Andrew Ferrier

NatWest have recently introduced a one-time pad device on their on-line banking system, which I’ve just got my hands on. As someone who travels a lot, it’s going to be an inconvenience to carry around, so I phoned up NatWest to see if I could have it disabled. The chap I spoke to implied it was being introduced by all UK banks in one form or another and wasn’t going to be optional. Does anyone know if this is true? I wonder if they have really thought through the implications for their customers. Online banking is often of the most use when you are away from home, and carrying a physical device seems like a very stone-age method of providing security. Why can’t I choose not to have it?

David Hill wrote recently on a Lenovo Blog about the design qualities that make Thinkpads great. Whilst some of these are shared by other laptop manufacturers, I have to say I largely agree – even if mine is supplied ‘free’ for use on company business. After dropping it again the other day (yes, I’m clumsy, sorry boss), it took a huge chunk out of my wooden floor. But after the battery had been popped back in, it spun back up and back to life. Truly amazing.

I would buy one myself.

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments on my blog recently, which even Akismet isn’t catching.

So I was amused to get this comment today:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site….

I think you can see where it’s going. One can’t help but feel that just maybe he knows a lot of spammers and knows I get a lot of spammy comments because he is a [fill in the obvious blank]. How frustrating.

Oh yes: is this legally blackmail?

Just finished reading Mark Hurst‘s new book, Bit Literacy. Mark is a chap of many interests and the creative driver behind the excellent (and varied) euroGel conference I attended in Copenhagen last year.

The premise for the book is that the computer-using public are getting swamped by e-mails, web content, blogs, photos, files, and so on – something that most folk would probably agree with. Mark ranges over all of these topics, and gives recommendations for how to handle each. Some of the material borrows from elsewhere – for example, the chapter on email appears to be heavily influenced by David Allen’s now-infamous Getting Things Done method – but this is no bad thing: it’s obvious that Mark is trying to bring together a style guide for the technical world. The Elements of Style is mentioned at least once as a model from the world of the written word. Most of his recommendations are straightforward and backed up with a solid amount of reasoning.

I don’t entirely agree with all of Mark’s recommendations – I think he has a deliberate bias away from anything that removes one’s control over data. Whilst this is a noble and sensible aim within reason, there are other advantages to be wrought from keeping data on the network (and sometimes you have to just chill). He also advocates a degree of customisation – for example, changing one’s keyboard layout to Dvorak – again, something I’ve found to be unwise as you move from computer to computer. But maybe I just do that more than Mark, or maybe he’s more adaptable than me.

Irrespective, there’s a lot of sensible and useful material in the book. Some will be a little basic for some readers, but as The Elements of Style proved, sometimes the basic bears repeating. It’ll be a hard job, given the rapid pace of change in technology, but maybe this book will enter the annals of history in a similar way. I wish Mark the best of luck with the next edition

It appears that all the cool kids are using Dopplr to run into each other more often. I’m kinda curious to know whether it’ll work (I ran some numbers on this a few years ago with some colleagues and we concluded it wouldn’t). So I’ve signed up. I’ve one beta invite left, so if you’d like it, let me know.

Things are still ticking along nicely here in San Jose. Am currently trying to plan what to do in my last week here, which will be a holiday. Probably some time in San Francisco, possibly some time in Vegas (flying there, I’ve given up on the idea of driving through Death Valley without a companion), then back to San Jose for a few days before flying home.

On a mostly unrelated note, went to a cinema the other day which was obviously using digital projectors for the adverts. This is the first time I’ve seen them used in a cinema, and they are without doubt the way forward – no flickers and no crackles. Of course, cinemas still suffer from the sticky-popcorn-noisy-teenager syndrome, but that’s a different problem.

I am now the proud owner of a Sony Cybershot DSCW-55, which I’ll use for the remainder of my trip around the Bay Area to take some photos, after my Canon Powershot failed. I got it from Best Buy for the bargain price of $240 including a 1GB memory card. Not bad for a 7.1MP camera, especially given that current exchange rates almost halve that price when converting to pounds.

Advantages:

• Easy-to-use Sony design – the build quality seems pretty good too. Normally I avoid Sony in the same way I avoid Apple – I just don’t understand the fuss (sorry Apple fans). This time, the bargain price swayed it for me.
• Much slimmer and lighter than my Canon.
• Goes all the way up to ISO 1000 (my Canon only does ISO 400). It remains to be seen how much noise there is at this level, but it’s still nice to know it can do it. I shoot in low light a lot, and hate compact-camera flash almost on principle.

Disadvantages:

• Not quite as many features as my Canon. It won’t do aperture-priority, shutter-priority, etc. I can do without these for the time being.
• No gravity sensor. It remains to be seen how annoying this will become, but Picasa makes rotating easy so hopefully it won’t be a big problem.
• Only a 3x optical zoom. Not sure what this translates to in old numbers, but it ain’t much.
• US charger – of course I didn’t expect anything different, but will have to solve this in the UK somehow.
• US-only warranty – didn’t expect anything different either, but just decided to take the risk – that’s an easier decision to make with $240 than the ~$1000 the 400D would have cost.

I’m really not sure what I’ll do when I return to the UK. It probably depends on how many the Canon will cost to fix. I might sell it on Ebay once fixed and part-buy an SLR with the proceeds (I really should have followed Adrian‘s advice originally and bought the 400D in the UK). I don’t really want to keep it; I’m most unimpressed with Canon now, and I get the impression the Sony will probably do everything I want from a compact. We’ll see.

I managed to drop my IBM-owned Thinkpad fairly violently last weekend and the hard disk crashed. Thinkpads are worth the money, folks, they really are the most reliable laptops going (honest – IBM has sold the brand to Lenovo now, anyway). Unfortunately even it couldn’t withstand my abuse.

I’m currently in the process of getting it fixed, but it was impressive how little disruption it has so far caused. I was both concerned and embarrassed when it first happened: partly because I really need a laptop to take away with me to San José, and partly because, well, it’s embarrassing to break other people’s stuff (even if that person is a virtual entity employing a few hundred thousand people).

Nevertheless, I began to realise just how much data that was important to me, both personally and professionally, was out there on the network, and thus still seamlessly accessible from the remaining PCs I have at home and in the office. My email is all web accessible (save from my business mail, which sadly is not – not without some fuss anyway). My bookmarks are all on delicious, and contain pointers to many things I read regularly. Some of my data (presentations, documents, etc.) is on internal IBM network storage – the rest I’ll be moving onto there in short order from backups. I use Google Reader as an RSS reader, so that wasn’t disturbed. I’m currently evaluating which of the remaining applications I use I should try to find online equivalents for.

I’ve always been paranoid about backups, and that’s one of the reasons why I held off using online applications for such a long time – I worried about control over my data. David convinced me to chill out about this, and I started using delicious (although I still run an automated backup of my bookmarks from it). It was so useful that I started to move more data off my machine. As well as illustrating to me how unimportant the operating system I use really is (I’ve been without a Windows system for a week, and it hasn’t mattered at all), I now really love the compelling value of network-based data, and this event has demonstrated the value of that to me clearly.

Go network!

A long discussion with plv the other day about open source and what it really meant got me thinking about that model when applied to other domains, such as mapping.

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’ve recently taken to reading a lot more on-line – particularly as services such as del.icio.us have helped me to find high-quality content and more high-quality blogs come on the scene. This, of course, is the long tail of written content. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that as I read more and different things, I get more impatient with long articles. I hardly read non-fiction books any more, and fiction books almost never (preferring film).

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?