You’ll need to pinch yourself for this – OK Go

Mar22
2012 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

Take an already recorded track. Then add string basses made from plastic, wind chimes, old fashioned music boxes, 280+ gretsch guitars (with amps), multiple pianos an amazing car and a whole lot more. You’ve got the new OK Go video and it’s amazing. I mean *amazing*, astounding and quite magic. First thing to do is to check it out below (even better to check it out in high def)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

Now I’m sorry but I find this astounding. My first thoughts are how real is this. How much is faked for the cameras and how much of an editing job was done. If you’re really amazed by now then take a look at the behind the scenes videos that you can find below. I’ve not got a lot else to say, because I think the whole thing, process, execution and the overall concept is just incredibly amazing. I mean how can you sit in a room and come up with the idea “I know we could drive a car into a whole bunch of stuff and get it to play our tune”, and then think that you could *actually* do it. If I was not here writing this blog then I’d be doing things like this video. Astounding.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qae4gAbXOZ8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsK8TSx1Sbk” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75aqU54CaYE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

Posted in Pinch Me - Tagged amazing video, car, ok go, percussion

Give me some more juice.. please

Mar15
2012 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

There has been much discussion since the release of apple’s iOS 5.1 update on if the update has made some kind of minor improvement to battery life. The result? No-one can really decide, and that’s because the battery life sucks big style. I’m not having a go at apple because all the smartphone are the same. Why? because they are small and battery technology is behind the times. We continue to see processing power, disk space and many other factors following the famous Moore’s Law, meaning vastly improved performance. We’re seeing miniaturisation on a massive (pun intended) scale, as demonstrated by the crazy resolution cameras we can cram into our tablet devices, and things like this crazy device that can drive itself through your veins (yes, you heard me right!)

However, battery technology by comparison has not undergone a revolution of this nature, leading to dissatisfaction and frustration. This report, out this week, shows customers of 4G handsets rating battery life as the major issue with many switching handset manufacturers to try and find a bit more juice. Look to Apple’s new iPad 3, and you’ll find a thickness increase. Unusual for apple, but necessary to provide enough battery power to drive the new screen yet keep battery life the same as the outgoing iPad 2.

Battery technology has not changed much in the last century, with the standard lithium-iron (Li-iron) battery common in your smartphone or tablet, and that’s because lithium is pretty reactive (see: http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/003.htm) and also the lightest metal you can get. Of course there are some advancements and improvements in the lithium technologies, but no step change is available because you can’t get a better metal for the job.

So, it’s all bad news on the traditional battery front, but of course I’m after a revolution, not an evolution so I’d be surprised to find it in your Duracell bunny. What about other technologies on the horizon?

Well, we’ve got Fuel Cells. Yes, these bad boys could in theory run your laptop or iPad for weeks without needing any refuelling, making you a whole lot happier in the process, and every manufacturer under the sun must be wanting to be the first out of the blocks with such a device. Apple has a number of patents which show that it’s clearly thinking about this area, but what have we actually got to show? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I’ve trawled the web for a practical laptop powered by such a technology and none exists.

However, I didn’t think that the revolution was going to come from fuel cells anyway. I putting my money on these babies. These friendly looking chaps should be capable of generating oodles of energy by themselves and pumping it into my iPad with just a bit of fresh air and the occasional loving word whispered into their ears. Microbial Fuel Cells are pretty cool (check the vid here, pick up your own here). However before you run out to plug one into your iPad 3 note that the sum total of the energy you get out is enough to blink an LED after “a few weeks”. Hardly going to give you an electric shock now is it.

Of course, we’ve got power over wireless, but that doesn’t really work and can’t provide very much juice. We’ve got solar power, but you’d need to wear a vast array of panels just to use your iPad for a few minutes, and I don’t think that carrying round your own wind turbine on your head would look all that cool.

But I’ve missed one! How about our own friend nuclear? Living near, and formally working for a nuclear power station how could I forget the wonder of nuclear energy. Is not a small nuclear reactor in your iPad the way forward? The so called Atomic Battery is another much in the news technology with little in the way of something that I can strap to my wrist and plug into my gadgets.

And so, I’m afraid to say we’re left with only out traditional battery technology with ever more clever and novel twists. We might be able to get the battery in the cases, improve the tech and squeeze a few more drops of life out of the Duracell bunny, but I’m afraid that is just not good enough. We might soon end up with a quantum computer in our pocket, but I’ll still be plugging the flipping thing into my dock every night and cursing the “low battery” warning when I’m navigating to some far flung way-point. COME ON!

Posted in Rant - Tagged battery, new battery technology

Ideas = Money / Success / Happiness / Reality

Mar03
2012 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

Perhaps it’s too much listening to audio books. Perhaps it’s my time spent on the very excellent 4 hour work week. Or perhaps it’s my desire to take to the skies, taking the flight departing to dreamland and leaving the world of work for the world of free time and enough money to enjoy it. Whatever the reason, I’m somehow mindful this week of the power of ideas and the idea that ideas = money and money = ideas.

I was impressed with this article before Christmas which highlighted the fact that it is even easier for people with ideas to see them through to a reality. Here, 16 year old Nick D’Aloisio’s idea was around a system of summarising web pages and search results so as to save time and make things simpler. It’s a great idea, but I would suggest something that in years past might have been a tad more tricky to actually get to market. Now Nick can benefit from the ability to write his own applications and have them marketed to millions of devices with the click of a button.

Check out how slummy works below (I think it’s a great idea..)

Anyhow, I want to suggest to you that things are in fact even easier. In Nicks case he already had some of the skills that he needed, namely that he could program and understood software development. Suppose you’ve got a killer idea for an app, but don’t know your basic from your python and think that C# is just a note on the keyboard?

Well, you can now benefit from new labour markets that allow you to recruit people (or teams of people) to work for you. oDesk is an example of a site that let’s you recruit people with specific skill sets and pay them an hourly rate to work for you. You can choose from a variety of people and skills, admittedly (and expectedly) with a bias towards IT. oDesk also have sets of tests and competency checks so that you can work out that the person on the other end of a wire might actually know what they are talking about.

This works, and it works on all scales. I have a friend who runs a company focusing on improving the quality of eduction, and who has recently developed (and continues to develop) a range of app’s to assist with this. This was done by selecting an application writer from such a virtual labour pool. Results have so far been encouraging, and there is more planned.

Ok. I suspect you’re thinking that this works great for websites and applications, but is not going to work if your next idea is a smart teapot, or a labour saving home gadget. Well.. you’d be wrong. Markets are also opening up in these areas. Take the example of http://www.dodocase.com/. Now these are professionally produced iPad cases, but they actually started life in a TechShop, which is an American members based workshop where paying members can have access to quality tools and equipment. It’s a bit like buying a gym membership to have access to those amazing running machines and stair climbers. Except, instead of running machines it’s laser cutters and instead of stair climbers it’s 3D printers! You can start a business, make it commercial inside one of these facilities and then ramp it up. Don’t think that there are any barriers. Once you’ve outgrown your DIY production facilities, you can then get any number of companies to make pretty much anything you want.

Of course, this type of idea does not have to be used for the big, money making, world changing ideas. It can be used for fun! Take fiverr.com, which allows you to submit what you would be willing to do for $5 and then let’s other people pay you to do it. I already have my own offering, and you could easily have yours as well. I have commissioned several bits of work for my $5 and it really does work rather well.

It all starts with ideas…. Branson had an idea that he could get a bunch of people home from their holiday, and that led him to take on the big boys with Virgin Atlantic. Now he’s going into space! Dyson was frustrated by the way things didn’t work right and took ideas from the things he could see around him. A thousand or so tries later he had a vacuum cleaner that didn’t loose suction and the rest was history.

What makes Branson, Dyson and others amazing is both their ideas and also their vision and drive to get those ideas to market and to make successful companies out of them. The great news for us is that it’s getting easier to perform that “get to market” stage. Now there is less of a barrier than ever there was to turn ideas into reality.

In the following years, as information becomes easier to share, it’s your ideas and the creative things whizzing around in your head that are going to become increasingly more valuable, and it’s much more likely that you can turn the ideas = <money / success / happiness> into your reality.

Posted in Musings - Tagged fiverr, ideas, ideas = money, money, new labour markets, odesk, outsourcing manufacturing, techshop

Dropbox – Your secure (sic) place in the sky

Jul11
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

Hi Dropboxers…
This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.

Today I attended a meeting, the purpose of which was to ask the question “Should we provide a similar service to that of Dropbox, but on the premises?” Now, that’s an interesting question and it certainly caused some debate, but ultimately it came down to a discussion on how we use (and protect the use of) cloud based serviced. You’ll not have gone very far without hearing the dropbox announcement which I quote a response from above. Basically, because of a “code update” for about four hours you could log into any dropbox account with any random password you felt like. A couple of things spring to mind…

1) What kind of “code update” causes authentication to be turned off? The kind of code update with a debug flag set perhaps, regardless it asks worrying questions about the sophistication (or lack of) of the dropbox code base.

2) How did it take them four hours to find out… More to the point how did they find out? Was there someone who noticed this exploit and told them, and if that is the case, what if no-one told them. It presumably could have been a lot longer.

If you believe dropbox, then things were not compromised for all that long, and in the time period not a lot of account access or changes occurred, however that’s hardly the point.

In the same week I delivered a security talk at a local church meeting, and talked about the inherent insecurity of email, likening it to sending postcards (in fact it’s a bit worse). See this link for a postcard that you certainly would not be sending! The two events are not unrelated. It ‘s not about what cloud based (or other) systems you use, but about how you choose to use them.

I’m a dropbox user. Love it infact. I get to access things on my iPhone, Laptop, Desktop and web, which is all pretty convenient. Just to be sure I’m happy, I only keep things on there that I would be prepared to show you on this blog, or in fact anyone. Sure, there are a few things about how much money I spend on ASDA shopping this month, but I don’t mind telling you that, there are some pictures that I would share with you and show my mum and dad (I keep all the naughty ones somewhere else), but the point is that I’d be happy to blow apart the dropbox security and I would not care.

I also store some encrypted information on dropbox, to take advantage of the fact that that information is synchronised between my different devices. I use keepass which is a fantastic password remembering tool (in fact it increases security by allowing you to use very strong passwords but keep them safe so you can remember them with a single master password). The key to success is that I’m still happy to blow open the dropbox security because the real security is provided by the encryption layer of keepass.

So, where are we? Using dropbox, facebook, gmail or anything else is not evil in itself, but you need to assume that the security is wide open. When you assume this then you’ll want to take steps to protect that information.

Of course, it’s pretty easy to use keepass, but how about protecting the entire contents of dropbox. Not as easy?

The dropbox wiki gives some general (motherhood and apple pie) security tips. http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/IncreasePrivacyAndSafety

Perhaps more interesting is the use of http://www.boxcryptor.com/ or equivalent to create an encrypted volume inside your dropbox.

This article http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/Truecrypt is a great one that shows you how to create a truecrpyt volume inside your dropbox.

However, we’re still a long way from a complete solution. The boxcrypt and truecrypt methods all rely on you having software to mount the volume available across all your devices which might not be the case, and it’s also very difficult to envisage a situation where you might be able to share those volumes. In fact sharing is where it all falls down.

It’s the alice and bob problem all over again, and the issue of key exchange. For a really good explanation of that then if you’ve not read this book then you must! And if you have read it, then you’ll know the real nature of the problem! Perhaps quantum encryption will be the saviour of cloud based file storage. Till then, keep taking the tablets, and assuming that it’s just a cloud full of postcards.

Posted in Security

Quick Tip – Finding unlabled email in Gmail

Jul09
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

I’ve been using Gmail as my mail system of choice for a couple of years now. The spam handling is really good and they keep adding useful new features (such as the intelligent tagging of important things that you should read!). Anyway, one of the key features was the storage, at around 8GB you’re never going to run out of space right? Wrong…. After a couple of years of hitting the “archive” button I found that I was getting pretty close to the limit. All the chaps in our mail team at work will now be saying “told you so” as they are always saying that there is no such thing as unlimited quota. Anyhow, I had been organising my important mail using labels, so I thought the easy answer was to find all the mail that didn’t have a label and delete it. Easy?

It turns out not to be all that easy, but this fantastic article eventually led me to the answer. The author of this post even goes as far as creating a spreadsheet which lets you build the query string to put in the gmail search. Fantastic! Oh and Google… 8GB is NOT ENOUGH!

http://theclosetentrepreneur.com/how-to-find-all-unlabeled-email-in-gmail

Posted in Tip

The Dan Plan

Jul09
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

The Dan Plan It’s a very attractive concept. In 1000 hours you can become an expert at anything, providing that you use those hours wisely.. Think of what you could do.

Well, “The Dan Plan” aims to do just that turning Dan, a 30 year old commercial photographer into a professional golfer. But just what is this deliberate practice, and does it actually work?

The theory seems to stem from a few research sources including this one which take a different view to the traditional nature v nurture kinds of debates and suggest that for many people, even if “naturally” born with some kind of ability improve by using a lot of practice over a short period of time. I guess thinking about the 6 year old piano players and the child prodigy sports stars then they all share a whole butt load of practice between them.

So, it begs the question, can we apply this kind of focused practice to areas of our own life? The suggestion is that we can, if we resit the temptation to believe that expert levels of performance are out of our reach. As K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State says:

“People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults.” “We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. Only a few exceptions, most notably height, are genetically prescribed. Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

Some people that I come across at work are all to ready to accept that they have reached some kind of ceiling. This can be because of their history, their qualifications, or their perceived lack of skill compared to others. However, in many cases they are operating at well below their full potential but just refuse to acknowledge it. Confidence plays a large part in people who are successful, but so does hard work and practice. This week I heard the following quote, a classic from Winston Churchill:

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

It’s sometimes hard, if we think that we’re not naturally skilled to think that we could actually be a success at something, but we should not loose heart. Even if you’re lacking in natural ability, by believing in yourself and being focused, learning from your mistakes and focused practice then you could well rise to be the best.

I’ll follow Dan with some interest, but I hope that like me you admire his sense of belief, and perhaps this might inspire you to new heights.

Posted in Random

Glitch – The $50,000,000 game that you can’t play yet.

Apr14
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

It looks amazing. Even as someone that does not play all that many games, the previews of Glitch certainly seem to look at though we should watch out for it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6O5QXj6n18

Unbelievably however, it’s already cost $50million before a single person (testers excluded) has managed to play it.

Glitch is the brainchild of Stewart Butterfield, founder of Flickr and another all round Canadian nice chap (see last post, and his resignation letter, which I just love) and it promises to be massive, visual, compelling and fun.

Of course, there have been other expensive gaming flops and some with massively overrun schedules, such as Duke Nukem Forever, which started development in 1997!

Hopefully there will not be too long to wait to see it Glitch is as fun as it sounds, it’s currently in beta testing and with nice Mr Butterfield at the controls I’ve every confidence that we’ll see it’s cute animated characters gracing many a lunchtime screen at work real soon.

Posted in Web - Tagged glitch, online game

Goodbye Prince II? – Raise a DP4 for the last time

Apr14
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

Project Executives, Board Members, Senior Users, Senior Suppliers please be upstanding. I have called you here today to bid farewell to the slow and process laden days that have gone before and to usher in a new dawn of great promise. From the ashes of failed software projects, elongated delivery time-scales and crippling process comes a new way… SCRUM*

Now, I’m not one for faffing around, but I do appreciate the need for being organised and systematic in the delivery of complex stuff, and software and other IT projects are certainly complex stuff indeed. I have therefore in the past experienced a certain love/ hate relationship with how project methodologies are used, especially in our IT world. More recently I’ve become more interested in the models used by fresh thinking companies such as google to do their development and to try and find a way of being more agile in our own project acitivites.

Some would suggest that Prince II is not adopted by many outside of the UK, that it is only suitable for building reactors and submarines and that it’s about as much use to software or IT change as a chocolate teapot. Now, I won’t go quite that far, because I know that the secret with any methodology is how you use it, and certainly Prince II is based on some sound principles. It is, for example, perfectly possible to create a light version of Prince II which performs enough project rigour but without undue process. Components that are key (imho) to Prince II are.

The product based approach to planning, breaking down an overall goal into the products that you need to produce in order to get there.
The logical journey that you need to go on, starting with a mandate for where you are going and why and then building on it with subsequent documentation to develop a method for managing and delivering the project
A small, focused group to make project decisions
An executive, passionate about realising the benefits and making decisions to ensure they are met.

Now, I may have missed a few here, but I think I’ve captured the essence of what I like. However, the frustration with so much of the IT world I find myself in from day to day is that this all takes far to much time. By the time we’ve drawn the Gantt chart and worked out our product breakdown structure, the rest of the university has already implemented their own thing, most likely in google docs, or some other cloud.

So, it was a breath of fresh air today to be introduced (by Dr Paul Ralph, a likeable Canadian) to SCRUM, an agile method of managing projects.

Of course, the first question might be “how on earth have they managed to call it SCRUM”, and the answer refreshingly is that it’s designed to have “the whole team going together as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”.. rather like a…. you’ve got it…. scrum. Genius!

Now, most scrums that I’ve seen don’t seem to go all that far so hopefully the methodology can provide a little more success than that (certainly if my experience in the high school “roffeys rejects” rugby team is anything to go by). However, I do like several of the principles involved, which do seem to match my desire for a non-faffing approach.

The Team – I’ve always said that we should form people into cross sectional teams, matching programmers, technical people, communications people and project managers into one unit focused on providing a specific solution. SCRUM appears to do just this.

The other players – I’ve always felt that sometimes management and some stakeholders get in the way of moving quickly and whilst should be taken into account might not be as important as things like Prince makes them out to be. Again SCRUM seems to recognise them as important but “Ancillary”

The speed – Lack of faffing is something that I *always* strive very hard for, and the cyclic development cycle seems to be a very sensible idea, delivering in short time-scales incremental functionality.

I like this, and I also like some of the crazy terminology such as the “Scrummaster”… who would not want to be one of those!

Anyway, I’m interested to find out more, so the book has been ordered and I’m giving myself some further reading. It is however good to know that there may be a world with less faffing and I, for one, am keen to explore the landscape further.

* other agile methodologies are available. Your home is at risk if you do not keep up payments on any loan secured on it.

Posted in Project Management - Tagged PrinceII, Project Management, SCRUM, Software development

Is there a brick in your toilet?

Mar30
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

Euphemism? You decide!

Today I spent a good portion of the day looking at technology (audio visual in particular) and as part of that day we looked into how technology can help reduce CO2 emissions by cutting energy usage. Technology can pull together data from various disparate sources to show what energy is being used. AV control technology can shut down devices, dim the lights, lower the volume and standby equipment. There are devices that not only provide PIR control to determine if a room is in use but use audio and can tell the difference between a rustle of paper and the background noise of an A/C unit. Systems can be integrated with building management solutions, radiator valves, room scheduling systems and pretty much anything that can even begin to understand a string of 1′s and 0′s… It’s pretty cool and amazing stuff, but as I looked around the venue at the wealth of people attending, as I scanned the car park for the 4x4s and self hire vans I wondered if it was all a bit too complicated, and I remembered our old toilet, with it’s brick.

The brick of course, was a simple device designed to reduce the amount of volume in the toilet cisten, and thus reduce the amount of water needed to fill it. A simple idea, but one that over time could save quite a bit of water.

5 (flushes a day) x 365 (days a year) x 75 (years life) x 1.2 (litres displacement of a house brick) = 164,250 litres of water saved…

Now, it is’nt actually a good idea to use a brick for various reasons, it might break itself of the toilet etc. etc. so it’s better to use something else, but the point of this post is not about toilets and bricks, it’s about not forgetting the simpler things to only concentrate on the technology.

Perhaps we’ve forgotton, or need reminding of some non-technology ways that we can all play our part in reducing CO2. Here a just a few that have done the rounds..

Turn off lights using the old fashioned switch when you’re not using them
Boil only as much water as needed in a kettle
Don’t leave the tap running when cleaning your teeth
Use appliances at non peak times
Grow your own food
Turn your thermostat down a degree or two
Turn your car engine off when your waiting
Print double sided (or better still not at all)
Share a lift, or walk
Visit your local library instead of buying books / DVDs etc.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. Yes, I’ve missed some. Yes, some of them might have some technical intricacies of embodied carbon or some such technical calculation, but I just wanted to make the point that we should not forget the simple.

Now, I’m off to check my home energy monitor and fiddle with my dimmers…….

Posted in Green - Tagged brick, eco, green, kiss principle, simple ideas, toilet

Got a problem? Then fix it..

Mar28
2011 Leave a Comment

Written by chris_dixon

iPhone alarm

You awake with a cold sweat covering your body… A terrible feeling comes over you as you recall the dream that woke you from a restless slumber. You dreamt that you were one of the worlds leading software writers, famous for producing applications that shine in the area of usability. Applications that are reliable, dependable and loved by billions. However, you made one flaw… one tiny mistake that plagues your dreams and causes even the most devout followers to begin to doubt your abilities. You can’t get it up! Well you can’t reliably wake people up at least. You pinch yourself hoping that you’re still dreaming, only to realise the horrible reality… You’ve gone and done it again…

Well, whilst you were getting an hour less in bed this Sunday in the UK, many iPhone users were scratching their heads with their scheduled alarms ringing an hour early… or perhaps an hour late… or perhaps not at all. MacWorld reported that users had seen problems in the UK after the BST time change but claimed that the issues were probably people who had not applied the software fix last time round, however posts on various forums indicate that this may not be the case, and may be concerned with MobileMe alarms.. anyway, that’s not really the point is it.

Bad things to happen, people do make mistakes… However, when those mistakes are basic, and revealed in a very public way perhaps it’s time to fix them, and fix them good and proper. No? Well apple, you appear to have had three goes to try and fix this and its *STILL* not working.

Try 1 – November 2010 in the US.. Fix issued.

Try 2 - January 1st in the UK.. Fix issued.

Try 3 – NOW!

Now, I’d just like to suggest that having the same bug THREE times might be a tad embarrassing for apple, especially as getting an alarm to play at the right time is not rocket science!

A real “pinch me” today, and I bet apple are hoping they are still dreaming. Unlucky :-)

Posted in Mobile, Pinch Me - Tagged alarms, apple, iphone, problem, software

You’ll need to pinch yourself for this – OK Go

Give me some more juice.. please

Ideas = Money / Success / Happiness / Reality

Dropbox – Your secure (sic) place in the sky

Quick Tip – Finding unlabled email in Gmail

The Dan Plan

Glitch – The $50,000,000 game that you can’t play yet.

Goodbye Prince II? – Raise a DP4 for the last time

Is there a brick in your toilet?

Got a problem? Then fix it..

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