Sorry to all Bean Counter APPLEBOX hotspot surfers. I’ve had to close off our wireless network as we now have only 500 meg left for our remaining 2 days of May trading. 19.5 of our 20 Gig has been sucked down via our hotspot in a month, so sorry, but we need the connectivity more than you!

Our May newsletter went out at 7.15am this morning, so all you early birds had something to read whilst having your first coffee for the day. If you want this newsletter delivered to your inbox directly - sign up with us! You don’t have to rent .. just whack in a username, password, email address and you’re on the list.

Anyone notice our bold advertising campaign we’ve been running about once a month in the Northcote Leader? Well here’s the easiest Where’s Wally you’ll ever get. It’s somewhere on the front page

….blog entry. Feel like I should be doing some sort of penance. I have to say a little disappointed with Kevin Rudd on ABC’s fantastic initiative Q&A last night.…. but I shouldn’t bring politics into APPLEBOX or I’m just asking for it. OH YEAH and I shouldn’t be promoting free to air tv shows either!!! (I can feel the thwack of Simon’s hand on the back of my head as I type this).

Just wanted to check in, make sure those of you I haven’t seen in a long time still know I am around. Simon and I have been at the train stations, early in the mornings handing out free vouchers. Had some uptake from them and it was good to get out there and tell the punters about ourselves. Lots in the melting pot at the moment, some exciting stuff. Andrew has turned out to be a winner, all over it, in fact pulling Simon and I up on things every now and then! Love it. Say hi and introduce yourself to him if you haven’t met our new member. Lots going on with the Love Living Local campaign… and we do.

Oh and another Aussie has made a splash internationally today. The Redbank winemaker Witchmount took out the prize for best Shiraz in the world!

In the States, Netflix has just launched a streaming set top box (it’s the black one on the left below). It’s got some limitations .. it so far only gives standard def output, stereo sound, and largely back catalogue with few new releases, but it’s killer feature is it’s price point: $100US (which is an unbelievable $104AU at the moment), and the movies streamed are FREE. That is, free if you’re already subscribing to the Netflix mail-order service. This must be costing Netflix a motza.

I like the form factor .. it’s fanless (quiet), small and is wireless. This is the sort of device that will get people giving it a shot. The Apple TV is the other contender, and whilst it’s form factor is typically a generation ahead, it costs twice as much and you still pay to rent movies (but you get a better selection of new releases). As for putting a PC under your TV .. only for the die-hards me thinks.

At this point I don’t think lack of new releases is a problem for Netflix, as close to half our earnings is from back catalogue .. there are so many good movies out there, the knack is to give people an easy way to find them.

So Video Ezy .. think hard and long about your own STB strategy, if you can’t hit the sub $200 price point don’t even bother, and you’ll have bigger fish in the market in the not-too-distant future.

Check it out.

Did my first build tonight .. first time I’ve touched some code in probably 5 months. We’re cooking up some exciting things for the future. So, with UML model open and Eclipse fired up, time to hit some long standing bugs and model in at least one killer feature. Stay tuned.

Sorta nice to take time out from printing and handing out flyers. Andrew and Mara are working hard in the store. Sarah’s broken the back of our accounting back log (hey .. things slip you know) and is exploring some great biz dev leads. Membership continues to build .. full steam ahead.

SOUI describes a development approach that fully separates UI and backend, whereby the UI is downloaded at application startup and then makes independent service calls to the backend. It completely deconstructs server assisted MVC (which is 99% of web development today) and repositions the View and Controller in the UI with the Model staying server side.

This is what we do at APPLEBOX. As a JavaScript nutter I was using the term Serverless AJAX, but soon discovered SOUI and SOFEA where becoming de rigueur terms amongst the server side noddies of the Java World.

SOUI sounds great to me! So I whacked it in my google alerts to track it’s evolution, and hey-presto .. it’s just popped up in this ppt presentation at the 2008 Microsoft Architect Insight Conference on “The Future of IT”. Looks like the presenter, Michael Barker has a background in J2EE .. but good to see he’s out there trying to educate the Microsofties.

I think SOUI is a brilliant way to develop rich web apps like APPLEBOX, but I think the push for adoption has got to come from the JavaScript frameworks out there .. prototype/dojo/yui/ext.js and so on. Appcelerant looks interesting (although I don’t know what’s up with their http://apptunes.appspot.com/ demo as it continually hangs firefox & safari on OS X) but the afore mentioned frameworks embody a massive number of web developers out there who are ready to jump on the next big thing. If SOUI is to catch on, it’s gotta be driven by these guys.

Just never disappoints. Went the mushroom and salami/prawn and dang, it was good. You should check it out. I just went searching for a link and found this at docoloco. I notice Palomino covered as well. It’s great to see this sort of local recommendation engine .. but I don’t really get the speech bubbles coming up from the recommender. Lots of space wasted and I’m scrolling continually to get an overview of 12 one liners. But I like it nevertheless!

Just to round off my recommendations .. Cafe Bedda is an absolute fave .. check it out.

Today Andrew noticed our in-store systems going reeeeally slow. I didn’t believe they were that slow until I popped in to check it out and yep .. the system was crawling .. except it wasn’t our system, it was our network connection. Turns out someone was downloading music and was hogging all our bandwidth. Dang!

I checked our Optus account. We’re on a 12gig/month limit and were now at 10gig used after only 6 days! Over the last 6 months, we’ve never used our full quota for the whole month .. but was now about to hit it after only 6 days. Hmmmm. I noticed someone had just finished downloading some music .. so thought I’d wander around and try and spot them. Out the front. Scope 1: person is over the road on a park bench, laptop on lap. Scope 2: quick wander through Bean Counter and not a laptop in site! Must be the park bench, head back out and she’s gone (and network performance restored).

Gotta say we love to provide our network as a free service .. but we aren’t a music/movie/file share download hotspot. I’d hate to have to install network software to time connections and manage consumption. Worse still .. charge for access or turn public access off. We like it that you can browse for free whilst having a coffee. But for those downloading the proverbial shit load - moderation please!