Bill Gates on the pace of change

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Omphaloskepsis →

Word of the day…

Laziness, stupidity and bad spelling.

There are plenty of words that are frequently misspelt by many people – you're probably familiar with many of them. Its easy (and fun) to poke fun at people who can't remember the simple differences between "you're" and "your", or "lose" and "loose". I would hazard a guess that this tends to be the result of an auditory) way of thinking – you think of a word in terms of the sound, and then think of how to spell that sound. (In other words, its not stupidity or laziness – its just a different mode of thinking that might seem stupid or lazy to people who think in a different way.)

But the flip side of the coin is the handful of words which I personally find myself consistently misspelling. For example, I always misspell "respondents." It just looks wrong to me, while "respondants" looks right. I know which one is correct – it just looks wrong to me.

Not a big problem though – I've usually got something that automatically either corrects it or sticks a red line underneath it to remind me that I've made that same old mistake again.

Except sometimes, I use the kind of software that doesn't include a spell checker. Photoshop is one. Final Cut Pro is another. Unlike email software or word processors that hold your hand and walk you through the complicated process of putting a bunch of letters in the right order, these are pieces of software that you use to put letters together to make words, while at the same time worrying about fonts, colours, balance and contrast between the typography and other graphical elements – and in the case of Final Cut, all of these things running at 24 frames per second (so you also have to worry about the timings, speed, where the viewer's attention is going to be, how what they are reading matches up with what they are saying etc.) In short, besides putting letters together to try to make words, you tend to have a few other things on your mind at the same time.

With an email or word processor, when you are finished you hit 'send' or 'save' or 'print', and your job is done. If you do make a mistake which, for some reason, the spell checker hasn't picked up on, it is fairly trivial to correct it. With a video though, when you are finished, you have to deal with rendering and transcoding the video. For something that is just a few minutes long, this can easily take half an hour or so. Maybe you then need to send it to someone – again, for a few minutes of high definition video being uploaded over a domestic broadband connection (where upload speeds are usually a fraction of the download speeds), this can take up another big chunk of time.

I mention all of this because today, I misspelt "respondents" in a video. (Worth mentioning at this point – by profession, I am a researcher. That means that I spend quite a lot of my time dealing with pieces of research, which are usually all about trying to get information out of respondents. So I make this mistake quite a lot…) Correcting the error took up about an hour of my time – about one minute to correct the spelling, and then an hour of rendering, transcoding and uploading.

Except, I then realised that I didn't actually correct the spelling. Instead, I spotted the word that had been spelt correctly, thought that it looked wrong, and then 'corrected' it to the incorrect spelling which I know is incorrect, but I still think looks right. So I then had to spend another minute correcting two misspellings, followed by another hour of rendering, transcoding and uploading.

Some would say that we are overly reliant on spell checking software. I agree. Because I am able to rely on spell checking 99% of the time, I don't need to think about correcting my way of thinking that leads me to consistently make the same mistake again and again, even though – unlike the 'wrong word' kind of spelling – it is quite simply a case of me being lazy and stupid.

And today, being lazy and stupid cost me about 2 hours of my own time (because I was doing this piece of work during my holidays, thanks to a different type of laziness and stupidity.

But thats the subject of another post…)

iPad mini as a notebook replacement

For just over 5 years, I've been working at a media agency, where there is something of a convention that everyone carries around a notebook which they use to take notes in meetings, presentations, conferences etc, manage 'to do' lists, and generally write down all the stuff that they need to (or might need to) remember. This might be something to do with a particular book from 1948 from a senior partner in an advertising firm. Or it might be something that happens in all sorts of industries – I know that us media types (even digital media types) seem to have an aversion to bringing laptops into meetings, which is an aversion that plenty of other businesses clearly don't share.

When I first started, the iPhone was very new, and very expensive (the iPhone 3G — the first to be available with a carrier subsidy — had yet to be launched.) But I had an iPod Touch (which was basically an iPhone without the 'phone'), and I started using the Notes app as a notebook alternative. For some things, it worked brilliantly — being able to come back from an out of office meeting with all my notes already typed up, which I could then easily email out to relevant people was a huge benefit. Having all my notes in a searchable format was another huge plus.

But the massive downside was that if you are sitting in a presentation and typing up notes on an iPod Touch, it looks to anyone watching (including whoever was part of the meeting or giving the presentation) like you weren't paying attention, and were just busily involved in sending a never ending stream of texts. So I stopped using my digital notes, and started using notebooks.

Now, I do like the idea of going back to the 'digital notes' idea again with my iPad mini. Its about the same size as a small notebook, meaning that its easy to carry around. But unlike a notebook, its easy to organise notes once they have been scribbled down. (For someone with handwriting like mine, 'scribbled' is definitely the right word — which means that as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to read what I've written.) You get around the problem of filling one notebook, having to move on to the next – and either carrying two books around for a couple of weeks, or transposing a bunch of notes from the back of one book to the front of the next. (Also, you miss out on the 'clean new book' stage.)

Importantly, I think that in the space of the 3 years since the iPad was launched, it is no longer something that most people see as the kind of toy that you only bring out in a meeting room as some sort of statement – that they have become quickly accepted as a useful organisational tool, rather than a gadget for checking emails and looking at Facebook – despite my own experiences, if someone is doing something with an iPhone or BlackBerry in a meeting, I still assume that whatever it is they are doing is unrelated to what everyone else in the room is doing.)

So… I'm trying out Notability to start with. It seems like it has everything I want from a note-taking application (easy to type and doodle, Dropbox sync, easy export etc.) I should be able to get stuff from the app to my 'proper' computer and vice versa – even if I don't quite know what that will mean just yet in terms of workflow practice. I expect that whatever problems I hit won't be the sort of problems that I will be able to forsee by simply reading app reviews.

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As a vague aside, I realised while trying to carry a couple of drinks at the same time that the iPad mini is actually small enough to fit into the back pocket of my jeans. I wouldn't really like to sit down on it, but it does mean that it's something I can carry around no-handed. I guess that technically, I could do the same thing with a moleskine-type notebook - especially one with a soft cover, but its never occurred to me to try it. Perhaps because I've never really taken the time to think about how I want to use a £7 notebook in the way that I'm thinking about exactly how I'm going to use a £400 tablet. Or perhaps just because I've never had a reason to carry around a notebook at the same time as two handfuls of bottles and glasses…

Old site still out of action (for the forseeable future…)

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This post is now the landing page for my old site at somerandomnerd.com, as it explains why somerandomnerd.com no longer exists.

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It is now two weeks since I pulled my old website off the internet for the good of the internet. (Not just to avoid anyone stumbling across my ramblings, but because my server got hacked and was redirecting visitors to… well, wherever someone else wanted to. Given that I don't know who that 'someone else' is, other than that they are the sort of person who hacks into other people's websites and messes about with them, I don't really trust them too much. Hence taking the site offline.)

This post is a rambling explanation about why the old site is going to be staying offline for the forseeable future.

Its also the first time I've managed to find both the time and the energy to sit down and try to get the old site cleaned up, working again, and back online so that I can start moving something like ten years worth of blog posts over to this new site. (Again, not because the internet is worse off without it – somerandomnerd.com going offline is hardly like _why vanishing – just because ten years of 'stuff' feels like a shame to just watch vanish into the ether.)

So… before I can even start on fixing things, I have to deal with the fact that my old hosting moved back in December. Which shouldn't be a big deal, except it means that when I try to SSH into my server, my computer sees that somerandomnerd.com isn't where somerandomnerd.com used to be, panics, and refuses to let me connect in case the site has been hacked. (Which, of course, it has – but as far as I can tell, this detail is actually unrelated.) I know enough about SSH and RSA to know how to tell my computer to be ultra-safe and not let me connect when something strange is going on, but not enough to know how to tell the same computer that I understand that something looks strange, but that it isn't so strange that I don't want to let it connect.

(This kind of thing is exactly why I don't want to look after my own server any more.)

So, I need to try to either figure out how to make my computer forget about the paranoid security settings I set up a while ago for this particular server, or for every server I've connected to, knowing that at some point I'll want to connect to one of them again and have to jump through a similar bunch of hoops. Which sounds like creating a new headache for the sake of taking my mind off the existing headache…

Instead, I'm going to try a different approach. Given that all of the old content that I want is sitting in a database, I'm going to try to just dump the database and sift through it for the stuff that I want to keep. I have no idea how much work that is going to be to make it actually work properly (by "properly", I mean "every single post makes it back online, with all the old links still pointing to the same content, images and links still working etc. etc.)

With it being ten years since I started putting stuff onto servers on the internet, that feels like a big job. (Or more accurately, a very large number of little jobs, many of which have a bunch of other little jobs nested within them.)

The new 'first problem' is that both Safari and Chrome are still being ultra-paranoid about my web domain – meaning that trying to access web-based tools gives me repeated 'This site is unsafe' warnings, breaking functionality of web apps – so while I can get into my databse, I can't easily download the contents of it.

Except... this turns out to be a database with almost half a million entries in it. Some of these will be relevant to the 400 or so blog posts, notes and links that I've posted. Most of them will be utter rubbish (including spam comments, spammy user accounts, unfinished draft posts from several years ago.)

So… rebuilding the old site feels like something that would take time and energy that might be better spent elsewhere. Its not something that I'm definitely not going to do (I'm particularly aware that the longer I leave it, the harder it will get.) But rather than this being something I'm going to do as soon as I have the time to look at it (ie. tonight), its something I'm going to do when I get around to it. Which, given that I have a lot of things that I want to get around to (including two children to raise, a bunch of iTunes U videos to watch, a new GTA game coming out this year to play, a new guitar that hasn't had nearly as much attention as I would like, a job to do and a bunch of commitments that will probably extend outside of the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday)… lets just say that digging through a bunch of code and databases is sitting fairly low down on my 'to do' list – some way beneath 'write some new stuff.' So although there are a couple of bits and pieces that I do want to pull out and put back online, I'll probably end up rewriting them and bringing them up to date rather than effectively necroposting my own blog.

So… Goodbye SomeRandomNerd.com. For the most part, it was fun. Except for all of the admin stuff that I don't have to do anymore…

iPad mini

After much deliberation, I bought an iPad mini last weekend. (16Gb, cellular model.)

My rationalisation was that my iPad 1 is no longer getting software updates, and although my iPhone 4 is over 2 years old (and therefore out of contract and due an upgrade), the only things I want to upgrade it for are Internet/app related (as opposed to phone-related.) and an iPad mini is a better and cheaper 'mobile Internet' device than a new iPhone.

In addition, data costs work out much lower- in a typical month, I'm spending £16 on 1.5Gb of mobile data on a 3G phone plan, while for the same cost on an iPad plan, I get 5Gb and 4G/LTE data speeds. (I think the reason is that phone data is so tied into phone usage - in a typical month, I might make 40 minutes worth of mobile calls, but I'm paying for a lot more. Partly in case I need the minutes, and partly because in the past it has balanced out with cheaper handsets/data.)

What I'm interested in logging is how my expectations meet up with my actual usage. I'm expecting (hoping?) that this will become my 'main' mobile internet device — so my iPhone will become something I just use for phone calls, text messages and maybe listening to music and podcasts. (The three things I can't do with an iPad mini are make phone calls, send and receive SMS messages, and put it into my trouser pocket. Although, with Skype and iMessages, I could do some amount of SMS/phone functionality with the Mini, the 'fits in my pocket' feature is really the killer app for the phone.)

I'm also expecting that, with both the bigger screen and bigger data package than my iPhone has, that I will be using it much more for video than before (where before, I was either waiting until I got home before downloading video or loading video onto my phone which I never got around to watching.)

Now, I know that I'm not going to want to replace my iPhone with something that doesn't give me access to the web, emails, maps etc. While an iPad mini fits into the pocket of a winter coat, or comfortably slips into my bag, there are plenty of times and places where the phone's form factor is a better fit for what I want to do. But I'm expecting the iPad mini to take over most of my mobile data usage.

What will be interesting to see is whether I still have any need for an iPhone in 6 months or so - if all I want from a phone is basic web/email/maps access, then I should be able to make do with a cheaper Android phone. So it will be interesting to see if an iPad helps me to 'cut the cord' with iOS for phones — or whether an iPhone 5S/iPhone 6 can convince me that an Apple-free phone is something I can't live without…

xkcd: Log Scale →

Log Scales are for quitters…

Twitter predicts SPOTY winner Wiggins | The Wall Blog →

"I know", I thought. "Instead of doing a 'Twitter Predicts...' story, it would be interesting to look at the different kinds of ways you can slice up data from Twitter to tell different kinds of stories."

I didn't write the headline…

Making Blues Brothers With John Belushi and Dan Akroyd—“We Had a Budget for Cocaine” | Vanity Fair →

There are the sort of films where you can imagine a director coming up with the vision, and working to make it a reality.

Then there are the sort of films where you just can't imagine what the vision would have been at the start of the process, where it feels that the film must have just somehow come together as a fluke of nature.

The Blues Brothers always felt to me like the second kind.

Agencies welcome UKOM and ComScore's cross-platform media planning metric | The Drum →

I get quoted in this piece about the new comScore/UKOM product. (I sit on the UKOM Technical Group.)

I like to think that one day, I'll be able to give journalists the kinds of quotes they want that also match up with what I really think over the course of a brief 5 minute chat. I guess that wanting to talk about the positives of the new UKOM product without being critical of the old one doesn't make for a great soundbite…

Introducing SomeRandomNerd.net

So, de-hacking my server, patching up holes, reinstalling software etc. is going to take a bit of time. Which raised the question of what I really wanted to do with the whole thing.

I was using Drupal as my CMS. While it was fun to set up and tinker with, frankly I'm bored of maintaining it, looking for 3rd party plugins to do what I want to do, installing updates etc. So I started thinking about alternatives.

Wordpress - see Drupal. Self-hosted, it still needs a fair bit of maintenance and looking after (and being widely used, is quite a big target for hackers. Some of the hacks that hit my Drupal site are actually Wordpress hacks – so I don't think they actually had any effect, but presumably would have done had I been using Wordpress.)

I could build my own custom CMS (which I've done before) - but I know that it will always have rough edges that I will probably never get around to polishing. (See: MyElectronicBrain.com) and I think I would rather be trying to do something new with my time than redesigning the wheel – at least for my 'main' website.

Tumblr - Its free. It has lots of 'social stuff' going on. Its up and coming (if not 'up and already here')… but to me, its not clear where it's going. And it isn't 'mine' – I don't have full control over everything. While I do have a Tumblr blog, I don't think I want it to be the 'hub' of all my online activity. (And it bothers me slightly that I don't really understand their business – the whole thing that 'if you aren't the customer, then you're actually the product' comes to mind…)

Squarespace - I know that I am the customer, and I understand what I'm paying for.

The downside is that MarsEdit doesn't work, which is a shame. But it seems to do everything I want to, and seems to have lots of flexibility for developer/designer tinkering. The iPhone app looks very good, which is helpful for posting short notes & links.

So, I've signed up for a year. I do plan to get the old SomeRandomNerd.com website up and running again – at the very least, so that I can get all my posts out of it and maybe put them here.) So dealing with remapping URLS etc. is something I'm probably going to have to deal with at some point. But it doesn't sound like a fun job, I don't have a lot of time on my hands at the moment, and I don't want to do a rush job of it.

So in the meantime… Welcome to SomeRandomNerd.net!

Hacked again...

On receiving an email from Google Webmaster Tools earlier today (14th Jan 2013) telling me that my 'old' website (at somerandomnerd.com) was serving up malware, the first thing I did was yank the website offline and put up this holding page (a bare HTML file) and start figuring out what the problem was.

(At least, that is what I thought I had done. But because my browsers weren't letting me visit the actual website - because Google was reporting it as containing malware - I couldn't see what was happening.)

So, the first place I looked was my Theme files- the ones that actually generate the HTML code that gets served to visitors. Sitting in my custom theme was an iframe, which linked to what looked like a Wordpress update script (judging by the URL), sitting on a .ru domain name. As my CMS is not Wordpress, this looked pretty obviously out of place.

(The slight worry is that I do have Wordpress installations on my server, so I'll be checking them over for any issues- as anyone/thing that can rewrite one file might be able to rewrite another.)

The second place I happened to look at also had a nasty, foreign iFrame. As did the third. So, some script has clearly run through my server, found every file that looks like it generates an HTML page, and made it do something I don't want to do.

It was about this point that I decided to check to see if this page was appearing instead of the compromised page by visiting it on my phone - which promptly bounced around about a dozen different URLS, before landing on some dating site. (As you can see, I've fixed that problem. At least for now.) The second problem turned out to be a modified .htaccess file (which is a file that usually is used to tell the server what to do if unexpected things happen – if pages have been moved, '404 page not found' errors etc.) which had been changed to redirect any visitors to a different site. An easy fix once you know what the problem is, but not (for me) a simple problem to find.

Annoyingly, my home router broke down yesterday, so I don't have a broadband connection at home. Meaning that I'm having to figure this out (and fix what I can) over a mobile connection. Oh- and mobile coverage of my house is hit and miss, dropping in and out pretty much at random. Which makes it even slower and more frustrating than it would be otherwise. (Also, as an added bonus, my 3 and a half year old son decided against sleeping this evening.)

So, right now I'm wondering if I can be bothered with the effort of ongoing server maintenance etc, and just moving everything to Tumblr or Squarespace or something where I don't have to worry about security, spammers and malicious scripts, and can just get on with writing things that I never finish again.

At least I know what I'm doing with that...