Category: design-and-ideas

My New Year Resolutions 2008 reviewed

So its the very eve of 2009 and I've been thinking what should I be doing for 2009. But before that a review of how well I've done in 2008 seems like a good idea. You can find the full post from Jan 2008 here.

  1. Finally go to Tokyo

    Well this never happened, but only partly due to the divorce and moving to Manchester
  2. Not to do another BarCampLondon unless the BBC is the venue

    Ah I remember this, I had just finished the amazing barcamp at Google and vowed not to do one again. To be fair, I've helped with 4 others but not actually done or organised them. Even better other people have stepped up and done barcamp in there own way. Which was one of my aims for 2008. Will there be a BBC BarCamp? Well there's been a internal mini BeebCamp but full BarCamp? We shall see, maybe it might make the 2009 list.
  3. Work on something very different but cutting edge this year
    So this did happen, I worked on a ARG with a variety of people but the project fell through when core parts of the team had a professional disagreement. We tried to carry on regardless but it was not possible to move forward as planned. We still have a excellent idea and story, plus I've been talking to new people about joining some of the original team. So I think this might get picked up in 2009.
  4. Dataportability
    Well I've almost cut myself off from the data portability group all together. Not out of choice or anything like that, I just didn't have the time and as things started to change and shift over the year, it became apparent that people were thinking about data portability more that ever before due to the efforts earlier on. I'm not saying its over, theres tons more to be done but also theres a bunch of other issues which need addressing. I'm hoping i'll get the time to pull some of this stuff into work, where I can have the most impact.
  5. Small Routines
    So actually this did happen, but not in a ideal way. Currently I'm sleeping very late and getting up late. During the night is when I do most of my blogging and reading. I don't know what it is but I seem to be more open to learning and taking it all in at 1am. I do still listen to podcasts while around the flat including in the shower. But what I need to do now is shift the time back by 3-4 hours. So I go to bed by 1am but get all my blogging and reading done between 9pm – 1am. Then I'd get up about 9am and not feel so tired. In regards to the RSS reading for example, the ipod is helping a lot (i should write a blog about it).
  6. Play a team sport
    Yep I started playing Handball in Manchester, but it was a ton of running about and seriously my body couldn't handle the dynamic pace of the students I was playing with. So I gave it up when I learned about a Volleyball team in Manchester. Its still very energetic and I'm playing with students and people in there prime years but my previous experience helps a lot and i'm not a bad setter at all. Theres a few tournaments coming up including a few beach ones in summer, so who knows what might happen.
  7. Geekdinners and Geekvenues
    Well I got to the bottom of geekdinner.co.uk. It was hosted on Photo Matt's server somewhere and he wiped it or something and now its all gone! Yes I know crazy but don't worry we have flickr pictures, blog posts and our memories to remind us of the good times. I also handed over the job of organising geekdinners to Cristiano Betta who I believed would take it forward while I move to Manchester. And I wasn't wrong, he's done a great job, scoping out a new venue and new speakers for the events. He's also tied the geekdinners closer to the girl geekdinners which is great. Geekvenues is still floating on somewhere, should think about that some more.
  8. Start learning Python
    Yep started, setup my environment and done Hello world and a couple other tiny projects. Micheal Sparks has leant me a couple books which are really useful including the Joel Spolsky book who I listen to on the Stack overflow podcast anyway. I also started playing with PovRay again and dropped learning AIR for now.
  9. Use the technologies around me better
    Yep this is happening, I'm also becoming more choosy and selling stuff which doesn't fit. So for example this year the Wii and Netbook went, not because I don't like them, but because they didn't quite fit into my life. I'm also switching some of my services. So I still use plaxo and now I have two Windows mobile phones, its become even more essential that I can sync between them over the air not just when I get to a Windows PC. I'm going to stop using delicious and switch to evernote. The lack of Linux support is frustrating but on the other hand its supported on my ipod touch and windows mobiles.
  10. Go to more comedy clubs
    This has happened, I'm 5mins walk from the Comedy Store in Manchester and I have been a few times on off nights. I plan to go more often and actually if I had been a bit quicker recently. Would have been off to Jesters in Bristol tonight for a night of comedy over new years instead clubbing it. So yes comedy is happening more often. Maybe I should spend less time in the cinema and more time in the comedy clubs?

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Apple’s Netbook?

Imran sent me a link to this readwriteweb entry about the iphone being Apple's netbook. Although I'm totally buying the reason of wifi usage here's what they say…

Steve Jobs once said that the iPhone is Apple's netbook, and this usage data does lend some credence to this. Most of these WiFi requests probably come from people using the iPhone on their couch at home or in a coffee shop, and often, these users might be quickly checking their email or the weather from their phone instead of booting up their netbooks or laptops.

I got to say I'm also selling my Acer Netbook because I now have a ipod touch. The Netbook was too much for what I needed. I just wanted a device to read rss and ebooks. It was cool having the netbook because I could run RSS Owl on it but it was over kill in size and most of the time it sat in my bedroom because there wasn't enough room to carry both my laptop and netbook. Miles expressed a simular thought about his Nokia N800 internet tablet now he owns a iphone.

In other related news Windows Mobile falls behind iPhone in latest mobile-market numbers

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Measuring success of evangelism

me

At the recent speeddating event I went on, people always ask what you do. I always have problems explaining what I do without using up at least 30secs of the 180secs. So I've recently found it easier to say I'm a BBC internet evangelist. Its not ideal but most people I speak to have a better idea of what I do because of the wording.

Christian wrote a excellent blog post about justifying the work we do. Theres some really good parts I would like to quote.

As an evangelist/advocate the hardest job is to tell people exactly what your impact was. A lot of what you do is planting mental seeds and inspiring people to work differently – that can’t be measured in hard figures. Other companies measure the success of an event for example by how many business cards were collected and have a department that follows these up by contacting people. I don’t like this much, first of all because a lot of the people I meet don’t have business cards but follow me on twitter instead and secondly because they gave me the card and not the company.

If you enjoy free information, swag, being able to directly reach internal experts and being able to network with a select group of like-minded people:

  • please leave comments on the blogs/announcement pages of the events (in our case the YDN blog and upcoming – a lot of people only look there and don’t have time to scrounge the web for all the info.
  • Use tags we provide at events to tag your photos, blog posts, tweets, videos…
  • Tell us about cool implementations and changes in your company based on what we talked about – we are happy to feature those and send you link love and there is nothing cooler than telling the world how someone else but us have done something cool with our stuff
  • If you sign up for an event – show up (or send a colleague). I am getting terribly sick of spending a lot of money to hire locations and have 150 sign up to the event in the first 10 minutes – effectively blocking out people that should be there – and then 20 show up! This is wasted time and money – and in the current climate that is not a clever thing to do.

I love my job and I am doing quite extensive work to make the IT industry understand that tech evangelism is not a waste of money but that there is a massive need for it. Marketing and PR departments just cannot reach geeks and internal geeks have neither the drive or the opportunities to talk to the world about the great things they do. I am very sure that innovation and change in IT is not coming from top down but from people who dare to talk to the right people to initiate change. As I put it in my talk at accessibility 2.0 geeks that care are the drivers of innovation and I don’t want to lose the opportunities we have right now.

Yes exactly this why I have had such a hard time with the PR and Marketing departments of the BBC. Luckily most of the time they have ignored Backstage but with the events we attracted a lot of attention. As most people know, I tried to educate our lovely PR lady Sarah by forcing her to read the Cluetrain Manifesto. That only works so far though, Christian is right the evangelist create opportunities at a grass roots level. I like to think PR and marketing is all about control while being an tech evangelist isn't, actually the opposite. We tend to tell it as it is and answer the tricky questions. But this is all about measuring success and yes its all about the stories. The stories when things grow from a small seed to something large and interesting. I guess being humans, we like stories. Stories put things in perspective for ourselves. Maybe this translates into a slide on a managers powerpoint between the hard figures of other projects. Or even a example for how successful a project or division is doing but at a much lower level, the links are tighter, stronger and true that ever before. Theres no way to measure these more human like attributes such as trust yet, but the day there is, I bet ever company will come around to the fact that evangelist are good long-term business sense.

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Community Management

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Read Write Web, community management jobs are hot.

What kinds of jobs are companies hiring for right now? In the move towards a social media world, we've seen a series of hires in the past week for variations on the theme “community manager.” Companies are hiring, candidates are hunting and competition for the best people and positions is heating up.

What's even more interesting is the debate we got into at the Web 2.0 Expo about jobs for woman. Some people were suggesting community management is something woman are dawn too. Although I have to say my job boils down to community management too, which is a term I really hate.

So if you combine the two, what do you get? Maybe a more balanced workforce in the future?

Who knows… But I do agree with the first comment – Seems like a risky job to be in when it comes to a rough economy

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Ubuntu is already more attractive that osx

Another noteworthy podcast, this time from Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, describing the somewhat non-code challenges in front of gnu/Linux. I heard this about a two weeks before hearing about Mark Shuttleworth's comments from OSCON recently.

Mark wants to make desktop linux more beautiful not only user friendly. Well in my mind looking at the desktops of my mac friends compared to my own laptop setup, I got to say mine is more beautiful and more interesting. But obviously I would say that…

What I find really interesting about Mac owners is the lack of customisation they generally add to the desktop and interface. Maybe a change of background picture, quicksilver and thats about it. While on the linux side I've seen radical changes, for example Glyn has stuck with the standard Ubuntu theme while Sheila has her ubuntu setup so weird it looks like Xubuntu. I've also seen black themes actually being used by people at conferences (always wondered if they save on battery life that way?). While all my mac friends have the same windows styles, same netrual pallette, same icons, etc. Some would say this is because Apple have a almost flawless interface design team, but I'm not so sure.

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Keeping your social data in sync with Atomkeep

Atomkeep simply keeps your profile synchronised across multiple social networks and services. I'm obviously in favour of this simply from the point of Data Portability. I found it via readwriteweb in my aggregator and I got to say I'm pretty impressed so far. I do wonder how easy it is to import and export from atomkeep without going to another service? I'm not going to say this is ground breaking because thats reserved for Ping.FM which I still use everyday, but its not far behind. Atomkeep tends to want your username and password from the get go. Even when the service supports other means of connecting and controling the account like APIs, OpenID, etc. It ignores them and throws up a login/password prompt for you to fill in. Whats also interesting is what's underneath it.

I confirm that this is my private authorization credentials and I acknowledge my approval for Atomkeep to facilitate data input and update for me in this system. I completely understand and accept Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of Atomkeep and every other system engaged in the transaction.

Wow thats quite a leap of trust, saying that Ping.FM knows about 9 of my accounts too. I'm still looking forward to the day when you can have these types of services on your desktop or on your own server. Plaxo pay attention, you should have done this ages ago, you had the data already and you already have the link to linkedin.

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Due to the magic of creative commons…

Meat Katie - CD cover by James Cridland.

I can't sing the praises of Creative commons and licensing generally loud enough. I remember reading in Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig ages ago his solution to the problem of works which may still want to be copyrighted going into the public domain. Make the author pay 1 dollar to keep the copyright of that works a live for another 14 years. It seemed very reasonable, because generally if that piece of work is earning you money its maybe earning you much more that 1 dollar. Of the major entertainment business's rejected this as it was too costly and burnesome on them. I say whatever! and of course its not to burnensome to track down users using sometimes highly questionable or even illegal methods and sue them out of their hard earned money.

But what I found interesting was Lawrence ultimately had a plan to deal with the problem of not knowing who the author was, through this proposal.

Once you know who the author/editor/copyright owner is and you can contact them without going through crazy methods things like this happen. From James Cridland.

Until a few months ago, when the Ministry of Sound contacted me about the photo. Could they use it for the cover of a new album? Sure. We agreed terms, I waited a few months… and there it is, in the niftily-produced photo montage above.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been published. Photographs I’ve taken have been used (at least, cleared for use) in the Russian edition of Time magazine; in a few books, some of which haven’t come out yet; in some postcards in Switzerland (oddly); in a video montage used by a comany to flog stuff; and apparently this one has also been used for a San Miguel promotion (the agency promised to send me lots of beer as payment, but I guess they never used it in the end).

What’s interesting is how excited I am about my photograph being produced in a way that the public will see it. And then I reflected that my photographs are everywhere, thanks to the magic of Creative Commons.

Its not just James either, my friend Sheila got her creative commons licenced photos of nigera falls turned into a paperweight which is sold on site. Even I've had my photos used in many places for a price or gift. Recently I was asked if a couple of my videos on blip.tv could be used for a DVD documentary on the ARG the lost ring. So I pointed out that the liceince I had applied already let them to commercially reporoduce the content but they must attribute me for the works.

Its great stuff and actually works as it should do. Imagine a world where stuff was actually licenced (even all rights reserved) and you could contact the copyright owner to ask questions about reuse and copying. Its not impossible, we can make it happen.

Don't use services which don't allow you to apply a licence and always embed a licence into media. Its that simple really.

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Excellent StackOverFlow podcast

I'm slowly catching up with some of the podcasts I was able to download at the frustrating speed I've recently had. I wanted to give a special mention to a excellent Stack Over Flow show which is a podcast by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.

Late in the podcast both of them just run through books which should be read or even owned. And there are some classics in the list.

Don't have time to listen to all that jibba-jabba? Here is Joel's short list:

If you don't like the rambling podcast style, there's also a public transcript with more books that you can shake a tree at.

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A blast from the past: Persistence of Vision Raytracer

Povray rendering glasses

I was listening to FLOSS weekly with the guy who actually created POV Ray (persistence of vision raytracer). It was amazing to listen to because, I along time ago use to run it on my old Atari ST. At the time I never had access to anything else, and frankly everything else was simply crap in when compared to PovRay's efforts. I believe there were all of about 4 3D rendering programs on the Atari 16bit platform and to be honest the ability to write images and animations using a simple notepad application was insane but ever so useful at the time. After a long while I built my first PC which was a 233mhz beasty and PovRay was one of those benchmark software which I used to prove to myself the investment. I could only dream how fast it would be to render scenes on my current workstation and laptop.

The author of POV Ray in the podcast talks about how he made the software freeware and wrote a basic license saying your welcome to modify it but if you do make a change please send it back to the author. This was before the word open source was around and even before the web had taken hold, so POV Ray was distributed on floppy discs, CDs and BBS. It was written before licenses like BSD, GPL and Apache were common, although PovRay 4 is going to be rewritten under the GPL 3 license.

PovRay isn't dead actually there starting to add some well needed features like native mutliprocessor support. In the past you would specify a part of the final image to do on one machine/cpu and the other bit on the other machine/cpu. This may sound very bizarre for a heavy duty raytracing engine but when you had a room full of computers like we sometimes had at college, it meant we could run renders of sizes like 1600×1200 and split the picture up into 4 pieces of 800×600, which were then run over 4x Pentium P133 machines.

The other thing I loved about PovRay was its realism, for year and years I argued that 3Dstudiomax, Lightwave, etc's results were poor compared to PovRay. The main reason was that this applications use to render results not raytrace them. This was why PovRay took so long to render scenes, like the one above. But for the hardcore, PovRay also had true Radiosity support

Actual writing PovRay scenes involves picturing in your mind 3D space and then mapping things based on that space. We use to graph things out on a graph paper and then translate it into C like syntax. It sounds more difficult that it actually is and before long your up and going. I just wish I could find some of my old scenes. Oh the language is a turing-complete language that supports macros and loops. So you can most of the time program effects using maths and logic that by hand.

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