webponce rants

$5 Comparison

2008-07-24T08:21:00.001Z

Nokia are running a project comparing things from around the world which all cost five dollars. Its an interesting look at how monetary value differs so much from market to market, and potentially interesting culturally what items will be selected.

http://fivedollarcomparison.org/

FriendConnect

2008-05-12T15:20:00.000Z

I've mentioned on this blog before about barriers to entry for innovations like opensocial or openid - and how some things are just too technical to become interesting to the mainstream. here is something which is lowering that barrier - and possibly (until tonight) the most anticipated 404 page i've ever bookmarked - http://www.google.com/friendconnect.

FriendConnect promises to offer social tools through basic embeds and snippets of codes, allowing content developers who aren't necessarily the most technically savvy, to still enable their site with the power of social networking.

David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, explains "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."

Watch this, and many other spaces.

again + again

2008-05-11T12:31:00.000Z

piwik

2008-05-08T14:47:00.002Z

Occasionally I remember how much of a geek i am, and worry myself. This is one of those times, normal people don't/shouldn't get so excited about web analytics tools. However, i'm not normal, so http://piwik.org/ has made me sit up and say 'oooh'. I've long wished i could do something more with the data *inside* google analytics, and piwik seems to solve that problem, not to mention using open source and non-prop software. I'd worry a little about constant hits to a db, and its scalability (as i've seen with slim's implementation of mint) - but its certainly worth a punt on a smaller site, and the API is worth looking at. Watch this tiny space.

Olinda

2008-05-02T14:12:00.003Z

A new product from the innovation masters, Schulze and Webb, supported ably by my good friend Amy T. and her team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D.

Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/olinda/

Looking for the mouse

2008-05-01T17:37:00.002Z

Succinctly elegant as ever, Clay Shirky talks about why participation is the revolution

Barefoot

2008-04-26T09:44:00.000Z

I've been walking around the office barefoot for almost ten years - apparantly I'm not mental, but doing myself some favours.

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Three and out

2008-04-25T09:43:00.001Z

I don't know if you've been following the ASLEF and RMT protests towards the new Mackenzie Crook film, but this response from the film-makers is pure joy

Leave me alone!

2008-04-24T16:45:00.002Z

Awesome! (I know how it feels)

http://leavemealonebox.com

Looks like the future

2008-04-24T15:57:00.001Z

Not April 1st

2008-04-23T22:16:00.001Z

Yes, i've checked the date, no it is not an april fool:

Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia

Street Art in Lower East Side

2008-04-23T16:36:00.001Z

Toothpaste

2008-04-23T12:46:00.003Z

It has always amazed me why we, as such a wasteful society, are happy to throw away half eaten meals, working electronics, tons and tons of perfectly useful stuff (and money) into landfill sites every year, but are obsessed with getting every last particle of toothpaste out of the tube.

Toothpaste Tube Maximisation Tools

Cameras 3,4&5

2008-04-20T18:17:00.002Z

Three more cameras have gone into the wild today - one on the southbank, one in central london's oxford street, and one handed to Peter from the Fifty Quid Danger Fund so he can put it somewhere of his choosing. You can find their location on the camera tracker.

I was walking along the southbank as my wife and I wanted to go and check out O2's The Memory Project - nothing to do with our little site, but a really nice idea nonetheless. Basically, they have created a 360 view timelapse of the southbank, which is taking images right now. Inside the installation, you can view old images from the panorama's last few days of capturing. Walking closer to the screens shows you newer images, further away, older (or vice versa). I'm not sure when its there until, but check it out - its a nice concept.

And finally, we've had our first request to make a DIY camera bag - all the way from Boston MA, in the US of A. Woo! Thanks Tom. Hopefully we'll be seeing his camera location pretty soon.

why tweet?

2008-04-19T13:56:00.004Z

As twitter increases in users and awareness in the mainstream, more and more people are asking 'yeah, but why?', more so than many other arguably less useful services. I'm not sure why so many people need a definitive answer to use what is such a simple service to join. The Guardian's Jemima Kiss sums it up best I think:

There are so many possible uses for Twitter. It’s a very functional group messaging service - if your ten closest mates were signed up you could say ‘I’m in the pub’ and would only have to send one message instead of paying for ten. And you could also use it for more creative projects, something I’d like to explore when I clone myself and have some time to do ‘art’ outside of all-consuming work time.

The real point, though, is that we should all be a little more willing to explore these tools without feeling the need to classify it or nail it down to some definite function when it is still so young. So many inventions were born out of a completely different idea; vinyl records were a spin-off (no pun intended) from a project for talking dolls or some such… It’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to be open-minded, creative and playful.

Three Sites / One Day

2008-04-18T09:36:00.002Z

Honestly, you wait for a site launch for a couple of months, and three come along at once. Big shout out to the team for the launch of three sites last night (in order of project length and blood/sweat/tears).

Vitra

This project has been a couple of years in the making, and the passion and effort put into the site shows. Chris, the lead developer, has pretty much worked on it single-handed since he started, and its a testiment to his dedication.

adidas Dream Big

A new campaign from the football team with some really nice video content.

adidas Cricket

The new adidas england cricket team shirts.

Paxman on UCG

2008-04-17T07:40:00.001Z

theramin

2008-04-13T11:28:00.001Z

disposablememoryproject.org

2008-04-12T11:13:00.002Z

For those of you not following the disposable memory project blog, we sent the first two camera bags into the wild today. Squeak!

The Screw You Coefficient

2008-04-12T09:01:00.003Z

"Flickr users hate video. Digg users don’t want their site to become DiggSpace. Facebook users are sick and tired of application invites. Unfortunately for you, these companies couldn’t care less, and I’ll tell you why."

There has been plenty of talk recently over whether social networks, or indeed any small loved app or site, which grow in both users and functionality, forget about their core idea which made them so great and loved in the first place. Twitter for instance is still relatively simple and holds true its original idea, whereas Digg are adding social networking tools, Flickr have added video support, amazon sell food, tesco sell insurance - okay maybe i'm over-extending. But the discussion is a valid one. Mashable, from which the quote above comes, propose the 'screw you coefficient' - one method of deciding whether a new piece of functionality or approach will make improved revenue for your one-time-blog-now-mega-super-app.com, contrasting loss of users against increased wonga.

Personally, whether its a commercial decision or not, I'm not sure adding 100s of new features is always a good thing. In fact, I lie, I'm sure it is not a good thing.

For instance, as i mentioned above, twitter does one thing, and does it extremely (mostly) well. They've created a well rounded API which allows others to extend their core functionality, but twitter.com itself is staying true to the central idea. They do need to be a little careful, recent interface changes are adding more and more links, @replies and following topics etc. etc. are neat additions, but much more and it could go the way of Microsoft Word - a 1000 new features, where most people only use a handful.

This is why 37signals tools are loved and arguably hated in equal measure. Their perceived 'arrogance' towards developing applications the way they see fit is actually keeping their tools simple and effective, rather than curtailing to pressure to add this, add that. Heck, I still use notepad.exe daily, i love gtalk's simplicity over any other IM, my favourite colour is whitespace (its actually red but works for making my point), and fit for purpose is always better than bloat for possibility.

In creating the first few pages for disposablememoryproject.org, I had to remind myself of that. i'd started creating page after page after page, one for contact, one for the concept, one for every paragraph in essence, until I stopped myself. This could go on a single page - everything the user needs within one screen - bang! and the dirt is gone! So, I rehashed, and rebuilt into a single page. So much simpler.

Having to write the postcards/instructions was similar. I originally wrote a longer set of instructions, but realising the text limit restrictions on moo.com postcards, I had to sub sub sub, into just a few lines - and for the user - that is SO much better - bang! and the waffle is gone!

Applications are the same - simple fit for purpose tools to enable you to do what you need/want in a super simple, low barrier to entry, way. The problem comes when you find yourself switching between 20 apps to carry out each distinct task, thats when the argument for bloating your product appears - but honestly it shouldn't need to. Open APIs and data portability aim to allow for interchange of data between all of these apps (that's the plan anyway), leaving each app's interface to do what IT does well.

Simple is good, simple is powerful, simple is relaxing.

Awooga!

2008-04-11T15:07:00.003Z

This has tipped the scales in favour of getting Sky
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/04/gladiators_ready.html

Do you have what it takes?

2008-04-10T13:35:00.001Z

This is one of the reasons to leave Hoxton:

American Apparel from Chris Garcia on Vimeo.

last.fm creates 119% increase in online sales

2008-04-10T12:45:00.003Z

Whilst i'm not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I'm personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon - but since its UK closure, I've had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i've never heard on the radio - far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to 'steal music'.

via [mashable]

interactive storytelling

2008-04-09T14:14:00.002Z

Penguin books have recently released http://www.wetellstories.co.uk - six stories, six authors, six weeks - utilising 'new' technology to tell the stories. a mix of tools like google maps, user entry, blogs, twitter, live writing are all in use to create new ways of providing a narrative - something very close to my own heart. its a lovely collection of stories and top marks to penguin for getting behind this. Makes me want to pull my finger out and finish off hyperconsequence!

five hours elapsed

2008-04-05T20:52:00.000Z

http://disposablememoryproject.org

So, I had this idea at about 5pm today whilst picking up my wife’s drycleaning. They had a disposable camera on the shelves for sale. I don’t think i’ve used a disposable for years - not since i got a digital camera smaller (and arguably better quality) than most disposables - the last time, I think, was at a friend’s wedding, where they’d been left on the tables for guests to take pictures of the day - and hand them back in at the end. The idea being the images taken will be a perhaps more candid and spotaneous collection of images than the official photographer might catch.

With the current spat of immediate update / lifestreaming sites such as twitter, pownce, facebook status updates and just the digital space in general, life is so quick hit these days - instant gratification is everything, or is it? At the same time as these sites are cropping up and hitting the mainstream, I’m also seeing a number of ’slow your life down’ sites - bookcrossing and postcrossing are two examples which I really relate (mostly because I love books and I love receiving snail mail).

So, throw together a disposable camera, the idea of slowing things down, and a little bit of ‘discard interaction’, and you’ve got the disposable memory project: take one (or more) disposable cameras, leave them around london with instructions on how to use, get them back (hopefully), develop the images, and post them for people to see.

I’m hoping that maybe we’ll see visually the journey these cameras take, passing from person to person. I’m not going to put any complicated user profiles in place (ie. now send it to user XYZ at address ABC), its just going to exist completely physically by being passed on hand-to-hand, person-to-person.

I’m sure some will get lost, some will get stolen, some will get just thrown away or destroyed by the security services, but those which make it back to me, you’ll be seeing the images up here as soon as I get them.

Once the images are online, hopefully people who took the images will be watching the site to see if their cameras turn up, and then they will be able to post/label/tag/comment on their pics, and the circle is complete.

So, that’s the basic concept. Like the idea? Watch this space, and I’ll let you know when the first set of cameras are out. Not bad for something inspired by a drycleaning shop.

When time travel goes bad

2008-04-05T13:57:00.002Z

Don't forget to watch all new Tek Jansen epiwebisodicnodes at Comedy Central

Barcode Beats

2008-04-05T13:15:00.002Z

A team of Interaction design students from Malmö University in Denmark have come up with a simple, but nicely executed, way of creating music from possibly one of the most prolific forms of visibly encoded information in the modern world - barcodes. Scanning any barcode takes the value of the item, converts it into a audio sample, and plays it back on a timeline, creating a realtime piece of music based wholly on the scanned items. As you can see from the video, interested shoppers enjoyed taking part in creating this unique piece of music experience.

http://barcodebeats.hobye.dk/show/english/concept.aspx

subverted

2008-04-04T14:08:00.003Z

well, as you asked nicely..

Memefight!

2008-04-04T12:57:00.001Z

Creating SSH key pairs for subversion

2008-04-03T13:05:00.001Z

Whilst it could be argued it isn't massively secure, to automate some subversion processes, it is often required to skip the username/password authentication process using subversion over SSH - for instance, we're writing an automation tools which allows our project management team to do an svn update on an externally facing server without using SSH or the terminal. As even a simple

svn update

has a password request, automation becomes difficult. I've finally got around to installing the PEAR/PECL SVN libraries for PHP5. Whilst they're experimental, they do the basics, which is pretty much all we need right now (we're doing any switching/branching via the terminal still), but you will need to setup SSH keys to streamline the authentication side of things.

First of all, log into the 'client' machine (ie. the server with your working copy which needs updates etc.) and generate your private and public keys:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Make sure you accept the default location and leave the password blank (this is essential).

Then copy your public key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) to the SSH/SVN server. It's pretty easy to do this via SCP

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@svn.server.com:

Then SSH into the subversion box and add the public key to your authorised keys file

cat id_dsa.pub >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Logout of the subversion server, and try ssh'ing back in - it shouldn't ask you for your password. If you're in - it worked!

This is also really handy for connecting to Media Temple subversion repositories, which have a bizarre username "user@foobar.com", and ecaping the @ can be a pain. You can utilise serveraliases to get around this:


Host alias
HostName realservername.com
User user@realservername.com

Enabling you to simply...

ssh alias

Where alias is, of course, the alias you've chosen, not an excuse to think about Jennifer Garner - why would you need an excuse?

Coining new designs

2008-04-02T17:51:00.002Z

The Royal Mint have released the new designs for our coinage. The coins have been designed by a 26 year old who entered a competition, and will this year see his work realised. The coins work together to build up a picture of the Shield of Royal Arms. Very cool, i'll be glad to have this soon-to-be design classic in my pocket.

via [we made this]

HTTPS support for SOAP in PHP5 under Windows

2008-04-01T17:29:00.001Z

If you're seeing error messages about missing https wrappers when trying to use SOAP ("Unable to find the wrapper "https" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?" or "[HTTP] SSL support is not available in this build"), you haven't installed the SSL libraries to support secure transactions.

Uncomment
```
extension=php_soap.dll
```
in your php.ini

Uncomment
```
extension=php_openssl.dll
```
in your php.ini

Copy
```
ssleay32.dll
```
and
```
libeay32.dll
```
to your windows system32 directory

Reboot apache, et voila!

magnolia moves to openid

2008-03-31T11:47:00.002Z

Ma.gnolia - the social bookmarking application has taken the decision to remove new user signups, relying wholly on the user to have an OpenID account. This is an interesting move. There is still, I feel, a great deal of education to be done with OpenID, and many of the users who want an account will presumably fall under one of the existing providers (facebook, yahoo, etc) - the end-user still may not realise they're using OpenID. I still worry about the feasibility of doing this for websites with less technically savvy audiences, as its a technology which hasn't been promoted in the non-technology mainstream press yet, but in time, with increased uptake of OpenID in smaller sites, i'm sure it will. Chris Messina has written an interesting piece on it over at Factory City

Compliance, yo!

2008-03-31T10:13:00.002Z

DoggyBall

2008-03-18T08:48:00.001Z

No longer required...

2008-02-29T08:55:00.001Z

A (very comprehensive) list of skills no longer needed by the world. If you can do something here, you probably can't put it on your CV anymore, but hey, there's probably a point past when its cool to know it again. mummification for instance. there's a skill i've always wanted to learn.

ObsoleteSkills.com

Prank Call

2008-02-28T17:22:00.000Z

I know this is old, but i only just heard it, and it made my day

Typographer Gag

2008-02-26T10:23:00.002Z

The Stream of Consciousness.

2008-02-24T15:54:00.002Z

I tend to use notepads to capture my stream of consciousness most days, scribbling todos, and things to write, but increasingly, i've been using my personal wiki to capture more detailed aspects of that. I'm not sure a blogging platform is right for these sort of abstract thoughts/comments/urls. Its not quite ma.gnolia's role, nor tumblr either. Maybe i need to find a little IM+SMS twitter-esque tool for capturing personal thoughts, and putting them somewhere for later digestion.

here is an example of today's stream:

* US Analogue TV shutoff in Feb 2009
* browser versioning (a list apart)
* wikileak
* gmail spam filtering failing
* scribd / embeddable doc sharing
* facebook analytics apps / adonomics, insights, develloper analytics
* http://linkblip.com/
* facebook 5% drop in UK users in past three months (400K users)
* streem.us - new blogging/tumblr style platform
* http://www.twipster.com/ - mobile publishing platform
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
* setup macmini + server at home

24/1994

2008-02-21T15:04:00.001Z

Happy Belated Valentines Day.

2008-02-16T22:46:00.002Z

I love you guys... mwah mwah.

Starting over.

2008-02-13T16:47:00.001Z

I've been thinking alot about, if i were to start a team from scratch again, what would i do differently. As I've been looking for a replacement for my role at de-construct, you ponder around these things, musing, trying to learn from your experience, and if given a blank slate - whilst there aren't a huge amount of things i'd do totally different, there are certainly a number of approaches i'd take in the future from learnings over the past few years. One of the biggest - and this spans the entire agency - would be resourcing. We're quite effective at having a number of developers working on a single project. We're about to launch the Crafts Council site (check it out tomorrow at www.craftscouncil.org.uk), and everyone on my team, at some point, and to differing levels of involvement, has had their hand in the code at some point. Its been a really great project. Having several developers working together means you get naturally occuring peer-review, and great iterative discussions moving the code forwards. It helps developers keep their work tidy (as there is nothing better to keep your code clear than thinking about what your collegue will say when they find your inelegant hacks), and its a fantastic way of learning.

Taking that a step further, what if you extend the model to work across your entire agency? All of the projects within the technology team are worked on by all of the team. Rather than Developer A being assigned to Project B, each project would be broken into its functionality elements, or user stories, and Developer A gets to choose which bits of work he wants to do across ALL of the projects in the studio - not just the ones he is pencilled in to work on.

Rather than having to worry about resourcing clashes ("Oh, but i need matthew to work on X all week"), your developer works on user stories of a manageable size in the time you can book him/her in for, and then the next chunk of their work may be on a totally different project. The project itself doesn't really matter, its just delivering on the functionality which is key.

The benefits:

- All your developers will be aware of all of the projects (or thereabouts), so if someone falls ill, there isn't a knowledge gap.
- Your developers get to work across a wider range of projects
- Your developers get to put their hand up and volunteer for pieces of functionality they're interested in developing
- Reuse of functionality/code becomes more apparant
- If two developers are vying for the same piece of code, you might get a fight over who gets to do it. Isn't that a good thing?
- All developers will have an interest in the overall architecture of the projects, and a consistant shared tone and approach to your code will naturally occur.
- No-one should end up getting 'mop-up' work, as the units of work should be discreet that a developer will always finish what they started (as well as testing it!)

I've seen this approach discussed before within the realms of scrum and agile - all work just get managed as a single project, and the entire workload is on the backlog, regardless of who the work is for, but i think it can exist in non agile situations also.

Harry is tired.

2008-02-10T12:30:00.000Z

Harry from matthew knight on Vimeo.

Instant Death

2008-02-10T10:50:00.000Z

Anyone fancy clubbing together to buy the secret recipe for making polaroid film? Maybe its not secret, but its license will be running out and Polaroid, after making a decision to stop producing their instant cameras last year, are now deciding to cease production of film for the cameras also. The loss of the now kitch photography tool will make many a designer saddened.

Polaroid gives up on film

Google Analytics and Event Tracking

2008-02-07T12:47:00.000Z

Google Analytics have released a new beta feature: Event Tracking, in order to better support RIA and Flash applications, or where 'page views' aren't the only information you want to track.

The Google docs suggest this is useful for tracking: 'any flash driven element, like a flash website or flash movie player, embedded ajax page elements, file downloads, [and] load times for data'.

Whilst we've been able to track things other than just page views using urchinTracker('/some/other/action') for a long time now, enabling us to show how many people download a PDF, or leave the site via an external link, many of the actions which a user performs within a page we don't want to track as part of the overall number of page views.

For instance, it is interesting for us to know how many people turn the sound off on our sites (it tells us whether the music is rubbish or annoying), or how many people stop a video halfway through playback (which also tells us whether the video is rubbish or annoying), but those figures can inaccurately inflate the 'pageview' count. It would be wrong to say we'd had 1 million page views if actually we were tracking the page view as one 'hit' and the 'sound off' as another.

Events allow us to seperate a pageview and an event.

To really understand this, lets get rid of (or redefine) the term 'page view', and call it 'content view'. I define a 'content view' as any definable piece of content, so that might be an entire HTML page, or the user selected 'next image' within a flash gallery. If you think about when, if you had to build a flash site in html without javascript, a new page load actually occurs, thats a content view. In our example of the flash image gallery, the first content view is the gallery page itself (and perhaps image A). Pressing 'next' to load the image B doesn't navigate you away from the 'page', but it does load in a new piece of content which is worthy of tracking. That would be two 'pageviews' - or the method _trackPageview()

Moving onto a more complex site, using a video gallery as an example, the first pageview is the gallery page, the next pageview is the user selecting a video, thats two hits (or two calls to _trackPageview()). The next step for the user is to press 'play'. Now this is not a pageview or hit, but it is interesting from our point of view. Perhaps they press play, scrub around the video a few times, increase the volume, mute it, etc. That's an event. Two content hits (gallery page, and then the selected video) and half a dozen events.

Within analytics, this then allows us to do two things: see how many people accessed that video, as well as how they interacted with it. Accurate number of 'page views', but far more granular data.

Google suggest you use an event to track a downloaded file. Personally, I would say that warrants being tracked as a page, rather than an event (consider my 'contentview' over 'pageview'), as we want to track that they have accessed that download. That is why 'pageview' doesn't cut the mustard. You can, however use events on top of pageviews. Track the download as a pageview AND an event of a certain type. So, perhaps your event object is 'downloads'. _trackPageview('path/to/filename') as your pageview, and the fact they've downloaded something as downloads._trackEvent('filename'). You can use the Event to then aggregate numbers of all events of that type (video interactions, downloads, external links) to get overall interaction trending - which has traditionally been difficult in Google analytics, having to some up 'types' of pageviews manually.

Currently, events are not related to pages. In theory, you could set up a uniquely named event for every item you'd like to track interaction on: movie_one._trackEvent('stop'), movie_two.trackEvent('stop') or movies._trackEvent('movie-one-stop'), or even using labels: movies._trackEvent('stop','movie-one'), giving you a fair bit of control over how you can classify those events (you can also assign values to each event, perhaps monetary, download times, scrub-to positions etc.), but they're then reported on entirely seperately to the page view itself. You would have to define a clear method of naming convention to ensure you can link all of the movies in Gallery A to the events you've tracked, as opposed to Gallery B. I hope the next step will be to attach (or nest) events to page views - for instance, get the count for all 'stops' under a certain content path. For now, we'll need to use labels and values, but in any case its a great step forward for the already very nifty analytics suite.

Italiano per te

2008-02-07T09:10:00.000Z

My italian teacher was featured the telegraph yesterday in an article aimed at helping someone shout at Fabio Capello in his native tongue:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/[...]

What time is it Mr. Wolf?

2008-02-05T14:01:00.000Z


w32tm /resync

Run that on the command line in XP or Vista, and your clock will update to the correct time, after checking an internet time server. Nifty.

Sunday Linkfest

2008-02-03T11:05:00.000Z

First up, grand central station:

Google's new Social Graph API:

I'm really looking forward to being able to spend some time with all the of new regularly released APIs for services like this when i leave decon, and give them my headspace to think about how they could be used.
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/

Bird poops in mouth - the making of:

If you didn't see the 'original', search on youtube, but here is the behind the scenes of the fake real fake original. ahem.
http://www.bobanddavid.com/2008/01/my_newest_superd_piece.html#more

Matt Damon!

A picture is worth a thousand words

Lovely so simple idea: http://www.unphotographable.com/

Some great print ads

Nice selection of some amusing print ads

Sigma DP1

mmmm. want one

and finalyee

fail.

Google gets creepy

2008-01-29T15:04:00.000Z

ex-con

2008-01-26T10:41:00.001Z

So, its about time i publicly announced this. I'm going to be leaving de-construct.
I've been with the company since its creation, as one of the founding members, about six and a half years ago. We started the agency as a group of seven who'd just all lost our jobs at previous agency deepend, due to the collapse of the company. We decided we all still wanted to work together, and felt we could create something to be truly proud of - and here we are - a forty person award winning agency doing some amazing work with an amazing team.

So why leave? A good question indeed, and one I've been struggling with for a while now, but in essence - i just think its time to move on. I've effectively had the same job since I was 19, and whilst I'm still getting the opportunity to work on some really great projects at decon, I'm hankering for other things, new challenges, new horizons, new everything really.

I don't have any plans as to what i'm going to do when I leave - I don't have a job lined up, i don't have any interviews to attend, I think i'll first just take a bit of a break, watch DVDs and read books, and then see what opportunities arise. I've got a list of personal things i'd like to try and achieve, and there are a whole load of people i'd like to try and meet and chat to, but right now - i'm just planning on having a little rest.

I'm going to be at decon for the next several months, working out my notice, and finding a suitable replacement, and then the mammoth task of handing over, but then, the world is my oyster card.

Etsy

2008-01-26T10:31:00.001Z

Really nice promo for brilliant site: Etsy

I'm going to Collect this weekend also to check out some lovely craftness at the V&A. Check it out if you've got time.

Recursive Sweding

2008-01-26T10:30:00.001Z

This sweding recursion could go on for ever.

Facebook as judge, jury and executioner

2008-01-25T10:35:00.000Z

This week's stock market crash has been levied on a rogue trader in France. An article in today's metro explained the potential cause of the worldwide slump, and then chose to round up the article with a truly damning inditement of the trader. Not content with explaining how his actions had left Societe Generale with a loss of 4bn euros, the Metro really stuck in the knife by explaining before the scandal dropped, Jerome Kerviel had 11 friends on facebook - but today, after media reports that he was the as yet unnamed trader, he has only four.

Well, he must be guilty then. I'm glad Metro felt it neccessary to point this out. My interest in the story was only passing until they linked it to his facebook popularity. This really is an important piece of news now. I haven't been too fussed by Mugabe's dictatorship, but I just found he hasn't updated his twitter status for over 24 hours, and that really pissed me off. What an evil man.

I must really try and not update my Facebook status the next time I rob a bank, it might come back to haunt me. "Matthew is holding up a branch of Northern Rock. Haven't managed to fill my bag of loot though."

Decoration tips

2008-01-22T11:54:00.001Z

What a great idea. I'm about to decorate my spare bedroom/study. This rocks! Need to find an old dictionary with a nice typeface though.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

OpenID

2008-01-22T10:14:00.000Z

I'd long wondered what the uptake of OpenID would really be. In principle, the concept of having a 'single sign on' concept across the increasing number of online applications one uses as a modern day web user was ideal. Keep your security credentials managed centrally, and authenticate with each service provider when needed. No longer do you need to keep track of all the different username/password combinations, but just a single username, and a password you can change on a regular basis, increasing security across all of your applications.

My worry about OpenID was take up by less-savvy users. One of the strongest commercial arguments for adopting OpenID was that new users would be able to come to your application with lower barriers to entry, no long painful sign up, just drop in your OpenID account, and you're away - but realistically, is my mum going to be aware of OpenID providers? Probably not. I'd happily implement OpenID in all of our commercial projects at de-construct, but many of the audience members are just not bleeding edge enough to have an existing account, and sending them away to setup an OpenID account seems overkill.

However, with recent news that Yahoo! accounts and Blogger.com blogs will be OpenID accounts also, this barrier is lowered yet again. Suddenly, all those flickr users are OpenID enabled. All those bloggers are OpenID enabled, it can't be long before Google accounts are OpenID enabled, whether Microsoft consider Passport to be worthy of OpenID is yet to be seen (although mooted). The next step is education and getting users to see the benefits. Most of the benefits for those non bleeding users will be immediate, we don't need to shout about them, just implement them, and make the user's life easier. Let's see if we can get our next authentication system using OpenID, and i'll let you know how we get on.

got milk?

2008-01-18T15:23:00.001Z

a new revision of the annual decon 'tea/coffee' list came out this week. we've always had a poster up in the kitchen to show how people like their hot drinks. this year its all about the pantone. not great for me, as being colour deficient, i can't match colours for toffee, but i never make people drinks either, so it works out for everyone.

National Treasure 2 - TrailOfSecrets.co.uk

2008-01-18T08:22:00.000Z

Put the bunny back in the box.

We launched a microsite for the new Disney release National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets. Play the games, enter the prize draw and get 2 for 1 ticket deals. Top work to Jamie, Joel, Andreas, Kamil, Chris and Sarah G.

svn.class.php

2008-01-18T08:09:00.000Z

We've pretty much switched over to using SVN for all of our LAMP deployments now, as well as during development. Its quite often useful for our, say, flash development team to be able to check their recent committed changes on the development server, but they don't always have access via SSH, so i've started writing a really basic SVN class for PHP which allows the developer to run an SVN Update without SSHing in.

I'm sure there are PHP bindings somewhere to make this more effecient, but this should work on most machines where exec() is supported. The example below is for Windows machines, as you have to pass the full path to subversion in case your PATH is not setup correctly.


class svn {

 var $svn_exe_path;
 
 function svn() {
  $this->svn_exe_path = '"\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svn.exe"';
 }
 
 function update() {
  return `$this->svn_exe_path up`;
 }
 
}

You will need to make sure you have a windows commandline installation of subversion (as i've used tortoise for most of my time with svn on windows, i never needed it until now). It is available here: Subversion for Windows including Command Line installation

Sound the death knell

2008-01-17T18:38:00.000Z

http://urltea.com/2j7s

The Chicago Tribune has stopped printing 'help wanted' ads in its weekday editions, preferring to publish them online. I can't help thinking increasing amounts of 'functional' content from newspapers will follow this direction - being higher profit margin and more accessible, searchable, useful, leading to the newspapers concentrating on the editorial and journalistic content. It has long been clear that newspapers are going to have to deliver more than just news reporting, but deeper insight and opinion as the strength of instantly updatable news websites increases, and people turn to digital sources in their thousands, and papers become for the more indepth comment and background to a story.

Harry

2008-01-16T18:18:00.001Z

Say hello to the newest addition to my household - Harriet Templeton Pearce III (Harry for short). She's a (almost) three year old girl cat, and seems to love nothing more than hugs, hiding under radiators and using her own body as a duster on our wooden floors. She's a big fan of Judd Apatow movies, thoroughly disinterested in any form of 'toy', and won gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in Curling.

Pretend you're a mac fanboy

2008-01-16T18:09:00.000Z

Can't be bothered to trawl the endless Macworld Expo postings, or watch the whole 90 minutes of the polo-necked wunderkind ejaculate apple goodness over the audience, but still want to hold up your end in a conversation about "Hey, did you watch the keynote?". No problem.

Spud

2008-01-14T16:04:00.000Z

2008 is International Year of the Potato, and in the webponce household, year of the fish (we should it more, we will eat more). That, for me, makes an excellent excuse for fish and chips. yay.

I also think i should dress more accordingly: http://www.theknightshop.co.uk/

il gatto

2007-12-29T10:40:00.000Z

my wife and i are getting a cat in the new year. its taken years of gentle persuasion (she's a dog person) but oddly enough, just before xmas, she suggested it herself (i think mostly after seeing one of our friend's kittens, and visiting their 'non smelly' house). so, in early january we will be getting ourselves a cat. no idea what type of cat just yet - we'll be visiting an animal shelter to find the addition to our family, but we're both really excited about it.

excited, and a bit scared. i've never had a pet before, apart from the goldfish from Goose Fair some years back - which lasted about a week before it chose to spend most of its time sleeping on its side near the top of the bowl. oh, and apart from the three fish i had at work for a while, until the office cleaner managed to kill them (long story). oh, and the aibo. but they don't really count - i think a cat is far more 'real' as a pet, and actually requires looking after.

still, it'll be a learning experience, and our first task (just after making the house catproof) is choosing a name. do cats need 2.0 style names these days? tigr?

Happy Christmas

2007-12-21T10:27:00.001Z

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/dlemieux/ under a CC license.

"It was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn't know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa's workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada. Worse, it wasn't just any number at NORAD: it was the commander-in-chief's operations hotline. In the spirit of the season, Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations at the time, had his staff check radar data for any indication of a sleigh making its way south from the North Pole. They found that indeed there were signs of Santa, and merrily gave the children who called an update on his location. Thus, a tradition was born, and NORAD has continued to help children track Santa on Christmas Eve ever since."

What a great story. Happy Christmas everyone.
From googleblog

Ajax is not Web.20

2007-12-07T13:02:00.000Z

I wrote this internally for our studio at work to make sure they're not incorrectly using all these new fangled terms. Thought I'd replicate it here for the sake of posterity (and so i can find it again in the future).

Ah sweet Ajax, that oft mis-used term.

I thought it would be useful for you all to understand just what Ajax is, so you're able to use it in the correct context. Being a digital agency, we should pride ourselves on being able to seperate bullshit terms dropped into conversation and actually meaning what we say.

This is a non-technical explanation of what Ajax is, so you understand the terminology. If you'd like a more indepth explanation, please ask any member of the webteam!

Ajax stands for 'Asyncronous Javascript and XML' (so should probably even be uppercase AJAX, as it is an acronym). It is the process of using Javascript to connect to a data source of some kind, send datato and load data from that source, and then often displaying it back to the user, without having to reload the page. It is commonly used in 'web 2.0' style sites, and can give a page more of a feeling of an 'application', rather than a sequence of pages. Tools like GMail use Ajax to a great extent, and it helps you reduce how much you're loading from the server each time, updating just small amounts of relevant data, rather than the whole page.

It has its benefits and disadvantages, which I won't go into here. It is also worth noting that AJAX as a method of getting data isn't even new, its been around in various guises for about 10 years, so feel free to chuckle and say "that ol' thing?" when people tell you its the latest thing in webtech.

Ajax is NOT animated HTML, Ajax is not a slideshow where images swap in and out without reloading a page, or tabs, or scrolling divs, or anything like that. Ajax is often USED to help create those effects, ie. loading in an image from a database query, or update a block of text based upon a search, etc. etc., but Ajax itself is not creating the animation or the engaging HTML experience.

When clients say "ah yes, i want it built with ajax", they're usually meaning i'd like the site built in HTML, utilising javascript to animate the page, load content in and out, but quite often this has nothing to do with Ajax itself.

When we build these sorts of pages, we just use HTML, CSS and Javascript, as we have done for years, the Ajax part is usually only concerned with the sending and retrieving of data from another script.

Whilst many people say 'ajax' to be a catchall term to describe the things i've mentioned above, web2.0 fancy shizzle, etc, they are often wrong, and we should be aware of that. We don't need to be pedants, laugh at them and say "ha! i think you'll find you're incorrect there, mr client", but we can help educate our clients, and at the very least use correct terminology internally when describing our work.

Wikipedia (as ever) has a great page with more detail on Ajax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29), not to mention the dozen other things which the Trojan war hero has lent his name to.

Irresponsible

2007-12-03T15:03:00.001Z

I wish.

British VOD Services

2007-12-01T00:04:00.000Z

BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and ITV are to launch a video-on-demand service offering more than 10,000 hours of TV programming.

Feet

2007-11-30T23:49:00.001Z

My project for Amstel came to a conclusion on Tuesday night in Amsterdam this week (blog post talking about that coming soon). I took a load of photos of the event, including this series of people in the profile booths from the ground. I thought it made a nice collection of same but different images, and fun to see people's methods of standing for six minutes behind a shower curtain, not to mention the wide array of footwear.

Kindling

2007-11-18T23:07:00.001Z

Amazon launches their eBook service (both hardware and software) tomorrow, a hand-held wireless device which allows you to download books to your Kindle reader, and then, well, read them, for around $9 a pop, not to mention monthly subscriptions to popular blogs etc. All for the tidy price of $400 (which at my reckoning is about 25 new paperbacks, or a hell of a lot more pengiun classics, not to mention scruffy second handers). It uses pretty cool digital ink technology, its pretty neat lookin', and hey, its Jeff Bezos who is selling these, so they must be good, right?

Me, I'm not so sure. Maybe I'm not the right person to comment, I only bought my first piece of digital music recently. Yup, me, Technical Director of a digital agency, and general geek, only just got around to getting some of that new fangled mp3 action from the interweb. Okay, not quite true, I've 'borrowed' the occasional album from friends via mp3, and i rip all my CDs to mp3 immediately so I have my whole collection at work, but it wasn't until last month that i actually bought something virtually rather than owning it in the meatspace (if you're interested, it was a Lily Allen B side, which I kept hearing on Pandora.com, but hadn't got with the album). Call me old fashioned, but I just like having, in my hands, cover notes, little booklet, crappy plastic case which breaks in the mail from amazon and all, the actual physical product. I think in the case of music, its because i still like digging through my old collection, and finding things i've not listened to in years (mostly due to embarassment). Books, however, are a completely different matter, one of pure emotive connection.

I love buying books. Worst case scenario for me is walking past a Waterstones or Borders after being in a pub, as I'll nip in and come out 30 minutes later with usually more than a hundred quid of wares. I love the process of going into a store, and finding a book which I like the look of (yes, i judge a book by its cover, blurb and smell), browsing around, thumbing through, cocking my head by 90 degrees and scanning the shelves. Then, once you have the book you've chosen to read, breaking the spine, marking pages, folding it, holding it, showing people pages, running your finger across the edge of the pages making the flicking noise. Its almost as much as a physical experience as a literary one - and of course, its a non-digital experience. Ah, yes, its offline. Its a reflective media, rather than projective, you don't get a headache, it doesn't flicker, it doesn't take a while to refresh, it doesn't scroll or animate or beep or allow you to subscribe. It is a step away from my daily life, not in just the story itself, but the technology also.

Then you have the sharing, social aspect of the book, passing it on to a friend, recommending and lending, returning to an oft-read book, dusting off the sand from when you were on holiday with the book, hand written inscriptions and messages from the friend who bought it you, and its okay to take a book into the toilet, but a PDA? How about on the beach?

I'm usually an early adopter, or rather I spend far too much money on gadgets which will often have a shorter period of holding my interest than its battery lifetime, but I might just pass up on Amazon's Kindle for the time being, until they can replicate the same total experience of reading a book - at which point, i'll just have to choose between a book, and a PDA pretending to be a book.

Gmail and Permalinks

2007-11-18T15:41:00.000Z

I use gmail all the time, both personally and at work. I have my personal domain forwarding all email to my gmail account, and equally my work accounts do the same. This allows me to use gmail as a webmail client (because our work exchange webmail is oh so lame), AND (here's the killer app bit) my past however many years of work email is completely archived and searchable. This is increasingly becoming useful as people ask me the same question six months on, I can refer back to the original reply i sent them, along with a sarcastic remark along the lines of "you asked me this six months ago, here was my response then". Where the wiki fails, gmail kicks in and helps out.

Google have recently added SWFAddress style permalinks to each mail as well, so if you don't want to keep all of the detail of the thread in a wiki or document, you can now just link directly to the email discussion, et voila, there is your sarcastic remark material. Brilliant for moody matthew moments.

You can email/save/bookmark searches:

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/what+is+the+wifi+password

You can email/save/bookmark label queries for quick lookups:

http://mail.google.com/mail/#label/sarcasticresponses

You can link directly to an email

http://mail.google.com/mail/#all/123895043859034

brilliant!

Probably not ideal for sharing, as its all material which is behind your authenticated account, but great for personal access to information.

Check out more top tips direct from the horse's mouth

Amen

2007-11-18T01:24:00.001Z

You have magical hands

2007-11-18T01:13:00.001Z

Impossible Park

2007-11-15T09:20:00.000Z

Another adidas football promo, this time for Germany. Our first dabble into Flash Media Server, although we actually ended up using Red5, an open source solution which seems to be doing the job fantastically well. We're also hosting this on Positive Internet, a return to the giraffed ones, and using AMFPHP for the remoting framework, and hooking into adidas' centralised user databases via an external interface we developed for them. A lovely technically very interesting project. Of course, its all in German, and I have no idea what they're on about :)

adidas football 08

2007-11-13T19:04:00.000Z

de-construct launch the new adidas football site today.

Go kick a ball.

your small breasts

2007-11-11T00:14:00.001Z

These illustrations are both beautiful, and genius. taking the oh so common subjects of emails we all receive daily, and turning them into something really special. makes spam huggable and lovable once again.

Loos ARE important

2007-11-10T23:44:00.000Z

Its good to know that i'm not alone in thinking bathrooms are important social spaces. Okay - not social in a 'three people having a chat' kinda way, but in terms of its place in our workspaces, and the time spent in the toilet. I'm really bad at taking screen breaks, in fact just breaks generally. I eat my lunch at my desk whilst reading RSS or catching up on emails, i return to my desk between turning the kettle on and pouring the boiling water into the mug, i generally spend between 8am and 6pm solidly in a working state of mind. Going to the toilet is, in my own way, a breakout area where work doesn't really invade, and my mind can wander. I've always been one for having books or magazines in the toilet, and that a loo should be a comforting relaxing and almost meditation-worthy place. Maybe i take that too far, but in our world of open plan offices, in constant contact with the world via mobile, IM, email, or in person, going to the toilet and closing that door is a strangely comforting thing to do. I think some time should be dedicated to thinking about how a toilet space is designed in work environments to get that quick hit of non-workiness. I also think that if one has to go to the toilet for that quiet time, something is probably wrong with your workload or workspace anyway - but thats a different matter.

too much information?

"bathrooms are a key indicator of a team culture"

Food==Code

2007-11-10T11:36:00.000Z

"The characteristics of a failing eatery ring remarkably similar to those of a poorly-run software product"

Interesting points from 37signals on how Gordon Ramsey's approach to restaurants can often be applied to software projects.

Honest Taglines

2007-11-09T08:13:00.001Z

Ikea: One day you’ll be able to afford real furniture.

http://www.guardedlyoptimistic.com/2007/10/if-taglines-were-honest.html

Crafts Council / Collect 2008

2007-11-08T14:41:00.000Z

Busy week for the deploy team. The Crafts Council have launched their Collect 08 microsite this week, providing a sneak peak for the look and feel of the new Crafts Council site we're working on to launch later this year. Check it.

Museum of Illustration

2007-11-08T14:30:00.000Z

de-construct launches a new site this week, an interim site for the Museum of Illustration. It is the brainchild of Quentin Blake, who as both an experienced illustrator and teacher saw a gap in the UK's museum sector. Currently, illustration is only seen in occasional temporary exhibitions in other museums and galleries. This museum will change that.

Red Gurnard

2007-11-08T14:27:00.001Z

We ate at a fishworks restaurant in Battersea on Sunday night, and decided, as we do every time we eat fish, that we should be eating more, so that very moment, we purchased a couple of Red Gurnard to cook the following day. Apparantly, they're being championed by Rick Stein currently - i just bought them because they looked funny.

We found a couple recipes:

* Baked Stuffed Red Gurnard
* BAKED FILLETS WITH PROVENCALE SAUCE
* Red gurnard salad with samphire and Jersey Royals
* Roasted Red Gurnard with Anchovy Butter
* Gurnard with Minted Pea Purée and Bacon
* Pan-fried Fillet of Gurnard served with a Lemon Herb Risotto and a Sun-dried Tomato Oil

but settled on making a lovely soup based on something in Catherine's head. Tres nice.

Industrial Action

2007-11-06T08:12:00.000Z

Due to the industrial action on the part of my writers, webponce rants may have little to say other the next few months. We can only apologise that we have nothing amusing to say for ourselves.

(willy, poo, bum)

Great Factoid.

2007-11-03T09:45:00.000Z

The setting of the SIS offices were featured in the James Bond films GoldenEye, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, and Casino Royale. For the first time MI6 allowed filming of the building itself in The World is Not Enough for the pre-credits sequence, where a bomb hidden in a briefcase full of money is exploded inside the building. Originally, Her Majesty's Government objected, citing a security risk. However, then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said, "After all Bond has done for Britain, it was the least we could do for Bond."

Wicked :)

Using SCPlugin with Authenticated Subversion Repositories on OS X

2007-10-30T13:51:00.000Z

I've cracked the way in which subversion and scplugin works on a mac. its a bit of a pain initially, but once it works, you're good to go. If you have an easier method of getting this working, let me know.

1. If the machine never had SVN installed, you'll need to install it. Get a binary dmg from here:

http://subversion.tigris.org/project_packages.html

2. Get a copy of SCPlugin from here:

http://scplugin.tigris.org/

3. fire up terminal

4. add this line to ~/.bash_profile to add svn to your environment:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

5. enter the following to mark in the changes

. .bash_profile

6. Do a checkout using SCPlugin (or the command line, whichever you prefer)

7. Make a small modification (ie. modify a text file with some whitespace)

8. USING THE COMMAND LINE IN THE DIRECTORY WITH THE MODIFICATION:

svn ci -m "First Commit to cache authentication" --username "SVN USERNAME"

(where SVN Username is the username, ie. Joe Bloggs)

9. this will ask you for the user's password. enter that, and your changes are committed.

10. Make another modification to the working copy (perhaps remove that whitespace)

11. USING SCPLUGIN, DO A COMMIT

12. This will throw a keychain message. Accept the addition to the keychain. This will cache the authentication which you used in step 8.

13. You can now use SCPlugin to commit etc. via Finder, without resorting to the command line each time.

phew.

A day of RSS

2007-10-20T16:17:00.000Z

Spent most of today catching up with my feeds.

Rather frustratingly managed to miss that this event was happening Friday/Saturday, considering I had been in Amsterdam on Thursday, and my wife is away all this weekend - it could have been an interesting couple of days.

Font loveliness here

Remarkable story of a blind kid who uses echolocation to 'see'.

Coming up to Halloween, here's a couple of links on the Willhelm Scream. Check out the clips and then go watch the movies and see if you can spot it. I guarantee it will ruin your enjoyment of all films ever.

Not surprisingly, Myspace seem to be feeling the heat from Facebook, and have started opening doors to support developers. Sucks that they are bowing to pressure commercially, rather than just doing something which they think is good for the community - but hey, same end i guess.

Ha - the height of laziness. Brilliant. I want one! Maybe they can write my blog for me.

Family Guy explains the Empire's aesthetically driven flaw.

Alex will be happy - finally we're lined up the Thundercats movie - w00t!

Did you hear the one about the guy with an ear on his arm?

Genius blog about "quotation" marks, and their "bad" use.

MacWifi is about to hit the streets. Warchalking efforts will substantially be eased, just buy a burger (or a chip, or whatever the cheapest thing they sell is) and write the access node password on the pavement outside.

Nice Site - Neo kept his minidiscs in a book called Simulacra and Simulation, so that makes this site related to the Matrix. Doubly cool.

Mmm. Minimal.

Mmm. Bacn (and Bacon)

Not so mmm. Mice Wine anyone?

ThinkSpotting. Nice meme, nice idea.

Okay - i'm done, and going outside now.

imified

2007-10-18T06:50:00.000Z

http://www.imified.com/developers/index.cfm

this is a really cool platform, and i think opens a lot of opportunities to develop less invasive apps. imified's developer api allows you to hook up an IM client to your applicatihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifon. it effectively provides command line support to your web application, so rather than having to fire up a web-browser, you can fire off a couple of lines of text into your IM client (which is of course always open and online). Think "what am i doing today?" to get back all your outlook appointments today. Think "get my bugs" to return a list of open bugs from mantis. Think "where is alex" to get his currently location from the GPS we installed in his head. Unfortunately, there is cost associated to this, so playing around with the concept is less than welcoming, but i think its a really very nifty idea (and negates the work i did trying to get a gtalk app running in php :)

You spin me round

2007-10-18T06:30:00.000Z

This is properly wierd:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

I just totally can't see it anti-clockwise. Damn, i'm meant to be left brain!

Sounds beautiful / Looks noisy

2007-10-16T08:00:00.000Z

This is just awesome.
[src: infosthetics.com]

The problem with experience..

2007-10-16T06:30:00.001Z

I'm finding that as we grow as a company, and there are more people to do more specific things, i'm also less able to do those specific things.

When we were small, we all had to chip in to all parts of the business. IA, brainstorms, coding, setting up project sites, uploading, HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Javascript, Project Management etc. etc. There was the danger, of course, of being a jack of all trades, and master of none, but still the proverbial finger was in many pies.

Now, we're a bigger company, nearing 40 people, there is someone to do each of those things, and as a result, I'm less required to do any of those things. I do little HTML, i do little PHP, i do little IA or setting up project sites, or helping out with IT issues.

At the time, it seemed a wonderful thing to be able to hand off chunks of work so i could concentrate on my core responsibilities, but now i'm finding myself less able to do any of those periphery jobs when required, because its been so long since i last did them well. Not to mention, my core responsibilities now being anything but what my core responsibilities used to be, even my core is getting rusty.

I suppose its like learning a language. I used to speak fairly good German when i was young, but after not using for most of my life, my Deutsche is nicht so gut. The same with British Sign Language, and the same with, unfortunately, the things which I'm supposedly meant to be guiding my team on. I'm all word docs and spreadsheets these days. Microsoft Manager Hell (tm).

That being said, I'm learning a great deal from all of the discipline specialists which sit beneath me. We have some great UX people, we have fantastic developers in my team and Rory's team - who daily inspire me in the way they work and approach problems. We have amazing designers and creatives. We have some really solid experience in all of the teams - which is helping me broaden my understanding and abilities, but at the same time, not specialising in any one thing. I've come full circle - jack of all trades, master of none.

I wonder if there is a golden route (mean,third,circle,egg,goose) through a career which keeps that specialism, but at the same time helps one progress in seniority, or does specialism restrict how many people you can be truly responsible for? I suppose its about job definition, and being able to do a bit of your specialist work for say 30% of the day, and the rest of your jack of all trades for the other 70%. Michael "Rands" Lopp thinks a manager needs to keep his hands-on-ness to a certain extent, but make it a bit of the project which you own, therefore shouldn't dip in and dip out at will. Other schools of thought suggest managers should let their team develop, and you just stay well away to ensure a feeling of ownership (and help keep micromanagement at bay). I'm finding it hard to keep away, because perhaps I'm not ready to give it up yet, and hard to balance both 'work' and work. I think the next twelve months of the team are going to be interesting to see how my role further develops. Stay posted.

Get some democracy in ya'

2007-10-15T18:18:00.001Z

I see London Elects is live once more - the run up to next year's Mayoral election can be followed at http://www.londonelects.org.uk - Top work to Matt and the LE crew (and Start's team in designing). Now, get your ass down to your local borough council, and make sure you're all eligible to vote.

Sustainability

2007-10-12T08:52:00.001Z

Finally the topic of sustainability has come up at de-construct with the talk of moving to a new office becoming the watershed we perhaps needed. Some early points we wanna look at:

* Flights
* Video Conferencing
* Paperless Office
* Public Transport (not cabs)
* Automatic Lighting
* Servers using sustainable energy
* Window seals
* Hand Dryers
* Recycling areas and waste management
* Energy efficient fridges and dishwashers
* Dual flush toilets
* Taps with flow regulators
* Reduced water use showers
* Green/Living roof
* Furniture from recycled materials
* Review suppliers, e.g. change to the green taxi company, review sainsbury's shopping, cleaning services
* Locally sourced/low carbon produce (ie. coffee, biscuits)
* Printer use logging / name and shame
* Turn off the fucking printer!
* Get rid of the fax machine
* Turning off machines and monitors at night
* More things to encourage people to cycle to work
* Return plastic Sainsbury's bag to them for recycling
* Use glasses NOT plastic cups

Cool People

2007-10-10T12:06:00.000Z

dopplr are offering beta invites to anyone with a email address from a handpicked list of companies on their site. Quite a neat idea in that they're saying "Hey, you're cool, we respect you and want you to give us your feedback", but also its a great way of giving some substantial organisations visibility of your tool - i guess in the hope of uptake of the product.

I'm not on there, but I do know people at over 10 of the companies listed there. Bums. I'm one degree of seperation away from cool shizzle.

Tattoo

2007-10-10T07:03:00.000Z

I've always secretly wanted a tattoo, but am too chicken and mainstream to get one. In any case I never knew what I'd get should I have the courage to have one done. Inspiration struck me this morning. Across my chest, I would have:


404
T-Shirt Not Found

Congratulations Jon and Dawn

2007-10-07T21:14:00.001Z

I'd like to say a quick thank you before I start with my speech today. To the internet. The internet is the reason Jon and I met, to a certain extent, and the reason we've not drifted apart. I was truly honoured to be asked to be Jon's best man, and it means a great deal to me. i think we'll both admit to being generally rubbish, and don't see each other as much as we should, and its the internet which has allowed us to chat to each other most days despite the 600 miles and classic 'boys being rubbish'. Its also great for downloading movies. More on that later.

i first met jon at on my first day at university, about ten years ago. true to form, jon had managed to turn up to university a week early. apparantly the university had assumed the name of carlos signified spanish descent, and invited him one week before most of the students arrived, along with the other foreign students. As a result, when the rest of the school arrived a week later, jon had been pretty much a single white female, sorry, single white british student, whilst all of the other students were foreign. Jon, never one to hide away from a challenge, stepped up to the plate, and by the time we arrived, he'd already made a good number of relationships with the students in our halls. However, on my first day, we met jon waiting outside halls eagerly to go to the union with fellow brits. I was going up to the union, and jon invited himself along - this was the beginning of our beautiful friendship. it was also the only time jon managed to turn up on time for the rest of university.

apologies for my slipup earlier, saying single white female, but its easy to get confused. jon has often toyed with blurring the lines of gender. not only had the administration of wolverhampton university invited him a week early, but they'd also managed to put him on a girls corridor in halls. Joanna Carlos was born.

jon and i were on the same course, and quickly sparked up a friendship. his bedroom in halls was about as messy as mine, and it wasn't long before jon was introducing me to his happy hardcore tastes in dance music, nor long before he demonstrated to all of us his special hamster dancing skills. i'm hoping he'll show us some moves on the dancefloor later. of course, jon has always been rather acrobatic anyway. i don't remember how we managed to find jon's velvet leotard one day in his room, but upon his explanation that he was actually an award winning trampolinist, no more questions were asked.

My core group of friends at university quickly solidified, and felt more of a family unit than anything: myself and becky being mum and dad, robin and lissa being the kids, and jon as the out of work uncle who just always seems to be in your house when you get home, but you never gave him keys. in our second year, you'd have been forgiven thinking jon actually lived with us. Fond memories of jon sitting at the end of the bed, eating cold pizza, and clearing the room with bodily gases.

Time at university flew, mostly made up of doing very little work, and lots of late nights in the last weeks of term because we'd done very little work. It wasn't long until we were required to start thinking about work placements. Jon was ecstatic to have found himself a job placement in Sunny Australia. It wasn't until a little more detail was divulged that actually it was the original Perth, rather than the antipodean version. Nevertheless, Jon took to Scotland and met Dawn, and of course the rest is very much well known.

We went our seperate ways during our third year placements, Jon flew to Scotland, I to London, but the final year came upon us in quicker than a flash, and Jon, after much hard work and bribing of tutors, graduated. I remember graduation day so clearly. Each member of the class was called up in name order, and presented with their certificate. Once again, the administration of Wolverhampton managed to call out Jon as a Woman, and announced to the stage Joanne Carlos.

Jon is one of the most loyal, loving friends I've had the fortune to meet, and I'm so so grateful of his friendship, despite being at the other end of the country to each other. It is this exact reason, for my love and respect of you Jon, that i'm not going to tell everyone the story about when you got your beer stolen by 14 year olds, or how bad your homebrew made in the halls of residence bath tasted, or that you throw-up without really noticing like a baby, coating my arm in red wine in the toilet of time flies, craft activities with clingfilm, or take the mickey out of your once questionnable facial hair. Its just not fair, and I won't do it. It was a really bad goatee though.

We had dinner with Jon and Dawn's families last night, and we got onto the topic of Chillis and the chemical structure of their hotness (don't ask) and Jon's father said he had just realised the reason Jon and I are good friends, because of both of our attention to detail, and ability to retain tiny bits of information like that. Apart from the obvious irony, he couldn't be more wrong, we're both useless, and thats why we get on so well. This speech was written last night infront of Jon in the hotel bar whilst he was writing his. Needless to say, on Jon's last night of freedom, he was sitting on his laptop reading the internet. So, thankyou again to the internet.

James Brown London

2007-10-02T08:13:00.000Z

de-construct launches www.jamesbrownlondon.com today, another project we've worked on with MadeThought.

NK Magazine

2007-09-29T09:49:00.001Z

The Visual Dictionary was featured in this month's NK magazine, Lithuania's new media rag. The full article is available on flickr, and if you're a fluent Lithuanian speaker, do let me know what it says. I'm assured it's good :)

The Visual Dictionary Poetry

2007-09-28T08:33:00.001Z

We had a couple of friends around for dinner last night, and I broke out the box of moo cards. I then had to run to the shops to pick up some cheese, and by the time i got back, even with the limited amount of words in the pack, Emma had written a little poem with them. I'd never thought of that idea. I'm going to do a bunch of other moo packs with a better/wider selection of words, and some themed sets also.

moo cards

2007-09-26T21:25:00.001Z

Woo! Moo!
My moo cards for the visual dictionary arrived today. They're wicked, just wicked. Ask me for one when you see me next!

decon 6th

2007-09-26T08:05:00.000Z

de-construct is six years old (yesterday actually, but i forgot to blog). Our birthday present was a lovely FWA Site of the Day award this morning for the adidas football site.

madinspain

2007-09-24T18:00:00.000Z

Fred was at MADINSPAIN this weekend, and showed the visual dictionary to the audience as part of his talk. Hello to anyone who is visiting the site from Spain, especially to those who heard about us from Fred. Its really hard to track word of mouth referrals, but just today, we had quite a few visits from Madrid, so you never know. I should have given him some moocards to hand out ;)

(oh, and strangely enough... the most popular word in the dictionary is Madrid. Go figure!)