The BBC’s magazine monitor has a riddle every Monday, set by a guy from the Puzzletome website. There are always less than obvious solutions to these riddles which keeps people occupied, rather than doing work I suspect.

It reminds me of the time I wrote a computer program to solve n-order simultaneous differential equations. Why would I write it? Well, it’s all to do with curve fitting. Pick a set of n points, and try to find the equation that fits all of these points. Using differential equations you can find such an fit.

It then got me thinking (this is back in, I dunno, one holiday when I was in my sixth form at school) that there are a lot of riddles which are of the ‘next in series’ form. Find the next number in the series 1, 2, 4, 7 etc. Trouble is, once you know that you can find an equation that fits n points or values, you know that there will be one that fits n+1 points or values. Furthermore, you know that any additional point can be made to fit. So, when people ask you the next in the series, you can rightfully state anything you like because there will always be an equation to fit the entire series.

So it’s the same with these riddles. And anything else you need to find an algorithmic solution to. Make up anything you like. Just make sure you don’t have to prove it.

I originally posted this a couple of days ago:

“Excuse me sir, where do you think you’re going?”

“Sorry, I’m trying to get to http://www.microsoft.co.uk”

“Have you got your password for Microsoft Passport?”

“No. Do I need one?”

“Yes.”

“What? To visit Microsoft’s UK website?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What about http://www.microsoft.com/uk ?”

“The same, Sir.”

“And http://www.microsoft.com ?”

“No. Anyone can view that site.”

I was slightly wrong, the situation is more bizarre:

If your browser has a cookie indicating that you have a Passport account, then you must log-in before viewing the site. If not, you can view the site. So Microsoft punishes people that have a Passport account (!)

On 13 December, Apple filed a civil lawsuit against no-one inparticular because “an unidentified individual, acting alone or in concert with others, has recently misappropriated and disseminated through Web sites confidential information about an unreleased Apple product.”

There’s a lot of talk about a flash memory based iPod (and indeed confirmation of manufacturing of the same in Chinese newspapers), and the launch of an Apple branded mobile phone (based on the official announcements that Apple was partnering with Motorola to have iTunes on their next generation phones).

But, what about this: I’d love to have a decent remote control for Airport Express. Based on the nudge-and-a-wink body language of Steve Jobs when the Airport Express was launched earlier this year, I reckon it will come. However, perhaps the current iPods are the wrong form factor. After all, do people really want to use such a valuable piece of equipment as a remote control? What about that hard disk? It’ll get bumped around something chronic if it’s in a remote.

However, a flash based iPod would be an ideal remote. Lightweight. No moving parts. Bump up the battery life more than equivalent PDAs – and remember it doesn’t have to have a great wireless range as it only has to make a hop to a chosen Airport Express. At the risk of sounding like a Gatwick Express PR man, let the Airport Express take the strain.

How do you make money doing web design? Or rather, why are businesses not prepared to pay vast sums for quality work?

The answer is complex:

1. Web design is seen as a ‘black art’ to some, so they don’t know what their expectations are. Because of this, they don’t know how much they should pay. But, they know that Harry down the road does a bit of web design, and that guy that advertises in the local newspaper does websites for £100 a pop.
2. Everyone can buy web design software. From about $30 upwards. Because of 1. above, this means that everyone is a fully qualified web designer. So why pay more than Harry or that guy charges? It’s just like desktop publishing in the 1980s.

So, it seems the way forward is to price in accordance with your view of the quality of your work. See Joel On Software’s rather sane view of pricing. We’ve not applied it to our business yet, but I’m thinking seriously about it. Why? Because quality websites take time and at present we’ve got a lot of web design work on that won’t bring in that much money in.

Our favourite web application at the moment is Basecamp. Actually, Basecamp is probably the finest web application I’ve seen. It certainly makes me aspire to creating something like this for our future clients. It’s the first time I’ve looked up to another web design company in six years!

So, what do 37signals (who wrote and manage Basecamp) charge for their work? (We charge around £70 a page, plus pro-rata work for specific application requirements). Here goes:

• $2,500 for a one page redesign
• $7,500 for minor changes to an existing site
• $10,000+ for a redesign
• $15,000+ for a new site

Hmm.. it’s rather a lot, isn’t it? It’s also worth noting this is really just for the user interface (as that’s what 37signals specialise in). The back-end stuff costs extra. Let me consider this further:

The most interesting thing I’ve read about 37signals is their believe that, so far as the web is concerned, the screen is the application. I’ve often specified complex web applications in this way, but at the end of the day thrown it altogether as a boring old document, perhaps with a few mock-up screen shots.

One of the web applications I’m writing at the moment would normally have a specification. This time (and coincidentally about the same time we discovered Basecamp), it hasn’t. I have instead been intensely thinking about the screen. What each page will look like, how it will work, and the flow between pages. I’ve kept a consistent look to each page, buttons, tables etc. using CSS to a greater extent than usual (thanks to these guys for that inspiration).

It will still bring us peanuts, because our pricing still remains competitive, but perhaps there’s a clue as to where we go next. I’ve decided that we do need to give our clients the best but we need to attract the right sort of clients. Those that are prepared to pay for the best and know when they’ve got it.

Ever got to that stage in a project when your client suddenly decides that he wants to search on a field that had been hidden away in as an object in a database. I have.

This project holds user information in a MySQL table. There is a column for the billing address which is a BLOB holding a serialized PHP object. For debugging purposes, I use a TEXT type instead which allows me to see the serialized object as a string. Objects serialized with the PHP serialize() function contain an explicit definition of the structure of the object so that PHP can recreate it, then associate it with a PHP class when it is loaded from the database.

My concern with searching the BLOB equivalent is that there is all the semantic information in the BLOB indicating data-types, array sizes etc. for the serialized object. If the client (for some reason) searched for ”{”, he would find that all of the data is retrieved as ”{” characters are used to delimit serialized arrays for example. Similarly ”:” is used as a separator.

Fortunately, I wrote customised serialization routines for the field just in case our client wanted to search it. These routines allow the BLOB to be searched without interference from the structural information. The only downside is that BLOB searching is case sensitive; TEXT searching is case insensitive. So, when the application goes live and I don’t need human readable storage, I may just change the type from BLOB to TEXT.