Kid666 Blog

This week I’m going to two Green events, a networking party run by AMEE and GeeKyoto. Given that I am such a treehugging (carbon neutral), duck-squeezing (vegan), person I’ve been wondering what it is that makes some geeks care so much about green.

My simple conclusion is that geeks feel like they are empowered to make a difference. Hacker culture is pretty strong right now, where if something on your computer isn’t the way you want it, you fix it. Or, you can at least find someone else who did. The same is true of green, the long standing “justification” about why not to be green is that one person won’t make a difference. The debate here is not why economic theory doesn’t fit well into the human psyche, but rather that geeks don’t feel that way.

I’m proud to be a geek, I’m proud to be part of a sub-culture, a growing generation of hackers that change what they don’t like, I’m proud that one of the things I’m changing is how we learn to look after our planet.

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green, geek, hackers, geek culture, vegan, tree hugger, carbon neutral

I’ve been reading YCombinator’s Hacker News a lot recently. It had a great link today to post about Lifecycle Messaging by Josh Kopelman.

Josh points out some really good things, and it all comes back to one of the current calls to arms at Y!, relevancy. It really is the holy grail. If you can send someone an actual relevant reminder at a relevant time (when they were about to forget) then you are going to get a much better total click through rate than bulk mailing a low relevancy message to more people.

Relevancy doesn’t have to be about mind reading. People won’t mind your best guess if it really is that. We deal with “nearly-noise” all day long. We don’t get upset when our co-workers ask us if we would like a drink, because the offer is relevant and timely (they are going to fetch drink and so the return will be immediate). On the other hand watching people who don’t want a free paper outside the tube station is a dramatically marked experience from those who do.

The key is knowing enough of what people want to make any offers seem like polite courtesy rather than blanket bombing. People will like you for polite reminders (as long as you don’t nag). This is something Josh really hit the nail on the end with, if you contact people just as they are about to forget it’s a reminder and they don’t feel upset. If you hit them too early in the curve it’s a nag.

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relevence, attension, memory, lifecycle messaging, josh kopelman

TinyDB is a new micro database app that allows you to easily get and set data to a URL and then access it again. It supports JSON and XML formats. I really like the concept a lot. The ability to throw up a simple datastruct or two in a very light way is definitely a good thing. The creators say it was because they wanted to attach data to tinyurls which makes a lot of sense to me.

While they point out that the TinyDB entries aren’t secure, I’m mostly curious to see if they plan to let people alter the data after it’s been posted or if it will remain locked in time forever. Whatever small concerns I have, it’s a great project. I also think it’s really cool that they’ve used AppEngine to create it with. I’ve been wondering how successful App Engine would be but with stuff like this coming out I’m looking forward to seeing the big internet providers compete to host the many apps of the future.

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tinydb, tinyurl, database, db, REST, google, appengine, hosting, apps, json

Phew… it’s been a long time since I last blogged here.

I’m writing something based on the sure knowledge that the one thing that will never have you blogging is meaning to. The only thing that gets you blogging is actually doing it. After blogging fatigue and just being busy interrupted my blogging habit, good intentions kept me almost blogging for months and months.

Small but significant thing that’s making my life easier. Stuart pointed me at Ensymble a Python script which uses x-platform libraries to do a number of key Symbian development related tasks.

Most importantly Ensymble can sign SIS files and create SIS files from pyS60 scripts. Since it does these with open Python libraries you can run it on Mac and Linux. This is a big step forward. I find it a bit upsetting Nokia needs a 3rd party developer to do this for them, but I’m not surprised.

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ensymble, pys60, s60, python, symbian, SIS, signing, nokia

So what I’ve been dying to talk about for ages is finally in the open. Yahoo is going to be an OpenID 2.0 provider. This news is big. On 30th January Yahoo will make their OpenID provider a public beta.

We, of course, have a developer page about OpenID. It’s a bit basic right now, but I’m sure that’ll improve when we go live.

One thing that really works for me is that both yahoo.com and flickr.com can be used as your ID provider, but most especially some magic at the Yahoo end means users won’t have to remember a URL, just yahoo.com or flickr.com. Sweet.

More coverage at:

• Techcrunch
• Readwrite Web
• Mashable
• Search Engine Land
• Webware

Well done to the Yahoo! membership team.

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openid, yahoo, openid2.0, open, web, login, ydn

This is not the sort of thing I often blog about, however this product really struck me. Fluidform (in Austria) are selling these beautiful beech bowls shaped like a map contour. I love this idea. I was thinking I’d like to buy one centred on where I proposed to my wife. Maybe when I have some spare money for a real luxury item. It seems like the kind of thing you would keep forever.

I find it’s a real sign of growth that a company is using an openly available web service to create physical products. Not only does this product rely on the availability of the service, it also gives them access to vast amounts of data that would be prohibitive for them to buy themselves. This means they can make bowls which are meaningful to people without needing to know why. I look forward to seeing more mashups like this. via TreeHugger

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mashup, google maps, bowl, soa, roa, design, beautiful

The bookmarklet I made to list out the YUI events on a page is now available as a Firebug extension. You can install the extension from the event lister page.

Please be aware however that auto-updating is not yet implemented, so if you want to keep up with changes to the extension you’ll have to subscribe to the blog, or keep an eye on that page until it is. Once I have auto-updating sorted I’ll put the extension on http://addons.mozilla.org.

I want to thank Steve Souders for his work on YSlow. His documentation in the YSlow code was one of the major things that helped me get this project as far as it is. I hope to help continue improving the rather abysmal state of Firebug documentation so other people can create more extensions to what is one of my favourite web development tools.

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yui, yui event lister, firebug, yahoo, web development, debug, yslow, steve souders, firefox, mozilla, javascript, events, bookmarklet

The trains were essentially exactly the same as the GNER service, except they have uglier branding. However the Wifi is free to everyone, not just first class. Given that it cost my wife and I only £20 more to travel by train than the cheapest of the cheap (Megabus) I am very pleased. Half the time and with near flawless internet for the trip. Well done National Express!

And, yes, I know National Express also run Megabus.

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megabus, national express, train, travel, wifi

Christmas time at my parent’s showed very well the reasons behind the success of Nintendo’s Wii and I also believe several other modern products like the iPod, iPhone and Tivo.

In our family Christmas is held at my Grandfather’s. He sits in his armchair and presides over the goings on of the younger folks, being 94 that seems pretty sensible. Not that he isn’t lively enough, with conversation and games of dominoes to be had. However, the new DVD/VCR was causing problems. It took the combined might of myself, my father, my wife and my brother-in-law to get the thing to record a show and then it was only my wife’s quick thinking that got it to do that. Even with large print instructions my grandfather hates the thing. The unit in question is some off brand I can’t even remember the name of.

The Wii, on the other, quickly became something everyone felt they could use. After my wife and I played a little tennis, we quickly progressed into bowling with the brother-in-law. Gradually more people wanted to play, even my Grandfather. He still found it a little daunting and the some of the timing on bowling always throws new people (no pun intended), but he enjoyed it nonetheless.

Thanks to Michael Gilbert for this Flickr photo of his father playing Wii.

This brings me to my point. All of the technologies I mentioned at the start of the post have made themselves undaunting to non-technical people. While my Grandfather had to be shown how to use a Wii he would never have considered using an Xbox or a Playstation.

The same applies to the Tivo (or Sky+, etc) while a regular VCR has numerous obtuse options and buttons, selecting the program you want to record from a TV listings is something anyone can do. Once you replace the newspaper listings with the onscreen ones it becomes even more natural.

My mother has been talking about getting a new phone.She hates the buttons on her current one. She finds them too small. She can’t text, she can’t even read texts. I think she will like the iPhone. It has a ‘proper’ keyboard albeit onscreen. You drag the address book to move it, no scrollbar or ‘down key’.

What’s the similarity in these cases? The metaphors are from the everyday life. They aren’t metaphors from computing nomenclature that only technologists are intimate with. If you think about it it makes sense. To bowl you swing your arm not press a button. To pick a program you, well, pick a program not type in some a series of numbers in steps. Sometimes I think we’ve been immersed in technology too long when we simply accept that “some people won’t get it“. Some companies are redefining the business to make technology work for people. You should make sure your company is one of them.

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wii, tivo, ipod, iphone, xbox, playstation, usability, design, nintendo, apple

For a while I’d been using Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk as a backup solution of sorts. However Amazon changed the pricing model a bit a while back, and Jungle Disk doesn’t really play nicely with rsync based solutions like iBackup.app.

My friend Sutha told me about Mozy. It is a really nice solution for backup. I like the Mac client which has some of the features of iBackup.app but is way less complex. It has Growl integration and a menubar icon, etc, the usual stuff. What is cool is that you can get 2GB of free storage by signing up via https://mozy.com/registration/free?code=C88WPG. If you add my referral code C88WPG at the end of the sign up you get another free 256mb of space, and so do I.

I haven’t run out of space yet but if you do you can upgrade to unlimited storage for $4.95 a month. Oh and the whole thing is encrypted so it’s nice and secure.

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mac, osx, mozy, backup, s3, jungledisk, ibackup

Wow. I haven’t posted anything for over a month which is a big break for me. But I just had to write a quick note about this. A post from August on the Pipes blog just arrived in my feedreader talking about the ability to extend Pipes using Web Services. I can’t express just how awesome this is.

When I first got access to the Google Mashup Editor I immediately disliked it. What the world really doesn’t need is another company pushing their own XML based web markup language. More than that it really doesn’t need one that includes mixing presentation code with content, and using table layouts.

The reason this new feature of Pipes has me so buzzed is that Pipes already gives me the lazy way to rework data with drag and drop slicing and sorting, etc. Now I can extend that to do anything with any programming language I want. More than that, I can easily make the web service available to people who wouldn’t be able to code it themselves, but are perfectly happy with the GUI interface of Pipes.

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yahoo, pipes, web20, soa, web services, mashup

The Accessibility toolbar for Firefox has a feature for developers that presents a list of the event handler attributes for each element on the page. The problem is that using attributes to set events is nasty and the YUI Event library instead attaches a singleton listener to the window which isn’t shown. This main YUI listener then delegates to YUI Event listeners which are created.

In order to get something like the functionality in the accessibility toolbar for YUI Event library listeners I’ve made a bookmarklet that uses some of the functionality of the YUI Event library. The YUI Event List Bookmarklet will show you a list of all the elements on the page that have listeners attached and what those listeners are. You can also view the functions that will be called when the event fires. It’s perfect for tracking down that elusive listener that’s using event propagation to hook onto stuff.

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yui, javascript, yahoo, web development, event listener

So Rosemarie and I have finally switched over to green power. Yay! The companies we are using are Good Energy for the Electricity and Utilita for gas.

I like Good Energy especially, they don’t supply gas, everything they do is 100% renewable. It was surprisingly cheap and should save us a little bit from British Gas. One of the the things Good Energy impressed me with was their work with micro-generation. They will actually pay you to generate your own power even if you don’t sell it back to the grid, which I assume is them making a government offsetting scheme available to the little guys.

Utilia are also good, for us it’s because they are offsetting our Gas usage. However, although they do use fossil fuels in part, they have a much better balance than most energy companies. They are investing in more green power than the government requires. They advocate energy saving quite well with schemes to award you free energy saving items such as loft insulation and light bulbs.

A cute little site called The Nag helped me switch with some great advice on which green tariffs really weren’t green. Some of the bug players in the market simply charge you more to switch to a green tariff getting energy from renewable sources. This is even though the government requires them to provide a percentage of their energy from renewable sources.

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green, energy, goodenergy, thenag, britishgas, utilia

Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.

I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of thousands of characters to learn, however once each is known the brain can easily scan and read it. However with English there seems to be much more decoding happening. Words are formed from letters which means that the brain has to recognise each letter in turn. Or at least enough to make a sensible guess.

It occurred to me this is somewhat like Regular Expressions. Regex is notoriously difficult to master, and yet once it is offers a powerful, concise way to express what could take many lines of conventional code.

I don’t think there is a lesson here, but I do find it interesting that there are a couple of approaches to both reading and programming with different advantages. One offers a low barrier to entry but repeatedly extracts a cost in efficiency, the other offers more prohibitive learning curve, but yields high gains once the threshold is reached.

I really love Regex, maybe I should learn Chinese so I can read more quickly.

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chinese, language, informationprocessing, cathyma

After a little bit of pain with video editing and writing transcripts (man that’s hard work) Shawn’s video of her talk at Yahoo’s offices London is now available. She talks about the new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and some of the other W3C accessibility standards. You can see the video and the transcript on the YUI blog.

Technorati Tags:
accessibility, video, yui, shawn lawton henry, yahoo, wcag, atag, w3c, wai