ESB Bavarian Wheat
SG @ 26 degrees was 1052.
Jonoabroad
A place to leave my rants and ramblings.
Web Directions South 2011
I'm unsure if it was a conscious decision, but the over all theme seemed to be how our world is becoming Gibsonesque. From the opening keynote with GPS enabled bees to the closing keynote where James Bridle discussed render ghosts and how technology is trying incredibly hard to understand us and how we are seeing our world more and more through technology's eyes.
I attended a few great technical sessions, but think I got more value from the big picture sessions.
I can't say which was the best session, the ones that affected me most profoundly were How to be a Web Sorcerer with Dmitry Baranovskiy and Lanyrd: From side project to startup. They were quite different talks but talked in very human ways about their two topics.
I went to Dmitrys talk to have my pants scared off by a javascript genius and instead got a wonderful talk about not being afraid to fail and not to suck. You suck, by not trying in the first place.
Natalie Downe & Simon Willison gave a wonderfully frank talk on Lanyrd inconveniently taking off whilst they were on their honeymoon.
Relly Annett-Baker explained why it is the little bits of copy that we all ignore that are the very import bits to those who don't spend their day in our world. The threat of having your genitals feed to a shredder also gives you great focus.
John Allsop concreted my preference for applications being web based rather than native in his talk The Dao of Web Design Revisited
I think the biggest thing that web directions has done is to rejuvenate my enthusiasm for the industry in which I work. Which was getting dangerously close to caustic.
Hopefully the venue will also have Dyson airblades as the hand dries were ineffectual, yes that is the only negative thing, I liked the food and liked the fact we didn't get bags of conference bin fodder. I don't need yet another conference bag, kindle Fire or any other non iOS tablet however...
Thank you Maxine & John for a wonderful conference.
I am remiss in mentioning the wonderful opening titles by Cameron Adams.
Lion
So far I've not noticed anything huge to write home about apart from the cognitive dissonance of reverse scrolling. So far most applications have just worked, although I have had the following:
- Drobo required a firmware upgrade for Lion to be able to use the time machine partition
- I can't talk to assembla's git repositories anymore - Richard had the same issue with github and has a fix I shall try.
- The Lion upgrade appears to have removed my Sublime Text commandline symbloic link, which is annoying.
Finally, one very cool thing I've not had a chance to play with is the Network Link Conditioner, which looks like a jazzed up version of Sloppy.
Getting Adwords & google Forms to play nicely.
I recently set up a simple google Form as a survey to validate an idea I've been playing with and ran into an issue. I wanted to drive traffic to the survey using google adwords, but adwords wont let you link to a google.com URL. Nor will they let you mask the URL with a CNAME.
What to do?
I set up a one page site using google sites ( survey.jonoabroad.com ) and embedded the form in the page. This gives the added bonus of google analytics to track how many people are viewing the form Vs completing it.
If there is a simplier way to achieve the same thing, I'd love to know.
How to create a Ubuntu VM on Parallels 5
This causes me no end of confusion everytime I try to "quickly" fire up a VM to try something out, so I am leaving some notes in cause anyone else has the same problem.
1. When selecting an OS click Skip Detection rather than Continue.
2. Select Custom as the Virtual Machine Type.
This will stop the unhelp error Unable to create the Unattended.iso disc image.
iPad applications
A few people have asked what applications Im using on my iPad, here is the current list:
Allows you to save articles to read later, presents them sans website junk. Just the text on an off-white background, a most compelling way to read. Just Lovely.
PDF viewer - allows you to upload PDFs and other file types. I have all my technical books on it. Displays them nicely. Not sure it will be needed once iBooks supports PDFs, will see.
My twitter client of choice.
Photo from the Guardian each day with a "pro tip". Wonderfully built app, do one thing and do it well.
Nice to be able to watch telly without having to bother with a laptop.
Drawing tool, think finger painting for 3 year olds if you have my ability.
ssh terminal tool that supports keys. Useful if you need to check your servers and don't want to leave bed.
This is a wonderful game to showcase the interface. It was pointless after level 20 or so. They have since updated it and added a load more fucntionality. Probably not to bad to start now.
This is another wonderful showcase of the iPad interface, try playing with with a mouse and keyboard.
Current an iPhone app, it scales okay on the iPad. Is meant to be a free upgrade later this year. We play the board game at home, so it is nice to have a electronic version.
Native client, runs on the iPad and iPhone.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary & Thesaurus.
Twitter client, minimal twitter client. a few too many querks for me. This maybe a little unfair, it could be that it is different to my beloved echofon.
Google reader client, wonderful and minimal, unfortunately requires linear reading habits. I'm not linear in my reading.
Sort of like the website except crippled.
RSS reader, a little average. This maybe a little harsh, I've not spent a long time playing, it is mean to support google reader, I couldn't get it working. I still prefer google readers website, it allows me to move quickly through feeds.
Final thoughts
Waiting for iOS4 and mail that works, multitasking, folders and native skype. I've loosely ordered the apps according to how much I like / use them.
Branch you silly git
Recently I had a Hard drive failure. This meant a few things, firstly my Monday morning was less than fun. Secondly, I had a chance to test if TimeMachine worked. Time Machine did work, but for some reason the latest complete backup was five days before the failure. A few days lost work, nothing to serious. It has however highlighted
some deficiencies in routine, which has been:
- pull any updates from the server and build if needed,
- noodle with code, committing every so often,
- once finish, possibly several days later, push changes to the server.
Enter the branch
I've been using branches to experiment with idea and share them with folks, but not day to day work. Which in retrospect was a mistake. My daily routine will now be :
- pull any updates from the master branch and merge them with my current branch, build if needed,
- noodle with code, commiting every so often,
- at the very least at the end of the day push my branch to the server, compiling or not,
- once story is finished, merge changes back into master.
Set up
$git checkout -b jaf_wip master
Switched to a new branch 'jaf_wip'
$git push origin jaf_wip
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@git.spiralarm.com:taykt.git
* [new branch] jaf_wip -> jaf_wip
The above creates a new branch and pushes it to the server, this assumes you've already set a server to push to.
Touch screens - the beginning of the end for the mouse.
I hope the iPad is the beginning of touch screen integration into all apple products. MacBooks and iMacs would be wonderful with an entire touch screen. No longer this disconnect between the pointing device and the thing you want to interact with, want to move a window, drag it, want to resize a window pinch it.
It could be the beginning of the end for the mouse. Not for everyone, specialist, such as graphic designers and possibly programmers would probably still need a mouse, if they don't like or know keyboard short cuts.
Here is hoping my next laptop is a MacBookPro with the optional touch screen interface.
Google needs to get into farming
Anna and I were watching Michael Pollan's talk on fora.tv ( http://fora.tv/2009/05/05/Michael_Pollan_Deep_Agriculture#fullprogram ), HT @jjprojects. He was talking about what is wrong with the American food system and what can be done to fix it - moving away from mono-cultures and feed lots to reduce the amount of oil needed to produce food; move away from spending 10 Calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. Also by moving to a diverse crop less pesticide and fertiliser is needed. Finally grow locally, so the produce isn't being shipped across America or the world.
The solution seemed to be that we need more diverse farmers, with a preference for farmers owning the farm rather than large corporates. It occurred to me if you want to be able to trace your Broccoli or Steak from paddock to plate, google is your best bet. They already look after our search, mail and in the US at least are starting to look after our Health records, Internet connection and power generation.
So, why not our food system.
They could track from seed to plate, gathering a wealth of information to help grown better crops in the future. Not by dumping large amount of chemicals on them, but by working out what plants grow together well. Nature is already far better at this than us, but it doesn't mean we can't find improvements to suit our needs.
Also if google are running farms across america it can better cope with the ebb and flow of demand, instead of shipping steak from California to New York ship it from New England. It will arrive quicker and in a better state.
The problem with electric cars
They don't go far enough and then you need to charge them for eight hours. The answer is apparently better batteries and while the performance of batteries will improve, I don't see them getting to the point where one could reasonably drive from Sydney to Melbourne in a day nor Sydney to the Gold Coast any time soon.
One way to get round this would be to treat cars more like laptops; you don't use your laptop on the battery for 3 hours then sit round for 2 waiting for it to charge. You keep it plugged in when you can and only use the battery when you need to. If you inverted this idea and ran on battery around town, short trips and used power on longer trips - on the freeway / motorway. Then one could cover long distances with an electric car.
I'm not of course suggesting we whip and buy 1000Km flex and hang it from the back of the car, rather use some kind of induction in the road to get power into the car. Pretty much turning the motorways into huge Scalextric tracks. Some kind of induction system would allow the batteries to charge while also providing power to move the car.
It is probably not viable as the cost to build the infrastructure is most likely prohibitive and possibly having a big enough induction coil that close to people may not be healthy. Well, as healthy as the current western diet.
Another alternative would be to treat the batteries like BBQ gas bottles and rather than refilling them yourself you swap them when empty. Service stations would then turn into large charge lots. It might be more efficient to direct power to service stations than homes and businesses for charging?
My final thought was Hydrogen / electric hybrid. The Hydrogen could either charge the batteries or be the primary power source,
