It’s fairly basic, very unoptimised, and probably far from perfect, but it works for me, and someone might use it as the basis for something better. It uses PHPs MySQL library to open a connection to a database and execute a query, the results are then avilable to MediaWiki (but perhaps sadly don’t become part of the version controlled content).

To use it in a page add <eventum bug="123"/> where 123 is the number of the bug you’d like to query.

Output is formatted through an eventum template which you’ll have to create, the parameters of that template from 1-5 are, in this basic example, summary, created date, closed date, status title, and status color. e.g. {{eventum|An example summary|1st Nov 2008|2nd Nov 2009|Closed|#00FF00}}

< ?php
/**
 * Extension Eventum.php
 * @author Rich Boakes 
 * @copyright Rich Boakes
 * @license GPLv2
 * @version 0.0.1 14th April 2009
 * This extension provides a basic eventum lookup mechanism.
 * Hack it to how you'd like it to look.
 * Copyright (C) 2009 Rich Boakes
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
 * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
 * WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See
 * the GNU General Public License for more details.
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
 * License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
*  Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.
 */

if (!defined('MEDIAWIKI')) die();

$wgHooks['ParserFirstCallInit'][] = 'rjbSampleParserInit';

function rjbSampleParserInit() {

    global $wgParser;
    $wgParser->setHook( 'eventum', 'rjbEventumRender' );
    return true;
}

function rjbEventumRender( $input, $args, $parser ) {
  if ($args["bug"] != "") {
    $num=$args["bug"];
  } else {
    foreach( $args as $name => $value ) {
      $num=$value;
    }
  }

  $svr = 'your_sql_hostname';
  $uid = "your_sql_id";
  $pwd = "your_sql_password";
  $qry = "SELECT i.iss_summary, i.iss_created_date, i.iss_closed_date,"
     ." s.sta_title, s.sta_color from eventum_issue i LEFT JOIN"
     ." eventum_status s ON (i.iss_sta_id=s.sta_id) where"
     ." i.iss_id=$num;";

  $link = mysql_connect($svr, $uid, $pwd);
  if (!$link) {
    return("Could not connect to MySQL server: $svr");
  } else {
    mysql_select_db('eventum');
    $result = mysql_query($qry);

    if (!$result) {
      $message = 'Invalid query: ' . mysql_error() . "\n";
      $message .= 'Whole query: ' . $query;
      return("Could not connect to MySQL server: $message");
    }

    $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

    mysql_free_result($result);
    mysql_close($link);

    $output = $parser->recursiveTagParse(
      "{{Eventum|".implode("|",$row)."}}"
    );
    return $output;
  }
}
?>

The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim that their Perfect Gadget does everything up to, and maybe even including, ordering sliced bread from the online grocer at the precise thickness that it knows you will prefer (a fact derived from a semantic analyses of how you use said gadget).

Socially driven news sites will go utterly berserk.

So how long must we wait until Apple actually makes this announcement? Perhaps we’re only five or ten years away from The Perfect Gadget 1.0.

Converging on Perfection, and Overselling the Dream

In 2007, Apple announced their intent to produce the iPhone. Even before the announcement, the iPhone was hotly debated by potential owners whose excitement was akin to a small child who’s told they could go on the swings and the roundabouts and visit the local shops to buy as much sugar based confectionery as they can carry before going home to watch cartoons, leading some to call it the Jesus Phone. Even I, as a non Apple owner*, was hooked by the hype. Mesmerised by the hope of a perfect gadget.

The iPhone was never going to change the world, but reading back over some of the rhetoric that Apple spun into their press conferences you’d be forgiven if you thought it would. When Apple chief Steve Jobs opened his keynote speech saying “we’re going to make some history together today” it was an archetype of overstatement. Apple are not alone in overselling. The technology industry as a whole is guilty, and the trend is going to increase as gadgets and appliances become less about the technical specifications and more about the design of the hardware and the software – the human factors. Any company that’s marketing something with intangible or immeasurable value, can safely oversell and over-hype their product, because those that buy it want all the hype to be true. They need it to be true to validate their emotional buy-in and to affirm their “lifestyle choice”.

Future Perfect

There will come a time however, when The Perfect Gadget really is released. It will herald a fundamental change in the the world of consumer electronics. A ubiquitous device that people don’t want to part with. Users will not upgrade because they will be perfectly happy with it, so eventually there will be billions of units in circulation.

Past Imperfect

As a seasoned user of seven laptops, seven desktop computers, several hosted severs, eleven different types of mobile phone and three PDAs I’ve probably invested more time and energy than the average punter who uses gadgets. I’ve relied on them for my livelihood, maintained their hardware and software, synchronised their data with the other devices, and failed to part with most of them, so I have a fall-back if the next gadget doesn’t work. So what would be my personal perfect gadget? The gadget that would force me, the moment it’s announced, to call up the person on stage announcing it and say “I don’t care how much, I want the device that’s in your hand, name your price, sir/ma’am, ship it to me now“. When I wrote them all down, my list of requirements became unwieldy, so I thinned them out to a manageable core that can be found later in this article.

Benefiting from the Paradox of Choice

Gadgets with a similar form factor to the iPhone are both blessed and cursed with simplicity. The keyless form factor enables the gadget to be more easily be tailored to the users desire, but such devices are intrinsically harder to differentiate, and their potential can overwhelm.  Often the key benefit that gets marketed is that a product can do more than the competition, which leads consumers into the paradox of choice. With so much potential, how do they avoid selecting the wrong gadget? They have to fall back on the emotional – they choose the gadget that makes them feel good. This is something Apple do really well, they focus on ‘their way’ of doing things and make that it simple and rewarding.  The perfect gadget, above all, will be intuitive and emotionally rewarding to use.  Technological sedimentation and improved software can simplify the multiplicity of capabilities, so a dual focus on the intangible factors of software and hardware design are the critical factors in differentiating gadgets that have identical underlying technological specifications.  Apple’s name change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. highlights its bias shift towards non-technical consumer devices. Indeed, Apple are in an enviable position that when they announce something, there is a lot of interest from consumers who tend do not burden themselves with technicalities: they’re just happy to know that it’s new, that it looks nice, and will reassure their ego of its value, whilst being generally useful and (critically) unchallenging to use.

Enjoy the gadgets, but beware the hyperbole.

The Perfect Gadget Specification

The perfect gadget should incorporate:

1. Everything in the iPhone. Because in a world where design differentiates, the iPhone is a great design. Telephones have undergone two critical form factor changes in the last 30 years. The first was moving the keypad onto the handset, which enabled the whole phone to become mobile. The second is the removal of the keypad from the handset, which removes the limitation on the device to be predominantly a phone. It can now just be a device that has communication as one of it’s capabilities. Apple were not the first people to suggest this: cognitive scientists have been saying it for years, but Apple brought it to market very successfully.
2. Screen size vs Portability. Phone screens are too small and a larger screen area is key to making the gadget useful in more circumstances. Something that uses up every available millimetre in the back pocket of a pair of jeans is perfect.
3. Flexibility. The problem of a device that’s sized for the back-pocket is that placing it there will put all kinds of stresses through it (because buttocks are not flat) so some degree of flex would be a bonus.
4. Induction Charging. I never ever want to plug my device in. Instead, I will have a tables and shelves around the house that are rigged up with an inductive charging system. The shelf by the door is a perfect candidate. Anything left on these inductive shelves would be recharged with no need to connect cables. We already have all the phones syncing over Wi-Fi and bluetooth, so it makes total sense to never ever have to plug them in again.
5. GPS/Galileo. I want the unit to know where it is at all times so my whole life can be tracked, then every photo and every calendar event can be correlated. GPS is good, but for Europe, Galileo is likely to be better (because of the control and positioning of the satellites).
6. Compass and spirit level. The device must know which way up it is and where it’s pointing, so that when I take photos using the device both location and viewing frustum can be recorded.
7. Cameras. Equally spec’d cameras and screens front and back (so that front and back become concepts in software only). The camera image sensors should be interspersed with the screen pixels so video chat is more natural and doesn’t appear as if the other person is talking to a point on the wall just behind you. With a screen on both sides, the image could be viewed by the person taking the photo, and by the subjects, bringing to an end all pictures where the subjects are needlessly and awkwardly tilting their heads when they’re already in-frame.
8. Social awareness. The device should be able to associate geographical locations with social conventions. When I visit the library (or the crematorium) the gadget must know this and no matter how loud I have it set it must not interrupt.
9. A Thermometer. If the device is below body temperature, it’s in my bag not in my pocket, so vibrating is less to help – it should know this and be more noisy. If it’s below body temperature and flat on it’s back, and its after 11pm, and it’s dark, then I’m asleep, so don’t ring until after 7am… Intelligence and configurablility of all these capabilities is key.
10. Peer awareness. Sensing the environment can be enhanced if other sensors can be consulted for comparison. If multiple perfect gadgets are near each other they could (and should) share common information. Rather than each one of them running at full power measuring all things, they could take it in turns. One sampling and sharing GPS position, another doing cell negotiation, etc. Sharing the work could mean reduced overhead and increased battery life.
11. Waterproof. Induction charging would make a 100% sealed unit a highloy viabile possibility; and with so9lid state devices operating better than disk drives under increased pressure it could be made waterproof for diving (or mountain climbing if that’s your bag).

… and of course, since the is the perfect gadget …

1. Tactile Feedback. A feedback system that makes the surface smoother and stickier as it is exposed to a varying electrical current. The whole experience of using the iPhone is lacking in tactile feedback and whilst a vibration feedback system would improve things, it’s not enough.
2. Self Repair. An organic surface, that can repair itself of scratches.

What’s probably not necessary…

1. Replaceable or Upgradable Storage. Globally ubiquitous and fast network connections with inexpensive data rates will render on-device storage irrelevant. Users will no longer need to replace their device every eighteen months for the sake of more space.
2. Replaceable Batteries. Opportunities to recharge mobile devices could increase exponentially. An induction device in your car seat would mean you never have to take the phone from your back pocket. A induction device in the train table would mean your phone would charge whilst commuting. Your whole desk at work could charge phones, laptops all at once. Batteries will never run out of charge.

Before	After

If it’s of any use to anyone, download it here.

Update1: Comments recovered, the DB had become corrupt somehow, possibly an overloading issue as the trackback comments were recorded.

Update 2: I’m not sure what caused the see-saw to tip over but when rebooted the load average was starting at 1 and heading skywards through 6 before the ssh session died. This all happened after I upgraded to WP2.5 (though I’ve been on the bleeding edge builds for ages, so it’s unlikely to be related… For a while I thought it could be file permissions. Thankfully the folks at bytemark provide a VM admin shell that enabled me to reboot the machine whilst it was under siege, gaining a couple of minutes after each reboot during which I could invoke some countermeasures.

Update 3: I’ve installed Donncha’s WPSuperCache plugin which has reduced the load average down enough that the server is at least usable again, so I can do more investigation.

Update 4:Looking at my helpfully rotated log files I notice that today’s log is approximately 25x the size of a normal log. a grep of the logfile suggests that we’ve been hit with approximately 25000 trackback spam messages between 4am and 2pm … hmmm.

labs:/home/www/boakes.org/logs# grep -c "/trackback HTTP" access.log.1
24447

Update 5: I’ve also installed Mike Hampton’s Bad Behaviour and that’s helped reduce the load too…

The sooner I can get automatic htaccess level banning working again on WP2.5 the better! Today the server’s fielded fewer trackback requests, just 7000 between 4am and 11am, a mere 1000 per hour.

Update 6 (48 hours on): top is now showing a 15 minute load average of 0.15, something way better than the previous normality has been resumed. What’s particularly interesting is that Google analytics for the day shows a lower than normal page view count and the number of advert clicks was also proportionally down. This suggests that spammers do little or no automatic clicking on adverts, which will be reassuring to customers of Google Adsense!

Update 7 4 days later: After more tweaking of super cache (it seems it was only enabling the default cache due to a mod_rewrite configuration problem) the load average on top now looks like this…

top - 19:05:01 up 3 days, 20:51, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 62 total, 1 running, 61 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st


That’s a fifteen minute load average of 0.00 … very low!

As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is identifying and deleting the comments that are 100% definitely spam (sent by the very worst offenders) so that any “false positives” (sent by real genuine humans) can be rescued from the spam bin!

Download it from
WordPress.org

I’ve got it working on this site already, where it’s proved faster than the previous versions – it also has a nicer user interface. There are a few minor operational features that need to be finalised, but it’s basically capable of doing what it’s supposed to.

This version has a pluggable interface, so different “litmus tests” can be applied to spam at the same time, and third parties can easily write tests without having to write a whole interface.

I’m keen to hear from people who:

• Know their way around WordPress/PHP already.
• Can take a look at the litmus test API and comment on ways to improve it.
• Suffer from very high spam loads (hundreds or thousands per day) who’ll be able to give the existing litmus tests a bit of a workout to check if their SQL is as efficient as I hope.

Development SVN is being kindly hosted by Automattic and releases will be available here.

The camera is already set-up so that whenever it’s in range of my computer the photos are automatically uploaded, stored for posterity and (most importantly) available to be viewed and enjoyed. What’s more, the software we use for managing our ever increasing pile of digital memorabilia (Picasa) already includes a tool for adding geo-tags to photos after they’ve been taken. They can then be viewed within Google Earth or Google Maps: so almost unsurprisingly, when I got home after work the other day, the photos I’d taken appeared dotted around Google Earth without me having to do a thing.

Geo-tagging is a wonderful thing; but it’s not yet photography nirvana – there are several issues that still need to be tackled:

Battery

GPS units eat battery, so regular use of geo-tagging is not particularly useful if you’re not able to charge your camera several times per day. One strategy is to keep the GPS circuitry switched off until it’s needed, however, it can take several minutes to get a GPS fix, which is useless for photos that capture the moment. In these circumstances the software I’ve been using appears to retrospectively tag photos as soon as a fix is obtained (which may be several minutes and some distance later).

GPS Accuracy

GPS accuracy in urban areas tends to be haphazard because tall buildings with solid flat walls bounce the satellite signal around before it reaches the phone. Unlike automobile GPS units, it’s not feasible to use a roadmap to correct for such anomalies and predict where the unit might really be when signal is poor.

An approximate tag is still infinitely better than no tag at all, but it’s far from perfect. I took a few photos whilst walking between Waterloo and the City of London the other day, which serve as a good example – the pictures appear clustered around certain spots rather than being spread out along the riverside.

View Larger Map

Enriched GPS Detail

Recording latitude and longitude is a natural starting point, but there’s other information that would be similarly useful. Several of the photos in the example set were taken fourteen floors up a building, so altitude information would also be good. What would be really cool however (and I’ve said this before) would be if some kind of compass and attitude sensor could be combined so that the camera direction could also be captured with the photo.

What originally gave me this idea was wandering around the fields of Glastonbury festival after we’d lost our disposable camera (whilst crowd-surfing – there’s a lesson there). We were rather gutted that we’d lost our pictures and I found myself thinking that even though we’d lost our pictures, we’d certainly be in lots of other peoples photos. So to get a photographic record of our time at the festival we’d just have to solve the problem of (a) sharing the photos and (b) making the photo search tractable. If there were 50,000 cameras used during the weekend and each of took 20 photos, there would be one million potential images that we may have wandered through so the search would be impossible. Surely GPS could help! If we had a GPS trail log of where we’d been, and if every camera position and direction could be recorded, then the intersection of those two data sets would predict which photos we might feature in. Comparing GPS trails alone is not enough in heavily populated events, it’s necessary to know not just if you are near the camera at the time the photo is taken, but also if the camera is pointing at you. For example, person b, is nearer the camera in the diagram, but person a is in the image. It’s still a pipe-dream until someone comes up with a camera that can record pitch, roll and yaw against polar coordinates, but when that’s possible it’ll open up some really interesting new query possibilities!

There’s a happily-ever-after for this tale too. We returned to the pyramid stage after the crowds were gone and scoured the floor, eventually finding the camera trodden into the mud, just inside the security fence in front of the stage (we were able to identify it because we’d written our postcode on it), so we got out photos back!

I watched as the machine-juggling-lady turned to one customer (a large, bearded and eminently recognizable rugby player who regularly commutes) and asked if he’d like milk in his coffee; at which point she stopped herself and commented that of course he didn’t: she knew his order. This got the brain cogs moving (I’m always wondering about how processes work and how they might be improved, disrupted or streamlined). Initially I wondered if face recognition software could help the staff – I discounted that idea because of potential unreliability and cost. I then recalled that Barclaycard have just introduced an RFID based debit card that works when the holder places it near a card reader; I already use the similar Oyster system when in London to pay for my tube journeys, so why not take that one step further and use it for ordering the perfect tasty beverage by placing a reader at the door of the café?

Give the RFID machine a small screen which presents the user with their 3 most common orders and just one machine can automate the process of giving the order, paying for it, receiving change and providing the information necessary to tailor the order to perfection, enabling the members of staff to focus on preparing the drinks during the busiest periods.

Of course… if the ordering and paying can be automated, so can the drinks preparation, and there’s many a machine these days that can make a very good cup of tea, so taking the concept to it’s unavoidable conclusion we must consider that the role of the humans in the shop will become more focused on food preparation, cleaning and general stewardship of the customer space…. after all, the whole point of the shop is that it’s not just a lonely machine on a platform, and the convenience of never again having to scrabble for change in the morning cannot be overlooked.

Some commuters always catch the same train, at the same time, so a time based alarm might do the job, but for anyone with more flexible train usage, and for the times when the train is running late, or cancelled, a simple alarm clock doesn’t cut the mustard. So how about an alarm system that you could configure to go off every time you come within a set distance of a specific point? I’m sure it’s something my GPS phone could no doubt do quite successfully, and it would solve the problem of arriving at the same train station at different times.

A proximity alarm is not the kind of application you could leave running on the phone and just forget, because it would fire every time you got near the station. If you happen to live near the station the alarm would be going off at all times. This could be solved if the alarm were based on a series of way-points. i.e. If you pass near points a, b and c in sequence then the alarm should trigger. This solves the problem of the alarm going off when it’s not necessary. The main problem is that the application still cannot be left running and forgotten because of the battery usage – the Nokia N95 for example, has a good battery and during normal phone usage it lasts well, but the circuitry that does the GPS appears to have a far more significant draw on power than the rest of the device, killing the phone in a matter of hours.

There is, however, a suitable alternative to GPS. Rather than base the alarm on GPS locations, it can be based on cellphone mast IDs. As the commuter moves through the country, the phone detects, and negotiates with different telephone masts. If the alarm system were to be configured to work with masts, then it could work quite successfully without the need for any GPS circuitry to be used.

It’s certainly a less accurate positioning solution than GPS, so the multi-stage trigger for the alarm would be a necessity, but this could be a fairly low-power service because the application would merely have to be woken up whenever a new cell is discovered by the phone, checked for relevance (i.e. does this new cell match an alarm? are any alarms satisfied for triggering?). It’s still not perfect though. What’s needed is a minimal battery solution for that we need to remove the application altogether.

The perfect solution, would remove the need for the phone based application altogether. If the phone company could monitor the phone as it travels between cells, and send an SMS to the phone when the the trigger criteria are met. This solution would work for all phones, even old ones which can’t have applications added to them. No commuter need ever miss their stop again.

PhD-level research is very specialised but (as my esteemed supervisor pointed out) most of the content should be comprehensible to anyone capable of reading a daily newspaper, because the more accessible the writing, the more useful it will be to other people (who may not speak English as a first language) and that’s the whole point of the PhD, it’s not just personal advancement, it’s another small step for the research topic, for scientific method and human kind. The thesis is marked and reviewed by respected academics, but the average person is the target audience, so they shouldn’t need to keep a dictionary handy to grasp the majority of the content. Obviously some parts of any field will require specialised knowledge in order to interpret plots or equations, but the majority should be accessible to all. When discussing the work, there are no plots and equations, there are only words. This is why the viva voce is such a powerful tool for final examination.

On numerous occasions however, I’ve observed an odd response from the average person when they learn that my research is about “building models that help us understand what happened when very large computer systems go wrong”. It’s the natural evolution of the “I can’t work the video” discussion: once computers are mentioned then within 3 sentences I’m told about how their child/grandchild/neice/nephew etc (usually aged between aged 2 and 6) can use a mouse already, and how this is in contrast with everyone else in their family. There are probably similar variations on this discussion for every non-computing field, and this is why the viva, in reality, is really enjoyable. It’s great to be able to talk to people who’ve read the thesis, understood it, and want to talk about the details. This is something that my old buddy Gethin (who got his PhD long ago) predicted for me beforehand, and he was spot on.

My viva voce was this Tuesday, and (for the benefit of anyone with a viva approaching) the whole thing was enjoyable (and not just the bit at the end where the examiner said “we’re going to award you the PhD” which was very tingly).

Kick-Off

To get the members of this alliance acquainted all of the the sales force, and technical consulting groups were invited to gather at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, near Route 101, just south of San Francisco airport. This involved considerable expense, flying the small consulting groups in from all over the USA, from Europe, the far east, and even Australia. It was, without doubt, an expensive and important shindig.

So, we flew in, we transferred, we checked in and headed for the bar. Our bodies were telling us it was midnight, but the wallclock said 4pm, we had to stay awake, so social interaction provided safety in numbers, and beer helped explain the woozy disjointed feeling of a timezone shift.

A corporate kickoff is a very special time if you’re a consultant because you get the opportunity to meet people who have only ever been email addresses up to that point. In many cases these email addresses have been really helpful and you owe them a pint for their troubles, or vice versa. This can result in the corporate kickoff being a rather happy and celebratory affair.

Added to this mixture was the fact that there were a whole bunch of new people to meet and politely buy drinks for, and vice versa, and, well, you can see how things might expand to the point where, upon counting the empty bottles the next morning, one could be forgiven for thinking that the hot-tub had played host to several hundred people until well after 4am; all supping on cold beers gazing at the stars and wondering if there is a better or happier place anywhere in the world.

Not everyone can make it for the first night of course, so it would be churlish not to welcome the late comers with similar bonhomie, so generally every night is party night.

The Auditorium

Picture the scene then on the first morning after: 9am in an auditorium below the hotel, the lights are mercifully dimmed and an expectant hush descends on the seated crowd, a great number of whom are rather hungover having continued the celebration with the email-addresses-made-flesh and new-best-friends until the bitter end, because it would be rude to duck out on such a good vibe.

This is an audience that has pulled itself from a strange bed, eaten a strange breakfast, had a strange hot brown beverage, and is strangely out of sorts due to an ill advised combination of timezones and alcohol.

Nobody is quite prepared for the audio visual assault of a max-volume inspirational music video projected onto the 50 food screen above the stage.

Know How

The offending audio-visual feast was called “Know-How”, a specially penned ditty describing “the truth in the net economy” and “technology borderin’ on mythology”, it was made for this specific occasion.

Whoever commissioned it had not bargained on the two companies being so friendly and generous around the bar the previous night.

During the following two and a half minutes, the entire assembled auditorium first wondered if there was a quieter and happier place anywhere in the world, then made an honest resolution to never ever drink alcohol again, then realised that they might need alcohol to get over what they were witnessing and resolved to drink more, as soon as the bar reopened.

It was seat gripping stuff, and pop-music dynamite, but, a typically bad corporate anthem. “Bad” because corporations should not force phrases like “right on course, primary source, in a technology evolution” into pop tunes. “Pop-music dynamite” because it was…

Some years later, I heard a song by an American performer called Justin Timberlake, and couldn’t help but notice the similarity. I remarked upon it to a couple of ex-netscape folk at the time, but without being able to compare the tracks we never really got to point the finger.

MC Sun|Netscape Alliance vs Justin Timberlake

Then today I found a copy of the video on an old hard-drive; so here, for your enjoyment, is the track in its entirety.

Without the volume and the hangover it’s entirely palatable, though still remarkably bad, and thanks to the wonders of you-tube, I can now compare and contrast the aforementioned Justin Timberlake track too.

They are remarkably similar, so I’m assuming that the guitar riff must be sampled from a common source – or was Justin Timberlake a secret Sun|Netscape Alliance fan?

[Update: The video is no longer embeddable, probably for copyright reasons, so it's available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cPQ75fgWhk ]

Web advertising is dying. Banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, text ads and video ads; all dead horses. Their time has come and gone.

The First Web Ads

The first paid-for banner appeared in 1993, when most people still hadn’t heard of email. A global marketing phenomenon has built up around that simple concept in the intervening thirteen years as the web’s user base has continued to grow.

During that time many companies have grown rich and respected by promoting responsible and non-irritating adverts, conversely the get-rich-quick merchants have (with the same natural and misguided competitive zeal that will destroy humanity), destroyed the market by their desire to get rich quicker than the next guy by any means possible.

Blocking Ads

The result of this advertising abuse is ad-blocking software which is starting to come as standard in web browsers. Today (still), only a fraction of the planet uses the world wide web, but as new, naive web users come online they will be protected from adverts from the outset and can no longer be harangued by irresponsible advertisers in the same way that the first wave of web users were.

We, the people, with our open-source software, have made the web less annoying, but advertising and marketing are important, they promote and reward investment in the web, so blocking ads has a downside.

As of today, 50% of the visitors to this site have advert blocking software installed. That’s probably higher than average, because a lot of visitors are at least a bit tech-savvy, but it’s indicative of a significant upward trend.

It’s also getting easier to block adverts. As web standards (such as XHTML and CSS) have evolved, web pages have become described in terms of what the content is, rather than how it should be displayed, so even if an advert is not marked as such, then the advert blocker can still make a fairly good guess at which part or parts of a page are advertising.

The remaining market

So the future audience of web advertising is a sporadic, poorly defined group of people who have mis-configured ad-blocking software, that’s not a particularly lucrative or stable market for any global advertising business, and it’s certainly a difficult sell-on to the advertiser.

The alternative to web advertising

So my alternative suggestion is that a major broker buys the right to advertise to me and my counterpart web users.

I agree, as a consumer, to enter into an exclusive contract with said advertising broker and in return, they provide me with responsible, bespoke advertising wherever I visit. It’s a win-win-win-win situation.

The four wins:

1. I win because
   1. I get paid to be advertised to.
   2. Advertisers can bid on my time, they can bid on how many times I get shown their advert, or what percentage of my daily browsing is laced with their message.
   3. The ISP bandwidth that I pay for is not being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for
   4. The screen that I paid for isn’t being wasted by an advert that I didn’t ask for.
   5. All adverts are relevant to me, because my broker knows me.
   6. All adverts are restrained, they don’t blink at me with garish flair and I never get pop-ups or pop-unders, because my broker is considerate.
2. The broker wins because they have dedicated groups of consumers that can become the target of concerted long term advertising programmes. Problems such as click-fraud are massively reduced and they can sell larger and more integrated multiple product (i.e. lifestyle) advertising programmes to advertisers.
3. Publishers win because they can provide the page and let the broker deliver an advert that may be unrelated to page content but still relevant to the user, so the publisher gets rewarded for publishing what interests the consumer, and not for publishing articles comprising mostly buzzwords that are intended to trigger adverts.
4. Advertisers win because they can target a specific group of consumers rather than a selection of consumers who happen to visit a particular website, plus, their advert can if they wish, be shown on every page I visit.

Advert blocking and page filtering will eventually destroy the basic web-based advertising model, but advertising helps pay for innovation and site development. If the web user enters into a contract with the advertising broker, there may be an intermediate solution that benefits all parties.

The typical geek has carefully selected and purchased their gadgets of choice, has a computer that’s tuned to perfection and needs no software purchased (because their entire suite is open-source) – so aside from comedy tee shirts with clever slogans that can only be understood by other geeks, buying for geeks is difficult, especially if you’re not a geek, because you can’t even understand if the tee is funny or not.

Novelty Gifts

Giving up and buying a novelty-gift is not a good solution, it has negative connotations. Novelty gifts are often made of plastics and are immediately discarded because they tend to look twee and lame next to the 30inch LCD monitor, so if you didn’t have environmental guilt about naff presents before, you will have in future.

Novelties get made, bought, wrapped, presented and then discarded by January 1st. A whole lot of carbons belched into the atmosphere and gallons of oil used for no reason, and they’re often not recyclable because they’re made in a sweatshop backwater that uses chemicals that are banned by most governments. There, guilt, it must be Christmas.

So don’t do it, don’t go naff.

The geek in your life has bigger fish to fry and your gift can help.

Good Gifts

Donating to a geek charity will show that you care, and that, even though you can’t comprehend the strange words they use, you do at least appreciate that what they do is changing the world.

Several worthwhile charitable causes with a technological skew immediately spring to mind…

1. The Wikimedia Foundation – the people who run Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (etc!) as a global services (free to use and free of advertising). The Wikimedia foundation have rejected lucrative corporate partnerships in order to preserve their independence and need the financial help of the community to continue to grow.
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation – who protect the the individual when large firms threaten to trample their rights with with legal bravado, and protect everyone by challenging companies and governments that enforce new laws that restrict rights previously granted to the individual.
3. The Free Software Foundation have a worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users. If you’ve not heard of the FSF, you might have heard of GNU/Linux, which is part of the free software stable.

I’m sure the geek in your life would appreciate a personalized donation far more than a novelty mouse warmer. If you can think of worthy causes to add to the list (or if you represent a worthy cause that’s not mentioned and happen to have dropped by), respond below.

For very complex documents with many thousands (possibly many millions) of elements, knowing that rendering a particular portion of the image is taking n% of the time can help identify which areas of the image need to be re-written to make the image as a whole work better and faster.

SVG optimization is going to become a significant area of development over the coming years, especially for SVG that uses ECMAScript to modify the DOM, because it will help turn todays stuttering experiments into tomorrows smooth graphical web based applications.

So if such a tool doesn’t exist already, someone needs to make it – perhaps as a Firefox plugin. If it does exist… what’s the URL?

I can’t help but think that the old solution for “not losing your mittens” would help here – you know, the bit of string that connects your mittens via the arms of your anorak… Exchange the mittens for the Wii nunchuk controller, and exchange the anorak for a nice wicking top that helps keep player one cool.

The details of what and how are unimportant, but for the record, selecting just one menu item in Eclipse lost me three days due to the data recovery process. Eclipse is both good and evil; yin and yang; it giveth and it attempt to taketh away. In the mists of time, this will all be forgotten, as will the baking heat of those three particular lost days, because the good news is that despite the heat, I managed to retrieve my work from the incremental backup I made on Thursday, and by 02:00 on Monday I’d reintegrated every improvement since.

So a small level of paranoia data rentention diligence is a good thing, because eventually, even if you avoid the nightmare of a disk failure, you’re bound to press the wrong button: as I did.

The moral of the story is this: backups work.

The subtext to the moral of the story is this: more backups work more.

Yes it took three days to get back to where I was, but that’s better than nothing. To improve matters should I make the same mistake again, I’ve now set the backup process to run every two hours rather than every night.

Obviously all this scrambling and backtracking had an effect on me, and in last nights dreams I found myself in the company of several soviet officers who showed me, on a post it note, several passwords that I have previously used; before passing me a pile of 132 column dot matrix printout (with the tear off tractor edges still attached) containing logs of my computer usage from the last several years.

Maybe it is paranoia after all.

When I heard this I was reminded of a very cool joystick I once saw for (IIRC) the Sinclair Spectrum – back in the good old days when you typically needed to first buy a “joystick interface” before selecting your preferred controller.

What made this particular item so cool was that it was basically a vertically held stick, with mercury switches mounted tangentially to each other so that tilting forward, back, left and right could all be detected.

Sadly, for once, I could pull nothing from the web – so if anyone’s got a clue what the stick was called, please let me know.

Strangely however, what I did find was that the US Patent Office attributes the idea of a motion controller to a “Mr. Jacobs”, not Nintendo: giving it patent number: 5059958.

I also noticed that Nintendo were unsuccessfully sued by the patent owner in 2004.

Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton says “With Nintendo, I’m trying to think of anything we’ve copied… but I can’t”.

I wonder if criticising Sony over stealing a “Nintendo idea” was a little premature.

For example: comparing searches for slashdot and digg using this search suggests that digg has seen a strong and steads increase in interest since it’s launch.

…or perhaps you’re interested to compare the popularity of WordPress with Movable Type…

…or maybe Firefox versus Internet Explorer…

…or anything else you’d care to think up.

With my tongue only slightly in cheek, I predict that Google will no doubt follow this with Google-Trends-Zeitgeist: a monthly roundup of the most popular Google Trends comparisons.

Today I learned from a trusted source that Apple is poised to make history next Saturday when it unveils the worlds first advertisement that can be seen from space.

Apple had hoped to keep their creation secret until the grand unveiling, however, after I was tipped off, and with just a little bit of lateral digging, I was able to uncover enough background information to get a clue of the location.

From there, it was just a matter of firing up Google Earth, and hunting for it! The pictures are a few months old, but clearly show the advert well on the way to completion.

The sheer size of the publicity stunt is difficult to comprehend. It covers 893240 square metres; roughly equivalent to eighty football pitches.

The ad, which depicts Apple’s flagship iPod product has been constructed on the site of an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia. It has been in development for almost two years since Apple’s founder Steve Jobs acquired the location during a game of poker with (the late) Australian publishing and gaming tycoon Kerry Packer.

Aliens need not worry about advertising regulations however; the general concensus is that the edge of space is at a height of 62 miles (100Km), and once you go much higher than that, the ad will very quickly shrink towards invisibility. It’ll look like an iPod nano for a while, then maybe a tictac.

Speculation is currently rife that the grand unveiling will be coordinated with the launch of a touch screen Video iPod.

Apple have a press meeting scheduled at the start of next month when more details will be revealed – you heard it here first.

See it in Google Maps.
See it in Google Earth (Free Mac & PC versions available).

They’re actually in a soundproofed hangar, on a disused US Airbase in Suffolk, and will be aboard the same movie set that was used in Space Cowboys and Armageddon, among other movies.

Various news reports have described how the nine participants have been incommunicado since (at least) mid-November – before the teaser trailers began to be broadcast. The poor things have actually been in quarantine since the very start of the month so their family and friends could be consulted, and where necessary give their consent to the hoax.

As well as two actors who will “pilot” the shuttle, the participants have also been infiltrated by actors since the earliest parts of the selection process, to help ensure the success of the hoax on all levels. For the show itself, three participants will be selected, and they will be accompanied by one of the actors for the mission – if they rumble the hoax, three more will get to go up. If the hoax is rumbled three times, Channel 4 will have to revert to broadcasting repeats of Friends, which they do for the rest of the time.

The possibility occurred to me that an elaborate double-bluff would be easier and more controllable than what has been described (because it could all be pre-recorded for perfection), and others have thought likewise. Either way, it should make great entertainment.

Space Cadets begins tonight at 9pm, on Channel 4.

Location

Photo of the exterior of Hush House, the soundproof hangar. Source.

• RAF Bentwaters Air Base Map
• Bentwaters Air Base in Google Earth
• Bentwaters Air Base aerial photo in 2003. – Source.