Got a survey through the post from Which, a consumer mgazine and I actually filled it in.

It asked whether I had various electrical appliances and whether I had had any problems with them. If so then it gave you a list of possible problems for you to choose from. The appliances were widescreen TV’s, DVD players/recorders, cable and satellite boxes, MP3 players, MP4 players, mobile phones, DAB radios, digital still and movie cameras and a whole load of similar stuff but no PC’s. Depressingly I had had problems with most of the appliances, though most were not terminal, and their list of possible problems always included the issue I’d had. All of these appliances were digital and it seems that Which might be about to put the boot into digital electronics. Not a moment too soon either.

One of my favorite Vista messages I get when an application fails and Vista pops up with ‘Windows is checking for a solution to the problem’ and it never has.

I’ve been playing Wii tennis since Christamas and it’s OK though when your experience level gets above 1700 some inconsistencies do appear from time to time. Today I was at experience level 2000, and it was a hard work getting there. I played a best of 3 games match and won and got 4 additoinal experience points. The next match I lost and lost 60 experience points. My third match I won but lost 20 points. All matches were close and were 2 games to 1 to the winner. Sounds buggy to me….

What’s all this fuss about deleting yourself from Facebook and getting upset coz your tracks are still left on there. Of course your tracks are on there. If you’ve had a conversation with someone or they’ve copied some of your photos what do these people expect, for all this activity to be removed if the owning person removes themselves from FB. Those actions have been done and are part of history.

If someone has a bank account and decides to close it do they expect all of his records and money transactions to be removed. Ferggeddabowdit. Those money movements have been made and audited and can’t just be made to disappear. I’ve got a feeling some people have behaved inappropriately on Facebook and are embarrassed by their digital detritus and want to lose it.

A couple of months ago I raised a bug on some empty fields with IBM’s Datamirror software. The bug didn’t go far, just hung around for a few months while all and sundry hoped it would slope off of it’s own accord, or at least do the honorable thing and put a bullet between its eyes. Eventually someone kicked up some mess and sent it to IBM to see what they had to say about it.

Today someone told me there was a fix due from IBM. I asked whether it was a known bug and it wasn’t. Nobody that had ever used Datamirror had ever encountered it or if they had weren’t confident at aiming said bug at big blue. So my bug was fixed by some fresh IBM code and may even be lobbed out the door to all other Datamirror users Worldwide. That might do my reputation at work some good (Why does it need it? Ed).

Quote of the day ‘The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair’ Douglas Adams

I’ve been playing around with Twitter in the last couple of days since I read in the paper that it is the latest in a long line of the ‘latest great thing’. I’ve had a Twitter account for about a year but I never really got it. Not sure if I do now, but we’ll press on.

All Twitter is, to me anyway, is your current Facebook status, with absolutely nothing else cluttering up the client which makes it a bit of not much when run on a PC with a large screen and a couple of pathetic messages hiding away on a corner of the screen. On the iPhone it looks a lot better. Of course on FB I only update the status once a day or even once a week. With Twitter you’re supposed to twitter away about anything. What I do is just update when I have something to say, like some software failing miserably or even some success with software.

I’ve also been using an iPhone app called Ziibii which sort of converges Facebook and Twitter as well as Flickr, Youtube and RSS feeds and displays the result as story headlines flowing along a river. No kidding. Anyway it works quite well. I’ve used the FB, Twitter and Flickr accounts and added a couple of RSS feeds and it looks good.

The problem with this app like all non-Apple written apps is that it can only be run as a foreground task. When it is run then you get updates to all of the accounts or feeds. Typical pull stuff. What would be better, and I’m sure it’s due from Apple, is the ability for the apps to have data pushed to them and for the app to have the ability to run some code in the background to display a number against the apps icon showing the total number of items downloaded via a data push, then the iPhone user would be aware of new data having arrived via a number displayed against the apps icons to denote the number of accounts or feeds that have been updated. This functionality is currently enabled with the iPhones voicemail, email and SMS.

Of course if push was let loose and all of my relevant apps – Facebook, Byline, Brightkite, football apps, currency apps, eBay, Joost, Newsdesk, Netnewswire, Linkedin and lord knows what else – were changed to pick up the pushed data my iPhone would look like a Christmas tree blinking away like billy-o. And the battery wouldn’t last long either.