Book Review: Hacking Capitalism - Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money by Kris Nóva

By
on · · 450 words · read ~116 times.
Book cover showing a hacker. She sits in front of multiple monitors.

I was saddened to hear of Kris Nóva's untimely death a few weeks ago. I had her book "Hacking Capitalism" on my eReader for several months, but hadn't got around to reading it yet. Never put these things off. The book is a complicated but fitting legacy. It absolutely showcases Nóva's ideas, ideals, and potential. […]

Continue reading →

Book Review: Kill It With Fire - Manage Ageing Computer Systems by Marianne Bellotti

By
on · · 1 comment · 350 words · read ~165 times.
Book cover showing a dumptster fire.

Computers, eh? Leave them for five minutes and they become obsolete. Leave them for five years and they become legacy infrastructure. How do we deal with a tower of "quick fixes" which are older than Moses? What strategies do we need to stop teams going mad as they try to upgrade a Spitfire into a […]

Continue reading →

Bryan Adams lied to you

By
on · · 6 comments · 450 words · read ~382 times.
A white plastic desktop phone with QWERTY keyboard and a video screen.

I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're […]

Continue reading →

Let's track footballers' heart rates!!

By
on · · 9 comments · 550 words · read ~139 times.
Photo of a football match. The striker's BPM is a high 150, the goalie a more leisurely 75. Original photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonker/8603265115/

I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the […]

Continue reading →

That costs the same as five nurses!

By
on · · 1 comment · 350 words · read ~113 times.
Pamphlet for the New National Health service.

Tom Dolan has an excellent blog post which touches, in part, on comparative cost. If you're working for, say, a TV company - then you know exactly how much an hour of TV programming costs on average. If you want to do something like build a website, it's quite natural for people to evaluate its […]

Continue reading →

People only want their technology to do three things

By
on · · 6 comments · 200 words · read ~373 times.
Old Nokia phone showing an area code.

Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them! This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing - calls, texts, and..." And... […]

Continue reading →

Fragile Technologists

By
on · · 7 comments · 400 words · read ~608 times.
A pet cat typing on a computer keyboard.

Picture the scene. You're in a pub and order, say, a cider or a cocktail. The local pub bore pipes up "What are you drinking that for? Real men drink..." and then names a brand of generic, piss-weak lager that is his substitute for a personality. He's the same guy who insists that "real men" […]

Continue reading →

Zeno's Paradox and Why Modern Technology is Rubbish

By
on · · 4 comments · 500 words · read ~735 times.
Robot faced Mark Zuckerberg is wearing a VR headset - it digs painfully into his smiling cheeks.

Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 […]

Continue reading →

The Modern World

By
on · · 5 comments · 1,300 words · read ~3,061 times.

This is a little story about standards, technology, civilisation, and the modern world. I know it is tempting to only talk about the various ways technology disappoints us, but sometimes it can be quite magical living in the future. A few week ago, I took a trip to a foreign country... I waved a rectangle […]

Continue reading →

Book Review: Always On - Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era by Rory Cellan-Jones

By
on · · 1 comment · 500 words · read ~170 times.
Book cover.

We live at a time when billions have access to unbelievably powerful technology. The most extraordinary tool that has been invented in the last century, the smartphone, is forcing radical changes in the way we live and work - and unlike previous technologies it is in the hands of just about everyone. Coupled with the […]

Continue reading →