Let’s take a couple of ideas driving Innovation in the software arena right now:

• Work should be more like play
• 3D alternate Worlds are useful in some way
• People are finding it difficult to deal with the incoming flow of information

Each on their own can lead to ideas like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Second Life or better Bayesian filtering. In short, when you focus on an idea you can find ways of making software better. Some people ask themselves, wouldn’t it be great if you mixed some of them up? Say a 3D World where you work? Or handling information flows like a game?

What happens when you try and mix all three up? Well, I concur with TechCrunch when I say this example is just pure evil.

Yes, I can’t quite believe it myself. And I thought the ads in GMail would harm productivity in a mail application…

With all the current hoo-haa about DRM (Digital Rights Management), you’d think controlling who could listen to music, where and when was a modern phenomena. You might be forgiven for thinking that it’s only since the rise of (the illegal version of) Napster a few years back that “the Establisment” has had to deal with uppity teenagers who don’t understand “the rules”.

Think again.

From Wikipedia:

Miserere by Gregorio Allegri is a piece of a cappella religious music (a setting of Psalm 50/51) composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, probably during the 1630s, for use in the Sistine Chapel during matins on Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. […] at some point, it became forbidden to transcribe the music and it was only allowed to be performed at those particular services, adding to the mystery surrounding it. Writing it down or performing it elsewhere was punisheable [sic] by excommunication.

[…]

Although there were a handful of supposed transcriptions in various royal courts in Europe, none of them succeeded in capturing the beauty of the Miserere as performed annually in the Sistine Chapel. According to the popular story (backed up by family letters), the fourteen-year-old Mozart was visiting Rome, when he first heard the piece during the Wednesday service. Later that day, he wrote it down entirely from memory, returning to the Chapel that Friday to make minor corrections. Some time during his travels, he met the British historian Dr. Charles Burney, who obtained the piece from him and took it to London, where it was published in 1771. Once it was published, the ban was lifted, and Allegri’s Miserere has since been one of the most popular a cappella choral works now performed.

[…]

Mozart was summoned to Rome by the Pope, only instead of excommunicating the boy the Pope showered praises on him for his feat of musical genius.

Thanks to the advent of technology, we’re all Mozart now…

Tony Wilson died early yesterday evening at Christie’s Hospital. Everybody in Manchester knew it was going to happen soon, but it doesn’t make the sadness of those who loved him and his work any less sharp.

Whilst this is a blog about innovation in software, the under current has always been about innovation in Manchester as well - and there are few people who can be described as an innovator in this city as much as Wilson can.

The tributes have started, and I’m sure I won’t be the only person to talk about encounters with him. Last time I met him was when he was having a meeting with my then-boss. It was about 11am and he was quite clearly off his tits - and said so - which made for a less than intelligent discussion. Many encounters you’ll hear first-hand about Tony seem to involve eccentricity, drugs, and occasionally a shade of darkness creeps in. Those stories rarely break out into public accounts of him. In a way, that’s a good thing: his work was never mediocre, never banal, and that’s a rarity these days in media.

The next few weeks of mourning are going to be the climax of this City’s obsession with a man who helped shape Mancunian identity over the last two decades. It will culminate in a collective prayer of “RIP” and then….

One of the barriers we have as a city in some ways, is that the only thing people outside the city have to talk about when the topic of Manchester comes up in conversation is the bands from Factory, the Hacienda and occasionally football.

I don’t think he’d be happy with that. He got involved in the political scene over the last few years and was an ardent campaigner of a regional assembly (notwithstanding the fact that for various reasons it was a flawed idea), and got very bothered about the future of the North West as a whole.

His ego aside (he was a self-confessed ego-maniac), I’m pretty sure that the last thing Wilson would have wanted is for the future of Manchester to be entirely about what *he* did here. I can already feel a pull in that direction - it’s been subtly happening for years, the Northern Quarter being a good example - but it’s the wrong way to decide a direction.

Yes, a cultural renaissance did happen here - one that impacted the entire globe - and one of the important sparks was Factory and Hacienda. Their spirit, like the spirit of Wilson himself, shouldn’t and won’t be forgotten. Whilst physically no longer with us, the memory of their achievements will colour our city’s culture for a long time to come, but they are not in themselves what the future is about.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, we should collectively pay tribute to Wilson the way he paid tribute to Manchester: ask ourselves “what’s next?” and then give it a go.

Well, I laughed:

The horrible truth is, we’ve become so obsessed with our own jargon, we’re no longer interested in how people really want to behave online.

Or is just that traditional shopping was always broken? :-)

via confused of calcutta

We should do something to fix this you know…

One of the most fascinating parts of looking at web server log files, has always been what search terms people type in to discover content on the site. There are few things that get you closer to staring into the eyeball of all humanity than seeing what they ask Google for.

I use the usual tools, but in recent weeks I’ve been trying out 103bees which, as well as providing all sorts of things similar to Google Analytics, throws you an e-mail every week with the search queries people have been using.

It took me a while to remember why it might be relevant to this site for somebody to type in “organised pigeon hunting”. It would appear I am not alone in finding some of my search traffic quite odd.

In the past I have always avoided being tagged by various blogging memes. However, it would seem my head is just slightly too far above the parapet for Will and so I find myself tagged with the ‘5 things you don’t know about me’ meme.

To be honest, when it comes to working out what you might not know about me, not only does it matter how long you’ve known me, but at what point you knew me best. Even people who have known me a long time will not know about large swathes of my life, because I have had several distinct periods in my life that don’t quite join up easily. If I ever get married, my stag do is going to be weird.

So, here goes, these are the top five “I bet you don’t know at least four of these, however you know me” items on my list.

1. As a young child, I was haunted by a family. Yeah, I’d laugh like you are right now too if somebody had just told me that. I can remember some of the conversations with reasonable clarity, and I even know why they were hanging out with me - a reason incomprehensible to a 4-year old, but seems perfectly sensible to me now, if you’re willing to take a certain view of the World (which I have serious problems with). I also remember the last conversation I had with them where they told me they weren’t coming back and I had to get on with my life. Then they were gone and I never saw them again. Yes, I know, I don’t believe in ghosts either. I’m just telling you what I remember.

2. When asked what I would have done for a living if computers didn’t exist, nearly everybody in my family would answer ‘doctor’ or ‘lawyer’ because I have a pretty analytical mind, and I expressed interest in both careers when young. However, when I was making decisions about these things as a teenager, for me the choice was nothing like that. It was either to make a career in IT, or to attempt to gain a commission as an officer in the armed forces. The main factor pushing me into IT was because I was so overweight at the time, I would never have passed a medical.

3. My father is a naturalised US citizen. He was born in Stockport (as I was), but after splitting with my Mother married Sheilagh and moved to the Bay Area (with my two step-brothers and step-sister) to program AS/400s in a little-known language called Synon. When I visited California as a teenager, I spent time in his office reading AS/400 manuals, and have a soft spot for IBM kit as a result. I also have a soft spot for the San Francisco 49ers and the SF Giants, even though my Dad now lives several hundred miles South of SF in Orange County. I nearly always watch American sports on five unless I have a meeting the next morning.

4. Christie O’Connor Junior - the relatively famous golfer - is my Mother’s cousin. I only recall meeting him once as a very small child, but met his father Arnold (my Great-Uncle) on several occasions before his death some years ago. The last time I saw a picture of Christie that I hadn’t sought out to say to somebody “yeah, he’s the famous one in our family”, it was by chance as I noticed him on the front page of The Times a few years back. He was playing golf with Bill Clinton.

5. Although I’ve managed to get rid of the the most problematic ones, I still have a whole bunch of Asperger Syndrome style behaviours. It’s self-diagnosed and as a syndrome there is no real science to it so it’s true that it could all be in my head. When somebody pointed out maybe I should look into AS, I realised that the weird obsessive-compulsive “looping” behaviour I sometimes had could be used against itself to train myself out of those behaviours if I wanted. You’ll have to work out for yourself what remains, but the most obvious remaining external behaviour is that it is unlikely you’ll have ever seen me with my shirt sleeves rolled down, and I flinch and feel nauseous around velcro. Oh, and look at what I do with my watch when I’m slightly nervous. Yeah, I know, mental, etc., etc.

Who to tag? Well, that’s a tough one, as few of my friends seem to have blogs. Either that, or they really wouldn’t appreciate a bunch of coders and developers pouring over their blog.

I will therefore choose a mixture of people. I will choose Andy Stothard because in the last week gave me a timely present for no reason other than because he’s a good mate. I’ll tag William Tozier because he was kind enough to cheer on my utter madness in recent blog posts here, and I had an interesting conversation with him via e-mail. I’ll tag Austin Kleon because I found his blog quite recently, and his work makes me smile. And for my last two I’ll tag people who don’t have blogs, but should know better, get their fingers out of their arses and get on with it. Carl Drinkwater, Andy Threlfall, consider yourselves chastised.

UPDATE - It seems one of the things I didn’t know about Carl Drinkwater was that he actually does have a blog. Serves me right for not doing my research properly. Again.

This is perhaps the oddest promo video I have ever seen. It’s worth every minute, despite being from the evil empire themselves down at Microsoft.

And it is really worth sticking with it until 7 minutes in. At that point it gets even weirder.

With all the production values of a porn film, the standing ovation at the end for a bit of copy’n’paste plagiarism and the closing shot suggesting Microsoft sales guys sleep with their clients, it’s one to file in the “how not to sell your product” category.

Either that, or the shots of 5.25” disks, audio cassettes and the “when we get OS/2, I’ll be ahead of the learning curve” references have just made me feel a bit ill.

The Office of National Statistics, alas, no longer produce the exact number of people who were injured by a garden gnome. They do, however, report on baby naming trends. This year, it would seem ‘Olivia’ is the most popular girl’s name and ‘Jack’ the most popular name for boy. Hidden in the stats however, is an interesting fact:

High climber Ruby (who has risen 69 places since 2001) is fourth.

Now what on earth could make Ruby the fourth most popular girl’s name in the UK? What could possibly have been gaining ground since 2001 to cause such a meteoric rise? I am guessing that there is going to be a rise in females entering the programming industry in the UK in about 20 years or so… :-)

And before you all get confused or worried about how ridiculous some of the chosen names are - I think naming your child ‘Cruz’ should warrant a call from Social Services - just be grateful we haven’t collectively sold our souls completely yet and started choosing brand names for our kids.

In case this is my last post before the weekend, Happy Christmas to you all.

I found this rather entertaining ‘review’ of sorts earlier today, and it made me think about my own relationship with Apple. There’s no doubt they’ve raised expectations of what consumers are expecting from their computers these days, but I have had a love/hate relationship with their machines going back over a decade.

It all change a couple of years back however, when I was running FreeBSD on all my machines at home, and where I could, at work. A lot of people involved in FreeBSD at the time were switching to Apple, and it became clear that a lot of them weren’t coming back. See, under the skin of OS X - Apple’s newest operating system - is a Unix that is based in large part on FreeBSD. One of the first to move over was Jordan Hubbard, who started the FreeBSD project and is, to my knowledge, still head of release engineering at Apple on the OS X product. He has been followed professionally by many people, and in terms of users, I don’t know of any local BSD guys who were knocking around a few years ago who don’t own Apple hardware yet.

My reaction to this at first, was somewhat… well… judge for yourself. On a FreeBSD mailing list, somebody asked if anybody had any tips for a BSD’er starting on OS X. My reply, below, aptly represents my attitude at the time (and yes, I did used to be this aggressive nearly all the time, jerk that I was):

My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily and cheaply upgrade parts of your laptop, built as it is on commodity hardware with 3rd-party suppliers being plentiful. You’ll find either the manufacturer’s support much better than Apple’s, alternatively you won’t have to travel 300 miles to find your “local” dealer as pretty much any computer store in the country will be able to carry out any repairs you need. Spares will be cheaper, labour will be cheaper, and you will not be without your laptop for 3 months whilst a replacement TFT screen sits on a boat from Korea slowly plodding it’s way to you, thanks to a ridiculous spares and repairs policy.

In addition, you won’t be contributing to the “brain drain” that Apple has caused on the Open Source movement, will understand more about how your computer works as a result, and won’t spend half your working day fighting bouncing icons, “helpful” software that constantly tries to break into every WAP point within range and a user interface that was specifically designed to be helpful to 5-year olds and your technophobic mother. You’ll instead get to use an OS and an interface designed for somebody who understands computers, not have to put up with one that assumes you are a 6th-grader with learning difficulties.

Plus, brilliantly, people won’t point at you and laugh when you get your laptop out on a plane or in a cybercafe for spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that isn’t as powerful as Intel-based competitors just because you think it “looks neat”. You will be considered by your peers to be a man instead of a boy, a leader instead of a follower, and you won’t get any more snide e-mails like this when you post to a FreeBSD list for help with your hardware.

Hope that helps. Sorry it was you that suffered my rant on Apple kit, but you are, to my knowledge, the first in a while.

I will now don the fireproof suit.

You know what the really ironic thing about that is? Two weeks later I needed to buy a new laptop. I didn’t want to go through the pain of configuring a load of drivers and just wanted a laptop with supported bluetooth and WiFi out of the box, with some reasonably familiar BSD-style Unix. At the time I was working for a University and qualified for Apple’s educational discount. Price wise, I couldn’t get a similar spec Thinkpad - or indeed any other laptop - to compete with the iBook G4 I’m typing this article on right now. Yes, I switched. I am a hypocrite. After blasting a guy with all that, I went out and bought an Apple.

I am now at a point where within a few weeks I will need to buy some new hardware, and once again I am considering the value proposition of an Apple box. They aren’t cheap, but given that it’s a FreeBSD userland under the skin, and they now have a decent processor inside, it’s starting to look tempting to drop a couple of thousand quid on a Macbook Pro.

The problem is, when I bought the iBook it made me a bit of a radical. Now, it just makes me the same, but a different kind of sameness. When I had a coffee in my usual place in town this afternoon, I noticed 4 people using laptops - all of them Apple’s of one flavour or another. They all looked like they should be using Apple machines: they didn’t look Unix types to me, more “I don’t know how to use my mobile phone properly” types.

Whilst Apple were able to leverage the fact that Toshiba, Dell, Sony Vaio and Acer laptops were all a bit ‘samey’, the problem they might now face is that Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware now signals to the nearby people in the know that the buyer doesn’t really know what to buy so just bought something ‘easy’. There is much more variety in the non-Apple laptop market than there is within Apple’s range, and its starting to feel like a severe and horrible weakness on Apple’s part.

What’s more, whilst Apple produces a pretty decent operating system, it’s not perfect. I do prefer the power and adaptive configurations you can push a ‘real’ Unix into, even if that means I don’t get to run various commercial applications. I can now get a cheap laptop with similar high-speed Intel hardware inside to a Macbook Pro from a variety of other manufacturers and roll out Ubuntu, OpenSolaris or even my old ally in times of war, FreeBSD, with relative ease: driver configuration has improved leaps and bounds.

Oddly, by buying a Sony, or even a Dell, I would now actually mark myself out as being a little bit different once more. I’d save money, and get all the advantages of cheap servicing I mentioned in my post above. The one thing that might make me stick with Apple? I think I might have subconsciously become an Apple Fanboy. It’s not that I want to lick my Apple hardware, but I like not thinking about it, and maybe the kids in the coffee shop are onto something: who wants the pain of thinking about hardware when all you want to do is write, produce videos, mix music, write software, whatever?

Walking back from coffee this morning, I was passing by a Subway sandwich shop which had a ‘Staff Wanted’ ad in the window. The precise words were:

Wanted: Store Managers, Deputy Managers, Trainee Managers and Sandwich Artists

Let’s just ignore the fact that there appears to be three layers of management in a store here - something that suggests a store is less ‘workplace’ and more like ‘a particularly deviant form of hell’. I’ll deal with that another time.

Let’s look at those last two words: Sandwich Artists

What the hell does that mean?

As one of the guys I regularly work with (Andy Threlfall) put it “you could have a lot of fun with that at an employment tribunal”.

I can imagine the scene now, as the tribunal comes to order and Subway put their case that you punched out a customer after squirting ketchup all over the store. Your defence? Your artistic integrity was being compromised, the customer was just a cheap hack who could not comprehend the depth of your work and the ketchup-squirting was “a statement of surrealism in a neocultural structural discourse” - after all, they did hire you as an artist, right?

Do Subway really consider their lower rungs of staff ‘Sandwich Artists’? Who would put such a phrase on their CV or introduce themselves as that at a party? “Have you met my new boyfriend? He’s a sandwich artist”. Good. Grief.

I am so glad I don’t work for those people.

Another useful write-up from Creating Passionate Users, this time on the subject of learning from people who hate your products.

For a long, long time now I’ve known this simple truth: I have learnt far more from criticism than I’ve ever learnt from compliments.

This isn’t some masochistic outlook on life: if you want to improve something you need to know what’s wrong with it. Sometimes that something is you, sometimes it’s your team, sometimes it’s your writing, your code, your broken down car, whatever. If something is wrong, living in denial and assuming the fault lies with the World at large means you’ll never be able to fix it.

All too often I’ve sat in on meetings where people have told me what I had built was “fine”, it was “OK”. I could see the product sucked, that it would fall apart when pushed, but it was their sign-off. If they’d been honest with me, I would have had the momentum and back-up for changing it and making it better. With the key people just sat there happy to sign off something “OK”, all I could do was let them be complacent.

When somebody criticises your code/service/product, don’t justify your position and block out what they’re saying. Listen. Take notes. Go away and have a coffee and think about what they said. Then work out what to do about it. It might be too late to do anything, or it might be an oppurtunity to do something great. Nobody will know until you’ve heard about the complaints in the first place.

There is one caveat though: remember being positive is harder than being negative. Negative is easy. When you ask people to be positive they may struggle, but when you ask them to be negative expect a cascade of venting to come your way. Be prepared for it, and don’t be surprised if after the exercise the number of negative comments outweighs the positive comments 10:1 or worse. Just accept it, deal with it, get on with fixing it.

A pretty funny article appeared in recent days on how not to name your company. The points are valid, and I’m really glad I decided against naming the company Pentaho.

However, a lot of people think Vagueware Ltd is a stupid name for a software company. So, time for some background.

First of all, it’s an inside joke to developers. Everybody has heard of vapourware and assumes it’s the same thing. It’s a kind of a play on that, because I am known for coming up with large numbers of ideas, selling everybody on them, and never getting around to shipping code. Starting my own business was kind of an anti-procrastination measure.

It was also meant to mean something else once before - originally vagueware.com was a wiki where anybody could put up business ideas. In the future, I still want to do that here, but for products/services already shipped. The idea is to try and get people who have fuzzy concepts of what they see software doing, finding a way of being able to actually get that vision turned into reality.

But mainly, it just sounds kinda good. Most of my current client base think I’m being weird though, and as a marketing exercise it sucks. Works with developers who think I’m being ironic, badly with people who think I’m being serious. Like, yeah, I’m such a crappy developer I actually put it in my business name as a warning… duuuhhhh….

However, the company name won’t be seen much. That’s because I’m planning on 3-4 software product launches in coming months that will all have their own names, their own domains, their own identities. When you dig around, you’ll find out they are trading names for Vagueware Ltd, but other than that, you’ll think you’re dealing with [Top Secret Product Name Here].com and won’t know anything about Vagueware. That means I get a name that makes me smile, makes cool people laugh a little when they hear it, and the customers don’t get freaked out generally.

In the next couple of weeks a project I’ve been working on seperately will be announced here - it’s not a Vagueware project, but I own 50% of it - and the story behind that name is great. I’ll share it when we announce it. Real Soon Now.

Take a look at this video.

Awesome, no? The guy is called Matt and you can read all about his exploits (and see an earlier video he made of different places) over at wherethehellismatt.com - his FAQ is an interesting read in itself.

See, if I were a TV executive and somebody came to me and said “I want you to give me a large pile of cash to travel around the World” I would be thinking “Michael Palin” and “sounds like a good idea”. However, if they went on to tell me they wanted to make a 3-minute video of them dancing in remote locations and that was it, I suspect I would have a problem seeing the vision. Because nobody would sign up to spend the money on a project like that. It makes no sense - who is the audience? How do you sell advertising or recoup costs? It doesn’t work!

This though, works. And it works because it has a guy who is inspired with a great taste in music behind it. It works because it was a great deal cheaper to produce than we probably think. It works because it’s unique and original. People are good at original/unique, TV execs by their nature are not. This thing works because it is an inspired piece of creativity that doesn’t really rely on the “money thing”. Matt doesn’t care about audience, or demographics or ROI. He cares about making people smile. 500 years from now, I hope smiling is an accepted form of currency, but right now it takes guts to do that.

Now if you were to go and do the same thing, nobody would care. It worked for him, he’s that guy who dances around the World, you never will be[*]. But if you come up with a different idea, you can go and do it. The technology is now moving to your favour, you are getting empowered by the minute. If you feel like doing it, you can find a way to do it.

That, I confess, is the driving factor behind the first round of projects I’ll be releasing soon: people with great ideas being able to do amazing things, just because they can and the tools are there to empower them. If any of my projects results in just one piece of content being created as good as Matt’s there - as uplifting, and eye-opening - I will feel justified in never caring much about the money.

[*] Note, I am not saying you can’t travel around the World and dance on video like Matt. If that’s what you want to do, cool. Just realise you’re not going to get a gum company to sponsor you or as much attention as Matt, because you’d just be a copycat. But if you want to stand in front of the great pyramids and flail your arms about in front of a camera, I hope you love every minute of it. It’ll probably be better for you than sitting there reading this right now.

Somebody is going to make a lot of money selling those t-shirts. And ‘facebooked’ has now become a verb like ‘google’. Odd. Pity they’re probably going to go bust then, isn’t it?