I’ve been running around with a press pass at b.TWEEN 08 today and writing up thoughts for The Mancunian Way.

There is something odd about b.TWEEN I can’t put my finger on. Maybe it’s because I’m used to conferences where the audience run the agenda, or that are very, very technical in content, but I’m sure there’s something else. I’ll work it out eventually.

This evening I was also interviewed for the Guardian Tech podcast - I blathered a bit, but hopefully something sensible will come out of it.

Anyway, plans as discussed have been postponed whilst I get on with my rather hectic schedule for a week or so. Stay tuned.

It seems like an age since the last one (in fact it was late February), so I’m pleased to announce the next co-working day:

http://manc-coworking.eventwax.com/13th-may

No networking, no OpenCoffee, just plain old straight format where those who want to meet up and discuss something can do, otherwise we crack on with work.

It’s the same day as GeekUp Manchester as well, so those of you travelling from outside of the city centre can get two events done in the same day and then feel really tired the next day.

I’ve resisted blogging this, as the BCS have been a little incompetent and booked a smallish lecture theatre for what is likely to be a well-attended talk, however there is a backup plan those of us with an ear to the ground will have in place, so here it is:

Free of charge evening talk organised in association with the Manchester branches of the BCS and IET.

‘Free Software in Ethics and Practice’ - speaker: Richard Stallman

Thursday 1st May, 2008 - Talk starts at 6:45pm (ends approx. 8:30pm) with refreshments from 6:15pm.

Venue: Room D1, Renold Building, University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB

There is no need to book a place - just turn up on the night.

Note that last line is perhaps the most stupid move anybody has made for a talk in Manchester involving an internationally-renowned figure in the computer industry, ever. I could be proved wrong, but I somehow doubt it…

Abstract:

Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.

About the speaker:

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

He’s certainly well known as a controversial figure, so it sounds like it’s going to be an interesting evening.

How exactly I ended up agreeing to him staying at my flat, I’m still not 100% clear. I have though, and will be pleased to host him for the evening. I was always brought up to be a good host even to those I sometimes disagree about some issue with so I only hope the fact me being an organiser of the local BSD User Group isn’t going to cause xkcd re-enactments. :-)

At tonight’s GeekUp (Briton’s Protection - just 50 yards from the usual venue - 6pm), there is another social discussion event. This time, another area I spend a lot of time thinking about is up for consideration. From the announcement:

Discussion Topic: “The Future of the Internet”

• How do you see people using the internet in 5/10 years time?
  • What features do you want to see browsers supporting?
  • Will people still be using browsers? If not, what will they be using?
  • Does anyone actually use 3G video chat? Will VoIP mainstream follow too?
  • Will Google always be the number one search engine?
  • Will Google be even bigger? Perhaps it might run our lives …
  • Will IPv6 actually be adopted by the masses?
  • Anyone up for a 3G wireless dongle biometric implant to hook your memory up to the net?!
  • Semantic Web - is it the future? what does it mean?

How we intend to get through that lot in a couple of hours I have no idea. I expect I will be writing up notes and reporting back tomorrow if people can’t make it, but if you can make it, you should.

I was asked last week to write up an op-ed for Crain’s Manchester Business on the City council’s “Digital strategy”. The result can be found online at their website now

Note how the recent sleep deprivation is showing nicely in that photograph. I meant what I said in the penultimate paragraph:

“After a decade of growth and a realisation that we are now at a tipping point of being dominant in the technology sector regionally, nationally and maybe even continentally, Manchester needs to make sure the opportunity isn’t wasted.”

The next couple of years are make or break time for us as a city in this sector. What are we doing to make sure we make it? Are we doing anything that might break it? Geography isn’t important until you factor in community and we have one of the strongest communities in the World, but we still seem to be lagging in a few areas.

I wrote this article about a week ago, but resisted posting it. Reading it back, I’m now even more convinced I’m right.

The simple truth is, OpenCoffee as a format doesn’t work in Manchester and we should be glad about it.

Here’s the basic format of an OpenCoffee meeting:

• Meet in a coffee shop (or hosted environment with coffee available) early-/mid-morning
• Meet people involved in startups who want to network
• Ideally grow businesses through that networking

Now, here’s an exercise. Spot the two big reasons from that format why it struggles in Manchester.

First, there is timing. The people who would be interested in meeting developers, entrepreneurs and technologists in Manchester tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Working for somebody else, in a salaried job. They can’t do OpenCoffee because their boss would notice their absence doing networking for the new company they’re about to start.
• Working for themselves and insanely busy and so find it hard to justify taking a couple of hours out of their schedule just to meet up
• Working strange hours that means they’re almost certainly fast asleep 7am-11am which are the “prime” traditional times for an OpenCoffee

Then there is the fact that OpenCoffee comes with an agenda: I am here to meet people to help my business. That just doesn’t work in Manchester. Ideas flow freely and sometimes get turned into business agendas, but the one thing that will kill an event in Manchester is an explicit attempt to progress your own agendas. Just meet, chat, see whether there is anything you can do for each other, if not just see what is going on.

People in London and New York don’t “get” this. They hate it. They need OpenCoffee. We hate the London events, and we should be glad about that. It’s what makes our community ours.

So, let’s design the perfect event for Manchester then:

• It should probably happen in the evenings when most people are about
• It should have a focus, but not an agenda
• The networking should be casual, not explicit
• Given it’s after work, some people will want beer, not coffee

Congratulations, we’ve just designed GeekUp. What’s that? You want investors in the room and a more structured event? Oh, OK, well, that’s NW Startup 2.0. You don’t want to pay for NW Startup? Well wait until the next BarCamp and we’ll try and get some investors in the room.

Remind me again, exactly what the point of OC would be if these events exist?

Co-working is likely to go on incidentally - it makes sense for those who want to explore ideas together and collaborate in a way that doesn’t feel like a wasted day. OpenCoffee - for Manchester at least - is dead.

If people - and I mean people prepared to actually show up, because personally I’m tired of doing the announcements knowing it’ll be dead - howl in protest I’ll run it one more time to see if there is real interest, but I suggest that for now we just let it go.

Towards the end I was tired, hot and wanted to go home, however we came through and BarCamp was great. I wrote a general overview over at the MEN blog. I thought here I’d just re-iterate my thanks, and give you a heads up about the photos on flickr and the Google Group where we can keep the conversations going.

I slept for a good while yesterday and even today feel fatigued like never before. Which makes it all the odder that we’re already planning the second event, and for this year. I’ll let you know when the pieces are in place…

It’s only just dawning on me now that tomorrow over 100 people are going to be turning up at the Manchester Evening News headquarters and engaging in an event that has virtually no planning involved in it whatsoever.

There is no schedule, no idea of how many people want to talk, nor any indication of whether everybody who has signed up has really just conducted an elaborate hoax and I’ll be sat there all on my own all day long.

I’m currently experiencing slight nerves and fatigue, because you have no idea how much work it takes to organise an event without any real planning.

Everything is about guess work and executive decisions. How much food do we actually need? What if we end up with too much? How do we give the prizes away? What are the logistics of moving people in and out of the building? Given the nature of the event until this week I kept the answers as nothing more than sketches and figured I’d work it out “closer to the day”.

This week then has been about forming a clear picture of what is going to be involved and how to manage it all. It looks as though tomorrow is going to be a great day now, but it’s all still “are we really going to try and do this?”

I’m going to really enjoy Sunday morning, regardless.

This week also saw the birth of the Google Group (which in turn produced a plan for some of us to meet tonight at the Bull’s Head near Piccadilly around 7pm), and as expected a few people had to drop-out. Alas, the waiting list went for a burden mid-week, so I’m having to re-open registrations. As I write this there are 2 tickets left over at the signup page. There may be other tickets available over the course of today, but at 5pm the list is locked and if your name isn’t down, you’re not coming in.

I also want to give a big thanks in advance to two groups of people without whose help and understanding I wouldn’t have managed to get this done this week.

First, Adaptavist who hired me to produce a back-end accounts system which is now a fortnight over-due and running. They’ve been more forgiving and understanding than a humble contractor deserves, and I’m now looking forward to wrapping up this work today that has been delayed by constant BarCamp interruption. They’re sponsoring the after-party about half of us are going to as well because they’re that cool, and I owe them a big, big thanks.

Secondly, Liquid Bronze, who have been cheering me on and helping with some of the logistics. Today they’re helping move food around despite this also being the day they move office. Quite frankly, they deserve thanks for that alone, but Andy Threlfall being a friend who knows me too well has done the sensible thing of provoking me into sitting down and thinking about precise details that I would normally wing.

If things go to plan and tomorrow everything slots into place like it looks as though it will, it’s in no small part thanks to these guys.

When Niels Bohr made the quip I use in the title, it’s unclear if he was intentionally or accidentally witty, or simply making an assertion about the weirdness of the quantum World.

Regardless, the Turing Lecture - an annual lecture given in London and Manchester - last night concerned itself with the future. Specifically, “The Meaning of the 21st Century”, as interpreted by Dr James Martin, a man of some considerable repute.

I absolutely hate being critical and scathing of anybody, but on this occasion I find I have no choice. If Dr Martin should find himself reading this one day, I’d ask that he note that I am not attacking him as a person, but purely his ideas and his execution of those ideas.

I attended the showing of his film before the talk, and discussions afterwards confirmed I was not the only person who considered walking out. In fact, my companion during the film decided he had better places to be rather than hang around for the talk.

The reasons for finding it so annoying are many. I actually stopped counting mistakes I found in the film after about half an hour (never mind the sound mixing being bodged and the long pauses at points), but it could be summarised as saying the tone was patronising and arrogant.

The thesis was heavily planted in the realms of Liberal Conservatism - two of the more prominent politicians interviewed were Chris Patten and John McCain with no counter-argument offered from anybody involved in “Leftist” politics. His answer to solving the problems of the World could effectively be described as US foreign policy for the last 60 years: export democracy and literacy and make foreigners realise they’re a bit thick - a policy which so far has led to where we are today.

Rather more disturbing for me was his attitude towards religion. Once in the film and once in the talk he talked about the “problems of Islam and religious fundamentalism”. He seems to think that the problems in the Middle East are purely rooted in Islamic fundamentalism and no blame can be apportioned to Christian fundamentalism driving a neo-Conservative agenda in the US, or that Israel has ever lifted a finger in anger or in error. He generalises a point about “all religions needing to learn the true values of their founders” but does not offer a method by which that can happen.

At one point in the film he makes a point after an Indian farmer has stated “God will help us” that “poor people need to be taught rational thought”. Sorry Jimmy, that’s just fundamentalism in another flavour.

I use this word carefully, but politically his arguments stray into what can only be described as a fascism, albeit a fascism he would want conducted by what Marx would have called “the proletariat”.

There is also something absurdly hypocritical about a film discussing the obscenity of the Californian lifestyle narrated by Michael Douglas, or the dangers of global warming being described by Martin appearing in a different city in a different country every 30 seconds. I stopped counting at 15 countries I think he visited to make the film, and in his talk he made a reference to “a few days ago I was in Cape Town” - it’s good to know he’s doing his bit for sorting out CO2 emissions!

So, onto the talk proper and I think the best way to rip this one to shreds is to go through the predictions he made. Many of you know that I think futurology is about as accurate as long-term weather forecasting, but with a difference: futurologists are exhibiting their hopes and fears. It’s hard to say whether he just collected predictions he considered credible for scientific reasons, or whether these form a good poll on his inner hopes and fears, but I’ll let you make your own mind up.

• Near-infinite bandwidth: in the future we will have bandwidth - “many thousands of a terabytes a second” - so fast that it may as well be considered infinite. Never mind history has always shown that we find a way to use nearly all of it almost immediately, there will be plenty to go around.
• Nanotechnology widespread: virtually everything manufactured in the 21st century will have nanotech in it somewhere. Some aspects of this I can see, but the extent he has predicted would be like suggesting in 1875 that every home in the World would have a steam engine in it by 1975.
• Ultra-intelligent computing but not human-like intelligence: this one confused me. He’s giving the Turing lecture. Turing described a successful AI as being one that passed “The Turing Test” - it would be indistinguishable from humans. He asserts that this is wrong, that intelligence will be “more alien”. Humans define intelligence, and therefore the only AI we will recognise as intelligent is one that which mimics our own. Even weirder though is how he thought this would combine with nanotech and by the end of the 21st century some humans would have millions of nanobots in their brain fluid using a “Brain Computer Interface” enhancing our mental function to “do the equivalent work of a PhD in 3 minutes” all communicating with each other via “wireless networks”.
• Automated evolution and genetic engineering: yes, I know evolution is already automated. What he means is that we will be able to kick-start it again for certain functions in plant, animal and human life. One prediction in the film is that 20 years from now people will be able to buy DIY gene modification kits for plants and they will design new forms of plant life.
• Use of quantum entanglement: cryptography moving to quantum? Well, yes. He doesn’t seem to have considered the true consequences of quantum computing though, specifically in the realms of breaking cryptography, or it’s use in science in a broader sense. His thoughts on “a friend who is a physicist” using quantum entanglement for more accurate brain scans were interesting though.
• Transhumanism: in effect, using technology to improve humanity in any way possible. Think rejuvenation technology currently being researched, the brain/computer interface, evolving ourselves, using stem cell research to “reset” our immune systems, and so on.
• Pebble bed nuclear reactors: I think he got confused at one point here because he suggested such a reactor could produce 180W of energy - enough to power three lightbulbs. I think he meant MW. Anyway, the idea is that this uses 10%-enriched uranium (which can’t be used for weapons) in a form that is impossible to extract, and using a design that makes it impossible to meltdown. The science looks interesting, and I’m prepared to go and research it but when he talks about pebble bed, it sounds like he might have shares in a company developing the technology. Apparently “there are Indians very interested in Thorium pebbles” - lovely.

Now, let’s talk about “Lovelock city”, his predicted “city of the future”. If the temperature rises by 4C we will need to build new cities somewhere cooler in which to live. This is reasonable according to Martin because we have seen the building work in Dubai over the last seven years prove that such cities are possible. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to work out the CO2 impact of building a new city the size of Dubai in the Arctic circle.

• Hydroponics: given the predictions he’s made about the lack of water available to us in the future, he thought hydroponics was the answer. Most students will be familiar with hydroponics thanks to their use for growing crops with which they’re more familiar.
• Magnetic Levitation Trains: which will run at “440km/h” back to our normal cities. You can always spot a crackpot futurologist when they get excited by Maglev trains. They’re horrendously expensive, stupidly noisy, hard to maintain, potentially quite dangerous, difficult to build and there is only one commercial maglev train running anywhere in the World. Still, the World will be full of them soon enough.
• Grand Masked Balls: I’m not making this up. Apparently the winters will be so dark in Lovelock city we will all attend masked balls. No, I don’t know why either.

One of my biggest concerns was that Martin had ideas, but no sense of execution. Ideas are worthless without some plan to bring them about. A political idea without a policy to drive it is effectively useless. At the end of his talk, he suggested 12 “policies” that would fix the World. The issue here is how you would bring about these “policies”.

• Manage the ecology of the planet: given we don’t really understand the climate models, ecological models and water cycle properly I don’t see how he can develop policies around this. Just because this is “the age of management” it doesn’t mean we can manage unknowns. Even when they’re known, the one group of people who know how to screw things up are managers.
• Decline in population to 4 billion: the World has too many people, apparently. Specifically too many Chinese and Indian people. But no matter, Martin has found an answer: women who are taught to read have fewer children. I figured his slogan for this could be “Women who read don’t breed!” - what did I tell you about straying into fascism? Anyway, a falling population is a good thing according to Martin, but I wonder who is going to tell the World population that this would mean all in this generation have to work until we were in our 80s in order to produce enough food for everybody and it would be the end of the state pension until the population had normalised down to his “ideal” 4 billion?
• Save water and improve soil: do you know how you save water and improve soil? You don’t eat meat. You don’t, I don’t, nobody does. It’s sensible, sane advice at an ecological level, but how are you going to convert a global population they can’t eat meat any more?
• Ocean management: we also need to reduce the amount of fish we eat in order to get fish stocks back up. If you avoid fishing certain parts of the ocean for a decade or more, we can fix the current depletion levels. Seems reasonable, but again how do you bring this about? It requires international consensus which can’t even be achieved at the moment around whaling!
• Millennium goals refined annually: do you have any idea how long it took to get the original goals agreed? Evaluation of progress against an objective is one thing, but annual debate is just going to lead to a quagmire of international politics
• Build up food reserves: politicians call those “food mountains”. They’re not very popular.
• Closing down of shanty towns: and move the people where? Let’s take a “shanty town” in a modern Western country: England. In Salford, “experts” decided that back-to-back terrace housing was inappropriate. So families who have paid off their mortgages are finding themselves in a position of compulsory purchase orders for their £60,000 houses and are being told they need to move. Don’t worry though - the new houses will be much nicer, albeit at a cost of £120,000. For a retired couple, this is just untenable. They’re happy where they are. They like their house. They want more neighbours. They want their community. If it’s happening in Salford, I’ll guarantee it’ll happen in developing nations.
• Religious tolerance: see above. Good luck, but Martin’s current theological ideas seem to favour neo-Conservative Christian fundamentalism.
• Tight non-proliferation controls: what more can be done? We’ve seen the NPT abandoned because any game theorist will tell you that Prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• Control of enriched uranium: that’s working wonderfully right now isn’t it? Look how friendly relations are between the US and Iran. How about this instead: develop foreign policies that don’t provoke other nations into wanting to attack you. Ron Paul in the US has a cracking little foreign policy that would stop all threats against the US - get the US army bases around the globe shut down, and if Iran wants nukes well, that’s its right. It sounds dangerous, but why exactly would anybody attack the US if they no longer looked like imperial conquering aggressors? This is obviously too insane for Dr Martin, who prefers an option that hasn’t worked so far and never will.
• Elimination of nukes: again, prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• “Understanding of dangers”: in other words, listen to Dr Martin some more

The truly sad part of all this is that in 2005 he gave $100 million to Oxford University to create The James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford. How many schools could he have built in Africa with that money? How many pebble bed reactors could he have built? How many alternative energy sources could he have invested in?

Yet he spent the money establishing a school named after himself, so that he could talk about his flawed ideas with some sense of credibility. His ideas aren’t just silly: they’re dangerous.

I expect Manchester University will ask him to invest in a center here, and given their uncritical view of his ideas he might accept.

If he turns up in Manchester again, I’m now prepared for an argument.

Prescient given that just yesterday we got the ball rolling on sign-ups for our February coworking day, the New York Times have published a piece on coworking and by the sounds of it, they’ve already seen some of the problems that we might need to think about as we move to doing this permanently:

‘Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.

Despite such ideals, the arrangement does not always work perfectly. Thor Muller, the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco start-up, said he had opened his offices to friends to come in and work. One day, a friend started aggressively recruiting Satisfaction’s employees for his own start-up, and he was banned from the office.

“There should be honor among start-ups,” Mr. Muller said, still rankled.

Ms. Hunt and Chris Messina, her partner in Citizen Agency, said they have had to make sure that people respect their space and leave it clean.

“Someone wanted to bring her dog in, and we had to say, ‘That actually doesn’t work for us,’ ” Ms. Hunt said. And Mr. Vlahides at the Hat Factory griped about “some humorless European guys” who sat at the common table and talked loudly on their cellphones instead of going outside. ’

UPDATE: The link was broken earlier, should be fine now

It worked well last month, so we’re going to give co-working and opencoffee together another shot.

Please note that you need to type codes into the promo code boxes - “CW” if you’re coming for Co-working all day, and “OC” if you’re planning on just the “OpenCoffee” bit.

Hope to see you there!

Organising BarCamp Manchester has allowed me to get to know some of the people over at the Manchester Evening News a little better, thanks to them hosting us on March 1st. In the course of events I suggested maybe a few blog articles about the local technology and geek scene would be a good idea on their blogs area.

Naturally, this resulted in me committing to producing said articles myself.

And so I have started contributing to “Manchester is Online”, which used to be called “The Mancunian Way” the blog that changed name and then back again to “The Mancunian Way”, (I didn’t get the memo :-) ) - one of the most widely read blogs in the region.

I should stress at this point that there are strict editorial guidelines on what I can publish there, so please hold back your press releases. No “advertising copy” is permitted whatsoever.

I’m just going to geek out there in a way that helps “normal people” relate to what it is the rest of us do. It’s a much more general audience over there, so it’s going to be interesting to try and work out how to relate to them.

Last week I was asked to comment for Crain’s article this morning on Yuuguu. I had to offer up a disclaimer, as I do now, that I have done a little bit of work for Yuuguu and I’m under NDA on what I know about the specifics of the internals of their technology.

Typically when asked to quote I give the journalist way more than they need in the knowledge they’ll pick out the one sentence that fits the story they want to tell. On this occasion what I said in full was:

“Yuuguu is interesting because they’ve executed a plan quite wisely. Rather than get overly clever about technology as many start-ups in the web sector do, they’ve used a suite of established technologies, understood user expectations and then combined them expertly. You don’t know how hard it is to do that right until you try.

They’re also very different to the other IM services out there - they’ve skirted around the problems people have with VoIP in a way that gives them a solid, proven business model.

They’ve taken on multiple markets at once in a way established players in those sectors are going to have a problem responding to quickly.

Even better, they haven’t spent years trying to come up with proprietary protocols and re-inventing the wheel, but instead cleverly blended together the best of what works and extended it to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

They’re in a tough area and they’re competing on multiple fronts, but I think they’re in a strong position. The IM sector is not engaging with the audience Yuuguu is and uses technology that would scare most IT admins away from deploying it anyway, the web conferencing sector still don’t “get” the modern Web in my opinion, and the companies selling shared desktop solutions have just had Yuuguu chop their business model out from under them - but many have yet to realise it yet, so aren’t responding.

The only real threat might come from better SIP services threatening their revenue model and customers communicating on voice outside of the Yuuguu system. Having spoken to the guys at Yuuguu though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t already have an answer to that.”

I think Yuuguu are a clever outfit that are doing something quite unique. They aren’t innovating in the madcap “let’s reinvent the wheel way”, nor are they jumping on a bandwagon and trying to use the words “social networking” in their business plan. They’ve looked at what does and doesn’t work, found a way to make something that works better and then established a set of technologies based on best industry practice to make those ideas happen. And all the while, the business model is sat right at the core of what they’re doing.

I hope Yuuguu does take off, and does make considerable profits in the long-term. It would be great to see a local tech start-up fly.

One of the advantages of being almost 30 is that people less than a decade younger than you tend to think of you as being “wise”. Some of the staff in my local bar will ask me about everything from US politics, the Renaissance, Alan Turing, 1980s TV commercials and arcane facts about the early forms of Parliament. Cultured bunch, the staff in my local.

Last night however, it was my turn to learn. One of them had asked me last week about the phrase “Jumping the Shark” and where it had come from. Last night she told me the very next day after I’d explained it to her, she watched an episode of Scooby Doo (OK, maybe they’re not that cultured) where Scooby jumps a shark and that it had made more sense to her knowing what it was a reference to - it is one of the classic insider jokes within TV comedy. I then had to re-explain it all to the other people assembled. The conversation that followed was… interesting:

It went on in a similar vein for a few more minutes. More examples of the futility of the network, the silliness of the apps. Admittedly, none of them had left Facebook yet, but that might be that it’s rather hard to leave, as GeekUp and Co-working day regular Alan Burlison found out

These are people the social networks need. In their early 20s. University students. Bright, intelligent, aspirational. I have no doubt that within a decade most of them will be in the upper 25% of earners in the UK. Malcolm Gladwell would call them “sneezers” or something - they spread their likes and dislikes around their friends quickly. They set trends.

And in the last couple of months they have come to hate Facebook and MySpace.

Specifically, they hate that these networks have been opened up to people engaging in what is effectively a developed and sophisticated form of spam. They hate that they are being hassled via the social graph into doing “fun” things that are actually about as fun as receiving a hoax virus e-mail. They understand that their time and attention is important and its being wasted by sites that don’t respect that.

I have ideas for applications that will actually add value to the social graph and be of use to people in this group, but by the time I get to roll them out it could be too late - the people that make the platform interesting to me as a recruitment base for customers may have moved onto something else.

Facebook are adding features to improve the user experience as they learn how developers are gaming the system. They might win the battle in time, but ultimately they might have to give more control to users to block invites from apps that are not even remotely in their realm of interest.

This isn’t over yet. 2008 could easily be the year the social networks died.

There is a very high percentage of the development community that is atheist.

Percentage wise, we give the general population a run for their money - it is made of perhaps the most pro-secular and anti-theist people out there in one industry with the possible exception of the biochemistry sector.

The reasons behind that stance don’t really interest me (or rather they do, but I won’t be addressing them here right now), but I know if it wasn’t for my Catholic upbringing - specifically observation of Lent - I’d not be writing this article right now. In fact I wouldn’t even be in the computer industry period: I’d probably be a lawyer.

Thank goodness for my own sanity - and the freedom of ‘my clients’ currently incarcerated in a parallel universe - that I manged to learn to code. I thought that as today is Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day, if you wish), and tomorrow marks the start of Lent, I’d explain how it happened, because it’s driving me to get involved in community programmes over the next few years.

When I was 11 years old, I was attending a small Catholic school in Buxton. These days they even have a homepage and are helping to develop vocational science and mathematics skills, but back then in the Spring of 1990 the only IT kit in the whole school was a room of BBC Micros with a couple of Archimedes machines.

I loved those machines.

They were old even then, and it was already getting difficult to find a supply of decent 5.25” floppy disks for the BBCs and the Archimedes were really picky about the brands of modern 3.5” disks they would take. The only real software we had available for them was the built-in BBC BASIC and a small collection of education software used in lessons.

One day I discovered a book in the small school library. It was about how to program BBC BASIC. My Father was by this point a systems analyst and I’d seen programs before and always thought it might be interesting to learn.

This wasn’t some heavy tome similar to modern programming books like the wall of 400+ page back-busters I have behind me right now. It was perhaps 90 pages, cartoon illustrated with robots pretending to be FOR loops and was about as basic as BASIC could be. It was designed for young budding programmers from a stance of “we know you don’t want to do this, but we’ll help you make it fun”. The fact I did want to learn made it even more fun.

Over the course of Lent, the computing teacher at the time offered to open up the computer room - a space which is now inhabited by secretaries in a reception area I believe - during lunch hour. You would have to forgo your lunch hour and realistically most or all of your lunch, and pay up at least 40p to the CAFOD box. This would give you use of the room to work on your own projects, and each lunchtime lots of guys (it was always guys, a problem we still have in the industry) from every year group would pile in and quite frankly, geek out on BASIC programs.

Those weeks running up to Easter were quite an extraordinary time now I look back at it. I was perhaps a little hungry from lack of food, but my appetite for these strange incantations was more than fulfilled - I was writing real, working software.

My fascination for software grew. Every time I got to work on code, I did. We couldn’t afford much hardware at home, so I’d go back to the ancient method dating back to the era of Kilburn of writing up programs on paper with a pencil or pen, and then typing them up when I could.

Much of my work from that time is lost, but what remains is remarkably precocious: expert systems and basic AI seems to have been one of my interests, an area I’d struggle to get to grips with today without a few weeks of reading up, and I’d never even begin to try and write it up in BASIC.

Eventually, the school’s IT systems got a little more modern. Mostly Archimedes, but at least one Apple (which to be fair, I hated - it’s only since OS X that I managed to get on with them) and a single PC used for careers service work.

Here’s a photo of me and some classmates in my GCSE computing class, by which point the computing classroom had moved to a larger space. Many of you who know me today will be surprised to note I really did have hair once:

Within a few years of that photo being taken I was making money in my spare time with the skills I had developed, and preparing to study Software Engineering at UMIST. Those skills ultimately led to a career that involved building out ISP infrastructure, working on R&D projects at GCHQ, traveling to the Falklands on contract, working within a University and ultimately (at least to date) setting up my own small software consultancy and development company.

With the exception of some bar work whilst at University (and the infamous year as professional gambler), every penny I have ever earned has been because of the skills I started to pick up that Spring.

Each year then, despite the fact I am now more agnostic than I am Catholic, I remember and observe Lent. I fast. I go hungry and develop an appetite for something else.

This year I’m going without alcohol and fast food, which most programmers I know would find hard to imagine doing for six weeks. Those of you who know me from GeekUp will find the abstinence from alcohol particularly amusing.

Normally I find it helps me remember how little my family and I had, and I remember that it was through my enthusiasm - and my teachers’ encouragement - for mucking about with machines with bright orange function keys that I managed to gain so much.

The fact I was able to be enthused by something so big, philosophical, creative and vocational at a young age has really stuck. Last week I had a meeting with MDDA about trying to get more kids involved in this industry.

It followed on from a meeting at the Co-working day where some of us established we had learned as kids how to program and that we’re worried that’s not happening any more. Twenty years from now, we might be the only people around who can write code and be excited by it. I want to help fix that, but right now don’t know how. As I work it out, I’ll keep you all in the loop.

If you’re giving up something for Lent, good luck and remember Sundays are optional. If not, at least enjoy your pancakes this evening.