BBC SPORT | Cricket | BSkyB lands England Test coverage

About time too. Whilst Channel 4’s coverage has been good, and in places innovative, of the past five years, since they took over from the BBC, Sky is the only place that you can get uninterrupted coverage of cricket. This is especially important now that a day’s play typically overruns the scheduled close of play. Channel 4 have been known to occasionally break such coverage to fit in other programs. Sky has never done so – if they need to they switch channels.

Additionally, Sky has interactive facilities so you can always catch up with the score or highlights. Furthermore there’s nothing more cosy than watching a day-night domestic one day match in the evening.

Now, it’s clear that this will upset many people – especially those who cannot afford a Sky package that includes sport. But Sky has long been the platform of choice for those that are passionate about any form of sport. Occasional viewers simply do not interest the England and Wales Cricket Board because they are not the people that are likely to help the sport grow in the coming years.

We’ve just purchased a subscription to Basecamp. It’s a very good web application which allows easy effective communication and planning between us and our clients.

Other applications go down the road of adding features or trying to be very complicated. Sure, there are times when you need this, but we don’t. More importantly our clients don’t. One such traditional application is LeadingProject. I’ve seen the site and I still don’t know what it does. Except you can embed multiple projects inside one project, and do a bunch of other project-y stuff if you need to keep meticulous detail of what’s happening or export it in a zillion different ways. (And if you do, get another job, because either your boss doesn’t trust you, or your client doesn’t.). In any case Microsoft Project allowed linked projects and sharing of resources across projects way back in 1996. Gahhh!

DMC Store – DMC 8270

Another stupid company trying to get on the portable MP3 bandwagon. I mean, just look at it. It’s something knocked up during lunchtimes at a technical design college. I had a Rockwell calculator in the late 70s that was more curvy and sexy than this lump.

I know that Digital Mind have been around for a little while – their Xclef 500 looks significantly nicer, but it seems they’re trying to cut pricing by reducing the styling. Frankly, it all makes me shudder..

This entry is all about web hosting. We do all of our off-line development on Apple Macintosh computers that run PHP 4.3.9, and commensurately up-to-date versions of Apache and MySQL (v2 and v4-something respectively).

This is fine until we move to our web host servers. They run PHP 4.1.2. There have been a lot of changes to PHP since then, which can be problematic when moving from off-line to on-line. Some of these I found out yesterday, which is why this blog entry is here.

I’m sure that upgrading PHP to a later version would be a nightmare for support – not least the fact that register_globals in PHP 4.2 or above is off by default.

So far, the things that caused me hiccups are:

1. There’s a bug in 4.1.2 (and probably other versions) which is related to register_globals. This setting automatically creates global variables for anything that is set by the server: cookies, form fields and session variables, for example. Obviously this compromises security, particularly if you don’t always initialise your own variables. But about this bug:
   
   You can clear a session variable with the code unset (_$SESSION["variable_name"]), but the bug only unsets the session variable if it has never been read. But because register_globals is set, session variables are always read to put them into global variables.
   
   The solution is to ensure that register_globals is set to Off in php.ini or .htaccess.
2. Our web host uses an old version of the GD library. So all the image manipulation functions needed updating. We use GD 2, they use GD 1.6.2. Unfortunately, reverting to an earlier version of GD means changing the functions that resize and create image resources. A side-effect of this means that the images themselves aren’t as good as they could be since the version of GD doesn’t use true colour maps or pixel interpolation.
3. It also appears that the formats supported by sprintf have changed. The PHP manual notes that floating point formats of the form %n.mf have n as the overall minimum width of display, so %5.2f should give you something like nn.mm. On our web host this is interpreted as nnnnn.mm. I haven’t found any evidence of this problem except a comment dating back to March 2001 on the PHP sprintf Page and this.

There’s something ironic about the new music title from Haymarket. It’s called Rip & Burn, primarily to appeal to the generation of music listeners who, um, you know.

The website itself is pretty awful. The forums appear not to work correctly: 14 posts in the General forum, of which you can only see one, if you’re lucky. And it’s not a forum, it’s a place for posting messages. A Newsblog that doesn’t know whether it’s a Blog or a Forum. And links that are the same colour as headlines.

But the funny part is that you can subscribe to it on-line. And get it posted to you. Yes. No download. No read on-line. Not even a measly PDF. Wouldn’t it be cool to have the magazine downloadable as iPod Notes?

Now let’s get onto the Reviews. Each review has a rating which is actually the number of tracks on an album that are worth burning. Not of course ripping. Since that would be naughty. If I don’t have the album, I can’t burn anyway. If I have the album, why should I burn tracks from it? In any case, there are no links to online music stores for the recommended tracks. What useless bunch invented this magazine?