Thom Lawrence

It’s interesting, going back and forth and sideways between Dare, Scoble and Steve Gillmor about ‘attention’. But if Amazon can’t get it right on one site, and eBay can’t get it right on one
site, and Google can’t serve me a single advert I’ve ever clicked on, I
don’t see how connecting all this data up into some even more
complex/dumb system is going to get me DVDs or games any quicker.

Maybe
I’m making the wrong ‘gestures’? I dunno. But our new attention
overlords can do what they like with my data, so long as they shove the
results right down at the bottom of the page where I currently ignore them.

Budding micro-ISVs with an interest in Windows Mobile might want to check out the Microsoft Mobile App Awards:

Winners will receive great prizes including; a Qtek 9100
Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 device; free version of Visual Studio
2005; tailored marketing services and support plus access to the
globally recognised Mobile2Market programme; plus free distribution
through www.handango.co.uk and www.expansys.co.uk to help you convert
your idea into a sales success.

The ever-grumpy commentators at MS Mobiles
point out that ‘free distribution’ at Handango means losing 50% of your
revenue, but you shouldn’t look even a two-legged gift-horse in the
mouth, I say.

So it’s no free bottle of wine,
but VistaDB are giving away a copy of their $229 embeddable database to
bloggers. Can’t see if there’s any Compact Framework support anywhere
in there, but for the desktop they claim it’s a simple alternative to
Jet or MSDE etc. I could use some of that, so let me pimp it thusly:

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released

This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support
for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005. VistaDB is a small-footprint,
embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server
Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0
applications. Features SQL-92 support, small 500KB embedded footprint,
free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free
distribution for both embedded and server, Copy ‘n Go! deployment,
managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools.
Free trial is available for download.

I’ve been readying Tivo for the launch on Tuesday of ITV’s fourth
non-news channel, ITV4. ITV2 is mostly reality television, ITV3 is
mostly crime-dramas, and as I browsed next week’s lineup for the new
channel I came to a very pleasant realisation: they’ve got tons of sci-fi.

It’s worth having a look through your programme data (or DigiGuide
or the Radio Times or whatever) if you’re interested in any of the
following:

• First Wave, as predicted by Nostradamus
• Invasion Iowa, William Shatner’s reality tv sci-fi spoof
• Alien Nation, for those who think cops need more latex
• UFO, Gerry Anderson’s story of futuristic cars, ships and wigs
• Timecop, he doesn’t play by the rules, he doesn’t like paperwork and he doesn’t take “no” for an answer, apparently

And probably a bunch of other stuff. Letterman and Larry Sanders and some football, mostly.

Given this debate (via Robert Scoble):

Interesting little debate going on the blogs this morning. Anil Dash wants Flickr to pay its users, particularly the ones who put the most popular content onto the service. Caterina, co-founder of Flickr, answers back, says more to life than money.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this turns out (via Russell Beattie):

I missed this last week, but I find this new service from Hutchinson’s 3UK called See Me TV incredibly interesting:

See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an
opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of
millions.

All the budding star has to do is submit a thirty second video clip to
the service displaying their talents in front of or behind the camera.
The clip will then be uploaded to the ‘See Me TV’ channel for other 3
customers to view*.

Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer
gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most
popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of
cash.

Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and
then a transfer made via Paypal - with no cap on what a 3 customer can
earn from See Me TV.

From the XP Yahoo group:

Jim Shore:

More than anything else, Fit facilitates thinking
about the domain. In the same way that test-driven development, when
done well, facilitates thinking about design, Fit done well facilitates
thinking about the domain. This thinking happens at the requirements
level and at the design level.

Done right, Fit fades into the background. Let me tell a story…

Ron Jeffries:

Jim … this is a tantalizing story. I find it
difficult to get ahold of. I’d like to see what the tables looked like,
to know more about what the conversations actually were. I want to have
been
there.

Tell us more …

I’ve never heard someone more turned on by a story about testing.

Anyone who’s lived for a while in Canterbury will know that the high
street is a gauntlet of clipboard-wielding marketeers, and moving up to
Sheffield, I was confident that my market-research-avoidance skills
were transferrable. So, as we swept into Sheffield station to see our
friend Jess off home, I noticed a couple of uniformed blonde girls
looming. I made no eye contact and carried on chatting to my friends as
we headed for the departure board, but they pounced all the same -
while thrusting a leaflet into my face, the girl shouted, I take it you’re a drinker, sir?

We found this pretty funny, and yeah, I am, but surely there are
more discrete ways to get people to buy what you’re selling? Like,
Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, for
example.

Or indeed this.

While Jensen Harris happily blogs about the new Office 12 UI, OpenOffice.org - with a mission to create the leading international office suite - fought back with OpenOffice 2.0 this week.

My first impressions, to quote Bart:

Let me get this straight: we’re already behind the class, and we’re supposed to catch up by going slower than they are?

Kathy Sierra quotes Steve Jobs:

“Here’s what you see at a lot of companies; you know how
you see a show car and it’s really cool, and then four years later you
see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They
had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat
from the jaws of victory!

“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great
idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah,
we can’t do that. That’s impossible,’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then
they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build
that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

Mmm. Perhaps if they listened to the engineers just a bit they wouldn’t build stuff that dies a heat death, has defective batteries or has a screen that shatters.

Stuff sure is purty, though.

So we didn’t get to see The Fallout Trust. They got held up in traffic, the Leadmill told them not to bother turning up, they turned up, tried to steal their free beers and got kicked out. Rock, and indeed Roll. We asked for our money back but didn’t get any. So…

Stayed to watch The Leaves. Great drummer, bassist looks like Simon Tam, lead singer played interesting guitar parts, dull keyboard parts and nobody heard a word he sang all night. The acoustics probably didn’t do justice to what I assume were lots of interesting synthy loops and twirls, but we met a guy afterwards who said they sound great in the studio. Fair enough.