This is because those clever Oyster card people, who have been paid millions of pounds to implement pay as you go functionality for London’s trains, can’t figure out how to deal with journeys where part of the journey is covered by the season ticket, and part by pay as you go.

Imagine you’re travelling from Wimbledon (Zone 3) to Waterloo (Zone 1) and you have a season ticket for Zones 2 and 3. The intuitive thing would be for the journey past the end of Zone 2 (which happens to be at Vauxhall) to be deducted from your pay as you go balance. What seems to happen, though, is that the cost of the whole journey is deducted: meaning you’re paying twice for the portion covered by your season ticket.

Surely this is a bit of elementary software development. I’d be happy for anyone on my team to code something that would do the trick. I may well add a question about this to my recruitment test for developers. TFL, the Oyster card people, have come up with a ridiculous work-around though: the Oyster Extension Permit. So when I plan to travel from my season ticket area to another area, I have to get another ticket so that I don’t get ripped off. Sadly, the machines at my station can’t even issue this permit, as they don’t sell Oyster card tickets.

Most people won’t notice, though, because Oyster card users only get statements online if they buy credit online, and very few people can therefore see where their online credit has disappeared to.

Feel free to comment, extend, ask for extra functions and such like.

Install php and MySQL

OS X comes with Apache installed, but you’ll need to install php and MySQL before you can install Magento. I got mine from here and they work perfectly: just download the dmg files and run them.

Install phpMyAdmin

Once you have php, MySQL and Apache all set up, you can install phpMyAdmin by downloading it from here. Installing phpMyAdmin and getting that working proves:
- Apache is working and pointing to the right place
- php is working
- MySQL is working and accessible from Apache / php

Create a host file entry for your local Magento install

Magento hates working on localhost, and the easiest way to work around that is to edit your host file and add a fictitious domain, which will actually be served by your laptop.

Go to the command line and type in ’sudo nano /etc/hosts’ then type in your password (assuming you’re an administrator on your laptop) and add a line like the following:

127.0.0.1 magento.enterprise.com

Save the file (Ctrl-O) and quit nano (Ctrl-K) and then check you can ping magento.enterprise.com. If you can, you’re ready to install Magento Enterprise. The first step is to install the sample data.

Install sample data

With Magento Enterprise 1.7 you can use the standard sample data that came with Magento Enterprise 1.2, available here. Download the zip file and unzip it, then go to phpMyAdmin, create a database (mine is called magentoenterprise) and import the SQL from the sample data file. It’s important you do this before you install the Magento application itself.

Install the application

I can’t link to a downloader for Magento Enterprise, but this is the point where you will unzip that, and copy it to a subdirectory of your sites folder. Mine is at ~/Sites/mage_ee which (if you’ve used magento.enterprise.com in your host file) will mean Magento is at http://magento.enterprise.com/username/mage_ee after you’ve copied it from the zip file.

You might need to set access on the files after you’ve unzipped them: to do this go to your site’s root directory (~/Sites/mage_ee in my case) and type in ’sudo chmod -R -v 777 *’ and enter your password when prompted. This is poor security in the real world, but fine for a demo site on a laptop, especially one that’s using a fictitious domain name.

If you type in the URL in a regular browser, you should be taken to the install script, which (if you’ve followed all the steps above) should work perfectly first time.

Critical things to remember:

- The URL is the one you created in your hosts file

- The database name, login and password were all set up in phpMyAdmin

Once you’re finished with the installation, you can copy the images from the sample data zip file to the media folder in your Magento directory, and your sample store will then have all the pretty pictures as well.

I can add more detail in most places in this article, but for most people I hope the sequence of steps is the main thing. If you do this in the wrong order, you’ll have to start again, so follow the sequence carefully.

BSOD at the Prado

The tube tunnels are full of posters showing people who apparently helped design Windows 7. Which is probably why stories like this one appear from time to time. If you let members of the public design your operating system, it probably would be better than Windows, where even the version number is a hack. There are many serious technical design issues, which impact security, reliability and performance. But it’s still the number 1 operating system.

Contrast that with Linux. If you visit this link you can browse all the bugs that have been logged in the Linux kernel (the bit at the heart of the system that everything else relies on to work) and see when / where they will get fixed. It’s transparent, and reflects a piece of software that is properly engineered and well structured. Critical bugs get fixed right away, and it’s miles better structured than its proprietary rival.

And the one you pay money for is the bad one, not the good one. Which probably explains this page at Google image search.

For several years, the PC and TV have been converging and next year could be a very confusing year for consumers as the 2 devices get more and more alike. Interactivity will be increasingly available on set-top boxes through Freeview and Sky, and TV content will be increasingly available online, where interaction is a given.

If you have a bit.ly link, for example http://bit.ly/4dWnCu

you can insert ‘info’ into the URL thus:

http://bit.ly/info/4dWnCu

to get all sorts of facts and figures, like how many clicks that link has had, which sites are referring using it, who’s tweeting about that particular URL, and that kind of thing.