Year: 2012

#SOPA/PIPA @WordPress

Yes, democratized web-publishing is a great force for change, for good. That’s why I blog. That’s why I use WordPress (and a dozen other social publishing tools).

But that doesn’t mean SOPA / PIPA are a bad thing. Creative people publishing content can choose their preferred IP model. Creative musicians and artists can work outside the corporate mainstream if they want, with cheap distribution and easy access to their customer base, with a larger share of a smaller revenue stream – if they want. (That is an example of what is enabled by the democratized publishing capabilities.)

And we can all choose to ignore the offerings of mainstream publishing, not contribute to their corporate coffers. But, unless you’re a “property-is-theft” extremist, IP needs copyright protection, to the extent that its owner wants to assert that copyright (again the owner is free to choose what rights to assert, or not).

The problem as ever is potential abuse of powers of enforcement, and conspiracy theories whipped-up to focus on “censorship” and infringements against freedoms. But theft is no-one’s right. We should focus on practical implementation and safeguards against abuses, not throw out common sense.

Surfing 9/11 USA

Picked these up last September from Andy Martin (Author of Beware Invisible Cows) but also film-maker and lecturer at Cambridge Uni.

The story 9/13 New York Board Meeting
The film 9/26 New York Surfing

Zen koans and a little religious experience, a subway ride from Manhattan.
(Same gentle style as his Cambridge Languages promo film. I see Andy’s Hawaii connection now.)

Egyptian Spreadsheets & MesopotamianML

In these days of mark-up languages believing they have made spreadsheets old-hat, I often point out that spreadsheets are a mark-up language, that they were invented by the ancient Egyptians and they still have a long life ahead of them. In fact it seems they were invented by Mesopotamian accountants before being taken across the Red Sea to Egypt.

Of course in these days where the latest mark-up language is “the best sliced bread” since the previous mark-up language, I saw a very interesting slide at a conference late last year that showed how clearly spreadsheet cells map to RDF OWL Triples. (A slide Kari Anne borrowed from Thore I understand.)

[Post-Note: Followed up this thought and the Thore Langeland “triples” reference in a paper on by business site. “For the Love of Spreadsheets”.]

Diane Abbott Comment Racist

Of course Abbott’s comment was racist.

The point is was it racist with positive moral intent ? Or was it done with ignorance or negative intent ? Colour-blindness is a red-herring too. Sometimes race/colour is germane to the topic, sometimes it isn’t.

Obviously her intent was positive and race/colour was more than just relevant, it was the subject. No problem there. Her mistake was to generalize “the whites” as some group with one set of qualities & motives vis-a-vis “blacks”, even though she used the expression in the context of a particular conversation. That was clearly racist. Diane on the whole is not I’d suggest – a lack of common sense maybe, given her profile as a politician. Get over it, she’s apologised..

Nice tweet from Mr_Eugenides :

DianeAbbott: Making Other Labour MPs Look Like Intellectuals Since 1987™
Worth a chuckle. Diane Abbott is OK, it is possible to be too intellectual. That’s why the Abbott & Portillo double-act worked so well.

Assisted Living

They’ve got something wrong here, confusing quality with quantity. Why would you need assisted dying for someone given only a short time to live ? You’d want assisted living, to get the max out of remaining time.

Assisted dying is a quality of life issue surely.

Designers Who Code

Interesting Garry Tan piece.

Reminds me of a conversation years ago – and several since. A colleague reporting to myself and another manager simultaneously found herself conflicted. As an engineer whose job had nothing directly to do with producing software products, she announced she was doing a course on coding (some variant of C, back in the day). Not asking specifically for funding or time off, just a bit of leeway and acknowledgement for her initiative. We needed tools and, whilst she / we never envisaged she’d be producing the tools we needed, she’d be better placed to understand the process of getting them delivered against our needs. I was game, but the other manager told her that coding was skill she didn’t need and more or less (publicly) instructed her to drop the course.

Regretted several times myself not learning coding, beyond noddy script-editing stuff. Increasing understanding of processes you need to manage is obviously part of it, but often we’ve concluded that producing a working prototype of what was needed, is much more effective than writing a comprehensive specification between engineer and developer, at either the individual or inter-organizational level. (If software is your business, interactive, iterative prototyping “agile” methods have been the rage for some time, but those for whom software is “merely” an enabler of core business could learn a thing or two.)

(The counter argument, really just a call for balance, is not to have the hobbyist hacker “secondary” developer get too far into the product process before you have an unsustainable, unmanageable, mill-stone of a product on your hands.)