This morning http://buyarug.co.uk, a Magento site that we operate, was showing a white screen of death. Checking the apache error log revealed the following error:
PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function getDir() on a non-object in /DOCUMENT_ROOT/app/Mage.php on line 328

After some investigation the problem proved to be intermittent and caused a white screen when requesting a page, yet hitting refresh the page would load, then it would break again and so on.

Sometimes I wonder if in the future people won't refer to eras in terms of the materials we use – like the iron age, or the bronze age – and will instead refer to iPhone generations.

The incredible success of the iPhone makes it an influential device in the digital industry; it defines the standard for mobile development in terms of apps and web. But what does the iPhone change, and what can we expect for mobile development?

Reissuing the brand name for their tabletop computing experience, Microsoft yesterday announced the familiar Surface for Windows. In two varieties: an ARM based Windows 8 RT (read lite) version, and a beefed-up x86 based Windows 8 Pro (read full) version; the two tablets can go one of two ways.

The announcement of Mountain Lion, Apple's latest Mac OSX update, is another sign that Apple isn't resting on its laurels and marks an ominous turning point for their competitors. While 10.7, or Lion, was intended to create a more enclosed and unified ecosystem – the distance between iOS5 products, like the iPad and iPhone, and Mac OSX was still notable.

Just a quick blog on a new social network that's doing some interesting (although not necessarily new) things.

It's a content aggregation website like delicious.com nee del.icio.us. Interestingly, Pinterest's most attractive feature isn't complex tech wizardry, it's just utilitiarian UI design. What Pinterest has identified is the ability of contemporary internet users to rapidly consume diverse information.