A round-up and some thoughts

Well I think I finally found something I could write about – a general brain dump of the past few months and my useless opinions on them. Nothing spurs me on to do something useless better than the impending threat of collections in just over a week, and pretty much nothing done in preparation so far.

I started at Oxford this October as many of you know, and I have to say that the term, although only eight weeks long, has been incredibly intense. I was of course under no illusions that Oxford would be easy, but a essay being set during Fresher’s week set the tone for how the rest of the term was going to go. That being said, and while I do find myself working to the exclusion of almost everything else (except Spooks of course. iPlayer saves me again), I have really enjoyed the experience. As I am sure everyone says wherever they are in the world, be it Oxford or Bangor Tech, the people are great and the environment is fun. I never got the ‘Oh My God I am at Oxford’ revelation moment I expected, but I did find myself quietly grinning to myself at times. Although I have signed myself up for another four years of intense work and a life going at a pace that is constantly a little faster than I would like I am happy with it – experience tells me I will never pick the ‘easy’ path for myself, and so if I am going to be killing myself for these years I might as well be doing it in somewhere like Magdalen and Oxford.

During these few months the world has again changed. We saw Obama elected. Despite my cynicism around the elections about the timing of his family tragedies, I am very excited about the prospect of having someone who can string a coherent sentence together in the office of ‘the leader of the free world’ (said in suitably appaling American accent and mocking tone..). That title really does annoy me – it is self-appointed and arrogant. If the Americans were leading by any sort of example then maybe it would be justified, and maybe Obama will justify it, but time will tell. There are a few things which scare me about the US in general. The expansion of the borders to include everywhere within 100 miles of a border, thus allowing illegal stop and search in a large swathe of the US – the so called ‘constitution-free zone‘. The bringing home of marines to help operate at DUI checkpoints in California and elsewhere. Then there is Obama’s proposed citizen militia – many have drawn parrallels to Brown/Black shirts, and the dogs in animal farm. I just think of the finger-men from V for Vendetta. Time and time again it has been shown that if you give a man a badge, they assume authority and get drunk on it. You only have to look at the security people in airports who bark at you as God in their own domain to know that what little authority people think they have will make them feel superior and in the right.

No blog post of mine would be complete without the compulsory tech-related comments. The final Apple appearance at the Macworld show is this year, and the keynote tonight will be given by Phil Schiller. I am actually quite excited as I hope he won’t present it with the same smugness that Steve always did. Don’t get me wrong, the man is justified as being heralded as turning around Apple and making it what it is (I write this of course from my MacBook Pro), but the smugness and arrogance of the presentations sometimes made me feel a bit sick to my stomach at times. The question really is whether this heralds the end of Macworld as an event. Sad as it is, I feel that it does. I know that for me and some other Mac-centric friends Macworld is pretty much only about the keynote. We will follow it on twitter or engadget, and then forget about the other two or three days. I would love to see a show of hands in the Moscone theatre of who would have come to Macworld if there were no Apple keynote. My money would be on very few hands being raised.

As I write this, the final thing which springs to mind, mainly because it is a ‘breaking’ story, is that twitter was hacked. I wonder if it is coincidence that this has happened as the publicity of twitter has spiked recently. I saw a Daily Mail story lamenting how the celebrities share the minutiae of their days via tweets, and a few weeks back they were whining about Jonathan Ross having the gall to enjoy his suspension and to tell people about it. They had the stock indignant Tory MP saying that if he was enjoying himself so much then maybe it should be made permanent, yada yada, but the point is that twitter is being noticed. Barack Obama used it during his campaign, although since it has gone almost dead since the election, I reckon people’s hopes of tweets from the Oval Office along the lines of ‘Off to meet Vladimir. Oh Joy! *sarcasm*’ will not be happening. As twitter becomes more and more popular, not only will it be plagued with even more scaling issues like those we have become so used to with unacceptable downtime etc, but just like as the Mac platform gains Windows ground, they will become a bigger, juicier target for people wanting to have a bit of a laugh and gain some kudos with their friends. The recent twitter hack was achieved by gaining access to the twitter admin tools, as confirmed by @netik in a video interview with Leo Laporte. While I am very encouraged by their transparency on the issue, it is a pretty serious breach for something which is becoming so popular, used by many ‘big names’ as a platform.

Hopefully this toe-dipping back into blogging will spark me to write more stuff, but in the mean time, I hope all had a good Xmas and New Years, and that 2009 isn’t as much of a blackhole as it is looking like is it going to be.

iPhone galore…

Well iPhone day has come and gone in the UK and Germany. Here it launched at 6:02 (why, oh why, did they make that joke?!) on Friday 9th, and seems to have been quite well accepted. I have had a fair bit of personal experience with the whole process thanks to both of my parents getting one this weekend. Activation is relatively painless, although having to wait a few hours for O2 to get their act together on this before you can really use the device and learn its intricacies was rather annoying.

As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.

Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!

I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?

Peer-to-Peer, Torrents, and Politics

Recently a lot of what I have been hearing about, reading about, and discussing, has been based on peer-to-peer and/or ‘copyright infringement’. First we saw tv-links.co.uk shut down and its founder arrested. He called it a hobby, and claimed he did not think he was doing anything illegal, and while this may well be true, The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) claims that it allowed users to access “any one of a large number of films and television programmes directly via the website. This is illegal under UK copyright law”. I look forward to FACT raiding Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask.com, etc and taking them down, considering they act in much the same capacity depending on the search criteria. It looks like a lot of sabre-rattling, and FACT having to act once told to by the US studios. Whether they would have acted independently we will never know.

Soon after this we saw OiNK, the hugely popular invite-only BitTorrent search engine and tracker, taken down and the owner/operator arrested by UK Police. Again it is a grey area, in my opinion, as to whether these people do anything wrong when not hosting any actual content. What I have found more amusing, and yet worrying, is the massive amount of misinformation that seems to have gone out with this story. Many of the quotes, from IFPI, BPI and Cleveland Police, imply that OiNK was a subscription service which users had to pay for, or that it was run for profit, both of which are untrue. The worrying lack of proper research into this, and the then misrepresentation, means that to the lay-person, the site and the community around it look much worse. Anyone who is not tech savvy, and even some of those who are, do not know how these things work, or what they are, and so when an organisation like the police is quoted as saying that the service was ‘lucrative’, this is taken as the truth. As far as we can tell, all donations to OiNK were used for the upkeep of the site, and key members of the community have stated that it was not run for profit. Who to believe? Both sides have an agenda here, and so it is your call. As a side-note, I called it a community for a reason. While the site has been taken down, the community has reformed in several places online, and I doubt that they will be kept back for very long. Another site, formed from the same users and philosophies, will launch before long and they will simply upload their content from OiNK to it. However, CEO of the IFPI, Jeremy Banks, is quoted as saying that sites like OiNK are “not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” At least I will now have no qualms lending a friend a CD for pleasure! The possible backdoors a statement like this opens for a file-sharing community could too be interesting.

With all this in the press, and the obvious political slants to it, it was inevitable that ministers and officials would wade in, under pressure from the record industry. One such minister, Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is quoted as saying that Labour would legislate if ISPs did not clamp down on file sharers. The record industry is pushing for such users to be automatically disconnected from the net, which seems like a bold move for the under secretary for innovation to be backing, especially considering the main demographic of file-sharers is those of University age, who are also the greatest hope for future innovation! Another example of the government sending mixed messages. While they make good points about the importance of availability of, access to, and investment in the Internet, they are trying to appease the industry, mainly because of the tax revenue it brings them, and in doing so alienates the users and contradict themselves. While it is understandable that record companies want to look after their profit margins, they do not seem to be able to push a policy which doesn’t cast them in a terrible light and make them even more hated. Along with artists dropping their labels left, right and centre, this would suggest that the industry, in its current form at least, is on its last legs.

Ultimately laws follow what is common practice. Actions are not currently in line with the legal situation, and this leads to these kinds of conflicts. Eventually of course the laws will change to reflect how we, the people, do things, but until then those with a vested interest in keeping it the way it was in the good old days will continue to use them to attack the easiest targets and make examples of them.

What a difference a week makes…

WOW. This week I was in Wales for a Field Trip for the first part, and then have been ‘blobbing’ since then – doing and achieving very little, but enjoying it. Just thought back on the events in Tech of the past week. We have seen TV Links being shut down, with the 26 year old owner arrested for the technological equivalent of ‘aiding and abetting’ piracy and copyright infringement. A sad day I think all will agree, and the implications of this decision may be more far reaching than we would like to think. It was said that would, for example, I also be guilty of this if I linked to TV Links, just as they linked to the sites which hosted the content? We will see but I hope this is overturned.

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ’stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)

Twitter while out and about

Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) was the school’s founder’s day, meaning that from about 12:30pm the process of shipping all 1000+ pupils and staff over to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London took place. This meant that myself and the others on twitter were split up in during the transit and service, and so we found that twitter was to be the desired medium for communication. Worked surprisingly well, and was an amazing use of it.

When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…

An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.

Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…

The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up

Well as I said before, we went off to ExCel in London’s Docklands to the Future of Web Apps conference on Wednesday. It was simply amazing! We arrived at around 8:45am, and were greeted by the booths with passes. Of course this was too simple, as they didn’t have my pass there… That said, the organisers there were amazing about it, and simply gave me a blank pass which got me in. Whether they would have done more stringent identity checks had I asked for a pass above the £5 expo-only pass, because they didn’t even check my name, I am not sure.

Once the initial ‘drama’ was over, we explored the expo-floor. It was a ghost-town at this time in the morning, which it turned out was because a lot of people were already there, but in the ‘Showcase Stage’ where some of the paid talks were taking place. First things first, onto the free WiFi provided for attendees of FoWA. For this the ‘Microsoft Lounge’ provided the perfect seating arrangements – Microsoft Visual Studio, and Expression-branded beanbags. Much Xbox 360, and Halo 3 playing ensued, as obviously it would have been rude to not play when Microsoft had provided six networked Xboxs for our amusement…

Once the conference got going, we had a wander around the floor, and some of the exhibits were really good. Meecard looks very interesting, and may finally lead to an end of the many different new services cropping up which are effectively a clone of an existing service, but with one new special feature which means everybody must switch. Instead, I can set up a meecard (such as my own here) which can have as little or as much data on it as I like, and links to most of my social services. While something like Google Reader is a News Feed Aggregator, I see meecard as a Social Aggregator, bringing all of the social services I use to one easy to find and comprehend place.

Another of note was Wakoopa, who not only had hacked iPhones there to attract people (it worked!) but also were talking about their next big planned development – to log which Web Apps you use (should you choose to allow it to). This means that it will record how long you spend on, for example, the GMail webpage. I queried on the privacy implications this raises, and they assured me that instead of sending your web history to Wakoopa for analysis, the Wakoopa client will instead look for specific sites which they can log, and only send usage info for these, so it does remove some of the privacy issues, although I am not sure how comfortable I would be with something putting my specific web usage onto a public page, and what info they displayed would be of great importance. That said I will be looking at these new features with interest if, and when, they are released.

The Microsoft stand was also interesting. They were talking about ‘Expression’ – their competitor to Adobe’s Creative Suite. A friend of mine, who is an avid user of Photoshop, with some astounding results (see here), mentioned that from the looks of it Expression was more accessible to users who were unfamiliar with Photoshop. For someone like me, who has always been scared or beaten by Photoshop, this is good news. One thing I did find very amusing was that the main computers that Microsoft had for Expression were MacBook Pros. One was running Windows Vista through Boot Camp, and the other was running in OS X, but it was a surreal site, and the last place I thought I would see those!

The other main highlight was meeting Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht – the hosts of Diggnation. It was purely by coincidence, in that we were sat in the foyer of ExCel, and they walked in. After about 20 seconds of umming and ahhhing we decided that there was nothing to lose, and went to introduce ourselves. This was amazing, and they were great guys, although they couldn’t talk for long because they were running late in preparation for Kevin’s keynote speech, and for the later live filming of Diggnation.

The Diggnation filming began at 7:30pm, and lasted for an hour. This was fantastic to see, and a great experience. Kevin & Alex basically got rock-star treatment, arriving on stage to cheering, applause and blaring music. One thing I noticed was that Diggnation had actually filled the ‘Showcase Stage’ at FoWA more than Kevin’s Keynote speech about lessons learnt from setting up Digg and Pownce, which said something about the popularity of this particular podcast! The ‘episode’ was great, and they were very good, managing and entertaining the crowd, as well as doing what they were there to do.

Photos from the day can be found on my Flickr here, and on Alex Muller’s here

Future of Web Apps

Here at FOWA, on the free WiFi. The conference is amazing! I love it. Some classic moments such as seeing Microsoft demoing their Expression system on MacBook Pros (admittedly one was running Vista in Boot Camp but still…)

More to follow,  but in the mean time – Just found this on Flickr. Awesomeness!

FOWA & Thomas Vander Wal

Well we are off to FOWA tomorrow morning for what is looking like a fantastic day. Spending the day on the floor, and then going to the Diggnation Live filming. Plus I get to leave home later than usual which is always a bonus! We will however not be able to see any of the speeches, because we didn’t spend £250 on the passes which get you those.

However today, Thomas Vander Wal is coming to talk at school, thanks to him knowing our Director of ICT. The talk will be about Thomas’s speciality – Social Tagging and Folksonomy. Should be really interesting. Hopefully we will get a preview of what he will be saying when he talks on Thursday at FOWA.

Future of Web Apps

Next Wednesday a few of us are being let out of school for the day to go to FOWA – The Future of Web Apps Conference. This is at the ExCel centre in London’s Docklands, and looks like it is going to be amazing. We’ve only got the £5 floor passes so we won’t be going to any of the talks, but we have been told that the speakers etc. can be found on the floor when they are not presenting. Who would I want to speak to? I am not sure… I think it would be amazing to meet Kevin Rose and others like him. For someone like me, these are the ‘celebrities’ although I think that could turn out being more of an insult than a compliment!

On the same day, after the conference has finished, there is a live filming of Diggnation – Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht’s video podcast about some of the week’s stories from Digg, and we will also go to see this.

Personally I can’t wait, and neither can the others from what I have gathered. One Week!

‘Mum is no longer the word’ – A follow-up

Firstly my thanks to Thomas Ricker, and Engadget for their live-blog of the event, which I followed this morning. Really good, as ever.

Well, as expected, we saw the announcement of the UK iPhone, running on the O2 network. My prediction of them launching immediately was (sadly) off, and they will be available from November 9th. This begs the question what the curtains, and the store closure until 4pm, is about. I am off to Regents Street this afternoon with some friends anyway, so we will see what (if anything!) is different.

The UK iPhone is the same as the current US model, and so we did not a see any form of hardware upgrade. Steve hinted that by this time next year we will have a 3G iPhone, in saying that they expect the battery life issues to be resolved by then. It is therefore running EDGE, which is bad news frankly. The EDGE coverage on O2 in the UK is shocking – indeed the demo model that Journalists saw this morning wasn’t even detecting EDGE in the Apple Store Regents Street, in Central London! While EDGE may be the major coverage service in the US, here and in much of the rest of Europe 3G is the way the networks have gone. It is a shame that this hasn’t been taken into account, as it will mean that the iPhone will probably get bad press from day one when it goes on sale officially here, with the features like Internet Browsing and Song Download needing WiFi connection to be remotely useful. Note that O2 has said that they have partnered with ‘Cloud’ to provide free WiFi in over 7,000 locations. Whether this makes up for it I am not sure…

While the announcement was good, I can’t say that I was wowed by any of the announcements related to Apple. Indeed one of the only ‘at last!’ moments was O2’s announcement that as of October 1st they will make all of their contract plans unlimited data.

Regardless this was a great morning, and I am hoping that by the time I get there at 4pm today, they will have put out the iPod touchs in the store for general consumption. I get to play with a multi-touch display at last!