Making a website

Glue together your ideas.  Make them work as a sequence that draws along the audience in a perpetual series of ideas that together result in action.  Or contain the action in the sequence and provide a building rush of excitement or discovery along every nook and cranny.  Have plenty of nooks, and, or, crannies.  Join everything together with rapid and readily understood navigation. Tie navigations to achievements, rooms that are now opened, discoveries already made.  Visually reflect selections and switches.

ISP outages

Typically, an ISP has a two level support staff, whether they are contracted call centres or staff that sit in their offices. The first line support tends to deal with the simple problems like forgetting of passwords or reconnection of equipment. Second line support tends to deal with the more specialised support issues like equipment settings, and fault diagnosis. Two recent experiences with a home level ISP illustrate what goes wrong.

• The first experience included these symptoms: no connectivity, wireless connectivity and the modem lights appeared to be on but no connectivity to the internet.

• The second instance includes these symptoms: no connectivity, wireless connectivity and the modem lights appeared to be working correctly, but no connectivity to new websites.

Either sound familiar? We have all found ourselves suddenly disconnected. These two experiences seemed similar but indicated entirely different problems.

How to diagnose these?

Of course sense dictates that we ring the ISP, but while listening to their objectionably friendly phone message and random pop tunes (which prevent any rational thought whatsoever!) I realised how frustrating this was when I had no idea how things work.

But being as human as anyone in the first instance after much frustration I managed two things, I obtained the address of their DNS, and then got put onto second line support who asked me two simple questions that made me look at the cabling.  Someone had disconnected the modem. Duh!

The second example, same ISP but this time they did not answer their phones.  That is the first indication that something else was awry.  The second indication was their messages were even more annoying.

I never got through to them but within 5 minutes I had connectivity.  Many of the ISPs other customers would still be on the phone, getting angry.

How?  Search for "ISP Connection" on sfsw.net for more.

Social Networking - the future

From an article on Google Buzz by Robert Scobie - this is an answer about malleable social graphs and if Facebook will sink other crowd gathering networks...

I worked on a social graph application in 1999 which attempted to form groups on one hand and published professional reviews (usually very acidic) on the other. It used an analogical search function (which these applications seem to lack) and would be the key to being mallible. Not being a share holder I will not say what it was but the sharing of places to go, and the resultant conflict between masses of people with banal interest (think of crowds who attend a popular sport event - temporary - simple reasons for attachment) and the small groups of specialised interest have very different algorithms. Map location is not the first 2D associative array.

A malleable graph must work on a variable number of dimensions and FB may have the best chance of gathering enough interesting things about your trails of interest to suggest things to do - but if that is their plan - to become a social mind - then it may work better if everyone uses the same platform.

For example today I don't really feel like going to a 3 hour film but I do not yet realise that. If I go and wander the shops I may be interested in Sushi restaurants and if I can see my friends will gather at a pub, I would like to be invited, rather than informed? So the app needs to know not just what I may do, but be oriented at making connections to those nearby. But if my friends all wanted to see a 3 hour movie, I may not prefer to join them for lunch. That human behaviour is just a little hard to predict. But it is nice to be informed.

The trouble with business focused apps is they attempt to sell to advertisers rather than people.

I think opportunities like this may well work better on FB where people randomly express themselves in a fairly banal way. Buzz may well work better for discussions like this. Opening up new ideas and connections. Being invited to in depth discussion seminars with luminaries - that would not work against a social graph that did not reveal the inner workings of one's mind. Buzz works for people who think, Twitter does also, but very on the web, link-wise - but is "followers" an inaccurate term?

These location based apps and FB fail in one respect as it is not about desire (advertising). It is about reaction and incidence (information).

Technology Revolution

It is bearing down upon us with ever increasing speed, the post information revolution will change the way we think, we act and indeed the way we breathe.

Like most of the technology revolutions, this one is creeping up on us all, gently. It will encroach upon our lives like a vine, obviating any need for replaceable human tasks and supplanting the need for the mundane with the pursuits of the individual mind.

Meantime the world worries about climate change and the real costs of energy. A trend to real worker efficiency will see the internet used in more extraordinary ways more commonly. The "remote operation" will become commonplace to fix mechanisms using internet controlled robots. Governance does not require presence either.

It is the humans who work together who require presence but costs of operating the business will be greatly reduced by enhanced ability to conduct meetings without it.

There is always a dark side to evolutionary robotics as conveyed in sci-fi movies where invitably we believe the machine will generate logic. Science fiction often precedes invention. AI has come a long way, but an artificial "will" has not yet been programmed.

Programming is in itself a wonderful thing - being able to create software is a passion. Customers look at you for your "web design" but the real beauty is under the bonnet. Strive always to write a better engine.

Ready for the Big time?

I notice websites being mentioned on twitter or a local newspaper, getting more than 20 simultaneous users - then becoming unavailable to anyone else!

These sites have not considered scaling in their design or are badly hosted.

NZ Govt plans for optic fiber questions by big telcos

The new National Party run government of New Zealand have a very unusual policy of investing 1 billion dollars in our network infrastructure. The big telcos are questioning the governments intent saying that it would provide for a whole new industry of problems to solve, like optical modems in every home? And how will homes deal with 100 Gigbytes of bandwidth? Of course except when downloading huge files, they will barely touch the sides. It is excessive and the socialist move by a conservative party - by investing in technical highways seems horribly misdirected. Education will do far more long term good. Unless there are inventions we have not been told about yet. Like being able to transmit experience, learning and skills over broadband. Now that would make the Governments investment worth it.

See Stuff NZ article

The value of high speed broadband

The value of high speed broadband can not be understated. That is if you are a movie producer, TV producer or any kind of business who sees an advantage in the zero cost penetrative medium - when the web is used intelligently, it gets an audience, an accumulative audience. But it is also hyper competitive - what works today may not tomorrow - and it is really the human talent behind the evolution of websites that work that really is the basis of what the internet is capable of delivering. High tech high profile internet "busts" sound terrible until you realise that there are still some who commission software projects like the latest snake oil - but a quality software project may take the work of a team of ten programmers which when subjected to the realities of the market may get absorbed into a larger unit due to business consolidation displacing others in the process. And thus the market gets to produce less product focused on a market need, and diversifies as individuals are able to make their own mark. The value of readily available high speed broadband appears to be simply video delivery. The value of video delivery is in teaching and it does not require the internet to be a replacement television network. The value of all this online video is, as a form of knowledge, limited. It is linear (you have to watch it all) and it is atextual (meaning it requires simple tags to create links to it, these tend to be a combination of targeted generics basically pitching every similar business against each other if they could spark/fake up enough "relevance" that the search engines can be seen to take notice. Search engine or whatever comes next to tell us what to watch - success in this realm has to do with connectivity, sure, but it has far far more to do with software. That is why international giants like YouTube exist - they are not ahead in upload and delivery technology - but they do have an audience. Just how committed that audience is, well it depends on the nature of the content. It is not riveting. I followed (for a while) three of the leading channels on YouTube, they are good and entertaining to watch. But do I want to go back?

More important, do I want to watch them again? How about fostering the development of content, like the BBC does. The deal with the TV license has given some of the most extraordinary documentaries for the world to see (for a fee, online, or from your local DVD hire). It has provided capital and now there is a library that new audience will want to see for years to come.

The main value of high speed broadband is to foster our citizen led film industry. We produced Peter Jackson. Now with a video camera in every ten year old's hands - someone will produce a zero budget master piece.

Companies who compete internationally are benefit by reliable predictable broadband availability. But to broadcast to the world, we must decrease the cost of international bandwidth or the massive increase in internal bandwidth will bottleneck our international bandwidth. Think, how does the motorway work when you jam more cars onto it? What if we increase maximum available bandwidth to every downloading teenager - that does not auger well for the availability of international bandwidth. There must be provision for that first. We are slow on the internet internationally, but locally we have a service that is adequate if the software is written to deal with a crowd rather than one, maybe two simultaneous users.

That is the problem. The new government is about to spend 1 billion on broadband availability. Great, spend half on international bandwidth and then train sofware professionals who can write software that scales successfully. And New Zealand will discover a new industry.

It is worth considering more carefully than a chant for "more bandwidth!" - it is really at a point where we are not efficiently using what we have.

See also:

LA Times