I read today over on Engadget that InstantAction announced their new technology for streaming games to any web browser and I feel sickened.

For me, this is the third time in my life that I have created a technology, showed it to companies and people,and had them be disinterested in it. It really is disheartening at times.

The first time was in 1990, developing technology for the creation of fruit machines for the European market, reducing the development time from over three months (and that was fast) to less than two weeks, with less testing and Q/A. Nobody was interested. I showed it to a number of companies. Not a single nibble.

The second time was back in 1994/1995 when demonstrating a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, the original was coded in C, which was later re-written in Java, which at that time was utterly brand new and still in Beta, because I wanted the system to be instantly cross-platform. I remember standing in a nightclub in Hollywood around 1995, drunk off my arse, explaining the technology to the lead guitarist of Aerosmith. That technology formed the basis of what later became many of the peer-to-peer technologies today.

In the middle of 2007 I demonstrated a game streaming technology, oddly enough called “GameStream” that I had created, to Activision, that streamed the game, at that time Shrek the Third, to your local machine. It broke the game up in to chunks, analysing the file access pattern of the game to get the pieces used first to you as quickly as possible. The software ran in any web browser that had Java installed, which is about 95% of every web browser out there. In 2008 I stood in the THQ offices and the Take-Two Offices and demonstrated Crysis streamned over my 3G cellphone in real-time. Click the link in the browser, and within 3 minutes, the Crysis game starts up. Instant dismissal of the technology and the concept of streaming games to player’s computers in real-time.

In 2008 I also showed the technology to a major MMORPG publisher (mentioning no names *cough* rhymes with Wizard *cough*) and I got the impression I was speaking an alien language. “Why would we want to stream the game to them when we can just have them buy a retail box?” was the response from the Executive Producer.

I even talked to my company attorney about patenting this technology, but because we felt it was so obvious, and because nobody showed the slightest bit of interest, we let it fall by the wayside, moving on to other projects to work on.

So frustrating.

If any company out there feels like taking a look at this technology, feel free to drop me a line. I’ve still got the technology demo, which works on 95% of all web browsers on all desktops, still on my laptop. Crysis streamed over a cellphone, to your local machine? Fucking brilliant idea!

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I purchased a Barnes & Noble Nook on Tuesday evening and so far my user experience of the device and the website has been thoroughly underwhelming to say the least.

Where do I start? Okay, let’s begin with the device itself. It feels cheap and plastic and even though the screen is a smidgeon larger than the one on my SONY PRS-505 e-book reader it actually appears smaller due to the design of the bezel.

Currently I have Oscar Wilde’s drug addled, half-lidded caricature staring back at me from the screen whilst it sits in standby mode. This is most certainly a feature I hope I can switch off – I remember seeing a related option under the configuration menu so I will be investigating that very soon.

Update: No way to switch off the feature completely, I can have “nature” or “authors” or “city scapes” but not actually just blank the screen. A minor annoyance but frankly I’d really like the option to switch off the background completely.

The packaging was utterly dreadful. It seems that Barnes & Noble went for a “unique user experience” but when I describe it as worse than the Windows Vista packaging you will hopefully understand what I mean. I have never in my life ever purchased a product that gave me pause for thought to actually consider using Google to locate instructions on how to get the stupid fucking device out of the box it came in. I cannot imagine an elderly Grandmother ever figuring out how to extract the e-book reader from the box. I swear I came close to snapping the device in half trying to remove the plastic backing mount from it.

God forbid that you should buy one of these devices for a journey, only to open the device up at the airport ready for some hot reading action to realise you need a computer, with internet connection, to actually be able to use it for what it was meant for, i.e. reading books. Why Barnes & Noble couldn’t have let you register for a B&N account directly on the device, without the need for a computer leaves me scratching my head.

As far as the Barnes & Noble website goes, I never thought I would encounter a more poorly implemented bookstore web application than the one that SONY has for their devices but Barnes & Nobles, I congratulate on utterly failing to be better than Borders/SONY bookstore.

Barnes & Noble’s website experience is sloooowww. I mean, really slow. Like, 56K modem slow. I’ve tried using it on a number of different computers, including my utter beast of a workstation, and various high-speed internet connections in different cities at different times and it just crawls. This isn’t a case of the website undergoing maintenance, this is just a slow, slow, slow website that needs some serious infrastructure work.

The user interface experience on the website is dreadful, requiring so many clicks to actually browse for and purchase a book that your impulse purchases will have utterly evaporated long before you ever click “download.”

The B&N bookstore website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox, many features are broken due to poor coding of CSS, including the search box. I suspect that it is geeks that are primarily buying the Nook and if that is the case, then they are most likely running Firefox or Safari, surely you should ensure your website actually works for the people who are buying your product?

Your personal book library on the website is managed through a Flash application which is rather poorly implemented. It frequently crashes, runs sluggishly slow, animates various pop-ups for no particular reason, forces you to navigate your library in a single small window – God forbid you should actually have, you know, a few hundred e-books – fails to remember options you have set such as zoom level, sort order, or many other settings. Again, because the website is so slow, the Flash application responds with appropriate sluggishness.

I’ve spent only a few hours with the device, and I am currently considering returning it to the bookstore where I purchased it and asking for a refund. It really is a sad little device with a poor end-user experience. I really was hoping for a better user experience than my SONY PRS-505 but unfortunately, this isn’t it.

I really wanted to like this device. I really wanted to replace my PRS-505, but I am really disappointed in the whole end-to-end user experience, from the packaging, to the device, to the website. Because of these problems it really colours my thoughts and final judgement of what the device is for: reading books. Yes, it lets me do that just fine, but the rest of the experience is just so poor that I would rather stick with the devil I know than use a new device that has questionable longevity and an even more questionable user-experience.

Maybe in a few years I will take another look at the Barnes & Noble Nook, but I will be returning the device to the store just a few days after purchase because it is plainly and simply a dreadful thing to inflict on anyone who loves reading books.

For now I will be sticking with the SONY PRS-505 and Calibre software until either the SONY Daily Edition or the Kindle DX prove themselves viable alternatives.

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After having ordered and paid for a simple two-year web hosting plan from MidPhase.com for this website back in October of 2009 I finally have gotten around to actually moving the code and database across. For the past five years this website has been hosted with PHPWebHosting.com who have done an amazing job of keeping my collection of websites up and running.

The requirements of some of my other websites have grown and that means that they have been moved off to MidPhase.com that provide different features, such as Windows and dedicated servers and virtual servers, that I felt it was time to move the last remaining website, my personal one, over to MidPhase.com too.

If you are in the market for a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web hosting company, I would certainly recommend PHPWebHosting now and in the future. It would be the obvious choice. Five years. Never had a significant problem with the web hosting, the server or the company.

I’ve been hosting other websites with MidPhase for the past year and so far have been very happy with the service I’ve received. I’ve only had to contact tech support once, and the issue was resolved in under 20 minutes.

The problem, if you are curious, was to do with the fact I was trying to sign up a new hosting account with user information I had already used on a pre-existing account. This somehow confused the account setup application that would indicate that the account was ready to go, but wouldn’t let me login. Tech support were incredibly helpful, via the in-browser chat interface, and the matter was easily resolved once the tech had looked in to it.

Again, if you are looking for two reliable, and really decently priced web hosting companies, PHPWebHosting.com and MidPhase.com. I cannot recommend them enough.

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