Raffle.it is a fairly new reverse-auction style 'raffle' site. What do I mean by reverse-auction raffle? Well, rather than bidding on an item you buy a ticket, and rather than just buying a random ticket you pick a number. The winner is the lowest numbered unique ticket, meaning if someone else pick's the same number ticket as you, you're not going to win.

When you understand the rules you start to ponder about human psychology, will people pick number 1, or will they all be scared off by the fact that it's so obvious, and other such thoughts. When you've thought about that for long enough you end up deciding what your 'system' is going to be. I decided that for small raffles (sub 150ish numbers/tickets) the winning number would most probably be less than 10, medium sized raffles (around 300) less than 20.

So how did I win a FREE Nintendo DS Lite? Well, Nokia was launching it's music download service (if I remember correctly) and they created a free-to-enter raffle to win an N81 with some free music downloads. Of course I entered (10 free tickets per person) and started to look around the site a bit where I found another free-to-enter raffle for a Nintendo DS Lite, which of course since you know the outcome, I entered, choosing number 4 along with a couple of others that I was immediately told weren't unique.

After just over a month the raffle ended and I was surprised to receive the winner confirmation and to now be immortalised on their site:

After exchanging a couple of emails to Pascal I'm now the proud owner of a Nintendo DS Lite

Videos from the Agile 2008 conference are now becoming available over at InfoQ. There are several good talks there, including a very interesting talk by Henrik Kniberg of Crisp titled '10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP', explaining where many Scrum implementations fall down and reassures that even if there are 'problems' encountered during the adoption process that this is all normal and should be used to learn from and improve.

I'll be using a number of sites to track my location and post media to, so keep an eye out:

• My Jaiku and Carol's Jaiku - Live trip discussion
• Qik - Live video from my mobile
• My Nokia Sports Tracker and also Carol's - Live location tracker
• Flickr and My Share on Ovi and Carol's Share on Ovi- Photos posted from my phone and laptop

Afterwards some videos will most probably be posted over on my Vimeo page too.

For ease I've embedded some of the main content below:

The latest version of my Mobile Barcoder Firefox Extension has now passed verification and is compatible with Firefox 3. New features and changes include:

• Link barcode - Right click on a link, and directly in the context menu you can display a barcode for that link. This will be especially useful for people who have been wanting to create links for application downloads on sites which don't display them already.
• Text selection barcode - Right click on a text selection and just like with links, you can display a barcode for that text directly in the context menu. Not quite as useful
• Now using Nokia Mobile Codes generator - Since the barcode generator is server-side, this should help ease the problems that have been experienced by users when my personal server goes down, and should also increase the speed of generation. Thanks Marku and team at the Nokia

I'm naturally quite a shy/quiet person, but have always felt pretty comfortable expressing myself online. What happens though, when you have multiple social circles which don't overlap? I've never really been into huge social circles, I've been more into small, more involved groups, so I'm not experienced with juggling between them.

For me at least it seems that to a greater extent my online life is left behind slightly in favour of my 'real life', and that didn't bother me too much (after all, it's real life) until I started meeting up with the people I socialise with online, and it gets gradually trickier to deal with the more I meet those people as it means also becoming more involved in the online communities upon which we originally met.

My offline friends, although geeky, don't understand the attraction of the (I hate the term!) 'web2.0' lifestyle. I've only managed to get 2 people I know offline to sign-up to Jaiku, and neither of those ever actually use it. Add to that most of my offline friend's aversion to having photos/videos taken of them, and even greater aversion to having those photos put online (although I tend to mark those as private). These kind of things culminate in a widening of the divide between groups.

Because of the lack of online interactivity (apart from Instant Messenger) of my offline friends, I find getting fully immersed in the latest online 'thing' hard at times and occasionally get left behind/give up. The kind of things I'm talking about are Jaiku and Seesmic, and to a lesser extent, even Flickr and Upcoming.org type services. My offline friends are Facebook users, and apart from having my own content presented through Facebook 'apps' they don't really see the things I upload. What's also a little spooky is that my parents will probably find this post quicker than my offline friends.

How do you explain to your friends services like Jaiku and Seesmic? I don't mean the technology that makes it happen, I mean the sociological 'why would you want to do that?' questions.

I've been interested in making some applications for S60 devices (My N95) for a while now, but never got round to having a thorough go at it. My main problem has been that I download SDKs and IDEs for (in both C++ and Java) and it always takes me ages to figure out how to compile the 'Hello World' examples, even from following the video tutorials.

I have experience with scripted languages like PHP and Ruby on Rails, and partial experience of Java, but very little knowledge of C++, so I think I may be in a good position to show a real beginner's experience.

I'm aiming my podcast (both audio and video) at people wanting to get into the world of S60 but currently only have experience of desktop programming. I may not do everything perfectly correctly, but I'll be learning at the same time, so please correct me in the comments.

I will begin by assessing the different available languages, the merits of each and possibly a 'Hello World' app in each, then I will settle down with my chosen language and go more in depth.

Release Schedule and Guests

I will be doing this in my spare time, so please forgive the very irregular release schedule.

If you are an expert on S60 programming (whether that's C++, Java, Python or some other language) please get in touch, I'd really like to have some people on my show to spread knowledge.

I got into work and noticed a small square box sitting in reception. I hoped it might be for me, and when I checked the UPS tracking found out that it was. The result being that I'm at work, sitting in front of a number or Windows/Linux machines, wishing I was working from home and installing Leopard!

Having just read the Lifehacker story about the whyfirefoxisbanned site (no, I'm not going to link to it), I thought I'd share a very quick opinion on the subject.

As some may have seen (if you use IE), I show a warning recommending Firefox to IE users who visit my site. This isn't because there's something really nasty in IE, only that it doesn't display my standards compliant page properly (mainly because of the lack of PNG transparency).

The site against Firefox complains that people are using adBlock to stop adverts from being displayed. Although this is true (I even use adBlock myself), I wouldn't say this warranted backlash against the browser. With Firefox getting more market-share they are cutting out a growing amount of visitors.

When not blocking ads

When I visit a site with advertising all over the page - a block in the middle of the article, lots at the top and bottom, and especially intellitxt type ads - I leave immediately... It doesn't matter if the content was something I was looking for, if I am presented with extremely intrusive adverts I go somewhere else. The site usually gets put on my 'avoid' list too.

When blocking ads

When I visit a site that doesn't have intrusive adverts - maybe a banner at the top, or one under the navigation bar at the side - and I visit often (like Lifehacker and Digg), I will put a rule in adBlock to allow the ads on those sites.

You may ask "why would I do that when you won't click on them?", but the fact is, if they're relevant ads, then I might. Granted, I'm not in the habit of clicking on every advert I see for a cool gadget, but if something really catches my eye with a good offer for something I'm looking for, I'll at least go and have a look.

What should they do instead?

2 simple steps:

1. Read M. David Peterson's post on O'Reilly's blog and try and understand why it's not in anyone's interest to block any type of user.
2. Create good content with non-intrusive advertising. The fact that you take some time in making sure your visitors are treated to a nice, comfortable visit to your site will make them like you and visit again and again.

There are a few modifications that I generally do to a site to make it more compatible with mobile devices. I do this using the CSS 'handheld' media type.

Most mobile browsers now recognise the 'handheld' CSS media type, and the media type should be ignored by normal desktop browsers. It does mean that the mobile will still download the complete page though, and not a special 'optimised' version of the page.

The things I do for my 'mobile versions' of sites are:

• Remove (make invisible) any unnecessary content (sidebars, most adverts and decorative images).
• Following on from that, make the content one column - mobile devices aren't wide enough for multi-column layouts.
• Restyle the navigation bar, it's probably horizontal at the moment and we want to make it vertical to fit better on the device.
• Remove any fixed width definitions from the main body. Mobile browsers sometimes do this resizing though.
• Move desktop-only styles to a 'screen' media type CSS.

As an example, I'll use Darla Mack's homepage.

Making things disappear

For simplicity, add class="hideonmobile" to the elements of the page that you want to hide. You can then use the following small piece of CSS:

@handheld
{
.hideonmobile
{
visibility: hidden;
}
}

A lot of your page may already have enough identifiers though, so you can also add those identifiers to the CSS you use, rather than adding the extra class all over your pages:

@handheld
{
#chromemenu div, /* This is the Google search box */
.hideonmobile
{
visibility: hidden;
}
}

Transform the navigation

You should have already seen the recommendations by W3C and several other web design sites that navigation should go in a list, and certainly not a table. If you've done this, you can modify the layout of the list using the '!important' rule.

#chromemenu li {
list-style: none !important;
margin: 0px !important;
}

You should also move the standard version of the navigation CSS into another CSS file and link it to the 'screen' media type. This will reduce the risk of confusion between which style should be used.

The same method can be applied to the widths of the content. What you want to do is either move the width definitions for the standard version into the 'screen' CSS or add an !important rule to the mobile CSS to change it to 100%.

Attach the new CSS to the page

Because of the use of @handheld we can attach this CSS to the page the same way you would any other CSS, but it is advisable to also specify the media type in the XHTML anyway, which will save the device/desktop from attempting to download the other's CSS:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css">

You might also want to use this same stylesheet for when people print your pages, in which case you can also attach it to the 'print' media type:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld, print" href="handheld.css">

Need more information?

This is a brief overview of the process. If you need more information or have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I'll endeavour to update this page with more information.

Writing my last blog posts got me thinking about Nokia Sensor again. The site shows that it's still available for a few old S60 devices, but it isn't available for S60 3rd Edition at all.

I loved Nokia Sensor when it was new... I loved the concept of creating another level of socialising on top of a normal night in the pub. I've tried many applications in the past, most who's names completely escape me, but they were all completely separate from each other, creating several very minor networks around the world, rather than one larger system.

Is the concept still valid?

At least in the UK, people are always told that bluetooth is a terrible security risk and should always be turned off when not in use, although you do see some people in the pub with bluetooth names like 'chat to me' and 'single and cute'. If you try to send a message/picture to the person it very rarely goes through, either because it's asking 'do you want to accept this message...' or because the device they have just doesn't want to accept it anyway.

I would love Nokia and other social mobile applications (eg. Jaiku) to put some more time into developing a location-based (bluetooth) communication mechanisms, even if the messages themselves aren't sent using bluetooth. I have some ideas of my own that I might put down on paper sometime... Is anyone up for developing a J2ME/S60 app (open source, of course)?