The venue was also great—if a bit too big for getting from room to room in a hurry—and the security and catering staff were some of the nicest I’ve ever encountered. Apparently we weren’t allowed to mention the name of the enormous sports stadium west of London that we all attended, but if I say it rhymes with Bembley and looked like it still had the builders in and scaffolding up then you’ll know where we were.

As at any conference the talks were a mixed bag, although all the ones I went to were definitely worth listening to. Mano Marks covered developer optimizations for Google App Engine with aplomb and a cheeky grin; Dion Almaer provided what might have been a “will-this-do” overview of the “state of AJAX”, which actually became a more interesting discussion of the state of browsers in general, and how they might move towards full support of RIAs; Nimrod Talmon’s discussion of Google Visualization, on the other hand, suffered from being immediately after lunch. I could’ve managed that level of tech details after a nap to sleep off my sugar slump, but I think he should really have been in the pre-lunch slot. We were all jamming on simple carbohydrates anyway, so it’s not as though we would have been itching for butties. The content of his talk was still intriguing, though, and it’s good to know you can at least consider handing this sort of thing over to a third-party engine if the client wants it but the poor webserver doesn’t.

The lightning talks at the end of the day were as shambolic as these things tend to be. Liz said that a lot of people had expressed an interest before the event, but if that was the case then they were all being very optimistic about what they’d actually be able to accomplish before the day, as we only had maybe half a dozen in what sounded from Nick like the most popular slot of the day. Anyway, it was fun to break out a bit, but my laptop wouldn’t detect the projector, and then the gist—the actual, pivotal slide—was lost in conversion to whatever it was it was converted to on a Mac. I may do it at a later Geek Night, if I can stomach abusing my position as organiser.

Google very much held off on any go-team antics, hoping that their products would speak for themselves. That was slightly marred by them making it quite clear to everyone, that they did indeed hope that their products would speak for themselves, but at least there were no overt recruitment drives, and rubbishing of the competition was limited to the pretty much warranted chastisement of over-prompting your user and making them numb to modal dialogues, behaviour of which XP is particularly guilty.

Within the reasonably frank and open exploration of their services, however, were occasional notes of discord. Whenever any kind of business case was mentioned things would go quiet, and quite clearly those things weren’t up for discussion, which I think is a shame. Google doesn’t need to pretend that it’s everyone’s best friend to have our respect: it’s public knowledge that it has shareholders, and I think developers the world over can admire it in that context if we know where we are with it.

Transparency engenders trust, and I’d take comfort from someone replying to a query about the bottom line by saying “well, I asked my boss, and he said that we give this stuff for free because it positions us as an influential brand when it comes to advertising revenue, trusted partnerships, GSAs, Google Minis….” Hell, if I’d been fed on those ciabatta rolls and caramel shortbread slices beforehand then I’d probably be asleep by that point, so it wouldn’t matter what they admitted after the fold.

Those occasional moments aside I had a grand day out. I’m itching to start working on App Engine now, and putting into place some of the weirder code patterns Mano mentioned. I’ve also already had a play with Gears following Dion’s talk, and it seems to turn Google Docs into something close to OpenOffice. But before any serious coding, I have to wait for the blood blister on my finger to go downfirst, which came from playing Guitar Hero at the end of the evening. How rock and roll, eh? The young Googler I played against trounced, me: as you’d expect: deep down I think Google’s just as cool as it wants to appear to be on the surface.

Like a moron, I left my mobile phone at home, and then ended up separated from everyone I know; so have a look at what I’m liveblogging and find me, if you care.

Edit 2008-09-18: notes now below.

The End

Lightning talks 16.25-17.35, SF2

Google App Engine
  <head> web conference - headconference.com
  Old days;
    An app would be built, load-tested get discovered, and die. 
  Now:
    You test with ONE person, it gets discovered, and GREAT!

  Construction phase
    More complex
    Tools more limited
      Both of these have their reasons

  1,000 files
    Django source > 1000
    Solution: Guido van Rossum: http://icanhaz.com/zipimport ; rietveld on Google OS

  1MB limit on ALL data structures
    You will run up against this EVERYWHERE
    Can’t combine files on server
    Solution: Amazon S3 - infinitebits.info gives FTP access

  No long–running processes
    Solution: hack it with HTTP refresh!
    Web-based cron! webbasedcron.com

  Short-term quotas
    24-hour quota
    Uncatchable
    Bad advert!

  Backup and restore
    GAE Backup And Restore (uh-huh)
    Open-sourcing it

  Django
    Google are not into developing application frameworks
    So basically use Django, dudes.

  http://opencountrycodes.appspot.com/
  http://isvat.appspot.com/

Android work, Kevin O’ Sullivan, Sita

  Airports still run on 60s technology!
    Looking at mobile technologies
    Predictive analytics from ACARS data - archived and ignored

  Passenger mobility
    Smartphones, context-awareness

  Application
    GPS
    Mashup, overlay with airports

    Click on airport and get Arr/Dep info, querying a backend system

RDF, Tom Morris
  RDF as an open-knowledge enabler
  URIs in the data
    Links to other documents
    URIs that define something e.g. wikipedia:Cities:London

  Mashups
    PITA - be a developer
    Or have the data link itself together
      “Let’s all use the same names”

    dbpedia, bbc.co.uk/programmes
    libris.kb.se - Swedish Nat lib
      every book has a URI

  SPARQL
    A bit like SQL

  sindice.com - search existing linked data (DERI - digital something research inst)

  Libraries + making easier for JS/AJax devs

Green Maps

  Green maps - Anna approached for Glasgow  Green Map
    Open project for local community?
    … Get them to do the work
    Also existing reuse groups - the Electron Group

  Put out leaflets everywhere around Glasgow
    “Enthusiastic developers!” “Enthusiastic designers!”
    … bugger all
    But presented at arts school and got lots of volunteers

  Dear Green Place
    website deargreenplace.org

Visualize your data: Google Visualization API, Nimrod Talmon, ->16.10, Atari

  Types
    Generic
    Specific
    “Hard”

  Examples - iGoogle gadgets
    Wrapped in Javascript, exposed to the iGoogle framework via an API

  Problem:
    Potentially many data sources
    Potentially many visualization sinks
    Many APIs - hard to find “the right one”

  Google Visualization
    Seems to be a generalization of Google Charts

  Google Finance - generic stock charts, embedded into GF

  70 lines of JS code for a simple-ish 10-20 point graph with widgets

  Why?
    Google does the visualization, so fast & scalable
    API built with devs in mind

  Premise of visualizing
    Abstract a visualization
       Data
       Appearance
    Model objects from Google’s API
       google.visualization.TypeOfVisualization() … chart.draw()

  (Nothing should ever make it easier to build pie charts. Especially three-dimensional pie charts, the anti-visualization for people who won’t get numbers anyway. Tufte FTW!)

  (A bit hard work -  data.setCell(x, y, ‘Label’) is a bit like <cfchartdata>. JSON methods?)

  Q; data going to Google?
  A: Javascript call to get API, but here generation is in client. Others in Flash wrapped in JS.

  Q: other formats e.g. JPG?
  A: ?

  Events & actions
    Own event model
    Visualisations listening to events and communicating between each other via closures addListener(fred, ’select’, function() { barney.method(); })

  Data views
    Dynamic re-slicing off the data you’re using for one vis, potentially for reuse in another
    Not a new data set - change the data, change the view
    Like SQL views

  Q: aggregate functions?
  A: wait 10 mins

  Why develop for Google Visualization?
    Reach - de facto standard
    Viable business model? Panorama, Eureka

  (Note to self: ESC :w does not work in a Google doc)

  Extend API with new visualizations
    Declare draw() method on prototype

  … slightly dry but interesting demos… they shouldn’t have these things just after lunch….

  SQL-like syntax querying Google Spreadsheets… Pretty cool, but count the number of browsers that will deal with this scalably: I make it two.
  Ah, this might only be happening server-side. Phew. I wonder if I still have that Bobby Tables spreadsheet lying around anywhere.

  Visualizations laid out on the webpage, about as well as MS Word does it in a document, only you can dive in and work out why everything keeps turning bold, dammit.

  Q: Accessibility?
  A: Don’t have generic solution for this - write your own vis and you can do it

  (Don’t see how that’s possible, as the data will still be in .setCell() calls… how about microformats on a plain-HTML table, with the table appearing for accessibility-impaired? A method to convert HTML or JSON to a data source would be tidier anyway.)

Lunch

A deeper look at Google App Engine, Mano Marks

  Overview of App Engine
  Quick walkthrough
  Best practices

  Standard problems of setting up a webapp
    Startup, scalability, upgrades, maintenance etc.

  GAE easy to start, easy to scale
  5M pageviews / month for typical app
    Payment for additional cap. BY END OF YEAR
  Python only
    More languages soon
    Mano can’t tell us which, but he won’t tell us why he can’t tell us - we don’t need to know
  Offline processing
    No cron, but… soon.

  SLA
    None
    Cloudstatus, partner org, monitoring tool
  Lock-in
    (You can’t download your code, so get svn warmed up)

  cite: Hackathon slides and other useful info - http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-codelab/downloads/list

  Tutorial
    app.yaml
    WSGI application
      methods as per HTTP verbs
    Models on top of BigTable
      schemaless - “what happens if you add a column to a table in a relational database? EVERY ROW in that table gets that new column”

  Q: What about data security?
  A: Google do not trawl through your data. It’s your data. We don’t touch it.
  Q: There’s an SLA?

  Q: Do we put ads on your applications?
  A: No. Your visitors will never know this is a GAE app

  Entities
    Most properties indexed and efficient to query (not including BLOBs and CLOBs/text)
    Keys - limitations (only one ID per entity, cannot change ID or key_name later) but Get() by Key is VERY fast
    No revision storage - you have to do this yourself

  Transactions
    ACID
    No queries in transactions - Get() and Put()
    So assemble your data first with .gql() to inform your transaction, then perform

  Counters
    BigTale doesn’t count by design. So must Model.count() scan every entity row
    class Counter(db.Model)
    Sharded counter - in an entity GROUP (see docs)
      Counters count a few entities on reads, and whenever necessary you could the counters

  (I thought Mano was going to break into a rendition of “That’s Amore” to the camera just then. I think you had to be there.)

  Cache reads and counters
    memcached
    cacheing for n seconds, where n is OK for your purposes.

  Q: 1MB limit - can we gzip and reassemble?
  A: We don’t give you access to files and Python - I think - needs that. But you have a 1MB cap on out-of-the door. And we don’t give you the underlying C libraries
  Q: So C won’t be the next language on App Engine?
  A: I didn’t say that (laughs)

  Q: SLA…
  A: UNOFFICIALLY, I’d like people to say “I want to spend this amount of money”. Currently you have a quota but it’s divided up so you don’t use it all up in one spike.

  Q: URL fetch - buy more time? (limit 4s)
  A: at this point no way round that. Can’t comment on future.

  Q: Django 0.96 - 1.0 roadmap?
  A: We haven’t released one. You can upload 1.0 yourself. But things like GeoJSON rely on C libraries, so there are issues there.
     People are always going to ask “Are we going to support multiple versions?” (which wasn’t really the question - 0.96 was pre-release, 1.0 wasn’t. A good reason to just support one version, and that be 1.0. It’s not as though there’s an SLA in the way.)

  Q: memcache - shouldn’t GAE handle that/
  A: we don’t want to pre-empt the developer too much, taking control out of their hands. Maybe a 20% proj will handle that if it goes in as a feature request…!

State of AJAX, Dion Almaer

  Dion runs Ajaxian

  1. Desktop-y world
  2. Cloud services
  3. Browsers
  4. libraries and frameworks
  5. Gears and monkeys
 
  Take a step back
    What does AJAX mean now we’re where we are

  Took a designer to see the potential
    “The latency will get you, the web’s not good enough”
    Needed proving through e.g. auto-suggest

    Maps - eyecandy of draggable maps itself isn’t really AJAX
      just different ways of thinking about the static HTML page

  Car ads
    Show the dashboard (UI)
    Not the engine schematics, although they’re important to get right

  Jared Leto as a UI overhaul
  Vista as a UI and not much else

  cite: Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface. I want Raskin’s head-mounted Borg interface.
    “… if the interaction between one human and one system is not polite and friendly it will poison the user experience…”

  Visual design and interaction design
    Two separate worlds
    But they’re both right

  The whole web used to look like MySpace
    Now, Apple Store - no Flash, but it zooms and swoops
    Expectations change: Bridge On The River Kwai vs. Spiderman 3
    Script.aculo.us, Dojo, jQuery follow expectations. You just have to use them nowadays or the absence is noticeable.

  cite: Jakob Nielsen
    1-second reaction time of your app is about the limit for keeping the user’s flow
    0.1-1, people notice, but they don’t mind too much

  The library dartboard!
    Gradually collapsing down to jQ, Dojo, P+s.a.u, and… GWT

    1. lightweight - Prototype
    2. hate Javascript, love that hot lava Java? - GWT
    3. functional, DOM-like - jQuery
    4. rich soup-to-nuts - Dojo

    I don’t like the sound of soup to nuts. I’ve been in that sort of restaurant.

    P, jQ and Dojo all have thin core + plugin community + visual effect plugins, so “pick one”

  Examples of other libraries
    Mobile Me (SproutCore)
    280 Slides (Objective-j)

  Dojo realtime charting - GFX package, Dojo grid, Processing.js (Canvas)

  The 0.1second limit
    Event queue, browser, processing - browser’s switching system (JS? style?) a bottleneck
    Firefox logo used for the browser, I see

    No such thing as threads in JS.
      cite:Brendan Eich, “Threads suck.”
      In comes Google Gears, neeow
      WorkerPool process outside the browser

  Jef Raskin again. “The typed ‘Y’ becomes a learned gesture” - warning dialogues just get clicked on, unheeded
    So undo instead
    But how do you do that on the web?

    Form history
      Slider bar changes between revisions - don’t ever actually have to give someone the undo

  cite: Jonathan Schwartz. Every RIA has a RIBackend

  Talking to desktop
    Notification APIs

  1. Fluid - Mac only, but integrates tightly using Greasemonkey-like scripts
  2. Gears - more about giving the browser access to existing APIs
  3. Mozilla Prism - cross-platform
  4. Adobe AIR - using Flash / CSS skills to build desktop apps

  Back to the dartboard…
    Wii remote, directing a dart, in an Ajax application.
    You’ve won a rubber bully!

  Wii -> bluetooth -> WinXX -> wiiuse -> wiiusej -> Java plugin WiiTracker -> browser

  Java PLUGINS?
    In Chrome,
      Works out of process (doesn’t kill browser, totally independent)
      Deployment with JNLP - download components only once
      Micro-kernel

  Modern Web Development
    cite: Alan Foreman, poisonedminds.com

  Mozilla’s monkeys
    Getting other languages into the browser with VMs

  Plugins only get you so far
    HTML5
    Gears is trying to follow this (and presumably to some extent lead it)

   70% of sites have a div called “footer” - so why not <footer> ?

  Questions
    Q. Compatibility & SLAs - adopting other people’s projects?
    A. No plans - still very immature environment.

Keynote

  Browser as client
    Ubiquitous, zero-install, standards
    but capabilities mediocre
    Google want to improve browser capabilities
  Cloud access
    Massive capability beyond most devs’ reach
  Connectivity

  Current web apps are pushing the browser’s capability
    Browsers haven’t changed much, but the web has
    Invisible iframe!
  So Chrome

  *** CHROME COMMERCIAL BREAK *** - good but covered by Scott McCloud already

  APIs
    Programmatic accessibility of authentication and content
    *Significant* growth in traffic

  Google App Engine
    Other languages in pipeline

    Solves non-dev problems for apps;
      Deployment
      Pre-launch investment
      Hardware maintenance
      Scalability

    Apps
      Wordle
      Buddypoke (OpenSocial)
      iPhone app - code.google.com/p/metasyntactic
      Pixverse - Pix Wall and Pix Chat

  Android
    Open Handset Alliance (!)
    OS mobile platform + WebKit

    Mike Jennings
      *** Android demo ***
      Tape over branding
      Slashdot is so 2002, unless you’re me
      Touch screen
      The blue dot app - accelerometer
      OpenGL, Java

  Google Web Toolkit
    Writing BIG AJAX apps
      Live demo - a bit .NET
      Hosting browser running Java bytecode, not Javascript representation.
      So can be debugged as Java code

Why this might be a plug, although it probably isn’t

I’ve also been waiting to categorically declare a very minor conflict of interest, which I can now do: yesterday a lovely paper copy of the Google Chrome comic arrived in my letterbox. So if you think I’m blogging because of that, you can navigate elsewhere now.

Certainly a product’s incompatibility with X/Linux would normally make me avoid it, so perhaps I have being persuaded by the marketing. But a large part of Chrome is marketing, and what makes it most interesting is what it reveals about Google’s marketing internals and about whether or not they matter; but more about that later.

How Google Chrome feels and acts

The ever-lucid Jon Hicks has already posted some thoughts, so my delay in writing has saved me time on that score. I don’t have a great eye for design, but I feel like Chrome’s appearance is interesting if less revolutionary than the promotional material might suggest. Tabs sit in a blue surrounding background, making them look like a half-hearted IE7 reskin. Menus have, as in IE7, been relegated to two weird buttons on the right of the address bar. Full-screen mode is nice, though, as the tabs sit over the top window bar, combining Windows chrome and Chrome chrome—does that make sense?—to increase the window size.

Browsers are browsers and, as with word processors and spreadsheet software, they should really be free and open-source by now, leaving proper software companies with time to develop the next generation of applications. So in a sense most of what Google Chrome does, it does well: unobtrusively and unremarkably, and that’s how it should be; but quite hard to comment on. What’s most noticeable is the speed: it’s faster than any browser I’ve used on XP, ever. Opening new tabs and windows—although in Chrome there’s very little difference under the hood, as they’re all processes—is nippy, despite the extra overhead that Google have decided is essential to Chrome’s distributed stability. Pulling a tab out of one window; letting it drop as a new window, or dropping it into a different window; maximizing windows and general rendering of content: these are all sharp and impressive. But again, they shouldn’t be as obvious as they are, and it merely reflects on other browsers that Chrome feels so fast.

There’s a kind of Firebug-like inspector in Chrome, and it’s nice enough, although it ought to be extracted as a plugin before long, otherwise my guess is it will end up neglected. And popup blocking—represented in the promotional bumf as the window swallowing the popup, and you the user pulling it out in a reactive way—is just a case of a popup window appearing in the main tab so that only its bar is visible. There’s no obvious feeling of resistance as you pull the hidden window up to be visible. Maybe that’s the point, but after the reaction of tab dragging and dropping you feel like you’re moving popups around using an entirely different UI. Also, as I’ve just discovered, text search doesn’t look in form textareas, which makes proofreading your blogposts difficult.

Generally, though, Chrome has at least run rings around anything that Microsoft can produce in the browser market, and then Google managed to completely open-source the code which, like some old John McCain company, Microsoft can neither do nor understand why it should. It’s astonishing to see one huge company outmanoeuvre another like this, and suggests interesting times still ahead

What packaging Chrome has been wrapped in

As regards the marketing, Google has also managed to completely confound the other big player Microsoft is intent on gradually rebranding itself as something in between the silver-and-blueblack chunky mens’ toiletries packaging that make it acceptable to possess both moisturisers and Y chromosomes, and transparent, flashy interfaces of the sort that IE6 always fucks up and means web developers have to work around. Google, on the other hand, has essentially presented itself through Chrome as a kind of retro-yet-futuristic 1950s take on a science-fiction OSX, all meals-in-a-tablet and egg-shaped seats.

Much of this has been down to the artistic skills of Scott McCloud. I never know what to think about him. On the one hand he’s got this unique, flowing, clean style that’s something like a scrubbed Daniel Clowes; on the other, his drawings can sometimes feel washed out, pretentious and affected. On the one hand, he’s tried to revolutionize the way that people think about comics, often by exposing what good comics have been doing for years; on the other, very few people have got rich on the micropayment model he espouses, and if it isn’t working for musicians it’s unlikely to work for graphic novelists.

Where that backlash came from

By portraying itself as different from other industry behemoths—which, to be fair, it is in some ways—Google has left itself in a bind. It still has shareholders, and on one level legally has to conduct itself as a responsible company, however much it wants to be treated like, or possibly with, Ubuntu. Fronting what’s essentially a business exercise with a divisive figure like McCloud leaves you ripe to parody, and The Register has tried to step in with Google Chrome comic funnies. They fly in the face of the no-alteration Creative Commons licence that Google/McCloud released the work under, but that’s fine because the uniquely American concept of fair use lets them do that if it’s satire.

Except they don’t work as satire, because they’re not funny. And yet at the same time the font they’ve used makes it look eerily reminiscent of the shockingly explicit Jerk City, which hints at a far better way of parodying the style: the 4chan/yayhooray parodies are in a way more honest and hence funnier: probably because they’re more anarchic and less interested in squeezing out another humourless Googlebashing.

No product launch is smooth, and there’ve been bumps in the otherwise smooth journey that Chrome has made to mass testing (if not mass acceptance). The end-user licence turned out to contain mad MyPlace-like terms of use which was sort of an accident, although it’s drawn attention to the fact that they still exist in other Google products. Whoops. The original beta—or, given that everything from Google is a beta, maybe we should just call it an alpha and be done—was susceptible to Safari-like carpetbombing, and The Register criticized the rather flaky bugfix and its rollout procedure.

I love el Reg and its journalistic instincts. It’s more than happy to puncture someone’s silly bubble, and it displays a dogged tenacity in pursuing the “real” story: although they’re basically wrong about climate change, in the way that Private Eye turned out to be wrong about MMR; and their grammar and sub-editing is atrocious for an outlet that considers itself to be conducting serious journalism.

But I think they’re being unfair on Google: what other open-source product would launch to such scrutiny? What other product has had seamless security procedure baked into it from its alpha, and why should that matter? Google are big, but they can only cover so many bases: there’s so much infrastructure glossed over by McCloud’s comic, and maybe a FOSS-like boring list of features and a changeset would have led people to underestimate less the sheer amount of stress testing, and the sheer amount of work that can only now be stress-tested, now there’s a user base and the animosity of the press to contend with.

Google did after all still manage a big reveal—only two weeks before London’s own Google Developer Day—in their usual manner. But I do wonder about the timing. Was there a danger in letting crowds into Google UK while Chrome was still secret? Did someone want Chrome to be out—prematurely, if need be—for the coup of having people drool over it at a GDD? Was the news about to leak anyway, and did damage limitation dictate the software’s release? If that’s the case, though… does it matter? Google gets its theatre; the world gets an interesting FOSS project; early adopters get an unstable pre-release: everyone’s happy. Ish.

Which hand is on Google’s tiller

Pessimistic journalists—and in my honest-to-goodness opinion there’s no better sort—always point to Google’s lack of revenue from its non-core offerings and suggest that it’d be far better for Google to concentrate on the products that directly earn it money. But they forget that Google’s profitless products exist as a perpetual rebranding and repositioning of Google: indirectly, they maintain Google’s status as a company that other companies, developers and end users actively want to be associated with, and actively trust. While they’ll never entirely remove the patina and dust collecting on their “don’t be evil” statement, they can at least act like a company that trusts open source, and whom open-source communities trust in turn.

Google can keep on pushing things like Chrome out, and its launch cycle can be dictated by something other than the developers’ whims, because: its main rival has nothing like Chrome, or GMail, or Google Docs; and successful FOSS projects like Django or Ubuntu have hardly suffered from bleeding-edge alphas or crotchety betas, as long as community, or honesty, or image, has been there to prop them up.

Who the hell am I to be telling you this anyway

I quite like Chrome. But I completely accept that receiving personalized communication from the company taints my status as a reliable blogger. So don’t take my opinion on Chrome at face value.

I certainly won’t: I’m about to reboot into a proper operating system, and I’ll lose Chrome as I do so. It’s a nice addition to the existing ranks of browsers, but not that nice.

This model of publishing in part explains the thinking behind his recent post, robustly titled Business Requirements are Bullshit. But Steve’s audience—compared to the web at large—is a small, self-selecting group. So although keeping in mind some of the details of his recent post can prevent you investing in dead-end projects, I just can’t agree with the overall conclusions about software development.

Although it’d be nice for everyone in the world to have programming skills, and to be able to behave like autonomous itch-scratching units, that simply isn’t the case. The vast majority of people need software built for them, and software builders are a demographic, with a broad range of shared interests and a vast landscape of shared uninterests. What if you can’t program but you want some software? Do you just sit there, or do you pay someone to build software for you? Should that person in turn refuse the money, saying “that’s too risky: Steve said so?”

Steve’s rant is aimed at CEOs instead, but the principle still stands. To what extent to people have to clamour for a particular feature before a CEO will say “well, I don’t want that, but I do want your money?” Personal phone calls? Petitions to their local MPs? Pre-ordering? Pressing themselves against the windows of electronics shops and drooling on the glass? Demanding it be available on the welfare state? Well, the canny software house would have started building the software before any of the above had happened. But how could they know, if they’re not secretly telepathic? Well, among other methods, by gathering business requirements.

From Steve’s point of view it’s less of an issue, because he works at Google, the House of Blue Sky Development. And I don’t begrudge him that privileged viewpoint at all, because Google has earned the business success that bankrolls schemes like twenty-percent time projects. If every business had oodles of cash to throw at developers as they wander off along tangential projects, then maybe none of them would need to through half an oodle at a discovery phase. But as long as money is a locally limited and unevenly distributed resource, then there will need to be different solutions to the problem of working out what to actually build.

The ultimate direction of software development proposed by Steve is just far too exclusive, and it’s been the bane of open-source projects for years. Project after project caters for its tiny community, never reaching out to what other communities might need; they start to cool off, then founder; the codebase is mothballed, and the project finally expires. Worse, in Steve’s world, we’d have to wait for blind people and RSI sufferers to write their own FOSS voice recognition software: maybe the blind person could hold the keyboard and mouse, while the RSI sufferer tells them what’s on the screen. Meanwhile, able-bodied programmers develop that sort of stuff for Vista without a qualm, and they can charge the earth for it because people want it.

Ubuntu’s recent successes might be almost entirely attributed to the fact that (a) the project is well managed and directed and (b) they reach outside their own community, and solve problems for people other than computer programmers. Despite Ubuntu, Gartner recently announced that Linux had a 4% market share. 96% of consumers opt for software built by people who on the whole weren’t solving their own problems.

The first commenter on Steve’s recent post says:

I find that a lot of Free Software is awful for exactly this reason — the authors built it for themselves. Their software only works for other hardcore programmers because they can put up with the same complex implementation and integration problems and not even notice them, and if it’s not quite right they lose a million potential worldwide users for every mistake.

The recent success of Ubuntu as Open Source Software shows that a lot of other projects still don’t get it. The first thing an OS community needs is outreach: scratching other people’s itches and not their own.

Actuallly, he says almost exactly the opposite, but then: he emails people with patches, so he’s probably a software author himself. At the very least, he’s in that four percent, preaching to the rest of the already converted. Meanwhile, the rest of the market went thataway. And if Warren Buffett were to take a break from spreading thickly his easily-believed homespun down-to-earth nonsense for a minute or two, what would he really do to capture that 96%?

Still, fighting the good green fight can feel pretty lonely, and sometimes you forget not just how many people are on your side in the next office or town, but also of the billions of people who have something to lose to climate change. So as a bit of fun, and to remind ourselves what it’s all about, we’ve recently given the green finger to climate change. Here we are, doing just that:

Want to join in? You can respond to the original YouTube video.

I don’t know how much experience Neil Berkett has of bus lanes—I will gladly credit him with enough of it to speak from a position other than that of the pompous, ignorant millionaire who thinks the only way to use a bus lane is to drive a bus—but in my own universe the bus lane is how buses get into the town centre far faster than private transport. If I were a customer looking at Virgin Media right now, to determine whether or not it was worth signing up with them, I’d scarcely pay more for less: that counts for both connection speed and managerial intelligence.

As I spend the scraps and offcuts of January and February evenings ripping and filing my 2007’s CDs—some of which I won’t listen to very often once they’re fossilized in the collection—I’m aware of a tremendous weight of madeness and invested time and energy on the part of the manufacturers, and of a sort of casual luxuriating in my first-world lifestyle on my own part. You prepare a playlist before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my tapeheads with crude oil; my CD tray overflows. So in 2008 I hope to buy as few CDs as possible (none is the target) while also avoiding DRM-crippled music and staying legal.

To this end I’ve been seeking free and semi-free online music—free as in beer, semi-free as in of limited choice—since the new year. So far, outside of bittorrenting (which is obviously of variable legality, depending on what you’re downloading), I’m having some success with Last.fm. Until recently they offered a sort of customized “radio station”, where your input into the of the next track was limited to an intelligent deduction by Last.fm based on what you told it you enjoyed in the past. Now, alongside this potluck service, they’ve just started offering three free streamings of any explicitly chosen track before requiring you to buy the track from a commercial partner.

I’ve yet to try the former service (I think you might have to subscribe to be on the beta wagon: I’ll look into that later), but the latter has so far provided our house with unlimited, free access to a radio station for our very own target market. While such slightly sinister profiling might make it harder for me to discover truly new music, it does at least permit me to expand the boundaries of my comfort zone slowly, and cast a critical eye over my friends’ music preferences, while at the same time giving artists their due and most importantly avoiding physical recordings unless I really want them.

Most commercial support for Linux distributions still consists of monolithic installations, wrapped up with checksums to prevent you tampering with them, and installing themselves on your computer in whatever location and potentially harmful fashion they fancy. Until upgrading to Gutsy this was largely my experience (painfully and often repeated) with such packages as nVidia and wireless drivers, and interesting software that barely gave a second thought to existing Feisty users.

After a spot of Googling I was expecting to have to go through the same palaver with Last.fm’s client, and crossed my fingers that nothing would go horribly wrong. But I needn’t have worried: the Linux client for Last.fm is

1. free of cost, as in beer
2. free of restrictions, as in open source
3. free of hard work, as in a no-sweat installation utilizing the Debian packages and apt package management that’s core to Ubuntu

To install it on Gutsy, you first want to add the GPG key for the repository for security reasons. At a command line, type:

wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You’ll be asked by sudo for your password. Then, open Synaptic Package Manager (under “System > Administration” in the GNOME menus); then, via “Settings > Repositories”, add the following new third-party repository:

deb http://apt.last.fm/ debian stable

You can then search for the Last.fm widget’s package in the manager (hint: it’s called lastfm) and install it. When you first run it after installation it’ll ask for your Last.fm account, so best have one of those in advance. And that’s it: you’ve now got Last.fm’s widget on your Ubuntu PC.

All of the above is explained briefly on the very URL of the apt repository. Not only that, but they have a free bonus photo of a very cute bunny in case all the apt stuff bores you rigid. Like a TV licence for the Flash version of the BBC iPlayer, all of this is practically worth a subscription alone. As I type, my mouse sits over the very location of the link to do so in a separate tab. I just need to know first: how many more rabbits do I get when I join?

Certainly marketing genius and total orphan Lily Allen, and internationally renowned cuttinge-edge futurologist Gene Simmonds are pulling the sort of pouts you’d expect from them both, and Guy Hands has a look on him like they just cancelled Christmas. But even in these hilariously gurning faces of criticism, and amid the wafting and intermittent atmospheres of genial misunderstanding of how content works these days from the TV and radio monoliths, Radiohead are keeping chipper. Far more so than I’ve ever seen them before, in fact. And when everyone’s on YouTube for free, letting rip with their Thumbs Down webcast, and accepting its reappearance—syndication, if you like—all over the shop very shortly afterwards, was a refreshing change from everywhere else exercising rigid control at the loss of an audience.

But for those of you (like me) who were thinking of taking part in Radiohead’s distribution revolution, yet weren’t keeping an eye on the time:

• The download-only area of “In Rainbows” closed this morning. I just managed to get a copy of the tracks yesterday: I’m sure if you’ve missed out then you’ll all know someone who’s got a copy they can loan you, right? Loan you until the plain old CD comes out at the start of 2008, right?
• Discboxes (40-quid monstrosities that I was secretly waiting till next year to buy) are actually already out and limited stock. I thought from various reportings of the event that they too weren’t going to be on sale till the new year. Get yours while it’s hot.

If there’s demand I bet there’ll be more discboxes, but frankly if Radiohead don’t stamp “SECOND IMPRESSION” over the next lot then I might sue. Actually, if my discbox doesn’t have “A TOTAL W.A.S.T.E. OF CARBON” scrawled over it then I’ll be terribly disappointed.

They’re great teachers and really highly qualified, as you can tell from the rash of logos on the homepage.