Planet NZTech

Coming up - two public lectures on science and the world it lives in

2010-03-11T00:15:36+00:00

Empty Space weighs something?

Is science too hard?
Curiously, I'm writing this post almost in tandem with the announcement that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the world's science academies to review work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Like many others I have a growing interest in how science is discussed and understood by non scientists, including me.

I'm also increasingly aware of the the need to discuss how science is debated in the media, and indeed how much scientific literacy the bulk of us have at at our disposal, especailly when trying to come to grips with some of the big ticket poltical issues like climate change, environmental degradation, re-newable energy etc.

There are two public lectures coming up in New Zealand which, from different perspectives, and disciplines, will cover this ground in spades.

Professor Lawrence Krauss
Professor Lawrence Krauss is coming to Auckland University - 22 March 2010 6:15pm - 7:15pm

Venue: Large Chemistry Lecture Theatre, Building 301, Faculty of Science, 22 Symonds Street, Auckland

Professor Lawrence Krauss is the award winning scientist, educator, author and Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. He is the best-selling author of The Physics of Star Trek, Atom: an Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth and Beyond and Hiding in the Mirror.
In this lecture - free to all - he is planning to 'discuss the distinction between science and fiction and between sense and nonsense'

The big issues
He will also explore how the business of science - and the role of scientists has become a growing part of the public debate on our social and political responses to the big issues - climate change - food distribution/production - environmental degradation etc.

Science - media - scientific literacy
As part of this, Prof Krauss will also cover the 'challenge that journalists face in presenting science appropriately, not only in a society in which scientific illiteracy is rampant, but also in which the public is exposed to a host of scientific fallacies presented as fact in the media'.

More on the presentation, here.

Exchanges at the Frontier
For a taste of his style, see the video above. It comes as part of the Exchanges at the Frontier series, recorded late 2009 when the Wellcome Collection joined forces with the BBC World Service to host some of the biggest names in world science. The Welcome Insitute have their own web reousrce on thise, here, plus the BBC world Service series is , here

Martin Lord Rees in Wellington 23d March, 2010

Next day, Tuesday 23rd, in Wellington, Martin Lord Rees, current President of the Royal Society of London, is giving the Rutherford Memorial Lecture in Wellington He is also UK’s Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He will be speaking, at

7.00pm Tuesday 23 March 2010
Wellington Town Hall, Wakefield Street, Wellington
(entry via Town Hall Foyer, Wakefield Street)

Lecture title: The World in 2050

" As a cosmologist, Lord Rees studies the universe, and tries to understand its evolution on grand timescales of billions of years. But he is also concerned with the much smaller time scale of a human life. In his book Our Final Century, he gave our civilization a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21^st century.

What does he think now, five years on from the publishing of his book and what is his view of how things will stand in 2050? .."
See here , for more

There is no charge but you need to book - tickets are available at www.royalsociety.org.nz

Enquiries to: lectures@royalsociety.org.nz or 04 470 5781

Lord Rees at TED in April, 2005
The alert among you will have figured out the TED video is 5 years oold - so the lecture in Wellington follows on from these early thoughts.

Tip: Beware of sentences longer than 20 words

2010-03-10T23:34:58+00:00

Here’s an easy rule of thumb when you’re writing at work: never write a sentence longer than 21 words.

OK, it’s extreme. But it will often get you out of trouble.

(Before you explode, let me remind you that phrases containing capital letters can be treated as a single “word” in this situation. Phrases like “Prime Minister of Great Britain” or “Department of Housing and Development”. People read them in one gulp, like a single word.)

The 21-word limit is a natural one. That’s roughly 7 phrases, at which point humans tend to run out of short term memory. Readers can’t remember how your sentence began. Even you can’t remember how your sentence began. What a mess.

The danger point occurs at around 21 words: that’s when your sentence risks spinning out of control.

If you are having trouble writing a particular sentence, it’s probably too long. Just chop it into two or more sentences. Or shorten the sentence by removing unnecessary words.

Newtown Fair

2010-03-10T23:10:41+00:00

Newtown Fair, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

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Urewera dreaming

2010-03-10T21:54:15+00:00

Urewera is a special place, full of rainforest, hermits, and Patupaiarehe.

Lake Waikaremoana, originally uploaded by RobAucklandNZ

I spent more childhood summers than I can count in the Ureweras, staying at the Hostel in Tuai. You're always a long way from "civilisation" and even further from a petrol station. The road enters the bush suddenly and you've got 3 hours of road just wide enough for one car, while you hope you don't discover a car going the otherway on a blind corner (though you seldom do see anyone else on the road). Suddenly the lake becomes visible from a high cliff top. I think it's the second largest lake in New Zealand, formed when a massive landslide blocked off a small stream. There's not much water going in or out so it's a very calm place.

Child beside Tuai lake wall, near the Hostel. Photo by Chris Thompson

It was, and still is, another world. Wild bees swarm in the village regularly. There seemed to be a dredge taking mud out of lake Tuai constantly, and silly birds that stand on one leg. There was no security stopping people wandering into the power station back then. Everything was closed in, the bush always nearby and us humans have only these little clearings that are far far apart.

We ended up out there because my father worked for the Electricity Department. My whole childhood can be mapped around powerstations.

Thanks to flickr, i found a few photos of that remote world.

I like this one best:

Meet Dan - this is his house.... he is a very happy man.
Unfortunately I met Dan around half way through the Urewera National Park, around 70km from my destination on a windy, wet gravel road. Dan and a few friends were moving his house from Ruatahuna to his marae. It is a VERY tight fit! I had a 30 min wait at this point while they dug the bank away enough to get the house through, and let me through.

This gate is the overflow of late Tuai; It is powered and controlled by gravity and alway fascinated me as a child. The high security fence is new; Times have changed.

Photo by Chris Thompson

Tuai Power Station

Photo by Phillip Rickerby

Photo by Phillip Rickerby

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A Great Message For Kiwi Companies

2010-03-10T21:29:31+00:00

Are you an exporter or a global company? It’s a subtle but very important difference. NZ tech companies have been confused on this one for too long.

Brand NZ does little for the NZ technology enterprise, so trying to derive some advantage in our clean, green, pure image is a waste of time. If anything it reinforces distance, remoteness and high cost. That’s not to say those values don’t work for our dominant industries – like agriculture and vodka production.

Don’t get me wrong, there is lots to love about being a NZ company with a bunch of dedicated Kiwis powered by Kiwi values. But that doesn’t mean you need to feature it.

At the end of the day, what we export in tech doesn’t weigh nearly as much – often it’s lighter than air. And more than often, while the IP is generated in NZ, the product is normally made in all the usual places. We in effect export ideas to people who make things for us and then export them to our customers who in term export the final product to their customer. You get them idea, if we are all exporters, why make the point?

Al Munroe of Next Window hits this on the head:

"It's important that New Zealand start-ups see themselves as global companies, because it may sound good to be a leading high-tech exporter [in New Zealand] but to the rest of the world it sounds pretty naff," he said.

Monro said being a New Zealand exporter gave potential customers and investors overseas the impression that their focus and scale was at a low level.

"I rail against the term export," he said.

Asked how New Zealand start-ups could escape being categorised as lowly exporters, he said they needed to be careful how they positioned themselves.

"If you position yourself as an emerging global company, it sends a completely different message."

Next Window is poised to become to of NZ’s tech giants. (And they are a supplier to Dell.)

Today on the radio: Do we deserve the Internet?

2010-03-10T21:05:34+00:00

It’s my last time on Radio New Zealand National for a while, and I thought I’d use it to address some more a philosophical question than I often do. I’ve written a separate post with my ideas below.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

The Internet: Too good for us?

2010-03-10T20:40:57+00:00

The Internet is an unmediated form of communication between humans all around the planet. It was designed that way and so far it has stayed that way. It’s different from the telephone, which allows targeted one to one communications, and from broadcasting which is one to many, although it does provide those as well. Through blogging, twitter, even email lists, the Internet has allowed us to build many-to-many communications systems. That’s a first.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Internet is the greatest engine of prosperity since since, say, the telephone or even since mass transportation. It allows us all to interact with people and business around the world without using up fossil fuels and personal resources in travel. It provides businesses with a customer communications channel connected directly to their back-end systems. On the Internet, life is good. And, as I have said on numerous occasions, it only got that way because the Internet is an open conduit for anything people can think of.

It has been recognized by lawmakers for years that openness is the key to the Internet’s usefulness. But, increasingly, that is coming to an end. The Chinese government routinely censors its domestic Internet and forces all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country through a giant gateway it controls. The US allows private companies to remove material placed on the Internet by third parties on accusation of copyright infringement. Australia looks likely to implement a national Internet filter in the name of pornography suppression. The UK is considering a “Digital Economy Bill” which would force Internet disconnections and filter access to websites. Even the New Zealand government is looking at a limited filtering system to combat child pornography.

All this brings me to my point: Can we, humankind, actually stand an open communications medium? One that lets all of us talk to all of us? Along with the huge list of economic and social benefits that brings? Observing the actions of government world wide, I’d have to answer “no”.

It appears that the Internet is just too open and too useful for humanity to come to terms with. Since the Internet is just a communications tool, this means that we, as a species, can’t tolerate open communications between all our members. That’s why I question whether the Internet is just too good for us, whether we deserve it at all.

But then, what can you expect from a species that can’t organize itself to operate in an environment of finite resources? There is no functioning mechanism for us to deal with global environment destruction or fossil fuel exhaustion, for instance. You don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to agree that we don’t have a way of dealing with it.

So, then, we are a deeply flawed race careering off a cliff of our own making. Does that mean we shouldn’t fight – that we should just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? I don’t think so. For me, each of us who recognizes the problems should act as best we can to hold a mirror to human activities. That means calling governments and industries when they try to hold progress to ransom. It means arguing for cooperative approaches to dealing issues that face us. It means not hiding our heads in the sand about limited resources.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. But until we at least accept the questions, neither will any of us.

How we deal with the Internet and its ability for us all to communicate will the question I posed in the title: is the Internet too good for us?

Uh Oh – the Google Apps Marketplace is Failing Me

2010-03-10T16:39:31+00:00

Exciting news yesterday that the Google Apps Marketplace was launching – this morning I thought I’d give it a whirl but…

To quote Homer Simpson… Doh!

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Azure Table Storage, what a pain in the ass.

2010-03-10T14:37:37+00:00

Lately I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s Azure service. Tonight in particular I was attempting to use the Table Storage service. Table Storage is a simple REST based object persistence system. Microsoft have wrapped this in the ADO.NET Data Services API. So it looks fairly full featured. However it is not. At almost every turn I [...]

Facebook, Twitter Get Into the Geo-Location Game

2010-03-10T14:15:10+00:00

Beginning next month, Facebook will include location-based status updates into its makeup, allowing all 400 million-plus users to update not just with short text blurbs, but with current location as well. Twitter activated geo-location on their status as well, just in time for South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas – one of the biggest tech gatherings in the nation.

Twitter activated their geo-location through the API in November, but did not incorporate it into status updates until yesterday. Facebook, meanwhile, updated their privacy settings (to much controversy) in November, ...

Four short links: 10 March 2010

2010-03-10T11:00:00+00:00

The Future of Book Publishing Business Models (Stephen Walli) -- some good thoughts about the book publishing industry and ebooks. When does Amazon create the iPhone/Android app and the programme that will allow bookstores to receive a cut of every Kindle edition they sell? I scan the book's in-store barcode with my smartphone, and I get the Kindle edition delivered, and the store gets its cut. Why is this different in concept than Borders on-line store being run on Amazon, or any of the independent book sellers that front through Amazon? It's not the normal book mark-up, but people already browse bookstores and buy on Amazon. This is better than no revenue. (When was the last time you went to a travel agent?)
Google Apps Enterprise Marketplace -- this is sweet. It looks like the play is to become the home page for authenticated apps rather than to make commissions from selling the apps themselves. This may be the Google business model vs the Apple business model in a nutshell. (via Marc Hedlund)
iPad Application Design -- some fantastic notes about the kinds of UI design that iPad encourages. I've avoided covering The Second Coming of The JesusPhone but this is interesting because of the middle ground it stakes out between phone and laptop. The primary warning about designing for the iPad is: more screen space doesn’t mean more UI. You’ll be tempted to violate that principle, and you need to resist the temptation. It’s OK to have UI available to cover your app’s functionality, but a bigger screen doesn’t mean it should all be visible at once. Hide configuration UI until needed. Look like a viewer, and behave like an editor ... There’s been a history of modes getting some bad press on the desktop. The issue is that they trade stability (things always being in exactly the same place in the UI, and not changing) for simplicity (not having too many controls to look through at once). On the iPad, it’s clear where the winning side of the balance is: simplicity. Modes are completely appropriate on this device. (via Marc Hedlund)
The Howtoons Visual Creation Guide -- we teach grammar and spelling in schools but not visual communication. This short booklet is a good start to remedying that. (via BoingBoing)

The Apps In The Google Apps Marketplace

2010-03-10T10:51:49+00:00

Image via CrunchBase

Last evening Google unveiled Google Apps Marketplace, an one-stop shop for SaaS business applications that are tightly integrated with Google Apps. Zoli covered the launch from Google Event and Ben did some analysis from the SMB perspective. I am going to take a different approach and cover some of the launch partners from the cloud computing space. Before I talk about the companies that launched in the marketplace, let me slip in some of my thoughts on this announcement.

Long before rumors of Google Apps Marketplace even surfaced in the internet and almost a year after Zoli clamored for Google’s entry into the business applications market, I fantasized about Gmail as an enterprise dashboard. People might have called me crazy at that time but I loved the idea of using the Gmail as a dashboard for all my activities.

I also want to point out that it is now possible to add any Google gadgets, including those developed by third party vendors, to Gmail. Who needs expensive Exchange Server and Sharepoint Server when you can have similar capabilities within a browser for a fraction of its cost? Before people jump on me for this assertion, I want to highlight the fact that I am talking about what could happen in the future than the current state of Google SaaS products.

Yesterday’s announcement was more like my dream come true. Well, I wanted a much deeper integration but it is a good beginning. From what I hear from many of the SaaS vendors, a deeper integration is in the roadmap for all of them.

Even though Ben has spoken from the SMB angle, I feel that this move by Google increases the relevancy of SaaS in the enterprise segment in a big way. One of the biggest obstacles for the enterprise adoption of SaaS is the issue of identity management. With the release of Google OpenID Federated login API, Google Apps became the identity hub of SaaS. The next logical step is to deeply integrate Google Apps with different SaaS applications and wait for the customers to jump in. With the release of Apps Marketplace, Google took the necessary step for this transition.

Check out this video giving an overview on Google Apps Marketplace

Google launched the App Marketplace with 50 launch partners. It is not possible for me to cover all of them. I will select four of them from the briefings I got and talk about how their apps are integrated with Google Apps. There is a common theme to all the apps. They are

Installing the app from the Google App Marketplace that shows up in Google Apps Admin Dashboard, much like other Google App services
The installed apps show up in the Google universal navigation (the links available on the left top side on all of the Google applications)
Integration of third party apps with Google apps and sharing of data

Zoho: Zoli has covered a bit about Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive sponsor of Cloud Ave) on this post yesterday. At this time, Zoho is integrating two of their business applications, Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects, with Google Apps. They have done some tighter integrations like the ability to import users from Google Apps, import contacts from Google Apps to CRM, subscribe and view events in CRM and Projects, attach Google Docs inside CRM and Project, etc.. This helps Zoho reach out to Google Apps users by offering a solid portfolio of business applications including Zoho CRM and Zoho Project. With the availability of Opensocial gadgets for Zoho CRM and Project, the data in these apps can be accessed from inside of Gmail. I asked Zoho evangelist, Raju Vegesna, about how deeply their products are going to integrated with one another in the future. He told me that we can expect much deeper integration with features like automatic sync of Google Contacts and Zoho CRM contacts, etc.. As a power Google Apps user and a Zoho CRM user, I can’t wait to have this kind of deeper integration. Exciting times are ahead for SaaS interoperability and integration.

Check out this video about Zoho CRM integration with Google Apps.

Socialwok: Socialwok is another favorite app of mine. Socialwok adds a social layer on top of Google Apps and offers a deeper integration with Google Apps services like calendar and docs. Socialwok, the winner of the Techcrunch 2009 demopit award, also runs on the Google infrastructure. It is built on top of Google App Engine. Already, they had made available a Google gadget which integrates well into Gmail. Now, Socialwok is even more integrated with Gmail, vastly simplifying the workflow and enhancing the collaboration further. I strongly recommend this app for any business with a distributed team.

Atlassian: Atlassian, the company behind the famous products like Jira, Confluence, etc., is also part of the Google Apps marketplace. Jira Studio, the fastest growing Atlassian product that offers developers a hosted software development suite, is now tightly integrated with Google Apps and it is available in the Marketplace. This integration allows developers to attach Google docs to any issue, embed any Google doc or list of docs into their wiki, Jira studio activity bar which shows unread message from gmail, calendar notification, open issues, etc. is available at the bottom of any page in studio and it is integrated with Google talk as well.

Check out this video about Jira Studio integration with Google Apps.

Skytap: Of all the partners, I was surprised to find Skytap in the list of Google Apps Marketplace launch partners. Unlike the other three I have covered above, Skytap is a cloud infrastructure provider (see my previous coverage of Skytap here, here and here). By integrating with Google Apps, Skytap is allowing users to log into their UI with Google Apps login, solving one of the biggest identity related problems faced by enterprises. But the most interesting part is the ability to run any enterprise apps, including legacy apps, on the Skytap cloud and access it from inside of Gmail. In my opinion, this is a true game changer and boosts the value of Google Apps among the enterprises.

For example, by using Skytap and Google Apps together, a sales engineer can instantly toggle between an enterprise application demo running in the Skytap Cloud to a Google Calendar application that contains necessary information to complete a task. Application developers and testers can move enterprise resource (ERP) applications to the Skytap Cloud without any code changes, migrate to a newer version, create application snapshots, maintain project milestones in Google Calendar(tm), and multi-task between Skytap and Google Docs(tm) to de-bug, track, take notes and collaborate with business analysts. Training Managers can use Google Apps to create a learning portal and provide access to a Skytap Cloud training environment for enterprise applications, while shifting between applications like Google Calendar which can be used for scheduling.

Check out this video about how Skytap is integrated inside Google Apps

I think few years from now, when we look back in this space, we may even conclude that this is a pivotal moment that catapulted Google into a strong player in the enterprise market. This has a potential to not only lift the prospects of Google on the enterprise side, this move will also strengthen the future of SaaS in a big way.

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EdTalks Symposium

2010-03-10T10:15:09+00:00

Forget Hollywood, or Bollywood for that matter, now there is EdTalksWood – featured on the hills above Wellington. Coming up on March 26th at Te Papa is a one-day “EDtalks Symposium – Leading Minds, Creating Futures”. This symposium features sixteen 20 minute presentations focusing on current trends in learning enabled through the smart use of technologies, and the related interface between education and business.

There’s a great list of presenters, thought leaders can ignite imaginations, stimulate fresh approaches, and challenge assumptions. The organisers have assembled a wide-ranging line up of presenters drawing on the university and schooling sector, business entrepreneurs, and telecommunication representatives, who will each provide a powerful idea, challenge or trend.

The day will be divided into four themed sessions, with four presenters and a short plenary for each theme. Each speaker gives a 20 minute presentation, and presenter details are published on the Symposium website.

All presentations will be accessible on the EdTalks website following the symposium.

Wellywood Sign, Meh, Time To Get The Pillars of Argonath [Updated]

2010-03-10T09:09:58+00:00

Today it was announced (Stuff: A sign of success for Wellywood hills) that there will be a "Wellywood" sign on the side of a hill into Wellington Airport sometime in June - here's what the Stuff.co.nz artists think it might look like:

picture from Stuff.co.nz

Whilst I think that's an okay idea I still believe that Duncan's idea from way back in March 2008 is much better - either side of the Miramar Cutting have the Pillars of Argonath!

This what they look like from the films (made in Miramar, of course).

And this is what the Miramar Cutting looks like from Google Streetview:

See, perfect place to have them!

It's just before the landing/take-off from Wellington International Airport and so would be seen by thousands of people.

Awesome idea eh!

And one that is supported far and wide ... ish

Update - and this is a mashup between the two photos from MrReasonable:

BTW: I'm not actively pursuing this idea, I'm not really thinking it's gonna happen - it's a blog post, nothing more. Lighten up anti-Wellyword-sign people, life's a little more complex and important than a bloody sign on a hill. That is all.

And to help you smile, check out the Wellywood Sign Generator from SkullAandBones

NZ Design Icons: 1974 Commonwealth Games

2010-03-10T08:23:55+00:00

In 1974 when New Zealand hosted the Commonwealth Games I was Eight. It’s a tribute to the graphic design that I can still remember (and regret losing) the pencil case, ruler, stickers and pens adorned with these icons.

NZ Design Icons: 1974 Commonwealth Games | Design Assembly

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2010-03-10T08:00:00+00:00

A really green printing idea – A “Don’t Print! Preview”

2010-03-10T07:55:13+00:00

A couple of tweets between CAD authors @thecadgeek & @SWGeek (right) combined with a need to reprint a sheet, several times, prompted me to think about the paper wasted with CAD. I read the tweels and dreamed this post up while waiting for my car pool ride, how green is that!

It spite of @thecadgeek’s comment I doubt the books you read to learn CAD are much of a factor in paper use. However, it did prompt a feature request that applies to any application that allows a user to edit and print output.

What the SWYDWBYP?

I want a special print/plot/publish preview that is not only WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet but also SeeWhatYouDontWantBeforeYouPrint! (SWYDWBYP).

Although the mock up shows the AutoCAD UI I think every application needs a green “Print Preview and Highlight Errors” button. It would find things like:

Dates not updated
The wrong project/client/site name where you’re borrowed an old job as a template
Miss-matched styles or stupid page breaks in documents
Links & tables that are not updated
Hatches that look fine on screen but too light/dense when printed
Fonts that are OK when you can zoom, unreadable so when you can’t!
And many more…

All that stuff that makes you go “Doh!” the instant you look at the print, sometimes even the instant you press print, but previously not apparent on screen.

I always thought this was because we scan/read paper differently to a screen. That theory fails as I find reading a blog post in the editor, then a second later when published (where it looks identical) is a similarly different experience.

Maybe it’s really because when viewing a print/published item you are aware others are/will also be seeing it? The advantage with a blog is you can fix the errors, if you notice them, without wasting more trees!

(A tired blogger presses publish and waits to see how many unnoticed errors were published in this post)

The ‘Wellywood’ sign: people power gets things done

2010-03-10T06:18:12+00:00

That was a very interesting 30 hours. I found out about the ‘Wellywood’ sign yesterday afternoon, through Twitter, and Tweeted to say I hated it. Little did I know then that there was a huge Facebook group—6,000 strong at the time of writing—where Wellingtonians were making their voices known.
And when I got there to Facebook, I was inspired.
While my opponents were still talking hot air, I decided to act for the good of the city. I was inspired by one comment on the larger anti-sign Facebook group, which asked: surely someone holds the copyright?
First stop: the Hollywood Sign Trust. If anyone knew who owned the sign, it would be them.
I received a very nice reply from Betsy Isroelit of the Trust at what must have been very early hours in California, to say that she had referred it to the correct parties.
By the time I got up today, I had an email waiting from Global Icons, LLC, which, with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, owns the original Hollywood sign’s intellectual property. Global Icons, from what I understand, looks after this side of things for the Chamber. And would I please send them the artist’s impression of what the sign would look like?
And that kicked it off. I mentioned this to Rachel Morton at TV3 news before I was interviewed, and she took the initiative by contacting the CEO of the Chamber for comment immediately. It turns out that he did not know that the matter was already brewing in California, but he does now. Rachel tells me that he then put the Chamber’s lawyers on to the case. That’s two for us, nil for Mayor Prendergast and the airport.
All it took was the creativity of Wellingtonians to show something I have said from day one.
You know, creativity? The thing that this sign does not represent, and makes fun of?
And all it took were everyday Wellingtonians collaborating. I was inspired by the person on the Facebook group. And if I hadn’t approached the Trust and Global Icons, I wouldn’t have mentioned it to Rachel. And if Rachel hadn’t called the CEO, Global Icons would probably be going it alone. It doesn’t matter who gets the credit, because the credit is, really, everyone’s. The result should hopefully be that this horrible sign does not go up because people were prepared to act—whether by making their voice known on Facebook, or making some phone calls.
People power, not corporates, not élites, gets things done. And that includes this year’s mayoral election.

"Would you like to take part in a 60-second survey?"

2010-03-10T04:16:07+00:00

"Would you like to take part in a 60-second survey?" is the opening line from many of the unsolicited phone calls I receive these days. Being less than enthusiastic about strangers trying to sell me shit or ask me intrusive questions over the phone, my response is usually something along the lines of "why, what are you selling?"

"Oh I promise you we're not selling you anything at all - we're just doing a quick survey about the economy" says the girl on the phone this afternoon. "Oh," I reply, "do you want to know what I think about the economy? Are you doing an opinion poll?" - because I don't mind opinion polls (I think quietly to myself).

She edges round my question without giving me a straight answer, and when I ask her what her company does, she tells me they provide financial advice for businesses - or something along those, lines, anyway.

So I say OK, because I figure, well, what's 60 seconds out of my life? I can handle that. I'm waiting for the next two questions because I know exactly what they will be. The first is my age bracket. I fall within it so I answer in the affirmative.

The second question is the kicker. It is always - and I mean always "do you own your own home?"

Hmmm. Why would they want to know that? Gosh, really - I wonder why?

I lie and say "no" because I have realised it's the single most effective way to get these people off the phone.

I have never ever had to continue with one of these "surveys" when I tell them I'm a renter. Goodness me! Don't they want to gather the opinions of people who rent along with those who owe hundreds of thousands to whatever bank was kind enough to give them a mortgage? Apparently not. How very strange.

Could it be because they're actually planning to sell me something further on down the line - if I give them the right answers of course - of which the most important, apparently, is "do you have enough income to get a mortgage and therefore potentially have sufficient income to be tempted by whatever shit we're really planning on trying to sell you?"

Of course they are. They'll either store all my details away for a cold-call later on when they finally reveal whatever it is they're really selling - or perhaps they'll put my details together with the contact details of hundreds of other people and sell them in bulk to some company that wants to sell me whatever it is that they sell.

Which means - goodness me - the girl on the phone wasn't exactly telling the whole truth, now was she? OK so she wasn't trying to sell me anything right that minute, but her response to my "no I don't own my own hone - I rent" answer couldn't have been clearer.

"Oh well, that lets you off the hook, then! Thanks very much - goodbye!" and with that cheery farewell she's off to hassle the next poor sucker dumb enough to have their name and number in the phone book.

Yeah thanks a lot cheery girl on the phone. I've changed my mind - that's 60 seconds of my life I'll never get back. I'm so over people lying to me on the the phone to try and get useful info from me that they'll use against me later on. Thanks very much - goodbye!

Technorati tags: consumer surveys, cold-calling, intrusive phone calls, do you own your own home, things that annoy me, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.

The Skinny on Google's New SMB Application Marketplace

2010-03-10T03:01:00+00:00

Last week I speculated to some impending announcements from Google about application stores specifically tailored to the small and medium business market. Well, readers didn’t have to wait long, Google has just launched what is essentially an SMB application marketplace – A place where (they hope) customers will discover, purchase and deploy integrated third party cloud applications.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a store front aimed at the 25 million individual users that Google apps has across two million businesses. It’s a standards looking web application space that leverages some core facets:

Central management of application availability

Universal navigation within and between apps

Single sign on
Secure data access via OAuth

In terms of the business details, later in the year Google will be releasing a flexible billing API for vendors to allow them to set their own pricing policies – either way Google extracts a 20% revenue share for applications purchased through the Marketplace.

I spoke with Bob Warfield, CEO of Helpstream who are part of the salesforce.com AppExchange (a similar, yet slightly different, app store). Helpstream acquires around 100 sales leads a month from their involvement with the store. I asked him what vendor and customer drivers there were around involvement on an app store. Not surprisingly, Warfield’s answer showed the bipolar nature of application store involvement:

For a vendor, app stores are all about how much traffic they bring you. I suspect for buyers, they're all about how many choices they bring.

It seems to me that Google’s approach is a somewhat limited perspective on what app stores can achieve for SMBs. Platforms (notably the AppExchange and the Intuit Partner Platform (see disclosure) have a much broader set of touch points than does Google’s incarnation. Whereas the other two examples use a broad common data model, Google’s is limited to management at the back end and calendar/docs/mail at the user facing end.

I put this to Scott McMullan, enterprise lead at Google, who expressed the position that Google believes “the web is the platform, and where common data models are typically created” a seemingly more open approach, but one that arguably drives less benefits to end users than a more proprietary, but richer, approach. I spoke to Sunir Shah from freshBooks about this matter and he, unsurprisingly, supported the oepn web view saying:

The reason the Open Web is important is because closed platforms lock small businesses into solutions they may not want with services worse than why the free market provides. The lightweight data structures is how the Web works best: small pieces, loosely joined. Forcing third vendors to buy into a massive monolithic data structure locks them into a smaller market which limits how much they can grow and reinvest resources into innovation.

Shah was also very positive about Google as a player in the marketplace saying:

I am a big fan of them. Not just for the obvious reasons of their size and market reach but because from the beginning they have put a huge emphasis on building a marketplace the right way. For years they have supported the Open Web movement and helped usher in protocols like OpenID and OAuth. They have reached out to partners and competitors to involve them in a fair and meaningful way. Moreover working with them has been great. They have been extremely helpful and I just want to give them a public high five for that.

McMullan’s view about open versus proprietary platforms was that:

We're [the more proprietary platforms and Google's more "open" approach] both promoting "integrated apps". We just tend to bring different types of data to the party to integrate. Intuit has a lot of transaction/finance data, so they're extending the value of that into other contexts. We have a lot of collaboration and messaging and user profile data, so we're looking to make that more useful to users.

This view is, unsurprisingly, borne out by Intuits Director of the Partner Platform, Alex Chriss, who told me recently that the IPP, with its common data model, will be more appealing for SMBs who want a “one stop shop” for their apps. “The simplicity of sign up and sign in and the ability to have data working seamlessly across applications is a very powerful thing” he said.

I also questioned McMullan about The Small Business Web and it’s goal of getting SaaS vendors to work together and publish open APIs. McMullan was positive about the initiative, saying that “I know this group and we like what they stand for.”

McMullan and I talked about app stores in general and for SMBs in particular. I asked McMullan whether there were synergies between what Google is doing and other SMB plays such as the AppExchange or Intuit’s Partner Platform. While not wanting to look too far forward, he was positive about Intuit’s approach saying that “We believe strongly in what they're doing w/App Center for sure and are fans. Synergies are mainly ahead of us, given we don't do much together, other than believe this is part of the future for small businesses acquiring software”

It should be noted that with the launch of the Marketplace, Intuit and Google are working together as Intuit has an Online Payroll application already listed.

So… as for the Google initiative. With 25 million users it almost guaranteed that developers will flock to the app store (at launch there are already around 50 applications available). The current APIs available to developers are well proven and hence integration with the store should be relatively straightforward. McMullan gave an example of Google apps appearing within Atlassian’s Jura application (see below) as a useful and efficient use case for users.

Coming up on the road map are what Google calls contextual gadgets – in the same way that Gmail is now automatically embedding YouTube videos with Gmail, so too could application developers chose to have contextual data from their apps embedded in an email – see the image below showing Appirio data within Gmail. This is from a real product “PS Connect” that Appirio are demo-ing at the Google CampFire right now.

All in all it’s an exciting move. The purist in me would have wished for a far higher granularity around data integration points and a richer common data model but notwithstanding that I’m fully confident that Google’s app store will gain significant traction in the marketplace.

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Why does anyone still use IE 8?

2010-03-10T01:58:36+00:00

I'll freely admit that I'm often first to defend Microsoft in just about everything they do. For development tools you can't beat Visual Studio and .Net. Office 2010 rocks. Yes, I even love SharePoint (again :).

HOWEVER, Internet Explorer 8 is the biggest waste of time I have ever seen.

According the Tom's Hardware Review (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558.html) Chrome is the #1 browser and I'm inclined to agree. The things that really nailed it for me are the lack of standards support and the javascript speed in IE. These are the 2 most important features for successful modern web sites and having 60-ish percent of users with a slow buggy browser is bad news. The most damning eveidence is clear - only a 20% pass rate on Acid3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3).

I switched to Chrome for most work a while ago and version 4 of this slipped quietly onto my machines without me noticing. It's a pleasure to use. It's fast, stable, simple and nearly all web sites work flawlessly - the few that don't tend to be IE specific sites.

My message to Microsoft is this. Give up!! You've lost. You've had 10 years? to give the world a better browser. Google has done it in 1 year. The only reason IE has 60% dominance is because it's on every copy of Windows that gets installed and most corporate users don't want the hassle of a non-integrated browser. If you really want to have a browser worthy of forcing onto everyones desktop then please just use WebKit and add whatever tweaks you need to that.

What happened to Hamilton

2010-03-10T00:27:06+00:00

This is not the Hamilton i remember growing up in:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6913352/hit-and-run-robbery-vic...

Passing motorists ignored a hit-and-run robbery victim left lying on the side of a Hamilton road last night, police say.

The 21-year-old man was walking home across Anglesea Street about 11pm when he was hit by a vehicle, near the Caro Street intersection.

The vehicle's occupants, believed to be two men and a woman, demanded the victim's wallet and took his backpack which had been thrown a short distance by the impact of the car.

In fact i'm hoping the journalist has left something out of this account to explain it. I'm gonna be watching for more details.

The area was busier than usual as people made their way home from the international cricket match at Seddon Park, and police hoped someone may recall seeing the incident take place.

I've seen someone fall off a pushbike in central Wellington and be inundated in people trying to help. Hamilton isn't that much different to Wellington.

p.s does Cricket really run as late as 11pm?

and now a baby photo:

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Lifeworks Counseling and Services Experimentation

2010-03-09T23:25:12+00:00

The Latest design to come out my Quentin de Manson designs. Its a website for Nickei Falconer who works as a counsellor in Christchurch, New Zealand. She calls her business Life Works

This site is the first in a package idea I am experimenting with at the moment. Its goal is to create the customer a website where they can change the content and have a professionally finished website for an affordable price. Great for start-ups and sole traders.

The concept was to use wordpress a free blog based CMS (Content Management System). Choose a free theme, ‘tweak’ it to suit the client then get it ready to go. Judging by how quickly it takes me to put a site together in this style, I thought, ‘piece of cake’. Mmmm… Not so much. To make yeah.. quick and easy. But you still have to manage the client. The time is spent is persuading the customer on why i recommend some things and not others, the time is in the dialogue to get the content just right, the time is in giving the client the preview of the website before the build and so on, do you get my drift?

So my high and lofty ideas to make affordable/cheap professional websites has hit a bump. Not a wall, but a bump. Perhaps some time needs to be spent in documentation, guiding the client through the process, without me having to explain the same stuff to different clients several times a week (weither they read this is a different matter entirely)? Maybe have an online project management and client management system like basecamp set-up. So all they have to do is login and see where I am up to, what they need to do and download documentation on whats happening. Mmm, well there are options, I will keep you informed on how the experiment continues. Does anyone you know need a website that my little “experimental package” may for fill? Let them know I exist, I might be able to help them.

Credits for elements that contributed towards the above website:
CMS: Wordpress
Theme Adjusted: Kirby – By Ian Stewart
Plugins Used: Dynamic Headers, Akismet , Google site maps

Michael Geist to keynote PublicACTA

2010-03-09T23:07:13+00:00

Michael Geist is coming to town..

allow me have a little fangirl moment

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

Here's the press release:

Michael Geist to keynote PublicACTA - InternetNZ

Media Release - 10 March 2010 - InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) is excited to announce that renowned Canadian law professor Michael Geist, a world authority on technology law issues, will be the keynote speaker at the PublicACTA event, being held in Wellington on 10 April 2010.

"We are delighted that Professor Geist is able to make it to New Zealand to contribute to the debate around the ACTA negotiations," says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter.

PublicACTA is being held the weekend before the next round of ACTA negotiations in Wellington, 12-16 April 2010.

ACTA is a plurilateral trade agreement being negotiated by the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, aimed at increasing the control that intellectual property owners have over their products and ideas, and at reducing incidents of counterfeiting and illegal trade in goods. The negotiation phase of the treaty is intended to be finished in 2010.

Professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, has written widely on the challenges of copyright and digital technology.

"His in-depth understanding of the ACTA process to date, and well publicised positions in favour of citizen access to the negotiation process, will add quality analysis and profile to the event," says Carter.

"PublicACTA will be aimed at creating a constructive contribution to the negotiations being held in Wellington. Professor Geist's participation will contribute to that goal," says Carter.

Professor Geist is looking forward to participating in the event:

“New Zealand has emerged as a leading global voice on ACTA and I'm delighted to have the chance to participate in this important event.

“Many people around the world have watched with admiration at how thousands of New Zealanders have actively engaged in domestic and international copyright reform initiatives, promoting a balanced approach that meets the needs of all stakeholders,” he says.

Further information about Michael Geist is available at his website, which can be found at www.michaelgeist.ca.

People who are interested in attending the PublicACTA event should register their interest by sending an email to rsvp@internetnz.net.nz.

Further details about the Conference will be released on a dedicated website next week.

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Statusnet Public Beta

2010-03-09T21:46:31+00:00

The fancy new version of statusnet rocks.

It's AGPL licenced, fully federated, and you can have you own installation for free.

head to
http://status.net/signup

And you can get your own statusnet installation. Mine is at http://shiny.status.net.

And cos it's all federated, anyone using another Ostatus compliant app can subscribe to you. You can subscribe to me by entering shiny@status.net, or br3nda@identi.ca -- you can subscribe to Google buzz users by entering their gmail address - and there are a handful of other apps out there that support ostatus.

It's a true open source, open data, open web solution - without any single point of failure. awesome stuff.

and now a baby photo:

p.s. Baby microblogs at caseyaroha@identi.ca

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Working on Me

2010-03-09T21:43:52+00:00

I seem to be running 3 months late this year – I’m just starting to realise what my new year’s resolutions are, and they all seem to be about self-improvement. I am thinking of going into an intensive phase of sorting some stuff out. This stuff falls into a couple of key categories:

NOT making the same mistakes again

I have recognised some trends in my life, around mucking up in the same way, time and time again. I *think* someone once told me that doing this repeatedly is in fact, a sign of insanity. I need to put a stop to that. Most of these mistakes follow the same path:
1. Natalie decides on something.
2. Natalie starts to have massive self doubt and second guesses everything
3. natalie freaks herself out so much, she can’t think straight on the issue any more.
4. Natalie does something very stupid and it blows up in her face.

So I’m going to work on point 2.

Set some goals

I have given myself a couple of years off, but there’s stuff I need to do. I need to pay off a mortgage so that I’m not stuck in a one bedroom apartment into my old age, I need to get more interests (i.e I need to learn that simply buying a Ukulele doesn’t make me a musician), I need to challenge my brain so by the end of the year I will feel like I am a slightly different and better person as a result of 2010.

I need to accept my past

I have struggled with this. I struggle to fit my mistakes into the person I think I am and find reason or lessons from them. Apparently this isn’t great news health wise. So this year, I am going to come to grips with choices I have made, things I have done and allow myself to absorb them as simply part of who I am. I need to stop letting my past hold me back and I need to stop hoping I can wipe some things from my history.

Breaking bad habits is TOUGH!

Michael Geist to keynote PublicACTA - InternetNZ

2010-03-09T21:34:28+00:00

InternetNZ is excited to announce that renowned Canadian law professor Michael Geist, a world authority on technology law issues, will be the keynote speaker at the PublicACTA event, being held in Wellington on 10 April 2010.

“We are delighted that Professor Geist is able to make it to New Zealand to contribute to the debate around the ACTA negotiations,” says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter.PublicACTA is being held the weekend before the next round of ACTA negotiations in Wellington, 12-16 April 2010.

ACTA is a plurilateral trade agreement being negotiated by the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, aimed at increasing the control that intellectual property owners have over their products and ideas, and at reducing incidents of counterfeiting and illegal trade in goods. The negotiation phase of the treaty is intended to be finished in 2010.

Professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, has written widely on the challenges of copyright and digital technology.

“His in-depth understanding of the ACTA process to date, and well publicised positions in favour of citizen access to the negotiation process, will add quality analysis and profile to the event,” says Carter.

“PublicACTA will be aimed at creating a constructive contribution to the negotiations being held in Wellington. Professor Geist’s participation will contribute to that goal,” says Carter.

Professor Geist is looking forward to participating in the event:

“New Zealand has emerged as a leading global voice on ACTA and I’m delighted to have the chance to participate in this important event.

“Many people around the world have watched with admiration at how thousands of New Zealanders have actively engaged in domestic and international copyright reform initiatives, promoting a balanced approach that meets the needs of all stakeholders,” he says.

Further information about Michael Geist is available at his website, which can be found at www.michaelgeist.ca.

People who are interested in attending the PublicACTA event should register their interest by sending an email to rsvp@internetnz.net.nz.

Further details about the Conference will be released on a dedicated website next week.

How much memory does my ColdFusion variable really use? – Part III

2010-03-09T20:12:23+00:00

Finally, nearly the last part (there’s one more coming…). In part II I talked about the different problems we’d run into using the instrumentation code out-of-the-box without modifying it for the special scenario of using it to size ColdFusion variables. We declared those issues solved (sic!) – so let’s have a look at some code and how to use it. All I’ve done was to grab the example from Heinz’s JavaSpecialists newsletter and changed some of the signatures (from private to protected). I then wrote a class CFMemoryCounterAgent that simply extends MemoryCounterAgent and overrides some of the methods with modified versions to cater for ColdFusion (well, technically it’s probably overloading because I modified the signature…).

Also while I was at it – I added a second argument to sizeOf() and deepSizeOf() named ignoreFlyweights. That refers back to the last section of part II – it enables you to define if the (what we have defined as well-known) flyweights are going to be counted for the total memory usage or not.

This is the modified internalSizeOf() method, that’s being used to “filter” for the the two well-known “troublemakers” in CF as discussed in part II. When I was doing some further testing, I came across a few more scenarios that could cause the memory sizing to drift off, those have been added as well:

 private static long internalSizeOf(Object obj, Stack stack, Map visited, 
   boolean ignoreFlyweights) 
  {
    if (skipObject(obj, visited, ignoreFlyweights)) 
    {	
      return 0;
    }
 
    Class clazz = obj.getClass();  
 
    if (clazz.isArray()) 
    {
      addArrayElementsToStack(clazz, obj, stack);
    } 
    else 
    {
      // add all non-primitive fields, non-CF memory tracker objects and non-SessionContext objects to the stack
      while (clazz != null) 
      {
        Field[] fields = clazz.getDeclaredFields();
        for (Field field : fields) 
        {
          if (!Modifier.isStatic(field.getModifiers()) && !field.getType().isPrimitive() && 
            field.getType().getName() != "coldfusion.runtime.NeoPageContext" && 
            field.getType().getName() != "coldfusion.runtime.CfJspPage" && 
            field.getType().getName() != "coldfusion.monitor.memory.MemoryTrackable" && 
            field.getType().getName() != "coldfusion.monitor.sql.QueryStat" && 
            field.getType().getName() != "coldfusion.monitor.memory.MemoryTrackerProxy" && 
            field.getType().getName() != "javax.servlet.ServletContext") 
          {
            field.setAccessible(true);
            try 
          	{
              stack.add(field.get(obj));        
            } 
            catch (IllegalAccessException ex) 
            {
              throw new RuntimeException(ex);
            }
          }
        }
        clazz = clazz.getSuperclass();
      }
    }
    visited.put(obj, null);
 
    return sizeOf(obj, ignoreFlyweights);
  }

I’ve provided a .zip file (version 0.1.1) containing the source. If you don’t want to compile it yourself, just grab the CFMemoryCounterAgent.jar and apply it to your CF instance as described in part I. The .zip also contains a memorytest.cfm that should be self-explanatory and will give you an idea how it’s supposed to be used. If you want to compile it, the build file for Ant should do the trick – please note that there is a copy task in there that copies the file into the location of my CF installation’s lib folder. You pretty much would want to change that to copy the .jar file to a different location OR remove that copy task in the first place. Also – I’ve build and tested this on CF 8.0.1 on OS X. You need Java 5 or newer to run this in the first place and YMMV with other CF versions. If you try it and get weird results, let me know.

Edit: The .jar file is compiled with Java 6 and the Ant file targets Java 6 as well. Make sure that you potentially recompile the source and change the Ant file if you try to run this on Java 5.

Please keep in mind that all results you’re getting from this are JVM-based estimations and sort-of right. Also, I would strongly discourage you to build totally messed-up code for the sake of saving 250 bytes or similar. Don’t forget that the JVM has a reasonably well-working garbage collection and the GC will collect most variables that you create on a page very quickly in the first place. The techniques shown here are more for information and to raise the behind-the-scenes awareness. Besides that, it’s just interesting to see how CF deals with the different variable types. The next (and final) post of this series will have a look at some results and try to explain those. Stay tuned.

How much memory does my ColdFusion variable really use? – Part III is a post from: Blog in Black

Harmony, A Great Way to View Google Docs from Outlook

2010-03-09T19:28:09+00:00

We are constantly looking for ways to make Google Apps and other cloud services work with you and your business. There are many people who prefer to use Outlook as their client of choice. Other tools like Offisync have integrated Microsoft Office and Google Docs, and you can sync outlook with Google Mail using the tools Google themselves provide.

Harmony have recently produced a new free add on for Microsoft Outlook that neatly integrates Google Docs. We have tried it and so far it seems to work really nicely!

If you give it a try, let us know how you find it in the comments!

Video: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide

2010-03-09T18:59:16+00:00

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been spearheading efforts to make web more intelligent and useful to people. As a part of this effort, he has been calling people to open up the data and put it on the web in an open format. Recently, at TED University, he spoke about some examples of how open data on the web has been used for many useful purposes, including a major role in rebuilding Haiti. We thought we will share the video of his talk here.

http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/TimBerners-Lee_2010U-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/TimBerners-Lee-2010U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=788&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide;year=2010;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;theme=new_on_ted_com;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;event=TED2010;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;">;">http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/TimBerners-Lee_2010U-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/TimBerners-Lee-2010U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=788&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide;year=2010;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;theme=new_on_ted_com;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;event=TED2010;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;">http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/TimBerners-Lee_2010U-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/TimBerners-Lee-2010U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=788&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide;year=2010;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;theme=new_on_ted_com;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;event=TED2010;">http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/TimBerners-Lee_2010U-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/TimBerners-Lee-2010U.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=788&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide;year=2010;theme=the_rise_of_collaboration;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;theme=new_on_ted_com;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;event=TED2010;" allowscriptaccess="never">

(Hat Tip: Huffington Post )

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Standing in Silence, again

2010-03-09T14:44:58+00:00

Rhian Sheehan is performing "Standing in Silence" again. Go. The last one was quite probably the best musical performance I've ever been to.

HP Slate Shows Off Flash in New Video

2010-03-09T14:15:04+00:00

With all of the buzz about the new Apple iPad, the new HP Slate has been a little overlooked. This new device from Hewlett Packard will run Windows 7 and, of course, Adobe’s Flash. The video also captures the on-screen keyboard, showcases how the hardware-accelerated Flash speeds up performance, and also shows that AIR applications will also run on the Slate.

Little is offered from HP on the technology underneath the hood of this device, but it’s obvious ...

Truly Open Data

2010-03-09T14:00:00+00:00

I'm kicking myself. I have spent a non-trivial number of hours talking to government departments and scientists about open data, talking up an "open source approach" to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses. I've had more successes than failures, met and helped some wonderful people, and now have more mail about open data in my inbox than about open source. So why am I kicking myself?

I'm kicking myself because I've been taking far too narrow an interpretation of "an open source approach". I've been focused on getting people to release data. That's the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.

Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't bring the same opportunities to data projects.

And a lot of data projects need these things. From talking to government folks and scientists, it's become obvious that serious problems exist in some datasets. Sometimes corners were cut in gathering the data, or there's a poor chain of provenance for the data so it's impossible to figure out what's trustworthy and what's not. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball, then immediately forks as all the users add their new records to their own copy and don't share the additions. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball but nobody has provided a way for users to collaborate even if they want to.

So lately I've been asking myself: What if we applied the best thinking and practices from open source to open data? What if we ran an open data project like an open source project? What would this look like?

First, we'd collaboratively build the dataset. This means we'd have a curator who is the equivalent of a project leader, taking patches and filtering for quality. Successful open source project leaders foster a group of developers of different skills, rewarding on merit while fostering new talent. Like open source projects, the nirvana state is to have a project that can survive the retirement or death of its founder.

But collaboration takes more than leadership--open source projects have tools that help. An open data project would need a mailing list to collaborate on, IRC or equivalent to chat in real-time, and a bug-tracker to identify what needs work and ensure that the users' needs are being met. The official dataset of New Zealand school zones has errors but there's nobody to report them to, much less a way to submit a fix to a maintainer. Oh, and don't forget a way to acknowledge and credit contributors—think not just of credits.txt but also of the difference between patch submitter, committer, and project maintainer.

Open source software developers have a powerful set of tools to make distributed authoring of software possible: diff to identify what's changed, patch to apply those changes elsewhere, version control to track changes over time and show provenance. Patch management would be just as important in a collaborative open data project, where users and other researchers might be submitting new or revised data. What would git for data look like? Heck, what would a local branch look like? I have a new attribute, you have a different projection, she has new rows, how does this all tie back together? (I eagerly await claims that RDF will solve this problem and all others)

That's just development. The interface between developers and users is the release. State of the art for a lot of government data is the equivalent of source.tar.gz. No version numbers, much the ability to download older versions of the datasets or separate stable and development branches.

Why would we want to download the historic version of a dataset? Because a paper used it and we want to test the analysis software that the paper used to ensure we get the same answer. Or because we want to see what our analysis technique would have shown with the knowledge that was available back then. Or simply to be able to track defects.

The users of data will have to adapt to the idea of versions, like the users of software have. The maintainers of the dataset might release five different versions of it while you're writing your analysis code, so it can't be a painful process to incorporate the revised data into your project. With software we have shared libraries and dynamic libraries, supported by autotools and such packages. Our code has interfaces and a branch that promises backwards compatibility. What would that look like for data? And what is the data version of the dependency hell that software developers know all-too-well (M 1.5 depends on N 1.7 and P 2.0, but P 2.0 requires N 2.0, and upgrading N to 2.0 breaks M which expects the 1.x set of interfaces from N ...).

And, of course, there's documentation. As with software, I imagine we'll see some docs structured and some unstructured. The state of the art isn't great for government datasets, it has to be said: if you're lucky you get a "code X means ABCD" but rarely are you told exactly how the data were generated, the limits on its accuracy, situations where it shouldn't be used, etc.

Finally, we need to change attitudes and social systems. Data is produced as the product of work done, and is rarely conceived of as having a life outside the original work that produced it. Some datasets will (some won't--think of how many projects fail to interest anyone but the person who started them). This means thinking of yourself not just as the person who does the work, but the person who leads a project of interested outsiders and (in some cases) collaborators and who is building something that will last beyond their time. This is not a natural mindset within government nor, in many cases, science. Funding and budgeting systems at the moment may prevent this, and would need to change.

The good news is that while government datasets are rarely generated collaboratively, science is a little further along. PubMed and GenBank are just two examples of great science collaborations that we can learn from, and I'm sure there are more. Beyond science, OpenStreetMap is an important example of collaborative data gathering and the Open Knowledge Foundation folks may have work in this area already. I'm keen to learn more about the open data projects that are more than just data-over-the-wall and share what I find. Time to stop kicking myself and start learning!

bbc homepage (re)launches

2010-03-09T12:23:18+00:00

The BBC homepage, which I worked on from January until October last year, has finally gone public (well, beta). You can get to it one of two ways: either hit the current homepage and opt in to the new one (link on the top of the page). Or just load the website.

So, whats new (well, that I know about – there may be more since I left)?

Note to the usual BBC-bashers out there: This is my opinion on a lot of things, and also a snapshot of how it was when I left in October. Things may have changed. I may not have remembered them quite right. People may have made decisions which you dont agree with. Get over it. And if you think I speak for the BBC, BBC Worldwide or anyone but myself, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you…..

The criteria of the homepage rewrite was a lift and shift, which means that functionality that the end user sees and uses should not change much, if at all, but it needs to run on a totally new platform, be somewhat future-proofed, and be updated for changes in technology.

The basic idea of a movable, customisable set of boxes with the various news items, launching you deep into other BBC properties, hasn’t changed. There are a number of smaller UX changes – eg the size of the header is different, the media box has changed completely and can now do video amongst other things – but the basics haven’t changed.

If you loved the old homepage, you’ll most likely love this one. If you hated it before, I doubt you’ll like it now, either. That’s just how things are. If you really want to change it, I suggest you apply for a job at BBC FM&T.

What has changed is mostly behind the scenes. On the front end the Glow Javascript library, which the BBC open sourced a few months ago, has been used for most of the page layout and manipulation. As this is the standard UI library within the BBC, this means that pool of people who can maintain the homepage is larger, at least within the BBC. A lot of the older markup and styles have been updated to reflect changes in the state-of-the-art since the original homepage was written.

On the backend is where most of the changes are. The BBC has invested in a new platform, internally called Forge, and the homepage is the first major project I know of to launch on the new platform. Forge is a complete re-work of the BBC platform – the existing one evolved over time since web 1.0, and was having trouble handling the large load of events like 7/7, or the projected load of the 2012 Olympics. Most of the code was a mix of Server Side Includes (SSI) and Perl, with some Java thrown in for good measure. The existing homepage had issues around how long it took to make a new widget, which was addressed in the new homepage.

The Forge platform uses a lot of up-to-date techniques and technologies. At the front end lies PHP, which is used to render the pages to the end user. I can only summise why PHP was chosen (as I wasn’t at all part of the decision), but I imagine it was for a number of reasons: it’s known to be able to be scaled (facebook/yahoo anyone?), and there are a lot of people out there with PHP and front end skills. Finding people with the right skills easily and (fairly) cheaply is always going to be more of a problem than throwing some more hardware at a problem, within reason. I have my own feelings about PHP (especially after using it for 9 months), but I think, in this case, it’s a good decision.

Forge uses a SOA-based architecture, and the base platform provides a number of different services to all applications, such as databases (mysql), key-value stores (couchdb, abstracted away to look like a dumb store), memcached, image manipulation, monitoring, geo-ip, inter-layer caching and a rather brilliant internal feed engine, which allows for feeds to be pulled from various internal and external sources, cached and managed for availability, and then served to the requesting page in a very short amount of time.

Other services – REST-based and usually delivering JSON or XML – can be written as needed and hosted on the Forge platform, using Java (preferred) or Perl (for legacy apps, usually).

Forge is also a development environment, designed to allow easy development both inside and outside of the BBC firewall. For example, during the snowpocalypse last year, working at home was as easy as just plugging in the laptop and turning off the proxies. From there, we had full access to all source code, continuous dev/test/stage environments, wikis, bug tracking systems, IRC etc. We even had one team member working from New Zealand using the same system. This aspect alone makes forge one of the best overall development environments I’ve used. Work anywhere with a ‘net connection. Really. Bravo to BBC’s Forge people on the design and implementation.

If you look at the homepage, the architecture is fairly simple (tho the implementation isn’t)

The first step is to work out if we know who you are. If we dont, you get a default page, which is served out of cache if possible, which puts almost zero load on the platform for 80% of users.
If we know who you are, PHP generates the page, based on a document definition stored for you in the key-value store. Updates to the definition can be applied here, for example adding a new widget (Olympics? Wimbledon?) to all users layouts.
The feed engine provides all the content – news items, weather, TV listings etc – to the PHP code. The default homepage had, last time I checked, around 75 feeds on it. This come from various sources, from databases, web services, RSS and ATOM feeds, and other sources, some of which could never handle the load of the homepage. The feed engine abstracts that away, meaning that the homepage only deals with one format, and the source sites don’t get slammed.
Most steps in this process – each widget, each sub item with in a widget, each feed, each document – are cached, reducing the load on the platform as much as possible.

One thing that new site does which the old one couldn’t do well, is having separate layouts for different geographical locations. At the moment*, it’s “UK” and “everyone else”. UK gets the normal page and everyone else gets a more world-focused page (eg, no London news unless you ask for it, world news above UK news), and also ads and promotional stuff via BBC.com, BBC Worldwide’s online business unit (which I used to work for), which is how the homepage pays for itself outside of the UK (which is paid for by the license fee). This allows BBC.com to sell campaign’s for the “rest of the world”, and have them integrate into the site seamlessly, where as before these additions looked somewhat out of place, as well as being quite hard to implement.

So, all up, it’s a massive change to a well-used page, but not one that most users will notice – which is the point. What people will notice is, over time, a richer availability of content and interaction, which couldn’t be done in either a timely manner or a scalable manner on the old system. Nice work to the team who developed this – both those who are still at the BBC, or have since left. Must be time for a beer on Jo….

* You did read the bit up the top regarding “at the moment” being “when I left”, didn’t you?

Google Docs Meets Outlook? – Yes, You Read That Right!

2010-03-09T12:00:00+00:00

Let’s face it – despite significant hand-waving to the contrary, Microsoft Outlook is the default email client for the vast majority of the enterprise world. No matter how much people love to hate the fact, Outlook is both widely understood and the accepted norm. I’ve talked to a number of people involved in deploying Google apps into enterprise sites and often the case is that this is in fact an infrastructure play – the organization uses Google as an exchange replacement but maintains its existing desktop clients.

This situation is a huge barrier to Google apps proper gaining traction – users are unlikely to edit a Google apps document, only to have to jump through hoops in order to collaborate on that document with others - as vendor MainSoft asks, what happens when you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, and you’re interested in using Google Docs? Is SharePoint + Google Docs: An Oxymoron? Not anymore, and this is an announcement that even I, jaded as I am from product pitches, am getting excited about.

Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly – so end users can be more productive. They’re also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate – full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint – tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.

The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar. Users can

share, locate, and manage centralized documents directly from their e-mail client.

A brief overview of the features that are available for Outlook and SharePoint users:

From within Outlook, people can:

Publish and share document links:
Drag documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDF files to the Harmony sidebar to upload them to Google Docs.

Share documents automatically

. Drag Google document links to a new e-mail message, and Harmony will automatically share it with recipients listed in the user’s Outlook or Gmail address books. The email sender decides whether each email recipient gets read or editing rights to the online documents. Recipients can view and edit the documents on Google Docs, using a free Google account.

Replace attachments with links and send e-mail, in one step

. When composing or forwarding an e-mail with attachments, Harmony prompts the user to publish the documents online and send a link instead.

Find documents from the convenience of e-mail:

Search the contents of users’ entire collection of Google Docs documents from the Harmony search bar.

Locate documents users have permission to access using views, folders, sorting, and starred documents.

Work on Google Docs documents:

Organize documents in folders; star, share, rename, or hide them.

Open and edit Google Docs documents in Outlook, including Microsoft Office, PDF, and Open Office formats.

Of course the question this raises is why on earth this is a free product. This would seem to solve such a pain point (at least for Google resellers and, I’d imagine, for Google also although they’re unlikely to admit it) that Mainsoft should have people more than willing to pay for the product. Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen told me that their strategy is a freemium one – the current product is free but future products that will include functionality that IT departments want (granular control, permissioning, central admin etc) will potentially be paid. I’m not sure if I’m convinced about this approach – Harmony provides significant value today (heck, the saving in traffic by not emailing attachments alone is significant for a large organization) that I believe they’d be able to monetize from day one.

Either way I’m really impressed by what Mainsoft have created with Harmony and I’m marking them as a company to watch.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Four short links: 9 March 2010

2010-03-09T11:00:00+00:00

Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) -- Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the 'right' or 'normal' way of behaving. Whether it's specific actions or social norms that are spreading, the result is the same - a ripple effect that causes groups of people to act in similar ways. People copy the modeled behaviour that they see. This is why, when you start a new social site, you should seed it with people who behave the way that you wish newcomers to behave.
Tulip -- open source 3D visualisation software of large graphs, homepage here. (via hjl on Delicious)
Six Months of Hacker News Front Page Data -- half a million archived records from the Hacker News front page, captured every 15m.
Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention (World Changing) -- a very thought-provoking post that challenges the idea that all we need to do to help the citizens of (insert censored country here) is to have more people using Tor. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies. [...] o figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole? (via BoingBoing)

A spoof ‘Wellywood’ sign seems out of touch to me

2010-03-09T09:16:26+00:00

I was interested to see a Tweet today (via Daniel Spector) asking if I would object to the erection of a ‘Wellywood’ sign in Miramar that would parody the ‘Hollywood’ one in the Hollywood Hills, Calif. The answer is: yes, I would.
For numerous reasons. First, it’s naff and tacky.
Secondly, why do we need to rip off someone else’s idea as a joke (and a second-rate one at that)? Sorry, whomever raised this is, to me, not used to the idea that New Zealanders are original, innovative people, and we lead. We don’t copy. Judging by my own Facebook page, this issue is running 12 to 1 against the sign, with the one conceding that she would prefer to see something ‘more Kiwiana’.
Thirdly, that money could be better spent elsewhere. City deﬁcit much? How about Wellington Airport just gives the city that money if it has this much to spare on trivial projects?
Fourthly, we don’t need any damned sign for us to know we are the best. Didn’t the proponents of this sign watch the Academy Awards last night? Winning those Oscars was proof enough Wellington doesn’t need a sign to be the world’s best.

PS.: There is now a Facebook group objecting to the sign.—JY

P.PS.: The Wellingtonista has covered this, too.—JY

Photograph by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid and licensed under Creative Commons

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-09T08:00:00+00:00

Point-Free style: What is it good for? « OJ’s rants

iPad versus Courier - work or play - can I have both!

2010-03-09T07:46:15+00:00

Courier or iPad
The word is the iPad commercial at the Oscars - see above - had them rocking in the isles. and being a happy flappy mac kind of guy I can relate to that.

However, this doesn't mean that Apple is going to have it all its own way this year. Just up on the Twitter wire is a viral to a bunch of videos espouses just what you can do with a Microsoft Courier - their answer to the iPad - even though, apparently, Microsoft is denying this project exists.

What is interesting me more and more though - is not the MAC/PC competition, but the different user frameworks that seem to driving the way these developments are being offered up to us.

Hang loose
The iPad advert, and all the other design and brand collateral, is all about lifestyle - hanging loose - leisure - and a smart kind of Renaissance like style - the 21st century Quattrocento.

Perpetual Journal
Microsoft , as seems inevitable is much more Weber - Protestant ethic with a look back to the Medieval Scriptorium. It's all about - the project - the meeting - and of course - the deal. Check out the video script below to see what I mean.

My reaction
Notwithstanding my ongoing troubles with chippy American accents talking about inspiration et al, I do like the notion of the endless journal. I also like the collaboration tools. In short, I like the idea of a device that helps me create contributions to the digital revolution, as opposed to one which seems to focus on how I can consume them.

Mrs Lenin
So please Apple - can we have a little less cool - and a little more work ethic! And of course, it would be just great if you could get your head round the fact that real revolutions require multi-tasking. Ask Mrs Lenin! As for Microsoft - is this real? Spill!

Lost in [AutoCAD Architecture] Space

2010-03-09T07:44:29+00:00

I was using AutoCAD Architecture AEC Space objects to mark up a site plan with hatched areas for parking allocation (below left). All was going well until, in the middle of an edit, they all changed appearance. Instead of colour coded hatch they had become a simple yellow outline (below right).

First thought was maybe some sort of display system problem (memory, resources, driver?) or I had changed display modes. The correct Medium Detail display was current so couldn’t blame that. A file open close, then AutoCAD restart eliminated potential memory/resource/system problem but the strange display persisted.

A trip to Display Manager (why didn’t I do that first) revealed the cause as it showed the “Model” configuration was being displayed instead of “Plan”.

It seems while toggling the active selection - with shift/control - and panning with the mouse I had, very slightly, orbited the model. It was so close to “Plan” that it looked like the plan but had orbited enough to invoke Model (3D) Display mode!

As these spaces are never used in 3D the Model display setting on all was the default byblock/outline only. Resetting the Plan view magically restored the correct appearance in a click!

While “Spaces” are intended for rooms I find them very useful for general hatching as display styles make controlling appearance of multiple objects easy. Just make sure you don’t accidentally fly into orbit!

Wellywood sign? Embarrassing.

2010-03-09T06:35:48+00:00

Apparently Wellington’s going to be burdened with a rip-off of the famous Hollywood sign:

Wellywood — artist’s impression from stuff.co.nz.

A massive Wellywood sign celebrating Wellington’s success in the film industry will greet tourists as they fly into the capital.

But not everyone agrees on the sign, which will sit on a cutting above Miramar wharf in the seaside eastern suburbs. …

Sir Peter Jackson said … “It’s Kiwi tongue-in-cheek humour at its very best, but beneath the leg-pulling is genuine pride. ” …

Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast said the giant sign would capture the essence of the capital.

[Via : A sign of success for Wellywood hills | Stuff.co.nz.]

How embarrassing: here we are a creative people in a centre of arts and innovation, and what we do is make a copycat sign to celebrate success.

I don’t see it as tongue-in-cheek humour at all. Referring to Wellington as ‘Wellywood’ is one thing, but ripping off an iconic sign is quite another. It just seems flat, stale and to suggest a poor imitation, try-hard wannabe.

Our film industry deserves much better.

A better idea is the Pillars of Argonath, as Mike Riversdale explains.

Update 11 March 2010 — there’s hope yet that the sign will be abandoned:

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Leron Gubler says the staggered Hollywood lettering is trademarked.

“If they do that with the Wellywood sign then I would think that would be a violation of our trademark…I am checking that with our attorney,” he told The Dominion Post.

[Via : Wellywood sign could breach trademark laws | NATIONAL News.]

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How much memory does my ColdFusion variable really use? – Part II

2010-03-09T03:54:32+00:00

Here we go – part II of an approach into sizing ColdFusion variables from within ColdFusion. In part I I introduced the problem we’re trying to solve, a general solution (JVM instrumentation) and also pointed you to the JavaSpecialists newsletter #142 for a working solution (from a Java point of view). Heinz also commented in part I and pointed out that there is a full-blown open source project named java.sizeOf() that provides a complete solution from a Java point of view.

How does it work?

This post is geared towards the problems the out-of-the-box Java solution runs into. Let’s first have a look into two different ways of calculating the memory usage of a CF variable with the approach described so far.: sizeOf() vs. deepSizeOf() respectively shallow vs. deep. If you’ve done any work structs in ColdFusion this concept should be somewhat familiar (there are shallow copies/references as well as deep copies). In our use of the terminology shallow will refer to measuring the memory usage of the object itself and deep will refer to measuring the memory usage of the object as well as its fields (members) as well as the parent class(es) and their fields up the object hierarchy.

How does the code do this? Basically it’s using a stack and a hash map to keep track of what do to and what already has been measured. First step is to grab the CF variable (which is a Java object), check a few things (more below) and then throw all members of the object onto the stack for further processing. After that, the superclass gets processed the same way, more stuff gets thrown onto the stack and popped off the stack again when we’re running out of things to process and measure.

Ignoring types

This fact alone contains a few interesting surprises. When I started measuring slightly more complex CF variables than simple Strings or Numbers, I got crazy figures of several MB for a simple struct. That obviously couldn’t be right. Using Java reflection on a few CF variables, such as structs or arrays, I easily found the “culprit”: reference(s) to coldfusion.monitor.memory.MemoryTrackerProxy. Sounds like the CF 8+ server monitor subsystem to me, but I might be wrong. But anyway – following this reference along up the object hierarchy creates the outrages figures for a struct and other variables. The Java class behind a CF struct is coldfusion.runtime.Struct and it actually contains a getter and a setter (getMemoryTrackerProxy() etc) to work with the MemoryTrackerProxy. For our purpose of measuring the memory used for the struct and its content, we certainly don’t need to follow the links to MemoryTrackerProxy when the instrumentation works itself through the object stack. What that basically means is that we have to ignore all members of type coldfusion.monitor.memory.MemoryTrackerProxy when we trace the object tree.

Just in case you’re interested, the inheritance structure for a CF structs from a Java point of view looks like this:

java.lang.Object
	\|- coldfusion.util.CaseInsensitiveMap
		\|- coldfusion.util.FastHashtable
			\|- coldfusion.runtime.Struct

After having “fixed” the MemoryTrackerProxy issue, common CF variables worked fine. I still ran into issues with some persistent scopes. Further testing showed that some of those contain members of type javax.servlet.ServletContext. Now – following those when tracing memory usage also creates huge amounts of memory being used because you’re pretty much including a lot of the overall Java API. That particular happens when dealing with measuring the application scope. Therefore javax.servlet.ServletContext is another class I’m filtering for and ignore when measuring memory usage.

Important: Both decisions are made sort of arbitrary. One can argue that following the references and including javax.servlet.ServletContext for the application scope for instance would create the “real” amount of memory used for the application scope. My answer to that would be: yes, that’s fair enough and it might be a valid point. I’ve made the decision not to include it because it’s not what I want to measure here.

Flyweights

Just a few quick word on flyweights or the Flyweight Pattern. I don’t want to dive into the specifics of this pattern, just follow the linked explanations if that’s of interest for you. But – I want to give you a plain language description of what it is (from 30,000 ft): Basically the Flyweight pattern is a way to manage memory very efficiently by sharing and pooling objects whenever possible. That’s pretty much you’d need to know for the purpose of this exercise. Ah – no, hang on. What again does this have to do with Instrumentation and tracking memory usage?

Well – think of a pool of Integer objects or internalized Strings. For us, it’s pretty much impossible to say if a particular object of such characteristics is used for solely our case or if it’s reused in a lot of other places in the app. Maybe we have our own instance of an Integer xyz and therefore the memory usage of it should be counted towards the use of our complex ColdFusion variable. But maybe we just borrowed an Integer abc for the fraction of a blink that was somewhere in the pool anyway and therefore just quickly using it didn’t do any “harm”. We don’t know and that’s why we check. For Integers we would basically do: obj == Integer.valueOf((Integer) obj). If that returns true, we know it’s a shared flyweight and shouldn’t contribute to the overall memory usage. For Strings it means to check the .intern() method (as described and linked above). There are a few more types for which such testing makes sense.

Still, one can argue that one’d want to see the memory usage ignoring any flyweight/JVM concerns, so I made that configurable with a switch. I personally think it’d be better not to include them, but both will possible.

That’s it for now – part III will comprise the actual Java code and .jar file to be used in ColdFusion and some examples. I should actually write another post giving a few more explanations on using Java reflection in ColdFusion and what it can be good for (basically tinkering with undocumented features .

How much memory does my ColdFusion variable really use? – Part II is a post from: Blog in Black

Digital Activism: An Interview with Mary Joyce

2010-03-09T03:30:00+00:00

Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as "the practice of using digital technology for political and social change." One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce, the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world.

She also founded DigiActive.org in 2007, a volunteer organization for grassroots activists. In 2008, she was New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.

Sponsor

RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be?

MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field. Today's digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications. We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world.

I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site - http://meta-activism.org - went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we'd like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism.

RWW: We've heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism?

MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes. Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal. However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism "success" - the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt - while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers.

Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa

The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective. Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures. Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here. In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures.

RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren't as aware of?

MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context. That's the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up.

Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and "use neutrality." Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. "Use neutrality" means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not.

Mary at the Women's Leadership and Technology Conference, Sharjah, UAE

RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools.

MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories. I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic - NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria).

In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization - Iran, Moldova, Egypt - without successful campaigns.

RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there - both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship, but we're not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet?

MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users. This means both creating new circumvention tools - more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates - and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users.

RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project!

Discuss

Infant Formula during Disasters.

2010-03-09T03:28:41+00:00

I'm willing to be challenged on this one, as I have only the basic details, but here's something that doesn't sound right going on in this tale.

Red Cross goes into Haiti following a massive earthquake - puts out the plea saying "send infant formula, we need it"

Across the Lactivist communities, (mostly) western white middle class women bloggers cry foul. Formula is evil, they need breastmilk, not formula. Don't send formula! boycott any charity sending formula!

and they're mostly right - the World Health Organisation STRONGLY advocates breastfeed exclusively because most of the world does not have access to a clean later supply. Haiti included

but - something feels wrong here. The Red Cross are there, on the ground, and they say that infant formula is what they need. It doesn't take much imagination to work out scenarios where formula is necessary. The mother being dead or missing comes to mind first.

Likewise, an island in Samoa recently asked for supplies, such as infant formula, to help them through the next cyclone.

I also ponder how much breastfeeding is a privilege. You need to be nearby a hungry child in order to successfully breastfeed, or have access to refrigeration, a breastpump, and sterilisation equipment. How many people in developing and impoverished nations have this access?

Breastfeeding rates in New Zealand are lower amongst those on low incomes, and lacking tertiary education. Many would like to breastfeed but are unable to because they work. (We only have 15 weeks paid leave, and it's very low paid).

Is it not the same in Haiti? Perhaps worse? Women don't have a choice but to return to the workplace, and there's no protected right have breastfeeding breaks or facilities for pumping.

My own conclusion is: If Red Cross say they need formula, then I will believe Red Cross first and foremost.

and now a baby photo:

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Julian’s man cave! The RC 3 Channel Glider is nearly done!

2010-03-09T02:09:06+00:00

On a totally non I.T. work related subject, every hard worker needs a relaxing hobby to keep them sane. RC model gliders is one of mine. I’ve built quite a few RC gliders and planes as a kid but though I’d have another crack and see if I could still produce the goods!

This is the 3 channel RC glider I’m building. Getting there. Just a bit more structure and some electrical/mechanical work, then I can cover it! Looking forward to throwing it off a cliff after 6 months work!

Bellow you can see I’m starting to fit the electronics. It’ll be a squish in there but we’ll get it all in hopefully! Thinking of adding a small USB camera ;-)

This is the other plane. It’s a trainer and regularly gets smashed up ;-)

We have the Hardware…

2010-03-09T01:29:49+00:00

I have been thinking about the Apple iPad, specifically how it relates to other devices. I then recalled my undergraduate course in human computer interaction, and the work that was done on ubiquitous computing. I looked about me, and realised that I was surrounded by devices that were restricted to a few research labs fifteen years ago. The hardware is all there, with a few differences, but we are a long way from the vision of computing that came out of the last decade of the 20th century.

In the 1970s the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) gave birth to the computing interface that would be used for the next 30 years (at least): the personal computer, modern graphical user interfaces, Ethernet networking, laser printers, and object-oriented programming. Famously, Apple stole most of these ideas to create the unsuccessful Lisa and highly successful Macintosh computers. As a follow-up, under the leadership of Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC started work on the next generation of devices.

What they came up with was the concept of ubiquitous computing — where computers will be vastly better at getting out of the way, allowing people to just go about their lives (Weiser, 1993). To achieve this Xerox PARC decided that we needed three devices to supplement, or largely take over, from the personal computer: tabs, pads and boards.

A cell phone is a common form of a tab interface. It is about the same size as a Post-It Note™

A pad interface is about the same size as the screen on a netbook. The Apple iPad is a very similar size.

The original board interface was used as a collaborative drawing and presentation space. The shared space created by game consoles are more common.

Tabs

Tabs were the smallest interface; about the same size as a Post-It Note. Originally they had very limited capabilities, with 128KB of store and the ability to play video at four frames a second. Tabs did have wireless networking, using a bespoke system that Xerox PARC developed, so they could work like a two-way pager (a device that the original tabs superficially resembled). Input was provided by a pen, but because of the limited processing power a simplified alphabet called Unistrokes was used (Goldberg and Richardson, 1993). Within an office building a tab could report its position, so your workmates will know where to find you, a bit like an advanced RFID security card.

Cell phones (alias mobile phones) are the same size as tabs. The intervening few years have seen store increase into hundreds of gigabytes, video increase to full-motion, three wireless protocols (Bluetooth, 802.11, and GSM) are typically used for communication, and GPS is used to track the location of the cell phone anywhere in the world (except in an office building, where satellite coverage can be a bit spotty).

Pads

Pads, or tablets, have had a longer history than tabs, as far as I can figure out. Commercial pen-based interfaces had been available for a couple of years by the time Xerox PARC started working on the MPad. Unlike the commercial offerings of the time, the MPad had wireless networking, multiprocessing (unlike the not-yet-shipped Apple iPad), and multimedia capabilities. However, it was the software that made the MPad dramatically different from the current crops of pads, but more on that later.

The pad has had a hard time commercially. Microsoft has been pushing tablets for over twenty years without much success (I can recall booting a Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing machine). The Apple Newton was problematic enough to get a mention on The Simpsons. Far more successful has been the netbook, which has a user interface similar to a desktop but it is as portable as a pad, for a lot less money. Interestingly, some netbooks are acquiring touch-screens, so they can behave even more like tablets. (The photo above is of a netbook, rather than an actual pad.)

Boards

Of the three interfaces I recall learning about as a student, the board is the first one I can recall ever seeing, sort of. The idea was to create a shared space where many people could interact — much like a whiteboard. The Xerox LiveBoard (Elrod et al, 1992) was the result of the PARC work on boards, which actually made it to market as a Xerox product. It could be used to record drawings, and make presentations, blazing a trail that Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote follow.

I first came across the LiveBoard concepts with the electronic whiteboards, which would record and play back the drawings that were made on it. However, game consoles are most common board-sized interface that I come across. They drive million-pixel displays, providing a shared space where people can interact using wireless controls.

The Hardware Difference: Keyboards

The tab developed by Xerox PARC did not have a keyboard as they have a very small interaction area — too small for a keyboard (Weiser, 1993). The Palm Pilot and Apple Newton had pen-based input like the Xerox tab. However, most tab-sized devices are not pen-based: even the Apple iPhone uses a keyboard when text needs to be entered. I do not know why this is the case. Maybe it was a long running patent suit (1997–2006) brought by Xerox against Palm (over the Xerox Unistrokes system, on which Grafitti was based) that made others wary. Maybe keyboards are easier to implement and learn. Maybe the tricks used by tab-like devices to allow text input (like multi-tap and T9) are good enough: the speed of input using T9 is 14.63wpm (σ 1.09) (Wobbrock et al, 2007) compared to 15.8wpm (σ 4.02) for Unistrokes (Castellucci et al, 2008). The Unistrokes patent must be close to expiring, so we will see soon if someone picks up the pen-input ball and runs with it.

Keyboards were optional on the MPad developed by Xerox, all netbooks have a physical keyboard, while the Apple iPad relies on an on-screen keyboard. As for boards, the Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft XBox 360 consoles all have an optional keyboard. In addition, Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote presentations are usually presented on workstations acting as boards and the keyboards are vital to the creation of many presentations (sadly).

…But Where is the Software?

Reading back across the ubiquitous computing papers, old and new, I am amazed at how far the hardware has come, and how little the software has changed. The original concept was to move beyond the intimate nature of personal computing, and to create devices that were better suited to communication and collaboration. The software would allow tabs, pads, and boards to interact with each other; not just your own devices, but those used by others. A presentation could be displayed on a board, appear simultaneously on pads (for annotation), and be controlled by a tab (Myers, 2001). A drawing made on one persons’s tab would appear on the shared board. A running program would follow you (well, your tab) from your workstation to another person’s office, where it will display itself so you could discuss it, a bit like cut and paste writ large (Rekimoto (1997) dubbed it pick-and-drop). There was excited (albeit awkward) talk of shared situations and collaboration. However, the seamless interplay between the multiple device surfaces that Weiser imagined is still far from reality (Klokmose et al, 2009).

Recent Apple products also lack the joy of ubiquitous computing. The language that Steve Jobs uses to talk about the iPad is still the language of the personal computer. Take the list of tasks that the iPad has to support:

Browsing (which did not exist at the time of the Xerox MPad),
Reading email,
Viewing your photos,
Viewing video,
Listening to music,
Playing games,
Reading eBooks

There is no shared space, beyond email (which is older that I am) and Web browsing (which is fifteen years old by my count). Instead he claims that unless a pad is better than those tasks listed above it has no reason for being. He then goes on to discuss how the iPad can be personalised and discusses the many single-user tasks for the iPad. When he briefly discusses sharing, in the context of photos, the talk is centred around a single device.

I am not a ubiquitous computing researcher (I studied undo) so I cannot offer any insight into why the software is not there, while the hardware is more than capable. Instead I take heart that there are still people working away at the problem — publishing papers about frameworks and software architectures, as user-interface researchers do when they need something to present and the coding is harder than expected. Software is also what free and open-source development is good at. With the free and open software present in tabs of all shapes and sizes, pads and boards I hope that some hackers may be inspired to take up the ubiquitous computing ideas, dodge the remaining patents, and create software that brings people together, allows them to share situations (not matter how awkward) and make the world a better place.

Me? I am still trying to sort out email…

New Zealand's gender pay gap.

2010-03-08T22:26:38+00:00

The conclusions on a kiwiblog post really annoyed me. (yeah, i know, i shouldn't read that blog if i wanna keep my faith in NZ)

http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/03/the_gender_pay_gap.html
quote:

I’m generally reluctant to conclude discrimination, and look for other factors, because discrimination is just so plain stupid. I can’t understand how anyone would think someone is more or less capable in a job because of their gender, and would pay them less. Mind you, I think the discrimination might be subconscious, rather than a conscious decision.

To paraphrase, the author thinks discriminating on gender is stupid, therefore gender discrimination probably isn't the reason women graduates are consistently paid less than men graduates with the same degree.

That logic just doesn't bare up to scrutiny, that because something is stupid it's therefore not what's happening.

Regardless, the study didn't find a difference in whether graduates gets employed or not. Both men and women graduates found jobs; but the woman was consistently given a lower starting salary than the man. The employer is not thinking "the woman can't do the job". They are employing women and paying them less.

There's two aspect to this:
1) Women doing the same job as men and getting paid less for it.
2) Jobs seen as "women's work" are paid less.

It's not because women take time off to raise children, because we're talking starting rates of someone who has just graduated from university.

The commenters did pick up on women not being aggressive negotiators; The commenters however haven't followed through to *why* women are weak negotiators.

This has been studied to death in recent years. Women who are aggressive getters of what they want are punished for it, with derogatory names, and avoidance. They are often considered selfish. Men who state clearly what they want and go for it are respected. This goes way beyond pay negotiations into all aspects of life.

Girl infants who are rowdy aren't encouraged, while parents will play much rougher with their sons. Girls learn very early that they are expected to be polite, simply because people around them correct their manners more, and their loudness, than they do for boys. Even a parent trying hard to not apply these differences to their children will struggle to stop grandparents, other parents, daycare, teachers, and other children defining their gender attributes for them.

Just as children today learn quickly that pink is for girls (and has been a girls' colour since only circa 1950), they quickly learn which gender they are in therefore whether they should be crashing trucks in the sandpit, or brushing a dolls hair in a circle with the other girls.

Girls who boast are not rewarded. Think of the women you know that have a high opinion of themselves, and how they are regarded by those around them - do they appear well liked? Now think on how many men you know with high confidence, are they disliked for this?

We need to undo this. Employers, and employees, need to question why they are paying women less. "She didn't ask for more" isn't a good enough reason if we're ever going to undo this. Teach the women graduates that they need to negotiate harder, and we should all examine our own prejudice against aggressive women. Negotiation skills are valuable in an employee.

Likewise, women ask your men colleagues doing the same job what they earn.

I hold no blame on women who choose to not negotiate harder. They do so simply because they are punished for being aggressive.

As for women's work being paid less - i don't know the answer, i work in an industry that is ~85% men. I suggest asking people working in those industries. Those observing from outside won't be able to see as clearly.

and as a last thought: In Open source 75% of women have experienced sexism, while only 15% of men have noticed sexism.

and now a photo of a baby driving a car:

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The unSocial Social Media and South Florida Bloggers

2010-03-08T22:15:04+00:00

Social media is taking the business of the Internet by storm and is the marketing wave of the now as well as the future. Yet social media is not nearly as social as people might like you to think. Recent events right here in South Florida proved that many of the so-called social media experts are, in fact, just self-serving marketing whiners. The social media bubble is about to burst.

Recently, the Sun Sentinel announced this year’s Best of Blogs Awards for South Florida in which fans of various ...

Hints of Google’s privacy misbehaviours in 2007

2010-03-08T22:10:32+00:00

I did my last edits to this blog’s pages that had resided on the old Blogger service today, before decommissioning them from the service. After today (in theory, since the updating stalled twice as I wrote this), you will not be able to make any more comments on posts written before January 1, 2010.
In doing so, I discovered a very interesting post: my moan about Google Web History on October 1, 2007. It turns out that was the day I switched it off, until Google decided, in its wisdom, to turn it back on again. In the same post, I mentioned how I was unhappy that I was signed up to Orkut and Google Groups without my consent.
Anyone who thinks Google’s recent misbehaviour is new is (as I was) mistaken.
Back in 2007, I threatened to shift this blog away from Blogger, which I did not carry out for two years due to busy-ness.
The silver lining then, as now, is that at least Google has the guts to tell us under what means they were collecting our private data and allow us to opt out (in theory). But the point, surely, is that we should not need to opt out, if we have never opted in, to these services.
The more things change …

Photograph by http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Nina Simon launches the book, The Participatory Museum

2010-03-08T21:07:16+00:00

image source

Nina Simon - legend!
Some days are just made for giving a shout out to interesting people - and none comes more interesting, at least to me, than Nina Simon , the Museum consultant and Museum 2.0 blogger, who electrified the last session of the New Zealand National Digital forum with her thoughts and insights into the Participatory Museum. Who can forget that gong! Liam Wyatt hasn't, for sure

The Gong
And for those who havn't come across it, the gong was on stage waiting for people to come up and bang it to announce they had just found someone to help in a project, or had become that someone and was prepared to help.

Believe me, being a Scotsman of a certain era, I can assure you my first- second and third thought - was no way hosaie - not on yer nellie dug are you getting me up on that stage and anywhere near that gong. But hey ho - as the tape will show for all eternity, never say never. And the project - cant say just yet - but it just started last week.

The Participatory Museum
All of which is a long intro into the welcome news that Nina Simon has a new book out - The Participatory Museum - you can buy it - here - but you can also start reading the first few chapters under the CC licence, here. Or just use the short-cuts below:

The plot
The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places, written by Nina Simon, exhibit designer, museum consultant, and the author of the Museum 2.0 blog.

Preface: Why Participate?

Part 1: Design for Participation
Chapter 1: Principles of Participation
Chapter 2: Participation Begins with Me
Chapter 3: From Me to We
Chapter 4: Social Objects

Part 2: Participation in Practice
Chapter 5: Defining Participation at your Institution
Chapter 6: Contributing to Institutions
Chapter 7: Collaborating with Visitors
Chapter 8: Co-creating with Visitors
Chapter 9: Hosting Participants
Chapter 10: Evaluating Participatory Projects
Chapter 11: Managing and Sustaining Participation

Powerhouse Museum
Another reminder - Nina Simon's entire December , 2009 workshop session with The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is online, here There are also links to the slides. Or just click and watch. Very generous gesture from both parties.

Nina Simon on The Participatory Museum - Dec 2009, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney from Powerhouse Museum on Vimeo.

The plans they keep a changin'

2010-03-08T12:09:49+00:00

Time is ticking along, and it seems that my plans for the big trip are evolving weekly. Ideas and experience keep flooding in as I talk to random people. Turns out everybody loves to talk about their experiences travelling!

I was planning on having Bangkok as my initial destination but then my cousin Peter informed me that his brother is now living on Ko Samui, an island off the southern peninsula of Thailand. Once I looked on a map I figured it make more sense to start in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur and head north rather then travel the peninsula twice.

Then I had a long Skype chat with a friend who spent 16 months travelling the world a couple years ago. Chris strongly recommended that I start in Indonesia, so after some more thinking decided that I'd start in Bali. Island hoping across Indonesia and Malaysia seemed like an amazing way to get to Thailand.

While talking to Craig, who is going to join me for the beginning of the trip, we hatched the plan to add exploring some of Australia to the beginning of the trip. So many people have talked about the amazing diving through Asia that it seemed like getting PADI certified would be a sensible thing to do. So with that in mind thought we'd start in Cairns, spend a week or so getting certified and doing a live aboard dive trip of the Great Barrier Reef. Then spend a couple of weeks driving to Darwin and from there hop a plane to Bali.

In the middle of all of this it looks like I've got a job offer to do a week or so consulting in the States. I'll be hitting San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City in a whirlwind few days and then possibly to Las Vegas for NAB. While this will provide a welcome influx of cash, it means that leaving is postponed until mid-April.

I thought that was probably about as much as plans could change, but now James has just told me about an epic adventure that friends of his are cooking up. Apparently a mate moved to Nepal and has been doing charity work there. They are now in the process of organising a charity tuk tuk trip from Nepal to Amsterdam! Sounds ridiculous(ly fun), the only gotcha is that they are hoping to leave in June and I'll have barely made it to Thailand by then.

I'm loath to pass up a oncer, but it would mean shuffling plans around considerably and probably doubling back later. Still I said I was going to travel with as little of an agenda as possible to be open to whatever opportunity arises!

Decisions, decisions ...

Using Exceptions in C++

2010-03-08T11:40:55+00:00

C++ is big – it has been said that any given programmer only ever uses about 40% of the language’s features. The trouble is that it is a different 40% for each person. Exceptions are a great example of this, some people swear by them while many coding standards specifically ban/discourage them (cf: google, mozilla). It is ironic that a feature designed to make code safer is sometimes regarded as being too dangerous to use.

Personally I like exceptions, but even I realise that they have there limitations. This post is an attempt to formalise some guidelines about when exceptions should be used and when they should be avoided beyond the usual language rules. I should mention at this stage that most of my experience is in desktop client/server software. C++ is used in all sorts of places these days, and what works on desktops and beefy servers may not suit the embedded world (for example).

When to Catch

My rule of thumb is “Do not let exceptions escape from a function you didn’t explicitly call yourself“. This includes destructors, callbacks, thread functions, WNDPROCs, and any other miscellaneous way your functions can be entered (it does not include constructors or virtual functions – exceptions are very useful in those). In general, all these things should catch and handle all exceptions.

Your program will die if an exception escapes a thread. If you are lucky your runtime will do something clever and your program will die painlessly but possibly the OS will have to dispatch the process messily. Either way, your users will not be impressed, so you should always wrap thread functions in try{}catch blocks. In the best case you might be able to signal that an operation failed to the main thread, which can restart it if required. In the worst case you can at least log what happened before exiting.

Lots of third part libraries communicate with your code using callbacks that you supply. You should always ensure that any exceptions are caught before returning back into third party code, since you can never be sure if the library does the right thing. C style libraries like LibCURL are right out, they will probably leak handles and memory as the stack is unwound. C++ libraries may (or may not) be better but could do things you do not expect, like swallow the exceptions themselves instead of letting them fall through (boost::iostreams). Also, some libraries actually call you back on a different thread (boost::asio) so the advice in the previous paragraph also applies here.

You should always be prepared to catch any exceptions that are documented by any C++ libraries you use, especially things like boost::filesystem which can throw at any time.

What to Throw

My advice is to create a small hierarchy that is derived from std::runtime_exception unless you are already using a custom exception class. Don’t try to get clever and throw std::string or char*. Design your hierarchy around how the exceptions are to be handled, rather than what can go wrong. For instance, if there are 5 different ways your program throw exceptions, but only 3 different things that can happen in response then you only need 3 types of exceptions.

In my experience, exceptions fall into two categories: recoverable and fatal. Recoverable exceptions will be caught within a layer, or perhaps the next layer up which can then reattempt the operation (or perhaps just log and ignore the problem if the operation was not crucial.) Fatal errors are usually not caught until the outer loop of the program, where they are logged before the program can be shutdown cleanly. In general, the exceptions you expect to recover from should derive from exceptions you expect to be fatal.

I tend to name my exception types based on how they are handled and what circumstance they represent, like so:

class UnrecoverableFileReadException : public std::runtime_error
{
	// thrown when a file cannot be read correctly, ie: the file exists but is misformatted
public:
	UnrecoverableFileException( const std::string& msg ):std::runtime_error(msg) {};
};
 
class FileReadException : public UnrecoverableFileReadException
{
public:
	// thrown when a file cannot be read but the user can be prompted to select another file
	TemporaryFileException( const std::string& msg ):UnrecoverableFileReadException(msg) {};
};

When throwing, always construct the exception with a sensible message if only for logging and debugging purposes. Normally this message would not be shown to the user since it will be hard to localise. Add additional members to your exception class if you want to include other information with the exception. Just remember that exceptions must be copyable.

1
2
3

ostringstream oss;
oss << "Could not open file " << filename << " the error was: " << errno;
throw TemporaryFileException( oss.str() );

If you really want to go the whole hog consider using boost::exception which builds upon similar ideas.

When to Throw

Exceptions should never be thrown if everything is running perfectly. Only when something goes wrong should throwing an exception be considered an option. I have seen code that threw exceptions to signal the end of an enumeration or to signal that the results of a query were empty – I consider these examples to be a terrible use of the feature. Remember that an exception is not just an error, but something really outside of normal program flow.

I also tend not to use exceptions for logic errors. If an algorithm can fail then the calling code should be prepared to handle a return code signalling an error. Likewise I would not throw if a database query returned no results – an empty result set is inside the bounds of normal program flow. However, I would consider throwing an exception if the query failed due to the database being unavailable.

The best places to use exceptions are in situations where your program is using resources that are not under your control, including anything to do with IO. Both files and network connections exist outside of your program and can become unavailable at any point due to any number of reasons. In many cases the problems are transient and all your program needs to do is try again in a few minutes – a program that quits each time the DNS, directory server, or external database cannot be reached will not survive for very long in any production environment. Exceptions allow you to back out of an operation without too much trouble and handle the problem in a sensible location.

One problem you might encounter is that is often hard to retrofit exceptions into code that wasn’t designed for them. In this case, my advice about not letting exceptions fall through 3rd party code also applies to legacy code that you own. This is not to say that you cannot use exceptions at all, just that you may have to take steps to keep exception handling within the layers of your application.

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working at home – 4 months on, what have I learned

2010-03-08T11:28:40+00:00

So, it’s been 4 months since I left the BBC (and wow, looks like the Homepage is about to go live-beta). It’s been a bit of a learning curve/wall, especially some things which I wasn’t expecting. Here’s what I found.

I don’t work well on a morning. Once I worked this out, it’s a lot easier to plan around it – I can do things like put a load of washing on, run an errand or 2, or just sit and think about the problem a bit. But there isn’t a hell of a lot of point getting hug up about not coding before lunch time. On a similar note, Twitter is a total time suck. I’m about this close (|-|) to using the parental controls on the router to block it.
I can’t, and shouldn’t, work as much as one of the owners of the company. It’s not my company. Comparing myself to them/him is just stupid, as I dont have the (potential) financial reward. Kicking myself for not working to 2am is unproductive and depressing. So I stopped.
I need to be managed around the coffee machine. And the pantry. Sad but true. Solution: I have a can of half-caff and the can of normal espresso beans. Not perfect, but better. 5 espresso’s is normal for a day, but at least with Monmouth half-caff (self-mixed from their swiss decaf and organic espresso), thats only 3 shots of normal, which I can handle. Iced tea and water is a great replacement too.
It is quite possible to not leave the house for 2-3 days. I often have to make an effort to get out. That said, if I include home + tube + office, it wasn’t hard to not step outside of those bounds for weeks at a time, so thats not really a big deal. Having the gym here reopen with new gear is also helping there – even if it is just a walk to the end of the block and a workout.
Some things are better once accepted. Mental load and all that. Once I accepted I needed some new hardware (yay! new Macbook Pro!) and bought it, development has been much, much nicer. I agonised over spending around $2000 USD for months. I could have been using a machine which is actually suitable for the job since January! Once I accepted that around 2meg is the most we can get in this area unless BT rewires the island, it was …. ok.
If I listen to talk radio (in my case, TWIT/MacBreak/This week in */Guardian podcasts, not actual public talk radio), I don’t get any work done. Issue solved: subscribe to Tiesto, John 00 Fleming, Armin, Above and Beyond and co, all as podcasts. Most others cleared out. Result: 5 days of so of new (psy)trance, and a load more work done.
Oh, and the Tiesto remix of The Editors – Papillon kicks serious arse. I need – NEED – an RPM bike for this track. If I play it any more – or any louder – I’m sure the neighbours will complain :)
Setting up a company in a country you dont know isn’t as easy as it should be. This is the second company we have had in the UK. We are still setting up a few things. It’s a little painful, and it shouldn’t be.
Turning down work is hard, especially when it’s for friends. I’m at or slightly over capacity at the moment, and I’ve turned down 2 lots of work already. While it’s not a big problem during winter, it’s going to become one in summer (which appears to be rapidly approaching!). If it’s not sorted out, the result is an unhappy (but understanding) spouse. Sorting that out tho.

Other than that – so far, so good. I have a nice “office” setup, and while it isn’t ultra tidy or perfect, it’s comfortable and definitely workable. Would I like faster internet and an office in a room on it’s own? Sure. Why not. But then I’d most likely lose the ability to turn 90deg to the left and see the dogs playing in the park. Not at all bad.

Four short links: 8 March 2010

2010-03-08T11:00:00+00:00

China's Cyberposse (NY Times) -- is vigilante justice ok if the cause is right? Is it okay if there wouldn't be justice without it? Does the end justify the means? Many interesting questions raised by this large-scale Internet-based "human-flesh-search" in China. In the future we are all 4chan. (via waxy, who also recommended this article on the same subject)
Questioning "Born Digital" (The Economist) -- an interesting collection of healthy skepticism about how the "born digital" folks will change everything. [...] many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools that they use regularly, especially when it comes to the tools’ social and political potential. Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives, in other words. The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population.
The Participatory Museum -- a new book by the mighty museum mind, Nina Simon. The ideas are very usable outside of the museum world: raid this for social and engagement ideas for your own situation.
Designing for Digital: What Print-Book Designers Should Know About Ebooks -- course notes covering format choice, tools, and (yes) typesetting. (via liza on Twitter)

Rainbows End

2010-03-08T09:51:20+00:00

I just finished reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Pretty good, but I think A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky were better. I think in Rainbows End the technology gets a bit in the way of the story ... Vinge carefully prognosticates and extrapolates, and that makes it overwrought.

Having said that, the prognostication is quite good and worth reading and thinking about. And having said THAT, there are a few major blind spots. In Vinge's world, software usually works, porn and spam are almost absent, and nations with extraordinary totalitarian power don't abuse it. Hmm ... I doubt it :-).

2010 – The Year of the Cloud (or something)

2010-03-08T09:44:00+00:00

I kind of thought we were a little for “10 things to watch for in 2010” type posts but it seems ChannelWeb doesn’t think so and have compiled a list of somewhat conflicting Cloud prophesies for 2010 from some of the clouderati. So without any further ado – let’s hear what them-that-know predict will happen this year and my measure of how accurate their predictions are:

First up James Demoulakis, CTO of GlassHouse Technologies opines that Cloud Storage Adoption will Broaden. Coming from a perspective of technology developments solving security and latency issues – he predicts 2010 will all be about cloud storage. I kind of agree that cloud storage will broaden this year but don’t see that’ll be caused by anything so high level. Quite simply it’s a reflection of a degree of momentum and some critical mass. Any issues that did exist still will. I give this an 80% chance of eventuating.

Hybrid will Happen, says Jimmy Tan, general manager for PEER Software. He calls it hybrid but I’d call it more offline available web apps. Either way he suggests that cloud services will continue to develop "off-line" working modes to complement their "always on" approach. Given HTML5, Google ascending and Microsoft’s play with Office 2010 – I give this a 90% chance.

Platform-as-a-Service Takes Hold says Sam Charrington (a really nice guy by the way) from Appistry. he believes that 2010 is the year that PaaS will really take hold as organizations look at how they take advantage of cloud platforms and push it beyond just requests for virtual machines. I’m not entirely convinced – while I love PaaS as a concept, I just don’t see widespread use as a given. I’ll give this a 50% chance.

Public Vs. Private Becomes Less Relevant says Vanessa Alvarez an industry analyst from Frost & Sullivan (and someone I’m looking forward to meeting at Cloud Connect in a few weeks). Vanessa says that in 2010, we'll START to move away from these terms as the importance of how apps/services/resources are delivered and/or from where, becomes less relevant to end users and the market overall. I’ve got to agree with Vanessa here – I’m not a hand wringing dogmatic who gets caught up passionately defending “purity” chapter and verse. At the end of the day it’s about results and I for one don’t care if those results are obtained through some sort of “pseudo cloud”. 75% of happening but less if the handwringers have their way.

2010 will be the year of planning for the cloud says John Ross, CTO of GreenPages. Apparently everyone will need to stop thinking about how we have done things in the past and begin to think about how we can do things differently with the resources that are being made available to us. I’m not so sure – I don’t see the world in black and white pre cloud/post cloud terms and I see the planning that John talks about as being more of the same due diligence type stuff that has always occurred. I’m not sold and I give this a 20%.

Cloud Platforms Gain Acceptance opines Barry Lynn, CEO of 3Tera. Apparently 2010 will be the year that the best cloud platforms will be accepted as enablers of mission critical enterprise applications in need of high availability, dependable SLAs and world class disaster recovery. What? I don’t think so. I think Barry’s been drinking the KoolAide a little too much 10% on this one.

Disaster Recovery In The Cloud will be big says Chris Pyle, CEO of Champion Solutions Group. Clients will start considering using the "cloud" as another choice when developing a disaster recovery plan he says. I don’t think so. Clients who already use the cloud will think about using it for DR, those who don’t won’t give it a second thought. DR will stay inline with general cloud adoption – 20% from me.

Private Clouds Die, Intercloud Rises, Openness Abounds says the normally reticent Sam Johnson. Sam’s a strong character and, gets a little passionate about things and attached to the dogma of cloud. I love what he tries to do but disagree with much of his vehemence. When it comes to this prediction, I’m erring on the side of the (somewhat confusingly) opposite view given by Vanessa – public? private? who cares just make it work. 10%

WAN Optimization-as-a-Service Surfaces preaches Adam Davison, corporate vice president for Expand Networks. Where do they get these guys from? Get a load of this: “As cloud-based services become more prevalent, whether private or public, the provision of an end-to-end software solution for virtualized WAN optimization from the data center, to the branch office and mobile users will be paramount.” Yeah whatever dude – just buy some bigger pipes – 15% although I’d qualify that by saying he’s probably got a 40% chance within enterprise who love the big words he uses.

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Amazon Fires Its Colorado Associates

2010-03-08T09:15:54+00:00

I just got interesting email from Amazon: the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers [...] We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states. The message goes on to say that they'll pay out all the money they owe me but I won't earn any more money for referring people to them.

Interesting! So let me get this straight: I've done nothing, and Amazon just fired me? Now, I haven't used referrals a whole lot so it doesn't hit me in the pocketbook but this should send chills down the spine of anyone who thought they were building a business, or at least an income, around Amazon services. It's one thing to be fired for something you did (hey doofus, don't cause a heap of MPAA infringement notices to land on Amazon's desk because you were running the new Pirate Bay on EC2) but it's entirely another to be fired for something outside your control.

A farmer friend told me that the goats to keep are female goats: when one doe headbutts another, the recipient then turns to the next in the hierarchy and headbutts them. With male goats, though, you get prolonged headbutt battles that are loud, intimidating, and potentially damaging. Amazon is obviously hoping the female goat scenario plays out: Amazon headbutts me, so I'll go headbutt my representative— punish Amazon's associates and hope they'll pass the pain on. I wonder whether any of Amazon's (former) Colorado associates will turn out to be male goats who, grumpy at being set upon, retaliate....

The full text of the letter follows, and there's TechFlash covered the new law.

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

compost

2010-03-08T08:06:19+00:00

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

Change the wording a little bit, and substitute “shit” for “carbon dioxide”, and it’s still just as true

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Attempting To Open Source Data Center Design

2010-03-08T08:01:56+00:00

Image via Wikipedia

Being an unabashed proponent of Open Source, I can avoid the news about a new industry group trying to start an initiative to open source data center design. The Open Source Data Center Initiative, announced last week, will act as a repository of technologies associated with the design of datacenters. This initiative aims to rope in smaller industry players and researchers from academia.

The complete freedom afforded by open source licenses allows for large scale innovation. We have seen the disruptive potential of open source in the traditional software world as well as in the cloud based world. In a way, open source encapsulates the freedom available in the academia and, therefore, has the potential to disrupt wide ranging fields. It is no surprise that the folks behind this new initiative thought of Open Source approach as the right model to foster innovation in the data center design.

Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side. There are many industry groups that are pushing for change in the data center industry suggesting many different best practices for innovation. The Open Source Data Center Initiative tries to take a different approach from the other efforts by tapping into open source philosophy to promote innovative ideas from the participants. It is a partnership between Greentech Research Foundation, Inc and University of Missouri to establish an engineering framework for datacenter design and technologies. The complete text of the agreement can be found here.

This effort is joined by one of the veterans in the data center industry, Mike Manos who is now building a cloud infrastructure for Nokia. In his blog post, he clearly highlights the role of this initiative

To be clear, this Open Source Data Center Initiative is focused around execution. Its focused around putting together an open and free engineering framework upon which data center designs, technologies, and the like can be quickly put together and more-over standardize the approaches that both end-users and engineering firms approach the data center industry.

Imagine if you will a base framework upon which engineering firms, or even individual engineers can propose technologies and designs, specific solution vendors could pitch technologies for inclusion and highlight their effectiveness, more over than all of that it will remove much mystery behind the work that happens in designing facilities and normalize conversations.

In my opinion, it is a pretty solid move to foster innovation. With the impending need for smart and green data centers, such an open source approach is the right way to go.

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Internet access – a basic right

2010-03-08T06:33:32+00:00

In the news today from the BBC is the headline: Internet access a fundamental right?, leading with a report about a poll that reveals almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right. The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

This headline and the story it tells reveal just how significant the internet has become in our modern world. In countries around the world, including New Zealand, there are widespread efforts to ensure the provision of a robust, high speed network that reaches all parts of the community, in homes, businesses, schools etc.

I often speak about a project I did with a group of 14 year olds, when I challenged them to find out what would happen if we “turned off the internet”. After their initial responses about how it would affect their use of Facebook or online gaming, the students spent a week interviewing parents, neighbours and business people, and returned to class with a long list of services and businesses that would severely affected – in news, entertainment, banking, manufacturing, marketing to name a few. Almost every part of our economy and social infrastructure would be affected in some way.

Of interest to all was the fact that they considered schools would be among the least affected, based on their assessment that the internet, while present in a great many schools, hadn’t yet become a “mission critical” part of a school’s way of working. (This was something I did about four years ago, so would be interesting to see what the response might be like now).

But the argument in the BBC report for access for all is based on something far more important than simply economic benefits – it emphasises the fact that access to the internet is important for freedom of speech and participation in a social democracy. For me, these are important ideals, and underpin why we, as educators, must be pro-actively supporting the concept of “cyber-citizenship” among our students, to prepare them adequately for living in a world where the use of the internet in this way is becoming the norm.

The BBC have also published an interactive map showing how the internet has spread around the world between 1998 and 2008. The map shows in a series of progressions how various countries around the world have embraced the internet and made access available for citizens. Of particular interest to me is the fact that New Zealand appears right at the start (1998) as one of the few countries with “extensive” internet usage.

Just shows how things change – what might have been considered extensive in 1998 is certainly not the case any longer – certainly not from the point of view of speed, reliability and open-ness. Thus the current effort to roll out a super-fast, fibre network around the country.

Planet NZTech

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