From here: “Itv news site audacious invention from necessity of having v little content and no way of competing with depth – turned into a real virtue”.

BBC/Guardian, et al feel like a curated library. ITV now feels like a twitter-stream, or as Paul said like tumblr.

It feels very “now”, you’re seeing the news of the moment. It’s not going to replace BBC News as my homepage, but it’s good to see ITV competing meaningfully, innovating not aping.

Between that, and the ever-present Words With Friends I’ve got a whacamole of social requests flying in, and the compulsive need to reply to them is too hard to break.

I’m going to start on all the stuff I have to do once I’ve got that to number to zero, but I don’t get anything done because people keep drawing comical stick-figures in various states of lewdness.

My inbox, that’s fine, that’s manageable. But my gaming, now that is a problem.

The UK has yet to launch LTE networks: the spectrum clearing and auction hasn’t got underway, but we do know that they will be running on 800 MHz and 2,600 MHz. (the 800 MHz provides great coverage, so good for rural areas, while the 2,600 MHz will provide capacity in cities because of smaller cell-size).

It looks like there are two variants of the iPad 4G, the AT&T (LTE at 700/2,100 MHz) and the Verizon version (LTE at 700 MHz along with CDMA support). Comparing the US and the UK specs, it looks like the AT&T variant is the ‘global’ one.

All the pages on apple.com have many caveats: 4G coverage is limited by carrier and by area. They make no claims for universal 4G availability. Only certain US and Canadian carriers are listed as supported.

Here’s the potential confusion though: the iPad 4G (as currently shipped) will never work with UK LTE networks. Our networks will be running on frequencies that the device cannot support. There is an outside chance that some carriers might reuse their 3G spectrum at 2,100 MHz – but the most likely to do so, 3,  recently ruled this out.

The same situation exists in Australia, where Telstra have launched their LTE network on 1,800 MHz.

The brief period where we almost had spectral harmony, or at least when devices supported enough bands to make it look like we did, seems to be over.

I would still buy the “4G” version, the better 3G support will make your browsing faster, and I like connecting directly without tethering to, and using the battery of, my phone.

By the time LTE arrives in the UK in 2013, Apple will have doubtless have launched the “New New iPad” and this probably goes away. But, if you’re selling a “4G” product in the UK, it’s not unreasonable to expect it would work with 4G in the UK.

I think that Video Apps on the TV video are great: I love using iPlayer and NetFlix on my TV/PS3/AppleTV far more than on my laptop. You can glance away, and glance back when something interesting happens, in the way you watch TV. You’re not cmd-tabbing through windows to try and find the iPlayer tab before the interesting bit ends.

The BBC Olympics application will let fans have access to nearly all the sports, not constrained by how many channels the BBC has – a useful extension and I think it will be popular. The Twitter app on my TV? Not so much, I used it once, and used it to say how awful sending that tweet was.

I really don’t think we’ll manage to have that many TV-only apps. No developer without lots of video (the Broadcasters, Netflixs and YouTubes of the world) is going to pick up a TV SDK – they’re going to learn Android or iOS programming. There’s already a lot of fragmentation in the TV space and billing is never going to be as easy, and lucrative, as on the mobile platforms.

I think that in the future we’ll see some of these phone/tablet apps throwing interesting graphics and content to the TV screen, like the scores at the end of a round. There’s scope for real innovation here, but it’s about feedback, not interaction.

The TV should be the easiest screen to get content on, you shouldn’t have to think about how you get content there: It’s about leaning back and relaxing. We tried ordering pizza via TV in 1998, it didn’t really work. Today we’d just do it from our tablet or smartphone.

Have a listen, let me know what you think, am I being too pessimistic?

The less flippant version is: Worry about what you do when you’re offered the job, not when you’re thinking about applying… Easier said than done, but make the opportunities then decide.

On sites like LinkedIn the value is (supposedly) the connections, and when someone has hidden theirs, but can still see your list of connections – that feels inequitable.

As an addition in the sea of privacy options, a checkbox that says “stop people seeing things that they don’t let you see” would help things feel a bit more balanced.

In less than a day I got the “welcome to the iPhone version, you want to invite your friends?” email.

It was needy. I’m not inviting them.

Calls to Action are a pain to write. Too passive and they won’t drive people, too pushy and they’ll drive people away. And invariably what works for some won’t work for others. Judging the assertiveness/aggression is tough; but easier is never, ever, sounding needy.

Asking me to invite people within 1 day of installing something feels that.

It might be a considered decision to strike while the iron is hot, but failed; for me, at least.

That’s Magic!

If you don’t understand stuff, it’s magic. And if you’re relying on something that’s magic, your platform can disappear in a puff of smoke. This especially true of newer things – I don’t understand MySQL but it’s long in the tooth enough I can (mostly) trust it. Some of the newer NoSQL techs do not have that lineage…

Open Source allows you to get under the hood of all these things, to look behind the curtain and reverse-engineer what is going on. You invariably have to as the documentation is a TODO item. This means that when you do hit these extreme edge cases situations you can fix them, eventually.

But that’s only once you’ve really understood the problem. In black-box situations it’s all too easy to pull the levers you have until it seems the problem has gone away, but all you’ve done is masked, displaced, or deferred it. You have to understand the whole stack and not just “your bit”. (This reminded me a bit of a conversation with a friend who does network security, where decisions not to collect some data for “safety” actually made potential targets more obvious)

There are no gremlins

My favourite point was this: Computers are (mostly) deterministic.

We talk about bugs, issues, intermittent and transient faults – almost resigning ourselves to sometimes “things just happen”.

As Artur points out, computers are deterministic state machines, this randomness doesn’t really exist. Yes, the complex interplay of our interconnected systems can give the appearance of a random system, but that is just the appearance.

There is pattern in there, and when find it, you can fix it. How? Lots of monitoring, lots of measuring, and good old-fashioned investigation.

Stop throwing boxes & sharding at things

The easy availability of horizontal scale-out makes us lazy and complacent: “we’ll just throw another amazon instance at the problem”. That can be a valid approach, but only when your existing instances are actually spending all of their time doing meaningful work and not stuck queuing on some random service. If you’re site is sluggish because of poor code, database performance or tuning, you’re not really solving the problems.

Latency is even more critical(Google PDF), and scaling out a broken system may just let more people use it slowly – not make it faster.

Post-Cloud Call to Arms?

Scaling was hard: ordering servers took ages and it was all confusing. CDNs cost lots of money, were hard to use and only for the big boys.

Then “The Cloud” appeared: people like amazon and others made stuff cheaper and faster to get machines from. For a while we could ignore the complexity and just throw money at it.

But latency isn’t as simple as capacity, and we’re back to the situation that isn’t always about throwing more boxes into the battle.

1. It meets a real need. Knowing whether to wait for the irregular but useful 355 was the bane of a previous commute. If it was due I could be at Brixton in 5 minutes, if it was running late I could walk faster than wait the 15+ minutes for it.
2. It super serves that need: no longer am I restricted to viewing the stop I’m at: I can answer “do i get this bus at stop x or that bus at stop y” from my phone. If services are rare, I can time my exit from the house to avoid standing in the rain.
3. It just feels future-y. Interactions of things in the real world with that panel of glass in your pocket always feel a bit more special than posting a funny tweet.

I mean, sure I’ve nearly missed the bus arriving sometimes because I’ve been too busy checking when it’s due, but still, it’s just pleasing.

I’ve never really worked in radio beyond running a mixer evaluation for Radio2 (the glamour), but RadioTalk often left me wishing I had done. It had a decent range of voices on, the roster was the right size that you could remember most of them. Even industry big-wigs like Tim Davie popped in from time-to-time. It had the pleasingly conversational tone of good radio, and combined with the occasional fuck-ups around the Academy-MDF as previous the non-studio studio was known, was an accessible listen to an outsider.

Anyway, thanks to Trevor and (long-suffering?) producer Heather Davies for creating something good for the last few years.

http://www.radioacademy.org/podcasts/