• To add nice headers and footers to each page use the fancyhdr package.
• Use glosstex for most acronym and glossary needs.
• Use the hyphenat package if you need monospace text (such as that set by the \texttt command) to wrap correctly, with hyphenation marks.
• The varioref package provides easy-to-use cross referencing with automatic phrases such as ‘on the following page…’ etc.
• To include EPS easily in both latex and pdflatex documents, use the following magic incantation in the document preamble:

\newif\ifpdf
\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
    \pdffalse
\else
    \pdfoutput=1
    \pdftrue
\fi
 
\ifpdf
   \usepackage{hyperref}
   \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
   \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.pdf,.png,.jpg}
\else
   \usepackage{graphicx}
   \DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.eps}
\fi

Then refer to graphics files, when including them, without an extension. Use epstopdf to convert all EPS files to PDF for inclusion in the pdflatex version of the document.

• Use the custom-bib package to easily create custom BiBTeX style files.
• The following command produces a new environment which gives a nice way of having an introductory paragraph for each new chapter:

\newenvironment{intro}{\sffamily}
{\vspace*{2ex minus 1.5ex}}

So far it’s been a pain to enter information into Dopplr manually, but they announced today that it can now watch iCal calendars and create trips accordingly. I’ve added my iCal feed from TripIt and it seems to work well so far. They are minor niggles. For example, it gets confused if you have multiple destinations in your trip as TripIt doesn’t really allow for this concept. Also, not all trips involve advance booking, so I don’t bother adding them to TripIt – they’ll need to be entered into Dopplr manually. Nevertheless, it should cut down on the amount of data entry.

TripIt, although it has similar facilities for maintaining a list of travelling contacts, originates from a slightly different and more ambitious idea. Essentially, you email TripIt confirmation emails for hotels, airlines, car rental, etc. – and it parses them and automatically organises them into trips with information-rich itineraries, including weather, maps, city guides, etc. You can print those out, but (more usefully) you can again syndicate them into tools such as Google Calendar via iCal. This way, I end up with details about all my flights, hotels, and so on in my calendar automatically.

TripIt’s not perfect – I’ve found a few bugs – and TripIt doesn’t support every single travel agent (for example, it doesn’t support the one we use within IBM – at least not directly). But the TripIt team are very responsive to feedback – I notified them about a Hertz reservation email this afternoon that wasn’t recognised. They’ve already fixed the bug and the information has appeared in my TripIt account. I’m not sure how they plan to monetise their service (although that’s still not clear with Dopplr either), but I am likely to stay a regular user for the foreseeable future.

(Honourable mention for another useful travel website goes to Kayak, which has the most flexible and useful flight search interface I’ve found).

Google have clearly made a success of Google Maps (I’ve discussed Google Maps before as compared to Multimap – not entirely favourably – but whatever I think, the market loves the former). Plenty of competitors have also sprung up, notably from Microsoft. Incidentally, Flash Earth brings together all of these services into one ultra-slick interface; although I’d still love to see them available on Jeff Han’s touch screen (iPhone, eat your heart out – your interface is nothing on this).

However, one thing all these services have in common is that the mapping data is (as far as I can tell) commercially licensed, ultimately from a governmental institution. In the UK, we have the Ordnance Survey (who actually produce excellent paper maps, even if their customer-facing technology is a little backward). The Ordnance Survey gets its revenue from licensing data, selling maps, and so on, rather than from general taxation (which is something that as a libertarian I can almost approve of; although it does raise the question of why the government needs to be involved at all, since there’s therefore clearly a market for the data). The closest equivalent in the US appears to be the USGS (which also has other functions).

It always used to be conventional economic wisdom that mapping (or, to be more precise, surveying) was a function that had to be performed by government, because it was so astronomically expensive – in other words, it cost more than the direct revenues one could possibly obtain (presumably the indirect benefit to society is supposedly significant, which is why we engaged in it). Whether you agree with the morality of this depends on your political views, but it is at least plausible. It’s interesting to see that the Ordnance Survey no longer seem to operate on this model, but clearly many folk still believe surveying should be done centrally.

Now technology might be able to change all of this. OpenStreetMap is showing how it might be done – using cheap GPS receivers, driving along streets, and plotting the resultant data (yes, I know the receivers rely on expensive satellites; but there are only a few of them; and they’d be there anyway). Obviously there’s a long way to go, as shown by the short list of places that have been mapped. There are obviously also concerns over completeness, accuracy, and so on (although most of these have an analogy in Wikipedia, too). However, the potential for these maps is huge if the concept does take off – Google Maps mashups would have nothing on the potential richness of data available. The real concern so far has to be over how many people are really interested in creating this data and keeping it up to date.

As with all futurology (aka: guesswork), time will tell.

Update 2006-01-16: A recent edition of the BBC radio programme In Business (available as a podcast) took a rather quaint look at open-source. Worth a listen as a discussion of how hard open-source is to sell, although not as a rigorous discussion of the technological and legal issues.

I suspect I’m not the only one suffering from this decreased attention span, but the question is – is there anything we should do about it? Insofar as lots of shorter information diverts people from a few bits of longer information (reading 100/articles/week, say, rather than 2 books/week), it probably indicates that we simply don’t get as much value or entertainment from the longer stuff as we thought we did (or should). This is called revealed preference – what you prefer is shown by your actions, not by your words. So I suspect the simple answer is no.

Seth Godin certainly seems to agree with part of this theory – he has a theory that books, in many cases, have now become a ‘takeaway’ for shorter essays and other written pieces. I don’t think it’s fair to go as far as to say that they are simply fluff, but Seth nevertheless makes a good point – that many books simply expand on shorter ideas – and it is questionable, sometimes, what the marginal value of that is over consuming something completely different (everything you do has a time-driven opportunity cost).

The problem, of course, is that building up habits like this may make it harder to concentrate for sustained periods of time on reading/viewing/listening when that is necessary.

I’m interested in what your experiences are – do you suffer from decreased attention span? Is it a result of increased volumes of information, or do you think it’s something different?

Google’s maps are simple; straightforward; and link together yellow pages data with mapping data – together with some cool APIs that enable rip-offs (an ancient term for a mashup). However, they also strip out contextual data that any professional navigator would consider important – landmarks, land type, buildings, etc. It seems apparent that Google are trying to hit a particular market – those who find conventional maps too confusing. And to be fair, they’re doing pretty well – empirical data suggests lots of folks use them. Their reasonably robust mobile maps are also quite handy.

Multimap, on the other hand, looks backward by modern standards: a confusing array of mostly-irrelevant fluff crowds the page. They have one strong advantage, however – they provide contextual information, since they simply use OS maps (at least at medium zoom levels). OS maps are excellent for providing detailed navigation data, and Multimap seems to be the only free online provider of them.

I actually use both sites – Google when I’m searching for things (e.g. dry cleaners in Winchester, of which there turn out not to be many), and Multimap when I want a printable map to navigate to somewhere specific. I would hazard a guess that Google’s map interface was designed by someone who works in a city, as they are virtually useless outside one. Google should be able to make the additional mapping data optional as an overlay – after all, there is already a hybrid interface that mixes maps with satellite pictures. This would be a welcome improvement. Multimap should focus on cleaning up their interface if they don’t want to be run out of town.

But Tufte seems only to be liked by elitists (a cynical and slightly cruel view of his work might say that it involves making graphics more complicated). Another hero of mine, Seth Godin, says: Edward and I disagree. He thinks people are a lot smarter than I do. I suspect what Seth is alluding to is the density of data. Tufte loves data that’s dense and rich, and when I’m feeling intelligent, I do too (I love the huge map of London on my wall; I dislike Harry Beck’s classic map of the London Underground for the same reason: why move the stations around to fit a neat pattern? You just lose their position for no good reason: try something like this instead). However, Seth’s approach does seem to be more realistic. Sometimes stuff just does need to be simple: you can’t always have a rich graph with 3 axes and 10,000 data points being a practical solution to a data illustration problem.

Most data presentation isn’t like either of these: it is just bad. Information design isn’t a field that many folks are aware of, but it is important (making plans to invade Iraq by Powerpoint is … well … just inappropriate. It’s hard to know what else to say). It’s particularly important as the world upgrades to Web 2.0, as a large part of the scope for improvement is in information design and presentation. It’s also simply pleasant to see data presented well. I just wish I could decide what the best approach is.

• Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I've since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I'd leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]
• Mr. Google, please stop developing so many interfaces – and plug them all together. If I want to do an exhaustive search for something, I now have to search Google Web, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, and possibly others. This is not a good thing – you’re straying from the simple search you started with. Some of those searches do show up in the main search results, but you could do a better job of tying them together to show what I’m actually looking for. This could be a real competitive edge, especially since the basic searches that MSN and others provide are now actually quite reasonable.

Google still have an edge in providing what people want – for a company so technically-focused, they either have talented marketers or are just lucky. Please, Google, keep it up.

• Social bookmarking. I now use delicious, so I can manage my bookmarks properly across the many computers I regularly use, as well as discover high-quality sites other people have stumbled upon.
• In-browser Flash-based video. You can argue until the cows come home about the technical superiority of this method, but the success of YouTube shows that it’s the way forward. I use to shy away from web-based video because of the hassles involved: Download or stream? Do I have the right codec? Which media player to use? Flash-based video solves this problem.

However, the Flash-based video technique does highlight a problem that users of Web 2.0 sites are likely to encounter for a few years as they become more prevalent: interface inconsistency. It’s been long recognised that consistent user interfaces are a good thing, but everyone thinks that they can make a better scroll bar, and although Flash has been around for some time, it’s so far mostly been relegated to those websites created by designers who value form over function.

Now that there’s a great use for Flash (no, hang on, really great), and AJAX is becoming more widespread, we will go through some years of pain before the UI conventions are worked out and those who stray are vilified, rather than held up as paragons of originality – it seems to have already started with the hourglass, as well as on some of the cruddier YouTube-imitating sites (several of which don’t let you skip forward in videos). This phase of inconsistency has happened plenty of times before in UI history, although never in an uglier way than some of the first web sites. Brace yourself, it’s coming again.

I’m already looking forward to this conference, and it’s almost a year away.

The theme of the conference is hard to pin down; it is defined as ‘good experience in all its forms’. I’m still struggling to ‘get it’, but it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. In practice, this seems to mean a variety of speakers from across the arts and technology, some of them specialising in user experience or customer experience, coming together to share their stories.

This is the first time the conference has been run in Europe (it has been run in New York City since 2003), and current indications are that it will return to both places. The creator of the conference is Mark Hurst, who also leads the sessions at the conference, and who I unfortunately didn’t get to meet. A large number of the speakers are obviously personal friends of his and there is accordingly a sense of community, which is also explored online (see the Gel blog category on goodexperience.com)

The presentations were almost all entertaining, and most informative and passionate. Some of the highlights were:

• Han Bennink – I’m ashamed to admit I’d never heard of Han before. It turns out that he is one of the top Jazz drummers in the world, and his natural exuberance for his work was obvious for all to see – a man who managed to enter the stage, drop a bunch of metal pipes haphazardly on the stage, and make it part of his performance, he obviously has more talent than just a natural sense of rhythm.
• Stephen Bauman – Stephen is a Methodist minister in New York, and in true ministerly style, he told stories. These helped to illustrate what he called ‘Basic Truths’ (on which he has also written a book). I was lucky enough to discuss these and others things with him later on, and he struck me as an extremely perceptive and open-minded religious man: an inspirational American preacher who didn’t hector about Jesus.
• Alison Young – Possessed of a beautiful voice, Alison Young is a supremely talented singer with Southern influences. Why she isn’t more famous is a mystery to me.

I also met some interesting folks:

• Kareem Mayan – Kareem is a returning Gel participant (and volunteer), and obviously enjoys it greatly. His blog has some interesting discussions about emerging technology, including plenty of media and YouTube links (including this ‘How to drive a stick shift’ video – sadly, this doesn’t impress chicks here in the UK, where manual cars are the norm).
• Alexander Kjerulf - Alexander is an irrepressibly bubbly fellow, and describes himself as ‘The Chief Happiness Officer’. He writes and consults on happiness in the workplace, and his passion for his work is obvious. What he says is not rocket science, but it bears repeating. His blog is well worth a read.

I was also lucky enough to win one of the prize draws – for a set of books written by some current and previous Gel speakers, so I now have the following to work my way through:

• Bing Get Dressed by Ted Dewan
• To the Desert and Back by Phil Mirvis and others
• Net.art Per Me by Vuk Cosic
• Bosch & Fjord by Bosch & Fjord
• Simple Truths by Stephen Bauman
• All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
• Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl
• The Power to Heal by Rick Smolan
• From Alice to Outback by Robyn Davidson

Thanks to all the folks who donated books for this – and to Mark Hurst and his team for organising euroGel. I will go again.

Update 2006-09-12: Alison Young’s website can be found here.

Is this really a mistake, or is it a feature? I can’t believe I’m the first to notice this. It’s cute, anyway…

Incidentally, JJLKeyLock is also a pretty handy application for the 6630 and other Symbian S60-based phones, as it provides a timeout-based keylock, as provided on some earlier Nokia phones, but not these.

• Can hold at least ten plastic cards, some cash, and some receipts so they are easily accessible?
• Isn’t so huge that it looks like I’m carrying a copy of War and Peace in my pocket?
• Looks fairly smart, preferably made from leather, but not like I just bought it from Armani or some other o-so-faishonable label?
• Lasts more than 2 weeks?
• And most importantly, has a zip all the way round so your stuff doesn’t fall out?

Is this so hard? (grumble, grumble).

Wallet manufacturers: I will pay you £200 for a wallet that fulfills the above criteria. I realise this won’t cover your R&D costs if it’s just for me, but I’m sure you could sell more of them. Please feel free to design the wallet before manufacturing it if that helps.

But after entering the number on Saturday, I got this message: ‘We have received your item, posted on 21/07/06 and it is being processed for delivery abroad.’ Well, duh. This gives me no useful information. I posted it to a foreign country, so what else would I be expecting? And I know when I posted it. How much longer is it going to take? Are there any delays at the moment? That’s what I want to know.

After entering the number on Sunday, I got: ‘Your item, posted on 21/07/06 with reference xxx has been passed to the overseas postal service for delivery in SWEDEN.’ In other words, Royal Mail have no link to a foreign tracking system, so can’t tell me anything more about it.

Is this really the best the Royal Mail can do? Some tracking systems actually provide some useful (or at least reassuring) information – a historical record of which depot a parcel went to, and when. I know this is a cheap-ish service (eight pounds for about 450 grams), and perhaps Royal Mail can’t stretch to that. But my conclusion is: if you actually want to track your parcel closely, don’t bother with the Royal Mail.

Roll on more competition in the UK postal service.

• It’s impossible to go that fast anyway, which is the case 90% of the time, or:
• The traffic jam is ending and everyone is so glad to be out of it they don’t honour the speed limit (and arguably the speed limit shouldn’t be there any more anyway).

So what exactly is the intended point of these? To pack more traffic on the same amount of roadway? Possibly, but if it’s impossible to go that speed, what’s the point? Have I missed something obvious? Is there some subtlety of queueing theory that explains this?

I assume these signs must be manually controlled – a person in a control room switches them on or off after observing the amount of traffic on a camera. Would they be more responsive if they were automatic?

Anyway, enough grumbling. I’d love to know how they are supposed to work though.

My worry was, though, that I was impressed by this. I shouldn’t be. This is honest-to-goodness systems integration. The volumes of data are not impressive. Even the transaction rates aren’t that impressive any more, to my understanding. And from an airline customer perspective, this stuff is rapidly becoming essential to stay competitive. Maybe some more regular travellers aren’t impressed: but I wonder how often things like this still don’t work? Are my expectations set too low?

After seeing the light turn on when someone went inside, I assumed I was correct in my initial guess – it was to indicate it was occupied. So far, so good – although things would have been less certain if you hadn’t been sitting next to it and seen it do this before. However, the light stayed on for 3 minutes after someone left the toilet. After seeing this consistently happen twice, I figured it must be going through some cleaning cycle – thus the light really meant ‘do not enter’ rather than ‘occupied’. I was just congratulating myself on figuring out this rather straightforward pattern when a further complication arose – as we approached London, and the roads got bumpier (or so I theorized), the light seemed to switch on and off fairly randomly, and this time I just couldn’t correlate it with anything meaningful. Perhaps just a faulty connection in a switch somewhere, but it made me question my previous two conclusions to the extent that as I got off the bus, I realized that I hadn’t really learnt anything at all. Perhaps the light had nothing to do with the toilet, apart from being located nearby.

This is a trivial example, and you could argue it didn’t matter. But also, after spending over 2 hours studying the light, and still not being 100% sure what it did, I couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, it could have been designed to be more obvious (or at least have the faulty switch fixed). These little technological irritations don’t normally hurt anyone (although there have been plenty of similar examples that have caused ‘pilot error’ plane crashes, for example), but they are still things that us technologists should aim to understand and defeat, if only for the sanity of ourselves and those around us.

For a lot more discussion on this topic, see Don Norman‘s classic book The Design of Everyday Things.