My technology time line
Charlie seems to have kicked off what might become a geek meme over at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/technology_timeline.html
I’ll break from my usual tradition of not mentioning brand names. Many of the brands I encountered are now consigned to the history books, others are still going strong. I don’t imply any endorsement, choices were mostly down to what made best (economic) sense at the time.
- Cassette recorder: age 4. The first electronic item I ever owned. It was a no brand front loading portable, mono only. I still have a tape I made of some bedtime stories – ‘I’m huff the hedgehog and I want my dinner and if I don’t get it soon I’ll get finner and finner’ – those were the days before speech therapy.
- Pocket calculator: age 7. A basic Texet LED model that chewed through 9v batteries at a shocking rate. I later modded it to work off a mains adaptor.
- Electronics kit: age 8. A Tandy (Radio Shack) 50in1. This was probably the real turning point for me, making up circuits for things like transistor radios and burglar alarms. I have still never managed to get a crystal radio to work (my most recent attempt being a few weeks ago). Thanks dad.
- Scientific calculator: age 9. A Casio fx-81. Playing with this got me into trig and other types of maths that they weren’t teaching me yet at school, which all proved to be a good grounding for engineering.
- Music centre: age 10. I wanted an Amstrad tower, as they were all the range, but got a cheaper unit. It still served me well for making mix tapes until I started collecting discarded HiFi separates a few years later.
- Computer: age 14. A Commodore Plus/4. It hadn’t been a great commercial success as the follow up to the C64, which meant that I got it with a huge package of software for £99 from Poundstretcher. It did however have a better BASIC interpreter than its predecessor. I coded my first programs to be published on this machine. This wasn’t the first home computer, dad got a ZX-81 when they came out, and we later got a Dragon32, but this was the first that was mine alone.
- Colour TV/monitor: age 14. This was kind of necessary to use the Plus/4 in my bedroom. I got an ex demo Philips set that had RGB and composite video inputs that worked with just about all of the 8 bit home machines (though I had to make my own video leads as it had obscure connectors). It’s still working today.
- Modem: age 15. Ever since seeing ‘Wargames’ I’d wanted a modem, and a deal on the Compunet modem put one in my reach (though the service fees and phone bill became a problem). It did 1200/75, which I also used for tinkering with Prestel and other videotex services and 300/300, which was the going rate for most BBSs at the time. The C64 that I needed to use this thing was extensively modded and hacked over the years.
- 16 bit computer: age 16. Another Commodore, this time the Amiga 500. This got me playing with A/D converters and making up MIDI interfaces for my brother and his friends. I came up with a design that switched a transistor for an op amp saving component costs and making fabrication easier (everything got soldered to the pins of the chip, which was then glued into the case – no PCB required). This machine was the one that made me learn C.
- PC: age 18. An Amstrad PPC-640. I bought this mostly for the integrated V.22bis modem, but it proved useful for many other purposes including PASCAL programming at University and my earliest forays into internet services.
- ISP: age 21. I needed a way to get online beyond the University network (which had JANET connectivity) so I got a CIX account in order to use there recently launched internet gateway. I still use it today, though I’ve been through many pure ISPs since.
- Palmtop: age 24. Life after university came with many moves, and little space for stuff, so I got a Sharp PC3100 to use on the hoof along with a ‘pocket’ 14.4k modem.
- Homebrew PC: age 25. Over the years I had built many PCs for other people, but this was the first for myself. I had a 486-DX2-66 that needed a home, and started out with 1MB RAM, though this quickly became 4MB. I have never bought a complete desktop PC unit for myself.
- DVD player: age 27. This was actually a kit for my PC with a DVD-ROM drive and an MPEG-II decoder card (as CPUs at the time didn’t have the grunt to run the codec in real time). I had to make a huge S-Video lead to watch stuff on the TV whilst it played upstairs in the study, and for some odd reason the chrominance and luminance on the decoder outputs were reversed forcing me to put crossover connectors into the cable.
- Mobile phone: age 28. I held out for some time on getting one of these, but when buying my first house it became something of a necessity. Prepaid one year contracts (at rates that we still haven’t really returned to) helped sweeten the pill.
- PDA: age 31. An early Sony Clie. The best feature may have been a multi system remote application that I once used to turn off a very annoyingly loud TV in a pub. Everybody glanced around for a second and got back to their drinks and conversations.
- Smartphone: age 32. When I realised that the Treo 600 gave me something that could be a phone and PDA in less pocket space then I was sold. I’ve not gone back to a regular phone since, though I still use the GSM mobile I had before as a host for foreign PAYG SIM cards when I’m travelling.
- MP3 player: age 32. Attempts to put music onto MMC cards on (smart)phones had proven a bit lame so I bought a 2G iPod. The crucial thing was that I owned about 11GB of music at the time, which fitted comfortably onto its 20GB hard disk. I still use it in my car (which I did not buy from new).
- PVR: age 32. Unlike Charlie I do watch TV, but I don’t like to run my life to the schedules, and I don’t watch adverts. I bought a Pace Twin as soon as they came out, and almost immediately invalidated my warranty by upgrading it to 60GB so that it would record 30hrs. I was an Alpha tester for the TwinRip app that lets me copy stuff onto my PC.
- Streaming media player: age 32. I had been tinkering with video on my PC for ages, and a network attached appliance that allowed me to watch stuff on the TV was pretty irresistible. The original machine is still going, though its DVD player is long dead, and it’s sat on top of its younger HD capable sibling. I still wonder at the lunacy over ‘rights’ that means there isn’t a product that successfully brings together the functions of the last two items (and no, I don’t count ‘media’ PCs).
Wow – it’s 6 years since there was a cool new product category that I felt the need to get into. Maybe the netbook I ordered yesterday will change things. I also wonder if I should have included more services, like webmail and social networking?
Filed under: technology, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Persona – one year on
It was a little over a year ago when I first wrote about persona, and I’ve done a couple of follow ups since.
It seems that the term is finally finding its way into common usage, and I’m encouraged by the recent posts by Nishant Kaushik and Mark Dixon. Mark’s visualisation is particularly good (and I hope he doesn’t mind me linking to it here):
All of this good work leaves me wondering why the definitions at IdentityCommons (which seems to be where Identipedia has moved to) haven’t really caught up, but maybe that’s just a mopping up exercise? Once again, here’s my own definition:
- Persona is an abstraction between an entity (usually a biological entity, or person) and a bundle of one or more digital identifiers, so that the entity can present themselves differently according to context.
I think I may have been concentrating too much on implementation details when I came up with that one, but it still encapsulates the key points about expression of a specifically modified identity in a given context (according to a user preference).
One of the challenges I’ve come across many times in the last year is that this concept of persona cuts across what many people have internalised as an aspect of ‘role’. The whole point of using another term is that ‘role’ has become too overloaded, and as we go about designing systems to support the various activities we engage in it’s useful to carve pieces of ‘role’ down to size. I do however accept that this causes trouble for people who’ve invested a lot of time and money into something that already kind of does ‘persona’ but has called it ‘role’. It may be just semantics, but I often find that semantics are very important.
Filed under: security | 2 Comments
Tags: digital identity, idm, llp, persona, security, trust
I first touched upon this a while ago when I called it the ‘interest feed‘, and JP recently got me going again with his posts about customer perspective. In theory this is the type of problem that could be addressed by ‘synopsys‘, but some deeper digging is making me think that things are worse than they first appeared.
I though I’d have a go at brute forcing a part of the problem. Each time a wrote a comment on somebody else’s blog, I’d subscribe to the comments feed and put it into a group in my aggregator called ‘comments watch’. That way I wouldn’t miss out as the conversation developed. So far it’s been an almost complete failure, as it turns out that very few blogging platforms support a comments subscription for a single post. The feed stock for microsubscriptions just isn’t there.
I feel a nasty cludge coming along.
What does the rest of the world do about this? Do people making comments just shoot their mouth off and move on? Or do folk obsessively (and manually) return to where they’ve been before (and I can’t help thinking of my West Highland Terrier as I write this)?
Filed under: blogging | 1 Comment
Classen’s law
Sean Park’s ‘The power of power laws‘ reminded me once again of one of my favourites – Theo A C M Classen’s “logarithmic law of usefulness”. I finally got around to doing a WikiPedia entry for it here, which I hope is notable enough to survive the WikiPedia deletionists (about which I’m entirely in agreement with Tim Bray).
It’s because of Classen’s law that I’ve declared myself as a singularity non believer (even though I enjoy reading singularity inspired SF). I think to have a real singularity it would take something that would drive an exponential increase in usefulness, and if Classen’s right that would need something to drive technology at a double exponential rate. Given how hard it has turned out to be to keep Moore’s law a reality that seems unlikely, though when Moore’s law finally has a hard collision with the laws of physics who knows what might emerge to take the place of reducing the feature size of 2D semiconductors?
Filed under: technology | 4 Comments
James McGovern came up with a good starter for 10, but since he called me out to add some more here goes:
- Ignoring Pareto – many enterprise architects end up becoming the creators of internal ‘standards’, and then become the standards cops. All too often the 80:20 rule is ignored (and in fact this tends to be more like 90:10 for many things IT), which results in an application being shoehorned into an inappropriate ‘standard’ platform, or the platform squished out of shape to accept an application that shouldn’t be there. Good architects are the masters of good exception processes.
- Thinking linear scalability will be enough (or worse aspiring to linear scalability). It won’t be – too many things in the real world follow power laws, and it’s no coincidence that the systems we build to model them and manage them also need to scale accordingly. Of course Moore’s law is itself a power law, and many have relied upon it to get them out of trouble, but the terrain is getting muddy as we go from single cores following Moore’s law to multi-core systems and the need to design expressly parallel applications.
- Too many patterns, and not enough understanding of antipatterns and how we get into them. If I pick up a patterns book then there’s sure to be stuff in there where I’ll wonder how it ever could be used, if I pick up an antipattern book I’ll be able to think of at least one application that’s fallen into every trap. My view is that there’s more value in avoiding the holes than there is to staying on the path.
- Thinking that the laws of software development only apply to other people, particularly Conway’s law when dealing with any organisation large enough to have people that call themselves enterprise architects.
Filed under: software | 4 Comments
Tags: antipatterns, architecture, pareto, patterns, scalability, software
Social network modalities
The fuss last week about asymmetric follow got me thinking about communication modalities in social networks. It seems to me that this is yet another case where there’s nothing really new, just fresh perspective. Social networks appear to support the same modalities as data networks, so perhaps it’s worth looking at the old labels and seeing how this applies to emerging use cases:
Unicast:
Unicast
The classic 1-2-1 pattern. This is what happens with instant messages (IMs), direct messages (DMs) and to an extent good old email (though the use of distribution lists fogs the picture a little there). It’s also what happens with the @name convention in microblogging or something like directed social bookmarking.
Multicast:
Multicast
In data networks we use multicast groups, and it seems that in social networks the groups concept is the same, so when we post a link, update a status or whatever then it goes by default to a group defined by our immediate social graph (our ‘friends’), or it can be directed at a specific group.
Privacy:
With both unicast and multicast there are clearly ways to have some privacy, with a trade off against the broader collaboration potential. This depends to some extent on whether the defaults are private or public, and whether users normally tinker with those defaults.
Broadcast:
Broadcast
This is the uncontrolled, anybody who’s listening option. There’s probably an important distinction between broadcast and public multicast, and this may well be the nub of what asymmetric follow is all about. Frankly I don’t see that much difference between pub/sub asymmetries in regular blogging and microblogging.
Filed under: e2.0 | 3 Comments
Tags: asymetric follow, broadcast, multicast, privacy, social network, unicast
The end of persona?
I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about persona, which makes it a little ridiculous that I find myself writing now about its possible demise. We’ve barely got started.
The problem is ‘the end on online anonymity‘, where Sarah Perez argues that the Lori Drew case will cause us to lose the freedom to use a pseudonym or alternate persona. If this was true then I feel that it would be very bad, but let’s unpick the details a bit:
- This is a classic knee jerk reaction of a legal system to an awful event. Things have far from stabilised, and as one of the commenters points out the scope is very limited for the time being.
- The US != the internet, and that becomes more true every day. From my own local perspective the UK has become all too adept at importing stupid stuff, but there’s latency there and a hope of balance being brought by the EU.
- This is about web site terms and conditions. Most of the popular social networking sites seem to have taken a line that you have to be yourself. That’s fine, though I think enfolding Ts&Cs in legal precedent is bad; they’re often just as abusive of real legal rights as most EULAs (which is why we need reasonableagreement.org). Forcing you to be yourself isn’t the case with MMORPGs, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other corners of the web where alternate persona makes commercial or social sense and will thus be allowed by the Ts&Cs.
I therefore think the end of persona (and the anonymity it may confer) isn’t yet nigh. The sky isn’t falling, and the trolls can still hide under there bridges. If you don’t like trolls, then probably best to avoid bridges.
Filed under: identity | 1 Comment
Tags: anonymity, identity, law, persona, privacy
Perhaps I was being a bit dull when I first read through Andrew McAffe’s The Ties that Find, as I seem to have missed the key point, which is that weak ties are where new information comes from. Thanks to Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas for calling this out so explicitly during his section of the networks masterclass at the recent SVCO event. I should also say that Mark S. Granovetter’s original paper on The Strength of Weak Ties is well worth a read – what wonderful insight for something written more than 25 years ago.
This gets me thinking that there’s probably a gravity analogy lurking here – once something falls inside a field of influence then it becomes less useful because it has lower entropy.
There’s also a potential molecular chemistry analogy here – that weak ties (like covalent bonds) take less energy to get reactions going than strong ties (like ionic bonds).
If enterprise 2.0 is looking to encourage innovation, to get those reactions going, to suck in that entropy, then we need to facilitate those weak ties. If we keep the enterprise 1.0 blinkers on and stop things at the electronic borders that wrap around our buildings then that’s not going to happen very well.
and that’s why enterprise 2.0 shouldn’t be ‘enterprisey‘.
Filed under: e2.0 | 1 Comment
Tags: e2.0, social networking, SVCO, weak ties
This post has been stewing for some time, and perhaps the fuss today over the launch of the .tel domain gives me a good reason to serve it up.
It’s my view that telephone numbers were THE original digital identity scheme. Of course like most pioneering activities things weren’t thought through particularly well, and we’ve seen various changes and kludges applied along the way. The system still works though, and most people (even amongst the less technically savvy) are aware of the limitations without even giving them much thought.
Security seems like a good place to start. For some reason my colleagues in the IT security world seem to turn purple and start ranting when I talk about telephone numbers being a type of digital identity. “They’re not secure”, I hear the cry. Let’s put things into perspective – a number is just a type constrained special case of a string format address. Less constrained cases (that are also used for the purposes of digital identity) include email addresses and OpenID URIs. None of these things are inherently secure or insecure, but we tend to associate them with the various degrees of badness embedded in the common implementations. When I dial a number I could be misdirected elsewhere (by an attacker, or just some clever call forwarding), and when I receive a call with caller line identification (CLI) it could be spoofed. It is true that the telephony system that we mostly use today is riddled with security hole, and that there are few good ways of establishing trust, but that’s mostly not the fault of the numbers.
Namespace management has been a key problem over the years. As the use of telephone numbers for personal identity became more common we see the same growing pains that we’re presently encountering in the journey from IPv4 to IPv6. Corporate exchanges were a bit like NAT, but corporate citizens came to demand personal addresses (=numbers), and sometimes more than one (for fax machines etc.). We also bump up against some cognitive psychology issues here – too much namespace = too long to remember. For those of you with kids you can think of yourself as being an expensive NAT router next time you answer their calls :)
Geographic anchoring is somewhat related to the namespace management issues. This is of course a hang over from the days where the physical location of exchange switching equipment was meaningful, but it continues to affect us. I’ve been trying for some time to run with ‘one number’ – a single telephone number that will reach me wherever I am in the world, on whatever device I choose to have with me. The mechanics behind this work surprisingly well; all of the issues are around social etiquette that’s annealed around our use of numbers. People still get offended when I don’t give them a ‘mobile’ number, and others find it impossible to grasp that dialling something that’s purportedly anchored in London will actually reach me in office in NY (or wherever else). I’m told that in some parts of the world great significance is attached to which class of number (from many on a business card) should be used at any given time.
Of course ‘one number’ isn’t a panacea. People still worry about things like long distance costs and roaming charges. +44 may alienate those from +1 or +34 or whatever (it may even be blocked on some corporate exchanges and pay as you go mobiles); so what I may really need is some identity virtualisation, and luckily services to do this already exist.
So, rounding up, telephone numbers were there being digital identity before the term was even coined. Since we still use telephones a lot we still have to consider the use of telephone numbers as part of a broader identity landscape, and that’s particularly important when the conversation moves onto unified communications – something that I’ll probably post about another day.
PS I’m intrigued by the utility of putting contact data into DNS versus something webby like Portable Contacts, and would love to hear stories of how this will be used in anger?
Filed under: identity | 5 Comments
Tags: .tel, digital identity, identity, numbers, portable contacts, telephone
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