Journal — 1 comment
08
Feb 10

Through the Window

Looking out of my hotel window I can see into the heart of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale. What do you mean it’s fairly uninspiring? East of here is Mountain View, home of the Google-plex, west of here is the Yahoo! mothership, which is the reason I’m here and to the south is Cupertino, and 1 Infinite Loop, the home of Apple.

OK, so that is fairly uninspiring and nondescript. This one is much more interesting. This is the view from my temporary cube in the middle of the Yahoo! campus, looking out over Moffett Field.

That oval looking building in the middle is Hanger One which is one of the world’s largest freestanding structures. It may not look that impressive but it’s almost 3 miles away; it covers 8 acres, is around 1100 feet long, around 300 feet wide and around 200 feet high. It’s big.

And that’s a much more impressive and interesting view out of the window.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317)

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08
Feb 10

The Airport Security Ritual

Post 9/11, post the Shoe Bomber and and post, for want of a better description, the Pants Bomber I’ve had to travel to the United States in the aftermath of a security incident and have had the dubious privilege of witnessing at first hand the incrementally heightened security procedures that have been put in place. Witnessed as a passenger I might add, so I can only pass comment on what I’ve seen and not what may or may not be going on hidden behind the scenes and out of site of me and my fellow passengers.

Even pre 9/11, airport and airline security seemed to rely on a degree of ritual, of knowing the right incantations and of knowing the right answer to give to certain key questions; “is this your bag?“, “did you pack it yourself?“, “could anyone have tampered with your luggage?” and “has anyone given you anything to carry?“. Answer the previous questions with “yes, yes, no, no” and you would be granted the honour of being able to check in and pass to the mysterious land of “airside“. Answer them incorrectly or get the yes’s and no’s in the wrong order and your life would become very interesting.

At Heathrow yesterday morning, prior to getting on my (much delayed) flight to San Francisco, I remembered to give the aforementioned answers in the right order (this is critical to success), took off my belt and shoes, took my laptop out of my bag, put the whole lot in large grey plastic trays and while they passed through the x-ray machine, I passed through the metal detector with nary a beep.

Lulled into a false sense of security (no pun intended) I made it to the departure gate in time, to be greeted with a large, slowly shuffling queue with the prospect of a bag search and a more personal search when I reached the head of the line. Now granted, the personal search of my person was thorough, verged on being ticklish and might have been liable to cause offence to other people but my bag search was a search only in the loosest possible sense of the word.

A nice security lady (I know this for a fact because she had a badge on saying Security) opened my bag, took a cursory look inside, commented “that’s a lot of computery stuff” and then proceeded to not actually search my bag at all. More ritual one assumes, the mere act of presenting my bag for a cursory poke and prod being enough to satisfy this particular one.

I was asked to empty the pockets of my jacket, which yielded an iPhone, a BlackBerry and my wallet. These weren’t checked or looked at and neither was my jacket looked at to make sure that I had indeed actually emptied the pockets. Yet more ritual; providing something from my pockets seemed acceptable and left me wondering what would have happened if I actually didn’t have anything in them.

Did any of this make my (much delayed) flight safer? Maybe, it’s difficult to tell. But overall the whole experience seemed to be about doing something for the sake of security and being seen to be doing it.

So has any of this made my travel to the US any different? It’s certainly made it slower, more intrusive, more frustrating and more laden with things I’m not allowed to do and not allowed to travel with. But has it made it any more secure? Taking the evidence of both the Shoe and Pants Bombers into account, both of whom made it through security and onto a plane which subsequently took off, it doesn’t really appear so.

This ritual of security isn’t restricted to the airline industry. Last year I paid a visit to UK headquarters of a technology company who were hosting an event I was to speak at. Half way through security, I was asked to sign a non disclosure agreement, which required me to promise not to reveal anything I heard or saw whilst on the premises. Which seemed a bit pointless seeing as I was one of the speakers; did this mean I wasn’t allowed to repeat my talk ever again? The security lady was insistent. I wouldn’t be allowed into the building without signing the NDA. Heels were well dug in by this point and I refused to sign it. She didn’t bat an eyelid and rather than being escorted from the building I was handed a security pass. More ritual, the point of which seemed to be that she had to insist about the NDA and then hand me a security pass regardless of whether I signed the NDA or not.

But existing rituals had been satisfied, and new ones called into being, so I guess that’s something.

Photo credit: Ned Richards and Milo Willingham on Flickr.

Written somewhere between LHR and SFO on BA285 and posted from the Sheraton Hotel, Sunnyvale, California (37.37159, -122.03824)

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06
Feb 10

It’s Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone.

If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you’ve probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there’s also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.
We’re poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let’s call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.
“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.“
This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.

The first time you use a location aware app on an iPhone, it asks your permission in nice, unthreatening language; it “would like to use your current location“. What this actually means is that it wants to use, and continue to use, your precise location to the finest level of granularity that the A-GPS system on the phone is able to deliver at the time it’s being requested.
There’s no way of halting this process temporarily, of being your own source of truth for your location (AKA lying about your location) or of controlling this on a per application basis. You can only reset asking this permission for all apps and for the entire phone via the Settings app. Although some well behaved apps such as TweetDeck do allow you to disable use of location information altogether as as well as on a per Tweet basis.

What we really need is to see is a way to set location granularity, including no location information at all, on a per app basis in much the same way as Fire Eagle currently does. And for all apps on all location aware platforms, not just Apple’s and the iPhone’s.

Some may argue that requiring such a degree of choice and intervention by the user may raise the barrier to entry to such a degree that an app doesn’t reach such a large audience. It’s a valid argument but as part of the location industry, I believe that we need to find the middle ground between irking the user once per app and letting LAMB loose on the world which has the possibility of irking the user multiple times per hour.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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05
Feb 10

Sometimes the Hardware is Willing but the Software is Weak

I’ve had an HP DeskJet F-something-or-other for a couple of years now. It’s a small grey thing, around the size of a shoe box that prints, scans and photocopies. At least that’s what it said in the brochure and on HP’s web site. It used to sit plugged into the USB port on my AirPort Express for easy wireless printing. Not that it actually printed mind you. 

I viewed this piece of hardware’s role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.

The DeskJet had other ideas.

It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.

The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.

So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It’s a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.

The hardware is very capable. It works and prints in black and white and in colour which is more than the HP DeskJet ever seemed to do. You can connect it via a USB cable, set it up as its own ad-hoc wifi network or add it to your own network where, for Macs at least, it broadcasts itself as a Bonjour printer and is perfectly happy to accept print jobs from my iBook and from my MacBook Pros. It’s now sitting on a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs minding it’s own business and in a state of slumber until one of my Macs sends it the right network incantation, it wakes up, prints and then goes back to sleep again. It just works.

Now granted, the supplied user guide said it supports Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.5, but a quick check on Samsung’s UK support site (before purchasing I might add), yielded a native set of 10.6 Snow Leopard drivers. And they work. But as I’ve mentioned before, applications which think they have a right to take over one of my machines and do things the way they want to do them without asking permission are one of the things that … irk me.

No drag and drop installation here. Not even a native Mac format mpkg installer. No, after some waiting and authentication I see the words “Installation powered by VISE X”; I’ve found in the past that VISE X installers, or rather the authors of VISE X installers, tend to see my machine as their property, to install and configure stuff with impunity. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Wait. What? You want me to shut down every single app just to install a printer driver? Oh, no, actually you want me to shut down every single app to install the printer driver, which then starts up Safari, gets me to configure the printer via a Java application which needs my firewall turned off in order to work and then you refuse to install the Smart Panel app because Safari, the one the installer started up in the first, is running.

So eventually we get there. The printer is installed, it’s printing over the network and all is well with the world. I can see the Smart Panel app is running in the menu bar and it’s only a glorified status monitor, which I can get through the printer driver anyway so I close it down. Meanwhile, Software Update is telling me there’s a security update waiting for me, so I install it, reboot and login again. 

Smart Panel is back with me.

Sure enough, a quick glance through my Login Items shows me that the installer has, without my permission, made a decision on my behalf that I’ll always want to run this app and has inserted itself into my list of Login Items. This is not a well behaved app. Well behaved apps, ask permission before doing stuff like this.

At least it’s not as bad as iPass Connect though, which reinserts itself into the Login Items every single time you run it regardless.

So, the Samsung CLP-315W; a great printer with weak software that just can’t be bothered to be good and takes the easy way out. Very poor as Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer used to say. But at least it prints.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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02
Feb 10

On The Matter of Blog Comments

After last week’s comments troll spat I decided to i) lighten up and ii) take a leaf out of the book of an author and blogger I deeply respect. So, inspired by a post on John Scalzi’s Whatever, I offer up a brief decision making flowchart to aid me, in future, in deciding who does and who does not get to act stroppy over comments on this blog.

Thank you; normal service will be resumed in the next blog post.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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01
Feb 10

The Theory of Stuff

Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called “In Search of Location’s Sweet Spot” and it’s sitting in draft and not yet posted. That’s because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act.

Just like Anne Elk (Miss), I have a theory. I call it my Theory of Stuff. I’m sure that other people, far more learned and erudite than I, have articulated such a theory but I’ve yet to come across any evidence for this and for now at least, it remains mine and it contains three buckets, looking something like this:

On the far left hand side we have the stuff bucket. Whilst stuff may sound vague, it’s entirely intentional. Stuff is defined as a collection or set of items, things or matter. Though I was focussing primarily on location data and location based mobile services, this applies equally well to other businesses and markets. It could be stock, inventory, left handed widgets or a plethora of other things.
On the far right hand side we have people bucket. The exact number of people doesn’t matter, for small businesses the number will probably be small and for large businesses the number will be, err, larger. These people are your customers, your audience. Hopefully they have money as well.
And then in the middle we have the secret sauce bucket. Again, it doesn’t matter what this is but it’s very important to look at what the secret sauce actually does.
  • The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.
  • It allows you to expose your business’s stuff to the people who are your customers, hopefully adding value along the way.
  • It also allows you to extract money from the people in exchange for access to your business’s stuff. In the Internet industry we call this monetizing your audience.
In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place. Have people and secret sauce but no stuff? Fail. Have stuff and secret sauce but no people? Fail. You get the idea.
Take a look at every business that is succeeding, especially those that are online and where the stuff bucket contains data, and you’ll see that they have all three buckets in place. Take a look at those businesses which have failed or are failing, especially those that are online, and you either see one bucket missing or there’s just not enough of it.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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29
Jan 10

No Comment?

Why do we blog? It’s a gross simplification but I think the reasons are three-fold. Firstly when you write a blog post you have something to say, you need to find the right words and write them down, albeit virtually. Secondly, you want someone to read what you’ve written. Thirdly, sometimes you want to stimulate or generate a debate on a topic, to provoke discussion and to participate in a dialogue with the people who’ve read your words. The last of these reasons is why comments are open on my blog by default and why it’s not necessary to register on my blog, just to provide a name and an email address.

So why then, after writing all of the above, have I closed comments on my recent post on the Ordnance Survey supported GeoVation awards?
I woke up this morning to discover that the post had attracted a reasonable amount of traffic; I saw this from the stats on the bit.ly link to the post that was publicised on Twitter and on Facebook, I saw this from a quick peek at my analytics logs and I saw this from the number of comments waiting for approval.
I firmly believe that everyone has the right to an opinion and a view on a topic and that they also have the right to air those views and opinions. But I also firmly believe that I have a right not to display abusive, offensive and derogatory comments on my personal blog and so I’ve removed those comments and closed the post for further comments. I’ve never had to do this before and I sincerely hope that I don’t have to do this again.
I made an informed decision as to whether to support the GeoVation scheme; you may not agree with that. You may feel the having the Ordnance Survey support the scheme and provide the seed fund is not something you want to be associated with. That’s totally fine but does it give you the right to be abusive towards me and have me publish that abuse? I don’t think so.
I’m really happy that you had a similar awards program in your country and that you feel it was better, or superior or vastly different that the GeoVation awards were in the UK. I’m not really sure that “my awards are better than your awards” make for meaningful or informed discussion though.
I’m sure that you think you could have come up with better ideas, better venture submissions, better applications, better uses of geography. So why didn’t you? Why didn’t you participate in GeoVation if you’re UK based or in a similar scheme in your country?
Time to move on from this topic I think.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

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28
Jan 10

What Happens When Geography and Innovation Collide

It’s taken a while but the consultation into opening up the Ordnance Survey’s United Kingdom mapping and geographic data is out and is no doubt being debated, looked at, discussed, pulled apart and opined on. Whilst every Ordnance Survey employee I’ve ever spoken to is utterly in favour of this move there’s still continued resistance to openness, though the gap between the two extremes of FreeOurData and the UK Government’s Cabinet Office is closing and closing fast. Of course, it doesn’t help when the Ordnance Survey asserts rights over the crime maps produced by London’s Metropolitan Police either.

But baby steps, as my friends in the United States often say. One such step is GeoVation, a Wikiword style merging of geography and innovation.

Last year I was approached by the organisers of the GeoVation challenge to be a judge in an endeavour that  ”allows innovative thinkers and geographic data to come together for social, environmental and economic benefit through the use of geography”. It looked like an Ordnance Survey public relations exercise to provide a seed fund to encourage entrepreneurs to use Ordnance Survey data.
But the organisers had good credentials, I knew most of them and respected them and so I actually read the small print. Yes, GeoVation was funded and supported by the Ordnance Survey. Yes, the seed fund pot, some £20K, came from the Ordnance Survey. But using Ordnance Survey data was not obligatory, mandatory or even strongly encouraged. I heard the phrases “what about GeoNames” and “what about OpenStreetMap” enough to accept the offer and become a GeoVation judge. Not everyone thought this was a good idea or saw beyond the Ordnance Survey involvement. It wasn’t just me either, I was joined by Steve Coast the founder of crowd-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap; James Alexander, CEO of Green Thing, the online service that encourages people to lead greener lives; James Cutler, CEO of eMapSite, the incredibly tall Peter ter Haar from the OS and we were helped by chairperson Steven Feldman.
There were a lot of submissions and ideas to look through. 380 people signed up, 170 ideas were submitted and almost 70 ventures were formally proposed to be entered into the award. We had some reading to do.
Let’s briefly mention the venture submissions for a moment. They varied. Oh how they varied. It’s unfortunate to say that a 15 minute video submission, a one page submission which doesn’t actually tell you what the venture is and a 20 page submission which still doesn’t tell you what the venture is are unlikely to engage the attention of the judges. But in the end we came up with a shortlist of 9 ventures and descended on the Ondaatje Theatre in London’s Royal Geographical Society for the final showcase. Each venture had 4 minutes to pitch their idea to the judges, followed by brief questions from the judges and from the audience. It doesn’t sound easy and it wasn’t, but each pitch put their heart and soul into it. After all the pitches were over, the judges retired to a back room for plenty of coffee and some animated voting and discussions. After 45 minutes we emerged, blinking, into the light, still friends and still talking to each other.
In first place and walking away with £10K were MaxiMap, a large scale education floor map of the British Isles which helps children understand the geography of where they live.
In second place, accompanied by a fetching gorilla suit, and loping away with £7K were Mission: Explore London, a team of geography addicted teachers, designers and artists who wanted to help children explore the city.
And in third place with £3K was London Blue Plaque Search, dedicated to making the iconic GLC/GLA/LCC/English Heritage blue plaques open to everyone.
After almost 6 months of meeting, discussing, debating and geopontificating GeoVation was finally over. At least for 2010. The challenge and awards will be returning in 2011 with even less Ordnance Survey involvement, though hopefully they’ll still contribute towards the seed fund. And as I seem to be quoted as saying in several places …
“One of the judges, Gary Gale, Director of Engineering for Yahoo! Geo Technologies, said: ‘The standard of entries was fantastic and the scope of them far-reaching and varied. Each of the finalists can and should be proud of getting to the finals and being able to showcase their geo-vision. But in the end, the judges decided that MaxiMap was the one idea that could make the most impact and had the greatest potential.’”
… and I can’t really sum it up better than that.
Photo credit: pomphorhynchus on Flickr
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — 2 comments
21
Jan 10

iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.
So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.
1. Quit iPassConnect? I see no Quit menu option.
From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.
Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.
Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.
2. Install as a Login Item? Every single time?
It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.
This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.
Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.
3. Update? What update?
Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.
There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).
Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.
4. Snow Leopard support. In 32-bits.
Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.
Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.
Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.
iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.
Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

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19
Jan 10

Is it Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles or what exactly?

In February 2009 I wrote a post for the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog about how people outside of the United Kingdom are sometimes confused by the vagaries of how to correctly write street addresses in the UK and if the United Kingdom is a country and if England is a country then how can England be part of the United Kingdom. Some pointed comments to the original post ensued from the likes of Ed Parsons from Google and Andrew Larcombe from the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group.

And so almost a year later I went back and started to research exactly how the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles are actually put together. It was an educational journey because, even with being born and bred in London, it turned out that even I didn’t fully understand this subject. So I tried to codify it with a variation on The Great British Venn Diagram, which looks something like this:

Let’s start with the easy bit. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries at an administrative level; they’re shown in yellow on the diagram above.

Great Britain, so named as to distinguish itself from Brittany, is a geographic island which comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign state, shown in red, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ireland, also a geographic island, contains the administrative country of Northern Ireland and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.

So far so good, but what about the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Both of these are not part of the United Kingdom, instead they are both Crown Dependencies, shown in purple, and are part of a federacy with the United Kingdom. And a federacy? That’s a type of government where one or more of the member administrative units have more independence than the majority of the member administrative units.

Finally, there’s everything else; those remnants of the British Empire scattered across the globe which enjoy the slightly nondescript appellation of British Overseas Territories (or British Dependent Territories prior to 2002 or Crown Colonies prior to 1981).

To be more precise, these are parts of the British Empire that did not gain independence and that the United Kingdom asserts sovereignty over.  They take in Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Written and posted from the Kempinski Hotel Bristol in Berlin (52.5052405, 13.3280218)

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