The SIM is designed to do a number of things; encryption, address storage, hold SMS, etc.

Most importantly, it’s designed to be swappable. With GSM, you [...]]]> The argument over the nano-SIM is a distraction. It’s a sleight of hand designed to catch the industry off guard and fool it into doing something really stupid.

The SIM is designed to do a number of things; encryption, address storage, hold SMS, etc.

Most importantly, it’s designed to be swappable. With GSM, you can choose your phone and your network provider separately. Want the iPhone? Hate Three’s network? Stick in a Tesco Mobile SIM. Love Vodafone? Think their range of phones is crap? Buy the phone and service separately.

It means carries and manufacturers don’t have control of customer behaviour. This is a good thing and allows our form of free-market capitalism to flourish with increased competition.

The reason that Apple claim their iPhone needed a micro-SIM was that the space inside the iPhone was too cramped for a regular SIM. This is hogwash.

The size saved by the mico-SIM is miniscule. It was originally intended for small or embedded devices where space was at a premium. While the iPhone is a complex bit of kit, the SIM tray is already close to the size of the full SIM. It’s simply not credible that the iPhone was unique and had to have a new SIM.

So what was the purpose?

Apple want to control the entire experience. You buy the Apple iPhone in the Apple Store. You download music and games from Apple’s iTunes. You send messages over Apple iMessage and Facetime. They want a 100% Apple experience.

When the iPhone was limited to a single carrier per market, they also had that control over the networks. They could (and did) dictate how much the monthly tariff cost. How many minutes, texts, and MB an iPhone user would have. They even prevented the phone being sold to PAYG customers.

You may have thought you were on O2, but you were really on an Apple MVNO.

That has (mostly) changed now. You can get an iPhone and put it on any network, at any price point, with any services and wrest control from Apple. And they hate losing control.

The micro-SIM was their first move. Use a SIM which cannot be swapped with any other phone. Make it hard enough to get a normal SIM into an iPhone that most people won’t bother. Yes, there are SIM cutters and caddies – this is an imperfect solution they foisted on to the marketplace. One which is backfiring as other manufacturers start using the micro-SIM.

Their next move is a phone with a “Virtual SIM” – Tomi Ahonen has a little bit of background – no physical SIM card to be swapped.

It’s quite simple technically. You buy your iPhone, plug it into iTunes, and tell it which price-plan you want. You pay Apple directly and they update the iPhone’s “Virtual SIM”. Hey presto, you’re on the network.

What network? Who knows! As far as you’re concerned, you’re on Apple. It may be Vodafone, it may be O2. And, at any moment, Apple could update the Virtual SIM and you’d be on T-Mobile.

I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This

There are several reasons why the Virtual SIM is a dangerous idea.

• If you’re unlucky enough to live in an area with bad reception from Orange? Too bad. All the people who matter live in cities with excellent reception…
• Reduced choice in price-plans.
• Zero competition in price.
• Security. Networks are very reluctant to give their encryption keys to Apple. Considering how easy it is to jailbrake an iPhone, this is wise.
• If or when Apple go bust – you may be left with a brick. There will be no way to update it.
• Roaming costs. Maybe Apple will do a deal with international roaming operators and reduce cost? If they don’t, there’s no way you can swap to a domestic SIM.
• Want to move your number to a disposable phone if you’re going partying / sailing / camping? Tough. The number stays with the phone.
• When Apple decide to up their prices – you can’t leave for another provider.
• Phone damaged? No easy way to move your number to another handset.
• I think you get the picture.

Luckily the operators kicked the proposal into the long grass. But I know that several parties are interested in Virtual SIMs – it’s a zombie idea which will keep coming back unless we kill it with fire.

This is terrible for customers – but you can see why Apple love it so.

The Kindle Conundrum

I’ve used Apple as a convenient scapegoat here. They’re not the only ones planning for a virtual SIM. In some ways, the Amazon Kindle was the first to try this strategy in the UK. As I’ve blogged about, the Kindle has a non-removeable SIM card. Well, you can remove it if you’re handy with a screwdriver and don’t mind voiding your warranty.

In this case, Amazon have an exclusive deal with Vodafone to provide worldwide 3G roaming on their network. If the SIM was replaced, the customer would have to pay the roaming bills.

The Kindle can only work with Amazon’s services – all the browsing goes through their proxy – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it couldn’t use a 3rd party SIM card. If you’ve no Vodafone reception or WiFi at home, it may even be worth your while paying O2 for a data-only SIM.

But the Kindle is sold as a single service. So it’s acceptable. Barely.

Future Imperfect

I dread the future where devices are locked down like American CDMA phones. No choice other than what the manufacturer demands. Gone will be the days of choosing the right phone and the right price-plan. You’ll take the service you’re given and will have to put up with it.

For now, the operators are on the side of consumers against manufacturers. But it only takes one to start us down that slippery slope.

I had a suggestion from digital journalist Kevin Anderson

Google Docs has an annoying 2MB limit for uploaded PDFs. However, I’ve taken the first half of Rebekah Brooks’ witness statement and run them through the OCR [...]]]> I’ve already blogged about the Leveson Inquiry’s disturbing habit of releasing evidence as scanned in PDFs.

I had a suggestion from digital journalist Kevin Anderson

@edent Put the Leveson docs up on Google Docs. I'd be curious how their OCR could handle them. Then click 'make public'

11/05/2012 11:40 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevglobal

Mr Anderson

Google Docs has an annoying 2MB limit for uploaded PDFs. However, I’ve taken the first half of Rebekah Brooks’ witness statement and run them through the OCR process.

This is how Google recognises the text in the document

Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press

1 I dlT| necessarily inhibited to some extent about what I can say in reiation to some of the issues that the Inquiry has raised with me.
My background

3. ijoined News International in 1989. I began my career on the News of the Worlcfs coiour supplement, Sunday magazine, whiie simultaneousiy attending ajournalism course at the London College of Printing.
4. Since then i have been either a joumeiist or an executive on both The News of the World and The Sun. For afrnc-st a decade Iwas a nationai newspaper editor. In May 2000 I became the editor of The News of the Worid and in January 2003 I became the editor of The Sun.

5. In September 2009, I was appointed Chief Executive of News lnternationaf. My responsibilities embraced ail the newspapers and digital products of the 1…. -. -

That’s based on this text:

Why Is This Important

The journalist Heather Brooke has been ranting for some time about the closed nature of the British Courts. It’s close to impossible to get verbatim or accurate information about course cases. This means as citizens, journalists, or archivists, we can’t accurately search documents. We need access to the original digital documents.

Poor OCR is also a huge problem. As above, OCR gives us a misleading impression that documents are searchable.

Should we wish to search, say KRM-18, to see whether the MP Tom Watson is mentioned; a search for “Watson” turns up zero results. Yet he is mentioned.

The page shows:

But the scanned text reads:

Had ~ debrief with 5f[ ~nd his team tm~.igl~t ttt 77~ betbre he [o~ t.o his constituency:
l-]~e is veo’ h.,qlopY~ith d~ ~va~, today” wellt mid ~s~cci~iiJ~’ ~,it[i tae ~bsoiutely’idiotie. del)&t~s led by Wtttson.urtd
Prescott.

So, it’s totally impossible to rapidly search through these documents. It would be necessary to laboriously read each document manually.

How To Accomplish This

There are two ways to get this done – in the case of the Leveson Inquiry.

1. Petition the Inquiry to release the original documents.
2. Crowdsource the OCR. Taking the Google OCR as a starting point and “Wikifying” it to let anyone correct the text. A bit like Distributed Proofreaders

I will, of course, send an email to the Leveson Inquiry – but would people be interested in being part of a crowdsourcing effort to opening up these documents?

The guys are (naturally) cagey about their product launch, but here’s what I was able to glean.

Lister’s cat is discovered because he takes a photo of the two of them and has it developed in the ship’s photo lab.

In 1988 – when Red Dwarf was first aired – nothing in the world seemed more natural than to [...]]]> The entire premise of Red Dwarf rests on this one scene:

Lister’s cat is discovered because he takes a photo of the two of them and has it developed in the ship’s photo lab.

In 1988 – when Red Dwarf was first aired – nothing in the world seemed more natural than to get a photo developed in a lab. Today, however, the very thought is laughable. It seems as archaic as posting a letter, ringing a land line, or renting a video-tape.

Red Dwarf gets a lot of things right in its grasp on the future. True, the Roomba isn’t yet as clever as Kryten, and our life sized holograms aren’t sentient – but there’s some cracking future gazing in there.

If we were to update the plot device for the 21st century, we might have the captain say:

You took a photograph of yourself with the cat and posted it on FaceBook!

But, again, in a few years time when Facebook is as dead as MySpace, the scene would look just as archaic…

In one of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who – Seeds of Death – there are two lovely moments which show just how hard it is to predict the future. The episode takes place on a colony on the moon, there are matter transporters, super-computers, and all manner of high-tech futuristic gizmos.

Out of the matter transporter steps this man. Carrying a briefcase.

A beautiful future where the women wear 1960′s mini-skirts and men walk around with breifcases!

The second moment is when Jamie and the Doctor are fighting the Ice Warriors. In order to get their heat gun working, Jamie has to plug it in to what looks like a bog standard electrical extension cord!

It’s a future fantasy grounded in the past.

Mundane

It’s the little, ordinary things which writers and futurologists can sometimes fail to grasp.

It’s easy to imagine a world with laser guns and teleporters. It’s less easy to imagine a world where no one needs to queue at a Post Office or has to flush a toilet.

The first problem with future gazing is that we don’t recognise what trivial aspects of our lives are candidates for being overhauled.

The second problem is that our views of the future are based on the current state-of-the-art.
It’s easy to laugh at the spinning reels of computer tape in the 1960′s Star Trek – but they represent the best view of what people thought the future was going to look like.

The challenge, for anyone interested in creating the future, is not to concentrate on big ticket items. Interstellar travel, ultra-high-speed data transfer, teleportation – these thing will (probably) all come. No doubt they will change some aspects of our society. But our monkey-brains will still be there – driving us to compete, betray, socialise, and play.

Human Technology

Without radical neuro-engineering, we’re not going to change our fundamental nature.

The joy of technology is that it reduces the boring and difficult jobs. Both a loom and a supercomputer perform the same task – quickly and without complaint or error do a job which humans find slow, boring, and error prone.

Technology also increases the good things in our lives. Phones help us socialise, televisions entertain us, drugs keep us happy.

In this way, technological innovation is either aimed at reducing pain, or increasing pleasure.

The things which will really have an impact are those which dramatically change the way small and mundane tasks are accomplished.

Post-It Notes

The most important innovation of the 20th Century is the humble Post-It Note. Not for any technological reason, but simply because it introduced the phrase “However did we cope without…?”

Can you imagine doing the household accounts without a pocket calculator – or spreadsheet?
How did we ever arrange social dates without phones? Did we just wait for people when they were late?
Were our suitcases really packed with a dozen books when we went on holiday?
Asking strangers for directions or hotel staff for restaurant recommendations?

Perhaps it’s best summed up by another quote from Red Dwarf.
Upon being awoken, Lister is told that he has been in stasis for three million years. His first thought?

I’ve still got that library book!

It’s a joke that still resonates – but for how much longer? Library books which use Digital Restrictions Management to automatically return themselves. Soon it will be as irrelevant as “Be Kind; Rewind” stickers on rented videos.

All Good Blog Posts End With A List

Here are my thoughts on some trivial aspects of our lives which – if put in a sci-fi film – would draw hoots of derision from an audience from the year 2022.

• Traffic jams.
• Attracting a bar-tender’s attention.
• Resetting a microwave’s clock after a powercut.
• Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).
• Tasting a dish to see if it’s salty or spicy enough.
• Recharging gadgets.
• Waiting for a taxi.
• Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.
• Monthly billing cycles.

Pretty obviously, that’s the user’s name and the ID of their tweet. Simple, right?

Not really, click on that link and you’ll see this:

That’s my name in the URL [...]]]> Did you know that you can to link to a specific Tweet on Twitter? The URL looks like this:
https://twitter.com/#!/edent/status/197967209459499008

Pretty obviously, that’s the user’s name and the ID of their tweet. Simple, right?

Not really, click on that link and you’ll see this:

That’s my name in the URL bar – but the Number 10 Press Office’s tweet on the page.

What’s Going On?

Have I retweeted that status? Nope!
Am I a 1337 h4x0r who has hacked Number 10? No sir!
Is the screenshot a fake? Nuh-uh. Check the link yourself.

It’s actually a curious bug / feature of Twitter. Each tweet you send has a unique ID. So there can only be one tweet with the ID 197967209459499008. And that ID will always belong to @Number10press.

The username part in the URL is redundant. It seems that it is not used except to give information to the user / search engines. It can be safely omitted or manipulated.

Malicious Use?

It strikes me that there is a slim chance of malicious use.

One could create a fake account – say Number1Opress (where the 0 has been replaced with a capital O). Make it tweet something ridiculous, then share a URL which has the real Number10press in the URL. Minor embarrassment is probably the worst consequence.

It’s an interesting usability / security nexus. The username is placed in the URL to make it easier or more useful for users – but it is ignored by the back end system. As it’s part of the hated hashbang syntax, I wonder if it could be simply be rewritten if there’s a mismatch?

It’s as though they think that people won’t be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine [...]]]> For reasons best known to themselves, certain sections of the entertainment industries seem to believe that bolting the stable door shutting down The Pirate Bay will stop all piracy.

It’s as though they think that people won’t be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine to find another torrent site.

Build Your Own Pirate Bay?

Proxying is a very simple concept.

• Alice is forbidden from speaking to Bob.
• Alice can speak to Eve.
• Eve can speak to Bob.
• Alice, therefore, can use Eve to communicate with Bob.

So, a user who wishes to access The Pirate Bay would have to do something quite complex to use a proxy? No, this is all there is to it:

SELECT * FROM html
WHERE url="https://thepiratebay.se/search/ubuntu/0/7/0"
AND xpath='//tr'

This uses YQL and xpath to extract all the information from a Pirate Bay search (in this case, for Ubuntu – which is legally distributed through Bit Torrent).

Simply, this asks Yahoo (an American site) to contact The Pirate Bay (a Swedish site) to deliver information to a user in Britain.

You can play with the results yourself in the Yahoo Console.

This returns a JSON string which can then be easily parsed (e.g. using jQuery). Simple.

Aha! But What About Downloading A Torrent?

In the olden days (well, last year) there was a fly in the ointment. You had to download a .torrent file from the website. That meant that you needed a way to connect to, in this case, The Pirate Bay or find a proxy which was willing to transfer files.

Nowadays, people use the magnet protocol. Here’s what a magnet link looks like:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:fa692da0488aee23e5eb605a87be934ad7cec106

Short enough to fit into a text message and, handily, can be embedded in an HTML document with no need to download an extra file. Paste those 60 characters into your torrent client, and it will connect to the cloud and start downloading the file you requested.

So, a single web request to Yahoo and a line of JavaScript code is all it takes to circumvent this blockade.

Next Move

So, do the UK courts need to order ISPs to block Yahoo as well? Or play whack-a-mole with all the new torrent sites springing up? Let’s not forget, in 2004 the huge Bit Torrent search engine Suprnova was sued out of existence. Just like with the Hyrda, a decapitation lead to multiple sites springing up.

Piracy is a problem of convenience. A pirated copy is

• Faster to download.
• Quicker to watch (no unskipable trailers).
• More convenient to transfer to different devices.
• Global availability (no artificial regional restrictions).
• Immense back-catalogue (Star Wars, for example).
• Cheaper.

The only downsides are that they are often of dubious legality, and occasionally of poor quality.

The entertainment industries have to compete on all these points. I’ll admit, that they will almost certainly not be able to compete with “free” – although monthly unlimited subscriptions come close.

The rest are problems of their own making. I described how I downloaded The Phantom Menace back in 1999. 13 long years later and the movie industry still isn’t even close to where it needs to be.

Amazon have done pretty well from selling raw MP3s – a simple web interface, pay a small bit of money, instant high-quality download which is DRM free. Where’s the equivalent for films? Or for TV? Or radio?

The pernicious restrictions around geography also must end. I want to watch Veep just as much as the Americans do. Why do I have to wait even an hour, let alone a week?

Finally, Star Wars still isn’t available to (legally) download. If I have a hankering for Jar Jar Binks at 3AM, I have to order a DVD and wait while it is physically transported from a warehouse. That’s such a 19th Century way of thinking that it hurts my brain.

Get all that right and maybe – just maybe – the “piracy problem” will solve itself.

Of course, alternatively, it may be too late. For 13 years people have been used to downloading without paying. That’s a long period of learned behaviour. How content providers can convince people to change the habit of a lifetime is beyond my knowledge.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a proper show-down between the two major players? You could really compare which OS was best given the same hardware. Is iOS’s camera software better than Android’s when given the same lens and CCD? Which runs faster when CPU, GPU, and [...]]]> Last week, I posted this tounge-in-cheek suggestion.

Prediction*: iPhone5 & Samsung Galaxy S 3 to have IDENTICAL hardware. Battle of the OS / ecosystems!*Well, wishful thinking!

26/04/2012 09:22 via ©Terence Eden SomeRightsReservedReplyRetweetFavorite

@edent

Terence Eden

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a proper show-down between the two major players? You could really compare which OS was best given the same hardware. Is iOS’s camera software better than Android’s when given the same lens and CCD? Which runs faster when CPU, GPU, and memory are identical?

According to WP-Life, Samsung’s Galaxy S III will run both Android and Windows Phone 7!

Judging by the article, there will be some cosmetic changes – but the basic hardware will be the same.

What a show that will be! I think WP7 is a beautiful but flawed OS. Android is powerful, but struggles on anything less than excellent hardware.

One day – one glorious day! – we may see hardware which will accept any software. Imagine, just like a PC, being able to buy the hardware and then choose which OS you want on it. I’ve written about porting Android to Nokia hardware, and I run Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro.

A true ecosystem involves freedom to move between platforms without artificial restrictions.

So you can avoid the situation where [...]]]> You cannot fail to have noticed that in most American films and TV shows, all the phone numbers start 555. This is a reserved number in the North American Numbering Plan. It means that it’s a number which will never connect to a real person or service.

So you can avoid the situation where a number is spoken on a show, or in a song, and everyone tries to call it – much to the annoyance of the owner of the number.

That’s the US – did you know the UK also has a similar set of reserved numbers?

OfCom have a list of numbers suitable for for use in drama. They’re numbers which will never be connected – and therefore are suitable for use as “demo numbers” in an app.

For mobile numbers, the range is 07700 900000 to 900999.

Why Use Them?

I’ll tell you a story from waaaaaaay back when I used to work at Vodafone. We’d recently put a site live which asked people for their phone numbers when they registered. Within an hour of go-live, our engineer’s phone started ringing. And ringing. And ringing. He’d stuck his number in as an example.

Guess what, people call numbers. People are – basically – stupid.

So, the engineer changed it. To what he thought was a completely random number. That’s when we can a call from “upstairs”. The “random” number was a string of consecutive numbers – 1234567 etc. That’s a “memorable number” and, consequently, was sold for thousands of pounds. The trade in mobile numbers is similar to those of car vanity plates.

So, we had a chap who was spending thousands of pounds with us pissed off because his number was plastered all over the web.

Lesson learned! If you need to use an example number, pick 07700 900123 or similar.

Now, I’ve no idea why I was the headliner – but I certainly wasn’t going to complain!

Museums Showoff is a spin-off from the popular Science Showoff. The idea is that [...]]]> This was the sign that greeted me as I made my way into The Camden Head for the first Museums Showoff…

Now, I’ve no idea why I was the headliner – but I certainly wasn’t going to complain!

Museums Showoff is a spin-off from the popular Science Showoff. The idea is that ten speakers come along and show off. They chat about what they’re doing, things they’ve made, stuff they’ve built, or anything that gets their juices flowing.

With the permission of the participants, I recorded the event. Here are the videos:

Subhadra Das – UCL Pathology

A touching and hilarious talk about all the grim and icky stuff found in formaldehyde jars.

Terence Eden – QRpedia

This suspiciously good looking chap chatted about QRpedia

Brian Macken – Dublin’s Dead Zoo

A high speed history of Dubin’s Natural History Museum. I really regret not visiting it when I was last in Ireland.

Rosie Clarke – Museums at Night

I love the idea of Museums at Nights – this was a great explanation of the effort it takes to put on the event each year.

Ayla Lepine – Architecture

How do you get kinds interested in architectural drawing? Alya Lepine explains all.

Steve Lloyd – Physical and Digital

A fascinating talk about digital signage in the modern museum.

Gordon Cummings – Fry Gallery

Did you know about the Fry Gallery? Gordon gave an entertaining talk about the gallery and the stories behind it.

Catherine Walker – Handling Objects

Who wants to squeeze a brain? Or see how a shrunken head is made?

Overall, a fascinating event with a great turn out, and a lot of money was raised for Arts Emergency.

Jay: Turning to page 51.
Witness: Which bundle?
Jay: 1606.
Witness: 1660?
Leveson: No, the page after.
Jay: Paragraph 7.
Witness: I don’t have a paragraph 7.
Jay: Ah, I [...]]]> I’ve been listening to the Leveson inquiry. A large part of the exchanges seem to go like this:

Jay: Turning to page 51.
Witness: Which bundle?
Jay: 1606.
Witness: 1660?
Leveson: No, the page after.
Jay: Paragraph 7.
Witness: I don’t have a paragraph 7.
Jay: Ah, I have an earlier print out.
Leveson: You’ll find it in tab 15.
Witness: Is this Volume 2?

And so on, ad nauseum.

Surely there’s no reason to have so much paper wastefully printed and then discarded? Why not a single reference electronic document which can be supplied to each participant? Allowing them to increase the font size, annotate, cross reference, and search?

Search

Ah, search. Searching text is something computers are really good at. Within a fraction of a second, even a modest computer can extract every sentence which contains the word “Clegg” from hundreds of thousands of pages. Brilliant! Makes life really easy. Until humans come along and bugger about with it.

Let’s take a look at the “smoking gun” emails which have been submitted from News International to Leveson. Specifically KRM18.

I have no idea how these emails were supplied to Leveson. I hope that they were submitted electronically – with all headers intact. What’s supplied to the pubic, however, is this:

The emails have been…

• Printed out.
• Redacted with marker pen.
• Scanned in as a PDF.
• Then subject to an uncorrected OCR process.

Computers are really bad at recognising text. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a very error-prone process. Take a look at how the computer has translated the above document.

It’s partly there. But enough of the characters are mangled, and words distorted that searching through the text is near impossible.

I get that PDF is a reasonably popular file format for sharing documents. It preserves the document structure faithfully – but at the expense of readability, fluidity, and usefulness. But distributing images is the least useful way of distributing information to people who want to use it.

It’s simply bad civic responsibility to do this. These emails, if they are important enough to be made public, should be made public in their original form. I understand that some redactions should be made – but that’s about the limit.

How on Earth is anyone supposed to make sense of this extract?

We need to shake off the tyranny of printed paper. It is wasteful, non-useful, and – in this context – damaging to justice.

I leave you with an entirely random extract from the emails…

*sigh* A non-mobile site. With [...]]]> No, I’m not talking about Masabi’s innovative technology, but of this rather odd bit of advertising found on the back of a train ticket.

There’s no specific call to action – but there’s not much space to play with. Let’s give it a scan…

*sigh* A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won’t work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing phones to non-mobile sites. It really bemuses me. Stations rarely have good signal (too many people leads to local network congestion) and, besides, large sites are a right pig to use on a small screen.

Stats

I’ve blogged several times about using Bit.ly links in QR codes. With a little bit of hacking (adding at + character to the end of the URL) we can see how many people have been scanning the code.

I don’t know how many of these tickets have been printed. That might be a really good conversion rate – but I doubt it. I only noticed the QR code because someone had dropped their ticket and it landed face-down. Realistically, how many people look at the back of their tickets?

The best campaign in the world would fail if it’s not put in front of an audience.

Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it’s a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that’s just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an [...]]]> OAuth was designed to combat an anti-pattern.

Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it’s a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that’s just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an untrusted site!

So, that’s why we use OAuth. Rather than handing details to a random site, we authenticate against a trusted site which then redirects us back with an authentication token.

That’s all well and good on the web, but on mobile apps it becomes a little more difficult.

This is the popular mobile game Temple Run. After dying in the game (as I frequently do!) you can Tweet your score. But, first, you need to connect with Twitter.

However, clicking the button, presents this screen:

This is a pop-up within the game. What you see in the screenshot is the totality of what the user sees.

There are now two important questions:

1. How can the user tell if this is the genuine Twitter site?
2. Why is there no indication that the site is served over HTTPS?

This is a clear anti-pattern! We’re teaching people to give over their usernames and passwords to sites that appear to be genuine – yet offer no way to validate their legitimacy.

We’ve been trying to educate people to look at the URL bar – to check that they’ve visited the correct site and that there’s some form of SSL verification (commonly a padlock).

I’m not suggesting that Temple Run is doing anything other than pointing to the correct site. Just that they aren’t giving the user a chance to verify the authenticity.

How To Solve This Problem

I haven’t the foggiest! Thoughts?

We can’t rely on the user having the Twitter app installed and firing via intent (or similar).
Due to the huge variety of phones and Operating Systems, there’s no easy way (that I know of) to redirect from a website back to the app.
There needs to be a way to keep everything in-app to keep the user experience.

So, come on then oh great minds of the Internet, how do we fix this?

Ahem…

When I first started shkspr.mobi it was [...]]]> My good friend Richard Brent has often complained that my blog has very little Shakespeare content. Despite the domain name, I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about The Big S. For shame! Fear not, my Brentish-Boy, this post is all about Shakespeare. And MySQL….

Ahem…

When I first started shkspr.mobi it was intended to be an easy way to get Shakespeare on your phone. At that time, there were no mobile formatted texts of his plays and sonnets, so I had to create them. Finding Shakespeare’s works in a suitable format for conversion wasn’t too hard – but it meant lots of crufty code to read text files line-by-line. Yuck.

A few years later, I stumbled across Open Source Shakespeare. The project grew out of Eric Johnson’s MA thesis. It’s a remarkably good idea with only one minor problem. The database it uses is Microsoft Access.

MS Access, as a database, could best be described as

deformed, crooked, old and sere, ill faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere, vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, stigmatical in making, worse in mind
(Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene II)

There are a few Open Source Shakespeare projects on GitHub, but they don’t seem very practical.

So, naturally, I’ve decided to create my own version of Shakespeare’s works – in MySQL :-)

This is what it looks like:

You can download it from GitHub.

I’ve stripped out a lot of the extraneous stuff from the original version – word counts, etc. So it should be a fairly lean database which is easy to use. I’m not a database professional, so I would be grateful if you could suggest any improvements. Either using this blog’s comment form or on GitHub..

There are four tables

Paragraphs

This is where the main body of text is. A typical row will look like this

• WorkID: hamlet
• ParagraphID: 639015
• ParagraphNum: 3427
• CharID: hamlet
• PlainText: Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at\ngrave-making?
• Act: 5
• Scene: 1

Works

This is what translates the “WorkID” into something human readable – plus some extra metadata

• WorkID: hamlet
• Title: Hamlet
• LongTitle: Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The
• Date: 1600
• GenreType: Tragedy

Character

This is what translates the CharID into a human readable name and description

• charID: hamlet
• CharName: Hamlet
• Abbrev: Ham
• Works: Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The
• Description: son of the former king and nephew to the present king

Chapters

This gives the setting for each Act and Scene.

• WorkID: hamlet
• ChapterID: 18893
• Act: 5
• Scene: 1
• Description: Elsinore. A churchyard.

What’s Next?

The next steps for the project are fairly obvious:

1. Write some high level example code to show people how to use the database.
2. Make shkspr.mobi a showcase site which runs off the database.
3. Fix any bugs and inconsistencies that people find.

You can download the Shakespeare MySQL Database from GitHub.

Customers don’t understand your company’s acronyms, processes, or business model.

It’s worse than that, though – most users don’t even [...]]]> We live in a world of our own creation. This means we can find it inconceivable that outsiders don’t know the acronyms we use daily. How can anyone possibly live without understanding what we do?

Customers don’t understand your company’s acronyms, processes, or business model.

It’s worse than that, though – most users don’t even recognise your company’s name!

Here’s a great example. In Zinio’s world, everyone knows who Zinio are. They live in Zinio town, drink Zinio coffee from the Zinio shop. ZINIO! It’s the first thing on their minds when they wake up, and what they dream of in their Zinio beds.

They are completely disconnected from the real world. They just don’t understand how non-customers see them.

Which leads to this disaster.

Zinio have placed a button on the PlayBook – and, apparently, have never tested it with a non-Zinio aficionado.

The first thing to note is that no one is ever going to click on that icon. Neither the name or the graphic hold any interest to people who don’t know what Zinio is.

Most normal people just don’t go around clicking random buttons to see what they do. Computers are mysterious and pressing the wrong button could easily break them.

But, let us imagine that a curious user hits the button – what should they see?

A splash screen? An explanation of why Zinio is awesome? A demo? A fully working application which – later – prompts them to create an account?

In short – the elevator pitch. The trailer. The hook. Call it whatever you want – you need to make people give a damn about your product.

There’s an excellent talk that Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic gives about the sign-up process. In it, he describes how sign ups to the service rocketed once they minimised the amount of information they asked if a user. Why would a user give over any information without understanding what’s on offer?

In the case of Zinio on the PlayBook, there’s a complete absence of understanding of a normal user.

• The icon is meaningless.
• The name is unfamiliar.
• There’s no way of knowing what the app does if you open it.
• There’s no incentive for the user to register.

Would anyone – who didn’t already know about Zinio – ever sign up to this?

I wonder who is paying for this deal? Is it RIM paying to have a killer app on its PlayBook? Is it Zinio paying RIM to access all their customers? In either case – it looks like a wasted opportunity.

This is a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots.

Plug your PlayBook into your Linux computer using a USB cable. You may see this screen (or similar) you can [...]]]> Here’s a simple way to copy files to and from your BlackBerry PlayBook when you’re using Ubuntu. This should work with any form of Linux.

This is a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots.

On The PlayBook

Plug your PlayBook into your Linux computer using a USB cable. You may see this screen (or similar) you can dismiss it.

In the Settings menu, scroll down to “Storage & Sharing”.

Ensure that the “USB Connections” is set to “Connect to Windows”.

Scroll down and make sure that “File Sharing” is set to “ON”.

Finally, still in settings, scroll up the left panel to “About” and select “Network”

Make a note of the USB IPv4 Address (in this image it is 169.254.144.217).

On Ubuntu

Open a terminal and type

sudo ifconfig -a

You may be prompted to enter your password.

Scroll through the results and you should see an entry of “usb0″.

To connect to the PlayBook, click on “Places” then “Connect to server”.

Select the server type to be “Windows Share”. Enter the IP address of the PlayBook (found from the PlayBook’s About menu).

If all has gone well, you should see this screen:

Click on “media” and you’ll have access to all of your PlayBook’s storage space.

That’s It!

You should now be able to copy files back and forth. Unlike a normal USB disk, you don’t need to eject or unmount the drive once you’ve finished copying files to the device.
Note – when you disconnect the USB cable and reconnect it, the IP address may change. You will need to go to the PlayBook’s network settings to find the new IP address. I can’t find a way to get a static IP. If you know how – or have any other questions – please leave a comment.

Update

You can set a static IP by turning on Development mode, or follow these instructions from Jarviser on the BlackBerry Support Forums

Forget the IP address, use Tablet Network Name which will always be the same…

In Storage and Sharing, after selecting Connect to Windows, touch Properties button.

You will find

Tablet Network Name – Use that instead of IP Address in Ubuntu. (Mine says PLAYBOOK-24B6)

You will then be asked for Username and Password, Mine is “playbook” and the playbook’s sharing password. WORKGROUP is left unchanged.

By which I mean – how do you make your content serve the user’s time-bound constraints?

What I’m trying to say is – serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives.

Or, to break it down further, a [...]]]> In a mixed paradigm environment, how do you ensure content is surfaced which is context specific?

By which I mean – how do you make your content serve the user’s time-bound constraints?

What I’m trying to say is – serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives.

Or, to break it down further, a user may only have a specific amount of time to dedicate to your app; how do you deal with that?

In a mobile game, the interface may present the user a choice of “Quick Play” for when the user is waiting for a bus, “Medium Play” for when the user is on the bus, “Long Play” for when the user is stuck in a traffic jam.

James Whatley blogged about this subject recently. In a mobile video app – such as the BBC iPlayer – the length of time the user can spend on the app is (probably) more important than any other discovery method.

Demo

So, I spent the weekend building a demonstration mobile service which starts with the amount of time a user is expecting to use the app.

LooTube!

As far as I could see, iPlayer doesn’t have any public APIs, the videos don’t work on all phones, and the content isn’t available outside the UK. So I have used YouTube as the basis.

The “User Story”?

As a user, when I am sat on the toilet, I want to be able to view a range of interesting videos suitable to the length of my visit.

Point your phone at http://LooTu.be and this is what you’ll see:

YouTube’s API only gives us three lengths of video – short, medium, and long – so there’s not quite as much granularity as I would have liked.

Clicking one of the buttons, retrieves a list of videos based on time. The “Quick” button will show the users videos which are less than 4 minutes long.

At the moment, http://LooTu.be doesn’t allow the user to search for anything. It only takes time as a search query. It does, however, randomly select between YouTubes standard “top” feeds – most viewed, top rated, most shared, top favourites, etc.

Technical Details

You can view the source of LooTu.be – it’s fairly basic HTML5 and jQuery Mobile. Feel free to laugh at my code and offer suggestions.

Thanks

Big thanks to Whatley for the inspiration, Robbie Dale for the logo, and my wife for her patience this weekend!

These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rules.

Social Media is a problem for all organisations – whether public [...]]]> On Thursday, I attended my first TeaCamp. It’s a mini-meetup for UK Gov folk doing interesting digital things.

These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rules.

Social Media is a problem for all organisations – whether public or private. Rightly or wrongly, the “public” see an organisation as having a single mind and a single focus. Anything which gives the impression of a lack of unit cohesion is extremely troublesome.

But troublesome for who exactly? Part of the issue with social media is its novelty – especially among the press. There’s a belief (particularly prevalent in the gutter press) that because it happens “on the Internet” that it’s somehow new and exciting and – therefore – relevant.

Would a civil servant writing a letter to the paper about a topic be as “controversial” as them tweeting about it?

Would an essay at university be as newsworthy as a blog post?

We all have a digital footprint which is trivially easy for anyone to discover.

So should we try to remain anonymous? Or, at the very least, keep our personal and work lives separate.

Even if we take steps to hide our tracks, it’s pretty easy to triangulate a person. FourSquare checkins with a careless friend, geotagged twitpics, who your follow, who follows you – if you can identify sexual preference from Facebook, why not who you work for and what your political agenda is?

There are, to me, three main points of contention.

1. Should employees have personal opinions which conflict with their organization’s?
2. Can an employee express those opinions publicly?
3. What should an organisation do in response to a problematic social media interaction?

It seems obvious to me that even the most politically-restricted civil servant has opinions. But I see the sense in keeping them as private as possible.

The privacy question is an interesting one – simply because people don’t yet really understand what “private” means in the context of social media. Ranting about your boss over a pint – the words just vanish into the wind. Mostly because you don’t expect people to have tape recorders running continuously.

But online? I think I’ve locked down my Facebook settings pretty well – but I’m still paranoid that my kvetching will leak into my “real” life.

The final one is the killer. Even the most responsible employee is going to run into a problem – either through an innocent misunderstanding, or a deliberate corruption of the position by a malicious external presence.

The key is a good HR team who will back the employee’s right to a private life, and ensure that they are not castigated for expressing their opinions.

All the guidelines in the world won’t stop people from making mistakes. No policy can stop a newspaper twisting every word you say.

What’s equally needed is policies for how the workplace treats mistakes – and for the world to calm down a little.

One of the very first things we’re taught in HTML school is that [...]]]> Image adaptation and resizing is a hot topic at the moment. With devices of varying screensize accessing your site, how do you ensure that the crappy 240*240 phone gets a reasonable experience while still making everything look gorgeous on the retina-busting iPad?

One of the very first things we’re taught in HTML school is that we should separate content and style.

<span font=”comic sans” colour=”red”>This is wrong!</span>

Instead, we should be doing

<span class=”stylish”>This is corrent!</span>

Yet, the very next thing we’re taught is

<img src=”example.jpg” height=”120″ width=”90″ />

Well hang on a second! We’ve mixed up content (example.jpg) with presentation (the dimensions of the image). The image will almost certainly have to be resized based on the screen size accessing the site. Which means all manner of crufty JavaScript and CSS hacks to get it to display perfectly.

The Right Way

Here is how I think the image tag should work.

<img src=”example” class=”icon” />

The first thing to note is that the image shouldn’t have a file extension. As I’ve set out in a comment on Bruce Lawson’s blog, the server should be looking at the HTTP accept headers to see what image type to serve up. If the device is capable of displaying SVG – that’s what should be sent. If the device is too old to support PNG – the image should be served up as JPG (or whatever format the device accepts).

Again, the content of the image should be separated from the presentation (i.e. the file format).

Secondly, we drop the height and the width from the img tag. In the olden days, they were needed to stop the page from dramatically reflowing as images loaded. That’s still a valid concern today, but the challenge is that we don’t know what physical size the image will have until it is requested.

“So what?” I hear you cry “We can already do this in CSS. Images can have their dimensions set by absolute pixel size and / or relative size.”

Indeed, you are correct. But, the HTML5 spec currently lists height and width as attributes which may be used. This, I believe, acts to tempt the unwary developer into using them. They should be as obsolete as “align” and “border”.

Ideally, the logic should be on the server-side. Your CSS shouldn’t be asking the device for its own properties, your server should be dynamically generating CSS which suits the User-Agent. The server should be adapting images on the fly (and cacheing them) depending on the resolution of the devices.

We should be writing ridiculously simple HTML5.

As I’ve said before

Computers are there to do the hard work for us. We shouldn’t be writing extra markup in every single new document.

Get the silicon slaves to do it all.

A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was:

70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish!

This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously [...]]]> At the start of 2012, I revealed how many scans TfL’s QR campaign was getting.

A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was:

70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish!

This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal – the true “response rate” of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone calls, visits to a website, or SMS interactions are directly attributable to a regular poster? No one really knows – or, if they know, they’re not telling.

For the first time, we’re able to see how many people are reacting to an advert, scanning a code, and then visiting a site.

Currently, TfL’s campaign is running at 5,000 scans per month – peaking at 259 scans on April 3rd.

Or, 16,000 in the last five months.

With a rather nice growth in usage in the last few months.

Here come the nay-sayers….

But… But…. How many sites is that across? Millions of people, thousands of sites, only a few scans? Rubbish!

So, I performed a Freedom of Information request to TfL.

There were around 400 sites showing these posters in November. That may have changed by now.

Ideally, I would have liked TfL to have created a unique QR code for each poster. That way we could see Putney gets more scans than Waterloo, for example. But I appreciate the logistical difficulties of that!

Phone Use

We also get some interesting statistics about the makes of phones that Londoners use:

iPhone has surged ahead – at the expense of Android and BlackBerry. Windows Phone 7 still remains a minority sport.

Haterz Gonna H8

Frankly, I don’t care too much what the doom-mongers say. Having over 16,000 responses to a poster campaign sounds like a success to me. And, best of all, the data is open for anyone to investigate.

If you disagree with me – I polietly ask you to show your workings :-)

I never wanted to be a landlord, I wanted to be a lumberjack! but somehow I ended up as one.

Let me roll back a [...]]]> I am an evil, capitalist, unfair bastard of a landlord. At least, that’s what my worry is. I try really hard to be honest, fair, and uncuntlike as possible.

I never wanted to be a landlord, I wanted to be a lumberjack! but somehow I ended up as one.

Let me roll back a few years to see how this sorry mess began…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ < to indicate wavy lines.

January 2008 was a pretty stressful time for us. I’d just got a new job and was commuting a hellish distance, so Liz and I decided to move house. Rather foolishly, I had also asked Liz to marry me and – even more foolishly – she had agreed. I say “even more foolishly” because she was finishing up the thesis for her MA. And was looking for a new job.

So, in the month of January we had…

• A new job for me.
• Moving house
• Planning a wedding
• Finishing an MA
• Looking for a new job
• Getting married

We often joked that the only other thing we needed to make our stress complete was to suffer a death in the family. Which, of course, promptly happened.

Frankly, the last thing we needed was the added stress of having to sell a house. The easiest thing to do was get a Buy-To-Let mortgage and let the house out. It was simply the path of least resistance – get a managing agent to take care of all the nitty-gritty and watch the money roll in.

Of course, for the first few years we lost money. Not a lot, maybe a couple of hundred pounds. Worth it for the lack of stress.

We’ve had two sets of tenants, and – up til now – things have been fairly calm. When the dishwasher broke, we made sure it was replaced straight away, when the fences blew over during the storms, we had new ones put in straight away – having been a tenant, I know how rubbish it is waiting on a landlord to pull their finger out.

Recently we installed solar panels – giving them vastly reduced electricity costs.

Overall, as I say, we try to be the opposite of the crappy landlords that we’ve had in the past.

The problem is, my current tenants aren’t cleaning the house. Specifically, the the mold they’ve caused in the bathroom.

We’ve asked politely, pointed out how it’s their responsibility, how it’ll just take a bit of Detol spray. But nothing.

The agency who manage the property asked us if we wanted to serve notice on them. To me, this seems like a massive over-reaction. They pay their rent on time, rarely bother us unless it’s necessary, and haven’t caused us any trouble.

But – at the same time – they’re not taking care of the house. It’s our house – I realise that. We own it, but they live in it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their home.

But I’m left with a nagging feeling. On the one hand, we might be able to get a bit more rent, and get in a family who will scrub the bathroom & weed the garden. On the other hand, the house may lie empty for months – and we’d be making a family homeless over a spot of mould.

*sigh*

So, what to do? They’ve been reminded to clean the bathroom. If they don’t, should we chuck them out? Send in a cleaner?

I spent the morning at The British Museum doing the first public experiments with QRpedia.

This is a video of the historic occaision.

So, here’s a quick run down of what this volunteer-lead project has [...]]]> An email from FourSquare this morning reminded me what I was doing a year ago today.

I spent the morning at The British Museum doing the first public experiments with QRpedia.

This is a video of the historic occaision.

So, here’s a quick run down of what this volunteer-lead project has acheived in a single year, in no particular order:

• Derby Museum installation
• UK National Archives installation
• The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis installation
• Sofia Zoo installation
• Juan Miro installation
• Monmouthpedia – covering Monmouth with hundreds of QRpedia codes
• Over 42,000 scans of the codes
• Named one of the top four most innovative mobile companies in the UK
• Become part of the “Occupy” movement
• Received scans from over 100 different countries

Wow! What a ride! From a few comments on Wikipedia and blogs, to project launch, to global domination :-) QRpedia really emphasises what a team of commited volunteers can do if they work together.

I’ll be demoing QRpedia at Museums Showoff on April 25th in Camden.

If you work with a museum, gallery, archive, library, zoo, garden – or any other cultural institution – and want to use QRpedia, visit the website or drop us an email to get started.

You see, being a heterosexual male, I’m biologically predisposed to be sexually stimulated by images and videos of women in [...]]]> Having sex is pretty good fun, isn’t it? I enjoy it. I dare say you enjoy it. But, tell me, is it really appropriate for me to associate your products with having an erect penis?

You see, being a heterosexual male, I’m biologically predisposed to be sexually stimulated by images and videos of women in various states of undress. When I’m sexually stimulated my penis has this tendency to experience a rush of blood, which makes the spongy tissues expand until the whole organ is fairly rigid. I have to say, it’s awfully nice. Yes, it’s nice to have an erection.

That’s why, I assume, your demo videos are filled with nubile young women, your booth-babes are busty, and your hackathons come with beer dispensing wenches as a “perk”.

An honest question – next time I’m confronted with one of your sexist selling attempts, do you want me to fling down my tousers and start beating one off?

No? But, you keep trying to give me an erection – I thought my priapic member was what you wanted. Why else treat women as mere sex objects?

If you’re one of the tech companies who are trying to co-opt my schlong, I want you to take a long hard look at what you’re trying to do.

When I’m at a technology show like MWC, or researching which API to use, I’m in “work mode”. Having an erection is an unnecessary distraction. It doesn’t make me feel professional. If nothing else, it’s hard to think with eight-times the normal amount of blood swilling round my phallus.

I want to work – I don’t want to be arroused. And – let’s face it – if I did want to be aroused, they have porn on the Internet now! I can go off to Alta Vista, type in “boobies” and get me some high-quality, women demeaning, surround sound erotica. I don’t need to glimpse half a centimetre of your model’s left buttock – I can see all of a lady’s naked behind without your glowing logo superimposed over it.

And stop demeaning me! Just because I’m a geek- it doesn’t mean I’m a long haired, spotty nerd, who spends every hour coding and is thus unlikely to meet a girl – let alone woo her.

As it happens, I am that long haired, spotty nerd and I’ve been happily married for nearly five years.

I know… I know… It’s “ironic”. You just love women! It’s all just “banter”. We’re all friends. It’s just, you know, a bit of a laugh.

Guess what? It’s really difficult to tell the difference between an ironic erection and the real deal.

Oh, and while we’re at it, stop being so hetero-normative. There are plenty of gay geeks. Now, I may not know an awful lot about what turns on homosexual men – but I’ve got a sneaking suspicious it isn’t silicone enhanced breasts, high heels, and a bikini. I suppose what I’m saying is – if you have to resort to sex to sell your stuff – throw some beefcake in there for the guys and girls who like that sort of thing too. In fact, if you’re a male CEO – how about we see you strut your stuff covered with baby-oil and dressed simply in a diamanté thong? After all, it’s not demeaning, is it?

That’s not really the corporate image you want, I suppose.

If your product can’t stand proud independently – don’t get my cock to do the heavy lifting for you.

My bookshelves used to burst at the seams.
Every individual shelf bowed violently from the over-stuffed mass of paperbacks squeezed onto it.
Shakespeare rubbed [...]]]> My shelves are empty. The half-dozen Billy Bookcases I bought from Ikea are now little more than scrap. I have burned my books. A bonfire of ideas and ideals.

My bookshelves used to burst at the seams.
Every individual shelf bowed violently from the over-stuffed mass of paperbacks squeezed onto it.
Shakespeare rubbed up with Straczinsky.
A complete set of Terry Pratchett was enviously glowered at by a patchy Enid Blyton collection.
Half-read oddities nestled with well worn volumes. A copy of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” which taught me how to read as a child occupying the same shelf as the a Camille Paglia book purchased solely to make me look intellectual. I somehow acquired two copies of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. What I want to convey to you is that I have a deep and abiding love for books. That is why I must burn them.

Every time I find an ebook copy of a book I have on my shelf, the ebook version is downloaded – redundantly backed up – and placed in my Calibre library. The physical book is burned.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not engaging in a Fahrenheit 451 orgy of destruction. Each physical book is carefully checked and then given to a charity shop so it can be enjoyed anew by someone else. I’m not a monster! I even gift-aid my donations.

But, for a while, it felt like I was doing something terrible. Destroying or disrespecting books is a secular sin – that’s what comes of having an English teacher for a parent. I’m trying to be a hip, 21st century guy and live digitally – but I have a heap of 20th century baggage (and a bunch of monkey-brained concepts) which are hard to let go of.

Having physical stuff feels good. Ultimately though, digital stuff is better. More convenient, easier to save in case of a fire, more useful, and takes up less space. I’m doing to my books what I did to my CDs – going 100% digital.

But What About The Smell Of Books?

Throughout the web, you’ll see people saying “Oh! But reading an ebook doesn’t feel the same! You don’t get same smell as old books! They’re cold and soulless.”

This is nonsense. Find an ebook copy of the book you loved as a child. After a minute, you’ll be right inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and won’t care whether the words are on eink or written on papyrus.

CDs are better at reproducing music than vinyl records ever were. DVDs are better than VHS. Ebooks are better than physical books. They contain the same words, the same stories and ideas, they entertain and delight in exactly the same way.

And now, I can carry my whole library with me wherever I go.

What Is A Library For?

Libraries have many ancillary functions that they’ve developed over the years. At their core, they are no more than a semi-convenient warehouse for books.

I asked my local library how many books they had – this was their response.

@edent Hi - at the end of last year we had 1,708,142 books in stock (Surrey Libraries) Woking Library had 74,805.

24/01/2012 19:21 via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@SurreyLibraries

Surrey Libraries

(I assume that’s physical volumes rather than distinct titles as they have duplicate copies of popular books.)

How Many Books Could a Bookchuck Chuck?

Could I carry on my Kindle every single book that my local library holds?

Ebooks come in various file sizes. A typical novel weighs in at under 500KB. An illustrated book is typically under 3MB. A comic – or other work with a large quantity of images – could be over 100MB.

Judging from my collection, the average ebook file is around 1MB. Which is rather convenient for our calculations.

Woking Library has 74,805 books. At 1MB each – that’s 73GB of files.

Buying a 75GB hard disk today is almost impossible. The smallest size readily available is 1TB. That’s 1024GB. Or, enough to hold 1,048,576 typical ebook. Slightly shy of the total number of books held by all the libraries in the county.

Total cost for a 1TB external hard drive? Around £60. Less than the price of a couple of cheap bookshelves.

If you wanted to carry the books on a MicroSD card – suitable for a nook or other ereader – then a 32GB card will set you back £30. You could carry around 90,000 ebooks with you for less than £100.

Realistically, though, how many books can you read in your lifetime? Even on holiday with nothing to do but laze on a beach and read – I manage about one book per day.

Were I to live to 100 years of age, and read one book per day, every day. I would barely be able to fill a single 32GB MicroSD card.

Everything I’ve ever read could fit on one of these.

What’s My Point?

I have none. Thank you for reading anyway.

I like a good curry. Damn. Even the word curry is a generic Britishism designed to cover [...]]]> It was a stroke of marketing genius to declare that the national dish of Britain was Chicken Tikka Masala. A dish almost totally devoid of Indian origin – but exotic enough to make us seem comfortable with multiculturalism.

I like a good curry. Damn. Even the word curry is a generic Britishism designed to cover any spicy food from lands afar.

Every Indian restaurant in the UK offers “The Most Authentic Cuisine”. I know what I like – but I’ve no way to judge its authenticity.

One of our hosts asked where I wanted to go out for dinner last night. “There’s this great Japanese place round the corner,” he suggested.

I love Japanese food. But having flown a few thousand miles to India, why would I try any cuisine other than Indian?

The food here is beautiful. As a vegetarian, I’m overwhelmed with choice. With the exception of some ill-advised chutney, I’ve been able to handle the spiciness.

I’ve eaten in both cheap canteens and high class restaurants – the food, drink, and service has been uniformly impeccable.

But is it better than my local Ruby Murray? That’s hard to say. There are some great restaurants in the UK. The only way to tell, really, is to have just one more spoonful of this paneer, and a quick bite of this dosa and – oh my! – another sip of this delightful mango lassi, and… and.. and…

But not me. I’m white. Very white. More than that – I feel white and foreign. I feel out of place. The people I meet are friendly – but it’s clear I don’t really understand the culture, [...]]]> India is an explosion of colour. The food, the clothes, the temples. They all pulse like a rainbow.

But not me. I’m white. Very white. More than that – I feel white and foreign. I feel out of place. The people I meet are friendly – but it’s clear I don’t really understand the culture, the way things work, or even how to cross the road.

My first sight of a swastika shocked me. I know its origins, its special meaning here. But even daubed in multicolour paint on the side of a taxi was enough to make me feel like I was totally separate in a way I’ve never felt before.

When I first travelled to South Africa, I wondered what it would be like to be a minority. An obvious outsider. I remembered George Takei – I think – talking about his first visit to Japan and being astonished that everyone there looked like him. He was no longer the odd one out walking down the street.

I had heard of international cities – like Beijing – where being “other” was enough to draw the stares of strangers on the street.

Bangalore isn’t like that. I am different – but that is not enough to draw the attention of anyone. Why stare at the pale white guy when there’s a cacophony of chromatic beauty surrounding you?

The face of the Indian street vendor clearly said “Oh, FFS!”

I had made the universal tourist mistake of paying for [...]]]> There’s a whole science dedicated to the universality of human expressions. Across vast continents and endless oceans, humans make the same face whether in a state of grief, joy, or disgust. More or less.

The face of the Indian street vendor clearly said “Oh, FFS!”

I had made the universal tourist mistake of paying for a cheap product with a ridiculously large bill. The bottle of mango juice I needed so desperately to cool down in the mad-dog sun came to 20 rupees. The smallest denomination I had was 500.

This created somewhat of an impasse.

Eventually, with much universal gesticulating on both sides, I received my change. It seemed broadly accurate, and I now had some more sociably acceptable currency, so I didn’t feel hard done by.

I’ve always had a funny relationship with money. I baulk at paying £5 for popcorn at the cinema, but think nothing of buying a £200 hard drive. Just the way I’m wired, I guess.
But spending money in a foreign land is very confusing. I mentally convert everything back to pounds sterling, and compare the price with what I’d pay at home. Common enough, I suppose. Then I try to mentally match it to the local economy.

“Yes, that’s cheaper than what I’d pay at home – but it seems ridiculously expensive compared to that thing over there.”

A group of us went out for a meal in an up-scale restaurant. The food was exquisite and the service was impeccable. Total cost? Maybe £30 per person plus tip. Not bad. Not bad at all. Cheaper than a similar meal in London. I tried hard not to think about the hoards of people outside the guarded perimeter who were on a dollar a day.

The next night a bunch of us went to dinner with our Indian hosts. There were eight of us. The beer flowed liberally, the food was piled high, the chocolate cake was en flambé.

Total cost was around £10 per person. This was a big deal. “Still,” remarked one of our hosts, “it’s good for team morale.”
“And it’s only once a year,” opined another.

On the journey back, the taxi charged us 700 rupees for a 200 rupee journey. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

(N.B. I work for a mobile advertiser – but this is my personal blog. This post isn’t written on their behalf. Naturally I’m biased.)
(N.B. I’m in India and jetlagged to hell – this may not make any sense!)

Wild headlines abound – but very few people seem to have read the [...]]]> No.

(N.B. I work for a mobile advertiser – but this is my personal blog. This post isn’t written on their behalf. Naturally I’m biased.)
(N.B. I’m in India and jetlagged to hell – this may not make any sense!)

Wild headlines abound – but very few people seem to have read the original Microsoft sponsored paper.

The 75% claim is based on…

• one app,
• running on the very first Android hardware (Magic & Passion),
• not disclosed whether the phones were running Android 1.5 (what they shipped with) or an updated ROM,
• based on the first thirty three seconds only of the app lifecycle,

There is no doubt that running adverts opens a 3G connection – and that takes energy. And, if your app is calling data every minute – that takes more energy.

But most apps aren’t coded that way.

And, even if they were, most phones keep a data connection open anyway for push email.

The energy used by downloading, say, a dozen adverts over a 30 minute session of Angry Birds is dwarfed by the total energy used by the screen, and the sound, and the music playing through your bluetooth headphones, and the vibration of incoming text messages.

Now, a sucky tracking SDK which turns on GPS, makes constant polls over the network might drain your battery a bit. But that doesn’t seem to be what these guys have found.

Profiling the apps’ only at their startup – rather than the continual playing of a game seems disingenuous at best.

Yes, cars everywhere. A fifteen minute walk quickly turns into a twenty minute taxi ride. No one walks here – the streets are too crowded for that.

Our hotel is hollowed out [...]]]> The heat. That all oppressive heat. Not that you’d ever notice it; you move from air-conditioned hotel, to air-conditioned taxi, to air-conditioned office.

Yes, cars everywhere. A fifteen minute walk quickly turns into a twenty minute taxi ride. No one walks here – the streets are too crowded for that.

Our hotel is hollowed out inside – very reminiscent of the Luxor. Same faux stone walls, unlimited buffet, and eager waiters.

The UB City shopping mall may as well be the Venetian in Vegas. Italian frescoes painted on the ceiling, soulless corridors housing luxury shops, chintzy Muzak permeates the air.

The background music of Bangalore isn’t that of Vegas’s chirruping slot machines – it’s the constant cries of car horns.

I entered a modern looking mall. Partly out of tourist curiosity, mostly for the air conditioning! I saw something which shocked me.

As I was coming [...]]]> Today was my first day in India. Bangalore, to be precise. The city is hot, noisy, full of dangerous drivers, cows on the road, and a disturbingly potholed pavement.

I entered a modern looking mall. Partly out of tourist curiosity, mostly for the air conditioning! I saw something which shocked me.

As I was coming down as escalator, I noticed a teenage boy stood at the bottom of the “up” escalator. He was surrounded by half-a-dozen elderly women. Relatives, I assume. While I couldn’t hear what he was saying, his meaning soon became apparent; he was teaching them how to use the escalator!

I was stunned. These women were all… let’s say “mature” and yet, so it seemed, had never ridden an escalator.

The eldest, in a resplendent green sari, kept placing her palm on the moving handrail and laughing with glee as it carried her hand upwards.

The boy was eager to get them on to the moving staircase and was trying a mixture of cajoling, exasperated sighing, and physical demonstrations. Finally he got bored waiting and drifted upwards.

I reached the bottom of the staircase and pretended to be interested in a rack of sunglasses so I could observe what happened next.

Some of the younger women fearlessly stepped onto the escalator. A couple decided that this was more trouble than it was worth and took the regular staircase.

The eldest was a game old bird. Grinning widely she placed a trepidatory foot on the escalator and promptly took it off, shaking her head in confusion. The sole remaining woman gently helped her on and they lifted off together.

For half a second it was as though the old woman was flying. Breaking free of the bonds of gravity and soaring into the heavens. Then she fell over unceremoniously. Her friend picked her up and they glided out of view.

I drifted off.

I began to wonder how anyone could live their lives having never stood on an escalator. From my perspective, they just seem so commonplace. I occasionally see a small child being taught how to use them on the London Underground, but I don’t think I’ve ever met an adult who had never encountered them.

Am I projecting too much on this one incident? Was this group of women an aberration? Or is there a whole class of rural people who don’t interact much with the modern world and simply don’t understand how it works?

Then, I realise, there’s so much that I don’t know about this culture. This country. My ignorance of shibboleths which instantly mark me as an outsider – as if my skin wasn’t a big enough clue!

I don’t even understand how to cross the road here. I see elderly old women dart out seemingly at random between the honking cars while I am left cowering on the pavement.

I stick a foot out into the road with great trepidation, and hope I don’t fall over.