Recently blinkbox pushed a new release of the site onto the live environment which adds a number of quite cool features that we have been working on over the last few months. As the UI lead engineer I’m quite excited by these so I thought I would share.

Perhaps my favourite change is that now any of the free movies or TV icons have a ‘Free’ overlay applied to them automatically. This is great at calling out how much free content we have, which is actually quite a lot now (loving the snowboarding titles we have)! We also are using the same system for showing off trailers, in case you notice the similarity. Additionally for trailer titles we also show the date they are to be released in the cinemas, or if they are currently showing, underneath the player (for example Avatar).

Free titles shown with a blue overlay

For those wanting more than free content we have a number of improvements for purchasing our premium content. Firstly the browse catalogue now supports price filters, which is quite handy for finding cheap flicks. Secondly we now have box sets and bundles – so you can buy a whole TV season or a movie bundle (Godfather Trilogy perhaps?). And lastly we are now securely storing credit card details for repeat purchases, much like Amazon. Using this I think you can go from browsing to watching in under a minute if the title is available for streaming – which is much quicker than trekking to the local rental store.

We have also updated the Games area and added a new video jigsaw. This is good fun on the easy a medium skills, although the hard setting can take a little while – you’ve been warned. All the current competitions are now listed on a dedicated competition page for all the competition junkies.

Last but by no means least is the member referral system – pass on your invite code after a purchase and you’ll get £1, while your mates will get £5 credit each! That is more than enough for even the latest rentals. I think this is a great deal for everyone so get it while it’s hot.

blinkbox, games, rental Hide

Recently I have been investigating the web capabilities of the Playstation 3 NetFront browser, and for the most part it works as expected. There are a few caveats however, and in my case this was enough to prevent the Prototype JavaScript library from loading. So far I have discovered the following issues:

• Ajax works, however it will only do a GET request – POST returns immediately with no data supplied.
• General browser model most closely follows Internet Explorer, however the accessors for the CSS opacity is like other browsers (Mozilla).
• Currently can’t read the opacity, gives a value of 1.0 always.
• Can’t fire custom events as the method for creating an event does not work (document.createEventObject).
• Since there are no custom events some functions do not work, such as Prototype’s document.observe('dom:loaded').

The event firing issue is a bit of a nasty one if you rely on custom event for updating page elements. To work around Prototype’s dom:loaded issue I have added a new method: Event.domLoaded(), that takes a function and stores it in an array. Once the DOM is ready the array is iterated through and each function is called. I have also enhanced the method to call the function parameter if the DOM has already been marked as ready, thereby preventing race conditions caused by a delayed function call. In other words it makes it safe to register a function to be called as soon as possible, regardless of the present state of the page.

I have uploaded an updated version of Prototype with the fixes applied – download here. Let me know if there are any issues.

Javascript, Playstation 3 Hide

I received a call from my uncle Bruce 2 days ago – after saying hello I was greeted a friendly yet frantic “I’m in big trouble Brad, my computer has been hacked!”. After getting most of the details of what happened and realising that it was quite unlikely any bank details or other highly confidential details were compromised I arranged to leave work early and see what we could do.

While I spend a considerably amount of my time at work making sure our website is secure I had yet to personally have experienced the wrath of an online scammer. I was intrigued to say the least. Once I arrived we scoped out the problem – one of my uncle’s email accounts had been compromised when he inadvertently tricked into giving away his password. After reviewing the situation it was quite a simple mistake to make, as they had impersonated his email provider in a similar nature to previous contact he had regarding setting his BlackBerry.

It was quite interesting to see how the scammers work. They seemed to have a limited interest in trying to get money out of my uncle directly; they were more interested in trying to impersonate him. By using a line similar to: “I’m stuck in Africa at an art fair with no money, please can you send me £500 so I can get back” they actually managed to get about 3-4 responses from friends offering to help. I’m fairly sure they will also sell entire contact list to spammers for a reasonable fee.

After trying some common techniques for re-enabling access to his account we hit a wall. The scammers had changed all the details required to change an account, such as the alternate email address and secret question. Lucky for Bruce he had his email account linked to his BlackBerry. This they key we needed: by sending a password reset email back to the same address we were able to forward the email to another temporary email address and then follow the usual password reset steps. I say we used a temporary email as there was a chance that this wasn’t going to work, hence we didn’t want the scammer to be aware of another email address, should he check the sent items.

During the password reset process we were asked to provide country information. The scammer would have been asked the same question and it would appear that this is checked against a geo-ip database, hence they were forced to put in a reasonable location of Senegal. They may have been in a surrounding country and were exploiting the errors in the geo-ip database, however the general region seems correct based on the information provided when asking for money.

So this makes me ask the question – why can’t I lock my email account such that it is only accessible from certain regions. Banks have this feature for credit cards, and even if they do get a bit over zealous sometimes and block my card while I’m on holiday it is still a good system. It is my opinion that the leading webmail providers should include an option so that any access from unauthorised regions should be blocked – or at least prevented from making system changes.

For example in my case I would like to restrict access to Europe, North America, Australasia and possibly the Middle East. Perhaps additionally I could state that changes to my account may only be done from the UK and Australia. Should I urgently need to make a change there are family and friends that I could call to make the change on my behalf, or simply use a VPN to gain access via a local ISP.

I would also like to be clear that this would be on a per account basis. I would not like to suggest that we block key internet services from developing countries, as that would surely result in even more hardship for the honest citizens of these regions. The system would not be perfect due to the limitations of GeoIP, however it would have most likely protected my uncle seeing as the hacker came in from Africa, a place he has not visited in many years.

Webmail Security GeoIP Hide

Since I now catch the train to work instead of riding my Ducati or bicycle I have a bit of extra time in the mornings and nights. I had thought about reading on the trip but so far I have a better toy – iPhone gaming. Maybe a Kindle for Christmas will peak my enthusiasm for reading, so I’ll wait for that.

In the meantime I’ve become addicted to the Doom port for the iPhone. This has only happened in the last couple of days after a recommendation from a colleague. My previous addictive game was GeoDefence Swarm, which I would highly recommend, although that will have to take a back seat to Doom for the time being.

I’ve played quite a lot of Doom in my time, although almost all of it was either single player with God mode on, or Deathmatches with guys from school over our 14.4kbps modems (the good old days of init strings). The iPhone port has actually got me playing the single player game properly for the first time ever – 16 years after it’s initial release.

Doom iPhone - Enhanced controls while screen is on

Doom iPhone - Markers highlighted with flash

Perhaps the biggest issue with the game is the control system, the touch screen is quite hard to use at first. After playing most of episode 1 (8 levels) I have added something that is quite useful. The biggest problem with the control system is not the responsiveness, it is the lack of any markings on the screen that help your fingers back to the centre points of each control area. I experimented with Blu-Tack, and while it worked ok my fingers would get caught up if I applied to much pressure. It would also obstruct the screen when not playing Doom.

I went to my local phone mobile phone store and picked up a cheap iPhone screen protector for £3. These generally come with cut out sections for the ear piece and the home button. These two parts are actually almost the perfect shape for each of the control areas when using the “Ultimate” control scheme – the left area requires a rectangular shape, while the right requires a circular disk. Placing these in the correct area results in subtle raised ridges that enhance the controls considerably.

The great thing about this solution is there is no chance of damaging the phone, and then when your bored of Doom simply peel off the stickers. If you are worried about the stickers coming off prematurely simply place the full screen protector over the top, which will firmly hold them in place without effecting much else. For such a cheap price so far this is working well, hopefully it will help me get through the Shores of Hell

doom, iPhone Hide

While updating the visual design of blinkbox.com a few months back we noticed something wasn’t right in IE7 – performance. No surprises really, IE 7 has been around a lot longer than many of the other browsers we currently support as our level 1 tier group.

The problem manifested itself mainly as a one second or more delay when hovering over images. Generally this would be a trivial operation for a browser as it was simply applying the :hover classes for the element.

A bug was raised and I started the investigation checking the usual things such as incorrect binding of javascript events, possible html issues, CSS selectors run wild and so on. A search on Google yielded no usable results that helped either. Since nothing was improving the performance of the page so I started to get a bit more aggressive.

I removed all the images from the page and this worked, although that wasn’t really a solution. After carefully working through it turned out to be the backgrounds that we were using.

Now there was nothing really special about the backgrounds, just simple PNG images 1 pixel wide with repeat-x on them used to form a gradient. Standard stuff.

Notice the hover state on the Fast and Furious icon - that was where it was most noticable.

Technically they are all bundled together in one image and then positioned using CSS, but perhaps I’ll talk more about that system later. One of the options of the image bundling system that I developed was the ability to have the images split up and served independently – but that had no effect so I was able rule that out.

After realising that this was the issue I used the gradient generator to output wider images of around 20px, and voilà, performance issues sorted. So basically if you are going to use a lot of gradients and would like to keep your site running smoothly then make sure they are more than 1px wide as IE7 just can’t handle it.

*Of note blinkbox.com uses over 4ooo pixels of vertical gradients site wide, so this might be an extreme case

CSS, IE7, Performance Hide

So somehow I have managed to register bradleyrees.com, not sure what happened the the last owner, hope nothing bad.

Anyway this is the first post on the new blog – the last was largely left untouched after a couple of posts – yes I lost interest. So far I have been very impressed by WordPress. Everything from themes, tracking, SEO and security are only a couple of clicks to install.

Well that is about it for the first post, hopefully this blog will see a little more love than the last one

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