culture

‘Tis the season to remove yourself from mailing lists if you’re subscribed from your work address. And there’s only so much good will to go round, until it’s completely soaked up by people asking lists with automated (un)subscription procedures to “unsubscibe” them, please, right now. It’s even harder to deal with those who ask thousands of people if they can be unsubscribed, but then re-subscribed

One big problem is vacation programs, aspects of your email provision that permit automated emails on your behalf to say “I’m not here right now.” They’re horrible, all of them. Outlook Express’ system only runs when your desktop is switched on: imagine the cheery post-seasonal look on your face as you return to work after two weeks away, power up your computer and then watch everyone who’s sent you an email for the past two weeks suddenly get an email each, per email they sent, before you can hit “cancel, for the sake of the newborn baby Jesus!” Outlook’s and Exchange’s equivalents merrily reply to any old bulk mailing list, leading to incredibly annoyed readers of the same address until someone takes matters into their own hands and either unsubscribes the offender or hunts them down, ties them to a post and shoots them in the head. Even the *nix .vacation is pretty grim, and you have to be careful not to set up some sort of nightmarish positive-feedback loop and bring down a server.

It occurred to me that it would be nice for subscription management systems to let you unsubscribe for a bit. The idea is that you’d let them tick a box at the point of unsubscription, and it would set a scheduled task to run in, say, two or three weeks’ time and resubscribe them. That would in a sense trump all the current user experiences when it comes to making sure you’re absent from all your mailing lists for the vacation duration. It would be fairly easy to do, because after a prompt from cron on the right date it could pretty much run off all the existing subscription code by calling a URL internally (and hence not requiring CAPTCHA or validation).

And then I realised: the people who would best benefit from the functionality wouldn’t even think to look for it. They’d just keep on telling all their fellow readers that they want to unsubscibe.

I’m so impressed with Radiohead. I was a fan back in the days of The Bends (y’know: before they literally, if not metaphorically, sold out), and have more affection for Pablohoney than most. But in an era when it’s trivial to get whatever music you want for free off your mate who happened to buy it, they accepted that fact and gave alternative distribution a whirl. And maybe it worked and maybe it didn’t: it depends on who you’re talking to.

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.

Incidentally, I currently have very little network at home. Eclipse managed to transfer my broadband fine during the house move, and then cancel both my old and new packages simultaneously at the point the old house’s contract expired (December 4). Oddly, although pulling the plug took but a second, reconnecting can take five working days. I’d love to know what they’re currently up to.

In the mean time, when necessary, I’m connecting to an alt-Fon network called something like Liberty Europe. I think they might be communists.

Agh! The fourth Oxford Geek Night is tomorrow: here’s a list of speakers. It looks like it’s going to be a darn good evening for everyone, and hopefully I can relax for long enough to enjoy it myself.

As usual we’ve managed to get a good mix of talks, with discussion of the society-changing work behind mySociety by Tom Steinberg himself, and a presentation of the really neat Pylons web framework by James Gardner. We’ve also got microslots on web security, open-source TV, and web solutions like nanoformats, mashups and the semantic web applied to social webs. And if you want to come and see me bluster and stutter my way through my stint at compèring, then you’re in for a real treat.

Skip intro - or three types of copy the world will never miss

… Did you think I typed in your URL so I could watch a movie? Duh! I want information and I want it now. Only a fool actively erects barriers between a potential customer and his content…

I have a suggestion for a more user-friendly line of copy on the home page. It reads “Play pointless Flash movie that we paid a fortune for and are now desperate to have you watch.” Then the small children at whom these animations are so clearly aimed could sit there all day watching zebras turning into photocopiers while the rest of us get on with some work.

So writes Andy Maslen of Sunfish, in magazine trade publication InCirculation. I remember when I was doing my physics DPhil that a certain global electronics manufacturer (that also deals in household goods) lost thousands and thousands of pounds of business from us because I could never get past the Flash splash page. Fast forward six or seven years and lots of companies are still making the same mistake.

Oxford Geek Nights have got a mention in the November 2007 issue of .net magazine. The whole article by Mark Boulton isn’t available online, but it discusses the resources that are available for freelance hopefuls, and how events such as OGN and dConstruct (yes, it mentions them in the same breath; yes, in that order!) can help those beginning a freelance career make contacts, share ideas and reduce their isolation in the industry.

I’ve no idea how we managed to get such exposure, but hopefully it bodes well for OGN4 (obligatory plug: the next OGN is on Wednesday November 28, at the Jericho Tavern.)

The OGN juggernaut rumbles on towards the fourth Oxford Geek Night. Keynotes have been confirmed:

• Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety
• James Gardner, co-founder of the Pylons Web Framework

We’ve also (as you can see above) got the website sorted out, alongside the Upcoming event. How l33t are we?

We’re back! After a too-long absence the Oxford Geek Nights return, sadly without Natalie at the helm (which is why it’s taken us until now to get our act together…)

OGN #4 is scheduled for November 28th, in the upstairs room at the Jericho Tavern as before. We’ll update the OGN website asap, but we’re already on Upcoming. That means it must be happening, so stick it in your diaries now.

We’re firming up the keynote speakers now, but if you would like to do a microslot then let us know.

We’ll also update the OGN website asap, but we’ll stick any breaking news on the Upcoming entry and when everything’s finalized announce the details on the mailing list.

I hope you all realise what day it is tomorrow. Kevin Reynen writes on the drupal.org development list:

It’s one thing to change your blog. It’s another to change all the sites of your coworkers browse!

http://greasemonkey.makedatamakesense.com/browse_like_a_pirate/

Rumour has it that this is how one of the original on-the-web site piratizers worked: it would translate your webpage into piratese, and also change all the links so that they linked back to the piratized version of the page. This was all well and good until webcrawlers started to hit it, and be redirected to it at every link they crawled. At one point Google’s indexes contained a shadowy, sinister twin of the entire web; several of the piratized sites, being slightly more random and novel than the originals, were ranking higher on the results. Everything had been piped through the piratizer.

Yarr, that be what young Willison related one stormy night, whilst the twain of us were bebarcamped some fifty miles east of Pompey. Many a rum were sunk that day.

… Sorry, I seem to have peaked too early.

Assaf writes about, among other things, REST as a simplifier of development against an existing system:

REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.

Interestingly, a corollary to this was brought up at Barcamp Brighton this weekend. During Gareth Rushgrove’s talk about REST and Nabaztag, a chap whose name I’ve again forgotten (although I’m sure someone like Fatty will enlighten me) pointed out that much of the push of SOAP is coming from the vendors, because the vendors make their money from selling tools, and REST development needs very few tools, most of which are free.

Undoubtedly there’s a set of problems that REST finds hard, but this truism is extended by SOAP vendors to the hard-to-prove (but also hard-to-contradict) claim that it’s a larger set, or a set more pertinent to enterprise solutions, than the set which SOAP finds hard. It convinces the consumers, because intelligent data mining and storage has always been a difficult problem, and a simple solution like REST feels like underkill for the job in hand. They let you confuse libre and gratis, the vendors point out (I see them sitting on the consumer’s shoulders with tridents at this point): so where’s the hidden cost of this free lunch?

(hat tip to Simon Willison)