blocking access to some sites. When I tried to go to several sites, including those of competitors like Sports Illustrated, I got a screen that said ESPN only allows you to go to “reviewed” sites it believes “work well on your ESPN phone.” That’s an outrageous level of control, in my view. [...] ESPN concedes it allows users to access only those Web sites it has approved, but it says this is a temporary measure designed to protect its software from the “corruption” that it says can be introduced if users download programs from certain sites. The company says the restriction on visiting unapproved sites will be lifted later this year, though the phone will still prevent the download of unapproved software.

Whoops. Customers hate that kind of stuff.

mobileGlu

Posted by on February 20, 2006 2 comments

Picked this one up via del.icio.us popular this morning, but I found a new app that just launched last week called mobileGlu that accomplishes a specific subset of what Skweezer does but via a Java client for your phone. Built by nintyten (the company behind buddyPing) I think it’s got some promise despite the client requirement. From the about page:

mobileglu is a project from the people over at ninetyten that allows developers to quickly and easily mobilise their services and provides one central place for users to access their online applications. [...] The goal of the project is to act as a mobile hub for existing open API’s. This will allow developers to look after their web code, and do what they are good at, which leaves us to mobilise those services.

Welcome to the party.

Update: Let’s hear it for originality.

Real M2M Payments

Posted by on February 17, 2006 Comments Off

Kevin wrote about TextPayMe the other day and yes, we have been sending dollars to each other to try it out. I’ve gotta say: it was perplexing. In my first 10 minutes with it, I communicated with TextPayMe through four transports: SMS, e-mail, website, and an automated phone call (IVR). Mind you, I haven’t even established a method to transfer money in or out of TextPayMe yet. PayPal (also going for M2M) has essentially the same problem, and that is: mistaking mobile browsing for the ugly stepchild of desktop browsing. While netizens in general dislike multi-page navigation, passwords, and waiting for things, these dislikes are elevated to extreme loathing on the mobile web, for obvious reasons. More importantly: an increasing proportion of new internet users won’t have a PC at all.

I have a few suggestions for any would-be M2M company, speaking as a mobile user advocate: Read more »

Array.BinarySearch is good

Posted by on February 16, 2006 Comments Off

I have a nice way to describe the binary search algorithm that is older-relative tested. How do you go about finding a particular card in a deck of 52 cards? Of course you flip through them one by one, and darn it if the card you’re looking for isn’t second to the last. If you have to find a single card often, you will quickly get tired of this. A better method would be to sort the cards in some predictable, understandable order. Then, when you need to find a certain card you divide the deck in half and see which half is closer to your card, then divide that pile in half and so on and so forth until you find it. In the worst case, you’ll only have to look at 7 cards. The beautiful thing is that if you doubled the number of cards, you’d only have to check your sorted deck one additional time. In a sorted deck of 8,000 unique cards, you’d only have to check 14 cards to find the one you’re looking for.

I mention this because I just posted a VB.NET class to look up IP addresses which would have been impractical without Array.BinarySearch. Enjoy.

Nintendo DS Browser by Opera

Posted by on February 15, 2006 1 comment

Opera announced their intention to release a version of their fine browser on the Nintendo DS, the most recent generation of the portable gaming platform from the House That Mario Built. It’s only a matter of time before other companies such as Skype announce something similar. Does anyone still not believe that all portable electronic devices are converging to a single unit that can make calls, play games, capture media, browse the web, and (insert other capabilities here)? So how about Opera for the PSP? Oh, never mind…