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Surfaces

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:10:32 +0000

“Surfaces,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, is kind of an odd subject, I mean in some sense almost everything is or has a surface. But what I liked about the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is that the whole building was strange shapes and surfaces, something that I tried to get across in this image. Which I thought made it a decent candidate for this weeks challenge.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Distant.” I’m entry 189.

Distant

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:59:27 +0000

I like the every-day grazing cattle contrasted with the “Distant” — this weeks PhotoFriday challenge — mountains. This was taken in Georgia (the country not the US state).

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Damaged.” I’m entry number 59.

Damaged

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:21:47 +0000

I saw this car a few weeks ago and thought that the crumpled headlight was interesting. I went back a day or so later and took a few pictures. I thought this might make a good entry for this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Damaged.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Slowly.” I’m entry number 181.

Slowly

Stephen Darlington — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:42:27 +0000

I flipped through lots of images for this weeks PhotoFriday theme,
“Slowly,” but I thought that this image fitted the bill and was a little different from most of the photos already posted. It’s of a line of camels slowly plodding towards our camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan.

I didn’t post an entry for last weeks PhotoFriday. (Indeed I was so busy that I didn’t even vote for my own entry in the challenge the previous week! No wonder I didn’t win.)

The Perils of Working From Home

Stephen Darlington — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:02:21 +0000

I got a lot done and with the ninety minutes I saved by not commuting I went to the gym, but there are problems with working from home…

The Up-Sell

Stephen Darlington — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:34:02 +0000

I don’t mean to single out a single business here. The flaw I’m pointing out is shared by many sites but this post was inspired by a recent visit to TripIt. In general it’s a great service. It’s well thought out, allowing you to enter all your details with a minimum of effort; just forwarding your email confirmation to them is a masterstroke.

However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.

The “tricky” part is that before you press them it is difficult to know which links actually work and which ones just ask for money.

There are a number of other tricks that some sites have. Another favourite is the interstitial screen, forcing you to view adverts before you can do what you actually want to do.

But it’s not just that I find it obnoxious. I don’t have data but I do have a nice anecdote that shows that it doesn’t really work.

During the dot.com boom I helped build a website. The launch went pretty well but the client decided that they wanted to push a secondary product, one with great margins but where customers really needed to be vetted. (I don’t want to get into specifics but it was a financial product.) The marketing people said that a pop-up would be the right thing to do.

We balked at the idea. At the time, pop-ups were the scourge of the Internet. They were used on all the least reputable sites. Technically adept users closed them without looking; the less fortunate were conned into either filling their screen with pointless adverts or visiting website they had no interest in. Pop-up blocked were a few years away.

In short, we felt that at best there was a reputational risk. Unfortunately we couldn’t come up with numbers to show that it was financially a bad idea, plus it was actually pretty cheap to implement. So they asked us to go ahead with it, over our objections.

As I recall it didn’t last very long.

After go-live there was a substantial up-tick in the number of people applying for this secondary product. However, there was actually a drop in the number of people who were accepted. That’s to say that it attracted exactly the wrong kind of person, which is bad enough, but there was also a cost associated with each rejected application.

Moving back to 2009, I think the problem with pushing your paid products too hard is that you actually make your free version less appealing. And, frankly, if your free version is a pain to use I’m certainly not going to pay for the full version just to make the evil bits go away.

To be clear, I have nothing against the so-called “freemium” business model. It can work really well. Flickr, for example, seems to have the balance about right: the site is useful even if you don’t pay for it with the extras useful for regular users. And paying LWN readers can get their content a week ahead of other people.

In short, if your paid extras are genuinely useful you don’t need to be obnoxious, you don’t need lots of “dead” links or interstitial adverts. And making your free version painful is most certainly not the answer.

Square

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:51:54 +0000

There are quite a lot of options for a theme like “Square,” but in the end I decided on this one of a square access hatch covered in graffiti. I’m not sure whether “Earth Liberation Front” is a serious organisation or not but the name amused me.

It was taken in Corniglia, one of the towns of the Cinque Terre.

Please also vote for my entry in the last challenge of last year, “Best of 2009.” I’m entry number 188.

Shrinking

Stephen Darlington — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:41:19 +0000

I just realised that there are two anniversaries this year. Neither would be worth grabbing a bottle of champagne for but they are vaguely connected and it does give me a chance to reminisce about some neat, old technology.

I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.

I guess it would seem pretty primitive if I were to look at it now. I seem to recall that they’d only just got X working on it and it didn’t work at all on my 386. But still, it ran and I could log in multiple times using virtual terminals. It even multi-tasked, something that Windows 3.1, the operating system in the other partition, couldn’t really do with any reliability. Despite the limitations, it was good enough to help me finish my final year project without having to make the half hour, hilly walk to the labs every day.

Five years after that I got my first mobile (cell) phone. It was an Ericsson flip phone, long before they teamed up with Sony. It was pretty small (even by modern standards) but they had achieved this by providing only a single line LCD display and stubby aerial that caught on the inside of your pocket when you pulled it out when receiving a call. Still, this was better than the Motorolas of the time which often allowed you to remove the battery when you intended to flip them open to answer a call.

At this point mobile phones were becoming popular but were far from ubiquitous. My Ericsson was tied to one2one, a network that no longer exists as a seperate entity (it’s now part of T-Mobile). Friends told me that this was a bad idea as they had poor coverage but I never really had a problem. When I did eventually move it was when they declared that I was on an “illegal” tariff and doubled my monthly fees. I’d called because I wanted to upgrade, to spend more money with them, but this was not what I’d had in mind!

As an aside, I continue to be fascinated by the farce that is the US cell phone industry. Ten years ago UK networks talked about coverage and dropped calls but it’s pretty much been a non-issue for a while now¹. Both still seem to be big problems (or selling points) in the States and yet Americans pay more than almost anywhere else for their service. The bizarre thing is that many of the most tech-savvy people actually defend the telcos.

But back to the main narrative.

It’s kind of odd to think that we’ve now pretty much come full circle. What was considered “big” in 1994, Unix, has now filtered down to the decedents of that Ericsson mobile phone. Pretty much all of the “cool” phones released in the last few years have a Unix core, the iPhone, the various Android handsets, the Pré.

I’m not sure that ten or fifteen years ago I would have predicted that you would be able to get Unix on a phone, but Moore’s Law was well known so it wouldn’t have been an outlandish idea. But what comes next? Unix (and Linux especially) already span the whole range from tiny, embedded systems right through to super computers.

Where do we go from here?

Orange have just started advertising about their 3G coverage, but this the first I’ve seen for a long time. I’m not even sure if it’s generally accepted that there’s a reception problem with the other carriers. I’ve been on most of the networks over the years and I’ve not seen dramatic differences.

Best Posts of 2009

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:31:18 +0000

It’s that time of year where all the papers, magazines and websites devolve into the best of the year articles rather than actually generate new content. I didn’t want to feel left out so here’s my contribution.

Of course “best” can mean any number of different things, so I’m going to pick a few top fives.

Here are the most popular pages viewed this year:

It continues to surprise me how popular the Oracle pages are. They are now very old products and the pages have not been updated for quite some time now.

And here are the most popular pages that were actually written this year:

Of course my personal favourites don’t always make the grade in terms of page views, so here are my choices (in no particular order this time):

If there’s a theme here, it’s photography and the kinds of pictures that I don’t normally take.

Best of 2009

Stephen Darlington — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:40:02 +0000

How do you define the “Best of 2009“? That’s this weeks PhotoFriday theme so that’s what I had to work with. It’s hard enough when you have a specific theme but something so broad makes it tricky. Best could mean personal favourite. Or most talked about. Most favourited on Flickr? Most views? Highest rated? (By some measure.)

In the end I went for the above shot, taken in Spain, because it ticks a number of boxes. It’s a bit different from the kind of thing I normally end up with; a few people commented on it; the simplicity makes it one of my favourites; and, finally, I’ve not used it for PhotoFriday yet this year!

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Winter.” I’m entry number 187.