Excuse my emissions... No. Its for your own good

2009-04-26T13:55:00.003+01:00

The motor industry are (understandably) not happy about the ever tightening emissions controls under which they find themselves. Increasingly stringent EU directives specify that volume car manufacturers must ensure that their fleet averages a CO2 output of just 130g/km. This is not much at all. Its a bit like asking a fat man, to come back in a month, 100Kg lighter. Achievable, but rather difficult. As a keen driver I too initially saw this as the end of enjoyable motoring, banishing one and all to the inexplicable dullness of Toyota Prius motoring (if indeed it can be called that).

Thinking about this a little more, I am however, now tentatively hoping, no, expecting, that these new restrict limits will have something of a positive effect for all concerned; mother earth, you, me, our offspring, and maybe theirs too.

You see, like our aforementioned anonymous fat gentleman, cars and also benefit greatly from improved efficiency, and one way to acheive this is to carry less weight.

In their ruthless search for CO2 reducing measures, the likes of BMW and Ford (something of pioneers in this area) started on a programme of efficiency measures including energy reuse, weight saving, even dynamically altering a car's aerodynamics based on its engine temperature. The rest of the motor industry are following suit, VW in particular, showing a marked reduction in emissions across their range.

So what does this mean for the motorist? Well it means your car will cost less to run, will weigh less and consequentially (we hope) handle better, all while (probably) maintaining, or improving power output through increased use of turbocharger technology which has matured significantly over the years. I expect to see an increase in the use of high torque electric motors either replacing or augmenting the output of a traditional external combustion engine over time. Downsides? Ok our cars might not sound as beefy as those big V8s and V10s but really, in this day and age, they don't really make sense when considering it's not ridiculous to see 250+ Bhp from a 4 cylinder engine.

Roll on efficiency, and let us all benefit from it!

The world revolves faster than you think

2009-04-13T18:22:00.004+01:00

A couple of years ago, I was passed a copy of the cluetrain manifesto from a friend raving this will change how you think about your information on the web. I hate bold assertions like this as it sets up the subject matter to be a literary creation of Orwellian standard. Fortunately on this occasion he was vindicated.

For me, the core message of the book read something like

You, your opinions, and those of your peers matter. The speed and visibility of the web, now mean that this really matters to business. Most businesses don't realise this.

The Lefty, tree-swinging liberal in me took great delight in this message. For a long time, I have felt that advertising and media in general, was due a good shakeup. Media IMHO should be democratic, available, and free. Attempts to constrain it, create distortions (enter Daily Mail). I'm not against media organisations either. I believe they have their place in a future of fast comms. I digress however; the purpose of this post was this:

Amazon, forward thinkers, arguably pioneers of the first (commercially successful) cloud computing business, the vanguard of book distribution; an establishment shaker. Clearly a company I have viewed in a positive light, have now, through seemingly ignorant policy making and BBCesque inaction found themselves at the centre of censorship scandal. It amazes me that such a company can fall foul of the very essence of their success.

As @girlonetrack succinctly puts it

the lessons to be learned here are simple: don't piss off the web, or your reputation will be seriously damaged.

Old Blighty, Black Swans and a Spot of Bother

2008-12-05T21:32:00.015Z

Over the past few months, it has surprised; no, alarmed me, how the financiers of our age have allowed banking to reach its current hiatus. (Don't worry, I'm not going to start harping on some high falutin rant about finance), simply that it's amazing that we can misunderstand ourselves to such a degree. Jeremy Clarkson sums it up perfectly in his recent article:

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth.

More interesting still, are the reactions of the intelligentsia at such times. The Economist: "Redesigning global finance", "Capitalism at Bay" and other evocative titles enshroud tales of job cuts, ruination and impending global failure. London's daily pulp "The Metro" struggles to open the eyes of the bleary 7am eyes of city workers with such titles as the good folk of the big smoke are tired of hearing the economic equivalent of "FUBAR" and "All your base are belong to us".

And yet looking upon all this with a cynical eye, one can't help but observe simply, that this crisis was widely expected, wholly predictable, and consequentially, massively more damaging than had first been thought possible.

Two recent enlightening factors have influenced my view on predictability and determinism, and hence on how such events can be better negotiated.

Reading Nassim Taleb's interesting, if slightly patronising "The Black Swan" he effectively outlines the characteristics of situations where linear determinism is applicable, and those where random, or highly improbable phenomena are more likely to occur (a phenomenon he calls a 'Black Swan').

In a similar vein, Malcolm Gladwell's recent TED talk touches on how difficult it is to decisively arrive at a single probable outcome for a situation, specifically in his example, the choices consumers want are largely unbeknown to them; or at best, ill-understood.

And so I believe it is this essential combination of human need to categorize events, coupled with the fact that our internal reasoning often differs from what is expected by others, leads to situations such as the current global financial state. This is all horribly woolly and ill-defined, but ultimately what I propose, is that as humans we do not behave as expected, and further that our need to categorize events is vulnerable to imprecision, and hence further misinterpretation.

I haven't spent enough time devising a highly improbable solution to this but it rests at the fore of my mind if only for the reason that it'd be a shame to see Old Blighty fall prey to a spot of dodgy banking.

His words, not mine

2008-09-14T12:52:00.003+01:00

Last week a couple of friends descended on the latest of geekdinner's events. Speaking at the event was Ryan Carson of Carsonified.com, the guys behind FOWA, FOWD and a few other rather good things.

I thought i'd post something up about what was said that evening, as these points from Ryan which were mirrored in the ethos of his colleagues, really struck home as a refreshing, maybe slightly idealistic, but nonetheless worthwhile principles to strive towards as a work ethic or indeed for life in general to a greater or lesser extent.

1) Work smarter - At Carsonified, they work a 4 day week. They make a big point of this but for the right reasons. Ryan states that it's "not about working less or just trying to be 'rad' but when you only have 4 days, you make sure you get it done in that time". This is something i'm sure you'd notice thinking about it. When you have 5 days to complete something, it'll take 5 days. when you have 3, it'll take 3. There are obviously times when you would undermine the outcome doing this but it does make sense.

2) A company's software... - is reflective of communication within the company. Look at the suite of tools from 37signals. They look like each other. They work well together. Hell, they work! I shall resist temptation to name others, there are plenty of companies where this is not the case, and it really does show. You wanna build good software? Make sure your people talk. Lots.

3) Do what you want - as knowledge workers we are fortunate enough to work in an industry sufficiently genericised such that it makes your skills largely transferrable. If you don't like what you're doing, change it. Simply put, you will do better work doing what you love, than idling doing what you don't.

Just a few nuggets of wisdom. Now... back to work. As you were.

Does it matter where you live?

2008-08-22T19:07:00.002+01:00

Well, apparently it does. London's Metropolitan Police force has decided to use London's crime data in a way which is tangibly beneficial to Londoners, tourists; any interested party really. But this is more than just another government website. The subject matter is crime, always a political hot-potato, and increasing visibility of badly performing areas should (and this is a good thing) increase pressure on local government to tackle localised issues, reducing their ability to hide behind the banner of London. It has been known for some time, that small pockets within a metropolis are responsible for much of its crime.

For a body such as the Met Police service, this is a refreshingly 'balls-in-the-wind' attitude to take, but one which can only serve to benefit communities, and may even improve police/community relations with the increased open-ness.

Some might consider this to be another token political gesture. I hope it's a sign of the future.

Email and the enterprise (vault)

2008-02-19T03:51:00.000Z

Why do we send emails? A simple means of passing information between one another; a proven, simple, understood means of information transfer. I guess email is so good at doing what to does, we begin to extend and use it in ways it wasn't intended. File storage, file transfer, lightweight identity handle, the list is near endless. It would be nice to extend this a step further, and be able to refer to an email by way of a URI.

"Hey Joe, you remember that email i sent you?..." "...er no" "...this one http://mycorp.com/mail/2008/02/joe_at_hisdomain.com/122". That would be handy. Sure you need security wrap around that but thats not a killer.

But then, not all people think this way.

Some would have you believe, that email should never occupy more than half of your mailbox. Some would like you to take extraordinary measures to prevent losing attachments or old mails. Some would have you believe they're "helping" you by moving your mail to an archive such that you're only able to retrieve the first 256 characters of the mail, and completely losing attachments.

Some people, friends, are idiots.

I would add, a caveat to this could be a poor implementation of this product.

A free, simple solution to personal email is offered by google. As many of you will know, their Gmail service, offers 6+GB of mail storage, all indexed, optional mail tagging available, which mean you practically never have to lose your email.

So why is this such a difficult problem for the enterprise? Sure, it can be expensive to offer each employee this volume of storage, esp. if you have to host the email data on your own servers. Even still, this is a solved problem, and for the majority of businesses, utility computing makes disk almost free. Services like Amazon's awesome S3 service for example.

Lets see the enterprise take a new stance on this and figure it out.

I'm back!

2008-02-05T11:02:00.000Z

Wooohoo - after a week or so of DNS wierdness my blog is back online.

Better write something.

hmmm.

Playing with images: Rmagick, Ruby on Rails, large coffee

2008-01-11T05:10:00.000Z

After a few minutes of messing around I found it was actually rather simple to perform basic manipulation of images with Rmagick and Ruby. At work, we'd been looking for a simple way of allowing folk to upload an image, pop it into a BLOB in postgres and generate a small thumbnail. So here's a brief rundown of what I did (btw: i'm assuming your modifying an existing model to store the image):

Install Rmagick
(i'm currently running Vista (not for long) and this is the best for windows as you'll struggle to find win32 binaries for the other ruby image mungers). Have a look here for the latest Rmagick.

Prepare your Database.
Do a migration to allow you to store some meta-data and the actual image data. I did something like this:


class AddImageData < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    	add_column :foo, :image_content_type, :string 
       	add_column :foo, :image_filename, :string 
       	add_column :foo, :image_binary_data, :binary 
       	add_column :foo, :image_thumb_binary_data, :binary
  end

  def self.down
	remove_column :foo, :image_content_type
       	remove_column :foo, :image_filename
       	remove_column :foo, :image_binary_data
       	remove_column :foo, :image_thumb_binary_data, :binary
  end
end

Run a rake db:migrate to prepare your database.

Write some tests to validate your model class is actually going to do something with the image data. I wrote a couple of simple tests to prove our accessor method below "uploaded_picture=" gets hit when i create a new "Foo", and that the image_data fields are read into the model correctly.

Fix up, Look sharp.
Now fix up your model to do something with the new image. I did this (not much code for what you get!):


  def uploaded_picture= image_data
    if image_data
      img_orig = Magick::Image.from_blob image_data.read 
      thumb = img_orig.first.scale(200, 200)
      
      self.image_filename = base_part_of(image_data.original_filename)
      self.image_content_type = image_data.content_type.chomp 
      self.image_binary_data = img_orig.first.to_blob
      self.image_thumb_binary_data = thumb.to_blob
    end
  end

  def base_part_of(file_name)
    File.basename(file_name).gsub(/[^\w._-]/,'')
  end

The code has eyes
Now modify your view to accept a file upload.
Note that you need to set :html => {:multipart => true} for the tag or you're in for a long and fruitless evening.

Add this to your form where "f" is the form in scope.


<%= f.file_field :uploaded_picture, :label => "Image" %>

And you're done. Hope this saves you some time! PS - sorry about the screwy CSS. I'm using a crufty wordpress theme. Will fix when i have some time.

Why we don't care...and Pepper Theory

2008-01-07T01:43:00.000Z

One of my first posts on this blog described the tendency of humans to behave in a manner which is ultimately self-serving. We consider the interests of ourselves over others. I called this selfishness, with a note that one should disregard the negative connotations of the word.

Months later, browsing the excellent TED talk archives I have come across Daniel Goleman's talk "Why aren't we all good samaritans"; a promenant psychologist, essentially supporting the theory (albeit indirectly) that we do principally, act to serve ourselves or our emotional need. Even, or rather especially in 'selfless' acts such as giving to charity; we get an emotional 'hit' by doing so. Yannis made some interesting points also supported in this talk. Check it here.

Pan fried duck breast in red wine jus

2008-01-05T19:03:00.000Z

My friend and colleague Tim posted a good recipe for warm spicy winter apple juice so i thought i'd post one of my faves. Its actually a French recipe so there are many other permutations of this available.

So, you need 2 medium/large duck breasts (skin on)

1 Medium orange

1/2 (350ml approx) red wine (Medoc or Malbec grape wines are good but whatever you've got)

2 Cloves garlic

Half Kilo Baby new potatoes

150ml fresh double cream

15g Fresh chives

Sprig of Thyme

10g Cornflour

50g butter

Take the duck breasts and score the fatty side with a sharp knife in a sort of lattice pattern. Grate the zest of the orange into a bowl, then add the orange juice. Finely chop the garlic and add to the orange bowl, along with the red wine and the thyme sprig. Place the duck breasts into the bowl so the meaty side is submerged. If you've got time, leave this to marinade for 3 hours or so, if not, leave it as long as you can.

Boil some water and add your potatoes. Depending on their size, they will need approx 10-12 minutes for smallish (4cm diameter) spuds. Once the potatoes are on, heat a frying pan on a high heat, with a very small amount of oil in. When the pan is hot, place the duck breasts in the pan fatty side down to sear the surface. After a minute or two the fatty side will have a lovely golden brown colour. You may wish to pour some of the fat out here if there's a lot (save it for making roasties!). Turn the breasts and sear the meaty side for a minute too. This seals the meat and keeps the juices in. Turn the heat down lower now, and pour in your marinade (wine & orange mix). Allow this to reduce on a low heat (such that the liquid is not boiling). Once the liquid has reduced down, the duck and potatoes will be ready.

Drain the potatoes and place back in the pan with the butter on a medium/high heat. Add seasoning to taste here. Fry the potatoes in the butter, rolling them round the pan so they don't burn.

Take the duck breasts from the reduction jus and place on warmed plates, or in the oven on gas mark 1. Mix the cornflour with a small amount of cold water and mix. Add this to the reduction jus along with the cream.

Place duck and potatoes on plates adding the jus as desired. Garnish with Chives.

Fin.

DRM and Downey clones

2008-01-05T18:27:00.000Z

My feed-reader picked up an interesting snippet of info the other day. Sony BMG, (Sony and BMG combined music arm) are to drop DRM protection on all music distributed from their back catalogue. Fantastic news then for music lovers everywhere! As is so often the case, now a major label has annouced this bold step (and yes it is bold for the music industry), others will surely follow suit.

Does this mean that Sony have rethought their strategy with regard to online sales, or is it merely acceptance of the inevitable? Either way, I admire the thought behind this, and the lead they have taken, especially given sony's dreadful record in bygone days for hounding down all those "evil pirates" when in fact, it was the DRM software causing the problem.

Anyway, let bygones be bygones. I can't help but think there's some character like PSD jumping for joy somewhere inside Sony's corporate wall, in fact i'm sure of it.

VRM VRM!

2007-12-29T06:09:00.000Z

Seeing more and more sites cropping up along the lines of getsatisfaction.com. This is a good thing. Also sites like http://www.gigpark.com/ which invite people to build genuine community driven recommendations of businesses. It seems VRM then, is inadvertently gaining ground. Cue thoughts of "path of least resistance"...

Feels like the Cluetrain Manifesto is becoming a self-fulfulling prophecy! About time too. Isn't reality refreshing!

Whats in a name? I dunno, ask Loic

2007-12-12T23:34:00.000Z

So LeWeb3 fourth edition, '07 draws to a close and leaves me with a confused set of emotions. As I sit in a cafe at Gare du Nord, I am feeling a strange combination of excitement, concern, happiness, amazement and anger.

I will start positively. Although entirely subjective, I think the conference succeeded in bringing some interesting, bright and talented minds together, putting some on the stage, others on irc.freenode.net#leweb3 and a few more on twitter, and got people talking about some of the new toys, problems, issues, hopes and fears of The Internet. I state the Internet as this was not all about The Web as the title indicated.

Keeping this brief (as my train's coming soon), I shall spare you the usual summative highlights lowlights foo and say more what I think overall. The speakers in attendance were generally excellent, the likes of Kevin Rose of Digg Pownce and others, Evan Williams(twitter), my usual faves, JP and doc along with the idiosyncratic but amazing french designer Phillippe Starck were among the better ones. Speaking of idiosyncracies, it did seem an odd setup. Odd insofar as being likable to a "Friends of Loic le Meur" gathering. Some talks were cut short in light of earlier overrunnings despite some of those being some of the more salient issues (VRM with Doc Searls comes to mind). Particular sessions were wildly off topic, much to the dismay of the irc'ers and twitter clan. My colleague Robbie asked a very valid question during this session, to which the speaker panel basically sidestepped (read more here). At least the food left no sour tastes in the mouth, well done there.

Overall, hmmm. I'm left wanting more of some, less of other and better overall, apart from the company. I met some brilliant, interesting people here and hope to keep in touch with new friends and look forward to new relations. Now then, wheres that train...

Lifestreaming meets MicroContent (is that a â„¢)?

2007-12-07T02:18:00.000Z

It seems the whole thing of Lifestreaming (or answer to the Robbie Clutton problem) is gaining pace day by day. Today i've read 3 mentions of a new service Seesmic which proffers to bring you feed driven video ala twitter, and provides aggregation of your other feeds, similar to that seen in onaswarm. Cool I hear you say; and indeed it is an interesting trend.

Seesmic is the brainchild of French hero-blogger/entrepreneur chappy Loic Le Meur and has received quite a bit of positive press. The big question, will it stick? So far one would say yes given opinions heard thus far. Interestingly though, twitter works because its quick, easy and pretty non-commital:

"What are you doing now?"

Doesn't take long to answer. If the aggregation part plays well in Seesmic could we have the next twitter?

Diatribe

2007-12-05T03:13:00.000Z

I am sick to death of careful demographic-select, target-market, key-message bu****it advertising. I picked up a copy of the Economist today - an excellent business/current affairs weekly (as I now have so little time to catch up with the news it makes a good tube read). Opening up the magazine a two-page spread by an oil company in a desperate attempt to invest in moral collateral after years of plundering developing countries reserves. Ethics of oil co's aside, in the back of my head I was screaming **** off! I don't care. I paid for a magazine, I don't want to be advertised at.

If you're in marketing heed this - I don't want your 'content' rammed down my throat like you're feeding a pre-fois-gras duck. Thankfully, the internet provides some respite. If you're using firefox and are sick of flashing crap and "you're the millionth site viewer" trash embedded in the articles you'd like to read get the ad-block plugin - a one stop flashing-crap-wasting shop.

Your life in a pipe

2007-12-05T02:35:00.000Z

My friend Robbie recently blogged about his annoyance at people aggregating their blog posts with their del.icio.us links and other stuff. He then came across onaswarm a new service in beta which aggregates your feeds from flickr, del.icio.us twitter... wherever you have a feed really, and brings that all together in one. Wow. I hear you say. Wow. But this is really cool as it allows you to aggregate not only your feeds, but those of your friends (or a select few depending on your preference).

In a way, the appeal of this lifestream tool is not entirely dissimilar to that of twitter - bite-sized updates on your friends, now with extra stuff in the mix. Interesting how many people think of the same thing at the same time. I wonder how many other funky uber-aggregators are/were in the pipeline. Exciting times as developers continue to hack down the marketing bubble-crap which has surrounded your sources of interesting stuff/info.

LifePipe

2007-12-05T02:32:00.000Z

LifePipe

In this day and age? Why?

2007-12-03T23:54:00.000Z

I love messing around with computers. I'm fairly sure (and am constantly reminded by my girlfriend) this makes me a geek. Even with this the case however, I like messing around with computers, cos I like making stuff work. Enter Linux; specifically Fedora Core 6.

I've just purchased a couple of VPS's and am in the process of configuring them. Now I have come a step closer to understanding why some system admins just love windows, and conversely others love Linux; both appear to wear their inequities on their shoulders alongside their respective merits. But it did get me thinking, why in the age of immersive 3DUIs, so called "rich user experiences" and the likes, we are still hacking around at [nigelpepper@fu15437664 ~]$ or C:\> depending on your persuasion.

Are GUIs not meeting their marketing promise of "making things easier". I have certainly felt the pain of missing GUI recently. Don't get me wrong, I like hacking around at the command line; at times however, I just want "it" to work.

I need your clothes, your boots, and your OpenID

2007-11-27T23:04:00.000Z

No coder's blog is complete without a code sample so without further ado here it comes.

On my current project we're using OpenID. When folk come to register we wanted to be cool and prepopulate the fields on our reg. form with data from your OpenID persona (Name, Email, Nickname etc). After a bit of googling and hackery I figured the way to do this is to use a simple extension of the OpenID persona stuff called SReg (simple registration extension). You can request extra user data by calling the following on the response object.


response = openid_consumer.begin openid_server_url

response.add_extension_arg('sreg','required','email,nickname')
response.add_extension_arg('sreg','optional','gender')

response.redirect_url(return_to_url, complete_openid_signon_url)

When your latest victim gets redirected to their OpenID server, they will be prompted to allow your site access to the specific details you ask for.

Enjoy!

You need less stuff in your life

2007-11-27T02:53:00.000Z

One of my good friends Robbie has been blogging recently about customer experience and cites an excellent link to a presentation by Oxford Professor Barry Schwartz. Viewing this really got me thinking about the value of all the paraphenalia we surround ourselves with in everyday life. Many of the people I know have multiple communcation devices (phone, blackberry, laptop etc); many of which carry these devices most of the time they're out. Enter now, Unified Communications. The notion of having or being accessible on a multitude of devices or, conversely, specifying a device on which you can be reached by certain individuals.

The mere fact that we have so much choice in our lives, and are pressured from all sides to be accessible wherever, whenever is required is, in my opinion, a product of "the customer always being right".

I've previously mentioned that i'm reading "The Cluetrain Manifesto" at the moment. Many of these issues are described, with in-business examples therein. (Well worth a read if you haven't already). It is interesting then, the culture shift which is becoming more evident daily. Finally people are choosing to step away from the piped glossy-content media, and the dictatorial approach with which you are marketed at as a demographic rather than a person. The plastic marketing speak and "your-call-is-important-to-us" rhetoric has worn thin and people are looking for other ways.

What happened to world politics in the 60s and 70s is beginning to play out with you and 'your data' in business and the internet is the guerilla force fighting for you!

VivÃ© lÃ¡ revolucion!

The latest rule on my Gmail inbox

2007-11-23T19:52:00.000Z

If incoming mail:

Matches: from:(*@facebookmail.com) (wrote OR posted OR invited OR added) -event

Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

I could probably do this on facebook preferences but its more satisfying this way.

I now support your OpenID

2007-11-23T06:35:00.000Z

You can now use your OpenID to make comments and do other things on my blog. If you don't have one, check out myopenid

Whoo whoo - Ride the Cluetrain

2007-11-23T06:03:00.000Z

I've just started reading The Cluetrain Manifesto this week. I am genuinely amazed that this book was first published in 2001. The observations and indeed thought therein, are way ahead of their time, or crucially, I have been ignoring my subconscious for a little too long.

I've been getting increasingly disillusioned by many bodies of thought which exist in corporate business. The nonsense which so often prevails over good sense and pervades, infects almost, the good work which some set out to do. Rushing a job to give the appearance of performance; half arsed, ill timed, decision making - all too common. Having covered only the first chapter or so, Doc Searls and his band of merry men explicitly describe how and why business must evolve to quell these behaviours through realising that people are...er... people. I absolutely love the tagline:

We are not seats or eyeballs or consumers or end users.

We are human beings.

And our reach exceeds your grasp.

Deal with it.

Get a copy. If you're in business and the above sounds like your company, its time to wise up.

Big, rich and stoopid v. Small, nerdy but happy

2007-11-22T05:06:00.000Z

I don't know about you but in my school but it really paid off to be big. You could get to the front of the lunch queue, people would look up to you, you'd get first pick of the girls, you'd probably be picked first at football... If I look back many of these people have, to a greater or lesser extent, gone off the rails; certainly not achieved their potential (not all, granted).

So its funny in software; big short-sighted corporates throwing their weight around without a real understanding of the problem they want to solve, taking the first thing which looks good to them without the breadth of scope to look at the bigger picture. Small software startups don't have the luxury of a shed load of cash, so their ideas stand on their merit and the skill of their developers. Factors which affect all businesses, often affect them the most; but more importantly, they have the greatest ability to disrupt and affect their markets. In small companies, big egos and megalomania are brought back to reality early (often painfully). In corporates, they have the opportunity to fester and develop; a bit like how Hitler came to power.

This is why I believe, the future of software has, is, and will continue to be determined by small smart driven companies, not the crap we see from the heavyweights.

SaaA - Software as an Artform

2007-11-18T22:55:00.000Z

There's always been a part of me which has been interested in Graphics, Typography, Site design; generally computery things which appeal to the eye. Indeed, when I began study towards my degree, I chose to Major in Computer Visualisation. It was a close call between going down the Arts and design route, or staying geeky and cutting code. I chose the latter in the end but maybe not for long; in practice at least.

It is interesting then, that over time, software development, or a significant proportion thereof, is now undertaken using similar principles to those adopted by the graphic design industry.

A design agency will often conduct initial consultation, understand something about the business and who the design work is to appeal to, before undertaking several drafts, each of which are presented back to the customer to approve/disprove of. Thereon, iteratively, the designer will develop the design in collaboration with the customer to reach the desired end goal.

With the increase in agile development, this move towards close collaboration with the customer, iterative delivery of, what will evolve to be the end product; clear parallels can be drawn between the two. Indeed, it is certainly true for web applications; Design REALLY matters. No wonder then, that the way we build software and the way we design our interactions with it, come closer together. With the role of design becoming more important then, this opens the question, what is the next step for software development? Gui tools and MDA's successor? Hope not!