Aquarionics

People keep asking me to do the 25 things meme. Or Tagging me, or something. Since Linus Torvolds – of all people – used my idea on how to do it best, I’m going to do it differently.

1. All things are really meringue. The illusions of things that are not meringue are caused by gloss paint and superglue. It takes the supreme baker five years to bake enough meringue to run each second of our time. It requires more hens than there are space for.
2. Purple elephants never weigh more than twelve stone, unless you dip them in coffee.
3. The book that most affected the course of evolution was called “Ugg’s envelope”, and did so by being dropped on the head of someone at the critical point of conception.
4. Civilisation is no more than four meals away from breakfast.
5. If you summon an undead cactus, you will not be able to tell the difference.
6. Science has yet to work out why your toes have toasters on the ends, but assume that it’s not a mutation that will enhance the species. Sorry.
7. It has been proven by advanced magic that the missing ingredient in your last chilli was sugar.
8. In Wassock, TX, they have built a coffee mug sufficient to wake up the sleeping earth. The only thing between us and a sentient planet is that they don’t know if they should make it white or black, or how much of a bad idea getting it wrong would be.
9. Accordions are no longer banned in Westminster, but only if they do not repeat the “9th Note In The Octave” incident.
10. You cannot fold a single piece of paper enough times to balance that table.
11. The radius of a CD was specifically designed so that you could use them to put your drink on when the burn fails. The entire industry dedicated to specific objects for that purpose then collapsed, because it had been coasting for years.
12. In the next series of Top Gear, all the Stigs will be put on trial for corrupting the time stream.
13. According to tradition, the last person to leave will indeed turn out all the lights.
14. Yes, they do come with a manual. No, you’re not allowed to see it. That would remove the fun.
15. If you don’t get well soon, they’re going to shoot you.
16. There is a fundamental universal law against anyone naming a decent drink “Starboard”
17. There probably is no event horizon, now relax and enjoy your shoes.
18. The proof of the pudding cannot be submitted for scientific analysis if you have already eaten it.
19. Conceptually, it is impossible for elephants to fly under their own power in their current form.
20. There’s no such place as Brazil, everyone has been lying to you.
21. Pluto’s demotion was a coverup, really it resigned so that the affair with Tarvos wouldn’t be an intergalactic scandle.
22. Elvis is the music industry version of Mornington Crescent
23. Adding more cornflour stops working after a certian – very early – point.
24. You’ll never get to heaven in a girl-guide’s arms.

1. There are only 24 things on this list.

1. And so it came to pass that a friend of mine’s house is falling down
2. And thus it is useful for him and his family to repair it before it collapses.
3. And the chances of the insurance coming though before the ceiling does appears small.
4. And it so happens that he has a book of children’s stories, which I’m told is Good (My copy has not arrived)
5. And so, if enough people buy the book, all will be well.

1. And for more details and links to the online places that sell the books, you should go to the website created for this drive, booksforbricks.com

Merry Birthday, Happy New President, Seasons 2009ings. Etc.

One of my resolutions was to get this updated more, which is slowly failing. Mostly because at some point in the last year I broke Epistula’s admin interface (It was a choice between “Breaking Edit” and “Continuing to do an extra ~100 queries per post”) and haven’t fully mended it yet. The only thing stopping me shifting the entire site over to Wordpress or something is losing threaded comments, which I still like. Anyway.

As of early this year, I now work for Doof as a web dev (Where my username is Aquarionics) mostly building something new, but also updating Twoof, the version of the site that a) isn’t entirely flash, and b) enables you to play against your Twitter friends instead of your Doof ones.

As a side effect of this I’m developing in CodeIgniter, which is new and therefore interesting. Having moved from the modified Zend Framework structure we used at Trutap to CI, there’s a clear difference in tone. CI’s slightly more clearly documented, with less of a tendancy to assume people should read the code to know the interfaces, and has less of an objects-within-objects-passed-to-objects fetish. CI, on the other hand, avoids this by having magic global functions that aren’t easily traceable. I’m sure as I learn more of how the internals of CI work I’ll bend it further to my will.

So yes. Still Alive (it is a triumph).

And Aquarionics is 9. Big one next year.

Paul and Storm – who used to be half of Da Vinci’s Notebook, and were awesome when I saw them in concert with Jonathan Coulton a few months ago – have a Thing. A Running Joke. They create themetunes for things as if they were written by Randy Newman. The joke is that they sound the same. Then the joke became that you could do this for a great deal of things without changing much. Then it became, as they put it, an exercise in musical haiku.

For Advent, they did one a day.

This is the one for Serenity (Contains spoilers)

And here are the rest

If you’re still reading this, Merry Christmas.

Maybe next year it’ll get content again.

I now own Left 4 Dead. It appears quite good, but I would like to play with people who I can rely more upon not to, for example, hare off into the distance alerting every zombie in the world to our location and then die and demand everyone heal him.

Left 4 Dead is a co-operative zombie-based shooty game. Very co-operative. You need to stick together or you will die. You need to not be a moron, or you will die. You need to both support and rely on your team mates. Or you will die.

(And then you will play as the zombies, and the humans will die instead).

If you would like to play with me at this game over christmas – or Team Fortress 2, or many others – you should friend me on Steam:

(Viewers are reminded that the following article does not represent the views of anybody else at all by default, though they are welcome to agree if they like. This – obviously – includes anyone else who works for my soon-erstwhile employer. Keep your arms and legs inside the cart at all times)

As reported in Techcrunch UK yesterday:

Trutap, a leading UK mobile startup, is to let go almost 80% of its staff after failing to hit its window for a second round of funding. The blow comes only a month after the launch of its latest software application for aggregating social networks on the mobile, the milestone of over 250,000 users and the launch of a revenue-raising advertising platform.

Trutap, for those of you playing along at home, are the people who give me a paycheque every so often.

To quote one of my coworkers, just when we got our ducks in a row, someone switched off the duck harvesters. I am in the 80% of the cull, unfortunately, and so am currently looking for a brand new job. Trutap is a company it has been my absolute pleasure to work for for the last two years or so, and I’m going to be sad to leave it. This is the second startup that’s gone against the wall as I’ve been working for it. I’m hoping I’m not doing anything wrong…

Mostly, we’ve been shafted by circumstance. Our main investors – as the article says – wandered out of the market just as we were needing a new round of funding.

The various technical news sites have taken something of a depressingly predictable view of why we failed. Classically there are a couple of classes of detractors, both with the same root argument, embodied by this comment by “The Spy” on TCUK:

Doesn’t everyone, who’s anyone, just own an iPhone now? So this app/service is a waste of time

This comment annoys me for several reasons. Mostly because of the sheer level of bollockry it contains in a few short words. No, not everyone has an iPhone, whilst they are very nice devices (and yes, I have one as my primary handset) they are clearly not a panacea. They aren’t ready for prime time as a business handset yet (The lack of support for Apple’s own caldav server, let alone anything else, is a case in point) and whilst the battery-life is better than it was, it’s still not great. Also, they are expensive. I have ranted before on why you can’t just ignore the 99% of the world that does not have an iPhone, and so shall not do so again. This time.

But there are technical hurdles. Future Platforms developed the Java Applet bit of Trutap, and recently published a couple of articles on the process specifcally to us and also in general on the platform, and it’s remarkably like the same arguments that were being made a few years ago about developing websites for different browsers. You start off sniffing for specific browsers and using different page versions for each one, sharing as much content as you can, but eventually you realise that this is not a process that scales far enough and go for a general solution that uses the features you can find.

As for the TT service itself, it’s not going anywhere for a little while. The cutbacks are not total, and we’re aiming to keep the servers on for as long as we can.

As for me, I’ve got an interview to go to. And another tomorrow. And another the day after. And potentially another on Friday.

It’ll all be fine.

Yesterday (I rule at this Daily Update thing) was the birthday of Benoît Mandelbrot, creator of the Mandelbrot set fractal, possibly the single most recognisable fractal image there is.

So popular is it, in fact, that a Mandelbrot generator is one of the classic computer science “Look, I can do this with this” problems. For example, someone’s created a Mandelbrot generator from flickr images and there’s even an implemention in four lines of bash, but to save your sanity I can’t find it.

It’s also one of the few mathmatical concept implementations with a song written about it

Mandelbrot Set you’re a Rorschach Test on fire
You’re a day-glo pterodactyl
You’re a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You’re one badass fucking fractal
And you’re just in time to save the day
Sweeping all our fears away
You can change the world in a tiny way

The Open Rights group founding was interesting.

At a talk just over a couple of years ago, organised by NTK, someone suggested that an organisation to protect the rights of people in the UK would only cost a few hundred people a fiver a month, and that there must be enough that this would be possible.

Having fairly publicly put my money where my mouth was a year or so ago, live on Hashlugradio, I’ve yet to regret doing so. And now it’s three years old, and already getting other people schooled.

It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the nation’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

So if you give a damn about protecting your rights online and off, I’d recommend throwing a couple of starbucks worth of change at the ORG each month, in return for a warm glowy feeling, a christmas party with no karaoke, and the possibility that the rights you’re guarding are your own.

But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

Go now. Go quickly. We only have a few months to save the world

Today, I went to the Future of Mobile conferency thing in Kensington. This happens to be the very first industry thing I’ve been to where the company I work for has had a major showing, and a major showing we made today. Not only with CEO Doug Richards going on a freeform odysssy of not only the future of mobile but its present also, up to Tom Hume of Future Platforms presented a talk on how designing multiple interfaces for each phone isn’t something that scales effort very well, and scaling very well is precisely the solution to the problem. FP are the people who build the TT App.

On top of that, CTO Carl did a panel at the end, Product Manager Luke’s on the spot for a workshop tomorrow (I think) and, generally, we were Visible.

I arrived a little late, but wasn’t too fussed about missing the first subjective five hours of the Phone Operating Systems panel, and instead only sitting though the final subjective two hours. There was a running theme of “The world would be better if the Operating Systems worked together” which was to be implemented as “You should work with us”, a theme that continued though the day, with Adobe’s Open Screen thing announcement starting off with “Do you know what sucks? The fact that everyone’s solution to the ‘There are too many platforms’ problem being to create a new platform.” I actually honestly hoped they had worked out a solution to this, and indeed they have. They have created a new platform. But it’s based on Flash, so that’s all right then.

Currently there are three main problems with developing mobile applications. They are these:

1. The phone operating systems
2. The operators

1. The install base.

   1 & 2 are classic problems. There are a wide range of operating systems for phones, few of which allow for things to run on more than one of them, and the desire for Operators to not become merely another data pipe (as the land-line phone companies did before them as the Web spread) but to retain a measure of control over their users (be it by refusing to allow non-signed apps to be installed as in the US, or by limiting data use by screwing around with socket access and web proxies as in Europe. Three have even started inserting HTML into pages in mid-flight, a-la 1990s Geocities).

   The third problem is the elephant in the room that none of the proposed solutions cover. It’s all very well for the iPhone interface to be cool, for Android and new Symbian installs to allow access to the phone’s data, for the Open Screen faffery to allow porting an application from phone to browser to desktop to mind-link by redefining the interface specification, but none of those are of any use to anyone who bought a phone before 2006.

   You can’t just pull a new standard out of your arse, say “I solved it!” and entirely ignore the billions of handsets and users that are simply not using “smart” level handsets. Like the rise of CSS in the last few years, but on a much larger scale, it’s not enough to declare that everyone else is doing it wrong simply because the early adopters now have something that does it right, you can’t just stop supporting them yet. We’re not even in the transition phase, where we have something to migrate to.

   It’s getting better. Back when I was working for Internet Designers, we were working on Java-based games for some of the very first mobiles to support it. At that point, one of the phones was so strapped for memory that Nokia had sliced out the portions of Java that allowed for network connectivity. You could access the internet, or you could run a Java app, but you couldn’t do both at the same time. As functionality increases, compatibility increases, and as more companies rely on full support of the VM, it gets slowly better with phone releases. Sometimes it gets worse.

   One of the recurring themes when the tech-’bloggers’ (Still hate that damned phrase after ten years) took to the stage was that the fundamentals still have to be solved. There’s no point in developing the next wonder-app if nobody ‘normal’ will download it because they’re afraid they’ll get a bill for a thousand pounds in data charges. Comparison was made to the days before flat-rate dial-up, and for good reason. The concept of bill-shock has migrated to a new industry (Ironically, much less of a problem in places like India, where the phone is the primary network device (few people have PCs, so most access is net-café based, therefore public, therefore not used for Social Networking, both with and without capitals), because the data rate is much lower).

   It’s slow, and it’s frustrating, and I know this because I did it as a web developer, but just because the technology that makes all this so much cooler is so very close that we – the early-adopter ‘Mobipro’ capitalist westerners – can see it doesn’t mean we can leap to it yet.

   The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet. (William Gibson)

   On that note, and because I really should mention it, Trutap – who still pay my wages – launched the new Version Two app this week, with the brand new even cooler interface:

   The new application, which anyone can download for free, blends intuitive design with a range of interactive features that make finding and keeping in touch with friends really easy. Key features include: a personal newsfeed, ‘who’s online’, status & location, extended profile, searchable user directory, private messaging, email, SMS, blogging, photo-sharing and mobile IM.

   We haven’t released ports for every phone yet – there are various different versions, and they all need to be QA’d before they’re released. If you get V1 - or already use V1 - we aim to send you a trutap message soon when your phone gets the V2 version, so bare with us :-)

   If you’ve got any problems with it, talk to nicholas@ or support@trutap.net