The Fishbowl

This is Dr. Martin Cooper, the man generally credited with inventing the cellular telephone. He is holding a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC, the first handheld mobile phone. The DynaTAC cost $3995 (in 1983 dollars!), was the size of a brick, and weighed one and three-quarter pounds. A full charge would give you 30 minutes talk time or about eight hours standby.

You also looked like a bit of an idiot carrying one around or making a call on it.

For at least a decade after the DynaTAC’s release, mobile phones were stereotypically cast as toys of the wealthy and self-important. Growing up in Australia at the time, it was not uncommon to refer to them as “wankerphones”.

This is a phone stack. Some bright spark came up with an idea where everyone at dinner stacks their phones together on the table, and the first person to grab their phone back from the stack, even if it is ringing, has to cover the bill.

Even thirty years after the release of the DynaTAC, we’re still working out new social mores and tricks to deal with its intrusion into our lives.

I'm pretty bad at predicting the success or failure of new technologies, I just think it's a little too early to write off something as potentially game-changing as Google Glass base on how it looks today, what it costs today, or based on the fact that we're currently entrusting one of society’s most socially tone-deaf groups (nerds) with the question of when it's appropriate to wear them.

The photograph of Dr Cooper was retreived from Wikipedia, copyright Rico Shen and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike licence. The phone stack photograph was retrieved from Flickr, copyright Roo Reynolds and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial licence.

If you look at the widely-retweeted code.org campaign, or the recent petition to add programming to the official Australian curriculum, you see a common theme.

The core of the petition:

The Digital Technologies section of the draft Curriculum for Technologies is a massive step in the right direction. If enacted, it will equip Australian students with the skills they need; not just to become competent consumers of technology, but to design and create our shared technological future.

Or, amongst the quotes from luminaries on code.org, President Bill Clinton:

At a time when people are saying "I want a good job - I got out of college and I couldnt find one," every single year in America there is a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer science.

Mark Zuckerberg:

There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.

Ashton Kutcher:

If we want to spur job growth in the US we have to educate ourselves in the disciplines where jobs are available and where economic growth is feasible.

This theme, that we should teach coding because it will lead our children to IT jobs and help our growing software industry, comes across far too strongly from both campaigns, and it's the wrong message.

Sure it might be the right message for bureaucrats, industry insiders and parents worried that their child's grade seven teacher isn't properly preparing them for a lifelong career as a sysadmin, but it's a really bad reason to set educational policy. General childhood education isn't, and shouldn't be vocational training.

Luckily, code.org has some more redeeming things to say.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains. — Bill Gates.

I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think. — Steve Jobs

Programming is probably the greatest, and most criminally untapped teaching tool we have developed in the last century. At its heart, programming is applied logic, a discipline that requires you:

• to break a problem into its component parts
• to construct those parts from a set of logical building-blocks
• to combine those solved parts into a greater whole

These are powerful, fundamental skills that are worth teaching to anyone. They're not only the building-blocks of a career in computing, they're building-blocks for critical thinking, for scientific thinking, even for creative thinking. Programming teaches all of this in an environment where you can keep students interested by having them use the skills they are learning to build tools, toys and games.

Programming even provides an answer to that question every school kid asks, “What the hell am I learning maths for?” I'm pretty sure my high school trig and calculus would have stuck a whole lot better if I had been asked to build a game with them instead of just solving equations on a piece of paper, or being assessed on my ability to draw a curve neatly on the provided graph paper.

Sadly, though, I suspect the problem with programming at school is far more practical than intellectual. All the willingness to add programming to the curriculum isn't worth anything if we don't also have enough teachers qualified to deliver those lessons. And so long as we as a society continue to devalue teachers and teaching, that's a much bigger challenge.

Shanley, I Wish I Knew — About Work.

There are also people in [the tech industry] who are dishonest, manipulative, abusive, bullying, mean-spirited, harassing and destructive. Early in my career I was very paranoid about maintaining amicable relationships with these individuals or staying quiet despite my moral qualms about their actions, because I was always told I’d have to work with them again, and that someday they might be on the other side of a hiring board or committee or collective I needed something from. I’ve since realized that these very fears ensure these assholes will have long prosperous careers, where we’re all forced to see them again.

When we moved into the new office a few months ago, Atlassian handed out adjustable standing desks to people who wanted them. Numbers were limited, but they were given out in order of tenure and, well, sticking with the same employer for nine years has its privileges.

I'm totally unqualified to comment on the medical benefits of standing desks. My light reading on the subject suggests that sitting down all day is bad for you, but at the same time (and after years of working eight-hour retail shifts I can attest to this) standing up all day isn't all that good either. So you naturally glide (or in the case of an electronically adjustable desk, buzz loudly) between one position and the next based on what your body tells you to do.

So on Monday morning, tired from one of my regular bouts of insomnia and my body still aching from a weekend game of squash, the first thing I did was return my desk to its natural, sitting position. Being the Internet junkie that I am, I celebrated this action with a tweet.

And there it would have ended, but for the Social Media Expert. The Social Media Expert, hired to increase his employer's exposure on The Social Media, decides that the perfect thing to do is butt his product into into my life. Seeing that The Social Media Expert is living in a different timezone, this happens fifteen hours later, after I have raised my desk again, lowered it again, spent the late afternoon lying on an office couch, gone home, worked some more then gone to bed.

Which meant I woke up on Tuesday to this.

Read the rest of this entry…

Quoted from a network security mailing-list I am subscribed to:

Last time [we] sent out a warning email along the lines of:

We never ask for your username and password. If you get an email that looks like:

"There is an issue with your account. Please reply with your username and password and we will rectify it"

You should never reply to these messages with your details.

50 people replied with their usernames and passwords.

Something I wrote ten years ago about prank phone calls, suddenly relevant again today: “Cruelty."

The prank phone-call, at its essence, relies on the generosity of the person on the other end of the line. It preys on someone's willingness to do their job to the best of their ability, or it preys on the victim's willingness to give the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt. So in essence, what it's trying to say is “People who take strangers at face value are funny, and it's fine to laugh at someone whose job it is to be nice to you whatever you say.” That, to me, is not funny.

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Three years ’til I’m 40
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

There’s no reason Nintendo’s ad agency couldn’t show a girl playing Mario, they just didn’t. Apparently girls are too busy taking photos of themselves and playing Style Savvy Trendsetters to play a real game.

In response to criticism, Nintendo removed the words “Boys” and “Girls” from the advertisements’ respective titles.

• • •

#1reasonwhy is the Twitter hashtag women in the computer gaming industry used to provide far more than one reason why there aren’t more women in the gaming industry.

• • •

Meanwhile, if there’s a complementary version of this Sunsuper billboard somewhere in Sydney where the girl dreams of being an astronaut, it’s not in any train station I’ve been through.

A year or two ago, I created a Facebook account for my mother’s cat.

(a) It was funny at the time. (b) My mother could use it to follow me and my brother’s goings-on without the embarrassment of having a Facebook account of her own. (c ) Donna and I may have been drunk.

By the time I got around to handing it over, my mother had sensibly decided that she’d probably rather not know what Nick and I were up to on Facebook after all.

Not long after that I forgot the account password. I also forgot the date of birth I used to register the account, which is necessary to recover the password.

As a result of this, every week or so, Facebook sends me a helpful email suggesting other cats I may be interested in pursuing an Internet friendship with.

Troll: v.i. to fish by trailing a lure or baited hook from a moving boat. — The Merrriam-Webster Dictionary

Around twenty years ago when I first set foot on Usenet, trolling had a much gentler meaning than it does today. Trolling was the art of saying something wrong, but in such a way that everybody except the target of your trolling could tell you were being deliberately obtuse.

Trolls ranged from the throwaway jokes like the deliberately typo-ridden spelling correction, to elaborate long-term performance art; for example the jokers who completely derailed the Star Trek newsgroups by dragging half the readers into a choreographed argument about whether sound (and, when that got too boring, light) could travel in a vacuum.

On one hand this kind of trolling was elitist and exclusionary, often a way for forum regulars to one-up newbies who didn't know the pecking order. On the other hand it served to discourage the very common nerd trait of wanting to one-up the world by leaping in to correct the most trivial of errors, a defence against the kind of knee-jerk pedantry that can clog otherwise interesting discussion.

“Don’t feed the trolls” was a warning as much as anything else. Don’t jump into a newsgroup discussion before you’ve read enough to know who is who; don’t make it your job to correct every trivial, irrelevant misteak. Learn the ropes first, and you might just avoid being the butt of everyone’s in-joke.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. — The Jargon File

As the early 90s drifted on, the definition of trolling broadened to encompass anyone who acts like an asshole on the Internet just to get attention. By the end of the decade, few people even remembered the original definition.

The reason for the sudden shift? The rise of the consumer Internet and with it, easy anonymity.

Anonymity on the old-school Internet of shell-accounts granted by universities or employers was a rare currency, mostly limited to “anonymous remailers” like anon.penet.fi, addresses that made it obvious that the author was making a deliberate effort to hide their identity. In the 90s, with the rise of dial-up Internet and subscriber online services, throw-away anonymity became the norm rather than the exception. And with anonymity came the ability for anyone to be an asshole without fear of repercussions.

America Online, with its “feature” of granting all users an infinite supply of screen-names, caught a lot of blame at the time.

The accepted wisdom was that the best way to react to the influx of assholes was “don’t feed the trolls”. Starve them of attention and they would get bored and go away.

Looking back from 2012, I can’t see any evidence of that tactic having worked. What happened was the opposite. By propagating the notion that the only way to deal with assholes is to pretend they aren’t there, we made the Internet a safe space for sociopaths.

This is a problem, because anonymity is also an indispensible component of free speech. Without guaranteed anonymity, the oppressed can't speak up, minorities can't find a voice, and unpopular opinions are suppressed. Stifling this vital freedom is unacceptable.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is the wrong approach.

(To be continued…)

I have 178 people in my Google+ circles, most of them co-workers, techies and early adopters. Four of them have posted something in the last day. I have 203 Facebook friends, a mixture of co-workers, techies, family and friends. Six of them have posted something in the last hour. Obviously, at least amongst my circles, something isn’t working out.

On the other hand, I’m seeing a slowly growing use of Hangouts, Google+’s teleconferencing feature, which at least in my office is beginning to supplant Skype.

Long a “how cool is THAT?” staple of science fiction and 1980s future technology TV shows, the "video phone" is one of those places where the future happened, and when it did we barely blinked.

It was one of those office Hangout sessions that prompted me to install the Google+ iPad app. I don't know quite what I was expecting, probably something very Google and utilitarian and “we spent all our time on the Android version”. What I didn't expect was for it to be slick, responsive, and pretty damn gorgeous, right down to the way new entries sweep into place as you swipe into the past.

And yet I'm still not going to use Google+ any time soon. As beautiful as the app was, a first impression that inspired me to blog about it, I’m unlikely to launch it very often. Social networks live or die on the content being published to them keeping people interested.

On the other hand, there’s Path. It’s another gorgeous-looking app (this time on my phone) that posts to a social networking service. It has a built in photo app with sub-Instagram quality filters. It has a neat hook in to a song recognition service. It can be pretty slow on my iPhone 4 and it used to crash all the time. I don’t care in the slightest about their built-in social network, but still I launch this application regularly and post to Path.

Because it also lets me cross-post my thoughts, pictures, and location check-ins to Facebook and Twitter.

Path has a Foursquare button as well, and it is just as easy to select that option as it is not to. Now, after months of mostly ignoring the stand-alone Foursquare app, I’m mayor of my apartment building.

While there are third-party solutions for cross-posting G+ content to Twitter and Facebook, they’re generally quirky, unreliable Rube Goldberg-style contraptions that lose important things like photos along the way. Which is a pity, because Google+ could have me posting to their service in an instant if there was a G+ button in Path. And from what I've seen of the new G+ mobile apps, Google+ could have me ditch Path in an instant if there were Twitter and Facebook buttons in the G+ app.

Google has its ongoing fights with both Twitter and Facebook, but I can't see either being able to dig up reasonable grounds to object to Google allowing people to throw more stuff into their walled gardens using published APIs. And from Google’s point of view, people are already sharing things using Facebook and Twitter, so who cares if it means they are also seeding Google+ with valuable content?

edit: The above paragraph previously assumed that YouTube and Reader also lack functions to crosspost to Facebook/Twitter. It turned out they both do, although both are a little bumpy (Reader requires you to share with each site separately, for example, and while I can make the YouTube Like button crosspost the video automatically to Facebook and Twitter… Google+ is still a separate button!)

When Google came out with their search engine, they famously didn’t care about making the site “sticky”. That worked pretty well for them.

Google, today:

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

Previously, when it received a notice of copyright infringement, Google would remove the specific infringing content from its search results (and leave behind a notice linking to details of the removal). Now, they're extending that policy to down-ranking content from entire websites.

On the face of it, this seems like a pretty good idea. Especially from the point of view of a blogger, it's great that Google will start taking action against the thousands of sites that exist purely to appropriate search-friendly content written by other people in order to boost search rankings and sell advertisements.

Except, that kind of abuse isn't mentioned in Google’s blog post. Instead, Google focuses on the stealing of TV shows (from Hulu), and music (from Spotify and NPR).

Where is the first place you go if you're looking for a particular song, or a particular bit from a TV show or movie? If you're anything like me and pretty much everybody I know, the answer to that question is YouTube.

Obviously, Google receives a metric tonne of takedown requests for YouTube. Presumably Google is not going to give YouTube the Google Death Penalty, because it can honestly say that those takedowns are already dealt with through other avenues. The same goes for any Google-owned site that hosts user-contributed content.

But what about anyone doing user-contributed content who wants to compete with Google? For anyone working in that space, dealing with copyright takedowns are part of the business. Google now have a perfectly legitimate, nay automated reason to down-rank these competitors in its search results.

Imagine a site that is a direct copy of YouTube, owned by some company other than Google. Google will receive a constant stream of takedown notices for that site, and its presumably no-human-intervention-required algorithm will take that into account when ranking that content next to YouTube’s. If the policy is not applied universally, any user-contributed content service attempting to compete with Google will be at an automatic disadvantage in its comparative search ranking.

What’s more, copyright holders will know that sending takedown notices to Google gives them extra leverage against sites publishing user-contributed content, to twist their arms into putting policies into place to restrict publishing and sharing that the copyright holders want, but that are not required by law.

tl;dr: Unless Google makes it clear that it will be applied just as much to their own sites as it does to others, a policy of downranking sites in search results based on copyright notices is dangerously anti-competitive.

I've long believed that website URLs are a piece of Internet plumbing: the sort of thing that web practitioners care a lot about, but that the rest of the world ignores, often leading to results that are hard for us plumbers to comprehend.

This is the location bar of Google Chrome. The URL scheme (http://, https:// and so on) is omitted, and everything past the hostname slightly greyed out:

Opera 12 goes further, taking everything that isn't the domain name and dimming it even more than Chrome.

As of the release of Mountain Lion, Safari 6.0 adopts the same style as Chrome, but applies possibly even more contrast than Opera to the “unimportant” bits of the URL.

Internet Explorer has apparently taken the same approach as Opera since IE8, but it does so on this strange planet called Windows that I rarely visit.

I give the location bar two (maybe one, maybe three) “browser generations” until it is merely an optional power-user feature. Browsers will still need a way to enter URLs and search terms, still need a way to copy the browser’s current location into other apps, but neither of these functions demands such a huge chunk of toolbar real-estate and user attention as the location bar now occupies.

Removing the URL from full-time display in favour of showcasing just the domain-name and SSL padlock might even save one or two of those poor souls who previously didn't notice that they were visiting www.paypal.com.hacker.ru.

Tom DeMarco revisits his earliest work on Software Engineering and the importance of metrics, and realises he got it wrong:

Implicit in the quote (and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an important aspect, maybe the most important, of any software project. But it isn’t. Many projects have proceeded without much control but managed to produce wonderful products such as GoogleEarth or Wikipedia.

…

What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A [cost $1m, value $1.1m] but almost not at all important for Project B [cost $1m, value $50m]. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?, by Tom DeMarco, Computing Now, 2009. Hat tip to James Roper for the link.

I was reading this depressing analysis of the finances of Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry phone, and reading some commentary that the apparent demise of RIM could have been avoided if the company had somehow been different.

It got me thinking about corporate DNA.

Pick any company, and there's a good chance you can distil its raison d'être down to a pithy, not entirely inaccurate sentence. Microsoft makes ubiquitous software intended to be installed by default on 90% of the world's personal computers. Walmart builds cavernous department stores that sell as many things as possible as cheaply as they can. Armani leverages the cachet of its high-end fashion business to mass-market clothing under ‘lesser’ labels. Electronic Arts throws armies of developers at big brand-name game titles. Facebook develops more reasons for people to visit Facebook.

For the years it was successful, RIM made utilitarian business phones that were really good at email.

Corporate DNA isn't determined by a mission statement or dreamt up on an executive retreat. It comes from what the company actually does.

DNA is a flawed metaphor, but it at least captures the core, self-replicating concept. If a company is built around doing X, it is going to attract the kind of people who want to work for a company that does X. It is going to select staff who are good at executing X. It is going to structure its divisions and management around the parts necessary to do X. It is going to build processes, conventions and traditions all around how best to do X.

Everything about a company's strategy—what new ventures are given attention, what old ones are scrapped, which of a range of possible solutions to a problem it might pick, the degree to which it tolerates risk—all get entwined in the question “How does this relate to executing X?”

This idea of Corporate DNA is writ large in Mat Honan's stunning evisceration on Gizmodo, How Yahoo! Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

But Yahoo's social success in those years was almost accidental. It wasn't (and isn't) a company with vision. Its founders Jerry Yang and David Filo's great contribution to the Internet? They built a directory of links and then sold ads on those pages.

It was a gateway, nothing more. This was hardly an innovative idea, or technically complicated to pull off. You don't have to write algorithms to build a portal. Yahoo was little more than an electronic edition of Yellow Pages.

The founders' influence on a company's culture is enormous, and Yang and Filo cared about business, not products or innovation. They didn't foster a culture of computer scientists, like Google's founders did, or cultivate hackers like Facebook. They grew a business culture. For many years that worked quite well—until Google came along.

So when overnight, and entirely to my surprise the smart phone market stopped being about making utilitarian business phones that were really good at email, RIM was in the worst position to deal with it because they didn't just have to change their strategic direction, they had to change their entire corporate makeup.

The phone companies that survived the iPhone shake-up most ably were the ones whose DNA most closely resembled “We flood the market with phones built from commodity parts.” Because they were already poised to beg, borrow, steal and copy the next generation of products.

Companies can successfully mutate their DNA, but it’s inevitably traumatic. Microsoft built a successful server business by throwing money at it until it damn well worked, and had an even more unexpected success with the X-Box by pursuing the same approach in gaming. But beside those successes, there has been a lot of red ink splashed on equally ambitious but far less successful reinventions.

IBM, whose DNA going into the 1980s was “We sell fuck-off big hardware to people who can afford it” spawned the PC industry almost by accident, immediately lost control of it to Microsoft and Intel, almost collapsed in on itself, then reinvented itself as a hybrid research/server/services company.

Microsoft mutates because it can afford to fail repeatedly, IBM mutated because it was, as Cringely said in Accidental Empires, the size of a small country.

The two tech companies with the most interesting DNA are the ones I rather obviously haven't mentioned yet. They're interesting and successful because their “X” isn't about building a particular thing, it’s about a particular approach to building things.

One is “We use exceptional engineering to execute our ruthless product vision, trusting that our aesthetics are shared by the market.” The other is “We stockpile incredibly smart people and throw them (or let them throw themselves) at difficult problems, trusting that enough of those solutions will be profitable.”

And both companies have undergone recent and major structural changes that challenge that core direction.

One of the more stubbornly persistent recurring themes from tech curmudgeons goes something like this. “When I was young, computers shipped with BASIC, and you had to laboriously type in programs from magazines to make them do anything. Computers these days are shiny, hermetically sealed boxes that do anything you want at the press of a button, and never expose kids to programming. In this way, we are betraying future generations of nerds to grow up without the advantages we had.”

From my perspective as somebody whose first computer had a BASIC interpreter burned into ROM, that’s a load of rubbish.

The window in which reasonably-priced, mass-market home computers were like these writers remember was the 8-bit Apple II/Commodore 64 era, or “most of the 80s”. By the time the 16 bit era took hold, only DOS shipped with BASIC as standard, and to those few people who discovered it existed it was just that weird thing with the snakes and gorillas games.

Even in the mid-80s when I got my first home computer, programming was far from being required to use it. The Commodore 64 and its cousins had a huge market as games machines, and that's all most of my peers, even many of the more geeky ones, used them for. You just needed to know how to plug in a joystick and type LOAD "*",8,1.

To be honest, that’s mostly what I did with computers growing up. I knew how to program, but 90% of my programming experience before I left school was watching my brother write code and occasionally offering (unwanted) advice. Nick wowed his teachers in high school by writing his own graphing app to help him with his maths assignments, went on to get a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, and is now a successful print journalist.

The children who actually used these early home computers as programmable devices were a self-selecting group. They were already nerds. And as (admittedly, the less programmer-y) half of a pair of nerds growing up in that era, I would have killed for the opportunities that come with the current generation of computers.

The Nick and Charles Millers of today aren’t growing up writing BASIC apps to calculate their pocket money. They’re putting up web pages, and they’re too nerdy not to want to look at the source code and see how it works. At some point they will want to make that web page do something interesting. That will expose them to Javascript, a language a hundred times more powerful than what they were stuck with on the C64 but yet still learnable in small chunks. Later, in their quest to make the page even more dynamic they'll stumble across Ruby or Python, all easily downloadable from the ubiquitously available Internet along with an inexhaustible supply of tutorials, examples and real people willing to help them get started.

And honestly, I can’t see any reason why BASIC is a better language to learn programming from than Python, Ruby or even Javascript. Today’s scripting languages still make it ridiculously simple to do simple things, while leaving the door open to doing more amazing things the more you learn.

BASIC was always a crappy language, and many of the kids who outgrew it in the 80s hit a wall and couldn’t go further. Advanced programming tools had to be bought, often at prohibitive cost, and it was hard to even know where to look to learn how to use them. There was no consumer Internet. I had one friend with access to a BBS, and as far as I know he only used it to download long lists of dirty jokes, print them out on his father’s dot-matrix printer and bring them to school.

Today, if you're a teenager with a Mac (insert some other platform into this paragraph if you object to Apple on moral or financial grounds), you can download for free the same tools that professional developers use to write Mac, iPhone and iPad applications. You can read countless free tutorials on how to use them, download reams of sample code for free, and ask for help on forums full of people who may never know you’re a precocious kid. And if you’re a thirteen-year old who can wheedle $100 out of your parents for the subscription, you can publish a best-selling iPhone app.

Can we just pause a moment and admit how mind-blowingly awesome that is?

Context: on a semi-work-related IRC channel, this conversation.

dennilan: Should I comment on [REDACTED] pointing out the Straw Man-ity?
Carlfish: Sadly, “straw manatee” returns no relevant image hits on Google.
dennilan: Turn off safe search. Rule 34 and all that.

Rule 34 of the Internet is an attempt to define the extent of human perversion by stating: “If it exists, somebody has already turned it into porn.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in Charles‘ head.

… “As a joke, I should come up with something really obscure and unlikely, and tweet a Rule 34 request for it.”

… “I know. ‘Rule 34 request. OSGi’”

… “No, not a good pick. People already get fucked by that regularly.”