Probably Random

Duxford

I went to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford yesterday for a nosey round.  It’s a very impressive site although the exhibits are somewhat spread out along the length of the runway so it is a fair trek from the entrance down to the land warfare exhibit at the far end.

Obviously Duxford is mostly about aeroplanes, but I hadn’t realise quite how many were stashed away in there! and how varied they are too.

I’m reading The Backroom Boys at the moment which has a chapter on the development of Concord, so being able to get on board a concord was great, and the USAF exhibit was excellent too, the shear size of a B52, and the sleek design of the SR-71 awesome, although it makes you wonder what they must have up there now if that’s in retirement!

You do have to pay at Duxford (the London one is free and I think the Manchester one is too)  but  it is an interesting day out (if you like planes) but there are a lot of them and it’s only really they new airspace hanger which has real activities for kids.

we-think (the talk)

I went to the British Library last night to a tlak given by Charles Leadbeater called WeThink to go with his new book.

The book was written and published on the web for feedback, this feedback and collaborative editing was then used to rework the content and presumeably add a little more based on the experience. The talk was about the book and the process and how we can collaborate on a much greater scale in the future. The idea is that we will think collaboratively, not as a Borg mind but as individuals within a network, and that new ideas are not necessarily invented in our heads but the real tangile outcome is created at the point where conversations, ideas and discussion cross.

Collaboration can work for real, serious projects such as Linux, Wikipedia and Encyclopedia of Life. There are many experts willing to give their time and effort for ‘free’ to contribute, they in turn get their position as an expert reinforced. In all these cases structure has formed to create the necessary environment for the collabortion but it has remained flexible.

There are arguements both ways on responsability. By collaborting you are in direct contact with people, readers, user etc, so you can’t, like an old school journalist, send out you story from on high and ignore the responses. But at the same time, who is legally responsible, in this world of ligitation and recrimination who would be held accountable, would it be everyone involved? the originator? perhaps this is a good thing.

I’m also reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends.. at the moment and was interested to read that this book was written collaboratively too (at least that’s what I read into it). He said that he wrote a presentation, gave it, got feedback, improved it, wrote notes and hand outs, got feedback on it all and eventually all of this collaborative work went in to form a best seller. An interesting idea is that of ownership, who owns the ideas and concepts that have been generated collabortively, well no one and everyone (as in the paragraph above with responsability) but at some point someone will take the idea to fruition, whether this be Charles Leadbeater, Linus Torvalds, Dale Carnegie or indeed artists, it’s amazing how little some of them do, or did, they have the idea but are basically art directors who put their name to a work which has usually be created by some other skilled crafts people, whether it be a bronze smelter and caster or an artist who specialised in painting hands back in the Renaissance, who we may never have heard of but we’ve seen their brush strokes. With the new collaboration, there needs to be much more recognition of the individuals involved, this is what people thrive on, if they are recognised within their group/network/society then they will be happy to contribute.

Joel on Software – the book

I’ve just finished reading this excellent book.  Obviously there is some pretty familiar material in there (if you read his blog) but it’s been reorganised and that makes a difference, it’s also nice to be able to read it elsewhere not just when i’m at a computer.

I really think anyone who has anything to do with computers (well anything more than checking their e-mail) should read it.  Its informative and several of the examples I have already used in other contexts when explaining things to people.

As well as reading the book check out the blog, there’s a really go article on IE8 in there which is pretty thought provoking (if you lie awake thinking about browser compatability…)

Microsoft 2008 launch event

The UK launch event for Microsofts 2008 series of products was yesterday (yeah I know writting it the day after is so slow, I should have twittered it and started a revolt against the speakers or something) and it was pretty good, a lot more glamourous than the one I went to in London for the 2005 launch.

Basically I’m not too bothered about Windows 2008 server, it looks good, more secure and everything you’d expect from a new release. As a developer I’m more interested in VisualStudio but having been to loads of the .net 3.5 MSDN days I already had a pretty good idea of what they were going to say there, so I spent the day in the SQL server 2008 sessions (although I did manage to sneak into Mobile Development seminar…). To be honest I was impressed with SQL 2008 many of the new features aren’t what i’d be using day to day but you can see where they may be useful (filestream data type) but the geodata is great, that’s going to help me with stuff i’m doing now, just simplify my life straight out of the box and save on passing unecessary data. They have also speeded it up and made it a bit more robust, so to me it looks like a nobrainer upgrade for VS 2008 and for SQL 2008. But what excited me was the presenters. Rafal Lukawiecki and Keith Burns were awesome, Rafal was so enthusiastic I’m still excited about data-mining a day later! Keith was rather less flambouyant but dry wit and solid SQL. Loved it. I know that’s the whole idea and it was a day long advert but hey what can you do.

My Highlights:

1. Keith and Rafal’s SQL session
2. Andy Wigley’s Mobile development session
3. The guy from Cambridge speaking about programming for parallel processing/multicore
4. The guy in the Mac OS X T-shirt
5. The company giving away a wii on their stand at a Microsoft event (evils across the room from the x-box people)
6. The MS employee on my train who had printed out Google maps for directions (i didn’t get my camera out fast enough)

Phorm! the end of creative marketing

Phorm is the latest way for the marketeers to give us better ads. Basically it’s a bit like a direct marketing company reading all your mail and interviewing everyone who visits you, listening to your phone calls and monitoring what you watch on TV so that they can sell advertising space.

Personally, I can’t see anything good about this unless you’re a shareholder, for two reasons privacy and creativity.
Privacy, well it’s a bit obvious why it’s bad for that. I’m just hoping that https will lock it out because if it doesn’t… then they can read all your credit card details. So one way to get around it is to route everyting through an encrypted proxy if Tor can find it’s way through the Great Firewall of China then we still have hope that we can use the internet without corporate monitoring.

Creativity, it seems to me that such targeted advertising will suck the creativity out of the marketing industry. If you know so much about me that you know what I want and when I want it then all I need is a text link saying ‘buy a new pair of jeans’. Which means that we will all miss out on brilliantly creative ideas like the Cadburys Gorilla, the Quicksilver Dynamite the Sony Rabbits,  see all the brand names there (just some of the best of 2007) … I remember them all, and I bet none of those adverts were written with me in mind and if they had had me in mind, I doubt they would have come up with that as a response.