Solitude

I try to avoid anything remotely political on this site, for many reasons, but I feel it worthwhile discussing some of the issues around Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill: one of the most wrong-headed political policies I’ve seen in the technology space.

In this country we, by and large, have a solid basis for our justice system: we are all innocent until we’re proven guilty. Suspicion of committing a crime is not good enough, it must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The upshot of this is generally positive. We can’t be accused of something and be punished for it, without proof that we actually did it. This is a fundamental right that allows us the liberty we enjoy.

Importantly, you also can’t be tried by the victim of a crime. If you are accused of stealing from someone, that person cannot serve on the jury, nor can anyone with an obvious bias. You have the right to a fair trial by a jury of your peers.

If we did not have these rights, then it would be all to easy for society to be manipulated by scaremongers and sociopaths, the idiotic and the greedy. One accusation, and you’d be finished. This is not a hypothetical. In our past, we tried people as being witches with no evidence, just an accusation. This has happened before.

Now, the media industry is in a difficult place. They’re making less money than they used to, and want to blame piracy for their failing business models, rather than adapt. That’s a whole deep dark hole of debate by itself, but is not what I want to talk about today.

No, I want to talk about the Digital Economy bill. As a way of stopping the perceived threat of piracy, the Digital Economy bill will give media companies the right to accuse people of copyright infringement and have them disconnected from the internet. Think about that for a second: the accuser gets to blame anyone they like and with no evidence of copyright infringement, have a punishment inflicted upon them.

No trial, no right to see the evidence against you and fight it. You’re presumed to be guilty. This is, of course, the opposite of how justice works at present. We’re basically putting justice into the hands of very large companies to protect their revenue in the way they see fit, whether they are right or wrong. We’re handing liberties over to commercial interests for no benefits.

To me, that is very wrong and I hope you join me in signing the petition to stop this very wrong policy.

For more views, Open Rights Group have a great site up called Three Strikes.

As someone working in technology, I’m faced with a fairly moving landscape. The number of new technologies and ideas that pass through my domain of interest make is so that the skills that I had yesterday might not be useful today, and are probably going to start looking silly tomorrow.

A necessary outcome of that is that technologists rely a great deal on different forms of training material, from full-on seminars to simple tutorials and APIs. It strikes me that a great amount of this material, perhaps the majority, is terrible; lacking the ability to convey meaningful lessons to the reader.

Ignoring the material which is underdeveloped or simply inaccurate, my experience tells me that the next worse kind of material is that which runs through a series of steps: do x, do y, do z, you’re done. While this is certainly better than no material at all, it doesn’t help build any understanding, and that’s the key to any successful tutorial. If you build understanding, you’re doing a much better job.

Rather than simply run through steps, take the time and patience to indicate the goals. What will each step achieve, how exactly does it achieve that goal, and what other outcomes are there in slightly different circumstances? Each step should be there to help build understanding of your domain (by which I mean the fundamental components and ideas underpinning your subject matter), and in doing so ensures that the reader will be able to reason about your domain for themselves much earlier.

An extraordinarily good example of this is something like the Spring Framework manual. Each section introduces concepts with worked examples, alternatives, and consequences. The outcome is that given a small amount of time working with Spring you can fairly well reason about a new class that you’ve never encountered.

Always build on the domain understanding, always underline core concepts and always teach underlying principles, rather than simply stating steps.

A while ago now, I was stood behind two women at a bus stop. I wasn’t particularly listening in, but being that close meant I couldn’t avoid hearing what was being said. The first asked the other if she had seen a movie that had just been released yet, perhaps a week earlier. The other enthusiastically responded, “I’ve seen it seven times!”

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with seeing a movie twice in a short space of time, particularly if you really enjoyed it. I can imagine seeing something three times over the few weeks of its release if it’s either particularly good or perplexing, but seven times? That’s just a failure of imagination.

Appreciation of cinema, as with any medium, is best enjoyed over time, allowing the passage of time and changes of context to enrich it and take your enjoyment in new directions, or to see it as something of its time. That’s true of music, art, tv, sport etc. Just about any hobby is best enjoyed in perspective.

An uber-obsessive, single-focus like that is almost childish; the attitude that seeing a two hour movie seven times in roughly a week is a form of lamentable one-upmanship.

To anyone who thinks that seeing something seven times really is fine, I say watch something else. Watch something worse, if need be. Watch something completely different, or something that makes you uncomfortable. By taking in a greater variety of your chosen medium, your context — your very understanding — becomes richer. When you finally see that film again, you’ll be seeing it with a new perspective and that’s far more worthwhile than obsessively watching the same thing in the same context time and again.

A big problem for security in software is that users have learned over the years that upgrading software is painful. Trying to click through dozens of settings and configurations, to then have to stop what you’re doing for an operating system restart has had the outcome of making upgrades a nuisance for most users. They avoid it.

In recent years, I’ve found that web-based upgrades have become less and less painful. WordPress, for example, is incredibly easy to upgrade these days. At first the single Subversion update command was a big improvement over the 5-7 step process. Now, it’s a single-click from your WordPress dashboard to upgrade, from downloading the update to installing it and running any necessary upgrade routines.

One-click. That’s how it should be. When you get one-click upgrades, then it becomes the default thing to do rather than the deferred thing. This benefits everyone.

That’s why I still hate upgrading vBulletin, the forum software that is abominable to upgrade. After having to upload the new version yourself (“upload a, b and C, but not d”), you have to click through dozens of screens to actually install it. If you’ve let it lapse more than a few minor version, and you will given the pain involved in upgrading, then you’ll have to do each and every incremental upgrade, one after the other.

The most annoying thing is that there is no interaction required here. You’re essentially clicking “next” a few dozen times. You know what? Software can hide this fact and just keep plowing on until it hits an issue (in which case it can let you know) or is finished.

Yes, it’s a commercial piece of software, but that’s no excuse. There are plenty of ways of allowing an upgrade automatically, after performing a license check. OAuth, for example, could be used to make this problem go away.

Instead, we have a terrible user experience: an upgrade that needlessly takes away administrator time from doing something else. Try harder, vBulletin.

I can’t remember the context, but I remember reading an article a little while ago about music, DRM and other digitally formatted media. The line that really struck me was not one that was tucked away anywhere, or that was the centre of any argument. It was presented as so obvious that it didn’t need any further emphasis:

Digital is flexible.

The natural state for things, anything, that is digitally represented is that it is mutable and changeable. If I chose to buy a digital book, the natural feeling thing is that I should be able to read that on my laptop, iPhone, Kindle or any other device that I pick. If I buy music, I should be able to crank it through my stereo, or put it through headphones. That’s the obvious take-away from that statement.

It struck me, too, that it’s natural to be able to take these digital things and reuse them as much as possible; whether that’s remixing music with other tracks, using digital media as the basis of an art project of some sort, or even just exploring a shift in context (like visualisation around novels to explore the themes) it seems like it should be an easy thing to do. That’s why DRM is bad.

Digital is flexible is the obvious, default starting point. If your media isn’t flexible, demand better.

After several years and 3 major hardware iterations, O2 have finally lost their iPhone exclusivity in the UK. Over the last few days, Orange have started selling the iPhone on their network too. Many saw this as a chance to start some competition in the marketplace, which is always a good thing. Did we get it? Well, no, not really.

The problem is that Orange have basically got the same deals as O2. The pricing is pretty much identical (if we’re not quibbling over pennies either way) and the structuring is too.

They could’ve competed on any number of fronts: pricing, different number of texts/minutes, different data plans, different tethering, cheaper handsets etc. Instead they seem to be doing exactly the same thing as O2. How does this really help your average consumer? It doesn’t. They’ve added very little to the marketplace, and O2 have too much of a headstart for a me-too answer.

On the plus side, they do have a better 3G network but on the minus side they also have explicit data restrictions. 750Mb per month might seem like a lot, and I’m sure it’s adequate for most people, but I’m fairly sure you could tear that down quite easily under the right circumstances (Spotify and iTunes video looking like likely culprits).

They could’ve done so much better, but instead we get a fairly middling effort. A waste and a disappointment. Let’s see if Vodafone, the next to get the iPhone, will do any better.

A film fight that’s up within a few weeks of it’s due date? I must be getting caught up. Anyway, October was an obscenely strong month. Let’s get on with it.

Zombieland is exactly my kind of film. Zombies, gore, action and comedy all packaged together neatly into 90 or so minutes. The whole thing is set at just the right level: over-the-top but with characters we can all get behind. While the story itself is pretty forgettable, it’s really not that important to enjoying the movie. The performances throughout are great, with Woody Harrelson in perhaps his finest role. The Bill Murray section is absolute genius and I implore you to see this film for that if nothing else. Very good stuff. (See my Zombieland Twitter review).

To call a Pixar movie sweet, touching, funny, cute and fantastically put together seems redundant; that’s exactly what the studio manage to do with just about everything they’ve done. Up is no exception. The unexpected star is an old man desperate to live out his (and his wife’s) lifetime dream of exploring. It’s beautiful and sad, with some of their best characters yet. Dug, and his squirrely obsession, is easily up there with the Toy Story crew and Wall-E. This is one of their best. A must-see. (See my Up Twitter review).

A romantic comedy has to be something special for it to win me over. Sam Mendes has managed that with his incredibly sweet latest film, Away We Go. It manages to find a careful balance between the mushier parts and the more sombre parts, by injecting the whole thing with a remarkably grown-up sense of humour; the featured couple are having fun with each other, not for you, and the film works far better that way. John Krasinski is the surpise of this film, managing to get far enough away from Jim from The Office to sell it. It’s not without its flaws (a little schmaltzy in places, and could do with being a little shorter), but still a solid film. (See my Away We Go Twitter review).

Finally, Fantastic Mr. Fox sees the unlikely coming together of a classic Roald Dahl novel and all the odd fun that entails, with a Wes Anderson movie, with his full suite of quirks, awkward timing, and time-tested cast (Schwartzman, Wilson etc).  The result? One of the best films of the year. It barely misses a beat, with George Clooney playing Mr Fox as smoothly as you might expect, an all-star voice cast backing him up, and Anderson reworking all of the lines to perfection. The visuals are gorgeous oranges and browns, the characters distinctive without being weird. It has a decent line in grown-up humour that will go over the heads of most kids. I don’t have a bad thing to say about this film. Absolutely fantastic, as the name suggests. (See my Fantastic Mr. Fox Twitter review).

The winner? Any of these films could win in other months but Fantastic Mr. Fox is just that little bit better.

So, I finally gave in and bought Spotify Premium for a month. I’ve been largely looking at the iPhone version and have a few quick week one observations:

• 3G is not reliable enough for me to do streaming. I’d typically get half-way through an album and hit stuttering.
• Great for sampling new music.
• Offline mode does exactly what you want it to do, but is completely playlist centric. You build a playlist and can either play it in order or in shuffle. If you happened to a number of artist’s tracks into a playlist out of album order, that’s too bad. You can’t sort it.
• It sorely lacks the ability to search amongst your offline tracks to just play individual albums i.e. if you have a playlist full of Green Day albums, you can’t just pick “Dookie” and go. You need to go through the playlist. Some kind of local search would be invaluable. You can kind of do this if you have signal, but that seems like an unnecessary requirement: the tracks are right there, just index them.
• The flick through artwork to get to the next track is nice. Very much in keeping with the rest of the iPhone.
• Had a few crashes, but nothing major.
• It’s not their fault, but not being able to background the application is a nuisance. I frequently write notes for later use and having to stop the music to do that is a pain.
• Having to sync offline mode via wi-fi is equally painful. A thousand tracks takes HOURS. I’m not an expert but I’m sure the USB cable can be used for this via the connector API.

I’m now into week 2 with more carefully crafted playlists and things are better. I might update again next week.

Several years ago, most people in the UK were issued with new bank cards featuring the now familiar chip-and-pin system (formally specified by the EMV group). The goal was to provide greater protection to transactions by removing easily forged signatures and greatly increasing the state of card cryptography, at least compared to the old magnetic stripes. While the system has its flaws, it has been a success and is now an every day part of life here in Great Britain, as well as most of the Western world.

One problem it doesn’t solve is timeliness for small transactions. If you’re buying a cup of coffee, a sandwich or a similarly low-value set of items, using a card still takes a great deal longer than a cash transaction. If you have a queue of people all paying by card, the time taken really adds up, both for shops and consumers.

There is a solution that has been trialled in various ways over the last few years, called EMV contactless. By embedding a small radio transmitter (tiny, tiny range) into modern credit cards, we can now make use of chip-and-pin free technology. Rather than inserting your card, typing your pin, and awaiting authorisation, you swipe your card over a reader (less than a second) and that’s it. It gets enough of your details to charge you the right amount (which it tends to do in the background) and you get on with your day. You basically have a system that’s much faster than cash.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar if you live in or have visited London in the last 6 years or so: this is exactly how Oyster cards work on London Transport. You swipe, you walk through, and that’s it. It may also be familiar to American readers who are part of the Chase bank. It’s been deployed by them under the name Chase Blink. (I should say I was once employed by another part of Chase’s parent company, but obviously had nothing to do with any of this – I just read about it there first. My opinion is not their opinion, yadda yadda).

Now, obviously, an instant debit card that finishes transactions after you leave is open to fraud: you could charge up a number of small transactions that total a huge amount. They’ve thought of that. There are both per-transaction and daily limits before you have to revert to chip-and-pin. It’ll vary from bank to bank, but I’ve seen sensible limits of £10 per transaction and £50 a day. That should cover the use-cases here i.e. replacing cash and low-value card transactions.

A far more interesting problem is proliferation. I have one of these cards (it got sent out within the last week) but, as far as I know, there are absolutely no places in Glasgow that I can actually use it. I imagine big name, high-volume chains will get it quickly (coffee chains, fast food, etc), but I can’t imagine a quick change for most other vendors. Given the cost in upgrading aging equipment to be chip-and-pin compatible, a real concern for this system is how smaller companies who would really benefit from contactless transactions are actually going to be able to afford it. Sure, the convenience and time-saving probably make it worthwhile in the long term but I imagine the equipment involved is prohibitively costly for many operations.

If this had been incorporated into cards at the same time as chip-and-pin, then I’m sure it would be huge and have a bright future. As it stands, I doubt its going anywhere fast. I would like to be wrong on this one.

Another month, another bunch of films…

The Hurt Locker is fairly well in keeping with the cinematic vision of modern warfare. Unlike World War II films and their heroic stands against evil, films set in modern conflicts need to have troubled characters who do the things that they do for less idealistic reasons. In The Hurt Locker, we get the men of an explosive ordinance disposal team in Iraq doing their work in difficult conditions. The characters are broadly stereotyped (the risk-taker, the strategist etc), but it’s interesting to see their perspectives. While there are some fairly tense scenes, the film moves too slowly and doesn’t provide enough genuine insight into their work to justify it. It’s slow but decent, and just decent.  (See my The Hurt Locker Twitter review).

Neil Blomkampf has followed up his interesting sci-fi short, Alive in Johannesburg, with a full-length, studio-backed effort, District 9. It’s an interesting take on racial divide, with the arrival of an alien craft full of under-nourished aliens causing the South Africans to segregate them into camps and treat them pretty poorly. Despite the sci-fi elements, the film is shot in a largely natural style, lending an air of authenticity to both the aliens and their technology. With some striking visuals, great action sequences, and an interesting take on the theme, District 9 stands head and shoulders above typical sci-fi fare. It’s very well-done. (See my District 9 Twitter review).

Finally, Adventureland looks to be a teen comedy about working at a theme park, but is actually much more of a teen romance. Following a newcomer to the park and his pursuit of one girl, the story doesn’t really take us on a ride that surpasses our expectations. A relatively average movie, that really isn’t my thing. If you like teen romance, then maybe it’s for you, but it’s not for me. (See my Adventureland Twitter review).

The winner is District 9, for it’s fantastic pace, visuals and story. Well done.