Battle for your TV

So I've been wondering who'll be weighing in for the battle for our TVs. There are certainly some interesting prospects on the market at the minute, but I who will win and does there even need to be a winner? This feels different to a format war reminiscent of VHS vs Betamax or more recently (and on-going) HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. It's more akin to the cable vs satellite vs freeview vs top-up-TV wars we've seen recently.

Both the cable and satellite offerings have pay-per-view content, while freeview generally doesn't. All of these offerings have recording options, although generally with cable or satellite you would have to use the operators set up box, with freeview you are free to choose from a variety of products, some with hard drives for recording.

Two more recent entries on the market are worth looking at further though. BT and Microsoft. BT have released Vision, which is a freeview recorder with pay-per-view capabilities. It looks as if BT have taken two interesting features from the above and merged them before the others had a chance. Get free digital channels, the ability to record programs and the option to purchase movies, TV shows and sporting events all without a contract and monthly fee.

So far so good, apart from the fact with BT Vision, as the content is delivered over the IP network it means you have to have a minimum broadband speed to cope with the streaming, and the way to do that is to have BT broadband. As a side note, to have BT broadband you need a BT land line, sorry all those who switched to cable.

It seems like a lot of competition, but let's not forget the software companies attempts. Well, I call them software companies, but if you have an Xbox 360 or Apple TV then that's hardware really isn't it?

Now in the UK you can download standard definition or high definition pay per view content. Its movies and TV shows at the minute with no sporting content signed up, but who knows what the future might bring. We've been able to download TV content from iTunes for a while now (well not really in the UK) and let's not forget the muted Amazon Unbox.

We're crossing into interesting territory now. With cable and satellite operators you need a billing relationship (and all that implies, i.e. address etc). With BT, you also need that, but have to buy into their other products. With iTunes, xBox 360 Live and Amazon Unbox you pay for what you use when you use it (or use pre-pay credits) and use them where ever you are signed in to the relevant hardware or software to view your content.

Are we living in a world where we increasingly don't need or want bundles? With mobile broadband from providers like 3, and wireless city meshes potentially driving out needing a cable run into your home for land line phone services and broadband, where digital TV is free and pay-per-view content available through a variety of sources be they games consoles, set top boxes or just over the web do consumers want to be tied into contracts and services they can only use in one place?

SDPs and other acronyms

Acronyms have always filled me with fear ever since my university Software Engineering class where we'd read case studies but with the names changed in a humourous way, like SNAPPERS for an automated processed through a photography lab. What it stands for now escapes me, but leaves me frightened nether-the-less. The telco industry is filled with them, the software industry has plenty go spare too and I'm stuck in the middle.

After reading JPs recent entry about the word 'platform' now being an overloaded word, I remembered what the telco industry was currently going through. I get the impression sometimes that in the industry if it's not worth putting a committee together to solve a problem, then there is no problem.

Take your typical Service Delivery Platform (SDP), talk about a problem that doesn't need solving! SDPs are specific to the telco industry according to Wikipedia. But, why are they specific? If SDPs are so central to (and I cringe as I type this) 'Telco 2.0' why isn't anyone else doing it? Why can't I just buy one? For that matter, why isn't there an open source SDP I can run?

I really like Urmy's "complex is lots of simple" approach. I look at some of the newish companies coming out and they seem to have something in common. David James said something which stuck with me about making your product x, the best damm product x anyone has seen. Take Twitter for example, what they do is really good, and it's simple to use and code against.

When building a generic framework, I'd like to see lots of loosely connected, easy to use web APIs to make it so easy to plug an application together, you could build it before you had time to put a committee together. Yes, those newish start ups do have the luxury of having no legacy systems like telco's do, but that doesn't give anyone permission to shroud those legacy systems in the mysteries of acronyms.

hReview use for music ratings

After my previous post on various music web sites and they work out for me, PSD left a comment pointing to the microformats site, and more specifically hReview.

What I'd really like to do is be able to traverse my music collection and build up a hReview page of where I've given a rating to songs and albums. What would be cool, would be to then import that into those music sites so my musical tastes are syncronized (and no, not the album by Jamiroquai).

Twitter as a messaging platform

When you have an itch, scratch it!

Well, that's what I've started to do. My itch is a common one in the UK and probably throughout Europe and certain parts of the world, but when you generalise it, it becomes a problem that nearly every one has. When there's a certain piece of information that I want to know as it happens, how do I find that out?

For me, it's Arsenal scores. I'm a big Arsenal fan, and unfortunately I don't get to see many games live (other wise I might not have this problem). As much as Arsenal play on TV, I often don't get a chance to see that either, I don't subscribe to Sky or cable, so I'll pop to the pub. Anyhoo, I want to know when there's a change of score, and I want to know the final score of all Arsenal games. So what did I do about it?

Let's put that question to one side for now and look at Twitter. I've been using Twitter for a few months and I'm lovin' it! One of the key points here is that it's a pulling mechanism of messaging. You have to 'follow' someone to view their updates but you can view those messages on the web, through RSS, third party applications (using the Twitter web API or RSS) or through SMS.

Let's get back to the question at hand. The Beeb has a great website for sport, particularly their refreshing latest score pages. Although not RSS, which is a shame, the page is formatted nicely, so writing an application to extract key data is pretty simple. Twitter can then be used to post that data too and anyone, myself included, can subscribe that information in my preferred means.

Looking back at the little application I wrote, it's screamingly obvious that with easy to use web APIs all you have to do is write some plumbing code to do what you want to do and scratch that itch that's been irritating you.

So far, I've created users on Twitter for Arsenal, Birmingham and Manchester Utd.

Soon, I'll be creating users for all Premiership clubs and pushing this a little more. Let me know if you have an itch (or well, at least a team you'd like to follow, it can be any team that has a live scores page from the BBC Sport Football website), let me know =)

last.fm vs musicovery vs pandora

I love listening to music while at work, and I can't help but feel agitated that my favourite web music players (last.fm and pandora.com) don't work when I'm on the company network. I've recently discovered musicovery.com from a friend mentioning it on Twitter, which more and more is my source of information. It works on the company network which rocks, I think it streams through a flash based player to traverse the company network rather than streaming straight into the browser. I can't help but think though that why isn't there a microformat for favourite and 'banned' music to use anywhere?

I'd rather use last.fm or pandora.com at work, but I can't. The next best thing would be to share my 'taste' of music across these sites.

Come on everyone, microformats are the way forward!

Blyk - Free calls for adverts

Something came to my attention earlier this week, a new virtual cell-co, Blyk. Blyk's angle here is that it's giving away over 200 free SMS and 47 minutes of free phone calls. All this is in exchange for being advertisted at.

There seems to be two schools of thought about advertising, the Cluetrainthought (number 74) against the Google/Facebook "look at us we're made of millions yet we don't take a penny" thought. Blyk seems to be taking the second side.

Get them while they're young!

Let's consider for a while, as the Guardian points out, teenagers are going to love this, free stuff rocks! But the Register points out a more serious side with the consequences.

Blyk will not only have your profile data for getting the sim (age and sex etc), but by using the handset it will also have call and location data about the caller as well. This data is invaluable, your location (although generally restricted by hundreads of meters at best through Cell Mast postitioning) can be used for targeted advertising and can also use call and SMS history to target ads as well. Will they go as far as reading your texts for key words?

People expect stuff for free now! Most are willing to be advertised at for free stuff, but some are still cautious about this.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this all yet. Anyway, check them out and Blyk in the news:

http://about.blyk.com/home/
http://www.blyk.co.uk/
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2006/gb20061103_894708.htm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/24/blyk-launches-ad-based-mobile-network/

Gordon Ramsey and Software Craftmanship

It's amazing the way you can find links between tenious, discrete things. This week my tenious link is Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmare. I find it really interesting that no matter where Gordon finds himself he tends to offer the same three pieces of advice, the only difference is how he assists execute that.

1) Keep things simple - most resturants Gordon visits tend to have elaborate menu's, trim the fat and do what you're good at.

2) increase efficenticy - to increase turn around and quality, put better processes in place. A simplefied menu will help, but add fresh food with pre-prepared (that day, not days old!) bases that you can churn out.

3) do some marketing to increase awareness. Let people know you've changed and give them samples to show them the goodness.

Looking at this, I can certainly see where my industry fits in. Make your products easy to use, make it so building your products is easy, and go out there any let people know about it and try it for free!

RippleRap

Whilst at LeWeb3 in Paris earlier in December I had the opportunity to test drive RippleRap.com from my buddies over at Osmosoft. Ripple Rap is a note sharing tool that can be used in Conferences, telephone meetings and the like. One missing feature was a mechanism to give feedback, so I thought I'd throw something up on here and send it over to them.

RippleRap is built on TiddlyWiki, a open source, primarily client based all-in-one wiki page and so I was somewhat familiar with the navigation and use of the application.

So, the question that I wanted answered was why I would want something like this instead of a text editor (local or hosted) or a wiki page online? The wifi at LeWeb was up and down and as you run RippleRap from disc you would never get any connection errors. If you were using a hosted solution you would have had to use local based notes and copy and paste all over the place. If that were the case, why not use just a local text editor? Well, when you do have connection, RippleRap automatically publishes any saved notes to anyone else using the app for that conference. This means others can read your notes and conversely, you can read other people's notes.

I got some benefit being able to read other people's notes from the conference. Others had picked up on things I missed and I could read notes from sessions I missed as soon as someone saved their notes (and had connection to publish). Some added quotes, some commentary and thoughts; I think a range of different possibilities will emerge if this grows.

I like the fact I can also get the feeds from agenda points, there's a great example from JPs talk.

There were some things that could be improved upon and new features which could spring up. My thoughts drift the idea of a conference dashboard where I could enter tags which I'm interested in and be presented in feeds from the web tagged with that information. For example, the tag LeWeb3 appeared in Twitter, Flickr and probably a whole bunch more. I'd also like to be able to tune that to get updates from sites which I'm interested in and not to receive updates from sites in which I'm not interested in.

I'd also like to have a permalink to the notes I've and others have made so I can quote those in blog posts.

It'd be cool to be able to go to RippleRap.com to set up a conference with agenda and then pull that down to distribute it, or get the permalink to that for others to download.

Vlogging the anwser to TV reborn? Get out of town!

The panel in this session were rambling on about video blogging with a bunch of web apps which I won't mention here. Don't get me wrong, this is relevant, the fact you can do an interview on a phone and publish it is freaking cool. However, this session titled "TV Reborn" sounded like it should have been a discussion on how media companies can play with the web and they failed to deliver!

I asked a question (heartbeat++++): "you've talked a lot about video blogging, but what about open source film like A Swarm of Angels and content providers giving it up like Star Wars Mashups?"

The answer was summed up by Paul Downey on Twitter.

The panel didn't understand the question, and I was largely ignored. It's not that these guys don't get it, but (a Phillipe Stark saying coming up) they are walking and looking at their feet.

[edit]

thanks to Phil Hawksworth for capturing this photo:


[edit2]

Here's the video, goto 41 minutes to see my question:

http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.394193

International Surfing

Sitting in a hotel lobby, trying to get onto wifi, I seem to have 4 accounts with my provider through an employee scheme, my broadband and FON and a mysterious 4th. When I tried to log in with two of those I had an error messaging saying something about not having 'roaming' enabled. The provider didn't recognise my FON account and I couldn't get details of my other account. Thank you, but why should I have to have roaming to get on the web? It's not like I'm making long distance international phone calls, the web is here in the room (I can feel it), but I'm not allowed to play. I had to buy credit, and that just sucks!

100th Blog post

I'd noticed that my blogger account was showing 100 posts for this blog and to be honest I was a little surprised. I thought I'd go back and look at my posting habits. Check out the graph. When I started this blog, it was mainly so I could post amusing anecdotes of my travels around Italy back in May 2005. I'd been fed up of emailing everyone and missing people off, so I gave my friends the blog link and told them to read that for my misadventures. If you've been reading for a while, you'd noticed that after that trip I had nothing more to say. Then I started with a few bits and pieces until a few months ago when I started hitting the blog hard.

While I've been working in my current job, I've been absorbing more and reading lots which has culminated in my suddenly having quite a bit to say.

Now, sometimes I don't know if other people are having the same thoughts as me, or if I'm having the same thoughts of other people. Art reflecting life, life reflecting art and all that. But it seems people are being quite reflective of their own blogging.

uncov.com launches against bloggers who like to think their journalists. I don't think I'm in this category, I just find this gives me a place to ramble, and get my thoughts down.

Piotr and David have both commented on why they've not be blogging enough, and I'd say to that, that blogging to me is my mind dump. It's a place to get everything out. I'm not a journalist, and I certainly don't spend a great deal of time writing my entries. In fact, I'm with Scoble here, don't be afraid to be wrong or to look wrong. And if you're thinking about stopping your blog, think about your global microbrand.

Using Onaswarm.com or a solution to the Robbie Clutton problem

After some discussion on my previous entry (people do read my blog, cool), I'm happy to say that so far I'm pleased with onaswarm.com and the conversations coming from David Janes over there.

I tried out a few things which Cristiano wanted, like hosting the link in your own domain and building gadgets.

First, on my own (rarely used) home page I added an auto discovery RSS element, so the RSS icon appears in the address bar and points to my lifestream feed. I also added a new page to show just a gadget along with the auto discovery RSS feed. You could do similar things with a redirect straight to the feed, or use some XSLT to transform the feed to your own presentation.

As a lazy developer and human being, I had hoped someone had built something like this so I didn't need to. Thanks onaswarm, expect some feature requests from me in the future =)

Becoming a Software Engineer

I was recently asked by a former disertation tutor to do a talk at my old university on being a software engineer at an open day for prospective university students. I was happy to oblige, and I've put up the slides on slideshare.net. However, in true Downey form there's not much in terms in written text, but there's more pictures and hopefully, engagement with the audience by the presenter.

This led to some interesting debates on my return to work, with some questioning the need to do a computer science degree at all. It seems there are plenty of people with other technical degrees that move into the software field, and seem to do rather well for themselves.

My take is that my degree was very vocational, and the things I learn't at university I apply directly to my job today. Also that I picked up a lot of theory and hopefully have a more rounded and thorough understanding of the technical problems we face. Hopefully. I have to say though that probably for each useful module I had, I had one useless module. Go figure, I could have tried harder at university, I could have learn't more, but I came out with a good degree and have a good job so no massive loss.

On reflection, a lot of the books I bought at uni are either sitting on my shelf largely unread or have been sold on eBay. But now adays I tend to read a lot of technical and 'business' books, so what would I recomend to prospective students?

'Technical books'

Agile web development with Rails - an excellent introduction to web programming in a cool language, though it leaves testing a little late.


'Business books'

Mavericks at work - a look at innovative solutions to common business problems.
Cluetrain Manifesto - how the web has changed business and made us communicate again.
Getting Real - 37 Signals answer to bloatware.

'Methodology books'

Practices of an agile developer - excellent practices to follow for an agile developer
Lean Software Development - lean and trim software development.

There's probably a whole bunch more I can't think/remember of and a bunch I'd like to read.

What would you recomend?

Stuffed or information overload

I'm stuffed, I feel like I've had three Christmas dinners in a row, I can't eat any more. No more fees for me please.

I seriously need a cull of the feeds in my reader, I can't keep up with everything that people are writing. I tend to have a habit of adding feeds left right and center when ever I read a good post/article. I like and want to be able to read good bloggers.

What to do?!?

Lifestreaming or the Robbie Clutton problem

With horror (ok delight really), I read about the "Robbie Clutton" problem on Simon's blog. It's interesting how a disgruntled post seems to get more traction, but hey ho.

Check out that post, then come back.

Ok, finished?

Good.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how to make lifestreaming easier for everyone. At the moment, I've seen blogs about doing that using Yahoo! Pipes, which is cool, but let's make it easier.

Any volunteers to help build a life stream site welcome =)

How much is it worth?

I've always liked my gadgets and my entertainment, such as music and movies. Recently, these industries have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing world around them. I've thought about this somewhat in the past (see: here and here) , but now my thoughts turn to: what would I be willing to pay for what kind of service?

Now, for example, Heroes, the awesome TV show is currently running the second series in the US, but the first season is only just finishing up in the UK. Luckily it's on BBC, so my TV license covers me to watch that, but really, why should I miss out on a digital product which is available in a different country, but now in my own country?

Let's get this straight, a show show/series/season is a product. It's something that you pay for, either through TV license, subscription or pay per view. It's not a traditional product, but it's something a lot of people pay for, hence the high cost for production companies to try to out do each other.

I might have lost out on this, take Lost for example. In the UK, it's on Sky first, and I'll be dammed if I'm paying £40p/m for something I don't need. I'll also be dammed if I'm going to pay £40 for the first half or even the whole season when it comes out on DVD. I might, however, be interested to pay a nominal amount to watch the stream of an episode. Hell, I might pay even more if I can download it and watch it where-ever. Why not take a leaf out of Radiohead's book and let me download the whole lot, week by week, and when available, send me a copy of the DVD release.

Yeah, I'd pay for that. I don't want to subscribe, I want to pay per view, and if that's through a consumer product like BT Vision, or Freeview then so be it. But, how about just using the web? And please, none of this DRM crap, I'd like to be able to watch the damm video on my Linux laptop while I'm traveling.

Word to the wise: I'm not going to pay for Sky, Cable or any subscription TV service. I'm not likely to buy a DVD of a TV series if I've seen it already, though I might take a chance if I've not seen it and it's reasonably priced. I am likely to pay for an on-demand/download service for high quality, HD content if I don't have to wait 9 months after it's shown on US television.

Time to get your act together, that includes you BBC!

The customer is always right, and now they've only got themselves to blame

Are you fed up of buying the same old crap from the same old places (for anyone who's been to my flat, please ignore the fact it looks like an Ikea showroom, just for now)? It seems that more power is being given to the people, more power, more choice, more voice!

Though I was taken my Barry Schwartz view on this (an excellent presentation I'm sure you'll agree), it seems now that the small guy is coming through, and they are giving people what they want. Something different.

Threadless.com is a great example here. A community driven clothes selling retail web site. Users can upload their designs and other users can vote for those. Winning* designs are printed by threadless for a limited run. Once those t-shirts sell, users can request another print run though at threadless's discretion. What an awesome idea.

Flicking through Saturday's Guardian, I come across another innovative, if similar idea. Essentially the same, except for household objects. People can upload designs of products and others can suggest changes and make comments. Once that product has a certain amount of votes (currently 1000), the business agrees to take on the design (unless it conflicts with copyright, health and safety laws etc) and create a batch to sell to retail channels. Now, this guy has just set up a channel agreement with Muji, a UK high street distributor. Instead of the threadless payback (kudos, plus some one off cash and gift vouchers - plus potentially more for re-prints and winning further competitions), the designer is given royalties on profits. How awesome is that. Both interesting models.

So now, not only can you buy something that's different, on a limited run, you can now potentially get your own ideas made for yourself and into the homes of others.

These sites let you contribute, but personalisation sites are doing well too, least we forget moo.com =)

*winning defined by threadless.com, not exactly sure what that is as I've not entered a competition

Experiencing Customer Experience

I may be wrong here, but the only time I really know I'm experiencing customer experience is when something goes wrong. That something going wrong could be any part of the buying, or 'in life' experience. I wanted to tell a few stories of when something went wrong with me and my reactions to those experiences.

easyjet

I bought tickets to Barcelona for Tech Ed from Easyjet, but made the mistake of booking the wrong week. I don't know why, my mind was elsewhere or something. Anyhoo, I noted that to change a flight there's a charge applied, fair enough I though. When I booked however, I was shown prices which I believed were the new price flights before my flight prices had been deducted. Only after I'd gone through the whole process had I realised that I'd been charged that extra. To me it had looked like I'd paid twice. I contacted Easyjet and over several increasingly frustrating exchanges I had not got any compensation. I had believed I had been charged twice, they didn't even listen to my point of view, and instead pointed me to their T&Cs. Bad customer experience.

threadless.com

I'd made the stupid mistake of getting carried away by a threadless.com sale. All t-shirts for $10. At the time I was just about to move home, but instead of directing them somewhere sensible, like my parents, I got them delivered to my home that I was currently occupying. The package went missing in the post. When I contacted threadless they were suprisingly helpful. They asked me to wait two weeks just in case the package showed up. When they didn't, they offered a full refund! I took credit, as I wanted to order some more t-shirts and they gave me an additional $5 for my troubles! Even though I'd pretty much said I was most likely my fault! Good customer experience.

land of leather

When I'd moved into my new home, I was in need of a sofa/couch. As it happened I'd seen an ad for a sale in the land of leather. I went into the store and after a while, seen a cracking sofa. Paid for it and had it delivered the next week. Only it wouldn't fit through the door. Somehow this was my fault. I'd thought the sofa would come apart, surely this is a common problem, I mean I only life in a standard size house. That was the first problem, the second was that the delivery drivers expected to get paid. This pissed me off royally, why should I pay for a product I'd not received? They wouldn't even give a refund. Bad customer experience.

Round up

It's not all about the money, it's about the dialog. Land of leather and Easyjet refused to enter a dialog with me, which meant I didn't get what I wanted and damaged their brand in my eyes. Treadless.com entered a dialog with me and exceeded expections.

Buying, Building and Open Sourcing

Stumbled across this great little post on Try Before You Buy Marketing, thanks to Doc Searls Thankslinking. It got me thinking about companies selling products they don't use themselves, there's got to me loads out there. Equally, there must be loads of companies that have products which are used within the company network that could be sold or open sourced, as well as companies who spend fortunes on buying products that could be obtained from the open source community.

Madness.

Software engineers need love too.

It's amazing how a new environment, a ton of pressure and a bunch of uncertainty can make people react. I found out earlier this week how software engineers react. At a three day off site, a large group of people, both developers and 'suits', were told to leave their job titles at the door. Unfortunately for me and the team I was working with, it felt as if we'd left our software engineering principles at the door too.

Having essentially 48 hours to build a product, mostly from scratch, or at least using new products/APIs and services to plug something together seemed to suggest that we threw our best practices out of the window. Now the working environment wasn't set up exactly how we would have liked it, but we could have done something about that. Without even the basic necessity of source control, it felt as if the team were fire fighting from an early stage with USB drives being swapped around at crucial times, along with cries of "hey, can you add this method to the code?" when it could have been done easily and checked in.

I certainly felt like I was developing with one hand without using test driven development, source control, continuous integration et al. If three days being thrown into the deep end has taught me anything, its to be prepared.

I once heard the phrase, "a bad tradesman blames his tools", but conversely, does that mean that a tradesman is only as good as the tools he uses? Perhaps I've grown so used to the tools that I use that I've come to depend on them, and while that encourages best behaviour, does that make me inflexible?

Introducing the next killer app: The API

The next killer app should free you, not tie you up. Learn to let go of the simple portal which either doesn't know or doesn't care about giving you your data. Throw away your one-size-fits-all applications. Discard your thick client can-only-use-on-one-computer solutions, abandon your installed behind the corporate firewall vendor stacks. Strive for simple and open protocols, embrace hosted in the cloud services, love the API and the data it allows you to get too. Pick the applications that suit your needs, adopt services that give you access to your data. It's your data, it doesn't belong to them. You are the user, customer and developer. Choose integration and syndication. Choose the web. Choose life.

I'm going to blog about you

First prize goes to Alan Spillane, first person to blog about meeting me (and Nigel). I have a few people asking me if I was that guy in that video, but this is a step further.

While talking about Tech Ed, Alan mentions meeting us and has a picture to prove it. Brilliant, that certainly made my day. Check it out here.

Other peoples blogs

Right, annoyed enough now (been reading uncov.com and feeling writing an agitated post). It really bugs me blogs have some mystical hook into a online book marking site that results in most, if not all blog posts having only links.

Please stop it, if I want to know what you're reading, I'll subscribe to your del.icio.us (or whatever) feed.

If you want to subscribe to mine, you can get it at del.icio.us/robert.clutton.

You won't find link only posts on my blog entry =p

Anonymity, Freedom of speech and privacy on the web

Is it everyones right to be anonymous online?

I was pointed to a discussion going on at getsatisfaction.com about Facebook users not being able to sign up with 'fake names'. Really, who is Facebook to judge such things? I have friends who sign up to most things with a fake name and email address specifically to not give away personal information. Who cares?

In my previous post I discussed the use of inner dialogs spilling out onto the web giving everyone a voice. Though the volume of randomness is extremely high (my RSS reader constantly tells me I've got more then a 1000 items to read, yikes!) everyone deserves a voice. We may choose to not listen, but that's another matter.

Like an employee kept behind a firewall during their 9-5, do they have a right to discuss their opinions openly on the web and do that in an anonymous way?

Others are framing what I think is the same scenario differently, JP talks about openness rather then anonymity while David Weinberger goes more into depth on the Facebook ad platform regarding privacy.

An interesting comeback, as I'm reading Cluetrain Manifesto at the moment (finally), and Chris Locke is talking about his struggles to get his voice heard while at IMB. Being locked down by the corporation, Chris resorted to anonymous mailing list/early blogs to get his views across.

Certainly, when I started using the web, I used psudeo names when I posted on message boards and even when I started blogging here. I'm not so anonymous anymore, but that's my choose and my decision to make, not any one application or business.

Social Networks and Inner Dialogs

"With Britain home to four million blogs, the inner monologue is in peril. But when everything is made public, something is lost" - Marina Hyde

Amazing! That comment and the rest of the article made me question why I even write blog posts in the first place. Yet, I'm still here, typing away. The part about the inner dialog makes me think about one of JDs daydreams from Scrubs (yes, I love that show). It all got me thinking, there certainly is a lot of information on the superhighway, and it's becoming more and more important how we filter that as more and more people have a voice and use it. I've certainly seen some complete gibberish on some of the social networks out there, along with the many blogs.

Does your inner dialog feel repressed in todays world? I certainly find myself talking/thinking to myself as much as any other time. Except now I think about how I can turn it into a blog post lol.

Convergence, Divergence and Social Web Apps

What's all this fuss about the iPhone huh? Do people really want convergence? Don't people like carrying around several different electronic devices on them to do everything they want? Wait. Scratch that.

Seriously though, has the world gone convergence mad? Is there any demand left for divergence? Well, I look at my hi-fi system and I see a perfect example. Now, I'm no expert, but since I had my first job stacking shelves at the local supermarket, I've bought hi-fi separates. I've bought good components and upgraded as I've gone along. I pay for what I want, and don't pay for what I don't. Want a kick ass amp? Hell yeah! Want a DAB digital radio? Not really.

When I look at social web apps like Facebook, I see massive convergence. Yes, developers are writing third party apps, but it feels like I get trapped in the Facebook mini-web. I like being able to choose what web apps I want to use and how to use them, and yes, I even pay for some of those (Flickr Pro rocks!). All of those apps are online and interact-able over the web and some even over SMS (e.g. Twitter and Dopplr).

This leads me onto another thought. None of the apps send me an email to tell me something has changed on their site and that I need to go to their site to see that. I can just get that straight through that email, or through other means like RSS (which means I can stick with my favourite RSS reader).

I mention this as I was sent this brilliant blog post at telepocalyse.net which reads like a web manifesto, and one I can sign up to.

In Facebook, I've got my 'friends' sorted and they can see any changes in state, application notifications and lots of other crap. I don't have to tell my friends about each application which is good, but means I get loads of crap I'm not interested in and find it hard to filter that out.

That was for the first point, I think I've touched on some of the others and you can easily see what the post is describing with the others. I can totally understand the point about OpenID though. Please, please, please, if you're reading this and are building a web app, for the love of god let me use OpenID.

Steven Fry, Techo Blogger

I grew up watching Steven Fry in Blackadder and always found him funny. When ever I'd read an article from him I'd always found myself chuckling. I had no idea that he wrote a gadget column in the Guardian until they printed an article about the iPhone on the front page on the Saturday edition. You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/10/iphone1?gusrc=rss&feed=media

This is probably the most convincing article I've read about the iPhone for the UK, worth a read.

Making Friends and Influencing Robots

Going to a conference to show off communication services often results in those we talk to thinking about the different notifications engines that sending SMSs could be used for. Cool, great, yeah... Now and then someone comes along with something a little different. Step up Mr Paul Foster. Paul has an interesting gadget at home. A robot. It reminds me of the robot in Rocky IV that sings happy birthday to Paulie. The subtle difference though is Paul's robot travels through his house and does stuff and isn't just in a classic (?) 80s film. Don't ask me what kind of stuff, I just don't know. What I do know though is that the robot has a web server and using CallFlow, Paul can use the pattern matching DTMF collections to POST requests to the web server that is Paul's robot, and that the robot can understand those requests and perform a task which Paul has programmed in. Read for yourself what Paul is up to.

Round of applause for the most creative idea I've heard of so far.

This triggered a distant memory (August is distant still right?), when JayFresh forwarded me a clip sent from Michael found about using a phone to control a video game. Check it out about 6 minutes in.

At the time this wasn't possible with the Web21C SDK, but Paul has shown that with CallFlow this is most definitely possible.

Happy coding.

Taking a REST at the library

I really like the fact more and more REST friendly web APIs are springing up in unlikely places. Embrace the web ... and go see if the local library has that book in stock ;)

data mining for good

There's been some press about data privacy, and these do revolve around large issues such as national ID cards, but data mining has it's uses. Consider this, I use last.fm to scrobble my music through my music player on my PC (also available for iPods when sync'd through iTunes).

From this data along with my location, I just got an email with gig listing of music I might like coming up in my location.

Awesome.

my blog stability

I've been told that my blog has been a little unstable over the last few weeks and after investigating the good people at GoDaddy.com told me how I'd mis-configured my named servers, whoops!

Hopefully anyone affected shouldn't have any more problems, but please let me know if you do.

Robbie

All Change: Lessons Learnt?

There is an interesting article in todays Metro (which is a rare thing in itself). A discussion with David Signton. He was talking with reference to the claims that the space fairing nations are preparing to go back to the moon and eventually onto Mars, but had disapointment in his voice. "I think they feel we haven't really hoisted on board the lessons we discovered from the Apollo missions about Earth". OK, he's talking more about environmentalism here, but the lesson could be said for so many other things.

I wonder where we make this mistake in our everyday/work lifes. When we pass things on, or move about in the work place, does the loss of continuity affect performance? Can this lead to the same discussion being had over and over or the same mistakes being made over and over?

Open Source: consumer vs creator (more thoughts)

I had some more thoughts on my earlier entry regarding those who make it their business to sell products that solve common business problems. There's plenty of examples from operatoring systems to specific industry solutions.

These do range from consumer (as in retail) to business and as such have different market stratgeies and such. I was wondering if it would depend what market you were in to how your open source strategy would be implemented.

If you solve a common problem, should you open source it, sell it or shelf it?

Open Source: consumer vs creator

Talk of "we do open source" or "we need to embrace open source" and lots of other comments at an open source awareness day at work yesterday made me think. What makes an individual, or company "open source" friendly?

I think I may have been guilty of some naivety around consumers of open source. I've heard some people be openly proud of the consumptive use of open source, but is it good enough to only be a consumer?

JP Rangaswami's blog post on 'Build vs Buy vs Opensource' springs to mind. Let's take in a few examples, and yes, they will be simple, as I'm simple minded ;)

Company A has a business problem that needs solving and they download a bunch of open source tools and applications (web servers and the like) and write a bit of custom code and make a custom application that solves that problem. Cool, well done.

Company B has a similar problem, but this time they sell that application as a vendor . OK, that's all well and good they've got costs to cover and if there's a market that's willing to pay then their analysts have done their job.

Now, what if both products from company A and B become common problems in themselves. Do they have a responsibility to open those products up? Perhaps responsibility is the wrong word, there may be circumstances (not red take circumstances that is) that makes this not the case, but do they at least have a moral obligation as a consumer to at least consider opening up?

Perhaps later, company A build a new product completely from scratch. If that becomes a common problem later, do they have any more reason to open source?

I suppose what I'm trying to ask is, is it enough as a creator to be a consumer of open source software to say "I'm open source friendly"?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh, and if you didn't attend, the take away was definitely PSDs poster.

Show me the feeds

Why is it when I subscribe to certain feeds that people choose to only show a snippet of their post/article. I want to read that in my RSS reader, I don't want to have to go to your site. Especially when I'm offline and I've downloaded the feeds through Google Gears, I get no value from those sites and it bugs me. Stop it. If you want metrics, then use Feedburner or something. Show me the feeds!!!

Keeping it Simple

I love this quote from Lifehacker.com

In short, Apple's used the best productivity trick in the world: to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. Leopard's release will no doubt bring on an uptick of Mac users who diligently back up their system and data without even thinking about it.

I love that some companies are driving simplicity as product differentials. Apple are a great example, but I love the stuff 37Signals are churning out as well.

Keep us honest!

Posting updates to Twitter with Ruby

Step one in my new Premiership updater: post status to Twitter. It's pretty easy, so I'll just dive straight into code:


require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

url = URI.parse('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml')
url.user = "your username"
url.password = "your password"

res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, {'status' => "hello world"})

puts res.body


Just two requires are needed before getting your hands dirty. Next is setting up Basic Authentication on the URI and posting with a single parameter of 'status'. Job done. View the result in XML or JSON through the update extension in the URI.

Twitter for group messaging

As what usually happens, I'm sitting somewhere or doing something completely unconsiderate for writing ideas down when something strikes me. I'm sitting in the car this time, driving home from a co-location day in Milton Keynes. I start thinking about Jay Fresh being stuck on a train, in the nicest possible way of course, and how Twitter could be used for more purposes then one to one or one to many communications. Perhaps an application could use Twitter to update those who are interested in certain information.

My thougths evolved into different kinds of application uses for Twitter and so far I've come up with two. Firstly, an account for an application to use for the specific use of microblogging. After this thought I went and set up an account for Mojo, a project I have been involved in at work, so those interested could hear what Mojo had to say.

The second use is more detailed to an application than say, a group of developers such as the Mojo example. As a football fan, I'm always interested in the latest Arsenal score, but I don't follow them extensively and am often out and about when they play choosing instead to watch highlights. I had thought about building an application that could slurp feeds from relevant sporting sites and post those to Twitter using their API. Then using features such as follow, I could get those feed updates straight to my mobile.

Cool eh? Now I have to go write it =)

Imifed blogging and other coolness

I'm entering this blog post through a GTalk chat with Imified.com which is a reminder/notes/other service for use through your favorite chat client. It's sure to be a favourite with those who like their command line tools. It's like running something through the command, but it's a chat. It's pretty sweet, especially with cool modules like reminding whereby you can set a note and add the command "in 15 mins" to get that reminder to your IM window.

Left field anwsers

Ever seen an answer for a completely different problem that you thought "hold on, that could work for me".

Project Darkstar from Sun in an Open Source online game server with massive scalability that may help answer some questions for me. Interesting.

Technorati Profile

OpenID and the Friend of a Friend social network problem

I've been reading some of the Google Groups about social network portability, and this was an interesting side from David Recordon.

Surely there's got to be a lot of leg room for OpenID as the data carrier of some kind of FOAF micro-format? OpenID can be extended, and if everyone moves towards OpenID as the authentication method of choice, surely that can be represented as a node in the social graph.

Something work thinking about methinks...

More finger pointing in the music biz

Apparently Apple and Tesco are more to 'blame' then the P2P file sharing sites for the 'crisis' facing the music industry. There has been a flurry of activity around 'the biz' recently with Radiohead's freebie album. At least Universal have taken some steps to move forward by selling USB sticks with singles on them with additional value add features such videos and the like. I can't say that I'd buy one, but at least they're trying something.

Once again I'll repeat my message. Stop moaning and change your business models to survive, or you will fall.

apps of the day

There seem to be so many cool little apps appearing on the web. I found Xpenser through an article on Lifehacker.com (http://lifehacker.com/software/personal-finance/track-your-purchases-as-they-happen-at-xpenser-309209.php) . It's real simple tool where you can post your current expenses to keep track of them via SMS, IM or email. You can then get some simple reports from those to help with your personal finances.

Sweet.

Jott looks like another interesting place, doing voice transcripts from voice mails and putting those as feeds on their site. Only available to US residents at the moment, which is a shame as I'd really like to try it out.

The secret of Radiohead's "In Rainbows" business model.

I wrote a while ago about the differences between the Telco and Musix "biz" (http://blog.iclutton.com/2007/04/difference-between-music-and-telco.html) and I think Radiohead have taken a brave step. I hope they drag the music industry along with them. Change is constant, adjust your business models to feed the needs of modern society or risk being left behind.The Times have run some uncharacteristic headlines "The Day the Music Indsustry Died" (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2602597.ece), although they had a more Times like headline today (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2633798.ece). They asked some interesting questions about the price people are willing to pay and had some interesting comments from artists in the industry. It'll certainly be interesting to see reaction from bands like Oasis (current unsigned and looking for a distributor) and Charlatans (who have said signing a deal is like joining the army). Although it seems the record companies have the money behind them to market their clients, these bigger bands can get away without this through marketing online, through radio or live sessions and festivals.There's so much we get for free on the web, I can't really see consumers paying for music at all within a few years apart from those collectors editions.Sit back, watch the industry and listen to the music.BTW, I bought my Radiohead download for £5 and I'm very happy with that.

read more | digg story

Google patents datacenter-in-a-shipping-container, ignores Sun's BlackBox

Amazing how some companies can execute on some many different technologies and infrastructor plays. Their target market could be anything from SMBs to large enterprises. I'm sure the bigger enterprises may have difficultly giving up their infrastrure, but surely the more that non-core business related activities are outsourced the more the business can focus on key deliverables.If that were true!

read more | digg story

The Perfect Desktop?

If OpenSUSE can handle my tv.Arsenal.com football (soccer) streams, I'll be a happy bunny. What do you think? Should I give it a go and bump Ubutnu?

read more | digg story

laptop batteries

I've been running my lightweight Fujitsu Seimens S7010 for about 2 years now, although there was a period of non use whilst using my massively oversized HP NW9440. A few months ago when I started playing with Ubuntu on the Fijitsu I've noticed the massive improvement in battery life compared with the HP. I've just noticed a warning on here, the battery logo gone red but it's still got an hour battery life left. I'd be lukcy to get an hour at 100% on the HP.

After speaking with JT at work, I'm seriously considering running Ubuntu on the HP with VMWare to try to improve performance.

Facebook Feed Shock!

After logging into Facebook this evening, I noticed a RSS logo, could it be?

Check it out for yourself...

It seems that this is the only place, for now.

No backward capability for new PS3s

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=84831

This kind of talk makes me think - wait, I've spent a lot of money buying stuff for the PS2 and was holding out for the PS3 to drop in price so I could still play my PS2 games. But now I might as well sod the PS3 and just get the 360 as buying a PS3 is the same as starting again!

Facebook vs Your Favourite RSS Reader

In the last week or so my web life has changed. I thought I was using RSS properly on iGoogle, but considered the change to Google Reader. Now with email like behaviour rather than static like content, I'm getting much more from the web then before.

This all makes me think about the Facebook debate about walled gardens. To be honest, I do have a Facebook account, but find it generally quite annoying. What it is great at is something close to online personal CRM app with lots of people contributing to. I've already used it a few times to get contact information from when I've not had someones number and needed to get in touch with them.

I think for me, although the friend of a friend (FOAF) issues remain, I'd much rather sign up for various web apps (Twitter, del.icio.us, Dopplr, Flickr and blogs) feeds and watch those through my RSS reader than watch those through Facebook.

It frankly amazes me that they're considered worth £10bn or something. It must be through potential advertising channels and otherwise.

In an effort to attempt to circumnavigate Facebook, I've set up a Yahoo! Pipe to grab all my feeds from across the web and suck then all in one place. For now, you can see that here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=8vLND2N03BGbhg_g1vC6Jw&_render=rss

Thoughts on Scrapblog and Ficlets

We live in a world of ever increasing ease and the wonderful world of technology can really help to make your life easier/lazier and it's such a shame when new applications don't take those few steps to help their users.

I've tried two newish web apps today, Scrapblog.com and Ficlets.com. Scrapblog looks like a place where you can create a presentation and share it on the web, but try not to think about Power Point, think funky young play things. It's pretty easy to use, but lacks some ease of use features like OpenID, nice URIs and RSS everywhere (it does have RSS, but you have to lunch some javascript to get to it, yuck).

You can see my first effort, my recent holiday to Nice, France here: http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/Viewer.aspx?sbid=94841

Ficlets.com is a short story site where you're restricted to 1024 characters, but the community can write prequals and sequals, pretty neat. I dug out a few stories I wrote whilst at university and posted there (http://ficlets.com/authors/robb1e). This site is all web2.0ed up, brilliant. I'm loving the adopotion of OpenID and this site is easily navigatable with pretty URIs and lots of RSS everywhere.

There's lots to learn from Ficlets, let's carry on making it easier for users so we can all be lazy =)

Blogs/Articles of the day

Payments via SMS looks hot at the moment

http://lifehacker.com/software/notag/-305400.php
http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2007/09/google_ponders_mobile_payments.html

More cheap virtual/cell phone companies starting up

http://lifehacker.com/software/telephone/get-global-calls-for-local-rates-with-maxroam-305236.php

Finally, after a great idea here about searching blogs for compaints and responding, At&T are taking it the other way...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070930-att-threatens-to-disconnect-subscribers-who-are-critical-of-the-company.html

Cool Tools - V2

It's that time of year again when Windows grinds down to a virtual hault and after a few weeks of pondering, I've decided this weekend was the time to rebuild my laptop. So, I wanted to make a note of the tools and apps I've been using (see my previous entry here).

Decision 1, Vista, XP or Ubuntu: I'd currently been using Vista which I'm happy with apart from my VPN client doesn't work. So I can't remotely log into my work network without spinning up a XP virtual. Pain indeed. The reason I'd consider XP is because of this, the features I like in Vista can be replicated in XP with tools like lauchy and Slick Run. I'd consider Ubuntu as I'm running it on my hope laptop. I could use OpenOffice and still develop in Rails, but some things like Live Meeting, a web sharing tool widely used at work, don't work. The VPN client doesn't work much like Vista and I couldn't install Visual Studio if I needed to do some .Net development.

Can't decide. Probably Vista with a virtual for VPN =/

Office 2007 is a cert, although I've no problem with OpenOffice. Many of the tools on the previous post still stand. Some I don't use any more because I'm not doing that type of work any more, or baked in features (index search in Outlook) have made applications like Lookout redundant (those in the know will know Lookout was bought by Microsoft and it's a high probablilty that the codebase found it's way into Office 2007). I've made a lot of use of OneNote which isn't in OpenOffice, so I'll be sticking with Office 2007 for now. There are alternative's, but I'm happy and lazy.

RealVNC is a cool product. We've got cool build TVs at work so VNC is handy for getting onto those computers (yes, built into the TVs how cool!) to display a web meeting or build reports.

Since doing a lot of Ruby on Rails development recently, I've been using Netbeans, but I'll probably give RadRails a try which is an Eclipse plug in.

I've been using HeidiSQL as a GUI front to MySQL which is very easy to use.

Other tools I've been using:

Firefox
Microsoft Office Communicator
CCTray
Filezilla
Flickr Uploadr
Foxit Reader
Visual Studio 2005 Team Tester/Developer edition (does anyone else hate SKUs?)
NUnit (not Visual Studio tests, see previous rants)
Mp3Tag
Nokia PC Suite (guess what phone make I've got)
Paint.Net
TortoiseSVN
Unlocker
VMWare Player
VLC Media Player

I'm Dave Gorman

Well, I certainly feel that way with my Facebook quest. Funny story, I got my account disabled for spamming. I think I'll have to think of a more ingenius way getting others to do my evil work for me.

V Review - Sunday

Sunday had the better line up as well as the first good band coming on later (read lay in).

We started with Mark Ronson who rolled out some guest apparences, followed by a subduded Rilo Killey (mainly due to under filling the JJB/Puma tent). Lily Allen was next who was too funny. I caught some on video, so keep an eye out on video.google.co.uk for those. We caught an underwhelming performance from the Manics whom we walked away from in about 10 minutes to catch Kasabian instead who rocked! Killers finished up with a truely rock and roll performance. The whole of the main stage was packed, and it was rocking.

Awesome.

VFestival Review - Saturday

All the good stuff

Foo Fighters play secret gig - We got to V early, sorted ourselves out with a drink then sat and waited for Juliet and the Licks to perform and got treated to the unknown band 606. Turns out, it was actually an acoustic set by the Foo's. Awesome.

Paolo Nutini was a surprise for me, sure I'd heard some of his stuff on the radio but he put out a really good performance and I really enjoyed his stuff. Especially his covers of "I want to be like you" from the Jungle Book and Mobys' "Natural Blues".

Kayne West rocked, and I caught a video of him doing a sample of the Verve's Bittersweet Symphony

Snow Patrol were brilliant and even rolled out Martha Wainwright to do a duet of "Set the Fire to the 3rd Bar" and we watched the Kooks wrap up. They were pretty good, but it doesn't help when they play new stuff on the closing set of a festival.

All the bad stuff

I'm sick of the heavyweight commercialism of these events. With day tickets, like what we had, there was no re-admittance. Really? You think during a whole day I might not want to leave the venue to perhaps get a coat out of my car? Or in our situation, food so we wouldn't be forced to pay for overpriced crap, like burgers that'd been cooked this morning but now 'warming' on the side. As luck would have it, they had the Caribbean stall back and you know you're getting quality chicken rice and peas and goat curry there!

It seemed ridiculous, the queues for drinks. I was waiting in a 5 deep queue at the bar in the Cider House and the place seemed so disorganised, with most of the taps out of cider and the bar staff running around like headless chickens. After waiting half an hour, I gave up!

Photos

Check out Saturdays photos.

"Were you in that video?"

I've done two Channel9 videos in the last 10 months or so, one back in October at Tech Ed and other in January after the 2007 Innovation Accelerator. Now and again when I meet a new person I get "your from the videos". I'm not greatly surprised as these are people who are coming to work with us, they've probably Googled 'web21c' and found my videos.

However, last night at the Facebook Developer party someone came and asked me that question that they was not affiliated with the project at all and didn't work at BT. Now, that was a surprise!

Robbie on Rails Part 3 - The Conflict of Redirect vs Render

RFC2616, 10.2.2 says that a HTTP response code of 201 should be the response when creating a new resource but from a user experience view, I'd want to be redirected to the new resource. However, this returns a 302 redirected code which goes against the RFC.

Hmm, this is a bit of a problem. We can render the new resource using "render :action => 'action'", but it doesn't show the URI to the user who may want this.

It's pretty frustrating, and for now I can't find a way around it, so I'm defaulting to user experience.

My Facebook Quest

I randomly put my surname into Facebook earlier and was surprised to see so many others with the same name, so my quest is to get those people together in a group and say hello. Maybe even go for a drink with the local ones.

Gotta love the web!

Robbie on Rails part 3

What a difference a day makes. Eastmad and I were pairing and decided to leave the strange error behind us and move on. We collectively had one the most frustrating days in the office because of that problem on Wednesday. As we moved on, we started to build up momentum and really started to see results. We also had a little help from Kerry who managed to help us with our issue we had the previous day.

Turns out the validates_associates function doesn't really do what we had expected it to do, but by using the key function validates_on_create we were able to roll our own data restrictions.

I have to say, I really enjoyed coding in Rails yesterday, long may it continue =)

Robbie on Rails Part 2

What a difference a day makes. I've spent probably three or four hours pairing on a stupid problem. Earlier today I was bouncing around looking forward to start building our rails app, but we hit a problem almost immediately. We had added a foreign key validation to one of the models and although the unit and functional tests passed, the actually web pages would not insert the row into the table.

Very infuriating.

Robbie on Rails

The last few weeks I've been involved in a new project at work that invovles building a portal and we went and had a play with Ruby on Rails. So far, so good. I must confess that I like the way that your application is structured in Rails, it stops a lot of ambiguity and I'm a big fan of the MVC pattern which Rails uses everywhere. It's the first pattern learnt at university, so I suppose there's a fond place for me there kinda like how I shop at the supermarket I used to stack shelfs at when I was 17! lol.

I bought a few books on rails for the office and I'm a bit disapointed with one of the books which claimed to be "agile" and hasn't shown me how to write a test and I'm upto chapter 6.

On another note, I've been asked to do a rails brown bag at work, I may use what this book has taught me, but introduce tests.

hmmm

XML Digital Signiture in C#

Why is using DS so hard? No, I'm not talking about the Nintendo DS either.

There's almost nothing online about using this in C#, and the other doc is showing you how to do this in WSE which is what I'm trying to avoid. I've signed the request and sent it, but am trying to validate the response.

Nightmare.

Athlete @ Koko

I went to see Athlete at Koko in Camden on Tuesday evening with some friends and thought I'd share a little story. After years of getting to gigs early in the off chance there might be a good support band (there have been times, I saw Nada Surf supporting Blur once, good album) we decide to pitch our tent in the local boozer before heading down for the main event. This time we were in the Crown and Goose on Arlington Street and as it happens, Athlete were in there having a cheeky pint before the gig. Sam noticed them, so I gave her the tickets and she got them signed. Cool eh?

My fun with Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu at home for a while now. To be honest, all I've used it for so far has been surfing and email and it's handled all I've needed well with the added bonus that OpenOffice is already installed so I can read those documents that people send to me, even the ones where people have pasted pictures into a work document. Never quite understood that, but hey ho.

I haven't really been pushing it, but today I decided to come good with my promise to learn a new programming language and I've chosen PHP. I tried it on my Vista PC and quickly got bored trying to configure IIS, so I thought I'd try it on my Ubuntu computer. I've been following this: http://hostlibrary.com/installing_apache_mysql_php_on_linux

So far, so good. Some hiccups though, like the C compiler missing and therefore not being able to build Apache Tomcat. I quickly found out what I needed to do, but I was a little stuck without Google's help. Saying that however, I quickly came unstuck, but when I found package manager I told it download what I wanted and it did. Then I created a hello world PHP file and it worked.

Cool huh?

evolution of internet communities

Isnt' it strange how a few years ago I would have been considered a real geek for posting on a forum with a bunch of people I'd never have met before, yet now with MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and all the others, it's almost the norm now. Odd how the technology has evolved now as well, with forums people come together around a topic or area, now they have their own little place on the web and people go to each other, and interact with that space directly.

Developer Express

I was at Developer Developer Developer Day 5 at Microsoft today, it's a pretty cool free event. It's mix of technology discussions with some vendor plugs, but I'll forgive them as long as they have a point.



One interesting application that was presented was Developer Expresses DXCore for Visual Studio plugins. This app allows a really easy way to to build plug ins using the code based used for CodeRush and Refactor from Developer Express. It's pretty powerful but there was a drawback, and that was in distribution.



If you wanted to distribute a Visual Studio plug in you'd developed, the target computer would have to have DxCore installed to. It's free which is cool, but it's just another step. Still, it's worth considering if you're developing a framework or tool kit to run in the VS IDE.

Filter/Dispatcher pattern for URI handling in .Net

I put together an interesting component of an application recently. It didn't get used in the end, but I liked it none the less. Using the HttpModules in the web.config I was able to get it to act as a filter pattern, intercepting all web requests through the web server. Then using a custom configuration I was able to implement a dispatcher pattern to configurable classes. This resulted in a web site that could catch any requests and process regardless if that page actually existed. It's a nice way to think about implementing a REST friendly web site.

Software Engineering as a Service

From the blogs I read and the people I talk to, I get the impression there's a ever growing movement of open source, free software delivered over the internet. The web is for everyone and owned by no-one is just one phrase which has added to this movement recently. I think it's fantasic; I can't think of many industries where people come together and passioned debates about the work we do, how we do it and the tools we use. Someone has to pay for it somewhere along the lines though right? I mean, if I write the next cool app, who's going to put food on my table? I think more and more, developers are having these great conversations and they're about making the development experience for other developers easier and better, simple and open always wins as they say. Although developers have a big say, and as Tim O'Reilly pointed out with alpha geeks they tend to pull the industry along somewhat, it's businesses who pay for applications, products and services. So, although we care about developers, we still have to be mindful of businesses.



I suppose a question to ask is: who is our customer?

Sleepless in Colorado

I thought I had learnt my lesson of travelling west to the americas before, but although I applied what I thought would work, I still can't sleep. Mind you, when I was last here I was 20 and fit! Now I'm 25 and decidedly unfit, I find myself waking at 4 or 5 in the morning with nothing to do but use the 24 hour gym or surf the net.

My Bear vs Shark Moment

If you've read this book, you'll know about the message of gross commercialism contained within. Today, walking around my local supermarket I felt like the main character, mindlessly picking up products that I thought I needed. It seems the easier these supermarkets make it for us to buy everything in one place, along with wrapping everything in pretty packaging, the easier we concede to their marketing ploys, even if we think we're resisting.

Share The Love!

I've just read a great post on coding horror by Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000845.html).

I've had similar thoughts on, as a software engineer I don't care what tools I use as long as their the right ones to get the job done. Sometimes that's been Microsoft tools, sometimes open source tools, or sometimes just the good old web! Jeff really hits the nail on the head, stop fighting and start worrying about building better software.

=)

edit: also was sent this, which adds a nice perspective: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/04/19/gapingvoid-got-it-wrong.aspx

Mavericks at work - Review

Read it. Especially the first three sections on 'open source' innovation across industries, discovering strategy and reconnecting with the cusomters. A worthy read.

Release Early vs Release Smarter

A while ago I tried to get onto the WCF bandwagon, but struggled because of the high barrier of entry. I was more put off when a few of the smartest developers I know (generally anyone developer I know) when to Redmond to play with the WCF team and couldn't even get something working. Then, as I was in a bookshop, I noticed a WCF book. Well, if someone's written a book about it, it must be ready for consumption by mortal developers like me. Seems not. I still have to install the Windows SDK to get a tool which is around 100kB to generate WCF friendly proxy classes.

Releasing technologies early is cool. If you get a beta, you expect some teething problems, but now after a few months of .Net 3 being released, I'd expect better tool sets by now. It just makes me thing, if you're going to release something, please make sure there's appropriate tools and support.

Ubuntu

So giving Ubuntu a try this week. After so much fuss getting a Windows server at work with licenses and such, I feel pretty turned off by Microsoft at the moment. Otu at work has been using Ubuntu for well over a year now and I've been meaning to try it, especially seeing as I'd got a new laptop a few months back and nothing to use the relatively new but now obsolete laptop I had. So here I am, this post coming to you from an Ubuntu powered laptop.

May my colleges have mercy on me. lol

Getting Paid to Play Games

The life of a software developer can be a hard one, but now and then you're asked to do something which makes you jump for joy like the kids from South Park when the Terence and Phillip movies comes to town. When you're boss asks you if you've ever read 'Snow Crash' (if you haven't, go read it now) with a glint in his eye followed by 'go and make our services work in a MMORPG', that's the feeling I get.

The Difference between Music and Telco industries

While the music industry continues to moan the loss of traditional revenues, the telco industry is attempting to embrace change. I should know, working on projects like http://web21c.bt.com at the UKs incumbant telco.

I'm a bit fed up of hearing the music industry bitch. If they don't come up with an answer soon, they'll find themselves out of work.

Lack of Support for MsTest

It's franly quite annoying how little support there is for Visual Studio testing. What are Microsoft thinking with the multiple flavours of the product? I didn't realise that some didn't have the test tools, frankly this is scary for our TDD friends. Perhaps considering the support there is for nUnit (not least nCover - theres nothing for MsTest apart from a tool a colleague and I wrote http://sourceforge.net/projects/mstestuncovered) it would worth thinking about migrating.

The Conflict of Test Driven Development and Compile Time Code Analysis

So, I'm sitting here pairing on some code and we write our test which involves generating a method stub. We attempt to compile, but we're thrown a load of errors as we've got our code analysis set to terminate (i.e. do not compile if your code sucks). But I'm finding this furstrating as the code isn't compiling as we're not using the parameters of the new method, but this is because we haven't implemented it yet and I want to see it fail!

So we have to suppress the error to make it compile, and hope to remember to take out the suppressions.

Now that sucks!

TV

I always say I don't watch that much TV, and in many ways this is true. Due to the combination of a bad memory and laziness I would rarely rush home to watch that special show at whatever o'clock. Even the new PVC (the very nice BT Vision) doesn't help as I've only got freeview and I'll be dammed to pay Sky or anyone else for content I'm not going to watch (see above for reasons).

There is some special occasions though when a particular show grabs my attention and pulls me in. Being somewhat of a geek. (Ok, a lot of a geek) this new tend in mainstream sci-fi TV shows is getting the better of me. This weekend I've spent most of the time in front of the TV watching Heros. I'm really enjoying TV recently. These season long plots, fast paced, low key sci-fi shows are getting me everytime. Sure there's shows I can't really stand (Lost?) but still find myself watching week in week out, but I'm happy that we seem to have put sit coms to one side for a while to enjoy character developement and kick ass plots.

Are We Hard To Shock?

I've just read an interesting article on how we've evolved thick skins with regard to bad news. Having grown up in a 24 hour media culture I don't know any different.

http://news.uk.msn.com/zeebrugge_numb_towards_disaster.aspx

Random Thought

People who wear suits cannot look good saying words like 'dude'.

FxCop is dead, long live FxCop

FxCop has been brought into VS2005, although now called the imaginative name of ‘Code Analysis’. The tight integration means that the rule violations are reported in the IDE. Here are some questions I asked myself when playing with the tool...

Q) Looks nice in the IDE, but how do I integrate this into my build process?

A) By cunningly enforcing rules at compile time.

Q) Interesting, tell me more. (Not really a question, I know).

A) Go to the project properties and select ‘Code Analysis’. By choosing ‘All configurations’, then enabling (not set by default) Code Analysis and (here’s the cunning bit), set each rule status set to (compile time) ‘Error’ i.e. code will not compile if a rule is broken.

Q) What if I want to turn off a rule?

A) In the properties, you can enable or disable an individual rule or a whole rule set. Alternatively, if you right click on the compile time error in the error list, you can select ‘Suppress Message’. This generates a file in the project called ‘GlobalSuppressions.cs’ which contains assembly attributes for individual rules.

Q) Will it affect my build environment?

A) If you’re calling MSBuild on the command line, you have to set the FXCOPDIR environment variable (see next Q)

Q) So I still need to install FxCop?

A) Not if you have Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers as FxCop is bundled and can be found here (default directory): C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop

Q) Is there any way to force code analysis or check that it’ being run in the build?

A) Code analysis isn’t set by default, so unless you wanted to create a project template with it set you couldn’t make sure it’s enabled on every new project created. You could check the csproj file to make sure it’s enabled using xPath or otherwise (/Project/ProjectGroup/RunCodeAnalysis = true) or check the MSBuild results in the build report.

Q) How can these rules be shared by the team ... are the rules that are turned off saved into the project/solution file?

A)The rules are embedded into the project file (yes, you have to set the rules for each project) including turned off and suppressed rules via the GlobalSuppression.cs file within the project at the root of the project.

When Good Ideas Go Bad

5 hours later I got this...

Gamma Testing

I was uploading some piccies on Flickr earlier and noticed that along with their logo, there was a subtle 'gamma' logo. I wonder, is this a dig at the empire known as Google and the perpetual beta program?

Thoughts from a train

First of all, it's pretty hard writing from a train where you don't have a seat with a table is pretty hard. I don't think when the engineers were designing the train I'm sitting on thought that the tray for eating would be used for resting a laptop on. On well, it's a minor thing I suppose, I can make do with the shaking, mistaking typing of mine.

So, I'm waiting at Kings Cross for a train to Edinburgh. I'm early as usual (a character trait which forces me never to be late, but always far to early!), so I get a coffee and pick up the metro. Searching, I find no-where to sit and once I finish my coffee I find no bin to put the cup in.

Why is it that we're so paranoid in London that we don't have any bins anywhere. We'd rather contribute to poluting our fair city the comprimise the security. Funnily enough I didn't notice any litter at the station. Go figure.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

I wrote this a while ago and just rediscovered it -

==================================

I really wanted to show off some of the functionalities of the new BT SDK by integrating it into Windows Media Centre Edition (MCE). However trying to implement the simplest solution in MCE proved to be a performance in itself.

Recently I'd read Adam Bosworth's blog in Joel Spolsky's Best Software Writing I book. As Bosworth said "It was essentially a reminder to a group of very smart people that their intelligence should be used to accommodate really simple user and programmer models, not to build really complicated ones". I felt this was certainly applicable in the case where I was developing an MCE add in.

I went onto read Bosworth's blog with all the comments posted. Bosworth talked about the simplicity of PHP and RSS and the complexity of WS*, SOAP and WSDL. Many of the comments discussed their disagreements with the decision to highlight these items but I feel many missed the point of the discussion in general.

Bosworth says it himself, "software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion."

Alan Kay said (and we've heard it around the office plenty of times) "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible". We've heard Tim say this plenty of times, but the SDK demo really brought this home for me. We weren't making it simple for the developers who'd be using the SDK. Both capabilities and the .Net SDK were guilty of this. There are arguments as too why this was the case, but at the end of the day it wasn't easy enough and that's what any developer would say when attempting to use our services.

Bosworth talks about how the simple and ambiguous free text search (Boolean logic) won over the seemingly easier query by example. "The engineering is hard, but the user model is simple and sloppy". We have to ensure that we follow this logic. The .Net SDK is there to make life unbelievably simple for the developer. We have to ensure that we hide as much complexity as possible from each abstracted layer so that the component layer can do something cool in one line of code.

Bosworth has concerns regarding WSDL, but remember let's forget about the technology for now and look at the underlining issue. "When it doesn't work, no human can figure out why". We've all had our problems with WSDL and developing on MCE proved equally frustrating. Initially I had to install MCE to get the libraries to develop against and had to develop custom batch scripts to compile and register my add-in. When I was happy with my "Hello, World" MCE add-in, I was ready to develop a BT SDK app but when it came to run the application it didn't work and there was no stack trace, no log file, no acknowledgement that the add-in had even failed. With my limited MCE development knowledge, I had run into a brick wall with reinforced steel, concrete and MCE developers!

Bosworth goes onto discuss programmers who consider code to be a means to an end. "The important issue is the content and the community, not the technology". As mentioned earlier, I originally wanted to do a brown bag on integrating MCE with the BT SDK, but the technology was an issue and so was the lack of content within the community. Developing on MCE felt like developing using COM; powerful, but as a newbie MCE developer, overwhelming.

Bosworth focuses on the value not of the technology but of the content. "The value is neither in the computers nor in the software that runs on them. It is in the content and the software's ability to find and filter content and in the software's ability to enable people to collaborate and communicate about content (and each other)". I feel this re-enforces the comment about the engineering being hard, but the user model being simple. The technology isn't important. Whether it's SIP, Oracle, SOAP or WS* it doesn't matter. What matters is that we get the content that matters to the users who want it (if they're allowed to access it of course).

We've all probably taught out parents or kids to use a computer and the internet and Bosworth reveals something that as engineers we can often forget. "My mother never complains that she needs a better client for Amazon. Instead, her interest is in better community tools, better book lists, easier ways to see the book lists, more trust in the reviewers, librarians discussions since she is a librarian and so on". An awesome SDK, great content and easy delivery isn't enough; supporting tools and communities need to exist to make using the application an experience and too pool the knowledge into a community to expose the power and simplicity of the products that are on the market.

"For the first time since computing came along, AI is in the mainstream". People can argue both sides for this comment, but I believe this comment comes from the ability of software to filter and deliver content to the users efficiently and quickly.