Tom Hume

I'm technically on holiday this week, but some links anyhow:

• Jeff Patton on kanban. Really interesting, (a) because it's Jeff and (b) for the content, and I loved Karl's talk on this stuff at the Skiff a few weeks back. I profess quiet caution though; having seen how many folks misapply the relatively disciplined approaches of more formal agile techniques, I fear the line "yeah, we're kanban because we stuck some cards to the wall"...
• Wonderfully put call for a group hug from Bill Buxton to the engineering and design communities. I particularly like the specifics he goes into here: how design awareness, literacy and even thinking can, with effort, be adopted by anyone... and how design practice requires professionals "who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs". +1, +1, +1.
• SmutOnRails, Martin Fowler on the recent CouchDB presentation that caused a stir: "My observation is that most men in the software business think that there isn't much sexism left in the profession - that this curse is a memory from a previous generation. Yet when I talk to women, I hear a different story". Interesting, particularly in light of the Geek'n'rolla debate where this view of the software/digital/IT industry was confirmed (by both men and women IIRC). Lots of further reading at the foot of Martin's article.
• VCs are struggling to see the sort of returns they want in a mobile apps business. Whilst obviously on one level I find this a shockingly short-sighted yadda yadda yadda, another part of me breathes a sigh of relief. App stores are a fantastic economy, but no guarantee of riches, and we tend to hear about the few successes well over and above the mediocre mass.
• Steve Blank continues to deliver some amazingly insightful posts, and "Four steps to the epiphany" will, I suspect, be re-read a few times this year.
• For fans of contention and BlogWar, "Is Interaction Design a Dead-End Job" asks none other than Bill Moggridge. More optimistically, Tim @ Cooper suggests that "the acknowledgment and appreciation of good interaction design has allowed the practice to evolve to include a broader mandate encompassing product and service strategy throughout the customer relationship lifecycle".
• Vodafone hint that future Android devices might be less Googly and more Vodafoney. /me whistles innocently, stares into space, quietly lusts after HTC Magic.
• GMail for Mobile got the "mute" feature, which I'd never heard of but am frantically using. Oh yes - I may have forgotten to mention that I'm now using GMail in the browser for *all* my email needs... I've fallen hard for the 'plex in the last few months.
• Interesting iPhone stats from GreyStripe: average app gets 20 sessions usage of 10 minutes apiece. I wonder how this, combined with the typical development cost of an iPhone app, compares in cost-of-attention that other forms of advertising or promotion might garner. Help me, lazyweb...
• GraphJam is my new favourite best thing in the internet ever.
• T-Mobile sold 1 million G1s - not bad going for a first-generation device with every conceivable input mechanism and a spangly new OS that *isn't* being marketed by Apple. But let's not pretend that the success of Android is predicated on the sales of any 1, or even N devices, eh?
• Whilst we're on big numbers, 1 billion iPhone downloads, eh? I put this down more to Longino's Revised Statute than Buckley's Law in this case (tho Buckley definitely applies elsewhere): the sheer ease of trying stuff out on the iPhone is what's had me (and others I've had the pleasure of observing close-hand) installing apps. When all I lose by downloading a new piece of software is a little boredom, I'll do it again and again...

I had a first play with the Guardian APIs yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised by how simple and effective they were. I'm not one of those Ruby-on-Rails kids who mashes Google up with the Facebook in between grinding a fat half-pipe on an ollie; even I found them really great to work with.

And, being the kind of childish individual who still gets kicks out of looking rude words up in the dictionary, I decided to use the API to examine changes in obscenity in the last 10 years.

To do this, I took a group of common swear-words, and searched The Guardian archives for the number of articles containing each one for each of the last 10 years. This gave me an idea for the prevalence of the word, without being overly affected by, say, the vulgar rantings of Mr Brooker. I then divided this number by the total number of articles available for that year - giving the percentage of Guardian content containing each profanity, and accounting for the fact that the total volume of digital content, and by extension UK liberal coarseness, has grown year on year.

I present the results below. Good news! The y-axis runs from 0 to 0.9%; even a liberal rag like the Grauniad seems to be pretty resistant to the tidal wave of filth which some might have you believe is flooding the English language nowadays.

A few observations:

1. Swearing is growing slowly year-on-year, across the board;
2. Unusually, in 2001, swearing stayed more-or-less level. Bastard declined after 2001 - probably an after-effect of 9/11, after which most other swearing grew;
3. Wank is massively underperforming over the last decade, whilst cock is flat;
4. Shit has grown disproportionately and steadily since 2005, whilst fuck has gone as far as it can;

• Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development by Martin Fowler;
• Industry trends in prototyping by Dave Cronin;
• Kaizen and Kaikaku, an analysis of where agile adoptions go wrong. Happy to report we went Kaikaku;
• Flaccid Scrum, for the title alone;
• Fascinating set of user interface principles for Palm WebOS;
• More wisdom from Jeff Patton on product owners and product design;
• Web Programming Is Hard, via ATobe;
• Dougie passed on Programming Sucks;
• Continuous Deployment: now there's a good target;
• One Free Interaction, a wonderful essay from the Cooper Journal;
• Recreating the Button, a painstaking investigation of the redesign of web buttons for Google;
• Scrum is not about engineering practices;
• Continuing the life tracking theme, BedPosted - a site for you to track your sexual encounters with;

"It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer.

...

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a "platform for running web apps". It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It's also got Google Gears built in. Great. I'll alert Tim Berners-Lee.
"

I'm *really* enjoying this guys writing.

Quadratura are doing an event in London in June. Go see their showreel, it looks amazing. Mr BigFug does lovely things with light :)

(and guitars)

Batty: I've done... questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraodinary things, revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of bio-mechanics wouldn't put you in heaven for.

One part of OverTheAir that I was particularly looking forward to was the hack-day element: getting a load of mobilists under one roof, working overnight within a tight timeframe to put together a novel demo. We'd had an idea beforehand that we'd like to do something which touched on the real world, and there's a fair amount of cynicism internally at FP about the value of some of the mash-ups you see out there today (which is not to say that there aren't some amazing ones too).

So Mr Hopper packed his soldering iron and Arduino kit, and we brought along a collection of devices: a GPS unit or two, a Sony Ericsson K850i and (of course) an iPhone. You can't hold your head up high these days if you don't do iPhone.

On actual ideas, I confess we were a bit fuzzier. I had some vague ideas of things I wanted to explore (e.g. bringing a bit of plausible deniability to digital communications, where it tends to get bumped out in favour of clear explicitness which is quite rare in meatspace), but had no idea of how to turn these into anything practical. So we went with doing something neat with robots.

The K850i is a strange device: a weird keypad and a mix of touch-screen and physical keys which a few handset vendors seem to be trialling at the moment. I find this hideously annoying, there's a really obvious jarring in my head when I press a button on these devices and have to work out whether it's actually been pressed by either looking for visual feedback or feeling through my finger - depending on which key I'm pressing.

But it has one lovely little feature, and that's an accelerometer accessible from J2ME via the mobile sensor APIs (JSR-256). Early this year one of our gold card days yielded an amusing little app using these APIs - a mobile spirit level - so we had a good idea of what we could do with them.

So robot arm, meet wavy mobile: we hooked up the accelerometer in the handset to the network, and (via a little bit of SSH tunnelling to work through the Imperial College firewalls at OverTheAir) connected it to a server running locally on a laptop, with said laptop driving the servos in the arm (connected using the Arduino kit). The result: with a 1-2s delay we could control the arm in at least two axes by moving the phone around.

This was quite fun, but I think we struggled to see it being hugely valuable to the human race. I had some vague ideas about getting the robot on stage, holding hands with it and swaying side to side singing "Give Peace A Chance", but they didn't generate the same excitement in the team that they held for me :)

So next step, add a camera: this was glued onto the end of the arm (making it quite heavy and giving us the sense of the machine straining slightly whenever it lifted up), and connected to an Ee-PC, which took photos from it at regular intervals and uploaded them to a publicly accessible web server. So now we had an arm which could be directed around, and which reported on what it saw: a little more useful, perhaps.

All this took us until about midday on the Saturday - an hour before the original competition deadline, with a few strained nerves as we ironed out last-minute problems and finally achieved consistent control of the beastie. It was here that things really took off as MarkNG and Bryan jumped in, taking the camera output and spreading it as far and wide as possible: in the run-up to 2pm (when the competition eventually drew to a close) photos started appearing on Flickr, in a Flash Lite client, on a Series 60 widget and, of course, on the obligatory iPhone. Our plans to show photos back down on the controlling MIDlet never quite emerged - some last-minute network problems courtesy of Orange (who suddenly started blocking our connections on port 8080 mid-way through the morning, necessitating a switch to Vodafone) had stumped a couple of us for an hour or so, and we never quite got round to completing this part.

The presentation was pretty ghastly, I'm afraid. Carrying a presentation laptop, controlling laptop, photo dumping PC, iphone, S60, iPhone, K850i, etc., all on-stage was a bit of a logistical problem (and we panicked a piece of kit would unplug/break/fall apart). Our preparation was minimal and I was far more nervous than in the previous days talk - when a few technical hitches stopped us showing the robot or phone on the large projection screens supplied, we called the demo short (after showing a film we'd made of it working). At least we managed to vividly demonstrate a theme Bryan and I had talked about the day before: that user interface concerns should be primary in any mobile project, and that development-led products are likely to suffer :)

I was genuinely surprised but obviously chuffed when we won the Best Overall Prototype; I (and a few other people I spoke to) had thought we were odds-on for "most over-engineered", but didn't expect anything else - and competition was strong. The prize, whilst generous, came second to hearing Matthew Postgate intone the words "Octo Bastard" in best BBC English - before the watershed! In particular I thought the LastMinute guys did a cracking job with their accelerometer-based sword-fighting game: I kick myself that we've never thought of this, it was so beautifully elegant and seemed to work really well. I hope that someone turns this into a real product, and I'm rather looking forward to an upcoming project where we will be collaborating with some of the folks from the team that built it :)

So, lessons from all this? Prepare more for presentations next time. Try and get some design involvement (both Hack Days I've done so far have led to the creation of bizarre hardware stuff, I'd like to go for elegance next time). And once you have your hack writing out to a web server, it's clear a whole load of other stuff opens up to you: widget platforms, mobile browsers, web services. As the mobile and fixed web converge (or the former subsumes the latter) it's the web-based services which are going to provide a basis for lots of interesting things, I think.

Also see Mark's writeup of the event, here.

At 6 o'clock this evening I dashed from the office up to Brighton station and hopped onto a train bound for London Bridge, to make it to This Happened. It was an absolutely enchanting evening of four talks, each running through the background to a product and its design process. It's late and I only have a few scrabbled notes, but I want to get them down whilst the memory is fresh:

1. Jussi Angesleva on the nasty realities of creating digital wave-patterns which seamlessly(ish) transferred themselves into real water, for an installation in Japan. Interesting to hear about the horrors of doing work which integrates with a space without taking it over (or just sticking up a screen and projecting cute stuff onto it). Cue lots of stories on the pain of cross-continental collaboration or "getting your hands dirty at a distance": edit/compile/test in real life. Icky, and unnervingly familiar: the real world is messy, physical proximity and the ability to have conversations wins out over documentation and electronic tools. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

2. Mr Schulze gave a slightly downbeat and self-effacing version of the Olinda story. It was refreshing to hear that even geniuses have problems balancing consultancy and their own product development, and a bit sad that the beeb can't produce the Olinda radios: I really hope that someone takes the open source designs and builds them (and that a suitable public back-end can be found for the social goodness which lurks backs them up). I wanted to know more about the modularity of the hardware too - Jack hinted at some smarts behind that side of things.

3. Kenichi Okada showed off animal superpowers, my absolute favourite: toys to give children the perspective of animals (giraffe for adult-style height of vision, ant for microscopic sight through "feelers", and bird for a homing instinct). Beautiful looking toys, charmingly simple, wonderfully presented. Timely for me too: I've been thinking a lot about animals recently, and had a blog post on the topic which MarsEdit seemed to drop somewhere :(

4. And finally, Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor ran through their experimental playground kit: incredibly cute, kinda life-size lego. And her slide on narrative and play had my Loco-sensors tingling: arenas, pathways, obstacles, territories, thresholds, destinations and sanctuaries being the components of games. What a beautiful way to envisage outdoor play!
   

All great stuff, all thoroughly recommended. Please don't tell your friends, I think I only just scraped onto the entry list this time around and will be sad to miss the next one :)

...so I'm listening to the excellent Long Now Foundation podcasts whenever I travel from A to B without something specific to think about or do (i.e. walking to work, to class, etc.) - and they're absolutely excellent, thoroughly recommended.

This evening, Brian Eno talking about how the Long Now Foundation were approached and asked to think about storage of nuclear waste. He relates the tale of the Yucca mountain storage facility, designed to last for 10,000 years - and how they reckoned this was the wrong approach. 10,000 years is far too long a timescale to think sensibly about doing something so risky and it would be better to work out how to store waste reliably for 100 years - with the aim of coming back then to rethink the problem with new technology.

And my brain's thinking "hmm... don't plan the whole thing out in advance, but do a chunk, then come back to it and replan... what does that remind me of".

Either I'm an incurable saddo, or there's a theme here. (erm, or both).

Whatever, hopefully I'll be the top result on google for "Agile Nuclear Waste Storage".

Friday morning. Turned up late for a Kevin Warwick lecture, as tradition demands.

Icky demo video, very sensationalist stuff. Kevin talks about broadcasting electrical impulses from himself across the internet.

"Tonight when you're bored, get some very thin wires and try to push them into your nervous system"

25-30 minutes before an epileptic fit, signals in the brain occur which indicate the onset of epilepsy - so fitting sensors to the brain can have a definite medical benefit here.

Talks about cultured neural networks - biological tissue hooked up to simple robots.

Next, Holm Friebe and Philip X from Zentral Intelligenz Agentur on the topic work, its quality and its changing nature.

"Rules of working together professionally and still remaining friends": working in a laid-back manner using digital technology. They've been road-testing these concepts in their own company; this is an interim report. They've distilled them into 7 rules:

How do you integrate individuals with a strong sense of individualisation, who wouldn't fit into a normal business?

(I'm starting to have my "we're special, not like other people" buttons pressed. A bit like people who capitalise the word "creative" and talk about "working spaces for creative people" - imagination fascism)

Their business turns over 200k euros per year - so not exactly a commercial heavyweight, but living costs are low in Berlin.

Their name serves as an entrance filter - people who don't get it won't make good customers for them.

1. Start with no offices; if you hang around at the same place all the time, you won't be able to stand each other;
2. No employees, so no-one depends on the company materially;
3. No fixed costs - they only spend 15 euros on servers a month; this keeps you independent of clients and incorruptible - you can always say no;
4. No pitches;
5. No exclusivity;
6. No working hours;
7. No bullshit;

All you need is "a good name, a web site and some business cards"

(I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone made a commercially successful business out of this. For instance, I find colocation to be one of the best parts of working with someone - the random sparking of ideas you get by being around someone for the working day is where interesting stuff happens.)

They've broken these rules already - they have offices. "But they're not meant to impress clients".

They've set up a co-working space based on the commercial model of a gym.

Rule 2: engage in client work and self-induced projects with equal committment. Sounds lovely and I would agree this is worthwhile: R&D seems important for technology or design-based businesses (and probably lots of others).

Rule 3: instant gratification, distribute profits immediately after a job is completed. People need to pay their rent (of course) but I'm not sure how that implies this. They keep 10% of profit for the company to accrue some play money for their own projects. They pay bills immediately.

Rule 4: Pluralism of methods: find technical solutions for social problems, use online tools wherever possible. I know some people really grok this, I love physical colocation myself. They wrote their own collaborative editing tools and voting mechanisms.

Rule 5: Fixed ideas. e.g. turning everything bad and annoying about Powerpoint into an on-stage format. They pulled 20 presentations off the net and got folks to get up and improvise presentations. Another project: direct feedback for poetry slam, letting callers leave feedback. The poets were wired up to a current and administered electric shocks when they received negative feedback.

Rule 6: Responsibilities without hierarchies. Each project has 1 person in charge, but it can be anybody. People play different roles within different projects. At the beginning of the year they have a retreat in the countryside, plan out upcoming projects and the year.

Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination. Don't try to be too efficient. Good ideas will adapt and catch on, even if you neglect them for a while.

Rule 7.5: No PR, if you do interesting stuff the press will come to you.

Next, Mieke Gerritzen on different views on natural and visual culture:

Mobile network masts are being disguised as trees, despite the additional cost of doing so. In Dubai they've just built islands in the shape of a world map. The Netherlands keeps a country that's below sea level dry.

Nature becomes culture: every square metre of ground in the Netherlands is man-made ("God created the world, except for the Netherlands: the Dutch did that").

We have designer hypoallergenic cats on the market. Next year we can expect transgenic cats which will remain kitten-sized for their whole life.

Shows logo drawn on the wing of a butterfly.

We have a shortage of human organ donors. Shows artists impression of an organ printer.

The featherless chicken has been created in Tel Aviv. It's a more convenient and energy-efficient chicken to live in warm countries where feathered chickens have trouble and air conditioning is expensive.

Colouring plate for children showing the sheer volume of animals on a contemporary farm.

Edible packaging for apples. To help people get their 2 portions of fruit a day, they're growing bizarre double-apples. As buildings become more inspired by nature, nature is becoming more controlled by man.

Nature becomes culture, culture becomes nature.

Shows video about implants and the increasing use of them in medecine. Fictional story about metal implants growing after insertion - didn't we get this stuff out of our system with Tetsuo The Iron Man? Reasonably disturbing images of people and animals with metal growing out of them - wooooo.

Lots of assertions I don't get, like "science fiction is becoming fact".

"Second life is not sustainable".

"Reality and virtuality are becoming equal".

Photo of unborn child using mobile phone.

I'm reminded of Adam and Joe's "Goiter"...

Shows off skeletons of Disney characters.

What she said.