John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

The Office

28 December 2003: The Office ended surprisingly beautifully, which made me really happy :-)

Signing off

24 December 2003: There's a unique feeling to Christmas eve at work. Mostly it's quiet, the phone doesn't ring, and you can get a couple of hours of concentration time. It's nice. Anyways, I'll be signing off shortly to get the house prepared so Merry Christmas y'all, I hope Santa brings you everything you wanted.

Minidiscs

23 December 2003: I bought a pack of 10 minidiscs today, but by the time I'd opened the packaging I'd missed the program I wanted to record.

Well, it felt like it anyway.

Packaging! I'm sure I'm going to starve to death when I'm older.

More on designers creating websites

21 December 2003: Diogo Soares is an 18 year old student designer with a website which lists his skills as Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Indesign, QuarkXpress, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks. The site looks great, and I'm sure he'll do very well.

But that got me thinking. Is knowing Adobe Illustrator a skill? Or is 'graphic design' the skill? If you were a carpenter, you wouldn't list use of hammer, use of chisel, and some use of sandpaper as your skills, you'd just say "I'm a carpenter" and back it up with your experience and your past projects. My first reaction was, hey, this guy knows Macromedia Dreamweaver (a wysiwyg web page creation tool), so he probably doesn't know the underlying HTML, or indeed, any programming.

But, don't I do the same? If I'm a programmer, then PHP, Java, JavaScript and so on are just my tools. It happens they are lower level than Diogo's, but that doesn't make them any better. So why do I list those languages and all the things I do on my site? I think I once got a call from someone who'd seen my site and was surprised I was prepared to take on website maintenance too .. "oh, do you do website maintenance as well, I didn't realise that". In other words, because I hadn't said it, I was at a disadvantage against those who did say "maintenance". Also, I know that these words have to be there when people use search engines. If they want a PHP programmer, and I've not written 'PHP' in a fit of "I'm a generic programmer, I can program in anything", then I'm at a disadvantage. Anyway, I wouldn't be able to program .Net without a big learning effort. C also. So the tools are important. I know Python is well regarded, but I don't think I've see a line of Python code.

Many jobs list 'skills' such as Dreamweaver as requirements. So if I was to get them, not that I'm looking for a job, I'd have to list Dreamweaver as one of my capabilities. But my HTML knowledge and experience takes me far beyond any Dreamweaver user. A weird one this, I'll have to ponder more on it. It feels like there are some basic skills such as knowing how to program, that makes me a programmer, and knowing how to markup text that makes me a web page creator. Then there are my preferred tools, such as PHP, HTML and a text editor, and so on. It feels like there should be a level above that, or one below it. It feels hierarchical.

Then I know there's a standard set of job descriptions available from the British Computer Society. Mind-you, I sent three emails to them the other week with various queries and received not a single response, so that's how responsive they are. I just struggled to find the descriptions on their website and a) it costs £350, and b) it seems far too detailed for what I want.

Then it also seems like there are values that inform how these tools are used. For instance, I use these tools to create standards-based and usable websites. Maybe. Others might favour creating something visually exciting over standards. So how you use those tools is driven by your values, so coming clean about those seems quite important too. Hmmmmm, definitely interesting. Maybe I need to do one of Hillman Curtis' theme charts to sort this out, more on that later.

Stunned

21 December 2003: Wow, I just read through Carole Guevin's wish list for 2004 on her fabulous Netdiver page (right hand column, hopefully it'll still be there when you link, but it changes often). As I started I was thinking, yeah yeah yeah, peace on earth and by the end I was thinking "wow, you know what, here are 12 heartfelt big-issue wants by this person who I don't know, and I can't disagree with any of them, in fact, I heartily agree with them. I like this person." So I thought I'd share them with you here. I was going to cut and paste them but I guess that would be wrong, copyright and all that, so you'll have to check out the link now, quick before it changes.

A terribly exciting time for space exploration

20 December 2003: Us Brits are terribly excited about Beagle 2, our first bit of interplanetary kit (I'm sure I read that somewhere) which will land on Mars on Christmas day morning at 3am our time and hopefully beam back a panorama photograph of the local landscape. It will then start analysing the surface to work out if there is or was life on Mars. Very nice. Great popular science .. Christmas day, life on Mars, the typically Open University professor who made it happen, all fantastic news material.

But then there's Cassini-Huygens, the mission to Saturn that brought back those stunning photographs a few weeks ago. According to this story a) we should be able to see Saturn's rings with a telescope over the Christmas period, although I think the business about running out after singing Old Lang Syn (or whatever it is) and looking directly upwards is probably right in the US but not in the UK (just guessing), and b) awesomely one of Saturn's moons, Titan, seems like a new world, perhaps with oceans and continents, with a dense orange atmosphere and loads of carbon, and in a year's time the Huygens probe is going to descend by parachute through Titan's atmosphere, taking over a thousand pictures over two and a half hours, and if it lands successfully it will analyse rock samples. Mind, it's a bit cold there, -178 Celsius, but this is a genuine thrill. Just imagine the excitement of seeing that.

Then I read rumour of Bush planning to announce more manned space exploration.

The local astronomy society has some public viewings, there's one in January I think I'll pop along to that, I keep meaning to.

So, it looks like space is the next big thing. Very big thing.

Non proliferation

20 December 2003: What's this? Libya coming in from the cold? Signing up to arms non proliferation treaties? How great the Brits and the Yanks are, making a former pariah turn middle east exemplar.

But wait a minute. Don't I remember America pulling out of or not ratifying some of those treaties not so very long ago? U.S. Foreign Policy Turns Unilateralist: "No" to Treaties, 3 Nobel Laureates Criticize Bush Nuclear Posture Review, Bush Abandons Biological Weapons Inspection Agreement, The Test Ban Treaty: Still In America's Interests.

Graphic design and websites

19 December 2003: If you're trying to decide who to employ to build your website, there seem to be two very different approaches. One seems to be led by the advertising and design community, perhaps with animation and multimedia too, and often uses Macromedia Flash. What made me think about this was this from Mundi Design.

I really should declare my interest at this point, because, while I understand the need for and worth of creativity in our lives, and I love it to death (really, I do), it's so very tempting for people who lead in that area to make something that's not terribly usable.

The way I learned on my university course was to place usability first. There's an international standard for this, ISO 9241 part 11, but unfortunately you have to pay to get hold of it so I can't link to it for you.

Anyway, the standard defines three parts to usability. Effectiveness, which is about whether a task can be accomplished. Efficiency, which is about how much effort is required to do something, how many errors, how many mouse clicks, and how learnable is the system particularly if it's infrequently used. Finally user satisfaction.

Effectiveness means getting something done. So the first thing a website should do is enable the visitors to do what they came to do. In that sense, a website is like a cash machine. No-one's interested in admiring our graphics, they are there to achieve a goal. Our job is to make sure that we generate the type of interest that we can fulfil, and then fulfil it to the best of our abilities.

You can become very successful at just doing that. But let's look a step further. What happens if you provide a function that people didn't know they wanted, such as my favourites Last FM who provide a personalised radio station tuned to your tastes which the system has learned over time. I didn't know I wanted that capability, but now I love it.

So my approach is to deliver what our target audience wants, and then to deliver something extra. These are usability issues. I believe usability comes first. If you can buy something from a site but it looks very basic you'll still buy. If it looks great but you can't seem to find what you want, you get frustrated.

Back to Mundi Design. I find its navigation very difficult to use. I don't think I can print it. I can't make the text bigger if I'm finding it difficult to read. I can't search the text using my browser search function. I doubt it's well represented in search engines, so I probably couldn't find the page in the first place. The content's great, but the site is difficult to use. Why is it hard to use? Because it's different. It's unusual. We're used to using the web in a particular way.

This is one reason why it's important there are internationally agreed standards. The web community's standards mainly come from the World Wide Web Consortium headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the WWW. There are standards for all sorts of things and they contain solutions to all of the problems I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Much as Macromedia would like you to believe otherwise, Flash, which the Mundi site uses, is not a standard, it's a proprietary system. The W3C has a standard for vector graphics (which is what Flash essentially handles) called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is completely controllable by standard web technology, so you can make it interactive with Javascript, you can send files to other systems and they can verify it's good because it's based on XML, another standard for defining data. You can transform database data into SVG to view your data, be it theatre seat bookings or shopping centre maps. Hopefully I'll be using this technology to write a kitchen planning website in the new year.

Mundi Design and many design-led organisations tend to make non-standard sites. They may be very nice to look at, but more often than not, they are hard to use. If they are hard to use, they fall at the first hurdle. There's nothing more to be said. What we need is sites that are usable, that happen to be good looking too. Definitely that way around.

So make your choice. Decide what type of site you want. Graphic-design led, or usability and standards led. Clearly I favour the latter.

Random radio

18 December 2003: Well, my last random radio wasn't a very great experience, to be honest. It was an hour of listening to a book being read out on OneWord. This time, the hour of randomly selected radio is Planet Rock at 16:00 tomorrow when Tank Montana does Tank's 5 at 5, classic albums. Does that mean anything to you? Me neither. Well if the website's home page is anything to go by: Cream, Billy Idol, INXS, Springsteen and .. it gets very much worse .. ELO, good grief. Remember when the Americans flushed out some south American dictator by playing rock music at him 24/7? I wonder if Planet Rock's what they used? Not my cup of tea I'm afraid, but hey, I'll give it a go. I mean, Cream had their merits I understand, and INXS might bear some investigation. I might live to tell the tale.

Huntley

17 December 2003: I usually shy away from this kind of thing but now that Huntley has been found guilty of the murder of the two girls, it turns out that he had a history of encounters with the Humberside police, yet when asked to do a police check on him they failed to turn up anything because a) he'd changed his name, b) the police deleted soft information (ie. information that didn't lead to a conviction) too quickly so in each of their encounters he appeared to them to be a new offender, and c) the sexual offenses information wasn't readily available to the operators.

I find that almost more upsetting than the initial crime. I know how these moments can lead to demands for more information to be held and gradually that wears away our privacy .. I wouldn't like lots of 'soft' information on me to be held at my local police station. But then, I've not had any encounters with the police, Huntley had numerous ones.

But this feels like the computer system that was supposed to help the officers failed to support them. Why? Probably not ignorance, probably there are organisational, management, and budgetary causes. And so the responsibility for this crime dissipates through an organisation. It feels like there's a team of people all trying to do their best against a system that wasn't supporting them. That probably sounds familiar to many, to be honest, perhaps I'm lucky in being responsible for my own systems.

I did a psychology subsidiary subject in my first attempt at university life back in about 1981, and one lecture affected me deeply and hopefully permanently. It was the one covering the Milgram experiments on obedience which everyone who has encountered will no doubt remember. Right down at in the third-to-last paragraph of the page the above link takes you to, is a particularly relevant variation which concludes that people are more obedient in implementing a painful process when they aren't the only one doing it. In other words, if you are solely responsible for something then you take great care. If you're part of a team, you can always blame your colleagues when things go wrong. That's one of my reasons for working alone .. I take responsibility. I think you get better software because I care about the quality of my software and service because the outcome can only be down to me. As a result of this news about Huntley, my resolve to stand my ground is strengthened.

I don't want a baying press and public calling for the head of IT to be publicly flogged, I don't think anyone would much enjoy a 'blame culture'. But Milgram showed that responsibility has to rest somewhere or the system will deliver poorer results.

I was asked to quote for a system for a government body wanting to establish a local stop-list containing the contact details of vulnerable people who didn't want to be cold called, to receive junk mail, or to be sold to on their doorsteps. My role would have been to design and implement a system where a person could register on a web page, and their details would be emailed to all the registered companies in the system. They would then take that information and add it to their internal stop lists, so they would no longer target that person with their marketing.

The more I think about this, the worse it is. Firstly, email is insecure. Details of vulnerable people are traversing the government body's network, the Internet, and the networks of all the subscribing companies all in plain text format. Half the time they'll probably then be printed out, left on a data enterer's desk, before being entered, discarded and left outside in the bins. A new company that subscribes would have to receive details of all the vulnerable people on the system, so possibly receiving hundreds or thousands of names all at once. For anyone seeking to exploit such groups, that would be worth something. Sending that information by email would in the end make those people more vulnerable, not less.

There were no visible safeguards to ensure that registered companies were legitimate. Anyone could just register and receive constant updates.

Then there's the question of how efficient and effective this system would be overall. Let's say we get 100 companies to use this information. For every new vulnerable person added, the system would generate 100 emails, leading to 100 lots of data entry. We've just multiplied the necessary workload by 100 and added 100 possible instances of data entry error.

I suggested that the system didn't use email to deliver information, but to remind subscribers of new information. They would then log in to a secure site and receive a bulk update at least as a comma delimited file (which they could import to their own database). That way, no data entry, no exposure of data, no printouts.

I explained why I thought that the system they'd designed was insecure and potentially exposed them, and the people they were trying to protect, to risk. I always perform a formal risk assessment towards the beginning of each new project stage. As a result, I said I wouldn't want to do the work as it was originally designed. I think that's an example of me taking responsibility for my part in developing this system. According to Milgram, it wouldn't have been unusual if I'd have thought, "well, it's their design, I'm only implementing it", thus sharing the blame and allowing me to live with myself if anything went wrong. I think I did the right thing by the BCS code of conduct too which requires that I "shall have regard for the public health, safety and environment". I know this account makes me sound a little high-handed, a bit full of myself, but I don't think that's how it came across at the time .. I was informative about the risks and then clear that the original design wasn't acceptable to me but that with specified changes the project would be acceptable and probably wouldn't cost too much more.

I was told, very nicely, that I'd designed a Rolls Royce system .. in other words, it was much more than they required. I suppose they gave the project to someone else who would build the faulty system, and I guess that's how these things happen.

I know, too, that we all have to live within our means. But to me that means we should do a few things well, not a lot of things badly, and on the cheap. In the Huntley case, the school relied on the police check being effective, which it wasn't. Bad systems can be worse than no systems at all.

Looking blankly at me

15 December 2003: Left to my own devices, I invent systems. For example, I have a 'monthend' list to work through which includes not only tasks like 'raise invoices' and 'do the accounts' but also, for instance (and I know I'm putting myself up for ridicule here) 'buy a magazine'.

Just buying a magazine when I want doesn't quite work for me. I must admit to having quite a liking for magazines, I always have. There used to be a really old newsagent on Parliament Street in Nottingham which sold Italian architectural magazines and all sorts of other foreign arty publications and I used to pore through them. Anyway, at £5 a go nowadays just buying magazines when I want, considering how much I might 'want', could get quite expensive. I want to buy magazines without guilt.

Then there's the purpose of buying magazines. What if I just got into a rut of buying the same kind of magazine? I want to maximise the benefit of buying magazines. Surely the biggest point of reading a magazine is to open yourself to chance, to see new things, to discover new possibilities. So I've worked out magazine 'sectors' to buy within .. Internet, PC, business and economics (The Economist), art and graphics, mobile phone, another operating system or format (Linux, Apple), digital music, digital photography and something alternative like Adbusters. My monthly routine includes a way to check that I buy equally from all these sectors.

So now I have budgetary control over my magazine buying, and I know I'll get a wide range of inspirations. I'm happy.

The problem is, that's so completely and utterly unlike how others buy magazines that it's quite difficult to explain to others the benefits. I think what's happening is that I've studied business methods for so long that I want control and maximised benefits from everything. I even get my partner to give me a satisfaction score .. no, I know what you're thinking, and no, not then .. after we've eaten a meal I've cooked so I can write her score and mine in the recipe book so we know whether to cook the recipe again. That's not the end of it, I have cycles and routines for working through our recipe books too, but that's another story.

I mention this because I think this is a great benefit to you, my lovely potential new clients. Clients compliment me on the feeling they get of clockwork administration, of reliability.

I think what it does is free me to enjoy being human.

You see, I have a theory (no, not the one about dinosaurs being thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin at the other end, this is a different theory). It's that as computers take on more human characteristics, perhaps they will soon be hearing our commands and speaking back to us, they'll know more about our mood and about what we want, we'll have more robots in our lives (starting with a vacuuming robot), so what it means to be human will become more clear.

At the end of the day, the only real pleasure in life comes from other people. Sure there's satisfaction in doing a good job, but spreading good feelings around your friends and family, learning from them, sharing with them is the only thing that really matters. The computers and systems can get on with the rest of it, while we concentrate on doing what humans do best.

Also, there's little chance of improvement if there's no system. I'm committed to continual improvement in everything I do. So when it appears something requires improvement I'll amend the system. How else can improvement be added to improvement? How else can I iterate my way towards perfection? No system = no improvement.

I think about stuff all the time, so my head is often elsewhere. One of my goals is to get rid of mundane thoughts about things that I can systemise or automate, so my head can spend its time solving a problem or making links between what I'm experiencing and a client's problem or, more probably, just enjoying the moment. So for me, my inordinate systemisation isn't a sign of geekiness, madness or sadness. It's my way of clearing out my head so I can enjoy real-life in the here and now. And I love it.

One side-effect, however, of over-systemising things is that it requires an occasional revolution. I read somewhere, maybe it was Tom Peters, that the role of a top manager is to create chaos. His point was that systems make themselves. People organise themselves into routines, the routines become ingrained, and the organisation becomes bored, in a rut, and eventually overtaken by competitors. The CEO's job is not to make more systems, but to destroy the systems that are ingrained in order to inject new ideas, youth, and vitality into the business and ensure it's competitive.

For me, I think this naturally happens when projects end and new projects begin. I've a project coming up that will use SVG which is almost entirely new to me. My weekly routine changes as new projects come in and old ones are completed. That's one of the things I love about what I'm doing, that I'm constantly forced out of my routines and always working on something new.

Those who know me will know my penchant for randomness. I have random systems. Much to the annoyance of my partner, I once had a random housework system. We still retain a random list of home improvement tasks. The point is this. Although I love systems and routines, I also find routine boring. So a system that includes a random element introduces at least a little surprise to the day. So while every other Sunday we may do work on the house, what we actually do might be chosen from a list by the roll of a die.

So anyway, sometimes (not often, just sometimes), I get a completely blank look from someone when I'm trying to explain something, and I have to remember that I do do things differently to the way most people do. I think that's a benefit to my clients. It's the reason I get good comments, and it's why people feel secure when I'm managing their projects.

Favourite Scarborough restaurants for a Christmas meal

11 December 2003: I'm organising a group of friends who work for themselves to have a Christmas meal and managed to squeeze some votes out of them for where they'd like to eat. It came out like this (the numbers are the vote scores):

Icon (9)
Scarborough Tandoori (6)
Hideaway cafe (3)
Tricolos (3)
Villa (3)
Alleyways Fish and Chips (2)
Rupchanda (2)
Royal Hotel (1)
Spice Lobster (1)

I just thought I'd share.

Alert system live on Tinshop site

11 December 2003: At last the Alert system on the Tin Shop site has gone live.

This was an idea I proposed originally. Putting yourself in a collector's shoes, you wouldn't want the burden of having to check various sites for the items you collect. Better to register your interest and have an email arrive whenever an interesting item turns up. So, that's what the system does. It's quite primitive at the moment, but at least it's running.

This came from browsing through secondhand clothes websites and finding nothing really worked. I guess there's not enough money in secondhand clothes to make developing a proper site worthwhile, but then, until someone does, we'll never know. Anyway, my partner was searching for fifties dresses, and on no site could you search by size. That's almost criminal. Who wants to know about clothes that don't fit them? The first thing should be, "what's your size?"

Anyway, now you know where to get your Christmas presents.

Saturn pic

8 December 2003: That really is a stunning picture of Saturn.

Overpriced?

8 December 2003: A quarter of the cost of your Microsoft software is profit, according to the latest figures which showed that Microsoft made a $2.61 billion profit last quarter. That's $2.61 billion profit in three months. Turnover was $8.22 billion.

Oh, but doesn't Bill give away lots of money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Well, I just counted what they gave away in July thru September this year, a quarter. $12.045m. 0.15% of their profit. Zero point one five percent of their profit. Leaving them to keep 99.85% of their profit. To match their 'commitment', I'd need to give £2.24 per quarter to charity (on average we give £13.75 ($23.77) and know very well we should do a whole lot more (if we ever purchase a lottery ticket, I don't count that as a charity donation in my accounts, because so little of that goes to good causes)). I'm six times more charitable than Bill and Melinda.

I give my money, such as it is, without fanfair. In fact, I keep quiet about it because I feel that it's so little. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation functions to provide an argument against those who say that Microsoft's profits are too large. Although the money's useful and it's great it's there, it's not really giving money away. The benefits to Microsoft are still larger than the amount of money being given away. Think of it as Microsoft paying for a PR campaign.

Compare and contrast Microsofts approach with that taken by the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman.

Now, I don't say that the money's not welcome, I'm sure it absolutely is. But, simply, there should be so much more.

Nor am I anti profit. Profit's great. It's a measure of company growth. Profit shows corporate health. No problem. But when a very very big, very very profitable company tries to say its doing good things when much of the evidence says otherwise, I find that tends to wind people up. Knowing how many people resent Microsoft and its business practices must make the company defensive, because a big reason people buy Microsoft software for their desktop is it's seen as the only realistic choice, or at least the default choice.

Increasingly, this is no longer true. In my experience Linux is much more stable. It's free of charge, it served the page you are now reading and is probably transporting the emails you receive every day. As a desktop system, it's worked fine for the three years that I've known it, and clearly big organisations are thinking so too, as illustrated by this NHS story which is one of many. The big hurdle Linux has to overcome though, is that everyone who knows anything about computing is used to Microsoft software. Linux looks and acts differently, so the fact that Linux is free is completely offset by the cost of training all your staff to use it. It appears this is becoming less of an obstacle.

Demolition

8 December 2003: SPAIN: When we were in Tossa de Mar it was coming to the end of the season, so every day restaurants, cafes, and businesses were closing up. What amazed us is that many cafes would be open one day, and the next they were closed, had builders inside and were completely gutted. Our experience of trying to get plumbers and roofers to even agree to turn up, or the damp-proof man to even return our calls, made us wonder how it was, in this time of obvious high demand in Tossa de Mar, builders were turning up on time, working hard, and being effective.

One day we heard a few crashes from down the road, the sound of machinery, breaking glass. The next, we walked past where it had come from, and a full four storey building had been demolished. It was the cleanest demolition I'd ever seen.

JavaScript joy

5 December 2003: It happened again. I sat down last night with two hours to spare and looked at my next 'todo' task. It described a requested change that came up in user testing to a menu behaviour on the kitchen site that you've not seen yet. I had no idea how I was going to do it. Less than two hours later, the job's done, it works. It's a huge buzz to do that, a fantastic feeling. Well, OK, it's not falling in love, but it's very satisfying nonetheless :-)

Radio Times

4 December 2003: I like the fact that you can personalise the Radio Times website very easily. You can create your own login without any password and username nonsense, just your email address, your postcode and your first and last names. From your postcode it works out your television channels and just presents those. Nice. The radio doesn't do the same though, there's no Yorkshire Coast Radio (not that I'd listen to it anyway).

I still can't see other wonderful things you could do though. Why can't it do the same as the Last FM people and use social engineering to a) join people together and b) work out that if you liked this program, you'd like this? You can't even select by genre. And what about being able to say "I only get to watch television between these times, don't show me anything else". And wow, I just noticed Last FM have a new interface and seem to have solved the problems with the music not playing properly. Excellent.

The other John Allsopps

4 December 2003: For a moment I was the most important John Allsopp in Google. Apparently, looking up your own name in a search engine is called ego surfing. Anyway, I did, a year or so ago, spend a fascinating few hours looking for other John Allsopps in the world, and I made contact with some. There's one notable John Allsopp living in Bondi Beach, Australia who writes very knowledgably about CSS. I notice he's now the most important John Allsopp in Google :-)

When I last looked, he didn't have a blog, now it seems he does and it's very similar to mine in that he mixes his own real-world experiences with business-interest ones. His ideas also seem very similar to mine .. I read the one about the cinema multiplex versus his local one where he prefers the local and felt criminalised by the multiplex. I think I like this other John Allsopp :-) Maybe the blog worked for him too, in that he got a higher search engine position. Anyway, I always did feel that he deserved the top slot, he's been published so much more than I have.

I had the audacity to write to him almost two years ago to try to get a summer placement before my final year at university. I thought, "how bad could three months working near Bondi Beach be?" I also enjoyed the idea of a nonsensical link being made on the basis of us having the same name. Anyway, he answered, having nearly deleted my message thinking it was spam, and very nicely explained how that wouldn't work for him. I feel good towards him because he took the trouble to write back :-) Maybe I'll get to meet him one day. So if you're reading this John Allsopp, g'day to ya :-)

I've been googled

4 December 2003: If anyone other than myself has read this blog from the beginning, you'll know that it was partly an experiment in getting a better search engine position for my site. I just checked and Google has spotted my regular updates and has indexed, of its own accord, up to the 27 November as I write today. That, at least, is the first piece of the process proven .. that the more you update your site the more often Google comes back to look. Well, maybe not proven in a scientific sense, but there's evidence to support the idea at least.

Walking map problems

4 December 2003: SPAIN: When in Tossa I heard about some walks in the surrounding countryside and went to the tourist office to get information. I was given three leaflets covering three walks.

A map showing a local walk from a leaflet given out by Tossa De Mar tourist office

It was only when I got back to the hotel I realised how hopeless these leaflets were. Take a look at the 'zoomed out' picture that shows most, but not all, of the map printed in the brochure. That's the first problem. This is a walking map, why do we need to see the rest of the area when we're only going to walk the blue line?

A closer look at the key area of map showing a local walk from a leaflet given out by Tossa De Mar tourist office

In the second image I've zoomed in on the key area. The blue line shows the area we're supposed to walk. It has waypoints marked 1-4. Ready for your instructions? Walking boots on? OK, here goes. "We'll start at the tourist office (1), go past the Torrent "dels Moros" and arrive to the villa "Xalet Vermell (2)". Eh? We're almost halfway through the walk in one sentence. The blue line is not straight, it doubles-back at one point, so is this a path or what? What's Torrent "dels Moros"? A waterfall? In this region where rainfall's rare at this time of year?

So, we're foreigners in this country. We probably can't ask for directions, the local conditions are different from ours, it's hotter, maybe there are some dangerous animals or plants we need to avoid. We've no idea what Torrent "dels Moros" is.

Anyway, the point is, there wasn't enough information to encourage us to do the walk. We know what it's like when we go walking with a detailed guidebook in the UK .. there's always a ploughed field or two to negotiate at least. Surely the designers could have zoomed in on the map, and provided more navigational information.

Oh well, it seemed outrageous at the time, but maybe it says more about me than about the designers. I've always been a 'look before I leap' kinda person. I like to know what I'm getting into. Hence my desire to understand fully a technology before using it. Which is bad if you want something new (to me) doing quickly, but good if you want someone who knows what they're doing.

ICD conference

4 December 2003: I've been a bit quiet as I've been out at a 'conference' for two days at the university. I've quoted 'conference' because it's actually a mock conference the third year undergraduates of the Internet Computing course present at as part of the Internet Computing Developments module. The students tend to present something to do with their third year project, which makes it a really interesting event to sit through as I get a sense of the direction of the latest thinking. Lots of mobile, and lots of security, in a nutshell.

Anyway, they have a keynote speaker and when I chaired the conference last year we asked the person who got a first the previous year to talk about his masters course. This seems to be destined to be a habit, as I was drafted in to speak at this year's conference. I gave a case study of the Tinshop web site .. I didn't want it to be too heavy as they were looking down the wrong end of 2-days of technical presentations..

Tesco

3 December 2003: We went to Tesco last night, quite late. An employee was putting returned goods back on the shelf when some chocolate raisins spilled on the floor from her trolley. Doing my best to be an irritating do-gooder, I pointed this out as she hadn't noticed. I did do it with a smile. Anyway, I noticed her watch me turn the corner at the end of the aisle, and as I walked down the next aisle, lots of chocolate raisins kept rolling into my path as she kicked them under the shelves.

Now that's funny. Very funny. She clearly didn't give a toss. The problem is, though, that if Tesco creates or allows that type of feeling in its employees, I don't think we can't rely on the company for anything. If that's what's happening on the shop floor, in front of me and the security cameras, what's happening in the back, out of sight? It's the old Tom Peters rule. If an airplane has coffee stains on its tables, you can assume they don't maintain their engines properly. Do you want to fly with them?

Poisonous plutonium in all our teeth

1 December 2003: So how does this work then? According to new research all of Britain's 90's teenagers have plutonium in their teeth, the amount depending on how far from Sellafield they lived. It's OK, they say, it's only a small amount.

As far as I remember, homeopathy works by stimulating us with minute doses of poisons. This is in my head from, well, from a couple of decades ago when I may well have taken a different career path and become an alternative health practitioner. I think the general idea was to know what poison or substance would give you the symptoms you were suffering, and to fill a bottle with that substance, then pour it away. Fill the bottle with water, and pour that away. Do that 14 times, or maybe 28 times. Then fill the bottle once more, take one or two drops of the water in the bottle, which would have minute traces of the original substance, and drop it on the patient's tongue. That, cures the ill. (Obviously, don't try this at home)

I rationalised this as the chemical acting as a catalyst or stimulant, galvanising the body's own resources into solving the problem that the rogue molecules would present. Homeopathy's success depends on the body's reaction being completely out of proportion to the amount of chemical present.

Also as I remember it, homeopathy isn't another wild and wacky alternative remedy, but is practiced as part of the NHS at least in an Edinburgh hospital.

If such a minute dose can work so dramatically in those circumstances, what were the effects of the doses of plutonium we seem to have ingested? I guess I've opened the door for the pro-nuclear people to say it might have been beneficial. I'd say, we don't know the effect, but we do know that minute amounts of chemical can have profound effects well beyond what would generally make sense.

I'm sure the money used to subsidise the nuclear industry could be put to far better use helping us become the world leader in wind and wave energy.

Pop Idol

1 December 2003: I love Pop Idol. It's such a perfect concept for mass audience television. It involves real people achieving their dreams. It's a good old singalong. It's got drama. It's got the same appeal as a newspaper (people go to work on Monday saying "Did you hear what Simon said? He's so wrong/right.") It lasts long enough for the audience, even the occasional viewers, to get to know the competitors. It's made Simon and Pete and all the rest household names. Ant and Dec are as good as always. Sam's (is that right) rendition of Mr Bo Jangles this weekend which seemed doomed in the initial shots of rehearsal was absolutely spine tingling. At the end of the competition, we have some ready-made entertainers and there are lots of products to sell too. The best of mass market entertainment. So sad that the website seems to have been not working for the last few days.