Thom Lawrence

Like, oh my God: In the second week of May, the BBC News website will be completely liberating the availability of its content.

We’ll be happy for outside websites to dip in and take our
headlines. We’re also adding new feeds, like one with the most recently
published stories, and still to come will be an RSS search telling you
when reports have been published about particular topics you are
interested in.

We’ll have a piece of that, I would hope.

Just got email through from PlusNet informing me that they’re abandoning their plans
for a Fair Usage system. They still claim they’ll clamp down on people
using the network 24/7. Seems to me that broadband companies are
becoming more and more like software companies. Every time a bottleneck
looms, just wait a while and everything’ll speed up to solve the
problem. Does Moore’s law apply to broadband? For how long?

Great thread over on the Joel forum: Great lost projects from your youth. Mine:

• An Amstrad game where you looked under shells for a pearl. When you found the pearl, a new level with more shells spawned. Each time, you were given a teeny little bit more time. Most addictive thing I ever made.
• Another Amstrad game where you shot at TIE fighters out of a turret.
• A QBasic action adventure. Text mode, you went around a map looking in buildings for treasure and stuff. Monsters would chase after you and you’d have to hit keys to attack them. They dropped loot and keys and stuff. I loved making text games (actually, the Amstrad game with the shells above was in text, but it let you edit the characters so you could basically draw monochrome sprites really easily).
• A text-based beat-em-up for a Texas Instruments calculator (more fun that it sounds). You typed in a number between 1 and 20 for a move. 1, 2 and 3 were hard-coded as Bite, Kick and Punch, but numbers higher than that gave you a chance at a random special move (all of which had quite offensive names). Used the calculator’s built in stats functions to store a high-score table. You could get so much tension with a simple dot dot dot MISS! or dot dot dot HIT! Popular at lunchtimes.
• A joystick calibration library for QBasic.
• A Visual Basic comic strip editor. Had a few images as backgrounds and some sprites that you could have drawn over the them, then it let you type some text for each scene.

Hrm. The stuff I’m doing now is so dull. Maybe I’ll sign up for this.

Hugh is a man of many fingers and pies at the moment. Middleware next. I just thought I’d quote from my comment because I really liked the image:

You can’t have your cake made out of completely incompatible ingredients, sprinkle on magic middleware dust and eat it.

Too many people think of infrastructure as the set of all the
solutions you’ve found to the various problems your business has faced.
That’s not infrastructure, that’s selotape. We need to be thrown into
the pit of success to get it right first time.

Frustrated in my last post that I couldn’t put times in the <ol> for my timetable. Putting in “10:30 - 11:30″ in the value
attribute of a list item results in just the “10″ being displayed.
Ended up using 24 hour time so it just treated the numbers like very
large integers. Is there some better method that semantic HTML gurus know about?

A few months ago, work wasn’t going so well but I wanted to be enthusastic about my career and signed up for a huge pile of MSDN events. I even went to a few of the things: a really great day in Manchester about Windows Mobile and the London leg of Scott Guthrie’s whistle-stop European tour to demo the web parts of Visual Studio 2005 were the highlights. But I ran out of energy and holiday days and let most of them slide.

Well, work’s great now and, re-energized, I stumbled upon Marcus Perryman’s announcement of the UK Mobile Embedded Developers Conference highlights day. It’s basically a cut down version of the US MEDC event, but it’s free and it should be great. Here are the sessions I signed up for:

1. Introduction to Managed Development for Devices with Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 significantly extends the device development toolset that was introduced in Visual Studio 2003. Learn about SQL Mobile database development tools, COM Interop, the new Device Emulator, and other enhancements for Pocket PC and Smartphone development targeting Version 1 and Version 2 of .NET Compact Framework.
2. Cool New APIs and Controls for Managed Developers in Windows Mobile
3. Panel Discussion : Building Mobile Applications. This session will discuss the different options you have building mobile applications including tools, data and programming methodologies.
4. What’s New with MapPoint Web Service 4.0? The MapPoint Web Service makes it easy for enterprise developers to build location-aware solutions using Visual Studio .NET. Version 4.0 adds significant features such as the ability to integrate custom map layers from other mapping and GIS systems. This allows advanced applications like RF coverage locators for mobile operators and geofencing for mobile location based services to become possible.

Some good stuff over at Brand Republic’s Design Bulletin. Raymond Snoddy on media: Look to Liverpool for secrets of press success:

Liverpool
is undergoing something of a renaissance as a city, creating a greater
sense of local pride. This may be helping sales of the local paper…

Low
pay in regional journalism is an undoubted scandal - one that could,
over time, undermine the performance of the regional press…

There
is a clear case for being more generous in swapping examples of best
practice so that the whole print sector can benefit. More competition
from the electronic media is inevitable. The latest is a range of local
BBC television news services for individual cities and counties, which
will launch in the West Midlands, right on the Evening Mail’s doorstep…

Advertisers
also have to absorb the message that free readers are still readers.
Anyone who doubts this has only to spend half an hour on the London
Underground to watch Metro being devoured…

Oh, and:

Readership
of paid-for weeklies has risen nearly 15% over the past decade. The
bestselling title in this sector is the Kent Messenger, which has a
circulation of 57,450, according to ABC figures for July to December
2004.

Ahem. w00t.

Poynter point to some McKinsey stats saying that newspaper classified revenues will be down 20% by 2007 because of the boom in online classifieds. Well, duh.

McKinsey’s Jochen Heck recommends that newspapers fight back by: putting compelling content around listings; automating ad-ordering processes; and “developing a finer understanding of what makes local markets tick.” OK, that’s all fine. The news industry has been hearing those recommendations for years. Does it really take a McKinsey consultant for publishers to hear and act on that?

‘Fight back’ eh? If you can’t beat them, join them: we should be focussing our classifieds offerings online. Build all the booking and automation into the online system and the print will follow (and if we get the data right, we can stop putting every other ad in ‘vacancies general’ in the paper).

Put compelling content around adverts… seriously? I hope we’re already doing this. Are we just telling people to fill the space between our precious adverts? Why bother publishing?

And what makes local markets tick? Who knows? The price of the ad and the number of responses? Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. But I’m not in telesales, so I’m no expert.

Exactly what I was talking about.

I also love the phrase ’snapcast’. It captures exactly the kind of A-Team style pincer movement of a conversation we should be asking for from blogs and podcasts. I still wonder if blogging will ever achieve the visceral thrill of an old-fashioned usenet flamewar, but I think what the guys are doing here is very interesting.

Oh, the actual story here is Scoble’s rant about some gay rights thing. Microsoft allegedly caved to some pressure by some nutter about some bill or other. Now, this is important stuff, I’m sure. But what I find interesting is the contrast between this and Google’s “do no evil” schtick. What do we expect out of the world’s most powerful corporations? A mere promise to be harmless and do no evil, or a commitment to pursue issues and actually take a stand? I wonder if there are more people who want their company to take a real position, or more that want them to shut up so they can get on with their work in peace.

Bill Thompson’s weekly column is out, and like most sensible people, I stopped reading at the introduction:

No program is perfect, but bugs in open source software are less of a problem.

That’s right, Bill - because open source is maintained by magic fairies. Yay!

You know, it’d be nice if Bill took the pile of money he gets from license payers each week to trawl Slashdot and The Register for something to paraphrase, and instead sponsored someone in the Firefox magic fairy taskforce to actually fix the “little red button” that installs yet another copy of Firefox on my machine each time I press it.