The petition also cited the security vulnerabilities in IE6 as another good reason to upgrade, surely our Government systems should be using secure and reliable software.

The Government’s response basically boils down to:

• the security issues are dealt with by the Government networks, firewalls and filters
• upgrading is not cost effective

Now, I can see that the cost to upgrade is more than will be more about upgrading all the existing systems that have been built to ONLY work with IE6 than just installing new browsers on all PCs and that that cost will bring no new direct benefit to users and therefore the cost doesn’t seem to be justified, but what doesn’t seem to have been understood is the future cost of NOT upgrading.

Not only is there a cost for any web project that must be made compatible with IE6 (this cannot be understated), but the cost of Government users not being able to take advantage of new techniques, interfaces and tools that are commonplace in the web applications we all use daily is enormous.

Our ability to open our Government up and  for citizens to work with civil servants is going to rely on everybody being able to use the same tools, to be able to see and share the same information and contribute to it together.

Now surely there is someone, somewhere in Microsoft who is bright enough to work out how IE6 can be packaged up so it can still be used on those legacy systems that weren’t built to the right standards in the first place, while still allowing IE8 (or another modern browser) to be used for all other modern systems.

Gina Trapani

Inspiration comes in many forms.  Sometimes it’s a TED talk that captures your imagination, or a TV show that really communicates the importance of a subject in a way that brings it to life, but for me for the past few months some inspiration has come from a woman discussing a fairly ordinary topic on an online panel/discussion show.

Gina Trapani is the co-host of This Week in Google alongside Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte.  It’s a show that I try and watch live every Saturday at  5:15 EST, which works out about 10:15pm UK time.  Each week the panellists (and usually a guest) dial in via skype and  discuss the technology, business and social impact of the week’s goings on atGoogle.  Maybe you don’t think that this would make riveting viewing but the conversation is always lively, interesting and often insightful.

But why would I find Gina Trapani’s presence inspirational, I mean it’s not exactly Nobel prize winning stuff is it?  Well no, but Gina’s ability to see through the technology and the business issues and communicate the real benefits that are being provided.  She also exudes a real love for technology that is infectious without being elitist or condescending.

I recall an example; Gina explained (and I’m paraphrasing) that she respected people who use Linux as their desktop more than those who use Windows or OSX because ‘they are willing to put the effort into using something just because it is right’.  That understanding that the technology in itself is not to be revered, but those who use it to better themselves and benefit others deserve a nod of recognition marks, in my book, Gina as someone who inspires me to try and do good.

Gina’s recently joined to Expert Labs, and they are adopting and developing her ThinkTank crowdsourcing application, which will be applied to help the US Government to address the ‘Grand Challenges’ of the 21st century – so maybe that  Nobel prize isn’t such a crazy idea.

• Ubuntu
• Boxee

Thanks to Liam Green-Hughes fantastic guide, it’s been relatively painless.  I didn’t need to do the crazy-assed graphix driver installaiton either – I just used EnvyNG to get and install the correct Nvidia drivers.

I now have it all up and running and playing music and video from my NAS. My next task is to interface a standard Sky remote control via LiRC and a Nintendo Wii remote via bluetooth.  I can then start building apps on top of the XUL based interface provided by Boxee.

If anyone has any ideas of apps that would be appropriate for a TV based device (either in the home or in an office environment) or any interesting ways in which gestures from a Wii remote could be interpreted, please let me know.

In order to seed some interesting conversations, the geekup organiser (Jag) asked a few people to ‘host’ some conversation topics.  Jag asked me to try and start up a conversation about the Digital Britain Interim report recently published by Lord Carter.  I was only too happy to oblige.

So I spent a considerable part of the evening talking to a couple of people (namely Chris and John) about what was right and wrong with the report and its proposals.  I was keen to try and steer the conversation away from widely discussed topics of infrastructure (whether it should be the government’s role to fund our new high bandwidth to the home network, or should it be left to the telcos?) and content (are the proposals in DB for the setup of a ‘copyright police’ simply propping up an outdated business model).

Instead I wanted to discuss one area that Lord Carter’s report doesn’t seem to cover at all – digital services.  I wanted to know if there are any digital services that are big enough that only a government could deliver them, but are not so important that we shouldn’t trust a government to provide them.

The obvious candidate is digital identity services, but that kind of falls into the ‘too important to be trusted to government’ category.  Also, as an evangelist for openID (and other distributed service mechanisms), I couldn’t, hand on heart, suggest that the identity management for an entire nation be provided by a central service (government run or not).

This lead to the statement perhaps government should instead concentrate on setting data interchange standards and service provider certification. The obvious application would be to enable the easy transfer of personal health records from one provider to another, not in some invisible way where any backstreet quack (or pharmaceutical company exec) who has got themselves an NHS login can access my records, but instead  in a way where I could be in control of who has access to my records.  Better even, I can also receive notifications when my records are accessed.

Chris mentioned that he didn’t think that current FOI legislation allows someone to ask an organisation WHY they have their personal data, which may become a pertinant question when you see that BigPharma Inc. have recently accessed your GP records.

Of course, this idea is probably past its best as the Nth billion pound of fund is poured into the big centralised NHS health-care record system, but the principle could be applied to many other areas of personal information: credit records, employment/tax history, benefits, pensions, criminal records/driving convictions.

Not only did we think that setting standards is what government is better suited to than providing services (certainly in IT), but it could also allow for innovation and consumer choice to enter the information systems market and allow the public to be able to control their own data.

Of course after this very interesting and inciteful discussion we then went on to talk about how the record industry is trying to prop up an outdated business model and how all the best songs are written by poor starving artists anyway…

I’m now looking forward to GeekUp Sheffield next month!

You see the brief is to pick a woman in technology that I admire and blog about them to try and provide more women with the role-models, the inspirational figures that they are able to related to, that will encourage them to work with and in technology.

While thinking about why it is that I have so few women in my list of technologists I admire, I recalled how I was first introduced to probably the most influential women in technology ever, Ada Lovelace.  During my first year of my Electronic and Control Systems Engineering degree, I took a course on programming.  Early in this course the lecturer was discussing (very briefly) the general concept of strong typing in languages for embedded systems and mentioned ADA, the language developed for the US DoD.  With glee, he told his audience of impressionable young engineers (a small percentage of who were women) that ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s mistress.

And with that dismissal of the significance of inventing the concept of programming, my lecturer gave a slamming indictment of the perception the contribution women have made to our industry.

So I will do all I can do to counter this perception and let women know that our industry welcomes their participation and I look forward to being inspired by them in future.

Now, I know many women technologists, I have worked with some outstanding women over my years and while I have respect for their knowledge, skills and endeavour, I don’t think I can claim any of them to be my heroine.  To admire these women just on the grounds of their gender would be patronising and demeaning.

I also know of a few women who are industry leaders and influencers, but  I have to confess to being more interested in the things that they do rather than who they are.  Among the few women’s names that have been associated with things that have been inspiring enough for me to research the person behind them is Mary Lou Jepsen.

What I know about Mary Lou Jepsen can be found out from her page on Wikipedia, but her dedication to a project such as One Laptop Per Child, must surely deserve admiration.  The OLPC vision is:

To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

This must be one of the most important technology projects that could be undertaken in a World where the divide between the connected and the non-connected is widening and being connected brings both the opportunity for self-fulfilment and economic independence.  Access to information allows people to educate themselves in the absence of anybody to teach themselves, to trade in a renewable resource that they have in abundance, their intelligence, and to add their contribution to the entire world of understanding and knowledge.

Mary Lou Jepsen, was the Chief Architect and driving force behind the OLPC project and was pivotal in getting numerous large corporates to participate in it.  Without her, the World would be a poorer and less equal one.

The format is simple, there is no format.

It’s a completely unstructured social event.  Turn up, eat, drink and talk to people.  Talk to people you know and to people you don’t.  Talk about the web, talk about the weather.  Whatever.  I’d really like it if you’d blog/tweet/email what you talked about (or what you can remember).  But whatever.

Rather than being the rather elitist and snobbish affair that it has been previous (yeah, right!) I decided this time to make it an all comers event.  If you know of anyone who’d like to meet up for a drink and a chat about web stuff, please point them at upcoming.org.

After checking for conflicts with other local web events, I’ve set the date for March the 26th, and I see no reason not to meet-up at the Devonshire Cat again.

Please use upcoming.org to state whether you’re likely to attend as, if the numbers go crazy, I might have to warn them we’re coming.

Have you ever noticed that if you fold a sheet of A3 paper in half it is the same size as a sheet of A4.  This fact is what implies the aspect ratio of ISO standard paper (A3, A4, A5, etc).

If a piece of A4 has long and short sides sides of a and b respectively and a sheet of A3 has long and short sides c and d respectively, and the aspect ratio of A4 and A4 is the same, then:

a/b = c/d

and the long side of A4 is the same as the short side of A3:

a = d

and the short side of an A4 is half the long side of and A3:

b = c/2

so, substituting:

d/(c/2) = c/d

(d^2)/(c/2) = c

(d^2)/(c^2) = 1/2

d/c = 1/√2

so the ratio of d/c (the short to long side) of A3 (and therefore any ISO paper size) is 1/√2 or approximately 0.707

I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I thought you might too.

I just joined the OpenID foundation in order to take part in the current board elections.

I’m reading the mailing list traffic with interest trying to figure out which candidates I should support, which ones are going to provide the OpenID with the right mix of skills and experience to make it have even greater success in 2009.

For me there are a couple of obvious choices, Chris Messina is an incredibly smart guy.  As well as already taking several projects to widespread success (BarCamp, Firefox), he also has the right UX focus that I think OpenID desperately needs.

David Recordon is another obvious choice for me.  Having seen him speak at FOWA London, I found him smart and articulate, this is added to his obvious commitment to OpenID (and the rest of the open stack).

As for for my other 5 votes, well, I’ve got to the 24th of December to decide, so I’ll carry on lurking on the mailing lists.

If you too are interested in having a say in how one of the most important elements of the open web will be driven in the coming months, then et yourself over to openid.net and pay just $25 to beome a foundation member.  Worth every cent

He explained, quite eloquently, how a technique called Markov Chains is used to create alternative copies of some source content that, to a search engine, has the same keyword profile, but cannot be linked back to the original content or to any of the other Markov derived versions.

Of course to a human reader the Markov derived versions are absolute nonsense, but to a search engine, they look like legitimate pages of human created content.  So when sprinkled liberally with links to the spammer’s target URL, the search engine rank that URL higher as a popular destination.

Now, I have no problem with people who use ingenuity to find kinks in the systems to bend to their own advantage, but it seems to me that it is not the (big nasty corporate) search engines who are being conned here, and it’s not just the users or the people who just want to create interesting and useful content but it’s the whole community that eventually loses out.

As the spam-arms-race spirals it becomes harder for us to find useful content or to get our useful content found.

While writing this I found that Seth Godin (unsurprisingly) put it much better..

My first thought about a concept of banking follwoing a utility model.  At present we commit to provider for a financial product and service i.e. deposit account, personal loan, mortgage, home insurance.  We commit to this provider based on explicit criteria (lowest interest rate, best cover) and value judgements (trusted brand, customer service).  When we want to swicth between providers we have to go through a world of pain or pay exit fees.

Now if we could give an online agent our criteria and allow it to move our deposits and loans between providers we would have a utility model for money.

The problem is what needs to happen to enable this:

• standardisation of services – not necessarily just one product (like 240 volts of electricity) but at least a way to be able to automatically compare products.  The comparison websites are already moving the industry in this direction.
• low cost of service setup for the providers – I have no idea how much a credit check/score costs a lender, but if this cost is passed on to the customer as a fee, it becomes a form of tie-in.
• better data exchange facilities between customers and providers – if I can’t quickly, easily and automatically setup my direct debits with my current account provider, I am prevented from changing providers.   Again, a tie-in, but this time imposed by the destination provider.
• and, most significantly, a significant provider in this marketplace to introduce financial services on this basis.  Actually the real problem is that it needs more than one provider else there is no choice of provider.

I find the likleyhood of two or more financial service providers who are willing to disrupt the market by moving to this kind of model pretty slim.  Especially as it moves the whole marketplace further from a value-add model to a price driven one.

Crazy thought eh?

My second thought was more grounded.  In this age of tightening purse strings I am wondering why my online bank is not providing me with visualisation tools.  Something that lets me see where my money goes each month and therefore where I could make the most significant belt tightening moves.

Sure I could (and occasionally do) download my statements and import them into a spreadsheet to categorise and analyse my outgoings.  But, surely my bank could save me a lot of trouble by not only allowing me to view my outgoings as graphs and charts.  It could use its understanding (or the aggregated knowledge of all its customers) to automatically categorise my expenditure.  Perhaps visualisations of my outgoings over time would also help me too.  Particularly if they could be compared against the aggregation of other users too.

So how about it banks?  Two options there, one that leads you to compete more on price, the other that adds value to your online services.