In a past article I talked about the issue with “Mob rule” with the internet, except I also proved, to myself certainly, that my ability to communicate needs work.

Thankfully through the BBC’s Digital Revolution project, I discovered Clay Shirky makes the point much more succinctly.

For those who want to have a go at putting a programme together, this is a must see project, and I think the outcomes might be very interesting (or at least quite humorous). It certainly illustrates the amount of work needed to put a programme together.

Back to the Internet’s voice… another rush on the site is one from Danah Boyd, who is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft looking at young people’s take on the social media and the effect it will have in their lives. A couple of things struck me about this:

The Permanence

Pretty much everything you commit to the internet will at some point end up being copied in some form or other. Whether it’s in google’s cache or in the Internet Archive, it will be copied, unless you make sure at a technical level that it isn’t… except everyone can copy and paste and “Save As…”. In essence it will always be there and you have no idea who will see it. An interesting point is when Boyd comments on her teenage past and the blog where she wrote about “working through issues” and a humorous hope that the presenter would not read that part of the blog. This makes me wonder: Is one of the things about growing up best served by forgetfulness ? Everything can come back to haunt you and how much right do complete strangers have to trawl through your past and haunt you with it ?

The Boundaries

Another really well made point is the idea about a Teacher. A Teacher as a person enjoys the same rights as most of us with the exception that their standing in the community is different, which means that behaviour that may be appropriate for anyone of their age/peer group is suddenly not. The internet has actually increased the amount of scrutiny and not in a good way. Why is the fact that a single teacher is on a dating site a cause for concern ? Why should the pupils know about it ? Why is this attached negatively to the job, when it really has nothing to do with it ? The Internet is now a wonderful way to bully someone and argue with people who if met face to face, you’d never say a word to. Is this constructive ?

Positive Contributions

So in the face of this, what is the positive parts being brought to the table ? Well some people point to the better political participation by people (sat “in their pyjamas – Gina Bianchini, CEO Ning).

This frankly I don’t buy. To me, the internet is noise. Any real meaningful contributions are still happening in the non-virtual world. I’m reminded that in the 80s BT thought they might put the airlines out of business through video conferencing. The internet is very good, as Clay Shirky points out, at creating places for lots of people to argue about things. One example is that when Obama got into office, one of the top things that came back through his website was the need to legalize the smoking of marijuana. I think that most of people would agree that in the grand scheme of things, that really isn’t a top priority except to a small vocal and organised minority who think otherwise. What about the Iran riots ? Well frankly, what about them ? We are left with one memorable youtube video (it’s not really SFW, and you can use your favourite search engine to find it) and not much in terms of change. The “voices” on twitter seem to have come from US/UK supporters changing their location to “Iran”. 8,600 people does not a majority make in a population of around 70,000. For all the technology it has not addressed some serious issues in people feeling that they are disenfranchised about the political system. If anything Social network would in fact drive groupthink, where people would be pressurised into voting similarly to their peer group, which the balloting system is supposed to avoid.

Speaking of “peers”, what exactly is a Social Network friend ? Are they representative of “real” friends or more likely then not, acquaintances or work colleagues (there may be overlap) ? How can you represent this ? How do you make the distinctions, and make them work as they used to do ? People have their little groups, there are the “work friends”, “university friends”, etc. Each group operates mainly without the knowledge of the others, and this is how we live now. Is this simply cultural or a way of protecting ourselves from some form of emotional overload that having 200 “friends” would bring ?

So the good news. The most you will get from life will not be from the Internet, and in fact most of the “real” things will probably never go near a social network. What does go near it, will escape from any control you might think you have and be there “forever”. Which was the point behind a now infamous piece by a young banking intern. People are social and like to talk, which is why the phone has not been replaced by video conferencing. The internet allows us to do many things, but it’s still pretty dumb. You still need to talk to someone when you work, and you can’t get the computer to know your personal circumstances in times when moral or ethical, or more bluntly, compassionate aspects are in play. In theory the ability to organise small groups is no much easier, but attempting to provide democracy or social mobility is certainly not working now. A world without borders sounds great, but no-one wants to pay the bill for it.

In a few posts on this blog I’ve tried to make the point that you need to know your local market. It seems Google are beginning to wake up to this… well, in Japan anyway, people in Eastern Europe or for that matter Western Europe will have to make do with an American viewpoint.

If you think about it, it shouldn’t be that unusual that a large corporation changes to suit it’s customers. But it is and it is noteworthy because it makes you wonder how many times a corporation has moulded the customers expectations to fit a “need” that is created for their products. Street-view has been a wonderful case in point in the UK and EU with people on all sides trying to determine the legitimacy of it – and in some cases the need for it ? Most times we need a map, not a picture.

How many times has a vendor pitched a product that will integrate “with a few changes to the surrounding infrastructure” ?

Hacker news brought me the delights of this post on the point that the Chinese language can express more in fewer characters then English. Something I can vouch for which makes translation from English to other languages painful for me.

Anyway, the scary bit, Twitter doesn’t allow 140 Unicode characters !?!

Look, if you say character, you should mean you support any Unicode character! And yes, that may in fact be 560 bytes, but come on, English is not the only language in the world.

One thing I’ve noticed is that often larger corporations, especially those who have a large installed base seem to start “hating” their customers. Which is an opportune moment to read this.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. In media or TV it’s hard to determine what your customer wants, you can’t really invite several million people in and ask them. The first thing that might happen however is that your product design starts to reflect the “prejudices” of your business in terms of how you see your customers. The bigger the spread of “ability” – for want of a better word – the harder this is. If you sell something technology based, and your audience ranges across the entire population spectrum, you are likely to play to the majority share in that market, which can be frustrating for some as they think you are treating them like idiots, and others might think it’s too advanced.

The nice thing about competition is that it does work these niches out, and then provide impetus to address each part of the market appropriately.

The crazy thing is, your customers aren’t that bad. After all they pay you money. The tricky bit is figuring out what they want and what works for them.

Everyone in Software is familiar with the “Iron Triangle”, the triumvirate of Time, Features (Functionality, or Scope), and Resource. In summary, these are the three factors that control any project, altering any one of them always alters the effect of the others, with enough Features, Time, and Resource, you have a high Quality product.

In recent years all the various methodologies have focussed on trying the win the “Time” argument, to stop the idea of time limits being set up front and thus reducing the Functionality as the Resource is generally fixed (which even if increased may have less benefit)  which may in turn lead to a lower quality product.

This has lent some credence to a new myth, that projects don’t need to have deadlines or set time limits, and in fact shouldn’t have in order to create good “Quality” software.

And in the real world…

This is a joke. Let’s start from the very beginning, suppose you are asked to deliver a project, you will generally be asked three questions, never mind all the ones you should be asking, those three are:

• How much ?
• How long ?
• Who do you need to hire/what do you need to do it (you could suggest this is how much) ?

Consider that everything you do has a deadline, even if this deadline is not the one for delivery. It is important to set a goal, and often this represents a line in the sand, where you can evaluate the progress and determine if you can proceed.

If you doubt this, consider what you ask the guy who comes to install your cable. If (s)he fails to turn up when they say or takes 2 weeks to wire a plug, you are not going to pay them. When you bought your house, your bank didn’t give you money that you could “pay back when you wanted”, they attached a timeline to it that reflected a best guess according to your capability to pay.

The Punchline

Your project has a deadline. It will always have one. Your aim is to have a realistic one, and that assumes the business understands what it is trying to have delivered. Even then a deadline is not your enemy, it marks a decision point for others to determine if they want the deliverable. It also acts as a focal point for your efforts, provided that the focus is not panic. There is no point in the argument of “it’s done when it’s done”, the money running out stops that dead. Remember the bank who lent you the money for your house, they don’t stop the clock because your job did. The bad news is that the bigger the organisation, the larger the number of levels that the deadline has been established over… so maybe the idea started at the board, so the CEO has a point in time in mind, then the Architects get the idea, and at some point there has to be a business case, and this will always need a deadline!

Practically, you have the following options:

• Cheap and quick – may never get upgraded/fixed, but will do, soon find out how import the deliverable really is
• No time at all – build a prototype, be upfront about it, if it works out, you can work on the full system, if not, well software doesn’t take up landfill.
• No resource – establish your own timeline of what you need to achieve – if the shortfall is obvious, either you get more resource, or time.
• Work nights! – this is not an option. Unless you are 20 and can work on 3 hours sleep, you’ll start spending 50% of your productive time fixing what you thought you achieved. Don’t do it. The odd hour fine, night, no.

Or hopefully:

• Just enough of each of the three parts of the triangle – due to the business understanding what needs to be done and having funded/invested appropriately

Conversely:

• Too much time – things wander and all three parts can be wasted.

Good luck with the deadline

Well it’s been a while, and in that way I thought I’d talk about a little project I’ve been doing in the meantime. It’s interesting simply as an exercise for how a project unravels, especially if it is a learning exercise.

So what’s the problem

Ok, I have a bathroom with a door. No big surprises there. The door is a fire-door, this means it’s a fairly dense door with fire-retardant material and a chain linked to a (very) strong spring connected to the frame to pull the door shut. Parents hate these doors, as children will trap their fingers in the door at least once

Now, the problem, both the door and the frame have been painted and repainted over a period of 4 years but not sealed properly, so wood stains and rust from nails in the frame are discolouring the paint, and the damp from the bathroom causes the wood to expand during the winter as it doesn’t dry out properly. To add to this the door handles have corroded and are starting to turn green rather from the original brass. Goal: as part of an overall renovation, repaint the door and replace the handles and hook in order to improve the bathroom.

Solution

Many possible solutions, I picked this one: Strip the door and frame using Chemical Paint Stripper, then seal and paint the door and frame and replace the metalwork with new handles and a hook.

Simple, eh ?

Ok… here we go:

How long ?

Should take a couple of days. Paint the stripper on, then strip the paint with a stripping knife and then repaint the door. Fine. Take the door off since it’s going to be easier to carry it downstairs to the garage, where it will be easier and less messy to do this.

First problem. Door is heavy. Very heavy. It’s a fire door! It’s not something I can carry downstairs and then 200m to a garage. Gah. Ok, get hold of a large canvas sheet with polythene backing and put the door on that. Paint the chemical stripper on. Turns out that one pot covers about 2/3 of one side of a door. Aaargh. Oh, and you need to leave the stripper for 6 hours. The fumes will also make you loopy.

Aaaargggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Carry on regardless

Ok, next day… get more chemical stripper, lots more. Oh boy, not cheap. Go over the rest of the door… whilst attempting to prop up the door. Paint the door frame and architrave with the stripper. Leave for 6 hours. Start attempting to take off the paint. Where it works it’s taking off the paint as a skin or powder, but it is patchy, and it hasn’t worked equally well, also the paint that it was trying to remove was not even… many, many hours are spent stripping the door and the frame. The fumes mean taking a lot of breaks.

After this… apply more stripper to take off the patches left… more fumes. At this point in September there appears to be no wind, so leaving the windows open doesn’t generate any draft to suck the fumes out. Things start to go woozy…

The Door

The door turns out to be a couple of layers of wood grain effect veneer on cardboard, with dense chipboard in the middle. I find this out by noticing that the stripping knife takes the grain veneer away leaving the “fluffy” cardboard. I begin to wonder why I didn’t buy a new door… then I remember on the occasion I looked at it and noticed it seemed smaller then the other doors in the flat I measured it on a whim and it was in fact 2/3s the width of the other doors. So it was smaller then expected… need to keep it. At this point it is no longer the weekend and various social engagements and the need to go to work get in the way. Together with my wife coming back home, and visitors coming, the door has to go back on the frame. It still has to be propped open which is inconvenient when visitors are around.

It is as I’m putting the door back on that I realise how strong the spring on the chain is. Top tip, when taking a fire door off it’s hinges, first take a nail or a screw and push it through one of the links in the chain nearest the door when the door is fully open, this saves trying to pull the chain back out and crushing your fingers when you fail. Count me as lucky here.

The Frame

The frame takes a long time to strip. Architrave is not a nice thing to try and take paint off. Eventually it all mainly comes  off. After a while the effort versus the gain weighs in favour of stopping. In hindsight, I should invest in a Detail Sander, which I would have used to get rid of the last few bits of paint. At this point two coats of primer/undercoat are being applied. 2 hours between each coat. More time… also the tin that covers 10m2 is beginning to look empty. Get new tin.

The Final Straight!

Ok, door is on frame, check, painted with 1 coat undercoat/primer, check, sanded down to remove most of the issues with the “fluffy” material exposed, 2nd coat undercoat/primer, check, new tin not needed, check, wood filler to correct holes created when new “privacy lock” was installed, check. Door closes…

AAAAAAAARRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

Gah. Right, sand door. No. Hang on. Take spirit level. Check door. Door is – believe it – or not straight. Hmm. Check frame. Frame has a bulge. In multiple places, in fact the frame is pretty trapezoid… ok one more trip to hardware store for sander (and to return undercoat/primer). At the store we opt for a cheap planer instead. 10 minutes work later, and the door frame is fixed. So fixed, the door should never stick again. Re-paint.

Back to The Door

In the meantime I’ve added a hook to the back of the door replacing the old plastic hook – taken off long ago now –by creating pilot holes with a nail. Sue me, I’m not buying a drill with a 2/32” drill bit just for that. Hook is fine.

New door handles, same model as the old one… except the holes and dimensions have in fact changed without notice. NEW holes for handles. GRRRRRRRRRRR! In the process the bar (which had to be shortened as it is sold oversize !?!?!)  for the lock part of the catch is bent, so turning the lock is now very stiff.

I still have a couple of parts to paint even now…

So what have I learnt

Projects can grow legs, without experience you can never plan enough up front, a 2 day job took me 7 days. Next time… well I would use a different approach, probably not involving stripping the door which from a cost and time perspective probably wasn’t worth it except for the odd dimensions in this case. The power tools would have meant a much better finish. All in all the end result is not bad, it’s not great, but it’s a lot better then the starting point.

Stuff to apply to projects in general:

• Measure more – checking the frame and door upfront would have told me to need to plane the frame, checking the handles would have meant better preparation of the various pilot holes and filling of old holes.
• Leave more time if you haven’t done it before – being over optimistic, nice idea, but you won’t be popular.
• Cost/benefit – getting new tools and material recovery – is it really worth it ?

Oh, and while you’re here, I’m not endorsing any products here, just stating what I used

Amusingly I got a link to Joel Spolsky’s post on Unicode by one of my Italian colleagues. The punch line being that even though we both work for a European company (owned by a US company) we can’t seem to be able to put the accent on the last ‘o’ of his surname – which should be ‘ó’ – in the User Directory of the mail system.

It also made me remember that I’d had this post in my reading list for a long time. In essence the point being made is that complying to Unicode standards does not mean an implicit use of UTF-\d{1,2} although for some reason which escapes me, this is exactly what .Net and Java do by having UCS style chars which are 2 bytes wide (or wchar). Great. Why ?!

Anyway, the point, Unicode – support it, you aren’t an island, no matter what Ted says, even if you never release your code to a non-english speaking country use a platform that supports it so on the chance you do, you’re ready. Given the number of places that need this (Hint: it’s the majority!) it’s going to make sense at a programming language level and on your product. If you’re using XML and ASCII the chances are you’re converting from ASCII to UTF-8/16 to process the XML even if you’ve specified ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1). If an encoding to support Unicode is there, use it.

For those in Europe and pretty much anywhere else in the world, it’s a must. In the US, I guess you can afford to annoy Spanish speaking people, hey ?

So GPS now means you can find anything, anywhere… but it does seem that trying to create a shortcut around having to look at maps and learn some basic geography doesn’t really work, as this couple trying to find Capri found:

"Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat," said a bemused tourism official in Carpi.

Do me a favour, when you need to get somewhere, learn the area, you found your way around before GPS, you can still do it, and someday that will come in handy.

The City have managed to do something that the rest of the Web have yet to figure out, which is get someone to point out why participating in social media isn’t really… um… social.

"Teenagers do not use Twitter," he wrote. "Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless."

The full article is here: Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert | Business | guardian.co.uk

It also begs the question, what are these people going to be like as customers when they become the next set of wage-earners ? I’m glad I don’t work on a newspaper… but then I’m also worried about the “summarise” aspect. Will any kind of intellectual investment in the world around you become a thing of the past ?

Gaargh! Upgraded Ubuntu and simply upgraded my existing problem. For some reason which I cannot fathom, my desktop with it’s nice wired connection is not permitted to connect automatically. With the wonderful new GUI based tools I can’t simply tweak the boot scripts to fix it.

This is definitely more painful then needed, but this works (with thanks to the people over at the Ubuntu forum):

1) Setup /etc/network/interfaces to have an appropriate entry for the         
interface you use such as:

   1: auto eth0

   2: iface eth0 inet dhcp 

You may also wonder why that entry is not already there… I know I did!

2) Purge the Network manager:

   1: sudo aptitude purge network-manager network-manager-gnome 

3) KILL the remaining Network Manager processes (if you don’t; any DHCP sessions you try and create will not bind)

   1: root      5749     1  0 11:59 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/nm-system-settings   

   2: --config /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

   3: xxxxx     6328  6086  0 11:59 ?        00:00:01 nm-applet --sm-disable 

4) Restart the networking:

   1: sudo /etc/init.d/network restart

The Pros of this approach ? There is now hopefully only one thing managing your network and it will no longer do it by creating merged config files in /run to do it. The Cons ? You lose your nice status icon. You may get over that.