A Donkey on the Edge

Easter holiday fun

2012-04-15T09:44:45Z

Building MT5 on iPad2

Well, I've been trying to get this to work for ages (yes, utterly pointless I know) but the screengrab below is from an iPad 2 running Movable Type 5. If you've built MT before you'll know this is a happy screen:-)

The box is built with lightty as the web server, sqlite as the driven database and Cydia Perl p5

So far the only thing I haven't been able to work out is how to map "choose file" httpd post file uploads to the iPad "choose file from Air Sharing, Keynote etc." so all the "choose file" functions don't work. Not surprisingly there's not a lot of Google-searchable content on the topic...

Will keep looking:-)

Metro UI, Sharepoint, iPad etc

As part of my thinking about tablet-based experiences, I've been playing with the Metro UI at work.

It's a really interesting project whereby a design framework is influencing the culture of a major technology company and bringing the UI of its software products into a really interesting space. The Metro project is still relatively young but it is sufficiently mature for enterprise product and software people to begin thinking about how the framework might help them connect all their stuff.

Over Easter I put a skin together as an experiment to show what a hypothetical enterprise Sharepoint web CMS installation might look like on iPad using the Metro visual language as a way to tie the different channel experiences together:

Sharepoint has many more features than Movable Type but there are enough cross-overs to make this experiment interesting. Here are the primary UI tweaks to date for any curious MT5 people out there:

Break "scope" nav object into two separate components 1) a drop-down list to set operating context and 2) a large
title to give you strong situational awareness (this last item feels like a big improvement on stock MT5 UI
Move "create new" menu items into a Metro-style "app bar" or "Charms bar" (haven't decided which to go with yet). These are nice as they become contextual the bar icons update based on application context
Move top-bar universal links (view site, search, rebuild) to this same app bar
Kill left-hand-nav and reload as a horizontal-scroll experience across the top of the main editing area. This isn't working yet but I've grabbed the jQuery from jqMetro which works well and looks great on the iPad
Use the Metro "back" arrow to provide a universal hook back to the "user dashboard" - kind of a "hyperspace" button for when you get confused
Serve the Segoe UI font in the CSS

One the the interesting user experience bits I've come across as I hacked the CMS templates was the behavior of the main left-hand-nav elements.

When I started pulling the 6A UI apart, one of my first worries was how was I going to handle the secondary nav items in the main left-hand-nav (things like "new", "manage" etc). What I found was that almost all of these links were un-necessary and most functions were accessible by hitting the left-hand-nav primary items ("tags", "comments", "members" etc). I say almost because I did find a few dead-ends but most were covered by either the publishing context drop-down or in-page links.

Mostly still broken and lots still to do but a fun holiday project:-)

European standard EN1176

2012-04-01T23:50:08Z

"Look at me Dad, I can run up the slide". Well done, Hal! nice moves:-) I can't remember the last time I was in a park with the kids. Mostly it seems we're dropping off or picking up from viola practice or Enjoyaball, it's so rare to just be killing time, goofing around on the zip-wire, climbing the tension frame...

Today was pretty sucky from the get-go, I'd been trying to squeeze in a few productive hours of work for a few days now but with Nicki away, the time just seemed to get eaten-up by one thing or another. Today was time to bite the bullet and get the presentation Powerpoint done. Park the kids in front of movies / Playstation and knuckle down to sorting things out. Yeah right... anyway by late afternoon I was feeling so guilty I piled them off the park.

We had a lovely walk around Oakfield Park. The sun was not yet setting but the light was fantastic, the weeping willows dipping their branches in the brook and the air smelling reasonably fresh. All in all a good walk around the park with Clem getting a view of her future school up on a hill in the distance (how did she know this and why didn't I?).

Hal wanted to play in the park so ran ahead and pretty soon I'm sitting in the grass with Hal on the zip-wire and Clem on the climbing frame.

I remember following Clem on the climbing frame when she was younger. I wanted her to explore, and climb and throw herself into it. When she was three she could climb right to the top of the wooden bars in the gym, she was fearless and we spent ages larking round the various North London climbing frames.

But I used to do this dance. Every time she'd head towards an opening, an area with no railings I'd (as discretely as possible) position myself to either block the gap or catch her if she fell. Of course she never did. Most of her playground traumas came from over-egging the push on the swings (but that's another story).

I did the same with Hal as well on the few occasions I've taken him to the park but for some reason today felt different, I had two, confident, sure-footed big kids. I let Hal walk the long way round to the park entrance (keeping an eye on him from a distance) and then both of them got a good old stretch after a day of being cooped up.

Hal pitched forwards from the top of the climbing frame. He fell head-first, his forehead connecting squarely with the ground and his body collapsing on top of him, snapping his head back and folding his back. An eight-foot vertical drop, landing directly on his skull...

When I got to him he was in shock. He couldn't breath, he was looking terrified and making a grunting, rasping sound as he tried to get his lungs to work.

He was conscious and mobile so I scooped him up and put him on his side to relax his breathing. At that point what do you do? I got ready to start blowing into his mouth but I was worried about his neck. Luckily he started crying and screaming which was a relief. I had this terrible moment of trying to decide what to do, weighing the possible outcomes, the possible damages. With a violent head trauma you've got a clock running, shock sets in, inflammation, vomiting, things get bad very quickly and permanent damage is a very real possibility.

But moving him has it's own risks, what to do? I was kneeling on the floor, phone in one hand about to dial 999 when I remembered an incident in this same park the previous year. It took the better part of 45 minutes for the ambulance guys to make it to the victim and the better part of an hour before she was moved.

I was looking at the little guy thinking I didn't want to lose him. He was conscious, he could move his feet and squeeze my hands. He had rolled over and started to get up on his own.

I guess I just took a decision. Given a choice of paralysis or the damage from trauma and internal bleeding I decided to carry him back to the car, strap him in as carefully as I could manage and get him to A&E as quickly as possible.

I'm guessing I'll be hearing from Barnet council about the very large number of red lights I converted to stop signs today but we quickly had the little guy in resuscitation (Clem wanted to take a picture of him when we got there but I thought that was too weird. The shot above is after the x-rays confirmed his spine was intact and the restraints where just about to come off). In the end, the doctors did all the checks and observations but the deciding factor had to be the floor surface. An hour into the A&E session Hal had gone from screaming and crying to lecturing anyone who would listen on the correct pronunciation of maul (as in "Darth Maul"). You cannot imagine how incredible a feeling it was to hear that Maul is not pronounced "mow-re"...

He's upstairs now. I've checked on him a few times now and he's still breathing.

Bloody hell.

Copyright isn't dead just because we're not willing to let it regulate us

2012-03-24T11:47:39Z

Love this from @doctorow in theguardian

...the tautological legitimacy of success: "You are an upstanding firm because you got rich, therefore the way you got rich must be upstanding."

And yes, this is a little embarrassing having two Doctorow posts in a row. What can I say, the guy is prolific and his content majorly resonates OK;-)

The Doctorow Aberration

2012-03-15T23:06:12Z

Not a Ludlum novel in my case but the remarkable effect of one retweet by mr @doctorrow. Looks like a 7-point hike in a day.

11 March 1934

2012-03-11T02:02:02Z

The more time passes, the more I want to recall on an emotional level the memories and dreams and things I fell in love with over many years. I wanted to remember Ruth on her birthday with a tiny fragment of a passion I've had since as far back as I can remember. This is Eddie Lawson on the Moriwaki R1100J at Daytona.

Kiva

2012-03-08T15:45:59Z

So it's #IWD today and I've just received an email from Kiva. I've been sending spare cash their way and investing in smallholders. The link at the bottom is designed to attract new investors. This is a process that makes sense and you should at least take a look

Over 1 billion people live in extreme poverty - 75% are women and girls.
76 million primary school-age children are not in school - 60% are girls.
There are 876 million illiterate adults in the developing world - over 65% are women.
Women produce half the world's food, but own only 1% of the world's farmland.

So go invest in a woman

4 O'clock boost

2012-02-24T15:40:28Z

Thank you Flat White

Fun with Lego

2012-02-18T15:19:23Z

Hal keeps getting given these Lego sets. Most recently, he's had a Pirates of the Caribbean thing with a mill-wheel and a bell tower (set 4183-1) and before that it was Mandalorian fighters (set 7914-1) and the Space Shuttle (set 3367-1) as well as a bunch of others I can't locate.

I pretty much build these as Hal wants the finished product in a hurry but what tends to happen is that he goes for it and pretty soon the toy breaks. Of course it's Lego, so it's not breaking as such, it's supposed to come apart after all...

Recently, after spending a good hour assembling the pirates set I decided that the thing to do would be to glue the parts with super-glue. Not the whole assembly, but those groups of parts that moved or were hinged in some way (the Shuttle's bay doors only stayed attached to the mother ship for a few minutes under heavy playing).

So, I read up on the Lego forums to find out what the best glue was and did anyone have any techniques for glueing with a light touch to prevent destroying the bricks. I can't imagine I'm the only dad out there who has had this idea so I was really surprised to read the near universal condemnation of glue in Lego assembly...

So in the end I gave up on the glue and this morning I was playing with Hal and we smashed up the Space Shuttle and I put this F-22 Raptor together. OK, so it looks nothing like a raptor and it's missing its nose cone among other things but it was really fun to do.

I just never tire of the way a couple of bricks can suggest a familiar profile, a familiar shape:-)

The other kind of interesting thing was that in trying to get the two jet engines as close as possible, I made the main body lift area (the bit between the two turbines) with an odd number of rows. Normally my models are symmetrical but in this instance I had to have a central, single-row brick running down the middle. For some reason this made progress way more difficult. The cockpit glass comes from a dinosaur set and was four rows wide so to fit the nose cone (or make a gap where the nose-cone would go) I had to use flat pieces with uneven numbers of rows on top and bottom (I think they were claws from another animal, with two rows on the bottom but a single, centred row on the top)

So yeah, so do you glue your Lego?

Sois jeune et tais toi

2012-02-03T17:43:32Z

Had company drinks last night and met a nice man from France. I was explaining how my family moved to paris in 1968 and it turns out he was six years old at the time of the summer événements. My family lived in the quiet western suburb of Vaucresson, 10 kilometres from Notre-Dame and as a five-year old trying to get to grips with a new school, a new language and new friends I let the events pass without noticing.

Turns out this guy lived in the Quartier Latin and had barricades on his doorstep! He remembers the sights and smells to this day. The confusion, overturned Renault Dauphines, benches and bins piled high, paving stones pried up for use as projectiles. One of his most vivid memories is students turning the Luxembourg Gardens into open-air debating chambers...

Anyhow, always loved this print, the silhouette in the background doing the censorship is of course the Général de Gaulle who was running the country at the time.

Al Green on 125th Street

2012-01-22T12:57:01Z

OK, call me a lefty ideologue who laps up whatever nonsense the Democrats put out but I've been watching the Romney v. Gingritch thing and I just don't understand how these massively un-presidential types think they have more to offer than President Obama? True, Gingritch played to the "authenticity" megatrend by speaking his mind about his ex-wife's ABC appearance and it's probably this same megatrend that caused South Carolina Republicans to down-grade Romney for his evasiveness around his taxes. But that doesn't make him White House material, not by a mile.

But the point of this post is that I was wondering why this video of President Obama signing Al Green didn't make more of a splash? The President of the United States of America, in the Apollo Theatre on 125th street. The President, in Manhattan, in Harlem, amongst friends, face to face with the Reverend Al Green and singing?!? In tune!?! It was AWESOME! Just made me feel great to see this:-)

11:11:11:2011

2011-11-11T11:11:11Z

This is Fred's letter to Polly, his mum. It was written on the eve of the May 8, 1915 offensive and signed with the words I'm going to do my duty gladly. Fred survived both the offensive and the war and the regimental padre kept the letters, unopened.

In the note, Fred mentions a papal blessing. He may be referring to Pope Benedict XV's Allorché fummo chiamati which was issued on 28 July 1915.

For Clem and Hal who need to get on their decks

2011-08-23T16:24:02Z

Just love this. I'm counting the days til I get my apex 37 so I can go practise sliding (and no doubt seriously injure myself).

Patent absurdity

2011-08-21T21:35:26Z

I feel like I spend a lot of time explaining why not having a commons of arts and sciences is a bad thing that we should try an avoid. I bang on about Sony Bono and Mickey Mouse and the great Dover books that helped crafters and artists in the 70s and I feel like I just can't frame the argument in a sufficiently compelling way.

I've just recently come across a couple of wonderful items. One, the short film embedded above. The other, a Guardian article penned by Richard Stallman in 2005. He uses Victor Hugo to explain how patenting processes can be dangerous:

Here's one example of a hypothetical literary patent:

Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind.

Claim 2: a communication process according to claim 1, wherein said character subsequently finds moral redemption through the kindness of another.

Claim 3: a communication process according to claims 1 and 2, wherein said character changes his name during the story.

If such a patent had existed in 1862 when Les Misérables was published, the novel would have infringed all three claims - all these things happened to Jean Valjean in the novel. Hugo could have been sued, and would have lost. The novel could have been prohibited - in effect, censored - by the patent holder.

I went to see Stallman talk at the LSE in 2005 (he was clearly motoring around Europe in anticipation of the vote in the European parliament) and it was like a light-bulb moment. If you get a chance I highly recommend catching one of his talks.

Dear Lovefilm, please fix your VOD proposition.

2011-07-16T12:37:09Z

Dear Lovefilm, thanks for taking the time to compose such a thorough response explaining what you are doing with your customer proposition.

Netflix is on my media center, why aren't you?

Unfortunately, you haven't addressed the core of my question which was to do with the commercial background to your customer experience design. My point is, the way you've approached this you are simply spreading ill will and damaging what is really quite a nice brand.

Lovefilm was built on a great service experience that trumped the video rental store by not relying on trickery, customer inertia and subterfuge to generate revenue.

Not only was Lovefilm a fairer and more transparent offer (and therefore more likely to engage the customer in the longer term) but the range extended far beyond what Blockbuster could hope to stock. You guys were basically, a 5-star service with a market-leading customer proposition.

So why make a mess of your online offer?

You need to stop explaining how content owners set pricing and new releases cost more and mensch up a bit and design an offer that shields the customer from the greed and foul-play of Big Copyright. The video-on-demand offer needs to give the same ubiquitous access to content the Disk-to-home service does and needs to avoid becoming a 'two tier' experience.

Some suggestions:

Lose the multiple price points. The more price points you have the more you feel desperate like a cheap hotel that charges for wi-fi
Offer Lovefilm at a single price-point: say £10.75/month gets you unlimited streaming access to the entire film library
Avoid using the word "package". Packages are all about making life easier and more profitable for distributors and not about getting the customer a better experience. Lovefilm shouldn't be like one of those satellite television brands that forces people to buy 300 channels they don't want just so they can see the football
Lovefilm could be a quality proposition that has "members" and membership gets you into the club (and what a club, where else can I get Russ Meyer, Godard and Die Hard 4 delivered to my door at a moment's notice?)

If you absolutely can't monetise without premiumising new releases, then distribute them through a completely different channel ("Amazon Hot Stuff" or something) so it doesn't dilute the Lovefilm proposition.

From a brand-building point of view, I really hope your research shows that for film-lovers, media quality and the range of the library trump newness in the long run. The movie industry just doesn't release enough good blockbusters to sustain a genuinely high-quality "all new, all of the time" proposition and after all, your logo says it all: "Love Film".

Thanks for your support and please do keep up this fantastic service.

Versailles part deux...

2011-07-01T06:58:11Z

OK so just a quickie as I take in Today on R4...

I haven't read the story on the NYT site yet but by the sound of it, the maid who accused DSK of rape collected a bunch of cash payments from some hoods doing time in a New York jail.

So I get it that a hotel maid on minimum wage benefits from some extra cash. But...

What benefit did the small-time crims get from the sting operation?
How did a bunch of dealers know to pick DSK or indeed what hotel he'd be staying at?
If the crims had no motive for the sting, who did?

If was Agatha Christie I'd have to say Christine Lagarde looked like a good candidate:-)

Talk about intrigue...