John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Christmas web traffic: 31 December 2007: The news talked about Christmas day web surfers and how they were expecting 3 million of us to go online and shop on that day. Curious. I've had a quick mooch around and I can tell you they weren't sorting out their insurance. However, they were looking at sofas. Is it really just that we sit around on the sofa long enough over Christmas to get intimate with its shortcomings and resolve to change it? Ours would be fine if there weren't bits of chocolate ground into the fabric.
Shields: 31 December 2007: SciFi space ships always seem to have shields. But they haven't been invented yet, nor does there seem to be any prospect of such a thing being invented. I know we haven't got the equivalent of the Enterprise either, but when watching Dr. Who it just struck me as being weird that shields always seem to be available. "We're being fired on sir", "yeah yeah, just put the shields up and chill out". I can see the literary benefits of having a matter transporter and magical ways to mend people, but shields seem to make battles more boring. Whereas doing the stuff a real fighter jet has to do (I know this because I once played F19 Stealth Fighter (quite a bit)), chaff, anti radar behaviour, evasion & outmaneuvering all make things more exciting. I don't remember Red Dwarf having shields.
The Bauhaus: 30 December 2007: MIMA has an exhibition about the Bauhaus, and the more I read the more fascinated I am.; What follows is a whole load of impressions, prejudices and ignorances, the chaff from my mind's threshing over the facts trying to work it all out. If I write like a first year on the subject, it's because I know nothing about it and am excited about my discoveries.; Basically, turn of the century, 1900 Germany was a staid place run by an established aristocracy with a military powerbase. A movement for socialism gained popularity and, there being not a lot of shared ground between those two ideals, World War 1 ensued .. no small thing, it deserves more than those four words. Communism subsequently taking hold in Russia inspired similar desires in Germans, leading to great political instability.; The Bauhaus school of art, craft and technology came out of that time. One noteworthy issue it tackled was how art and manufacturing mix, so we get a number of notable product designs (for chairs for instance) from here.; The big deal for me, though, is how the Bauhaus sought to teach design from first principles. History was ignored. So we get simple, modernist designs.; What I'm getting to is how that must have felt as a reaction to the mayhem that preceded it. Simplistic, pure designs as opposed to political mayhem.; What's interesting me, too, is I have memories of Germany as a romantic place. A place of idealism. Where the West and the East met. A country divided. The Berlin wall. There was the film about the murder of the Green politician Petra Kelly as that Green party rose to prominence. And Baader Meinhof. Big ideas being played out, with people prepared to die for them.; It makes me think of that idea of French philosophers, Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir sitting in some cafe in Montmartre toying with the big ideas. No idea if I've mixed up generations here.; Contrast that Germany with todays. From the outside looking in (I've never been there), we characterise Germans as being soulless, almost robotic. Certainly not lovers of beauty. I'm sure that's probably not the case, but it is the image portrayed.; So then I'm interested in how geography and history influence a people. That Wikipedia link about the American Gold Rush is still with me as an amazing period in history and, again from the outside looking in, it seems to have influenced Californian character.; Does that mean Germans nowadays have learned to keep a lid on their passion because of the price they paid?; And does modern Germany with its fractious history, give us a model for, say, a stable Balkans? Obvious for anyone who knows their history, but I don't so I'm excited.; Does it mean that underneath modern capitalism lies revolution and war. That if we are not distracted by the latest Wii games and the January sales, if we are not comfortable, then people become more wedded to principle, more willing to die for what they believe (particularly if they have nothing to lose). So is capitalism really what the World Bank says: the great peacemaker? We may kick against it when we don't quite get what we want, but there's no sense of an imminent popular uprising here in Scarborough.; Wow. I'd best get down the sales. In the interests of world peace, you understand. I'm serious. Perhaps the secret is to enjoy the ride, love what life is for us (in the wealthy west), the possibilities, the freedoms, and yes, to promote that for all. Perhaps Bush is right about democracy and capitalism. Glory be!; I got my lowest mark ever in history at school: 19%. I wanted to learn about the second world war, to understand it, because both my grandfathers fought in it (I think, not actually sure). But we did stonehenge instead. Who made that decision?; We went to the MIMA Bauhaus exhibition and was, in truth, a tad disappointed. It was a bit dry, there was nothing about fonts (which I was interested in), and no sense of a historical perspective. But I guess that's Bauhaus for you .. a bit passion-free, soulless. Stand-offish. Yet at the same time, it appears to seek unity, the truth. Church-like, perhaps. Cult-like, maybe. A simple truth is attractive, but perhaps truth is complex, perhaps too complex for us to understand.; All that I've read about the Bauhaus has been about the people who taught there. What happened to the many students?; It's not a Bauhaus building but comes from similar ideas, Le Corbusier's Villa La Roche in Paris is built from first principles (ie. soulless, scientific ones) but just filled me with joy as I walked around it.; So is Bauhaus soulless? Or is it divine? I can't decide.
wikiHow: 30 December 2007: I've been having some fun with wikiHow. I might even follow the advice for how to shave, I'm thinking at 46 I probably ought to be able to do this. Can't work out the instructions on how to spin a drumstick though, method 2 looks like what I'm trying already. And how to roll your r's .. I'm willing to try although it sounds rather difficult. Maybe that's a new years resolution for me.
The History Boys: 29 December 2007: We watched The History Boys last night on the telly, and it was fantastic. It doesn't sound like it will be, but it was. If you liked Dead Poets Society (I love it), this is pretty similar. But maybe The History Boys is better if you're English (it's set in Yorkshire) and I think it's a richer experience. Kaleidoscopic, jam packed full, multilayered and beautiful. Plus Frances De La Tour is still very sexy indeed. Genuinely more so than, for instance, Kylie. So all in all, recommended. Looks like we'll be seeking out more Alan Bennett things. We even considered going down to London to see The History Boys in the theatre, but, maybe not. Interestingly (or not) the last time we went to London to the theatre was quite some time ago, to see Frances De La Tour in a one-woman show.
The AllsVom scale: 29 December 2007: I propose an International standard measuring system for cat vomit, rather like the Richter or the Beaufort scale, based on the number of sheets of thickness kitchen paper you dare to use at once in your first attempt to tackle it. I propose we call these new units AllsVoms. A 1 AllsVom vomit is probably just phlegm, confidently dispatched with just one thickness of kitchen roll. A 2 AllsVom sheet vomit is your usual pile of undigested food or a hairball. A 3 AllsVom vomit is probably an unusually large pile of unchewed food, enough to erode your confidence in just 2 sheets. A 4 AllsVom vomit is where food and water combine, possibly from a height, and ending some distance from the cat. A surprised look on the face of the cat is usual for a 4 AllsVom event.; Obviously this would be based on standard kitchen paper, the international standard sheet being kept in a temperature and humidity controlled environment in a secret vault in Berne.; The international adoption of such a system would cut down on lengthy household discussions. Of what did the vomit comprise? Who was the culprit? Much of this can be cut down to a simple report. "I just cleared a 1 AllsVom Mitzy" or "Sorry I took longer to get breakfast, I trod in a 3 AllsVom Kanba" or at A&E "I slipped on a 4 AllsVom".; I would encourage families adopting such a system to keep a record of the time saved .. the Allsvom system aids record keeping and statistical analysis .. and around this time of year to add up the savings achieved. By considering, perhaps, a minute's saving for each use, less the time required to train the family in its use, and then working out the value of that time in terms of earnings (minutes saved * salary / (weeks worked * hours per week * 60)) for each family member, a value figure could be calculated. I propose that is put to good use in a suitable charity (buying lottery tickets doesn't count).
Benazir Bhutto: 28 December 2007: Obviously I know nothing about Pakistan or its politics and am commenting through western eyes given what we are given by the news, but if I have any Pakistani readers, I am sorry to hear your news.; Anyway. Benazir Bhutto.; Here's someone who knows something about it, and here's a list of newspapers in Pakistan, I'm not sure how to choose the most reputable and unbiased one.
It's Christmas: 24 December 2007: It's Christmas. At the risk of sounding like someone on QI, according to Wikipedia, many ideas about Santa come from a poem published in 1823 called A visit from St. Nicholas reproduced here. Actually, the entry is quite specific that's at the root of the popularity of a number of traditions in America. In conversation it turns out to be possible that the poem gathered together a number of existing ideas here in Europe and perhaps packaged them into a single vision. Anyway, it's rather spesh.
My wish list: 24 December 2007: After watching Downfall and adding some books on German history to my Amazon wish list so I could better understand how it all happened, today I logged into Amazon and it said "Make Your Wish Come True. You wished for The Coming of the Third Reich. You might also consider The Third Reich in Power." Yeah. I think I getcha.
The post: 24 December 2007: The news is full of gloom about how people have shopped more online but perhaps not everything's arrived in time. I've an idea for next year: buy stuff earlier. It's not as if Christmas is a surprise. Anyway, this blog is about equity theory, which goes something like this (my partner is a work psychologist): if you treat your employees badly they will nick your stationery (etc.) until they feel they've got you back, or made it fair.; It's not long ago the Post Office workers were out on strike. I have a strong but completely unfounded feeling that many will have pledged to themselves to seek restitution over Christmas when they are really needed. But the Post Office employs lots of temporary workers at this time, the reports are of everyone working very hard, and the Post Office says it will deliver everything that was posted by the deadlines. So that's OK then.
The Saturday papers: 23 December 2007: The Sunday paper ritual for us starts on a Saturday (or a Friday if I get confused about which day of the week it is, a problem when you work for yourself and aren't haunted by the fear of turning up to an empty office if you get it wrong), when I take the morning stroll to the newsagent and buy an Independent and a Guardian. We got bored with actual Sunday papers, the Saturday ones seem better.; Saturday morning for me is then, at least partly, about sitting in bed with The Independent, eating toast and drinking proper coffee while trying to ignore the increasingly desperate looks on the faces of our three cats who are, honestly, getting quite concerned about the food situation.; Sunday is the same, except I've developed the habit of reading the Saturday's Guardian. Buying two papers is a fix for the male/female newspaper issue where the bloke obviously takes the serious news bit leaving his lady friend to make do with the travel section and the 50 best handbags survey.; For a few weeks now, The Guardian on Saturday has been a lot more interesting than the Independent.; There's Charlie Brooker, of course. And Ben Goldacre's crucial 'bad science' column in which, this week, he looks at the science around anti-oxidants and concludes it's all marketing bullshit and actually they might kill us early. Fantastic.; Sometimes you get the sense the journalists have had a conversation in the canteen. This week, Charlie Brooker talks about classic films that you think you know but actually you've only seen bits and clips and never actually sat through them. He says by actually watching them he's discovering they are really quite good. Then Goldacre mentions a similar thing. Wow. Brooker and Goldacre in the staff canteen, mulling over the world. Talking about their cars and what they are doing for Christmas. I'd have loved to earwig on that conversation.; Speaking of which, I did always have a desire to bug the tables if I ever ran a cafe in order to discover what people really thought of my food. This mutated into the idea of feeding all those mic leads into a speech recognition system to turn speech into text, and pouring it out into a cafe blog and a display in the window. "People in this cafe are currently talking about organic & free trade cocoa, their pin numbers, buggery and whether Peter Biggins smells". I can't decide whether having your conversations turned straight into a blog and poured into t'Internetscape would be a turn off or a turn on. Probably the former. Good job I don't own a cafe.; Then there's a perfect Indy story appearing in the Grauniad instead: All government decisions are to include the cost of carbon emissions, £25.50 per tonne for 2007 rising to £59.60 a tonne by 2050. Exactly the sort of thing Brown excels at and what I'm really looking forward to. Deeply thought through, the right thing to do, full acknowledgment of how decisions are really made. Very cool indeed.; I only hope it's real. Marks and Spencer's dropping of its "10 items or fewer" signs (back to the bad English of "10 items or less"), shows how it's done. Get loads of press coverage for making a stand for the English language, appeal to your upper middle class customers, replace all the signs with "10 items or fewer". Then later, quietly revert to what you always used to do, and push another PR button. Do that ten times, and you have ten lots of PR benefit but since you relented on all your announcements you are actually unchanged, still doing exactly what you've always done.; Then there's sexual etiquette courtesy Marina Hyde. I won't go into the details, you can click for that. Actually, the way I wrote that gives the impression I disagree with what she says, I don't, I think what she's written is fabulous. It does raise all sorts of questions though, which is exactly what a newspaper seeks to do. Does that mean if you don't read a proper newspaper you're missing a chance to exercise your brain?; Finally. I've kinda stopped buying magazines because I subscribe to two or three and they are piled up waiting for me to have a moment to read them. I refer to them, but there's rarely a moment to read them. But there we were the other day, outside again, stood in W H Smith agape at the shiny magazines, wanting to be seduced by them, and I was amazed that in this Internet age magazines still seem to be flourishing. I've always loved magazines, and used to be in PR. Loads of new and specialist titles I'd never heard of: Organic Gardening magazine. Two magazines for drummers, for chrissakes. Maybe that's because drummers can read two at once while practicing paradiddles with our feet. Our magazine industry is simply beautiful, a real free market hedgerow mess with magazines struggling minute by minute for position, circulation and ad revenue.; On the one time I went to the US I really wanted to stand in an American newsagent, open my arms, throw back my head and have the flesh blown off my bones by the awesome power and number and size of their magazines. But it didn't happen. Maybe I was in the wrong part of town, but from what I saw, they don't have the same thing at all. It's big names only. None of the diversity. "You want a what? A magazine? I'm sure I had one here somewhere, buddy, just hang on a minute."; But EMAP's in trouble. I must be missing something.; All that from Saturday's Guardian. Did I feel that need after reading The Independent? No.; Right, that's earthed my brain, now I can get on with some work.
The Omagh bombing: 22 December 2007: Just a thought, but the BBC news coverage of the Omagh bombing, calling it the biggest single atrocity in the history of the troubles seems to ignore the fact that the Brits at best ignored Ireland's difficulties during the Irish potato famine in which perhaps 1.5 million Irish people starved to death or died of disease who wouldn't have otherwise (a fifth of the population or thereabouts), although perhaps they would argue 'the troubles' didn't start until after then so, technically, they were correct to say that.; I know it's a while ago, water under the bridge, all that, but as Bill Hicks said, I'll stop talking about that if you stop talking to me about Jesus.; Gotta say too, it seems like a right cockup of a police investigation. I've no clue whether the chap was guilty or not and I've no links to the place or the people involved, but even I feel aggrieved.; And, may as well gather all this together, a comedian on this week's Comedy Shuffle who tried to say that the suicide bombings here are funny. Yes, funny. Because a) the bombers want to convert Britain to Islam, when it hasn't even converted to Christianity yet, and b) they choose to try to do that by blowing up themselves and others around them. Yeah, it is kinda funny in a squirming, uncomfortable, very true kind of way.; Sweet dreams.
Sharon Lewis: 20 December 2007: Sharon Lewis is playing locally in January, apparently. I'd not heard of her but the website's nice enough. I tried looking at bigger pictures though, and it didn't display them, so I looked at the developer and he seems fair enough so I thought, in a spirit of togetherness and mutual whatever I'd drop in a line to say what I'd found. I used the contact form on her site because when you click for the developer it's not immediately clear how to contact him. So I carefully crafted a description of what I'd done to cause the problem, what I was seeing on the page, and what browser and OS I'm using, all the stuff you need as a developer to work the problem out. Then I pressed 'send'. The form rejected me saying I wasn't using a legitimate email address. But I was. In an instant what was a spirit of bonhomie and mutual help and itHappensToUsAllness turned to stopWastingMyFuckingTimeness. And that, is that.; It might be a good example of form over function. What's the main function of a site like this? To enable people to discover your music and get in touch. I was stopped from seeing pictures and couldn't get in touch. Imagine the opposite where I could see big pictures and get in touch, but the site contained garbage hieroglyphics, a window 300 miles wide, no colours and a message saying Sharon Lewis couldn't care less. It would get sorted out sharpish wouldn't it? That's an assumption, but I just don't understand why that would be more likely to get a response while a functional cockup, like rejecting people who legitimately attempt to get in touch with attempts to be nice, is allowed to happen. Bet they spent a while going "can you shift that bit left and make that blue".; Can you tell my own frustrations are creeping in? LOL. It's not happening at the moment, maybe it's only happened once in my whole career actually, but it's certainly happened that I've gone through the whole process: project definition, project planning, analysis, engineering, maybe a couple of months of work, emailing the client and letting them know what's going on and what design decisions have been taken and then suddenly when you put up a preliminary web page the client wakes up and goes "oh, well can we have more of this and make that bigger and I've just had a great idea why don't we do this" which leads to more time than is called for being put into how the site looks, often flies in the face of decisions you took earlier based on deep knowledge about things like readability and accessibility, while eating away at the budget for other things, like checking the contact form works. It's fine, obviously some people need to see stuff to make decisions, if that was a problem during development I'd be guilty of not providing accessible access to the development process. It's just the whole being led by the visuals thing, which I can sometimes find predictable and frustrating because I don't think I'm made that way, sound is what drives me I think (given the pop psychology choice of visual, aural or kinesthetic), and because it's a hill I'm constantly running up: a pretty website is an easier sale than a functional, accessible and standards-led one. You need both, incidentally, because obviously customers are visually led too but when budgets are tight guess what gets cut.; I was, actually, able to hear the music and get as far as almost paying for an album, so I guess functionally the site works in that regard. But I think all things considered I'd want to know she was really there and hadn't moved house or something before parting with my cash.; Incidentally, there was a fashion at one point for using a contact form rather than publishing your email address on the web in order to stop spammers, but I don't 'get' that either. My email address is all over the web and has been since about 2000 and, well, I just checked my email trash and out of 30 I trashed this morning, 1 was spam (the rest were mailing lists I requested to be a member of). Sure, I have a decent spamfilter on there. That's kinda that, surely. I never did like the idea of making things difficult for the client in order to make your life easier, and it is difficult because if you make that contact through the form, it means what you wrote isn't in your email client outbox where everything else is, so you've no history. The person's not in your addressbook either, so there's no record at all, so if they don't reply, you've got to have some sort of system to enable you to get in touch again. I'm a belt and braces kind of chap, I don't trust to receiving a reply. I just went through this trying to get some software support: I only got a response on the third request and each time I got in touch I'd forgotten what I'd sent previously.
Clever programmers: 18 December 2007: I'm developing a problem with clever programmers. I had the chance to look at a proposal from a fabulous sounding development team comprising overseas (ie. cheap) developers. Their Gantt chart showed, yes, overarching management stuff, but basically it said from day one: we're going to program this module, then this module, then that, then this ... ending with ten days of testing.; That didn't give me a good feeling. At uni, there were two types of programmers. Those who were clever and wrote code in a burst of genius, and those who programmed for the long term (which is how we were trained). Basically coding is a bit like meditation, you get into the zone where the whole system is loaded into your head, and if you're good, you can just code. It flows. You feel good. Everything makes sense.; In the morning, however, you're no longer in the zone, and what you wrote seems foreign. To everyone else, it is foreign. You may have written working code in an afternoon, but no-one is ever going to be able to maintain it.; The software industry pretty much convulsed, last decade, under the realisation that programs last a long time (the Millennium Bug was because we were, at the end of the nineties, still using code written in the sixties) and that, over that long period, a huge amount of time and effort goes into making the code follow the business it supports as it inevitably changes. Code is cheap to write, but expensive to maintain.; Once written, too, it's difficult to summon the will to write code afresh. It always seems more cost effective to amend, update or change what we've already got because it kinda works and we've invested £x in it already.; The problem of unmaintainable code was addressed in a number of ways. One was object orientation. Here, real-world objects, eg. sofas being sold on Sexy Sofas (not originally my site, not my design, and not object oriented, but moving that way under my stewardship) are represented by software equivalents that you can query. For instance, once you've created a sofa software object you can ask its name, its price, its delivery time, and you can have someone (represented by another object) run the buy-method on the sofa of their choice. It's all very understandable because it's analagous to real life. You do talk to your sofa don't you? And when, and why, did we stop calling them settees? Anyway, when you come to maintain such code, it's obvious where to look to make changes.; Three tier architecture is another improvement. Here your software system is split into three (think of them as horizontal) layers. The top layer deals with the interface: what you see. It contains all the messages and screens and handles things like whether you are looking at the system using a desktop PC or a handheld WAP phone, and localisation (languages, currencies, address formats). Underneath that is the business layer. That contains all your business rules such as whether people can buy things if they don't have an account with you, how you re-order stock, how you allocate tasks and so on. Underneath that is the data layer which interfaces with your data storage systems and any special hardware. Splitting systems into these three layers, each comprising objects, again makes it obvious where to look when a problem occurs or change is required, and helps to ensure that there is only one right place for any particular piece of code, which reduces duplication.; As an aid to all this, there's UML, a set of standards for drawing system diagrams. Much software is created without any system diagrams at all. The existence of UML is a good sign because it hints that someone's actually thought about the optimal system design and, assuming the software followed that plan, it provides a quick view of what the code should do.; I'm not sure what the word is for this last technique but for any non trivial software I create Use Cases. There's a Use Case for every human interaction with a computer system, eg. Use Case 1: new user registers with system by clicking a [register] button. User is taken to a screen where they enter their first name, last name, email address .... and it ends with the user being logged in and with an entry in the database. This specifies the system, and it means when you've gone through systems analysis, engineering, programming and testing and come out the other side, you can run through the Use Cases and check the software does what you wanted. Moreover, it adds vertical columns to the three tier architecture, because every Use Case has, at the very least, a user interface object at the top level to support it, if not a business layer controller too.; There's my other issue with the gantt chart I saw. For me, programming should come 3/5 of the way through the project (well, it depends on what methodology you're using). For me, up front should be some form of system definition followed by an analysis stage that takes what the customer asked for in human terms and fleshes it out into a proper systems specification. For instance, if you ask for there to be a list of countries in a drop down box, what actually, is a country, who defines that, do we need to allow people to click regions for shorthand country selection, what's the initial state (are there default countries), and what will happen when countries change (Kosovo, for instance, looks like becoming a country in its own right soon)? Having done a full system specification in the analysis stage, the engineering stage looks at how that's going to be implemented in the system. Who maintains a definitive country list? Can we get hold of it? In what format? How often will we update our list of countries, how, and who will do that? How will that affect existing data: eg. when Yugoslavia broke up, how would we code up pre-existing clients in Yugoslavia if the code for Yugoslavia disappears? All of this is a royal pain in the arse, so no-one wants to think about it. But these issues are real and have to be dealt with before you start coding, otherwise, you don't know what to code. Or you have programmers making business decisions, which makes no sense.; Actually, because I do what I do and work in the field I do, I add in a final stage after coding and testing: marketing. Internet marketing mostly. Again, there's little popular realisation that just putting up a website isn't enough. Nowadays, lots of people are using some Internet marketing techniques to get better search engine rankings, generate traffic to their site and convert them into sales. To be successful, you have to be much better than that. After all that website work, there's probably at least the same amount to do in Internet marketing.; Anyway, back to the code: add in a good few software patterns (proven ways of organising your code) and you have a system that makes complete sense and is maintainable.; Such a system is more expensive to build, but it's much, much cheaper in the long run. There's an article in the current edition of New Scientist that talks about procrastination. Obviously I've put that aside to read later, but I scanned it and it said we are motivated to do enjoyable things that have immediate reward.; Now, UML diagrams are the most boring, tooth pulling things to develop. It's much more fun to just sit down and code. It's cheaper (in the short term), and faster too. But it's the difference between being professional and being child-like. It's satisfaction now versus much greater satisfaction later.; Yet at the same time, we are very motivated to buy mobile phones on a 'pay as you go' tarif because we shy away from long term committment. Coding fast and loose creates a long term committment to expensive maintenance that's just as real as signing a long term phone contract. Once you're using software, you have to maintain it, just like you'll have to buy a baby seat for the car if a baby comes along. Your environment changed, and you can't do anything but accommodate it.; Given all that, I was really surprised that in the first proposal I've seen from a supposedly professional software development company, I saw none of the professional stuff I've just talked about and lots of stuff that looked like clever programmers just coding. The more the proposal said how clever their programmers were, how everyone has a PhD, the more uncomfortable I got. The cleverer the programmer, the worse the problem: the more tangled a nest they can build in their head.; And I was also disappointed to find people I respect and like making what I perceive to be decisions based entirely on the short term, without seeming to realise the horror of the maintenance problem they were about to create.; Having said that, of course, if a business doesn't have a long term, then short term is all there is. I'm not privy to that knowledge. They may have been making the only decision they could.; I'm in favour of relatively stupid programmers working in a good way together. Given a professional development environment, you only need average programmers to create excellent and maintainable code. Don't be fooled by clever programmers.; If you're buying software, I'd say push hard to find out how maintainable your code is going to be. Ask about how it will be designed, at the top level, for maintainability, and how the code itself will be structured for maintainability. Ask to see the code from a previous project to see if there are reasonable comments. Keep pushing on maintenance until you're really satisfied, maybe get a third party in who knows software development to pass judgment. Maintenance is where the costs are.; Once you're happy with maintenance, I'd push on usability (how do we know your software will be usable, what tests will you run) and accessibility (let's try closing our eyes and see if we can still use your software) and findability (what will be done to give us the best chance of being found in the search engines (if it's a web project)). Clever programmers just don't come into it. Actually stupid users very much come into it. I looked for a local shop for a friend the other day in Google, and because the shop came up in various directory listings on the front page it transpired later they got the impression the shop had lots of branches. There are huge costs in help and support for websites, and the same plus training for internal software. Usability testing cuts those costs enormously.; To avoid embarassment, these things should be right up front in your request for a quote. Otherwise, even I might end up on my back foot, since we tend to provide what we think people want and will understand, with a sprinkling of what we know they need. All this costs money up front (but saves it in spades later), and if the client says "I want code by next Thursday" and I say "well first I want to spend the amount you want to spend on the whole project just on formulation, planning, analysis and engineering", I'll be broke by Christmas. Sometimes even the good just provide code. Customer is king and all.
Night night: 18 December 2007: Bad night's sleep. In my halfsleep I invented a new saying "sweaty as a bee's tit", which presumably is based on bees being busy and having breasts.; I also invented a new reality tv program called "the ride to nowhere", where two teams battle it out to create a journey of interest. They do that by combining their travel knowledge with a kind of Scrapheap Challenge mentality, or perhaps natural history skills, to create a mode of transport that takes them through an interesting place. Yak trekking through Ilkeston, or Harrods by tank. Anyway, the most interesting combination wins and there are no points for arriving anywhere useful: it's the journey that matters. Maybe I'd build a shrinking device and saddle up on the back of a chlamydia spore. Are those schoolkids still reading this? I'm thinking, if Charlie Brooker can write in a national newspaper that (memory errors excepted) the Spice Girls have all the style and panache of a hasty crap in a motorway service station, then what I just wrote is perfectly acceptable nowadays. That comment swam around my head as I tried to go to sleep, occasionally bursting forth as a laughter snort, which kinda irritated my partner. I like the Spice Girls though, especially Sporty: chick a chick aaaaahhhhh indeed.; Anyway, if tonight I get to weave into my reality show idea a way for the contestants to look younger at the end of their journey, and to have benefited from an unrealistically great property deal, then I think I'm on to a winner.; I think all that's based on a really beautiful card my girlfriend bought me, the Zen Dog from Edward Monkton.; It would be great, just once, to see a reality show about someone who was born, got a job, worked hard, fed the kids and brought them up nicely, had a nice retirement, and was nice to people. Nice.; Finally, I dreamt our good friend Stevio was (in Spiderman style) lizard man, and he was climbing up the outside of the house at night using suckered feet on the windows in an effort to get in through an upstairs window. I was irritated by this because he was leaving marks on the windows which I'd just cleaned. That's how I knew it was a dream: me cleaning the windows is rare indeed.; So now. Hands up who wants a website.
Ditto: 17 December 2007: Beth Ditto and The Gossip. Can't fault it. I saw her on some BBC coverage, I thought of Glastonbury but I can't find it now, might have been T in the Park, where she stripped down to her underwear and I was genuinely inspired and uplifted. Also: only three people in the band (guitar, drums, and Beth), but what a sound! I didn't know what band I'd seen and have only just worked it out, courtesy the NME's roundup of the year and an article in The Independent this Saturday. Fabulous.; I was going to write a faux letter from a retired air force Wing Commander in order to emphasise my position as a latecomer, someone outside, looking into what's going down with the kids. But I couldn't be arsed, you'll have to imagine it. It would have contained the line "she can trim my control surfaces any time", but that would have been the best bit, the rest just transport for that line, so best not, eh?; The website doesn't quite work for me though. The giglist is out of date and doesn't scroll properly on my browser, so it falls over on the sale, which is bad.; It did lead to a conversation about how women don't form rock bands much, and I got a big revolutionary thrill imagining four or five of our middle aged women friends in a band together. Revolutionary in the sense that .. it doesn't really compute, so it shows bands as either all guys together getting sweaty and rocky, or guys imagining all sorts of antics with everyone from Blondie to Girls Aloud. So a band of real women who aren't pumped and botoxed, whose first concern isn't how they look, who have got up to play music just like guys do, that's revolutionary. I could only think of (another example of my outoftouchedednessitynessness) The Slits. Even they got naked on the cover of their album. So, anyway, Beth did her job. Maybe I'll add Typical Girls to The DT's next tune vote.; Interesting, too, I always thought they had a Camden feeling about them, and through the beauty of t'Internet I tracked one member back to Crouch End, just a stone's throw away.
The train 3: 15 December 2007: Perhaps part of the strategy of the train companies is to make train travel upmarket, to bring back the romance, make it the civilised way to travel. Perhaps even to steal what was the romance of flight. If I travel in the company of people willing to spend £150 on a day trip, then that's a select group of people. Less so than travelling first class, obviously, which I've never done, but people who do seem to be of the opinion that it's worth it partly because of the people you meet. I have done business on the train before now.; On the other hand, flying is rather common nowadays. As I blogged before (I thought, but I can't find that now), any old taxi driver can buy flights for a fiver through the year and then choose on the day whether he actually flies or not.; As for buses, well obviously they are populated with single mums, people on their way to the dole office and old people. Sweet though that might be, and conversing with any one of them might well be enlightening and beautiful, none of them can be expected to be able to afford a website.
York: 14 December 2007: My birthday happened recently and we tripped out to York to see the Tracy Emin exhibition in York Art Gallery.; I don't know whether it's the economic mood, my mood, efforts to use less energy, or a requirement to spread what was the Christmas budget more equally among the different cultural festivals, but the towns don't seem very Christmassy this year, there are few lights and just not a lot of effort. Which is fine.; The morning, incidentally, started with this sight: how close the cats had come to causing a disaster in the night.; We went to City Screen where I notice nothing much had been done about what happened to me on my last visit. We are getting into a regular City Screen calamity actually, because this time I'd misread the timetable and having waited for two hours (in a pub, granted) for our film start time, we turned up only to find the Tuesday timetable is different. I blame usability, but it could be my stupidity.; Anyway, here's a picture of the urinals at City Screen, York:; Sorry it's wonky, but you have to be a bit sharpish if you want to take a photograph in the gents loo.; Notice how there's a light directly above each urinal? Very stylish. I didn't. So I stood there doing what you do and then something dawned on me. My head was getting hot. 6'6" is a magical figure in building. It's the height of a standard door. So these lights are pretty much 6'6" off the floor (maybe a little more, but I was wearing shoes too of course). But, that's my height. So the top of my head was burning against the light. It's comedy, I know.; But as I sat in the film I got more and more distracted by the feeling that I'd burned the top of my head. It rather spoiled my enjoyment of the film and afterwards, being a programmer at heart and therefore a lover and a follower of systems, I asked to fill in an accident report. Which all went well. They found it, I filled it in, the manager came over to check I was OK, which I was. I just wanted it noted and I wanted to follow the system, that's what it's there for. And because in truth, it really pisses me off (ha ha, geddit?) when buildings make me feel like a freak. I'm not a freak, I'm just tall.; Anyway, no-one sent me any commiseratory cake, and they haven't shifted the lights (yet), but they were nice on the night.
The train 2: 14 December 2007: the morning train; the sun on english landscape frost and the woman who says "it's beautiful" to her friend on the phone; the large group of athletic kids, and the quiet coach; the chance to text friends; discovering that National Express trains provide free wireless Internet; the woman with the foreign accent and funny shoes who smiles at me when the buffet trolley woman won't take the used milk cartons she just sold me because she "doesn't have a bin facility"; Alexandra Palace; St. Pancras and the new concourse, and its emptiness, and being lost in it; the woman and the kid for whom the railway bridge steps are too big; the businessmen from Geneva, Dublin, South Africa and yes, Scarborough, who joke about women because they met for the first time a few hours ago and, when all is said and done, that's what joins us.; the bottle of birthday champagne and the tales of the maharaja and being escorted off the plane to their accommodation by two elephants; the rule "if you don't trust people, you'll get nowhere"; the on-time taxi; the Luton born taxi driver whose roots are in Kashmir (here too). He was there two weeks ago when it was 45 degrees. He asks about me and where I'm from and is interested, and talks of his desire to learn The Knowledge and his school love of a Turkish girl who he married, who had an affair and they divorced. He can hold his head high, he did nothing wrong. He's married to an Armenian woman now and wishes me a happy birthday and a safe journey; the eternal Kings Cross Swatch stand; the worried mother, the daughter who's seen her, and the hug; the young man in the expensive coat; the series of young women at the information desk; the row of seated travellers, no free seat; the sheer multinationality of all around; the flower seller packing up her stall; the freedom to eat takeaway and chocolate without guilt; the woman at the fast food outlet who says "here's your lovely food, take care, it's hot"; feeling safe; Arsenal football ground in lights; the Newcastle accent, and the Nigerian, the French and the Scottish and the Jewish man in the seat in front reading a book written in squiggly writing; the fresh, cold coastal air of home; I was let out for a day
The train: 10 December 2007: I've been called to a business meeting in a hotel near Harpenden (north of London). One of the people I'm meeting is flying over from Dublin for £20 return. Me? I'm going by train for £143.; So all that nonsense about how people prefer their car because it's their own personal space and so on. Well, yes but it also that they can't afford the train.; It's actually quicker to drive, too. At the Inland Revenue rate of 40p a mile (or thereabouts) it's only slightly more expensive to drive. That price takes into account the purchase of the car and its depreciation.; Clearly what's happening is people want to travel by train (I want to because it means I can work (and earn), rather than drive for eight hours of the day), but the train service has limited capacity, so prices are being used to throttle demand. Well, prices are accurately reflecting demand and supply.; When there's so much pressure on roads, and on the climate, none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Where is our train line building programme?; All this only revives my desire to go to work on horseback. The only problem with that (neigh, there is surely more than one), is I work from home. It looks cheaper.
Visitors: 9 December 2007: For some reason I just got the feeling maybe I'm talking to myself here. But no. I just checked. 4,500 unique visitors to this website in November. And I'm not even promoting it, just doing what I do. Maybe I could use my fame to raise awareness of Ethiopian orphans.; Update: I ran my November blog against this 'how much is your blog worth' calculator. The answer? $0. Thanks a bunch.
Alex James: 9 December 2007: Farmer Alex James is heartily getting on our (my partner's and my) nerves. Not content with being part of the very irritating Blur (I only ever liked one of their songs (the later one with the choir in it), the rest was public school rich boy tosh .. I mean, Country House .. c'mon (I'm still hurt over it beating Oasis's majestic Roll With It)), and then writing his memoirs "A bit of a twat", he's now on every page of every newspaper, giving us his opinion about anything from south American drug barons to the most stylish hat while pushing his latest speciality pork. I'd never do that, dear reader.; The only reason we haven't started a campaign to get rid of him from our newspapers, alexjamesisaprat.com or whatever, maybe a poll on the government website, is that it would play into his self publicising but sweetly humus smelling hands.; It seems like a path others seek to follow, however. Gary Lightbody, the singer from Snow Patrol, was there yesterday reporting on child soldiers. Something like that. What I want to know is: why couldn't the paper send an actual journalist to write and investigate that story? If it's that fewer of us would read it, then we should be absolutely ashamed of ourselves.; As you know, I genuinely hold journalism in the highest esteem. I really don't want my newspaper written by pop stars any more than I want the radio to be full of music written by journalists. Journalists must despair. Still. One foot wrong, James, just one foot ...
Peter Brewer Goldsmith Ltd: 8 December 2007: I have a new case study for you: Peter Brewer Goldsmith Ltd. It's a goodie, take a look.
The Hoover building: 7 December 2007: Ooh, I just remembered, I dreamt one of my B&B landladies had sold up along with her neighbours, the land had been purchased, and in its place was a building a little like the Hoover building in London. It had security guards so I couldn't see what was going on inside. My dad's just been taken into hospital (but he's OK), and I think the sense in the dream was my B&B lady had died (she was just in hospital too, and she's perky now) and so her 'land' had been sold. That's the root of it I think.; I wonder if there are more than the fair share of car crashes outside that building, because I remember when I first drove past it, before it became a Tesco's, my jaw just dropped. It's a beautiful thing.
Splat!: 6 December 2007: There's a copy of my first single on eBay atm. Well, not 'mine', quite, but I was the guitarist in Splat! and this is 'our' first single. We did it all ourselves barring going down the vinyl mines (that was how things were done at the time), it got played on the local radio and twice on Peel. The middle of the record was a white label and we had designs made in rubber stamps and I remember getting all the records out and stamping those designs on them.; The reason I noticed this on eBay is someone just emailed me saying they remember Terry Christian playing Yeah The Dum Dum (the main track on that record) loads in 1983/4 and saying he's been looking for it for years and wondered if I knew where he could get one. Amazing.
Morrissey not racist: 5 December 2007: It's a delight to read Morrissey's rebuttal of the NME's accusation of racism. My only fear is that the publicity surrounding the legal action, which reached mainstream news, will bring the NME back into people's consciousness (precisely the people who used to read it when it was good and who now watch the news) and cause a 'hmm, maybe I'll buy one to see how things are going' moment, leading to higher sales, and vindication of the actions of the NME's editorial team.
Monkey intelligence: 4 December 2007: Would everyone please stop saying that the chimps that can recognise a series of numbers on screen proves they are more intelligent than humans.; I mean, it's impressive, I can't deny that. But I really thought most people recognised that intelligence is a very ill-defined term and can't really be tested for and is therefore pretty meaningless, so I don't think all the news channels, including Channel 4 news (you should be ashamed), AND their science correspondent, had to say that word in order to help us to understand it.; The science correspondent even said the chimps recognised the value of the numbers. Well, no, they recognised the sequence of a series of shapes. They still wouldn't be able to pay for their groceries, they didn't really have a sense of the meaning of the shapes.; So. OK. At best it's a test of short term memory. Whoopedoo. Lots of animals have capabilities greater than mine. Birds can fly and I can't. Fish can breathe underwater, and I can't. Britney Spears can sing and dance at the same time, and I can't. It's a matter of being evolved for your environment. I'm sure recognising shapes is a pretty important skill when you're stuck up a tree in the jungle all day wondering what's lunch and what's going to bite you to death. We have other things to think about.; Chimps aren't more intelligent than humans, OK? Can we stop saying that.; Actually, I've worked out how magic tricks work. Every night, I run through the same routine with our three cats. I take some medicine from a bottle with a syringe. I take out a tablet. I get the dry food ready, then I open a sachet of food and feeding starts. All the while this is happening, and over the months this has been going on, the cats have no clue what's being placed where nor where the food actually comes from. They just mill around the dishes waiting for the magic to happen. It's beyond their comprehension. Sleight of hand for cats. So all magic is, is sleight of hand that's beyond human comprehension. Simple.
Post Office woes again: 4 December 2007: On the 21 November I received one of those notices that someone had sent me something without paying the correct amount of postage. I immediately went online and paid it. I think that facility might be new, I don't remember that being there before.; Then I patiently waited for my item to be delivered. It kept not arriving.; Although I work from home and the Post Office is just a ten minute walk away, the collection office is closed in the afternoon and the mornings is when I do most of my work on a good day, so I didn't get around to going down to check.; Today, I did, en-route for some flour tortillas that M&S had run out of yesterday and some blank DVD+Rs (because I erroneously bought -Rs several months ago and only just discovered I got the wrong sort). Postie looked through the box of underpaid letters and couldn't find mine so went around the back to find a different chap with a beard. He looked through the same box, found my letter, and gave it to me with an apology.; The package was a strip of lithium batteries which I'd paid 99p for on eBay. I paid £1.85 for postage and packing (which consisted a DL envelope with my address handwritten on the front). Then I paid the 6p excess and £1 for the Post Office to not deliver my letter, twice.; However, while running yesterday in the pitchest black night and under the most beautiful clear sky I saw mars rising over the sea. So you've gotta get these things in perspective.
Global warming: 4 December 2007: If you're inclined to protest against the warming global change climate, there's an international day of hot action on Saturday. There's a protest in Scarborough, meet at 12 outside Marks and Spencer and walk loudly with like minded souls to the Spa Suncourt.; If you want to do more than that, get up early and get on a coach to the London protest. Call Jane on Scarborough 363930 for your place on the bus.; On Thursday, there's a workshop to make the banners (the alarming warming warning hoardings) and so on at Crescent Arts 10-4.; The website is www.campaigncc.org.
Art masterclass: 4 December 2007: I just had an art masterclass in Critical Theory which feels like the equivalent in the arts of knowing your stats in science. It feels like I just discovered Narnia. Thanks Tracy.; Checkout Matthew Barney too: 1, 2, 3.
P J Harvey: 2 December 2007: I wasn't quite prepared for P J Harvey on the increasingly essential The Culture Show last week. The video clip they used was just jaw dropping, taking on male sexuality and eating it alive, like the spider that eats her mate after sex.; Then the interview, and the song aftwards. Pam Ayres meets Twin Peaks.; I'm going to need professional help to deal with that.; Meanwhile Long Snake Moan is in the list for The DTs to vote on. Dive in
Gordon Brown: 1 December 2007: It just occurred to me, I wonder if the unrelenting bad news dogging Gordon Brown atm are down to Gordon not working well with the press. Remember, he's the man who wants to move away from spin. I just wonder if he's annoyed the press.; There was a glorious example of that on Channel 4 News yesterday. David Abrahams, the businessman who wanted to help Labour and also keep out of the limelight, also seems not to have spoken much to the press except for releasing statements that aren't timed well with the media's deadlines. So the program went researching, found all the companies David Abrahams is linked to, totted up their total net worth, and wrote it in big letters on the screen: £23,000 (more or less, I can't remember the exact figure). It's exactly the same tactic as the red tops use on celebrities: "we're running the story anyway, don't you want to put your side"?