Kris's blog

Panadopter (n): Someone who’ll sign up to anything.

Last night I went to a Google Wave presentation, the comedy highlight of which was Pulp Fiction, Wave Edition:

The talk was given by Lars & Steffani, who gave the Google I/O talk earlier this year. I think everyone there was secretly hoping for an exciting announcement, but it was essentially an adoption-so-far talk. Very interesting, but no new revelations.

The Q&A section was mostly, "Can we get feature X?". I felt for Lars during the Q&A, who was forced to answer a stream of questions with, "Yes, we're working on it, but no, I can't give you a release date."

Anyway, here are some snippets I did glean:

• Speed seems to be their number 1 development priority. I was surprised quite how much the speed was bothering them - I find it fine.
• There's a team of about 60 people, of which 50 are engineers.
• They really want people to press Shift+Enter a lot.
• The biggest reason they're losing new users is the classic network problem - when you first arrive, none of your friends have an account yet. It's scaling well, and they're opening a vast number of new accounts every day. Something in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Demand for invitations is still outstripping supply though.
• The second biggest 'leak' is a lack of notification. People don't know when they have new messages, or when friends are online, so they're not drawn back in.

That last point is the real thorn for me. When I've used wave with friends I've found it to be a terrific product. It really makes online conversations easier. It's as interactive as instant messaging - better even - but it keeps the 'threadyness' of email. A topic sits in one place, and you can keep chatting about it and coming back to it over the days & weeks.

It's a great user experience, but it's sadly hard to come by. It's rare that I'm online and one of my contacts is too. I really need an iGoogle gadget that says when people are online, and when I have new messages. I'll gladly build one as soon as they build the API.

In the pub afterwards I got to speak to Lars very briefly. I apologised, but asked when there'd be a notifications API. He rolled his eyes and said, "Soon, soon." Poor guy. He's probably going to spend most of their European tour saying that...

One thing about me that’s changed over the years is I’ve become less of a perfectionist. I used to think nothing was good enough, and looking back, it definitely meant I got a lot less done. It’s funny – if things have to be 100% right, you can freeze up and achieve very little, but if you aim for 95% you can actually crack through things at a fair old pace. Obviously you have to be sensible about it – a working engine is the first 5% of a car, not the last – but something can be ‘ready’ before it’s ‘done’. The current trend to launch software in ‘beta’ is an example of that thinking, and it works. Perfection is paralysing.

Somehow I was reminded of this this lunchtime, listening to Prince’s song Kiss. It’s an absolutely fabulous track. It’s novel, funky, catchy, sexy, brilliantly produced and cool. Anyone creating a single work like that could die happy. If you haven’t heard it recently, dig a copy up – it’s perfection.

And yet, Tom Jones came along an absolutely knocked the balls out of it. Nailed it. And as a friend of mine once said, “When Jones nails a song, it stays nailed.” How is that justice? How can you be broken if you strive for perfection, but if you do the impossible and achieve it someone can still come along and effortlessly trump it?

Obviously, most of us will never face this problem directly. Very few of the readers of this blog are actually as cool as Prince (though some do wear the stilettos and eyeliner). And none of us will be graced by the attention of the Mighty Welsh Enormous. But the problem stands: strive for perfection and you may achieve nothing. Achieve perfection and even that won’t last. Delude yourself that a thing like, “The Best” can exist, and you end up watching football.

What’s the answer? I don’t know – I’m just rambling at lunchtime. But I think from now on I might try rating my efforts in terms awesome per minute, rather than the absolute awesome that history demands…

So YouTube now supports video downloading, but only if you're browsing in the United States. A bit of a bugger, since I want to get some of the Google I/O 2009 talks onto my iPhone.

But all is not lost. I ran into this problem last year when NBC wouldn't send the latest episodes of Heroes over to Blighty. Here, in brief is the recipe:

You will need

1 cup SSH.
1 US-based server/mixing bowl.
1 Firefox.

Instructions

$ ssh -D 9999 me@myusaserver

Firefox Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings
* Manual proxy configuration
* SOCKS Host: localhost Port: 9999

Now the world will think you're browsing from the US.

Other recipes you may like to try

Getting through to iPlayer from outside the UK, using a UK-based server.

I've been trying to use Flash components in a GWT project running under Ubuntu, and I've been having a devil of a time getting flash to work. Flash works fine in my Firefox install, but not in the GWT hosted-mode browser. I've just found a fix, so here it is for Google & the world to find:

The trick is simply to copy¹ the flash plugin that Firefox is (successfully) using to the right directory, so that GWT can find it.

  # Find the plugin
  $ locate libflashplayer.so
  /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

  # Find the Mozilla directory.
  $ find $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins -type d -name 'mozilla*'
  /home/kris/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.linux_1.6.4.v200904062334/gwt-linux-1.6.4/mozilla-1.7.12/

  # Copy the plugin to the mozilla-1.7.12/plugins directory.
  cp /usr/lib... /home/../mozilla-1.7.12/plugins/

Restart the GWT hosted mode task, and Bob should be your uncle.

¹ Or symlink, or a bit of mucking about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH would probably do it too, but I'm just going for a straight copy here.

Woman ‘bit off’ partner’s tongue

...however, this quote from the victim, revealing his culinary sophistication is:

“I can’t distinguish between certain foods, like the difference between cheese and toast, and just toast.”

As you may know, I hate ABBA. Well, hate’s a tad strong. Let’s say I’m sick to death of them. Nevertheless, here’s a Wednesday afternoon game: If ABBA songs were countries, which countries would they be? Results from the office so far, starting with the easy ones:

• Mamma Mia – Italy, obviously.
• Waterloo – England, again a given.
• Fernando – Spain.
• Knowing Me, Knowing You – East Germany, where everyone was spying on everyone else.
• Dancing Queen – Brazil, home of the carnival.
• Take A Chance On Me – Las Vegas, though that’s stretching the rules a bit.

Anymore for any more?

...that if I put a blog entry in here, it’ll bounce through to twitter, and then to facebook. Is that good? Of course it is, it’s tech.

“Customers who bought this also bought: Davina’s Superbody Workout”

...well, those customers are weirdos. Kindly keep them away from me.

Gordon has become my new role model of change-driven design. Or design-driven change. Or something. Here's his latest brilliant statement:

"If there is a change to be made in the system and the system has failed, we will change the system."

Let's just see that again in code:

if (
  calculateAllPossibleChanges( system ).getSize() > 0
  &&
  system.getErrors().getSize() > 0
) {
  change( system )
}

protected void change( MutableSystem system ) {
  // TODO
}

The Earl of Sandwich’s sandwiches were sandwiched between the Earls of Sandwich’s portraits.

Woo-hoo – my first app is now up on iTunes. The imaginatively-named “Gold Price” app lets you track the price of gold bullion live:

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod touch you can download it now for free.

At least, that's the plan[1].

fn1. The queen of evil Evian made me post it.

I’ve just been taking a look at the list of Olympic events. Weird, weird, weird.

Softball, water polo and BMX biking are in there, but not rounders.

Judo, two flavours of gymnastics and Taekwondo make the list, but no Tai Chi.

Wrestling, boxing and fencing, but no fisticuffs.

And worst of all, running and jumping, but no climbing trees.
Or “putting on make-up while you’re there”[1].

I’m all for the Olympics, especially when someone else is paying for it, but they really ought to have consulted an expert (like me) when assembling the event list.

And I couldn’t find a single mention of Sir Daley Thompson anywhere…

¹ Thank you, Mr Izzard.

Everyone knows that Coca-cola got its name from the fact that it used to made with cocaine, right?

Well, it occurs to me that if history had gone a little differently and they’d made it with heroine instead, we’d all be drinking “Jack Daniels & Hero”...