The NZ Herald is carrying a story today confirming that the Government will go ahead with its ban on the sale of spray cans to persons under the age of 18. Additionally, taggers (if caught) will be penalised more harshly than before with fines and community work.

Whilst I welcome the initiative, I’m not convinced. Heavier penalties are all well and good but the chances of a tagger getting caught in the act are unlikely to improve and that means tagging will remain a relatively risk-free crime.

Criminals over 18 I expect will be welcoming the news – it should give them a nice new source of revenue.

One of the new front-end features I’m most excited about with our new site is the ability to browse categories by “brand”. What this basically means is that you will be able to filter a category down by some of its most prominent franchises or characters. As an example, if you were looking at the PlayStation 2 home page you might see the following brands:

• Buzz!
• SingStar
• Final Fantasy
• Need for Speed

I’ve named our top four PS2 brands by product count in this example, but there are loads more and I’m really quite excited about the potential that this feature has for our existing product ranges as well as the new ones that we plan to introduce when New Site goes live. In all honesty, gaming isn’t the best example, but hopefully you’ll share my enthusiasm once everything is done and you can see the results.

On the technical side of things, the brands concept is a shift from the way we’ve done this sort of thing previously. I won’t go into great detail, but with Gameplanet Store we have an enormous category tree which contains top level categories like DVDs, Games and Music and, below each of those, things like DVDs > TV Series or Games > PlayStation > Action. Then, if we wanted to make a special page for, say, “Final Fantasy Games”, we would add a new invisible category, add each item to the new category, and pull the results based on that criteria.

With New Site, we plan on consolidating the category tree so that it’s reserved for real categories (genres, if you prefer), and then building tricky pages by the use of branding as well as a couple of other new backend categorizing tools we’re developing. A comparison:

Gameplanet Store:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy > The Simpsons

New Site:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy
Brand = The Simpsons

Because the branding is not tied to the category, we will also be able to show you category-unspecific pages so that you can see The Simpsons Game, The Simpsons Movie and The Simpsons Sing the Blues all from the one section.

This may seem like a subtle change on the surface but it will give us back-end flexibility with our content management and, most importantly, it will give you more browsing options so that you can better find what you’re looking for.

UK techie site Techworld recently published a story sporting the headline “Encryption could make you more vulnerable, warn experts”. Whilst being attention-grabbing enough to warrant a read by any security conscious programmer, I have to say that the story inspires more fear than it should.

In a nutshell, the article claims that encrypting data has the potential to wreak havoc on a business in the event that a decryption key is lost, forgotten or, worst yet, stolen and held for ransom. Gosh. Scary. These may be valid points, but what the article doesn’t go into is that these problems are not a result of using encryption; they are a result of having a badly designed or insecure system in the first place.

A poster to a Slashdot discussion on the subject sarcastically compared the logic to things like door locks and deadbolts – basically, it’s all well and good when it works; but what if you lock yourself out? Then, quite clearly, you’re screwed, right?… but, perhaps, if you’d done some research before you started and figured out how the system worked, you wouldn’t have let it happen. I believe the same thing applies to encryption, and Techworld’s article certainly hasn’t discouraged me from protecting sensitive data.

Hi there. You may want to make a coffee; this post went longer than originally planned.

My name is Matt and you might remember me from such Internet hotspots as Gameplanet Store, Gameplanet Forums and, well, Gameplanet. You might be noticing a bias, but I like to think that what I lack in variety I make up for in commitment and on that note I am proud to have been associated with these companies in some capacity for around eight years.

Professionally, I’m a self-taught* PHP programmer, systems admin and general I.T. response team working in a LAMP environment full-time for Gameplanet Store. In my career so far I’ve never dealt with anything else, and at time of writing I’m yet to see a strong reason to change; LAMP quite simply gets the job done and gets it done at the best price possible.

That said, I have on occasion dabbled with C++ and Java, but without having genuine projects to hold my interest my experience in “real” languages remains limited. My desire to explore the rest of the programming world is low because, along with time constraints(!), I find the Web to be an interesting medium. Off the top of my head there is a couple of key reasons for this:

Firstly, getting everything working isn’t enough; even a normally lightning-fast site can be brought to its knees by a sudden influx of traffic. It is at this point that technologies such as load balancing, caching, expensive and sometimes complicated server arrangements and not-normalized – but very efficient – database trickery begin to show their true worth and the fact that our business needs to evolve technically as it grows – as do I – keeps me on my toes.

Secondly, the always-evolving nature of the Web makes us as an online-only e-commerce business terrified to sit still for long periods and so we continue to search for new ideas, tweak existing code, modify what used to be well-established pages and, on occasion, rewrite huge blocks of code entirely – sometimes, frustratingly, at no difference to the end user – and, other times, more obviously. (More on the latter in posts to come.)

Away from work I try to find (make?) time for a variety of interests including video games – at present I’m an Xbox 360 man – and, to a degree, athletic pursuits – currently consisting quite unimaginatively of weights and running. I spent most of my years at high school playing basketball instead of studying, and apparently developed a passion for fitness along the way. I am also attempting to learn to play the guitar; just don’t ask me to play you anything.

* For the record, I genuinely mean this in the conventional sense that I am not University educated; to the handful of clever people who have answered my countless questions over the years (and continue to do so!) I thank you. To be able to learn from people who are smarter than me makes my job a lot easier!