Christopher Jenkins life of a software developer, musician and student.
Technology
Fusion Ticket and Me
May 6th
Not all of you may know my involvement in Fusion Ticket, but I am the original creator, lead dev and soon to be director.
Fusion Ticket has been a major part of my life the the past 3 years and the evolution of the product has been amazing.
Any one looking for a Open Source or Free Box Office / Ticketing solution should seriously consider checking it out.
I shall be doing some following Fusion Ticket Development posts on how we get round some tricky core issues.
The first one I shall cover is automatically generating a patch for the client to download straight from our server.
More Soon Sheep!
WP Android
Feb 3rd
So… I thought I would try blogging from my phone. Have to say very easy thouse WordPress guys have done a grand job.
If you have WordPress and android. Try android.WordPress.co.uk
jQuery life saver
Feb 27th
This is up there with the “Why the hell didnt I use this earlyer!”
jQuery, So what is it? A very handly small javascript libary that makes writing javascript so very easy.
win!
I have only been playing with it for the last few days, but so far I am very impressed 
so much so that we will be intergrating jQuery into fusionticket to start doing some really cool stuff
What can it do? Very quick ajax calls, css formatting, validation, all your normal javascript stuff but quicker, text transformation, box animation, calander plugins… the list goes on, really the sky is the limit, a bit of JS and server side scripting can create very cool web apps!
But of course you need JS enabled in your browser, What i love about jQuery though is the cross-browser and scalability, beacuse it does all the work when its enabled, if JS is off your website works just as it would normaly but without the JS functionality as JS does all the work after the page has its html.
Truly anyone that wants to use more JS start looking at jQuery and some other lib’s.
Broadband Speeds
Feb 10th
I am covering exsisting ground, battering on about the same point over and over. But I can allways keep finding stats about broadband to tell people who to avoid and who to go for.
People dont belive me when i say Virgin Media is rubbish.
Apart from samknows.com fantastic review of the broadband sector. speedtest.net can give you some very intresting stats about ISP’s.
I’m with BeUnlimited and I jumped on them as soon as they came into plymouth. You wonder why…? Well have a little look at this. I couldnt ask a better example than that could I? So all of Virgin Media’s “fiber optic” network gives them NO edge… sure they can push TV and phone down it but thats not the way media is going…(On a little note, VM Fiber Network barely extends BT’s, only a few places in london actualy have fiber down the road. 99% of virgins lastmile connections are copper just like everyone else. differnce being its just newer.)
Lets start simple. You connect to your ISP. All data goes through your ISP. So if your isp is based in london/madienhead then your traffic has to go halfway accross the country first, then to the destination then back through the isp to you.
Now thats fairly simple… so whats the problem. We think about this… You have 2.5Million subcribers (Virgin Last time i checked) Every single bit of data has to go through them first. AAARG… So for virgin to actualy provide the bandwidth they say. they would have to have bandwidth which exceeds 25Tbps. Now thats very exspensive. to offer everyone 10Mbps broadband for £16 a month is allmost impossible.
Thats not to say BT or anyone else is perfect.. just think twice about who you jump in bed with before you tie that 12 month contract.
But broadband quality is very linked to cost. Why is orange free BB rubbish? well because its free. Why is virgin slow? because is cheap. Why is BeBroadband/O2 or Aquiss,Titan actualy work and fast? becuase you pay for what you get.
Admitidly if all you do is check emails once a day and browse a few website then. Orange Free BB will be fine. If you acctualy want to use your internet connection then look for something else…
Hope you may be a little more informed please feel to ask any more questions.
