Functional, Pragmatic, Confused

One of the touted benefits of University is building up a diverse network of friends, who go on to do interesting things. Usually, the undertone is "your university friends can help you get jobs down the line, when your hippy plans to live off your parents goes awry". Parents tend to be strong supporters of this logic.

Recently though, I've been finding one of the side benefits of my university life has been having friends who are still academics in my field of work. "Poor people," you might be thinking. "They just don't know how to get out". I dunno, this summer it's been international conference after conference. And despite the suspicious looks from those of us that work for a living at this globe-trotting, academics do lots of useful work.

One of my friends is working in the newish area of "web science", a cross-disciplinary beast that covers sociology and computer science. She writes a cracking blog, and recently we've been having interesting short discussions around her posts to do with publishing, social media and more general webscience. Lots of these mini-thoughts could do with more elaboration, but this is the first chance I've had to sit down and write it out.

The first thing I wanted to address was my thought from a few weeks back, about how teenagers use the feature of disabling a Facebook account in unexpected ways.

Last year, danah boyd posted a this piece on how two teenage girls keep control of their social selves on Facebook My tweet came up in the context of friends of mine disabling their Facebook accounts to see if they can live without them (and also to sample the alternatives). What's interesting here is that one of the teenagers mentioned uses the ability to disable her Facebook account as a constant privacy feature, to control the appearance and interaction of her online persona.

I know of no one in my circle of friends who does this - in fact, their usual case of handling Facebook is to use it as a trail of their lives, stretching back to the first status update they posted when they joined the service. This kind of social research is important - not only to reveal new things and old truths about us as humans, but also to help engineers design new and more useful systems, which more naturally encompass our social interactions.

By the way, danah's work? Consistently engaging. She's employed by Microsoft Research, is a fellow of Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and her blog posts are fascinating. If how young people use the Internet is of interest to you, there are two things you should realise. One: you yourself are not young anymore. Ah well. Two: follow her blog - the internet is a big place, and we're all learning how to use it still.

 

Edited:

NB: a friend pointed out to me that danah's name is intentionally not capitalized. FixedSorry danah!

In my life, I have a had an amazing multitude of friends and connections, many of whom I still talk to reasonably regularly, and others who (usually by cause of distance) I've drifted out of touch with. Last year, a woman of the latter type of friends of mine, was assaulted at an open-source conference. Intellectually, I'm aware that this type of thing still happens, but it blew my mind to find out that it had happened to someone that I knew. She is a strong person, and decided to write openly about it on her blog. This had a more mind-blowing response: although there were plenty of people that responded in the comments in the same reasonable fashion that you would expect (expressing dismay and surprise that the assault could have happened, along with support), there were also plenty of thoughtless jerks.

The assault and the blog post that described it has had some positive outcomes, which I'll let my past friend describe in more detail. In summary It informed the open-source conference community got the Conference Anti-Harrassment Policy, which, if you're running a conference you should certainly adopt, adapt and publish, and more importantly, it has helped in the creation of the Ada Initiative.

The Ada Initiative is (to quote from their 'About Us' page):

"a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media" .

And I am all for that: increasing the participation in a movement to better reflect the diversity balance in the population as a whole seems both natural and sensible to me. Their goals obviously require some funding, so if you think that this is a goal worth supporting, consider contributing.

 

 

Hey there regular and semi-regular readers.

There are really two reasons why I blog - one to teach myself things
(explaining is apparently good for that), and the other is to be a bit
creative. You might be surprised to find I have friends, and but you
won't be surprised to find they are more talented than me, in more
aspects than I can enumerate. One of these things my friends are
better at than me is being awesome. To whit: The Great Cake* Experiment.

We're blogging weekly, around a theme that is set at the start of the
week, and what's more we are competing for cake*. This is the second
week, so you can go and read the first entries now - my friends really
are very talented so you will undoubtedly enjoy it.

So that's a bit distracting. I'll get back to regularly scheduled,
semi-web developmental blogs here when the time is appropriate.

*the cake might be a good lie

A few weekends back, I went along to Rewired State's National Hack the Government day at The Guardian's offices with a friend of
mine. I crafted a little write up about it in the week following, in which I mentioned that my
co-hacker and I were our own worst enemies when it came to actually
getting stuff finished on the day. We started out with all the
possibilities of government data in front of us, and ended up with a
'your nearest bus stop is' application instead. How did it all go so
wrong? More importantly,is there a way we could organise ourselves
better *next* time? "A hacking postmortem," you wearily enquire? Just
so - this weekend I'll be hitting up the Book Hackday in London, and I
figured it'd be good to get my excrement together before I ended up
looking foolish again.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarcas/3916216231/

Quick summary for those who don't know: a hack day is an event with a
bunch of developers and/or creative types who get together for a short
period of time, to cobble or 'hack' together ideas and prototypes of
all kinds, usually around specific themes or services. At the end of
the 'day' (which can be anywhere from 6 - 24 hours later), there are
presentations of these thoughts and showing off of prototypes,
followed by general excited discussions with fellow developer/creative
types about the possibilities and things on show.

So, first thing you should do when turning up to a hack day: have some
idea about what you'd like to work on. Oftentimes you will be able to
find other people around with ideas who are looking for help, or
indeed brainstorm some ideas as a result of sessions/presentations
given at the start of the day, but it's always good to go in with a
few scraps of ideas. I had spent a few minutes poking around the event
website and data.gov.uk before the event, and had an idea of where to
start. Rewired State were very upfront with us: they're hands off, no
presentations, just a quick whip around the room, asking if anyone
needed help, or if there were people around who could code, but had no
clear ideas. We arrived with two small semblances of ideas, as a
result of skimming over the event website, and http://data.gov.uk, the
place where all the available government data is listed - a good start
right? Sure, but it might have been better to own up in advance.

1) Know what you're going to do, or let people know at the start that
you're just a willing helper in their crazy plans.

The second thing you'll want is to make sure you have the right tools.
For some, this might be inflatable beach balls and glitter dust, but
for me it was my handy laptop. However, the laptop wasn't enough: I
wasted a huge amount of time with my laptop not being configured
right. From point 1), I knew I wanted to do something related to
location, but I didn't look into any of the software tools that help
with that. We spent a bunch of time setting up a Couch instance (to use
Geocouch), and then due to various misunderstandings on our part, we
eventually aborted that, and started using Mongo. As a result, I wasted two
hours.

Incidentally, did you know there are three free software distribution
platforms for OS X? I didn't - and it's probably the kind of thing
that would have been useful. Hell, it's useful to me now, and I'm not
even using my Mac at the moment.

2) Have your tools ready - or at least more ready

Despite my incompetence, my totally level-headed hacking partner meant
we actually ended up with something vaguely useful. Part of our
problem at this stage was that we were unable to get some of the data
we wanted in the right format. As more people went up to present, it
became clear that we were not the only ones with exactly the same
problem - until one guy presented an API for converting the data the
way we all wanted it. In short: we should have spoken more to each
other

3) Communicate (even if briefly) outside of your hacking group.

And finally, as you sit through awesome presentation after awesome
presentation, the reality sinks in: there are all levels of
completeness from passing thought to working prototype here, and all
levels of talent from basic hacker to zen-like genius, but most of the
great leveler is the presentation. If you have some time, and you
realise that you're not going to get to a point where you can demo
your idea, spend time on the presentation at the end instead. You
should be passionate about what you're doing, so getting that idea
across is the most important thing. In the end, this + some last
minute hacking skill saved us from total embarrassment

4) Have a presentation, and be passionate

So yeah, those are my key learning points from National Hack the
Government. Now, I gotta go work on getting myself ready for *this*
weekend.

Sooo...anyone have any ideas on the future of the book?

I was never very good at statistics at school. I couldn't envisage a situation in which I'd need to use it, nor did I feel that it explained very much of the world around me and subsequently I struggled to care hugely about it. I remember thinking wryly about that in 2008 when I saw this video from the Yahoo! Developer Network about Facebook's data team. It turns out that not only are there almost countless ways in which stats could be useful to me, but it also explained a huge amount about the industry I worked in. So, good work school-aged me.

Data is hugely useful - when you're writing a business plan for example, it's a good idea to know how many leprechaun hunters there are, and what their turnover of rainbow detection equipment is like. Similarly, a government finds it invaluable to know how many people live where, and how happy they are about it.

If you think about it, there's lots of information about our government itself that would be useful to have. As a taxpayer, you do fund the governement, so in theory you paid for at least some of the data that the government holds. Granted, you might not be particularly interested in the qualifications of children leaving care - but someone may be, and since we collectively own it, that person should have easy access to it.

And think of what you could do with some of this information! You could construct your own weather checking apparatus, thus doing away with your pathetic reliance on both forecasts *and* windows! That someone has actually done this is in part due to Rewired State, a British organisation that runs hack days where geeks gather to creatively play around with information provided by Her Majesty's Government, and the occasional council.

Which is how I found myself at the offices of The Guardian yesterday, in a room full of people, desperately trying to create something interesting.

My co-hacker and I ran across a few problems during the 7 hours, which I'll cover in another post (the theme of which will more or less be: "Things not to do if you want to create summat sweet at a hack day"). Despite our wee issues (all self-inflicted), the atmosphere was incredible, and the projects that had been created at the end of the day were varied: comic, inspiring, worrying and with a good smattering of utility. There are a bunch more pictures on Flickr, and a good review by one of the participants here.

Massive thanks to the folks at RS, and all my fellow participants and the Hack. Same time next year? I had a great time, but the one of the important things that will hopefully come of this is access to better and cleaner data, which means that someone like those hackers will be able to craft a useful application for you (where's the nearest public toilet to me *right now*?), or indeed the government can use at little cost. And that means that kids who paid more attention to statistics in school than I stand to make better decisions, and make more money, than I ever will be able to. Which is good for the economy right? Moar data plz? Kthxbai.

Addendum: Rewired State are running a hack day for all geeks 18 and younger in August. If you know someone who might be interested, let 'em know.

On my walk to work, I pass through one of London's Greens*, which is a
good way to absorb the changing seasons and get some natural exposure
before sitting in front of two LCD screens for 8 hours. It was a cold
February day, but I'd seen some struggling signs of life, which
reminded me of an earlier email and prompted me to snap this picture.

I'll get to the email in a second. First, a week later, our local
paper led with a shot of a Park** near our house, resplendent with
these same colourful flowers. In the headline: Crocuses. "Aha!",
clicked my slower than average brain,"These flowers are the same that
I saw on the way into work, and now I have a name for them!".

Triumphant, I dropped this fact into conversation.

"Yes James. Those are crocuses. You would have seen them every year
you'd lived here during spring."

Ah. Yes. My seeming inability to learn about European flora and fauna,
even 14 years into living in the place, reared its confusing head
again. And this, actually, brings me back to that email. Now, I don't
know about you, but I learned about the seasons in school. Living in
a country with three seasons (rainy and really, really rainy and
baking), and then two seasons (just rainy and really rainy) we had
long banners up on the wall with months and season names, and relevant
illustrations to prove the point (if you consider American
Thanksgiving a relevant illustration to a class of students from 15
different countries). So, I know what you know: summer runs from June
to August, autumn from September to November, Winter from December to
February, and spring from March to May.

It has to be true right? I'm a spring baby - I was born in May.
Irrefutable. Except, it turns out, the Irish don't think so. A few
years ago, I was sitting in my shared flat with my flatmates and some
visiting friends - the majority of whom (flatmates and friends) were
Irish (and, y'know, still are). For some reason (possibly the heat of
the day), we got onto the subject of seasons. Shock news: the Irish
think that the summer ends in July. What what what? Yes, July. Which
means, they think spring starts in February.

Well, as a tropical kid speaking to temperate kids, I felt on shaky
ground. But dammit, I was well educated seasonally-speaking, childhood
school banners don't lie, and so I stood my ground. Back in the
present, I received an email from one of those friends, pointing to this Wikipedia entry on the Irish Calendar.

It confirmed the crazy Irish seasonal ramblings! Blown away, I
summoned things I knew to be true. To whit: August is the hottest
month on average in both the UK and Ireland, and February the coldest.
"The coldest month of the year in winter?" I asked, "Pish, pash, and
posh surely." I even provided statistics to that affect from the Met
office! Surely you can trust meteorologists! When have they ever
gotten it wrong?

Her response can be summarized by this extract from a follow up email:

you can throw all the climactic climatic doo-hickeys at us you
wish. Ours is a good system. Ours is a stable system. Ours is based
on the length of *days*. Weather is transient; light is eternal ...
;-)

And so, these flowers are for you Elaine - the flowers know when
spring starts towards the end of February or beginning of March, even
if the Irish don't and the English don't (and us third-culture kids
have no freakin' idea). Tomorrow, as we celebrate the stoutest *heh*
of Hallmark holidays, think of the poor Irish, who think that we're
midway through spring. Think of them too in August, when they think
summer has gone and they're outside wondering why it's so damned hot.

And smile happily at this thought: British folk, shivering in the
bitter February winter weather are surprised by happy faced Irish
people rushing up to them, and asking what season they think it is.
Look at the mixture of surprise and confusion on the Irish faces, and
then the comforting smile, imparting the knowledge it's really OK -
spring has started already. Have an elongated straw star.

* As a side note, I'm not 100% on what differentiates a "Green" from a
"Park". I used to think it was a size thing, but then I lived on
Stepney Green, and it's pretty freakin' big. I suspect it might have
something to do with the grass to tree ratio, although as you can see
from the picture with the dodgy weather we had here in mid-February,
there wasn't a whole lot of grass going on.

** Yes a Park - not a Green this time. The distinction might prove important.

 

You may have noticed over the last few years, the tendency for people
to tap and swoosh their fingers about on their phones, rather than
talk with or punch numbers on them. Commuters are fondling responsive
glass, listening to birds crashing into wooden blocks through crappily
designed white headphones with no bass response and a flat mid-range.
Yes, the new smartphone feels like it's sweeping all before it.

I remember Steve Jobs' keynote at the 2007 Macworld Expo, which unveiled the iPhone to the world.
The feel around it was incredible - a phone with visual voicemail? An
iPod? A first class web browser? In fact, that was the one thing that
really stood out for me from the keynote: the web experience. Being
stuck with the inbuilt J2EE crappy browser on my Sony Ericsson whilst
working on the web was no fun (Opera's initial releases of the
extremely useful Opera Mini didn't
run on my phone), and the promise of a better way was enticing.

Fast forward four years, and it isn't the web experience that is the
first thing that comes to people's minds when thinking about the
iPhone, Android devices, or mobile smartphones in general. In a way,
that's an excellent sign of how far things have changed. Most of
today's smart phones handle the web well, and Opera Mini 5 handles it
on a huge variety of features phones effortlessly (although Javascript
remains a pain point there). Nope, instead the smart phones are all
about the apps.

As a web developer who started coding in the early 90s (yay!
Geocities! and professional pages), I feel two ways about this. One, the
explosion of independent (largely one or two person) development shops
is awesome. The variety, imagination and creativity that goes into
making native applications for phones mirrors the early days of the
PC, Amiga and Commodore 64. Because the hardware and display variety
is still quite limited, there isn't a huge amount of testing that
needs to be done for different platform environments, which means a
developer can focus less on that, time consuming aspect of
programming. People also tend to engage with their phones for smaller
chunks of time, which means that you don't necessarily need to invest
a huge amount of time in building a deep experience - although you
certainly can. And the design constraints mean that hugely detailed,
high resolution visuals don't need to be provided in order for your
application to feel well polished.

As a bonus, all this tedious, non-technical webbery with
misconceptions of data structures which the programming community
seems so focused on these days can be replaced by caring about
pointers again (at least, if you code in NextStep's Objective C).

But, and again I say this as web developer - what about us? There are
plenty of people who have lots of experience coding websites on the
frontend and backend. We write code that scales to multiple
resolutions accurately, supports at least 4 major platforms with
legacy code provisioning (I'm looking at you IEs 6 & 7 and Safari 4),
and is pretty damned easy to prototype. This sounds ideal for small
form factor smartphones, with less detail engagement required.

And it turns out that the platform providers (to my knowledge, at
least Google
and Apple)
have happily thought of us too - in a way. But, I hear you wonder,
I've used websites, and if there's one thing I can tell you about
them, it's that they are *not* like running an application on your
machine. I mean, Gmail is many things but it is not a native mail
application (although you could argue it is better for the way it
embraces its setting). How can a web application possibly compete
against native applications?

Well, we do have the help of new technology specifications, with parts
of the CSS3 specs and the HTML 5 specs allowing an amazing amount of
native application like behaviour. This includes offline storage,
access to hardware acceleration and native drawn buttons (rather than
images). Just like our native coding counterparts, we get to target
only devices that support advanced features(although if you're a good
web developer and use progressive enhancement/graceful degredation,
you can build a full experience for many different device types), and
there are even platform specific Javascript APIs that allow access to
accelerometers and multi-touch gestures, and custom meta tags to
control zooming or remove browser chrome.

So, everything's rosy right? We can rock on with our preferred coding
environments, and just go about providing the best damned user
experience possible? Well..not quite. Apart from some non-trivial
technical considerations, the very term 'app' has muddied the water.
If you do web development and client work, you might now be faced with
a conundrum: what does a client mean when they ask for an 'app' to go
along with their existing website?

In the last year, I've come across our clients wanting 3 different things:

1) An app - it's what they asked for. Y'know, the ability to tap an
icon and launch a full window experience. There's promotional
opportunities here - games with client branding, related search (is
your client in the food industry? A recipe app might work..). There's
also some money in it - you can charge for native app downloads, or
provide subscriptions for a web app. Yes, you can have a full logo
experience on your mobile device of choice for a web app - in most
cases.

2) No really, we meant an app stupid. Clients almost universally think
of the Apple App Store when they initially talk about apps, and the
concurrent marketing and promotional opportunities. This can be a
problem for web apps - they don't appear in Apple's main App Store,
and are unlikely too in the future. This is down to the fact that you
can change your website without submitting the changes for Apple's
approval, which can be a boon for the users - you update the
application and push the changes when you want. They don't have to
download anything new, and everyone automatically receives the update.
There is potential for web apps in this space - Mozilla and Google
have both launched Web App Stores of late, and Apple have a separate
listing page for web apps, but at the moment those native developers
have it sewn up.

3) A mobile view of their website. No really. You can obviously handle
this any number of ways - some User Agent sniffing (I know, I know) to
push mobile devices to a different URL with an alternative experience,
or different design handled through media queries and CSS.

Yeah, so I guess what I've learned is something I should already have
known: you need to speak to your clients to understand what they want,
and most people's engagement to technology is different to your own.

D'uh.

My current employer is, if you choose to blindly ignore 6 months of
working freelance (and I do), almost the smallest company I have ever
worked for. It's certainly the smallest company that I've ever had a
desk at and that is, in fact, one of the attractions of the job. I've
worked for some large companies, and some
mega-brontosaurously-gigantoid enterprises, and I'm really enjoying
the freedom to get things done and the impact I feel like I'm having
day to day in this smaller scale environment.

Although we're a small company (fewer than 30 people), due to some
convoluted company history and an admirable people-first attitude, we
actually have 3 offices. I work in one of the two smaller offices,
where we have had 3 staff for the last few months and one standard BT
copper line to bind them. It has doubled as our broadband connection
to the outside world as well as a way of pushing our voices to the
other offices, as a way of confirming we're at work. I imagine this is
reasonably usual for small businesses in the UK - ADSL is cheap,
whilst having multiple DDIs (direct lines) or a PBX (internal
exchange) is not. This has lead to some problems with, y'know, needing
to call someone when the phone line is in use.

So last week, BT rocked up, installed a PBX, and gave us some new
numbers (including direct lines - woo!). I should be clear - it's not
like we won the BT lottery or anything. We did *ask* them for the
installation, and we are paying them. Otherwise it'd just be weird. In
the afternoon of the very same day, we got the first call - it was
answered by my manager:

'Yes, speaking. Yes, the name of the company is..'
'No, we've been here for a few years',
'I'm sorry, why do you need that information?'

Ah, it was the people from Thompson directory, updating their business
listings. Fair enough, and good on them - taking a proactive approach.
A second call - this time from BT directory. Fine! They would know our
number has been updated, since BT installed the flipping thing. And
then a third, and probably a fourth - we missed that one since we
haven't figured out how to change the number of rings before the
voicemail kicks in.

The next day, I arrived at the office first, and got a phone call
almost immediately, from a pleasant lady at Yell.com. And then 10
minutes later, another from yet another provider. After the initial
set of calls the day before, we were already over this
talking-to-random-people malarky, and now it was beginning to get on
my nerves.

There are many odd things about this. Firstly, I should make clear
that in the UK, there are many business directory
listing..err..businesses these days, partially as a result of the move to open the directory enquiries market in 2003. Just as obviously, the
internet is hitting these businesses hard. I'm sure for many types of
business it does make an enormous impact to be listed in a telephone
directory, but I'm not convinced anyone is sure how much impact it
makes, and which places are the most effective to list. A quick world
wide net search leads to no studies, and few anecdotal blog posts
about the matter, and none of which are from the UK

Secondly - the number that all these companies called on was the new
office number, and most of them called up within 24 hours of it being
installed to 'update' their listings. Who the hell told them a) who we
were b) that we had a new number and c) what it was? Clearly it was
BT, but I know I wasn't expecting all these calls. Would they jump in
your grave as fast?

Thirdly - I *totally* understand them wanting to check your address
and phone number, the name of the business and even what type of
business you are. That makes total sense from a listing point of view.
And after telling them that we were a web design/development shop, I
also understand that no one asked us our opening hours. You'd care for
a high street chemist or library, but not for a business to business
operation right? But what I don't get are the other questions they
ask. How many people work at that office? Are there other offices?
What is your annual turnover?

The suspicious in me thinks that these questions are used as marketing
material - more information that these companies can sell on to other
marketers. I asked one of the callers about this. "Well you see sir,
depending on the size of the business, the rate that people leave and
moves changes, so it helps us to keep our records in order, and know
how often to call to check the details." Really? Really really 
really?

Fourthly - people! We make websites!

I suppose I'm just surprised at the interaction. The longer that I
work at different jobs, the more surprised I become at the type of
work that exists in the world, and the way in which people interact
with each other. It's a strange world. Happily, the number of phone
calls seems to have dropped off, so I look forward to a new week of
only talking to people I'm expecting to talk to. Clients, colleagues,
that sort of thing.

It'll certainly make a nice change from fighting off the slavering, 
speed-dialling hordes of directory listing businesses.

A year ago almost to the day, rain was washing down the trail, and every step I took made me feel older. Compared to the coast, it was cool, the ever present clouds providing cover from the sun. It was exciting and damp, worrying and thrilling. It was awesome. To top it all off, I think I was probably at my most productive as a ever as a writer. For six months, we crossed countries, negotiating currencies and languages, experiencing new foods and places and people, and we both still found time to take pictures and write a bit about the experience.

Two days ago, as I sat on a bus in the rain, with the wind beating against the side of the glass (albeit at about 10 meters worth of elevation instead of 3300), the thought of Cuzco, the Inca Trail and the task of trying to impossibly represent the 4 days on the Inca trail in words came back to me. When we returned from travelling we decided to up sticks and change neighbourhood. I got a new job (web developing again for fun and profit!), met up with friends and family, went to gigs and festivals, and I haven't found the time or the space to write? Ridiculous!

I'm setting out to fix this now. Most of what I post will probably be web development related, for any number of reasons. So apologies if you know me, but you don't care about testing procedures, version control systems and programming languges. As for the rest? Random thoughts, long winded and rambling. Should be fun, and the writing should improve. Hurrah!