I’ve been to the show a couple of times over the years. There were projects on weather, studies on crops, sexuality and society, web applications, teeny electronic steam-punkedness. The most impressive thing about the show is the students. Some bristle, “ask me stuff”, others are a little reticent – but all are passionate about the who, what, why and how of their projects.

This year’s show opens on Wednesday and runs right through to Saturday, although be warned that after the prize-giving this Friday, the booths tend to close up and students go home.

Caterina’s post has been swimming in my mind for few days, and it came to the surface yesterday as I read this tweet by @jessefarmer:

People don’t want to be convinced, they want to be inspired.

These both come from the same place. As human beans, we all just wanna be inspired. The things that inspire me to make things or make things better are not reading about Y Combinator deals, or going to enterpreneur- sandwiched meetups. It’s not baitlinkings. Or ebooks.

Sometimes the frustration of mangled double-speak on topic of technology makes me want to scream bullshit like I used to and run away like a seven-year girl. If someone is inspired, they’re probably hacking together something rather than speaking around it. They are probably investing their time in things they love making.

My day job necessitates me being a critic all day long. I enjoy this. But sometimes, the doing of trying to make things better gives one a sinking feeling, nay a hesitation, of making things from scratch. 9-5, I plan for gaps. Afterhours, it can be difficult to focus on the making things, gaps and all. It slows the pace of making, as I Hans Brinker my way through. Plugging gaps in designs proactively. And that’s something I have to deal with, and something I’m getting better at. But even then, I’m inspired and led to making things, by the things that made me. Kinda like Caterina alludes to.

In a roundabout kind of way, I suppose I’m saying that making doesn’t have to be profound or released to the public or a straight line or the subject of every greasy-till fumble. And the making of Silly is needed now more than ever.

A lot of the problems I see Yahoo making over and over again stem from its failure to really embrace the spirit of its failed Brickhouse project and give levity and space to its engineers to invent. Yahoo aren’t the only company making this mistake.

Brickhousing
On establishment, Brickhouse was shaped to be a pocket monster of an invention studio. Set in the startup hub of central SF, its mission was to recapture the startup vibe in Yahoo. While it produced some interesting projects like Fire Eagle, it was for all intents and purposes, a phantom limb for nurturing innovation in Yahoo proper.

There seemed to be a lot of problems that stunted Brickhouse’s impact. Not being on the main campus was a massive problem. Not just for the Brickhouse imagineers feeling the beat of the HQ, but also for reinvesting that innovation and reenergising the body of Yahoo. It’s difficult to motivate people at the coalface of an organisation working on the mundane but shipping parts of a site, when you’ve created a special hip beast in central SF and annointed them as the engine of the org’s R&D effort going forward. Who wants to be shipping yesterday’s software?

Revolving Chiefs, Revolving Goals

Leadership was going in circles. A lot of tech vets ran through the doors of Brickhouse – Salim Ismail (now at Singularity U), Chad Dickerson (now head of Etsy), Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch). It all seems a bit chicken and egg. No doubt the exec bounce rate was inextricably linked to Yahoo’s existential crisis. A crisis completely characterised by the infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto written by the former SVP Brad Garlinghouse in 2006 just as the Brickhouse was was finding its feet. A crisis that included Yahoo buying Zimbra in 2007 for $350m, a company who’s mailbox architecture was seen by Yahoo as an undoubted opening salvo against Google Apps dominance

The acquisition of Zimbra will help Yahoo! to expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain.

Zimbra was then punted to VMware less than three years later, with Yahoo still committed to using its technology for its mail and calendar products. A double-whammy. Yahoo basically said we don’t want to architect Zimbra’s IP, but because of dependancies with our architecture, we’ll be at the mercy of your decision-making, Mr VMware. Basically.

It’s damn clear that rebellion was ricocheting at lots of levels of Yahoo – the manifesto, execs and key product people leaving. The effect was astounding. Acquisitions were bolted on hap-hazardly. Partnerships on roads to nowhere inked – search deals with Samsung and RIM etc while the iPhone quietly hoovered up marketshare.

But all of that is now in the past. Or is it? There’s a lot of commentary on the web saying that Yahoo needs to embrace its present company DNA and just decide it’s a media organisation rather than a technology company. Yahoo, the media org is at first-glance is an easier value proposition to understand. It has properties to drive – Yahoo! Finance and Mail are still well eyeballed but I fail to see the impetus to reinvent these properties if Yahoo decides just to be a media company. Yes, media organisations like the Guardian do very well – thank you very much. But Yahoo will never be the Guardian. And it probably shouldn’t try to be.

And stirrings of the impending sale of Yahoo shouldn’t come as a surprise. Packaging the whole company. If I’ve learned anything from Pretty Woman it’s that selling off a company in well-rounded units rather than a confusing maw of properties makes sense. Which is why I am intrigued to read reports of possible sale of the company is on the cards. Maybe going private is what needs to happen, but a private monster is still a monster.

The historic setting of St Patrick’s Hall as a backdrop to the Queen’s speech made me think of Garret last night. As the results of the Lisbon Treaty were called out to assembled politicos in St Patrick’s Hall of Dublin Castle, I gatecrashed the gig (thanks to ye know who ye are), and got to interview Garret briefly. Here’s the footage! Yes, it’s raw.

And when I got talking to him, the established media saw he was open to giving comment and they circled around him asking him questions as well.

Oh and here’s Garret, Dick Roche and Conor Lenihan celebrating the Yes result! Snatches of MaryLou in there as well.

What a gentleman! And what a loss to us all Garret RIP.

Some background on the centre. The Clarity Centre is a Science Foundation Ireland centre for research in Science, Engineering and Technology. It specialises adaptive sensor technologies and information discovery.

The internship blurb:

The primary aim of the CLARITY undergraduate internship is to offer exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to participate and contribute to exciting research projects at CLARITY which allows the student to use leading research facilities and to inspire these students to take the first step on a path to a research career.

Through the CLARITY Undergraduate Internship, Interns will be:

• Given the opportunity to undertake research in a co-operative environment;
• Introduced to research via relevant and stimulating real-world applications which will be used in ongoing research projects;
• Exposed to new research problems, interdisciplinary research exploration as well as the use of high-tech equipment;
• Given groundwork in basic research skills, which will assist the interns in transforming the internship experience into a long term plan for research career options

Projects include the development of web portals, sensor applications, Android development and using Kinect for motion perception. Full details on the Clarity Centre site. Spotted via Marie!

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Today is my 1444th day on Twitter.

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Last night’s Culture Show special ‘The Books We Really Read’ on BBC2 presented by Sue Perkins explored popular fiction down the centuries and how today’s bestsellers sit a gulf across from literary fiction. Perkins, a self-confessed literary fiction fan and past Booker Prize judge, decides to investigate the impact of popular fiction on culture across the genres of crime, romance and thriller. She reads Jackie Collins, meets fans of Dick Francis and interviews Lee Child and Sophie Kinsella.

What’s interesting about this is not Child attempts to shrug off the snooty High Art pretentions of the literary fiction as almost a class thing. What was stirred my stones is how he noted that he could do what they (the LitFiction crowd) do, but that they could not do what he does.

//

Related somewhat to Child’s I’m currently reading Stephen King’s wonderful ‘On Writing’. This snippet from the foreword really struck a chord:

One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk—that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and then said: “No one ever asks about the language.”

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my own motivations—why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one like this, that would leave me feeling like either a literary gas- bag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those books—and those writers—on the market already, thanks.

But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

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Om wrote a thoughtful post entitled ‘Why the Medium Is Not the Message’. Om’s posts are always thoughtful, but this really stuck out for me me:

When companies can’t really tell the difference between the medium and the message, they get in trouble. Let’s look at the much-hyped photo-sharing service Instagr.am and Flickr, the granddaddy of photo sharing services.

At their core, both these services are about social broadcasting and social validation, not storing photos. But today, Flickr gives an impression of being a staid photo-sharing product. Why? Because mobile has become key component of this sociability.

Instagr.am embraced the medium but focused on what was its core task: social broadcasting and social validation.

At first, it sounds like Om is directly opposed to King – but while in different realms, they both question the hows and whats.

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In the last week Twitter has started to roll out its grand plans to monetise. Hello #dickbar. In a strange way, I’m confused to how they came to the decision of executing on this. Heavy consideration of medium as platform and message as add-on?

//

Christmas 2010 and I’m closing Twitter in my browser in favour of old Usenet groups I used to frequent. Anemic and somewhat web-filled. They too have been scooped out and branded as Google Groups.

]]> http://golez.net/2011/03/06/of-medium-and-message/feed/ 0 http://golez.net/2010/10/13/iarnrod-eireann-copyrights-its-train-timetable/ http://golez.net/2010/10/13/iarnrod-eireann-copyrights-its-train-timetable/#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:23:26 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=4736

Iarnród Éireann Copyright
No part of this timetable may be copied, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system or used in any form for commercial or promotional purposes without the written permission of the copyright holders.

Protecting themselves from commercial mobile apps using their timetable information. Can a timetable be copyrighted?

Spent 90 seconds skipping into Engage and hit a wall with the buzz-word drinking game. Perhaps I’ll return when I have the others finished.

Enjoying this far. Krug uses the word mensch in the dedication and never belittles web browser when tracking their habits.

About Face 3 is on the to-read list. Tometastic.

Any other design/psychology/web books I should be reading? Any recommendations?

Besides the sheer size of the facility, the next thing that’s been whispered is that Apple will use it to put iTunes in the cloud. It has to be Spotify-like service though, because I can’t see telcos wanting that kind of data clogging up their backbone.

And what about Spotify? They can’t be happy. It’s not inconceivable that iTunes will go with the subscription model in the medium term especially if your tracks are merely up in the air? They could do a mixed-mode model, say you can buy X songs for 5 bucks a month or have Jay-Z hand-pick a playlist of tracks.  Whatever happen, a cloud-based client that serves up music has to hurt Spotify.

Also, it’ll be interesting to see what value-add products Apple can bring online to compliment the music offerings it currently sells. Imagine buying your 8 year-old daughter a Hannah Montana pass on iTunes. They can download the music, get a season pass to episode of the show, see exclusive Miley concerts, ringtones, karaoke backing tracks, dance how-to videos. I could go on and on. Suddenly Apple isn’t in the music business, but it’s a content delivery platform player and media tollmaster. Whatever device, they have a holistic menu you can buy like age-appropriate passes to and just gift to whomever, even kids.

The Apple cloud computing centre isn’t just a music play. It’s a CDN play where scale matters and they’re counting on that. Their single biggest asset is the bank of iTunes customer accounts they manage. Yes, security concerns has hampered iTunes in the last few weeks, but you can bet that Apple are depending on iTunes in the cloud to unlock market scale unheard of and predictable income streams, year on year.

Grove, ever the engineer, takes a deep breath and a pragmatic approach to exploring why having a manufacturing base in America is important to scaling the economy and fostering innovation. Learning how to build things better comes from knowing how to build.

There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

In Ireland, we’re even further behind the US. As a net beneficiary of the off-shored manufacturing for a window up until the late Nineties and early Naughties, we learned how to build. The things we built may not have been sexy, but skills nonetheless.

We don’t have the powerful entrepreneural engine that the US has. We have lost and are continuing to lose technical jobs of all descriptions – from R&D to high-end manufacturing. Riffing off Grove’s assertions that sometimes economies need focus applied by their governments, we have a little more market infrastructure on tap to plan our economy more. But is the Irish Government applying its stimulus salve to the right place?

The Taoiseach was in New York last week launching the country’s new shiny solution to the dearth of  VC investment in Irish firms. The Innovation Fund is a halfsy match of public-private monies to the tune of half a billion Euro. The fund will be managed by a board and expression of interest can be lodged through Enterprise Ireland from the September.

It’s up to that board then to decide how to dole out the money. Is it crazy to believe that a conceit still exists around manufacturing in this country, especially when giving out grants for innovation? I’d love to hear what the board of the fund think innovation is.

Update: Facebook appear to be backing down and have restored original settings of setting landing tabs for pages. Cue saving face while they figure out how to assess to situation?

News filtered out this morning that Facebook had withdrawn the rights of some Facebook Page owners to create default landing tabs for their pages, so that those affected pages were effectively demoted in style, fit and branding.

What this means is that if you have a small business or project that has a Facebook Page with less than 10,000 fans you will have to stump up and pay something in the region of $25k in advertising to engage with an account representation or somehow gain enough fans to pass the ceiling of 10k fans. Chicken and egg much?

Landing pages are one of the most effective ways to generate and sustain an identity on Facebook where the sameness of blue and white pages sometimes breeds attention fatigue.

In effect, Facebook are attempting to take more control of the economics of the platform. One wonders if a Facebook Page owner and Page Developer revolt will make a blind bit of difference. Users have been revolting against recent changes in privacy settings. Application development houses like Zynga revolting against being forced to play ball with Facebook on sharing their jewels. Could there be blood on the landing page?

Facebook are not only raising the ire of page owners but also page developers.  By changing custom landing pages to be features for the gentry of Facebook pages, Facebook have effectively killed the livelihoods of cottage-industry Facebook developers that work mostly for small businesses. Owners with deep pockets probably won’t go to single developers. They are far more likely to engage with established development houses to develop landing pages, applications and ancillary widgets. Development houses that are probably part of the Facebook Preferred Developer Program. Are you seeing the link here?

Funny that this announcement should happen after F8 too, as developers would have a chance to meet peers there and possibly vocalise their opposition to the move.

My question is, if you are a small operation with meagre sums allocated to tart up your Facebook Page – a place where the first 10 seconds are the most important – where do you turn?

Like how the BBC homepage has gotten a facelift recently (went live yesterday), but the clock has returned albeit with new HTML 5 bits under the hood.

When we launched the Beta Homepage we received feedback from a number of you who missed the clock, so we’ve turned it into a module allowing you to position the clock where you want it on the page (or shrink it or remove it altogether).

Does this point to O2 claiming iPad exclusivity come launch in May? Or perhaps a signal that we won’t sneak in with the launch of the device in Voda territories? Interesting.

Every single one of the winners deserved their awards. I especially enjoyed seeing Pat, Jim, Redmum and Suzy win.

Best speech of the night award goes to Eolai and Panti jointly.

Yes, the winners get a bit of glass, a sting and a few minutes to say thanks but the attendees are the real winners.

What’s not mentioned in the coverage of this dispute so far is the security threat of using personal equipment on the beat. While I’m sure that the Gardai would be as careful if not more careful about keeping their personal equipment safe, have these been secured for use for police business?

Pictures taken on cameras and mobile phones could easily be copied and data downloaded from laptops. One wonders about how many of these laptops have encrypted hard drives, locked-down ports and secured remoting services. Let’s not think about virus protection.

One of the tasks that Gardai use their laptops for is case notes. If a laptop is stolen or compromised, can you imagine the amount of sensitive information that could be harvested? Only a matter of time.

Interesting to note also, that last month it was revealed that less than half of the country’s Garda stations have Internet access.

A single strand of hair from the late Elvis Presley is expected to fetch £600 at an auction in Gloucestershire.

The hair is mounted in the centre of a gold disc, which is inscribed with “The King’s Authentic Hair”. The item includes a certificate of authenticity.

If ever there was a warning signal:

It is being sold by a Gloucestershire music fan who bought the strand “on a whim” through a television auction.

This lunchtime, Microsoft showed off their new Windows Mobile 7 operating system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Font and UI-wise, its DNA is firmly in Camp Zune. I’d love to play with one to see if I will jump from iPhone. Oh yes.. More details at Windows Phone 7 Series site.

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft)

To participate you need a phone with Internet access and a camera and a Twitter account. Form a team with some mates and elect a captain to communicate back to the @dublintweasure account. The rest is up to you.

Follow the @dublintweasure account for all the details. The Twitter hashtag is #tweasurehunt. Have fun!

Many years ago, I was a printmaker. I’d spend time agonising over the weight, grain, weave and composition of paper. Reversing the design on tracing the design and staying true to the outline, hatching and colour-whitespace balence, all vital. The ritual of spread, mask and swipe was hypnotic. At the end of the day, you hoped that your end result somehow paid tribute to your sketches.

And lo, the variety of the pieces were a testament to the process and to their individuality. At the back of your mind, though, was the clear and present truth – that your work needed to be scarce and transigent.

Prints, whatever their process or medium are defined by their exclusivity. A print off a run of 10 is far more precious than one of equal quality from a run of 10,000. Buy a print from a printmaker and look close, you’ll notice that it’s numbered. That number a maker in time, space and effort. A footprint of scarcity.

Ask a printmaker what they do with print 11 in 10 print run, and they’ll tell you they hollow out the centre of the surface and produce a ruined print. The end result is numbered to prove that the run has hit its limit.

The other day, I was reminded of the hyperlocal newspaper project in the UK. The project took London boroughs and took data on local services and packaged them into a handy paper. Taking that information that lives in the abstract and transposing onto a format that New Media gurus say is dead – paper.

Paper has been our message boy for centuries. To copy what the UK project has done wouldn’t really push us into new territory. But it might kick off ideas about the sharing the lazy neighbour chats that would have sang over the wall of the back garden fifty years ago.

I wonder if we took are news, our art and everything else we churn out just like the printer limiting his run, applied a best before date to it before publishing it on paper, web  (a dissolving page after X hits) or whatever medium took our fancy – how this would change the consumption and dissemination of the news?

And just like spreading ink over each mask aims to repeat our initial design, but physical factors like pressure, temperature, materials and human factor make each one unique – what would automated faults, specialisation and just-in-time updates do for limited publications?

]]> http://golez.net/2010/01/11/his-best-of-season-newspaper/feed/ 2 http://golez.net/2010/01/05/fixing-itunes-syncing-when-it-cannot-locate-folders-on-your-ipod-or-iphone/ http://golez.net/2010/01/05/fixing-itunes-syncing-when-it-cannot-locate-folders-on-your-ipod-or-iphone/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:25:23 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=4342 Since before Christmas, my iPhone has failed to sync photos to my Mac and this morning I fixed the issue. On attempting to sync my iPhone to iTunes, a dialog box would pop up complaining with the message:

iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone “Alexia’s iPhone” because the folder “iphone” cannot be found

The message was driving me batty and no amount of disabling and reenabling photo syncing seemed to work. This morning, though, I deleted the Photo Cache and it fixed the issue. This issue can repro on iPods too.

If you’re on a Mac like me then you can:

1. Make sure you disconnect your iPod/iPhone
2. Open the Pictures folder – /Pictures
3. Holding down Control, right-click on “iPhoto Library”. (I use right-click, can’t shake Windows habits!)
4. Select “Show Package Contents”
5. Delete the “iPod Photo Cache”
6. Connect your iPod/iPhone and sync like usual

New US spot for the Palm Pixi. It may be a Pre-lite with no wifi, but damn does the advert have a stomping mix of music, imagery, movement and editing.

Passion Pit’s Sleepyhead really works here. Nice work by Modernista!

The whole Twitter thing has turned into a pile of BS. Cliquely-political-campfires, post-modern-intellectual-nihilism, buy-my-shitism, listen-to-my-podcastism, I-have-a-nice-new-blogposttastic, here’s-a-link-via-a-PR-firm-hello.

It’s not as simple as saying unfollow. Because it’s game. Some say it’s a performance art. There’s nothing I say on that outlet, that I wouldn’t say in real-life to someone.

I guess the real question is, would you address a group or a single person in real-life like you do on Twitter? Would open up your notebook and point repeatedly at the real-life equivalent of a blog post? Would you repeat things incessantly (in effect retweet) that you heard from people you want ingratiate yourself with?

Those College Humour videos of Twitter in Real Life are trite reflections on the medium, but would you act like you do on Twitter and would you tolerate it?

Screencaptures of the Radio 1 iPhone app:

Screencaptures of the 2fm iPhone app:

Here’s my Last Night’s Checkins heatmap.

The classic Metroid theme snippet rocked the first part of the show. Highlight of the second part of the show was the Super Mario theme.

For the encore, we waved our phones, DS’s and anything else gadgety. And did the Super Mario theme. BLURRRRY – but you get the idea!

Martin Leung, of the blindfolded Super Mario pianist fame, wowed the crowd with his genius.

That blindfolded vid.