For Suarez to have been 'probably' guilty just isn't good enough for me. That's the equivelent of saying that Evra 'probably' didn't lie about it. Calling Evra a credible witness, and it seems that he and Suarez were the only witnesses to an event that happened between the two of them, is also ridiculous. And to just let it slide that Evra also used derogatory words towards Suarez (which he says he never heard) and threatening to assault him is also baffling.

I really wish things had been handled better by my beloved LFC and their statement announcing that they would not be challenging the decision was welcome if only to draw a line under the matter. As Oliver Kay suggested yesterday on Twitter, a more dignified, Liverpool, approach would have helped the situation so much more.

One thing I don't undestand is how the 8 match ban was justified for Suarez, but the FA were happy to appeal against a 3 game ban for Rooney which was the result of him physically assaulting a fellow professional, while playing for England. It's a disgrace and stinks of double standards, but then what's new?

All I'm looking forward to now is seeing Suarez back in action and the > 8 game ban for the obviously guilty, John Terry.

it's revealing that in the eyes of many fans the biggest movie event of this holiday season is the seven-minute preamble to a film that won't reach theaters for another six months. 

Says it all really. Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman and Michael Cane have done an exceptional job with the caped crusador. I cannot wait until next summer and sadly, I want to go and see Mission Impossible:Ghost Protocol just so that I can watch the prologue!

Once my camera had been written off by the company taking care of repairs, I decided to start the search for a new camera and one that really caught my eye, was the Sony Bloggie 3D.

At the time, I was planning on purchasing a 3D TV and the combination of HD and 3D video recording really made the Bloggie stand out. At less than £200 as well, the camera just became more and more attractive with each passing comparison.

The camera's HD offering is OK, certainly not the best, but considering the price tag and it's other features, it's not worth complaining about either.

The 3D capability is pretty good, you don't need glasses to view the video on the device and you have the ability to adjust the effect, bringing the two frames closer together or further apart where necassary.

I've been using the camera a lot more than my Toshiba already and have uploaded a few short clips to YouTube.

Samsung, as well as HTC, Motorola and almost every other tablet manufacturer has tried to release a variety of tablet sizes to help match Apples incredible output and sales. Hoping that demand catches up with devices on offer, rather than trying to fullfill demand. A dangerous game to play in what I would class as a, admittedly large, niche market.

Habit

Unfortunately, it seems that, especially in Samsung's case, releasing a number of different sizes has become a habit of what might be seen as their core business. The humble TV.

For decades now, television manufacturers have released any number of sets with almost identical features (if not identical), just in different sizes. Walk into any electrical or department store and you now see walls of the things. Gone are the CRT offerings, but now you have plasma, LCD and LED. 22, 32, 36, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 60 inch and beyond in terms of diagonal screen size. This is one crowded market space.

Just take a look at Samsung's current D range sets which come in 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 series configurations, each a slight step above each other, then the different types of technology powering within each series. The range is further widened with the multitude of screen sizes available. On their website, you have the choice of 148 televisions. 148. An insane number of devices to have on offer.

If this is your common approach to selling your devices, it is probably a natural step to take into new spaces. Their mobile and tablet offerings don't offer as many choices, but compared to Apple's solitary device, it looks like a lot.

Apple were not always the experts at just giving users one choice, take the iBook (5 different colour options) as an example. Or the iPod Mini (5 colour options) or iPod Nano (4th and 5th generations had 9 colour options). Admittedly, colour options are less serious than different screen resolutions, but then their iMac and MacBook ranges also give a multitude of options... the difference? Configurability. Whether that's space, screen size, RAM or the type of input devices, Apple makes their devices either personal or configurable. One thing their iPad competitiors do is give too much choice.

It's a bit of a hack, or probably better described as playing the game, but not something I would do with my personal account. Spreading news of my brand/projects is important though, so I am willing to just follow larger numbers of people. If any real followers want to really interact with those accounts, they're likely (guaranteed?) to @ the releavant account in their message.

There is another case, where you might want to follow all, or most, of the accounts that a friend follows. Whichever case you're interested in, below is a script you can run in your browser and it will click follow for every account it finds.

javascript:$('.follow-button').each(function() { $(this).click(); });

This could be adapted to work on Facebook or any other social network. Google+'s use of circles, rather than lists, makes this harder to implement, but maybe that could be turned into an extension?

To make the process even easier, just drag this link to the bookmark bar in a modern browser, then all you have to do is click on the bookmark to follow everyone you can see.

While quite a few people have commented on this, if you have a Google profile URL - mine is http://profiles.google.com/cchana - you can use that to send people directly to your Google+ profile.

Another option, and one I've adopted, is the use of your own domain to redirect users to wherever they need to go. By adding a '+' to the end of your domain - http://domain.com/+ - with the power of an apache redirect, you can take users straight to their Google+ page. I've found it far easier to find a few friends of mine who have that exact redirect in place than to go to Google+ and find them. Hopefully this is a temporary situation and Google open up vanity URLs for everyone.

If you'd like to do the same for yourself, feel free to use the code below:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
# Social Network redirects
Redirect 301 /+ http://profiles.google.com/cchana

Simply, the above just redirects you from http://domain.com/+ to my Google profile. This in turn, redirects to my Google+ profile. Not ideal, and not something new users seem to be able to do, but a good stop gap. If you don't have a friendly Google profile URL, you can always replace the URL with your Google+ profile.

I went to the extreme and replace the '+' with a '-', '*' or '^' takes you to Facebook, Flickr or Twitter respectively.

Much of the credit for this method of a friendly Google+ URL, must go to Boback Shahsafdari and Adrian Parr.

When Wave launched last year, I was excited at the prospect of finding a new way to communicate effectively with friends and colleagues, but a mix of factors made that impossible. Google stated that Wave is email, if email was invented today. A bold thing to say and it didn't pay off and Google Wave is probably Google's biggest failure. Google+ has a lot more promise, and I for one, would love to see it succeed.

One of the problems that plagued Wave was the invite process. They were far and few between, and while invites had served GMail so well, the concept is a little outdated now. If you're a company like Google, or Apple for that matter, it's probably too much to expect people to wait for an invitation to a service. Your reach is already vast and when you announce something like Wave and Google+, a lot of people want in instantly, if only to find out more about the product by actually using it.

Google+

Google launched Google+ a few days ago and to be honest, I completely lost it's launch in the +1 project, not really getting what the fuss was about. Once a few 'acquantences' started talking about Google+, I realised it was more than an extension of the +1 project.

Put simply, it can be viewed in one of two ways:

1. A social network that learns from all the mistakes of Buzz and Wave (maybe even replacing the former, if not both)
2. A real rival to Facebook

Either way, I couldn't be more excited about yet another social network. While LinkedIn serves a purpose and Twitter makes it easy to follow the information you want, Facebook has always been a bit of an odd one for me. I liked it's simplicity early on, but it's grown into a monster and I find a lot of friends rellying on it for way too much.

The difference between Google+ and Facebook is that Google+ has Google behind it. Facebook is Facebook and unless they branch out in to advertising, search, email and whatever else in a big way, it will be a site with a range of features. Google is now like an entire suite of software. A free suite, I might add.

Trust in Google?

For the most part, my email is handled by GMail, I use Picasa (and Flickr), YouTube and Google Docs. I look at website stats through Google Analytics and monetize through AdSense. I've even advertised through AdWords! I have an Android phone and there's a level of trust I have in Google to deliver me quality search results and an excellent user experience in all of it's products. This isn't always the case, but in 90% of my interactions with Google, I am a happy customer. If my interaction with Google means that they are able to serve me better ads, I don't have much of a problem with that. I've been using the internet long enough to be able to distinguish between ads and content 99.9% of the time and have enough self control not to be sucked in and buy things I don't need.

Google+ Android App

The Google+ Android app has already had one update since I downloaded it, but these incremental changes are fine by me if I'm getting features on to my device quicker. There are a few things I'd tweak in the app and the desktop version, like making the feed more relevant, rather than using as many options as possible to bring old posts to the top, but it's pretty good as is. Muting, being able to +1, comment and share are all easy and familiar and the Instant Upload feature is brilliant. Data intensive, for sure, but a great feature to have. How this effects Picasa storage remains to be seen, but maybe Google will be giving more away for free?

UI

Lastly, I'd like to talk about the small UI improvements. You've probably noticed them if you use Google at all. The new, dark, global navigation bar makes discovery of other parts of Google much easier. Switching between it's accounts is straightforward, and although it was a little crazy for a few days, it's working as expected, if not better.

The Google+ and +1 projects are tying in together nicely and I am enjoying making use of both, although going back to results to +1 something is a little counter intuitive and not something I'll be doing often. Tweeting results is more likely, but hey, Google know who I follow and improve my own search results with that information too!

I noticed yesterday, on my iPod touch, that there's a slightly different mobile UI too.

Previously you had a cluttered interface that showed Google services. Not very useful for a lot of users I felt. I certainly made use of this feature maybe 3 times in the last 3 years. Now, we have the above, a small list of links that are much harder to click on... however, if you swipe down on your device, you get the following:

Yes, I noticed this change while performing a vanity search, but it's a great application of gestures on a mobile device. The user gets more of what it is they really want but all the options are still there within easy reach.

More of the same from Google is more than welcome.

Circles

If you'd like to add me to one of your circles, or just follow me, check out my profile!

In recent years, I'd taken the time to catch up with the animated movie and took a real interest in the history of the franchise. While Michael Bay has stamped his trademark style all over the films, it still feels like the Transformers we know and love. Admittedly, part 2 a little less so, not that 2 didn't have it's moments, but this third installment really nails the action aspect for me.

3D

The 3D scenes are so well choreographed and seeing the 'blood' of a Decepticon wasn't something I was expecting. There's a scene where a Decepticon looses most of his foot and responds in a more human manor than in any of the other two films. The reaction is realistic and what the kind of attention to detail you want to see. When you see the 'blood', it's in slow motion and almost suspended in the air. A great effect and one they should (could?) have used more often.

The way the film ties in with real human history is an interesting take on how the Transformers have effected life on earth. The trailer certainly got me salivating at the prospect of tieing in the moon landings with the arival of the Transformers.

Megan Fox?

As you'd expect, some of the story is predictable or a little unrealistic, but completely forgivable. Megan Fox's replacement, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, is certainly a better actress, but I don't think she fit the film as well... a pretty minor criticism of an otherwise great casting. Speaking of which, there are some great cameos by Ken Jeong, of The Hangover fame, and John Malkovich.

The Autobots are pretty much as you were, with a couple of new arrivals, which include a beautiful Ferrari 458. The Mercedes-Benz SLS55 AMG is also one hell of a sexy machine and Bumblebee hasn't lost any of his alter-ego's sex appeal either!

Chicago

Without giving away too much and turning this into a spoiler, I just wanted to give some attention to large scene that took place in Chicago. My god, they FUCK CHICAGO UP!

In the first film, parts of the film took place in what was apparently LA and Las Vegas, but really, they could have been anywhere. The mass scale destruction of Chicago and it's landmarks just make it that much more realistic and impressive. Again, so much attention to detail.

Although there's unlikely to be a fourth, it definitely takes the franchise out on a high. I thoroughly enjoyed the 3D aspect of the film, admittedly, there were a few scenes where it was pretty unnoticeable but it didn't take anything away from the film and if anything, just added another dimension to it.

If you're a Transformers fan, see it. Id give it a generous 4.5/5 and a 5 if they'd edited out the first hour!

The use for Google Maps hit me in a moment of real inspiration. Time to improve error handling for receeve.it!

404

If you're unlucky enough to come across a 404 page because of the site's migration from one service to another, you'll now be greated with a much more appealing 404 page than anything I've built before.

The 404 and error pages now have Google Maps as a background with an info window on top. Feel free to take a look at the source of the page, it's really easy to do!

Although the layout and feel are very different to the rest of the site, I'm hoping it serves it's purpose a lot better. Making this change also lets me see how the branding works in another situation and track who's ending up where (and more importantly), why they are where they shouldn't be!

Other errors

Other error pages get the same treatment, but those should be even less common and actually serve the same purpose as the 404s. If anything, it's just nice to be able to do something different and fun rather than making the sitation a bit too serious for users of receeve.it

After a bit of a fuck up on my part, I re-built the site and re-launched. Few front end tweaks but a complete overhaul of the back end system. The site had a small number of users but I couldn't quite figure out the best way to promote the site. By the second launch, the number of competitiors for this service has grown and Amazon's own wishlist service was doing all of that and more. The turning point for registrations was having receeve.it accepted as a part of AddThis. A great achievement and there was a lot more traffic finding it's way over to receeve.it

Unfortunately, the day of acceptance to AddThis coincided with a big event in my personal life that stopped any real development for over a month. I managed to make a few minor tweaks but this magazine, Nike+PHP and a currency conversion site I had an idea for took over the development time I had.

This mag launched with a few friends as contributors, Nike+PHP matured to v2 and the currency site, launched obscurly in April/May 2010 got some attention.

The currencty site already did it's job well enough, but I never quite had the end goal in sight. Earlier this year, I sat down with Photoshop and trashed out a decent design. The logo/brand never felt the best, but I thought the UI was a good effort and moved on with what I had.

QCon got in the way, but beacause of the amount of time I spent learning about HTML5, the currency site benefited from it.

In March, I decided to cut my losses with receeve.it as it is. I informed AddThis, who kindly responded and removed receeve.it from their list of services and I posted a closure notice on the website. The end of March arrived and I closed registrations and at the end of April, the site closed down briefly.

Re-launch

As part of the re-launch, I turned put the receeve.it name to the currency site.

The site is now a one page app, with a simple three step process.

Enter the amount of GBPs that you'd like to convert, choose the currency you'd like to convert to and hit go!

If you have JavaScript enabled, you'll see your results below and if not, you'll be redirected to the appropriate page. Because it's a HTML5 app, you'll see the URL changing regardless and back and forward actions have been accounted for in this situation. You can also share any URL from the site, which will hopefully make it more useful.

I hope to add more retailers and hopefully get the site to a good place where it's running itself. It's pretty much doing that now, but could do with a few tweaks, which I'll apply as I find the time.

If you're off on holiday soon, convert your currency on receeve.it and you could save a few pounds, or, more appropriately, gain a few dollars!