This opened yesterday and I was on one of the first flights to land at what is now the largest airport in South East Asia. Just as we were coming in to land it occurred to me that the pilot had probably never landed at this airport before and so this was his first attempt! Luckily he did a good job though. This is the photo I took from the plane, which doesn’t really do it justice. It is mind blowing how big, modern and ornate it is. They basically have gone all out to try and be bigger and better than Hong Kong, Singapore and KL, all amazing airports, who are all now apparently planning to increase their capacity again.

I found some better photos from the construction phase.

It amazes me how developing nations like Thailand just get that they have to invest heavily in infrastructure. The cost must have been massive but in this case, build and they will come. There will now be more flights with more tourists and more business people than ever before coming through Bangkok. This is essential for a high growth economy. Meanwhile, back in NZ, you still can’t land 747’s at Wellington Airport, the capital.

Technorati Tags: Suvanabhumi Airport

So how can one company be so good at online (iTunes) and still beat all the standard metrics for success in traditional retail?

Andy Lark has the answers.

I can confirm that the Apple Store in Regent Street, London is exactly as he describes. Buzzing with energy and people queuing orderly to purchase more Apple stuff. Every marketer should buy an Apple product to experience what it takes to be a super-brand.

It is full of bugs. Crashes regularly for no good reason. New interface is good though. Just wished it was stable.

100 people affected by food poisoning traced back to spinach.

This is the new online virtual iPod. Not the best application I’ve ever used, but it is in beta to be fair. Great idea though.

For more Apple/iPod news check out Wired.

My deepest, deepest sympathies to Steve Irwin’s family.

This is still funny though.

British ‘guerilla artist’ Banksy asks a very good question of Paris HIlton. He has cleverly doctored about 500 copies of her new CD and then slipped them into the stock at various HMV and Virgin Megastores in a bout of reverse shoplifting. Brilliant. Check out the full set of photos on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: paris hilton, banksy

CrossOver is a beta release of software that will allow you run Windows applications on Mac OS X natively. This means you don’t have to buy or install Windows operation system. If this works, it could well be the answer for many Mac users, like myself, who still want to run the occasional Windows application. We don’t actually need the operating system in most cases. I think I’ll wait and see some of the comments in forums and blogs before I try this out though.

Technorati Tags: apple, crossover

I still maintain AJAX is the way forward when it comes to web development, however, having just spent hours trying to debug issues that only affects IE when the same code works perfectly in Safari and Firefox, is extremely annoying. IE is very helpful and gives you this error message “Unknown run-time error”, which basically translates to “something went wrong, can’t tell you anything more than that though”.

Anyway, long story short, don’t try to have JavaScript write to an innerhtml element within <p> tags, I changed it to a <div> and everything worked. I really hope that IE 7 has better support or at least better debugging for AJAX.

Technorati Tags: ajax