Planet Yoyo

Tom Raftery rips Nokia a new one with his review of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Last summer there was a huge amount of interest in the Nokia tablets after the 770 was available for a knockdown price. I was about to go on holiday for a week and couldn’t wait for the 770 to arrive and so I bought an N800 model (which I reviewed earlier). I’ve not yet upgraded to Internet Tablet OS 2008 but that’s because I’ve been using my iPhone pretty much 90% of the time (and the other 10% has been with this laptop).

First off the maps for the GPS are terrible. … and the GPS application doesn’t plot routes either.

Next is the low memory of the device. I only had around 3 applications running at the time so I was surprised that this consumed all the RAM on the device.

The UI is really clunky. I mean really clunky! In this regard I have been spoilt by my iPod Touch experience.

It is slow opening/running applications and the browsing experience is painful compared to Safari on the iPod.

The display doesn’t change orientation if you turn the device through 90 degrees.

It is a brick - big and heavy. Am I likely to carry this and my N95 with me when I am traveling? I don’t think so!

I have most of the same functionality with the combination of the iPod Touch and the N95 as I do with the N810 and the N95 for a fraction the pocket real estate!

Ouch!

Admittedly I didn’t find the N800 to be as much hassle as Tom describes and there are some times I wish it had had the hardware keyboard of the N810 model (Nokia needs to talk to Apple about onscreen soft keyboards). But it did save my geekness while I was in Skegness.

I guess we’ll have to wait until February to see if the iTouch and iPhone really start to challenge the Nokia internet tablets in terms of available software. We’ve already heard that SAP is building their native application for iPhone and there’s the recent news that Sling Media were also building for the iPhone/iTouch too.

The Nokia wouldn’t be enough for me to ditch a laptop and frankly neither is the iPhone or iPod touch. The issues with the iPhone/touch are 90% in software. I need more and better apps. But it’s getting close that these small devices could change our lives.

The other issues with these devices is also their strength. There’s something nice, something essential about using a proper keyboard. Finding a keyboard for the N800 was difficult enough that I eventually gave up after buying one and finding it wouldn’t work. If someone made an external keyboard for the iPhone, even a wired model, I think they’d be onto a winner.

I can’t wait to see what Nokia and Apple are going to bring out next.

Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
4. Good design helps us to understand a product.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
6. Good design is honest.
7. Good design is durable.
8. Good design is consequent to the last detail.
9. Good design is concerned with the environment.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

When you look pictures hosted on Gizmodo you can see that Jonathan Ive is heavily influenced by Rams’ designs.

We now have to see what other household products Apple will reinvent.

I’d have to add that

• Good design affords usability
• Good design reduces confusion
• Good design sees no need to conceal
• Good design reinforces clarity of purpose
• Good design has no need to shout
• Good design shapes focus naturally

I’m no design guru but I think there’s room for improvement.

It’s that time of year when people start burning things, lohri, the new year festival is under way and I’d arrived off of flight Virgin VS0300 just in time to get to the party. The journey over was smooth and hassle-free. I watched the dark Russian mob in London drama Eastern Promise and the Ian [...]

On the left, we have the French. The bowl is typically devoid of water and raised so as to be as close to the posterior of the user as possible. The overall effect is that the experience has not really progressed from a primitive state of nature, which is further emphasised by the frequency which one encounters the ‘Turkish’ style in bistros and cafés. However, the utter absence of water until the flush is engaged is perhaps a statement of the poor French economy. Water cannot be spared until it is absolutely necessary to engage it in a perfunctory cleansing action. The effect, as my ex-colleague Stephen Richards commented, is that one feels you are staring at a dead, battered seal when one has finished. Fraternité indeed.

On the right, the Americans. The triumphant success of free market economics means the deep, voluminous bowl should look like a bath that one only belatedly remembered to turn the taps off to (or should that be fawcets?). Our cup overrunneth. A small, sliver of enamel will be left to provide something for the European male to aim at but otherwise, the abundance of water helps to advertise to everyone in earshot the activities of the user. An act of nature has become a commercial for the lavish, liquid luxury of the American lifestyle. Listen to me, the plumbing screams, as I prove how careless we can be with water.

Britain truly does bridge the Atlantic from the Continent like a plumbing Goldilocks. Water, not too much, not too little, but just enough. A bowl which does the job with calm detachment and understated pride. God bless you, Blighty.

So I worked out why I have found it hard to get enthusiastic about Mexico.

My previous travels have almost all been in Europe, America, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. What these areas have in common is their cultures and civilisations have left a mark. They created alphabets, discovered knowledge and propagated themselves in books. They are all profoundly written cultures and as such, their impact can be observed and felt in our contemporary society. I find them interesting because to understand them, is to understand myself and the world about me that little bit better.

Conspicuous by their absence from my travels have been Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of South Africa). Whilst pre-Colombian cultures did discover knowledge, writing and were relatively advanced for their time, I cannot see or feel their effect in my own, Western, Judeo-Christian cultural life at all. Wandering around a museum of artifacts spanning two thousand years, not one aspect of Latin American history had any resonance with me other than to impress upon me the fact that it no longer exists in any recognisable form. It pretty much failed absolutely.

I can understand why Latin American, and perhaps even Africa, appeal to people who enjoy carnival, partying and a multi-coloured good life. But, I need intellectual stimulation from my travels. I need to feel a connection with the location and these two continents have yet to make one for me.

The one exception to this is in regards to poverty. We passed by some slum areas on the bus yesterday, and I am appalled, fascinated and impressed by the ability of human beings to survive in extreme, basic conditions. Seeing the corrugated steel roofs over tiny boxes reminded me of how lucky I am to live in the West. I have felt the same thing when travelling in North Africa and wish I could have spent more time looking around the poorer areas of town here in Mexico City, but I have been wary of the crime rate. I am not a poverty tourist, but wish I could meet the people who live in these areas and learn more about their lives. To only experience the history of a city without seeing its present makes a trip incomplete.

Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about the twice-shy entrepreneur.

In the article he writes more about the difference between entrepreneurs from Bubble 1.0 who watched everything disappear down the pan…

The intense pressure entrepreneurs were under to get revenue at any cost led them to make decisions that, with hindsight, were blatantly foolish. And when the market crashed on April 14, 2000, those same entrepreneurs had to lay off most or all of their employees after making those decisions. And face outright humiliation on FuckedCompany, the site that chronicled the downfall of the Internet bubble.

It left a bit of a scar.

…and current entrepreneurs who may not carry the same sort of baggage.

But what if you were not directly affected by the Bubble? I was in Nortel and yes, the bubble was responsible for thousands of layoffs but I took voluntary redundancy in 2003, much later than the bubble. Nortel was still in it’s death spiral (which hasn’t changed, the curve just got asymptotic).

Setting up MacSys took blood, money, sweat, tears and friends. It used them up pretty much in equal quantity. The sacrifices I made are not sacrifices I would make again lightly. That’s why, even though I have a successful, profitable business under my belt, I’m still ultra-conservative.

But I’m interested in how to break out of this rut. My SO thinks I could do so much more with Mac-Sys. I’d like to do heaps more with Infurious (as well as with wow4kids, macheads, ukwifi) but time is definitely limited.

Winston Churchill - Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm

This is what I’m concerned about. I have heaps of energy for ideas but I’m currently too busy worrying to actually go through with any of them (plus the holding down a day job that I’m loathing doesn’t help).

A Dutch colleague from school, Peter, has a Mexican girlfriend and so spends all of his free time down here in Mexico City. We arranged to meet up today and go to Teotihuacan, a large pre-Columbian site with one of the largest pyramids in Mexico. His girlfriend advised him to seek out a fellow called “El Gorila” who had given her a tour some time ago, which she recommended we take. Entering through the main gate, we were told to look for a large fellow with grey hair and white trousers. Luckily, he was right by the entrance when we arrived and indeed, he did look just like a gorilla.

Whilst attempting to negotiate a fee for his services, which unlike the Middle East he seemed very easy going about, it became clear that he was already leading a large group of people around. They were milling about, staring through binoculars at various birds. All of them seemed to have binoculars and were staring at the various avians, in fact. A fellow, who introduced himself as Diego, told us the group were actually the cast and crew of the Lion King, who were touring around North and Central America. They had booked El Gorila for the day and were half way through the tour and were due to have lunch with him in a couple of hours. El Gorila and Diego seemed happy for us to join them for the tour leading up to the lunch, so we all headed in the direction of the ruins together.

The first stop should have raised some alarm bells. Standing by a tree, El Gorila pulled down some leaves and proceeded to spin a yarn about how they were used in courtship rituals and could heal all sorts of ailments. Claiming that putting a leaf behind the ear brought good luck in love inspired several of the cast (one could tell they were not crew as they were attractive) to put massive clumps in the hair and in their back packs. A more desperate cry for love could not have been more evident. Having been on a few guided tours before, I know that the guide likes to embellish a site with the mystical little tales which amuse the audience so nothing seemed too problematic.

We then descended into some excavations beneath the foundations of the city. Here was more typical explanation of how stones were laid and pointing out the irrigation and plumbing systems that were used, all standard stuff, and moderately interesting. El Gorila, then took out some pink candy from his large backpack and explained the Mayan origins of the food and the effect it has on one’s libido. Laughter all round. He then segued into describing what would be served for lunch at his house in a couple of hours: crickets, ant eggs, worms. I think I heard someone say, rather meekly, they were a vegetarian. I looked at Peter and raised my eyebrows.

Coming out of the underground area, we arrived in one of the large plazas at the foot of the pyramid. In the blazing sun, El Gorila got us all to sit around him in a circle. Delving into his large backpack, he pulled out a bright, multicoloured piece of cloth and an incense bowl. Placing them to his left, he asked who in the group was in touch with and loved nature to which a a blonde woman raised her hand. He asked her to join him by his side and then made her put on a red headband and told her to place some amber in the incense bowl, which he then lit. The bowl, he explained, would channel all our love and draw out all our illnesses. Passing out more sticky amber incense around the circle, he then told us that we would all have to say what was in our heart and what we wished for, whilst we placed the amber in the burning bowl. Starting with the blonde woman.

“I am grateful for the new beginning we are finding here in this most sacred place, and wish love and harmony for everyone on earth and that all evil can be removed if we learn to care for each other”.

I think I tried to look over at Peter, as the group turned to the next girl in the circle.

“I hope for peace on earth and for mankind to know eternal love. All the harm in the world can be eliminated if we look into each other’s souls.”

Desperately trying to not snigger, I was desperate to make eye contact with Peter. Surely, we couldn’t be about to take part in this weirdo, California cult love-in? I wanted to learn about the frickin’ old bricks lying about, not your inner spirituality, you bunch of fruit loops. But, no, the pressure built as two more people in the circle gave us their platitudinous solution for world peace and eternal love.

And then it was poor Peter, the matter of fact, down to earth, Dutchman’s turn: “I hope we can all learn to get along with each other.”

Ok, not too bad - but I sure as buggery didn’t want to learn to get along with these bunch of space cadets.

The girl next to me pleaded to the gods of this spiritual nexus to forgive her and remove the stain of evil from the world, and how life would be so much easier if fear was eradicated from our hearts, before bursting into tears.

Jesus H Christ.

You don’t need fear removed from your heart, sweetheart. You need good, long, hard and deep therapy.

So, my turn next. I couldn’t exactly say what was in my heart as it would have involved a complaint about the lack of catering facilities on site and that I sure as hell wasn’t going to be seing the Lion King anytime soon.

“Erm. I hope other people benefit from the hospitality of strange groups, in the same way that me and Peter have today.”

Yes, I really wished other people were enjoying this group’s hospitality. Instead of me. I did not lie.

Several more heart felt pleas for love were endured before El Gorila, placing the burning bowl in front of him, took out a large shell and told us he would now help us open up and clear out our chakras. We should reveal our hearts, close our eyes and assume the lotus position.

The only thing being opened up with this group of freakazoids was their fat, Western wallets. My chakra, along with everything else, was remaining firmly closed and would not be having anything going in or out of it, thank you very much.

“Chant after me: Om shanti Om. Om shanti Om.”

Ok, if you are going to go all spiritual and milk these dumb ass American theatre lovies, at least try and keep it geographically contiguous. Stick with the Mayan crap - but please - NOT BUDDHIST CHANTING TOO.

Blowing on the large shell (it sounded like a shofar), the chanting started. This is how death cults start, I thought. I wonder if this ends up with them all throwing themselves off the top of the pyramid. Now that, I would open up my chakra to see.

The chanting continued and the shell was blowing. Please let this end soon, Please let this end soon.

After a few more agonising minutes, it stopped. El Gorila announced: “We will all now walk in single file to the top of the temple pyramid, with our blonde goddess leading the way with the burning bowl of amber and incense. There, at the top, I will each discover your personal spirit animal and your Indian name.”

Finally, I made eye contact with Peter. There was no mistaking what we were both thinking. My spirit animal was trapped between two pieces of bun and had relish all over him and I didn’t want to wait to climb to the top of the pyramid with David Koresh and his followers before I had a chance to eat him. Hastily thrusting some money into El Gorila’s hands, we thanked everyone and got the f*** out of dodge.

As El Gorila waved goodbye to us, Peter with wonderful insight, said: “I should have been known something was wrong when I saw they were bird watchers.”

Having gone back to school with the intention of specialising in the Middle East, I have found that my interests have changed somewhat. As one of my previous posts mentioned, I did take a Middle East seminar, which was extremely intellectually challenging and very useful in making me apply my knowledge of the Middle East to examine theoretical issues. This has definitely provided me with a new lens to look at the politics of the region and I am enthusiastic to return to discuss it all with friends. Yet, this course alone, and the numerous blogs I continue to read, have been sufficient to sate my Middle Eastern intellectual itch. I hope to revise my Arabic language notes next week but this is somewhat under personal duress.

In fact, there were two courses which aroused more enthusiasm and motivated me to read more extensively outside of the syllabus. The first was the War, Peace & Strategy (WPS) course, and the second was a class I audited (attended but did not have to write for) on Law and the Internet. What these two courses had in common was their impetus to try and perceive the long run.

WPS involved reading literature which reviewed the last 200-300 years and highlighted trends and theories which helped explain past events. The law course examined the interaction of law, politics, economic and technology over the past 30 years and detailed how the interests of parties in each arena has shaped how we use and experience technology.

The ability to pull theories from an intellectual quiver, to review and explain trends, is satisfying because it makes one feel more confident in being able to predict the future with less ambiguity. To see the past as one historical evolution means the future looks less vague. Ironically, the one area where theory is powerfully explanatory but very limited in prediction is the Middle East and this perhaps explains my change of direction, about which more in a moment.

The political science department at Columbia resides in a large building which is principally the home of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). In contrast to the PoliSci department, which is mainly the location of pure academics, that is theoreticians who are doing PhDs and who wish to teach and do research, SIPA is a policy school which focuses on training future diplomats and policy advisors. Given that one of the motivations behind my going back to university was to try and effect a career change in precisely this direction, the obvious question is why didn’t I go to SIPA rather than do Political Science?

There are a few reasons. Firstly, I was perhaps not fully cognisant of the role that SIPA fulfilled. The distinction between the academy and the policy world was less than clear to me. Interestingly, this somewhat arbitrary and America-centric split was the subject of discussion in one of my Middle East seminar classes. The professor claimed that the distinction between the two occurred as a result of the 1968 movement which saw students accusing their teachers of colluding with the establishment. The US academy had the “luxury” of retreating in on itself and splitting from the policy world, a trend not replicated in other countries where the split between the two is often non-existent.

Secondly, I did look at SIPA but was put off by a curriculum which mandated economic, statistic and language courses and spread the degree over a 2 year period. Wanting to study only politics and not wanting to re-open the old wounds of an economic undergraduate degree, SIPA seemed to put too much stress on a wider range of subjects. Now I understand that this was because they aim to produce graduates for the public sector in the same way that business schools produce MBA graduates. Armed with a kit of vocationally useful experience, the focus is on producing people for the workforce.

Do I regret not going to SIPA? The answer to this question depends on what I end up doing next. I do not regret avoiding economics and statistics! However, the main advantage of SIPA is that they assist in securing internship positions in fields that interest the student. This produces an impressive line on the CV and opens doors for latter employment, which is augmented by a very active and influential careers office. I do look on with envy at the options this presents students. As such, any regret I may have would be tempered by securing interesting employment in the coming year.

I am slightly different to the majority of SIPA students, in that I have a longer CV and more established career. This hopefully will mitigate the lack of MBA-like studying I have avoided and mean my employment prospects do not suffer too much. However, the real question is what am I going to do next?

Going back to school has clarified two points. Firstly, my interest in politics is more than an idle curiosity. It is as equally a driving interest and passion as technology was for me when I started work in the internet industry in 1995. Politics and international affairs excite my interest and stimulate my thinking in a way that the latter part of my career did not. The discovery of a vast array of literature and theories reminds me of the joy of discovering the internet and UNIX and realising there was an entire world of new toys to play with. Yet, I think I am too old to start at the bottom of the ladder again. After my studies, I would be qualified to get a low level research analyst position but it would be difficult to secure and paid badly. Even had I gone to SIPA, with my limited prior experience in politics, I would find it hard to enter a think tank or policy unit at anything but a junior level. I am a little too impatiently competitive to climb the ladder again. I am also too addicted to decision making to fully enter a pure research area.

Secondly, I am not bored of technology and the internet. I had feared that after 13 years, I was losing my passion for technology (or IT to use a laymen’s term I dislike but submit to regretfully). But I have continued to read and be excited by developments in the field and still feel an affinity with computer geeks (which included my talking to a Czech kernel hacker who works for Novell at the top of the Torre Latinamerica this afternoon). In the same way that international politics affects everyone, so does technology, and the ability to see trends and the game of trying to predict the future is still one of the most fun and stimulating activities one can play.

So, the challenge is to try and find a way to combine the two.

In the public sector, the UN is an obvious avenue. There are field position for CTO-level candidates. This involves managing infrastucture for the UN In various locations. This would certainly get my foot in the political industry, yet the work may be horrifically bureaucratic compared to the private sector, and too tech-centric.

In the private sector, the field of Information Warfare and Security seems an interesting route There are a number of consulting and research firms who work with the Pentagon and the Dept. of Homeland Security, advising them on threats to critical infrastructure and helping them develop internal systems. The pay would be good, and I would be technically and managerially qualified. However, security clearance issues means that being a British citizen might be an issue.

These are initial thoughts and I hope to ferret out some more options over the coming months but time is growing short as I (hopefully) graduate in May and will need to start looking for work in June/July. Meanwhile, I am eagerly awaiting my second term back in the library, head in a book.

Nick Corcodilos writes for Infoworld:

Companies are madly trying to hire skills, not talent. They want to harvest fruit overnight. Give a smart IT worker some manuals, a workstation, an objective, and a little time, and they’ll come up to speed every time. That requires strong leadership.

But if you leave it to some personnel jockey who relies on buzzwords and resumes, you’ll never hire real talent — and it will always seem there is a talent shortage. What’s difficult to understand about that?

Or alternatively, don’t hire new people at all while you’re haemorrhaging personnel and watch the good people walk out the door while you keep the shareholders happy.

I’ve been here before.

Don Reisinger, a freelance technology journalist, writes for MacNN:

Once it hits a critical level, the cell phone carriers may mobilize and we’ll realize just how ridiculous cell phone contracts and AT&T really are.

Enjoy your iPhone now. But soon enough, you may be wishing you bought that Treo.

Nope.

I love my iPhone. I’ve hated every other device and with every passing day, my loathing does nothing but grow.

Everyone who doesn’t have one is jealous. And I share a knowing grin with every one I know who also has one.

This ain’t no cargo cult. This is gnosticism.

In a recent report, the European Union commissioner for information society and media made a breathtakingly naive statement in support of DRM, mere days after consumer pressure has managed to convince the mainstream music publishers that applying arbitrary restrictions to users use of the music they’ve bought is a bad idea.

The last thing the anti-DRM movement needs is knee-jerk trendy European legislation attempting  to plaster a “one size fits all” DRM “solution” (more than likely Microsoft based) onto a system which is only now beginning to work.

Defective by Design have an open letter on their site and I’d recommend that anyone interested in avoiding having their digital music tied to a specific platform signs it.

An Open Letter to Viviane Reding.

I think I had expected Mexico City to be more like Cairo however this potential was quickly dispelled when I saw people spraying the pavements down and sweeping up the litter. With barely a car horn to speak of and the pavements easily navigable, this could instead very easily be a large Spanish or Mediterranean city and the dominant European architecture assists the illusion.

Perhaps my initial impression of the town is coloured by the fact that today is a Saturday. Weekends are never very indicative of a city and the crowds queuing for mass, playing in the large parks and riding the rollercoasters in the city fairground are probably skewing my perception of the city. It all seems very civic orientated and amiable. But dull. I am always suspicious of capital cities which don’t anchor themselves by the coast or by a large river.

The Zocala, not to be confused with the Babylon 5 location, is the natural centre but, but… it is not a Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, Midan Tahrir or Champs Elysee. It all feels very anonymous, no sights which one immediately recognises or is drawn to. The city does sprawl but not in a way which tempts you to one part over after another. I think I need to get out of the central locations of the Zona Rosa, the Condessa and the Paseo de la Reforma and investigate the less salubrious areas which I passed on the way from the airport, but unlike Cairo, crime is an issue here so we shall see.

I think my attitude towards this city is being affected by the fact that I cannot find a copy of the Economist anywhere. There are news stands everywhere but they seem to specialise in car and lad mags and pornography. This seems to reflect a general lack of Anglophony on the street signs and even in the Museums. Not surprising when you have such a dominant Northern neighbour perhaps but it does seem rather petulant and self-defeating.

This is not a cosmopolitan city. I forget how much satisfaction I get from face watching in London and New York but other than the entropic European features of some, the dominant ethnicity seems fairly uniform. It was notable that amongst the trendy (and more expensive) cafes in Condessa, that the European features were more common among the clientele.

The weather, in contrast to New York and Miami, is wonderful. Tomorrow I shall investigate the subway I think.

Mark Pilgrim moved his parents to Linux because their Mac experience was souring.:

I had originally chosen Kontact/Kmail for their email needs, but I ran into some strange bug where Kmail refused to send messages. Basic functionality, right? You’d think someone would, you know, notice. I realize email standards are wide and complicated, but still. An email program that can’t send email is pretty fucking useless.

my father threw me for a loop and asked how he could realign the print heads and check the ink levels. I have owned printers for many decades and I have never done this, but apparently it’s a regular occurrence for him, and the Mac printer driver let him do it. So OK, I poke around Google, and lo and behold, there’s a package for that. But it doesn’t work. Oh wait, I need to install gimp-print too (God knows why). Now it aligns the print heads, but it gives an error message while checking ink levels. But it works from the command line. But only as root. Weird. Unresolved. Grr.

Sounds like they’re off to a great start!

Here’s the scenario: you’re writing a green field web application. This application will be used to power more than one e-commerce site, which means that it must be easily tailored. You can use any toolset you like, and the requirements are fairly standard (e.g. exporting data to CSV, modern UI, payment gateway, etc.). What do you choose?

1. Off-the-shelf e-commerce engine
2. Open-source e-commerce engine
3. Build your own

So, it seems you’ve got three options (anyone think of a 4th?). Of course within each of these options there are any number of competing solutions, especially in “build your own”, where you could potentially use any language, web server, etc.

I think with any software developer, the preference is to build one’s own. That way you get ultimate flexibility and intimate understanding of the code, which makes it easier to expand and customise. The downside is that you have more work up-front in order to get running.

Off-the-shelf (i.e. commercial) software tends to have a lot of features that your accountant and fulfillment department would like, and often gives you the ability to customise using one of a few popular languages or their own pseudo-language. The real advantage is that you can have a store quickly, or so you might think. Often, shoe-horning your data into their proprietary and closed-source format makes this option longer and more expensive than building it yourself.

All of which leaves open-source engines. You can be up and running quickly (like with commercial apps) but you have access to the source code if you decide you need to change things the way you want them. Potential downsides are lack of support and lack of particular features you might need (e.g. a particular payment gateway).

So, which would you choose?

I met my co-conspirator Aidan in person for the first time today. He&aposs over here in sunny Belfast for a while and is working up on the third floor of the same building as myself, so we had a bit of lunch and got chatting about our plans for the future, our experiences of working for $BIG_CORP and life in general.

It was good to finally put a physical person to the online persona and apparently neither of us looks like the photos we use as avatars

Go team Infurious!

David Brin writes for EDGE on their 2008 question:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

I agree that social networks are trivialising communication, the quality of the human species which really sets us apart. Our ability to formulate ideas would be wasted without the ability to share them. It’s therefore unfortunate that the vast majority of FaceBook conversation seems to be in comparing trivia knowledge, attacking each other with virtual werewolves or using the platform to spread the latest YouTube hit about some girl baring her breasts on webcam when her dad walks in (and I certainly believe that each and every one of those was staged).

I ache for meaning in conversation. Some old fashioned conversation about The Selfish Gene or the Null Hypothesis of Alien Life. Conversation where my preconceptions might be challenged, firing my imagination and igniting something in my poor brain long thought dormant.

Funwall? Fuck off.

The news lately has been totally saturated with reports about Benazir Bhutto’s death. You would think it was the People’s Princess all over again. I’m pretty certain though that I’m not the only one who thinks it’s rather excessive. There’s now quite a sizeable Polish minority in the UK now [...]

Cool, I didn’t know you could just grab entire articles from the IntarWeb and publish them wholesale without even giving an attribution link!

That’s what Rixstep has done?

Scott Anguish, one of the nicest guys on the Intarweb is more than a little upset because Rixstep has repeatedly refused to remove his content which has been ripped of wholesale. What’s worse…

Scott writes

My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. Yes, the DMCA would allow me to get it taken down, and I am exploring that route. But given his track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect and horrible stuff about me, Aaron Hillegass, and others, before.

It is imperative (and the reason I temporarily pulled things down) that long-time readers of Stepwise know RIX stole this.. I do not approve of his doing so. His use does not fall under fair-use, or commentary. He’s simple theft.

I’ve worked 13+ years on supporting developers by maintaining Stepwise (which truly is a labor of love) and I don’t want this theft and misrepresentation to damage that effort.

Rixstep gets traffic by stealing content, misrepresenting the opinions of the authors and doing the whole “keeping it real” thing in the face of millions of new Apple converts.

I must say it’s an interesting marketing step, calling Apple’s customers idiot fanboys while trying to flog them a replacement file manager. It really motivates me to buy it.

Scott Anguish is a pillar of the NeXTStep community. Anything that offends him and, in his own words “makes him sick” should motivate everyone interested in the Mac and especially Cocoa.

iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, but from big business. SAP as previously discussed is bringing their product to the iPhone because their own people want it (and as we now know, the SAP client is being developed using a pre-release iPhone SDK here in Belfast).

Avaya, one of the big names in modern telephony, has also signed up to the iPhone and therefore lent it some serious credibility in the Enterprise.

Avaya one-X Mobile for iPhone will allow users to have access to visual voicemail, corporate directories, and VIP lists, all via an “enterprise-secure” environment, and allow the iPhone to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls while maintaining users’ office identity.

Click for the flash demo (which, of course, you can’t view on an iPhone).

Nortel, (never the visionary) hasn’t leapt onto the bandwagon for either Contivity or their IP phone products. But then they’ve been hot on air and cold on “actually doing anything other than loudly collaborating with Microsoft”.

Good oh!

Okay.

The 10/20/30 Rule - It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

The Lessig Method - the functional opposite of the 10/20/30 rule and best illustrated by the man himself (scroll to the bottom for video).

In both cases the focus of the presentation is to capture attention though they use drastically different approaches. Pick one of them.

Essentially you want to avoid this:

From Seth Godin’s Blog. Used without permission

I think it’s tragic that I’ve seen powerpoint slides in $BIG_CORP that may have beaten this one to the title of “Worst Powerpoint Slide Ever”.

[Chris Brogan’s 100 topics]

Joel writes about in house software:

That’s the second reason these jobs suck: as soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice.

which is essentially why most Enterprise software sucks.

On my Newton, I downloaded maybe 20 apps. I bought two over the wire. I even bought one in a retail package.

On my Palm vX, I bought two apps. A Paris City Guide and a VT100 Terminal app.

On my other phones and devices between then and now I’ve downloaded two apps. One was a Telnet/SSH client for my SonyEricsson K800i which was so bad that I never used it and certainly never bought it.

The other was yesterday when I bought and downloaded Sonic the Hedgehog for my 5G iPod (the one I have donated to the kids, secure in a iFrogz Tadpole wrap).

I’m beginning to think that, based on my experience, the third party application market on Phones and PDAs might be a bit of a sham. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on software for my Mac so I’m not averse to spending a bit of cash when something catches my eye.

The logic remains. I’ve only bought software for 3 devices. My Newton, my Palm vX and my iPod. Not one purchase for any of my phones in the past.

I think this is what will make the big difference in the PDA market. I think we’ll see an explosion of sales for the iPhone in third party applications even with the premium Apple will demand for signing.

RoughlyDrafted visits the news that the iPhone is already beating the stuffing out of competitors in mobile phone operating system usage.

With iPhone demonstrating considerably better statistics in terms of market share, it must be absolutely galling to some:

The most recent market share numbers are particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, especially after CEO Steve Ballmer announced in January that Apple wouldn’t capture more than two to three percent of the market and described his own Windows Mobile platform as having or soon acquiring 60 to 80% of the smartphone market.

Ever seen Minority Report? In the film, Tom Cruise plays a cop who, through the assistance of precognitive sun-loungers, can solve murders before they happen. The precogs are pale, bald and skinny. What we missed in the film was they had a not-quite-so-good brother called Steve. He was bald, pale and kinda avocado-shaped. His predictions were pretty much 100% wrong so they kept him in a different room where he could play with his own poo.

Windows Mobile isn’t going anywhere soon, up or down in marketshare but it’s another market outside Windows for x86 markets where Microsoft is being beaten senseless with a large rubber anatomical facsimile. They’re losing money hand over fist in the games consoles. By 2005 they’d lost over $4 BILLION. They’re also going to have to pay out another BILLION or so replacing XBox 360 consoles. And they’re congratulating themselves that in Sept 2007 they got better sales figures than the Wii. Yup, 5% better despite the release of HALO 3. Brilliant, lads. You’ve chewed through more than 5 billion dollars and you’ve just edged past the Wii…for one month. I can’t wait to see your next trick.

It should also be an embarrassment for Benjamin Gray of Forrester Research, who just released another report insisting that IT departments shun the iPhone and limit their support to platforms that are dead, dying, or obscure in North America, such as the Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian.

Quite. But I’ve covered the Forrester report previously.

The rest of the article is very well written so go read.

Another gem regards why Apple didn’t run with Symbian.

It turns out that just like the original Mac System, Symbian is hamstrung by the compromises they took on in order to get decent performance on old hardware. Now, as the hardware has matured, the system remains archaic and though Symbain claims a large market share, it’s firmly divided into three separate binary-incompatible camps, a Japanese version, a version from Nokia and a third from Sony-Ericsson. Despite the investment they have, they are only licensees of the software and therefore it’s unlikely there’s going to be an overhaul of the system to bring it up to date.

A Symbian developer explains, “Nokia is more or less stuck with Symbian since it doesn’t have the competence nor the time to make a new OS from the ground up. Its only alternative, in practice, is to go Linux, which it is of course experimenting with, but it’s still not an easy path to go.

This sort of explains where Nokia are going with the Nokia 770/N800/N810 platform. Sure, it doesn’t include mobile phone features but it’s going to give them a solid developer base when they get round to releasing later hardware especially since they have promised a WiMAX version sometime in 2008. Preparing for the VoIP onslaught - oh you better believe it?

iPhone’s OSX is just starting out, less than 6 months in the public domain and it’s making big waves. There may be some ups and downs in the near future but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was followed by an Apple TV SDK sometime later.

As Guy said earlier:

“Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile can have third party development, so they are better”

David’s retort was

“iPhone is beating the stuffing out of them without an SDK. What do you reckon will happen in February when it’s available?”

Just a quick update on what I’ve been working on for Infurious recently.

Since finishing up on configuring Jabber I’ve been developing our website with the specific aim of allowing customers to download our products and purchase licenses for them.

For this I’ve returned to CakePHP and been tinkering with the PHP portion of the AquaticPrime framework which Aidan has implemented in our upcoming application, Rickshaw.

Other highlights have been working with the PayPal Sandbox and writing a component which generates “Buy Now” buttons for our apps and then handles the Instant Payment Notification and Payment Data Transfer callbacks once the transaction has been completed.

My current task is generating the license details, emailing the details to the customer and finally bunging a copy into our database for future reference and backup purposes…

It beats making minor configuration changes for the world&aposs largest financial institution any day!

I downloaded the cool CTU ringtone for iPhone inspired by “24″ and eagerly loaded it onto my iPhone.

Of course….no-one rang me all day so I didn’t get to quickly take the call, stand up in the middle of the training course and say “National Emergency, I gotta take this!” What is that all about?

Mood: Sad

A bloke I know works for the Britannia Building Society. He’s just received the following internal memo.

Piggy Banks or Froggy Banks?

As a result of feedback received from our members through the Feedback Café, we have made changes to our Piggy Bank Promotion.

We were made aware that we have members and potential members who are interested in our children’s savings account but their religious beliefs may mean that they are unable to take out the account due to the savings bank being a pig.

To ensure that the account appeals to everyone and that there are no disappointed children out there we have secured a limited stock of ‘Froggy Banks’ as an alternative to the ‘Piggy Banks’ for customers in this situation.

The ‘Froggy Banks’ are not to be offered as an alternative to all customers, only offer ‘Froggy Banks’ to customers who advise you of a religious or cultural reason that may prevent them from taking out this account. .

If you would like to order a ‘Froggy Bank’ please follow the following process;

1. Branch member emails xxxx@britannia.co.uk with the request for a frog.
2. The decision is made as to whether there is a valid case to have a frog.
3. If the request is valid a frog will be ordered.
4. XXXX will courier a frog to the customer - do not contact XXXX directly as they will only respond to requests through the correct channels.

Now, forgive me if I’m being naive, but this is the BRITANNIA building society, yes? It’s not the INDIA, or ARABIA? Last time I looked, Piggy Banks have been a part of British culture since the 18th Century. But now, it appears, Britannia are to offer a Froggy bank as an “alternative” to a Piggy Bank to those customers who are insecure enough as to be offended by a pottery piggy. And who pays for the special run of Froggy Banks, do you think? Will it be reflected in the interest rate offered to those for whom a standard piggy bank isn’t good enough? Course not - it’ll be factored into the overall costs that ALL customers pay. Even the ones without a morbid terror of all things porky.

So there we have it - established business practices and social traditions can be overturned on a whim just to be politically correct. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find the idea of brutalising women, corporal punishment and forced marriages offensive. Don’t see any of those things being publicly criticised any time soon.

The thing I find the most wierd about this is that I know loads of Muslims, none of whom would bat an eyelid at a piggy bank. So who are these people popping up and complaining about piggy banks, nativity plays, etc etc. I don’t actually think they exist. The Muslims I know personally are well-adjusted, gentle, friendly people. These few people throwing a strop at every little thing are doing no favours for Islam.

The christians in this country are constantly being reminded that it’s a multicultural society and that we should be tolerant and accepting.

It seems to me that all the “tolerance” is going down a one-way street.

p.s. I noticed that NatWest are currently using piggy bank imagery in their printed material - expect that to be dropped real soon.

p.p.s. Pork is banned in Islam. Piggy banks aren’t made out of pork.

See? I told you! Nothing is sacred any more - the politically correct brigade are entwined so deeply into the fabric of our society that we can no longer express ourselves artistically.

What a load of utter crap.

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York | The Register

Intuit recently issued an update for QuickBooks which, due to some fuckedupness deletes the entire desktop folder. That’s pretty serious shit right there.

RixStep, the whiner of the week, was caught by this bug but blames Apple. I’m not sure how “unsafe” code written by Intuit really qualifies as being Apple’s fault considering that the Intuit developers must, at some point, have tested their code on a Mac OS X system. Sure - there are bound to be bugs in Mac OS X - every system has them - but this is what testing is for. We can all justify the release of unsafe code but deleting the entire desktop folder? Not acceptable. I’ve seen this kind of problem before, in the olden days when Bungie was an independent company they released Myth 2 which had the possibility of wiping out large amounts of your Windows install. Eep. Bungie released a fix pronto and said sorry.

Rixstep, however, points the finger at Apple and not at Intuit. Oddly.

His reasons:

Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.

Did anyone else miss the NeXT takeover of Apple in 1997?

The greybeards at Apple responsible for the bugs that he complains about are actually NeXT greybeards. It’s nothing to do with KoolAid. It’s nothing to do with Apple’s head honchos and their file system APIs. It’s absolutely 100% to do with the “world’s most fantastic system”. Where do people get this kind of hyperbole? That a CEO waltzes in with an entire management team and a new operatiing system in return for $400 million. And it’s still the fault of the OLD guys at Apple when there’s a bug and a problem? Catch a grip. Apple is NeXT. The same fusty old NeXTies who built the world’s most fantastic system are the same fusty old buggers making Mac OS X. Blaming it on a nebulous “Apple” is just fairy tales designed to help you sleep at night. You seriously think there are areas of Mac OS X that Jobs doesn’t make his presence felt at? Do yu think for a second that once this bug affected Mac users that there wasn’t a high level meeting to find someone to go and explain how it was Intuit’s fault? At risk of certain death from their Steve Vader leader?

The solution is, of course, is that if you don’t like it go back to using OpenStep.

Unless of course it wasn’t actually the world’s most fantastic system….to be honest, the post reads like the inane ranting of a stalker.

The Rixstep blog spends most of it’s time complaining about Mac OS X. But mostly it’s a damn good read. It would be nice to see a post about why, if Mac OS X is so broken, Rixstep’s writers continue to use it.

Rxstep takes issue with lackingareas of Mac OS X. The lack of an Advanced button and the lack of supported GUI theming.

OS X has no advanced button. There’s no way for professionals - for developers and admins - to get beyond the confines of the tilded user home area and see what’s really going on in the file system or the network using tools available from Apple.

Professionals assigned OS X have no recourse except to take to the command line - and this with a company renowned (infamous) for how it’s eschewed the command line all these years.

The problem here is the definition of “Advanced”. Are we talking about the mythical pwer user? Mac Professionals? Mac OS X SysAdmins? Seasoned UNIX Hackers? Fusty old NeXTStep types? How do you even begin to cater for all of these groups?

You do what Apple did. You create an interface that is simple, subtle and shallow for the 80% of users and for the remaining 20% you expose the command line and create kick ass developer tools. My frustration with Windows is that the GUI tools are simply stupid with windows that cannot be resized in table view dialogs and theres no obvious way to expose that information in the command line (like I’m going to relearn DOS in 2007!) My frustration with Linux is that it’s engineered piecemeal and feels disconnected - one minute I’m safe in GUI-land and the next minute I’m in advanced GUI designed by the developer who didn’t think to ask anyone if it looked like ass.

It’s obvious OS X users want the opportunity to customise the look and feel of their systems; not being permitted to do so ‘legally’ means they will resort to ‘illegal’ approaches. And history shows they’ll use these illegal approaches if that’s all that’s available.

It’s obvious to me, as someone who meets a lot of Mac users and Mac OS X installs, that theming is a 20% solution. The tools are there for people who want them. And the providers of these tools provide the warranty (i.e. nothing).

It’s frustrating enough trying to explain to someone who’s 70% blind how to do this or click that when the dock can be moved to three sides of the screen. If they could move the top menu as well it would be an absolute nightmare.

It’s not that I disagree with the sentiment. I just think there’s bigger fish to fry than “Advanced” buttons and themes. They need to work on the bugs, they need to fix security holes. Maybe theming will become important in 2037?

Apple is trying to be all things to all people. Whereas Linux GUI interfaces attempt to cater to small subsections of the population with the unhelpful suggestion that you can change the Window Manager to suit. That’s not a solution for anyone other than the 0.2% of the population which can be bothered. Similarly the Windows interface is designed for Windows users and the absolute horlicks they made with the almost simultaneous release of Office 2007 and Vista and the completely different UI paradigms for both. Ribbons? What’s that you say?

Apple’s approach is not going to please everyone but that’s why they ship the extra tools. It’s why the BSD subsystem is no longer optional. Previous to Mac OS X 10.0 shipping there was debate about whether Apple would ship the system with Terminal.app or whetherit would be a developer-only option. Apple is walking the fine line betwene providing a UI that my mum can use and providing a UI for the Alpha Geeks.

We’re very pleased with ourselves. Last night was the Livingston and Broxburn Brass Band’s christmas concert and the whole lot of us were playing! And we weren’t awful! So, nerves shot to hell, the panic is just starting to subside (panic, I might add, caused by hearing just how amazing the senior band are) and I’m looking forward to going back to learning at a sedate pace instead of worrying about performing.

I’m sure we’ll be more relaxed the next time.