aBlog

Randomness, Throbbers and the

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:37:00 PDT

[caveat - if you're reading this in a feedreader, I have no idea how the iframes below will work. If they do, then great. If not, then maybe click through to the site...]

As I've been on holiday for the last week, I thought I'd take the opportunity to learn a little bit about some of the new funky stuff that's in HTML 5. The Google mobile team just released an awesome new version of gmail for iPhone and Android that relies heavily on HTML 5 and it seems that there are some pretty cool things you can do with it.

In an amusing twist, the fact that iPhone and Android browsers are based on WebKit means that for once, (smart-phone) mobile developers can build on top of the new standard with more confidence before their desktop cousins (assuming of course they don't need their sites to work on a Blackberry). On the desktop, Safari and Chrome are built on WebKit, so they are fine, and Firefox is gradually introducing all of the features through each new build to Gekko. As the standard is still evoling, no browser has comprehensive support, but as far as I can tell, WebKit is most in tune (get the nightly build for the latest bells and whistles), with Firefox and Opera not far behind and Internet Explorer (as ever) a distant fourth (IE 7 and before have none of these features, IE 8 may have some but I'm on a Mac and so haven't tested it...)

The three areas of HTML 5 that I am most interested in exploring are the <canvas> tag, the Application Cache and the Web Storage API (mainly because these are the ones that my colleagues blogged about and I caught the bug). So far I've spent a couple of days playing with <canvas> and have to say I've enjoyed it immensely. Posts on the App Cache and Storage capabilities will follow just as soon as I'm finished drawing (I promise...)

So, what is <canvas>? Well the wikipedia article has some good history, but in essence <canvas> lets you define an area of the DOM that you can subsequently use for scripted vector graphics. There is a detailed tutorial over on Mozilla Developer Center that I used to get started, which I don't intend to reproduce here. That said, here are a few useful pointers:

<canvas> takes two explicit parameters height and width to specify the size of the area on which you can draw. Apparently setting these in CSS is not a good idea.
You draw inside your canvas using Javascript. Get hold of your canvas object from the DOM and you'll find it is imbued with all the helpful vector drawing methods you need
You can animate your canvas by using the Javascript setInterval() function to redraw it at regular intervals.

Armed with the Mozilla tutorial and the latest nightly build of WebKit I set off to try my hand at a bit of canvas scripting.

First order of the day was to try to recreate a fun test that I saw recently on In The Dark (a great physics blog if you're on the look out for one). The test works on the basis that humans are really good at identifying patterns (even where there are none), and that this can lead us down the wrong path sometimes. We are shown two images of seemingly randomly scattered dots and asked to identify the one that is truly random. In lab tests, humans consistently pick the wrong image. We pick the one where the dots are scattered more smoothly, because we identify 'patterns' in the clumping caused by truly random behavior that throws us off the scent. And now, by the miracle of HTML 5, here are the two images:

No prizes for which one folks normally choose as the random image. Interesting huh?

There is a really simple piece of Javascript running these simulations (and because it's Javascript you can add interactivity just like the customisation I added to the right hand box). If you want to see the code, just view the source of the frame above. The whole thing took next to no time to put together (especially given that I was learning about <canvas> at the same time). Onto my next exercise.

In their blog post the gmail team said that they had decided to build a throbber for gmail mobile using <canvas> and Javascript so that they could reduce server round trips and page weight. I thought this sounded pretty amazing (after all a throbber gif is never more than a few kB right) so I set out to see if I could recreate their efforts. After a bit of gnashing of teeth and a lot of fun tweaking my design I came up with the following 49 lines of code (1668 Bytes or just 702 when gzipped) :

function Throbber(containerId) {
  this.options = {
    speedMS: 100,
    center: 4,
    thickness: 3,
    spokes:8,
    color: [0,0,0],
    style: "line" //set to "balls" for a different style of throbber
  };
  this.t = document.getElementById(containerId);
  this.c = document.createElement('canvas');
  this.c.width = this.t.offsetWidth;
  this.c.height = this.t.offsetHeight;
  this.t.appendChild(this.c);
  this.throb = function() {
    var ctx = this.c.getContext("2d");
    ctx.translate(this.c.width/2, this.c.height/2);
    var w = Math.floor(Math.min(this.c.width,this.c.height)/2);
    var self = this;
    var o = self.options;
    var draw = function() {
      ctx.clearRect(-self.c.width/2,-self.c.height/2,self.c.width,self.c.height)
      ctx.restore();
      ctx.shadowOffsetX = ctx.shadowOffsetY = 1;
        ctx.shadowBlur = 2;
        ctx.shadowColor = "rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5)";
        for (var i = 0; i < o.spokes; i++) {
        r = 255-Math.floor((255-o.color[0]) / o.spokes * i);
        g = 255-Math.floor((255-o.color[1]) / o.spokes * i);
        b = 255-Math.floor((255-o.color[2]) / o.spokes * i);
          ctx.fillStyle = "rgb(" + r + "," + g + "," + b + ")";
        if(o.style == "balls") {
          ctx.beginPath();
          ctx.moveTo(w,0)
          ctx.arc(w-Math.floor(Math.PI*2*w/o.spokes/3),0,Math.floor(Math.PI*2*w/o.spokes/3),0,Math.PI*2,true);
          ctx.fill();
        } else { ctx.fillRect(o.center, -Math.floor(o.thickness/2), w-o.center, o.thickness); }
        ctx.rotate(Math.PI/(o.spokes/2))
        if(i == 0) { ctx.save(); }  
      }
    };
    draw();
    this.timer = setInterval(draw,this.options.speedMS);  
  };
  this.stop = function() {
    clearInterval(this.timer);
    this.c.getContext("2d").clearRect(-this.c.width/2,-this.c.height/2,this.c.width,this.c.height)
  };
};

You just add this code to your site's JS, create a new Thobber object passing in the ID of the element you want your throbber to live inside and call the throb() method on it. You can use your parent element to style the background color and the options within the throbber element to customize it. For context, the gif-based throbber on a website I built a while back was fully 3,208 bytes while the code above at 702 bytes covers not just one kind of throbber but a vast array of customizations. Here is a little demo:

Obviously there are more impressive things you can do with canvas, but I really enjoyed coding this up and think I'll find it useful (especially for projects that are focussed exclusively on iPhone or Android). I hope you might too. There's even a whole framework (processing.js) designed to make scripting canvas easier. I think I may look at that next...

So it seems like canvas is a welcome addition to the HTML family (it is a lot nicer than Flash and ActionScript in my humble opinion). I guess as browser adoption increases, we'll see more and more of it.

Simple maths

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:27:00 PST

Seems like the music industry proved again this week that it is incapable of acting rationally (seriously, there is a great paper for any budding behavioral economist in how the music industry incentives got so screwed up).

The offending action came this time in the form of labels leaning on fabulous new music streaming service spotify to add greater restrictions to the service. No doubt a bunch of these restrictions were needed to support the arcane company and rights structures the music industry dreamt up over the years. As an example of how crazy this can be, if you want to set up a site which lets users watch, interact with and mashup music videos you need:

at least 5 separate rights (covering the performance, the score, the recording, the video be the sync/mashup right - it's different in every country, but this is about it)
deals with a ton of different subsidiaries and rights middle-men in each of the countries where your users live
oh, and if your users want to use TV or movie clips, then try repeating the whole process with the moving picture industry - even hulu hasn't managed to get rights outside the US and they are owned by the TV industry!

But this is just another symptom of an industry that has become so overrun with lawyers that they have lost both the ability to do simple maths and the imagination to identify a massive opportunity when of comes to them and offers a substantial slice of the pie.

So let me spell it out for them:

People don't steal music
This is the first thing the industry needs to learn. When I see estimates of revenue lost to piracy they infuriate me. At the right price (and the right convenience) many of the folks that torrent stuff today would buy (especially if they knew that most of their payment went to the artist). That price might be very close to zero, but for legitimacy alone many folks would pay a nominal fee (either direct of
through advertising). The problem is that the music business has invested virtually no effort into providing a low cost, legitimate, easy alternative to bit-torrent and has instead spent lots of effort trying to shut down every promising avenue.

There is way more demand than you thought
Seriously, you did your elasticity calculations and optimised around your £10 price point. But you completely missed the explosion of demand when prices approach zero. You just labelled it piracy and moved on.

Distributing music is free now
Virtually. Which means you can make a gross profit at few pence per track if you think it through.

And then there is the simple maths:

£1 Pross Profit * 20k units << £0.01 GP * 20m units

So record companies, please, get with the programme. And in the meantime try to help build businesses that represent the bull of your future earnings rather than shutting them down.

YouTube and eBay in awesome ad shocker!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:06:00 PST

I skipped over to YouTube to check out the latest trailer for the new Star Trek film today (I'm not sold yet, but I am excited). And I saw this amazing ad.

It got me very excited for lots of reasons. Here are a few:

1. It's a great ad. It's interactive, it's useful, it's got prices, it's not flashing or jumping around. This is content as advertising.
2. It's amazingly targeted. Star Trek items on eBay advertised next to a Star Trek trailer - yes, this is how I want my ads (and this is how advertisers should want them)
3. It's from eBay - generally I've not been a fan of their ads, but this is exactly what they should be doing.

This is what I was hoping for when Google bought YouTube. Let's hope we see a lot more of it.

Only in cinemas

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:53:00 PST

I'm confused. On my regular morning walk through Victoria station I keep seeing posters that advertise new movies with the strangest of boasts: Only in cinemas.

I'm confused because I would have thought that the marketing teams at MGM and Lucasfilm would be keen to gloss over this obvious product shortcoming. I'm sure they must have made the case for their
customers. I'm sure that they must have made the point that the product would be considerably enhanced if it was available everywhere. That some of their customers might not want to go to a cinema and heck it doesn't cost much to release it on DVD or over the internet at the same time.

But no, this is not how it works in the movie industry. They have a formula you see. One honed over years of research that tells them (or so they think) how to squeeze every last drop out of every movie that they release. First you release at the cinema, then later on DVD, then VOD, then TV. It is a model (like most old school media business models) that is designed to ensure that customers pay the highest possible price per item of content consumed (in this case a movie) through inconvenience. And this formula is so ingrained in movie-land, that the marketing folks actually think that the inconvenience is actually a selling point.

Sadly, like most old school media companies the movie studios are trying to cling on to something that made sense in the 1980s but today is just ridiculous. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the formula is actively hurting both customers viewing experience and movie studios' profits.

1. 'Only in cinemas' means that cinemas do not compete for your business on the basis of the quality of their product. It creates a local monopoly. If you want to see the film, and you want to see it now, then your going to the cinema. If you want to go to the cinema you probably have 1 or maybe 2 theatre's that are close enough to where you want to be to get your business. This is why cinemas are expensive and universally poor. Imagine if cinemas were competing with a simultaneous Internet, DVD and VOD release. They'd have to sell you on the experience. Maybe they'd have lovely big arm chairs, maybe they'd have amazing sound and visuals, maybe they'd sell beer. One thing is for sure, they'd be a lot less complacent.

2. All those customers that want to see the movie now (and are prepared to pay a premium to do so), but don't have the time to get out to a cinema (I'm a new dad - this is me!) have to wait 6 months for their fix. Basically this means that I see far fewer films than I would otherwise and it relegates DVD rental, VOD and Internet to some sort of bargain basement, entertainment-of-last choice. I really wanted to see The Day the Earth Stood Still (I know it was rubbish) but I didn't because I couldn't find the time to go out, and now, I probably never will (or will wait for TV) because seeing it was mainly about the hype!

These two customer complaints mean that movie industry is missing out. The cinemas are missing out on creating a real connection with their customers. On becoming the place that I have to go to see a new movie. And the studios are missing out on massive untapped demand. There are a lot of millions to be made here.

I've had this rant in my head for a long time. It started out with hard back books - I want the book now, I don't mind paying a premium, I don't want to take a hard back on the tube; why are you forcing me to wait a year to read your book, and why are you forcing me to pay a cut down price for that... But I think the movies are a better example. Primarily because they seem so proud of their model, so focussed on a meaningless metric optimized through inconvenience.

The first studio to opt for simultaneous multi-channel distribution of all its films is going to make a fortune. I bet it's not one of the current crop.

2008 Music Highlights

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:27:00 PST

I'm even later than usual with my top picks post this year...

That said it wasn't a bad year for music, (and it was a great year for music technology) so it'd be a shame not to recognise some of the hits and misses of 2008.

Top Records

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever (amazon)
This album is just heart-wrenchingly delicate and beautiful. It is the perfect album for a cold, dark winter's day. Every song is brilliant, and my favourite seems to switch with the seasons. When I first listened, it was Creature Fear, then Blindsided, now re:Stacks. I'm sure this album still has more to give and it will remain a staple in our house in 2009.

Glasvegas - Glasvegas (amazon)
I was switched on to Glasvegas by a friend's Google Talk status, saying simply 'Album of the Year'. Well Simon was right on that one. This Scottish group make the most incredible racket. They remind me of Jesus and Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine, but this is no pastiche. The lyrics and melodies are touching and sometimes childlike (even when they're about getting stabbed) and the production is staggering. Favourite track right now is S.A.D. Light (Ruthie likes the nursery rhyme!)

Kings of Leon - Only the Night (amazon)
I resisted KOL almost until the very end of the year. Finally, in December, I succumed and made it my first purchase through Amazon's new UK MP3 store. I have to say that everyone else was right on this one. It blew me away. The best out and out rock album I have heard in years. It has echoes of so many great bands of the past, but is absolutely KOL at it's heart. Sex on Fire is my favourite single of the year, and that is nowhere near the best track on the album.

Portishead - Third (amazon)
Portishead have been away for what seems like ages. I remember hearing Dummy for the first time as a student and having my ears opened to a completely new sound. So it's pretty astonishing that one band could do that twice. Third sounds like nothing else released this year. The beats are harder, there is a new mechanical edge as evidenced in tracks like Machine Gun and there is liberal use of old school synths. Portishead have obviuosly been listening to a lot of Kraftwerk while they've been away.

Special Mention
Radiohead - I Might be Wrong (amazon)
I know this is an old album, but it gets a special mention as it was playing through most of the birth of our first child Ruthie. Pippa is a nut for Radiohead and this, I think, is their finest moment. The versions of True Love Waits and Like Spinning Plates are breath-taking. And now it will have the added benefit of always making me think of little Ruth.

Honorable Mentions
Spiritualized - Songs in A&E (amazon)
Sigur Ros - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (amazon)
Beck - Modern Guilt (amazon)

Top Music Technology

The big tech event in our house this year was switching 100% to the Apple. We ditched our old desktop and now meet all of our computing needs with a black Mac Book and a shiny silver Mac Bpook Pro. This had an additional massive benefit for our music enjoyment of enabling us to access the awesome music stack on the Mac. So now we have all our music living on the Mac Book, which is wirelessly connected to our amp via the AirPort Express and is controlled via the iTunes Remote on my iPhone (or the TuneRemote app on Pippa's Android). Our CDs are finally in the loft!

The other big Apple news was Genius Playlists on iTunes. We have been using it loads in order to re-disciver the music on our hard drive. I'm really impressed by their algorithm (and I'd forgotten quite how good Beck was!)

The last.fm application on my iPhone gave me a glimpse of a future that I thought was a lot further away. The first time I streamed personalized, Internet radio over a mobile 3G network to my phone I had a huge grin on my face. This is the way it's going to be in the future and I can't wait!

On the desktop, Spotify pointed the way to free streaming ad-supported music on-demand. It's a great service with a nice lightweight client and a very large library. The ads every 5-6 songs are absolutely fine and have even turned me on to a couple of things (my observation is that Movie ads work best in this media). I'm not sure if they can make the numbers turn round at this rate, but I hope they can.

In December, I rejoiced in the long awaited launch of Amazon MP3 in the UK (all the amazon links on this page point there). It's a great service. Big catalogue. Cheap (KOL was 4 quid). DRM-free. iTunes eat you heart out.

Finally the new year has brought two great music zeitgeists which are starting to live up to the promise of the internets ability to aggregate our music tastes. Last.fm have a chart made up of music scrobbles while Hype Machine have one based on blogs written. Both of these are great services and I'd like to see more automated music discovery in 2009.

I've definitely resolved to get back on the blogging machine in earnest in 2009, so expect a bit more traffic than the miserely 3 posts in Q4 :-) I might also try to post a few songs on Tumblr if I can make integration with this blog work.

ZX81 - seriously ZX81

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:08:00 PST

One of the guys at work is setting up a computer museum in the office. The idea is to have as many (working) examples of historic computing devices as we can find. Apparently Google New York has one, and we in London don't want to be outdone. Especially since some of the best early examples of home computers were invented and built over here in the UK.

When the email went out asking for people to donate their old computers, I immediately thought of my old ZX81, sitting on top of a wardrobe at my grandad's house. My grandad is an ex-Television Engineer from the days when you could open up a TV and fix it, and he gave me the ZX81 when I was 6 or 7. I gave it back to him for safe keeping when I graduated to an Amiga, but never really lost my love for that little black box of magic with its 1K onboard ram and 16K RAM expansion pack.

So I was delighted this weekend to find that not only was the ZX81 all atill there (RAM expansion pack, manual, power supply, computer) but that in the intervening years my grandad had built it (along with a tape recorder for loading and storing programs) into the inside of a large wooden suitcase (is this the world's first and most antiquated laptop?)

When I got it home, I tentatively connected the RF lead to my ridiculously over-specced Sony flat screen TV and hooked up the power. After tuning in the TV, there was the cursor, a little bit blurry, a little bit of interference - but it works! Not bad after 20 odd years. I mustered as much of my BASIC programming knowledge as I could and set about getting some output. And here are the results!

Taking a leaf through the manual, I remembered the 'special characters' that let you do graphics and the 100 line programs that delighted me when they ran fiorst time (or more likely second or third). Oh heady days...

Well now the ZX81 is headed in to Google and hopefully with a bit of love and care we can have it running in our museum for all to enjoy. I'll post a few more pictures when it is finally in situ.

KTUU 2008 Sarah Palin turkey interview

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:54:00 PST

Oh gosh. This, apparently, is fun!

My iPhone - 1 month in

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:33:00 PST

I got an iPhone about a month ago and I have to say I love it. I thought it'd be fun to lay out some of the things that make me smile about the iPhone, and some of the things I want Apple to fix, so here I go...

Happiness

Safari - The real internet, really. It's so cool, and it's way better for not having flash ;-). The only thing better than browsing the full on internet on you iPhone is using...
iPhone optimised sites - Remember the Milk, Google, Friendfeed. Silky smooth and super responsive.
The 'silent' switch - The only physical switch on the iPhone. No need to unlock the phone to go on silent. Great tactile feedback. Just really well thought out.
Google Maps My Location - The big pulsating blue range finder that zooms into your location makes me feel like I'm in an episode of Spooks.
Twitteriffic - Great Twitter app. Integrated with twitpic.
last.fm - Listening to recommended radio streaming direct to your mobile phone is like the future now...
Google Earth - Enough said.
Oh, and it's beautiful

Fixes

Text messaging sucks - there's no letter count, you can't forward texts, and the app itself takes about 10 seconds to launch which is absolutely unforgivable.
Mail client is clunky - there's no way to rotate the keyboard into landscape mode, the 'Mark as Read' button is inexplicably hidden in 'details'
Mail client UI (Mark as read, add attachment), you can't add attachments (hello, photos...)
Folders on the home screen. Grouping icons would fit my mental model a little better
There's no Copy and Paste - I genuinely thought this was a joke...
No background tasks - Given patchy 3G coverage I want all of my apps to go off and cache data while I'm not doing anything with the phone (that's like 90% of the time people).

So, the upshot is that the iPhone has some amazing features and some serious (silly) bugs. I love it, and I can't wait for version 2.2!

The Daily Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:38:00 PDT

Yesterday was a big day for the political leaders of the US and the UK. In the US, Bush put forward his case for the massive rescue package currently going through congress . In the UK, Gordon Brown made the 'speech of his life' to try to retain control of the Labour Party and hence the position of Prime Minister.

Most of the accounts that I read gave both a B- type response. Good, but certainly not great. Bush's aid package is no doubt necessary, but a bunch of folks have huge concerns about potential market distortion. And Brown made a few nice policy announcements (free prescriptions for Cancer patients and free nursery for every 2 year old), but generally lacked substance.

As a quick test I wordled their speeches to see if anything interesting came out:

Bush:

Brown:

That has to be the most high-brow word cloud ever created from words uttered by George W Bush! And in Brown's cloud you can see the root of the problem. Those are the words of a generic socialist leader speech. Fairness, people, every. The one thing that jumps out at me is that the most popular word he used was 'new'. Yet I watched his speech and I can say that in my opinion, that is the one thing it wasn't...

Apple's Genius business model is all wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:50:00 PDT

I recently installed iTunes 8 and for once, I'm pretty happy with the upgrades they made. I like the new interface, I like the new look, and most of all I like Genius.

Genius is Apple's attempt at collaborative filtering. You nominate a song in your library and it builds a playlist of your music to match that song (based on the masses of data Apple collects from iTunes users). So far, the playlists it has created for me have been excellent. They've been coherent, listenable collections and have resurfaced some excellent music I had forgotten that I owned. For once, I am not angry that I had to accept the iTunes ToS yet again :-)

One thing I think that Apple have missed though is the monetisation strategy. Right now this consists of a persistent sidebar that shows stuff you could buy on the iTunes store that relates to what you are listening to right now. It's a very small evolution from the old mini-store panel.

That's all very well and good, but here's my beef with it. When I am using iTunes, I am listening to music. I am not looking at my computer and reading a bunch of text telling me about tracks that I have no idea how to rate. I'm afraid that response rates on these ads are going to suck, monumentally, for the reason that this is old fashioned interuption marketing. It's pretty well targeted I'll give you that, but it gives me nothing, and I have to stop what I am doing to interact with it.

My suggestion for a better monetisation strategy would be this:

1. Every Genius playlist that is created adds 2 relevant tracks that you do not own and streams them from the iTunes store.
2. Before these tracks play there is a little unobtrusive sonic logo that let's you know you are about to here something you don't own.
3. While these tracks are playing, there is a big button on iTunes that let's you buy them with a single click (you could even have it set up so that pressing 'Menu' on your remote would do that).
4. Every time you play the Genius playlist it inserts a different two tracks.
5. Once a week, Apple emails you about all of the stuff that it inserted into your Genius playlists that you didn't buy at the time. These emails give you the context of the track and a 30 sec reminder. They replace the awful emails that iTunes currently sends out.
6. There could even be a nice bit of the iTunes store fr you to go and review this info whenever it suits you.

I guarantee that this approach would sell more tunes than the current sidebar.

No doubt the lawyers would say that there are all sorts of issues with streaming and DRM etc , but hell, if you are going to build a walled garden, why don't you take advantage of it. Better than that, if I was Apple I'd go to the record companies not asking how much I'd need to pay for streaming rights, but how much they will pay to get their tracks inserted. I'd build AdWords for iTunes, with record companies / bands bidding a higher rev share to Apple on the inserted tunes, and Apple figuring out AdWords style what combination of bids and quality score (clicks, purchases, match etc) delivers the best result for the end user and for Apple. New bands just getting started might offer Apple a huge rev share to get started. Getting inserted into a million playlists automatically is a great way to build a fan base (if you are good!)

As a user, I would absolutely love this. It's what I want from last.fm, but sadly they don't have the assets to complete the sale there and then. Apple on the other hand has built exactly that. So please Mr Jobs, give me the chance to really discover and buy new music on iTunes...

Announcing the arrival of Ruth Eleanor Gawley

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:26:00 PDT

On Thursday 18th September at 0909 Pippa gave birth to our first
child, Ruth. Ruth is 6lbs 7ozs and 47cm long. She is simply the most
perfect and beautiful human being I have ever met.

So now I can add Ruth stories to the repertoire of this blog (nestled
in amongst the tech, maths and such).

As a starter for 10, here are some pictures from her first few days...

Radiohead - True Love Waits - 1st Time Ever!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:20:00 PDT

I've been kind of obsessed by this track for the last week or so. It's so incredibly beautiful. So I was very happy to find this video on YouTube which shows the very first performance. Check out the keyboard arpeggios toward the end...

News prediction

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:51:00 PDT

I really like prediction markets. The other day I saw a tweet from Fred Wilson that opened my eyes to a nice new site based on the concept. It's called Hubdub and I highly recommend you give it a try.

The concept is simple. Users come up with statements about events that will happen in the future, and then other users buy and sell 'shares' in the outcome for those statements. The value of each share depends on the popularity of that answer at a given time. If you hold the share until the outcome of the question then you either get the return promised at the time you bought it or you lose the lot. It's a simple concept, but it's been proven to be very good at predicting outcomes.

Hubdub have got some other nice features down too. See below for a nice embeddable banner that shows one of my bets. And they've got a nice Twitter integration too. I think prediction markets are going to be really important in the future, and I'll be really interested to see where Hubdub goes next. Want a go? Try my LHC question below!

qmwztlxb3

Will the Large Hadron Collider be functional and producing data by October 1st, 2008?

I predicted Yes on 13th Aug 08

what is this?

The News Prediction Game

True Love Waits

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:57:00 PDT

I have been particularly obsessed with this track (from this amazing album) for the last couple of weeks. So I was very excited to find the first ever performance on YouTube - this is why I love YouTube.

Check out the awesome synth arpeggios toward the end.

Searching for meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:33:00 PDT

This is the search bar on the New York Times webiste. Today for the first time I noticed the filters that help you to refine your search to more recent articles only. The default is 'Since 1851'. I love it. Says so much with just two words...

And this is the homepage of new search engine http://cuil.com (pronounced 'cool' apparently). They're the new hot thing in the tech market and their USP is the size of their index - it's been a long time since we've seen a 'Search 100,000,000 web pages' tagline - takes me right back to the days of AltaVista, seriously.

It'll be interesting to see how cuil develops, but for now, despite that whopping index it seems to be somewhat lacking. Everyone does a vanity search on their first visit to a new search engine right? Well in this case Alex Gawley brought up lots of interesting stuff (link to follow when they are back up) from Friendfeed and Twitter and MyBlogLog, but not a single page from dear old aBlog. By comparison on Google we're right up there - what gives?

The other thing I'm not sure about on cuil is the UI. True, they're breaking the mold of the 10 blue links, but I can't tell if the I should read from left to right or down the columns in order to go from least to most relevant. Maybe I am just being old fashioned, but that really threw me.

This one is going to be a good one to watch (if they can get their servers back up...)

Back to music (for your listening pleasure)

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:18:00 PDT

I love this picture. It was created using a cool service called Wordle and it shows the most popular words from the aBlog RSS feed. If you have a blog you should have a go with, not just because it produces lovely pictures, but it tells you a lot about what you blog.

And this Wordle picture showed me that a friend of mine was right recently when he said I'd let the balance get a bit too techy (or 'silver' as he puts it).

So to redress the balance I thought I'd get back to my roots and post a bit of music. You can play the MP3s right here using the little del.icio.us playtagger. My iPod's 'Recently Added' playlist is giving me a lot of joy right now so here are a few samplers:

The Rip - Portishead

Third is such an amazing album. Ambitious, fragile, beautiful. While we are at it, the Radiohead cover of this track is pretty amazing too.

Like a Lion - The Decemberists (boo, only have DRM AAC so go listen to it at last.fm)

Just discovered the Decemberists. Liking their album, The Crane Wife, but this track from the compilation Preserve, Volume One is a world apart. It's got this dissonant harmony running through it.

Extra - Ken Ishii

This is why I love emusic. When I was 17 I loved this album. Ken Iishi makes precise, angular, unmistakeably Japanese techno and, boy, has it stood the test of time. Jelly Tones is a glorious album. If your into electronic music (and even if you're not) listen to this album.

Chemtrails - Beck

Beck has flashes of genius on each of his albums and on Modern Guilt, this is it. It reminds me of Primal Scream at their drug-induced Screamadelica best. I love it.

AM 180 - Grandaddy

From the pong-on-acid intro to the thrashing guitars this is full of life. Makes me want to jump around, quit my job, start a band and jump around a bit more...

Something is technically wrong...

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:55:00 PDT

Is Twitter worth $1bn or nothing at all?

I read those two articles yesterday and to be honest I'm still a bit of a fence sitter on this debate.

On the one hand Twitter have built a hugely compelling user and developer proposition. Simple interaction with your friends, audience and web services via IM and SMS is a killer app. Because of that they are amassing a significant user and developer base. If the both of these continue to grow and they figure out a way to monetize all of that traffic then $1bn might be achievable.

On the other hand there are the service issues and downtime. Twitter's downtime is legendary. What started off as something users could forgive the playful little startup has become a genuine threat to user happiness and retention. If all those wonderful tweets migrate to some new platform then that valuation comes down a whole lot.

For me the value created by web services is all underpinned by the technology. There's no doubt that building a user base and traffic is valuable, but the long term defendable advantage on the web is in solving a technical problem better than anyone else. Have Twitter done this? Partly, but the downtime is a real worry - not just because it pisses off their users, but because it points to a real weakness in their technology.

Let's hope that they are using their recent infusion of cash to re-architect the service from the ground up. If they are then a big payday is surely somewhere in their future. If not, then...well the field will be wide open for someone else to come storming in.

This week I have been mostly learning about Unicode...

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:49:00 PDT

I hear your cries. What? Why? Who cares?
Let me take the questions in reverse order.
Anyone building a website which accepts user input, or input from other services, or which has users outside the US (that is, everyone!) should care about Unicode. They should care because when it's done right Unicode lets your website speak in many tongues. It enables your webpages to display the weird and wonderful characters that make up the alphabets of all of those non-English languages spoken outside the US and UK.
A good (or indeed bad) example of this came when, recently, I added the new Sigur Ros album to my glisty.com wishlist using glisty's bookmarklet to add the album from its Amazon product page. When I went to glisty to check out my list I noticed that it had mangled the Icelandic characters in the album name (urgh).
I knew that this sort of thing happens when you're not properly set up for Unicode, but I had very little idea how to fix that. I had thought that configuring my MySQL DB to use Unicode would be enough. Obviously not!
So I have spent the week fixing glisty for UTF-8 input and output and along the way learnt a few things I thought I might try to pass on. I would certainly not purport to be an expert, but these are some practical tips on the steps I undertook to make it work.

Getting ready for Unicode impacts all of the components of your website, from Javascript through to MySQL, so I'll take each in turn.

First stop - web pages

This is pretty easy. Make sure your web pages all have meta data to indicate that they contain unicode. You can do this by adding:
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

(if you are writing XHTML you don't strictly need this as XHTML defaults to UTF-8 but what's a bit of belt and braces amongst friends)
When you do this, it tells the browser explicitly to treat the content of the page and any text submitted from a form on the page as UTF-8.

Next up - Javascript

The main area to worry about here is escaping data if you are using AJAX. There are 3 different escape functions in Javascript:

escape()
encodeURI()
encodeURIComponent()

Only the last of these works properly with Unicode. Make sure to use it everywhere you want to escape data using Javascript (true story: a rogue escape() kept me unproductive for almost an hour last night)

Then - PHP

If you are displaying user entered data on your webpages, then it is a good idea to escape html from these strings to prevent anyone 'injecting' malicious code into your site. The way you do this in PHP is through the built-in htmlentities() function.
It turns out that this function expects Latin encoded data by default. It will mangle any unicode characters it finds. On top of that the setting for encoding is the second optional variable so you have to add a stub for the first. Basically you should escape HTML using the following function:
htmlentities($yourString,ENT_COMPAT,"UTF-8");

I'm looking into whether you can set this as a global parameter in PHP.ini but haven't got an answer yet.

Finally - your MySQL DB

The collation of your DB should be set to UTF-8. Any text fields should have utf8_unicode_ci encoding and be typed as varchar (not char).
This is all achieved easily in PHPMyAdmin or via the command line. I'll let you figure out the details.
On top of this, you also need to tell MySQL that you are sending it Unicode data. That means adding a query to the start of all your submission scripts. I achieved this by adding it to the constructor function for my DB class in PHP. It looks something like this:

mysql_query('SET NAMES = 'UTF-8');

I'm also looking into whether this can be changed in MySQL settings to avoid the overhead of an additional call.
And that's it. All relatively small things, but if anyone of them is off, then you'll end up with junk. Hopefully this guide will help you avoid some of the pitfalls I have enjoyed over the last week...
By the way, as you can see from my list, glisty now handles unicode characters!

Radiohead at Victoria Park

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:48:00 PDT

The concert was truly excellent. Radiohead are a band at the height of their powers. 2 and a bit hours of splintered, beautiful music.

Two beautiful proofs

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:44:00 PDT

I'm currently in the middle of my annual summer re-read of GEB. It's such a great book and it teaches me something new every time I read it. One of the things I love about it is the regular forays into Number Theory and the occasional review of a classic proof.

So that got my thinking, what is my favourite Number Theory proof? Well, I couldn't decide, so you're going to get my two favourites.

They're from different ends of the spectrum, but they have one thing in common (like all good proofs). They take a problem that looks foreboding and offer up a solution that is so elegant and simple that it seems make you wonder why you were ever so puzzled.

Here's the first one:

Gauss' Sum of numbers from 1 to N

Gauss was an incredible mathematician and came up with many of the methods, proofs and theories that form the basis of modern mathematics. This particular proof is generally held to have been derived whilst Gauss was a mere scamp and still at school.

His teacher (feeling particularly lazy) had asked the boys in the class to add all of the numbers between 1 and 100, then write down the answer and bring it to him at his desk. When Gauss strolled up to the front after just a few minutes with a piece of paper reading 5050, the teacher was astonished (and daresay a little annoyed).

So how did Gauss do it? Well like all good mathematicians, Gauss generalised the problem and found a common solution, before applying his general solution to the initial question. In that lesson Gauss was able to fathom that the formula to tell you the sum, S(N), of the numbers between 1 and N was:

S(N) = (N/2)(N+1)

and that therefore the sum of numbers between 1 and 100 was:

S(100) = (100/2)(100+1) = 5050

The proof?

Take the numbers from 1 to N and pair them up against the numbers from N to 1. You'll notice that the sum of every pair is N+1 and that you have N pairs. So the sum of all the numbers in your two series is N(N+1). However, you doubled up your initial series, 1 to N, by pairing it up with N to 1 so you should divide this sum by two and you will have (N/2)(N+1).

Example:

                                                Sum
1 to 100:  1    2    3    4    5   ...  100     5050
100 to 1:  100  99   98   97   96  ...  1       5050
----------------------------------------------------------
Both:      101  101  101  101  101 ...  101     10100

I first saw Gauss' proof of that formula when I was at school and ever since it has remained one of mathematics little wonders to me. It felt like magic when I first saw it and it still does now.

The second result is a little more arcane, but the proof itself is no less magical than Gauss' above.

Cantor's Diagonal Proof

Cantor was a mathematician in the 19th century and he was really quite interested in infinite sets (to put it mildly...) He spent a lot of time trying to figure out a proper mathematical basis for infinity and in particular if their was more than one type of infinity.

He was able to definitively prove the existence of more than one infinity proving that there are fewer Natural Numbers (i.e. the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ....) than there are Real Numbers (i.e. all numbers that can be represented by a decimal expansion like 0.1872459, 199.779, pi, e, ...), despite both sets clearly being infinite. His solution was ingenious and alarmingly simple.

First take all of the Real Numbers between 0 and 1 and map each of them to a Natural Number, hence:

R(1) = 0.13459872635...
R(2) = 0.23098175638...
R(3) = 0.58098903284...
R(4) = 0.98761834891...
....

(It is worth noting that the 'Reals' on the right must all be represented as their infinite decimal expansion).

Then he used this table to create a new number. From each of the original numbers he took the digit indexed by the Natural Number he had assigned to it (the bold ones from the diagram above):

T = 0.1306...

He then added 1 to each of these digits to obtain (cycling any 9's back round to 0):

T' = 0.2416...

Now, T' is definitely a Real between 0 and 1, but at the same time it can be seen that it does not correspond to any of the R(N) above, as:

The 1st digit is not the same as R(1)
The 2nd digit is not the same as R(2)
The 3rd digit is not the same as R(3)
...

So if we matched all of the Natural Numbers to a Real equivalent between 0 and 1 and found another Real that had not been matched then there must be more Reals between 0 and 1 than there are Natural Numbers. That is there must be an infinity that is bigger than the one you get by starting at 1 and counting up...

I love both of these proofs and I hope you enjoyed my (no doubt flawed) explanation of them. Do you love a different proof? Have a reason why these shouldn't be my top two? Let me know in the comments.

Great customer service

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:21:00 PDT

Seen at a recent expedition to our local DIY store...

They have these buttons all over the place, particularly concentrated in areas where customers might be feeling they need a little guidance (tiles, paint, wood cutting). Every time I felt that little surge of stress when I realised I have no clue what I'm doing, I looked up and there was a big orange button.

When you think about it, it seems obvious. Most customers shopping for hardware need help at some point during their visit and there is nothing as painful as trundling round the store trying to find a staff member that isn't serving someone else.

What really impressed me is the way that every part of this solution seems just right.:

1. The buttons are bright orange and green; they are placed in highly visible positions
2. The promise is simple - Need help? We'll give it to you in 2 mins or we'll give you a discount
3. The countdown dots help to make you:
(a) comfortable while you are waiting (help is on its way) and
(b) delighted when a member of staff beats your expectations by arriving while it is only a quarter of the way round.

It makes me so happy when I see companies really thinking about what they can do for their customers and then making it as easy as possible for their customers to ask for that. What upsets me is that I see it so rarely. For now, Homebase, you have a new evangelist!

What's the date?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:10:00 PDT

I implemented some new features on glisty.com over the weekend (in fact it now has an almost complete set of features against my original spec - yipee).

One of the elements of this feature set was to enable users to set an end date for their gift lists. After that date (but not before!) they'll be able to see which items were bought for them by friends and family.

Dates on the web are a bit tricky as we pesky humans have invented all sorts of different ways to represent them. Month first (US), day first (UK), month as a word, year as two digits or four, dashes or slashes, the list is endless. I often wonder how many websites think my birthday is in October...

I looked into various options for glisty from allowing users free form input and just doing my best with it at the back end (similar to Remember the Milk's cool interface) to putting in 3 explicit boxes for day month and year using drop downs. In the end I decided on a simple in between. Pick a format, state that up front and re-enforce it during entry, and finally use Javascript to parrot back my interpretation of your entry in a universally understandable form in real time.

Here are some screen grabs showing the flow.

State the format up front.

Re-enforce it during entry.

My interpretation of what you input (is it correct?)

It's not perfect (could add support for the other punctuation types), but it's a good way to help users get their data into the system without any nasty surprises.

This sort of instant feedback loop is one of the things that Javascript (plus DOM) is really good at. Judicious use of it helps users and developers alike.

Big Ideas: Don't get any - 'Nude' by Radiohead

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:02:00 PDT

Absolutely brilliant. Really, really great.

Introducing glisty...

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:14:00 PDT

The main reason that aBlog has been so quiet of late is that I set myself a challenge a while back to learn a bunch of web app programming languages and build something useful with them.

Well like all good 20% projects this soon grew to consume most of my free time and much of my waking thought. Getting into the nuts and bolts of javascript has been great fun (dealing with the vagaries of PHP less so...) I've learnt a load of new stuff from dealing with cross browser annoyance in JS, to the benefits of being object orientated on the server side, to setting cache headers and mod-rewrite on Apache. My code is far from beautiful, but for now it works (mostly).

So, what did I build? Well I followed some advice I picked up a while back and tried to solve a problem that was close to home. Wish lists. Our friends and family use wish lists at birthdays and Christmas to let each other know what we want. The big problem though was that someone needed to be assigned to manage each person's list so that no-one ended up duplicating gifts. We used a massive array of tools to make this easier over the years (from paper to online spreadsheets), but never found the killer app.

Well that's not true, it turns out that Amazon had the killer app, almost. Just as long as you were happy for everything on your list to come from them. Unfortunately they don't stock original paintings from my favorite artist, so I decided to build a little app that replaces the Amazon wishlist with one that works where you want it to not one that works where Amazon wants it to. And now I'm keen for a small number of users to come and help me test what I've built and make it better. So what do you get? Well, we're still pretty deep in alpha so the feature set is a bit limited, but I promise a steady stream of upgrades and improvements, that said, I think I've met the original brief...

Create lots of different lists, publish them to friends and family who can mark items as bought or bagsy them for a few days, or keep them private just for you
Add stuff to your lists from any website while you surf the web using the magic bookmarklet
Add stuff while you're on the go by text message or IM using Twitter
Import your existing Amazon wishlist
Add notes to each of your items so that friends and family know the exact spec you want
Search amazon Books, Music and DVDs from right inside glisty

Some future plans:

Let users mark their own items as bought (might finish this tonight if I make the time :-))
Expiry dates for wish lists after which time items will be visible as bought to the user
Amazon sync - let glisty stay on top of any new items you add to your Amazon wish list
Collaborative list creation
Gift suggestions based on other users lists (those last two are a bit further off!)

So if that sounds interesting, then go to www.glisty.com and use the following invite code ABLOG0529 (20 invites only) to have a play. I need lots of feedback and user requests so remember to send lots of feedback via my feedback group too.

Mixtape Two - Nice Background Music

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Gawley) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:14:00 PDT

Pippa makes these great mixes for her dad under the heading of 'Nice Background Music'. The last one she made was the first one to have singing on it. Although they're for her dad, the joy of iTunes is that we have them too, and this regularly makes the grade for our weeknight listening.

Enjoy.