June 2008 – Page 4

Death and Taxes

Inside iPhone, an O’Reilly blog has a good article on tax avoidance in the new App Store. Tax avoidance is the entirely legal process where you minimise your tax outgoings. Tax evasion is the illegal process where you just don’t pay tax. To cut the story short, Apple will hold up to 30% of what … Continue reading “Death and Taxes”

To cut the story short, Apple will hold up to 30% of what they owe you for tax purposes unless you supply them with a W-8 form which states that you do not need to pay taxes in the US because you pay them elsewhere. Unfortunately, that form requires a valid SSN (the US Social Security Number) which you will not have if you are not a US citizen.

Fortunately, the SSN can be substituted by an EIN (Employer Identification Number) which is used to identify companies as legal entities. If you are a non-US developer, you can request such an EIN from the IRS (the US Internal Revenue Service which is the tax authority).

Click through above to see the instructions. And then talk to an accountant.

Impenetrable Corporatespeak

“I once had a boss who said, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.’ It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil.” Tim, Durban Source: The BBC Related posts: Wherein … Continue reading “Impenetrable Corporatespeak”

“I once had a boss who said, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.’ It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil.”

Tim, Durban

Source: The BBC

Damn

Outing to Kainan Cafe postponed to another day due to work. Canteen down at NISP closed due to some event. Not enough time to go get actual food so have to go to the ‘Coffee Deck’ for some overpriced drek. OmNomNom….no. Don’t even go there. Related posts: Bedouin workspace in Belfast Workplaces Lunch yesterday The … Continue reading “Damn”

OmNomNom….no. Don’t even go there.

Virtual Notes

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’: Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell … Continue reading “Virtual Notes”

Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’:

Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell University, the University of Edinburgh and now in the news this week: Duke University.
…
“Virtual sticky notes” are messages and other content that people can’t read unless they’re standing in the right spot. The idea is that a phone’s GPS determines the location for both poster and readers. The concept turns the physical world into a kind of 3-D Internet.

It’s not just the big companies, there are half a dozen lone developers and micro-ISVs who are working on something similar.

The moment I heard about the Core Location possibilities in the iPhone, the moment I realised how big this was going to be. Location-Services are going to be the hit technology of the next eighteen months. And if you don’t believe me, well…you’re an idiot. Geeks have been lusting after a reliable match-up between virtual space (cyberspace, whatever) and meatspace (the real world) for decades (I first read about it in 1993 in a roleplaying game so you can appreciate how long geeks have been wanting this). Now we have devices with GPS and internet capabilities that will allow that to happen.

Mike describes some scenarios such as writing a restaurant review after stepping out of a restaurant and posting it to the the ‘Virtual Note’ server which can be retrieved by the next person who stands there and opens the ‘Virtual Note’ application.

Whether this is used for private messaging or public messaging, it’s also open to abuse. Rather than phone booths containing cards for illicit services (admittedly I’ve not seen these in Belfast), you might end up with virtual notes which only really occupy virtual space and not meatspace. What’s to stop and unscrupuluous business owner or advertiser from swamping a competitor’s physical location with bad reviews? What’s to stop criminals from leaving an enticing breadcrumb trail that brings our curious geeks into a mugging incident because the criminals know they have some saleable technology with them.

Worse still, we’re talking about virtual overlays of the real world here so places that are heavily visited will become swamped with messages; both personal and commercial, public and private.

This is why exclusivity might be needed. We need to be able to segregate this traffic so that we only see the traffic from the people we subscribe to. This would be, a good goal for Twitter 2.0 (or maybe Google is going mash up Jaiku and Google Maps to give us exactly this for Android?)

There are other avenues of fun – leaving a breadcrumb trail for someone to follow armed with a GPS and your ‘sticky notes’ software. And what if the ‘location’ isn’t enough data. What if you required the GPS location as well as a necessity to point your camera in a certain direction in order to do a fuzzy pattern match from a photo you just received. Sounds like fun.

Now, imagine if the overlay technology was built into glasses.

Mike says this will all be due to three things:

GPS Electronics in phones
Social Networking
Google’s Android

I can believe the first two but there’s no way that Android is currently a major contributor to this – there’s only an unfinished SDK and no shipping phones. We’re going to see compelling applications in this space long before this (considering it takes 6 months to build an application and Android is probably 6 months away from initial release) probably shipping for iPhone and Windows Mobile. Mark my words.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something like this already. Socialight already has channels which can accept location-based notes, Loopt already allows you to look through the history of friends locations (though it relies on SMS messages) and this will be something that we see added to other existing social network services.

Lunch yesterday

Yesterday I had this olive bread with some sweet potato and bacon soup. It tasted a lot nicer than it sounds. Today, I’m intending to meet Michael, Graham, Paul and Jim (or some combination of those names) for lunch at Kainan Cafe (which I blogged before. I’m not really a ‘foodie’ but I do love … Continue reading “Lunch yesterday”

I’m not really a ‘foodie’ but I do love my food.

Anton Ego: You’re a bit slow for someone in the fast lane.
Linguini: And… you’re thin for someone who likes food!
[Crowd gasps]
Anton Ego: I don’t LIKE food, I LOVE it. If I don’t LOVE it, I don’t SWALLOW.

This quote is from Ratatouille and it’s safe to say that I’m not like Anton Ego. I love food. I look forward to trips to faraway places largely in part because of the taste experiences. And yeah, I could probably afford to lose a few.

I’ll try anything. The Bush Tucker trials in “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here” leave me wondering how bad these things could taste or whether it really is just the idea of eating eyeballs and penises that bothers people.

To be great, you need focus.

Via

Via Gruber:

Do What You’re Great At.

“When youâ€™re growing up, itâ€™s good to try a bunch of stuff. Then as you get older, you can figure out what youâ€™re great at (or at least realize where the potential is) and focus on that. Maybe you can even be the best.”

Dave Pell is talking about companies. Google is great at Search. Yahoo great for News. If you are Yahoo, let Google have the question mark as long as you have the exclamation mark. (I like the diaeresis and the interpunct myself).

I think this applies to everything, from individual to company. If you spend long enough trying to improve the areas where you are weak, you end up losing the edge on your strengths – you should focus on your strengths, stretch them, train them, challenge them. This is why an ace baseball pitcher spends his time on the field perfecting his pitch and not playing table tennis or learning the unicycle. To be great, you need focus.

I wonder about this because I apply my attention rigorously. At the moment because I’m concentrating on Cocoa (and finishing off a couple of web deployment projects), I can’t find time to pay attention to the gaming side of life. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not strong in Code-Fu but I am keen and it does seem to make sense. But is this side of things really one of my strengths? How do you define your strengths?

Back a long time ago, I bought a book called ‘TimeLord’ by Blacksberg Tactical Research Centre. One of the initial chapters of the book instructed you to take the group and perform tests, physical and mental, in order to define characteristsics, strengths and weaknesses. There was some debate during the tests and one person in particular became very withdrawn, having achieved very low scores in all of the physical tests. The relevance here was that part of the mental/social tests included group rating for the individual as a levelling/balancing mechanism. It became apparent that people often have an inflated view of their intelligence, their charisma and their experience. It’s also true that some people cannot see the wheat for the chaff and despite having degrees and friends and an active social life, would describe themselves as an unintelligent loner. Hence the need for the group levelling.

I am left these days wondering what my strengths truly are and what I should be doing to enhance them (perhaps as the best way to cover up for my weaknesses.) How do you define your strengths? How much does peer review factor into your result?

Work/Life Balance

Tribal Wives is on BBC Two tonight at 9 pm (and will be available via iPlayer) and the BBC has a report on one such journey. Before she went to the Ecuadorean jungle to live with the Waorani tribe, Karen Morris-Lanz was a BlackBerry-toting workaholic single mother from Milton Keynes. Here she explains how life … Continue reading “Work/Life Balance”

Tribal Wives is on BBC Two tonight at 9 pm (and will be available via iPlayer) and the BBC has a report on one such journey.

Before she went to the Ecuadorean jungle to live with the Waorani tribe, Karen Morris-Lanz was a BlackBerry-toting workaholic single mother from Milton Keynes. Here she explains how life with this remote people helped teach her to relax.My life before the jungle was very busy. I tended to work 24/7 and never stop.
…
Now I’m self-employed with my human resources firm Waponi [the Waorani word for “beautiful” or “everything in balance”]. Since I’ve become a consultant, I can stop. I don’t have a BlackBerry now. They rule your life.

Work-Life balance is something I’ve not been monitoring recently. The day job requires an awful lot of time, including regular callouts in the middle of the night and additional work on Sundays to make sure everything is working for Monday morning production.

A few years ago, Mac-Sys received a commendation from the e-Commerce awards in the area of TeleWorking. This was on the basis that Mac-Sys was a company which was operated by parents for the most part. Our engineers had families and we were very flexible with their home requirements and the same went for our administration staff. School runs (morning or afternoon) were catered for and we trusted the staff to put in the hours necessary to do the work and provided laptops, VPNs and VoIP (including Video) facilities for all staff. For many of our clients we put in place remote support options which meant they could time-shift some of their work to when they wanted. A side of effect of this was that administration work was then carried out out-of-hours which suited the clients better.

Providing this level of access doesn’t sit well with everyone and is seen most obviously in the increased numbers of executives who switch off their Blackberry devices in the evenings and weekends. Speaking to a colleague in New York recently, she described the Blackberry as a ball-and-chain and that she feels manacled to her desk by it.

I have to admit that my life is filled with technology. At home, my network is wireless, slingPlayer and printers connected via WDS-enabled Airport wireless devices. I have multiple computers and a couple of handhelds which all access this network, though not simultaneously. I carry my iPhone everywhere – and before that I carried three devices – a SonyEricsson K800i, a Nokia N800 and an 80 GB iPod Video. I enjoy having connectivity and I enjoy having this all in one device even more.

I usually turn off all email/text notifications overnight (though being on call means I cannot simply switch off the phone) and I enjoy catching up with email/twitter in the morning. Most of my interactions with my devices are social or research/reading for enjoyment.

I’ve refused a Blackberry for the day job – a telephone call is enough. A Blackberry would just have me receiving and sending email in the wee small hours and would not increase my productivity any. (On the other hand, a laptop configured with company software would go a long way but nooo…)

I don’t have an issue with the technology in my life. I do currently have an issue with the work/life balance.

Recession coming, solution = Entrepreneurship

John F. Kennedy writes about the recession of the Irish economy Enterprise and entrepreneurship are the antidote for unemployment and recession. Encourage people to use computers and broadband to beat the recession, they can work for anyone from anywhere. They can create businesses based on anything from selling stuff on eBay to using their intelligence … Continue reading “Recession coming, solution = Entrepreneurship”

John F. Kennedy writes about the recession of the Irish economy

Enterprise and entrepreneurship are the antidote for unemployment and recession. Encourage people to use computers and broadband to beat the recession, they can work for anyone from anywhere. They can create businesses based on anything from selling stuff on eBay to using their intelligence to write, provide consultancy services or develop technology. This is the way out. Failure to provide them with the tools is economic sabotage. Let’s hope intelligence prevails.

Yes!

This sort of thinking is what Momentum and the Digital Circle[1] should be working on. It’s not necessarily about supporting the existing economy but by providing grass roots access to technology to take advantage of nascent knowledge workers.

I just don’t see us taking advantage of it. And we’d have to work hard to create value in this ‘credit crunch restricted’ world. That said, while the property market is in the doldrums, there are investors with cash in their portfolios looking for technologies to invest in.

To this end we need strategies like Co-Working Belfast or my as-yet-stillborn New Workspace to provide the most basic substrate for people to find places to work and collaborate. Just getting the space organised would make a big step – the rest is then up to the individuals with experienced mentors providing the introductions. How about a system of half a dozen mini-Ycombinators?

Anyway. You’re a taxpayer. Think about it.

[1] For a laugh, see digitalcircle.org without the www. Anyone see a problem?

Ghost (aka The Context Engine)

In January 2007, I wrote about what I wanted out of software and mobile devices. I called it my Ghost My Ghost has communication to the core. It reflects my status and copies that to all of my applications. When Iâ€™m busy, I set it to BUSY and it handles all of my email, voicemail … Continue reading “Ghost (aka The Context Engine)”

In January 2007, I wrote about what I wanted out of software and mobile devices. I called it my Ghost

My Ghost has communication to the core. It reflects my status and copies that to all of my applications. When Iâ€™m busy, I set it to BUSY and it handles all of my email, voicemail and instant messages. When I am available it allows them to come through. When talking on the phone, it changes my status to â€œon the phoneâ€ and when Iâ€™m busy playing â€œJet Set Willy for GHOSTâ€, it rightfully changes my status to â€œIn a meetingâ€. When Iâ€™m available, I want it to retrieve my GPS co-ordinates and use them as a tag so that my buddies and colleagues can see where I am. For when Iâ€™m somewhere I shouldnâ€™t be, I want to be able to switch that off too

Of course, a few days later Apple announced the iPhone, which began to seem relatively prescient. It would take another 18 months for iPhone to have GPS or third party software which would enable all of this, but I can see it on the horizon for the first time.

Half a year ago, Chris Brogan wrote some science fiction:

Chrisâ€™s context engine has 3 favorite orders for this particular coffeeshop chain. He clicks the second option on his phone, and waits to collect it, making smalltalk with the server. Meanwhile, the context engine has noticed that 14 friends within 5 minutes distance of the coffeeshop have revealed status and location information favorable for a visit. The engine offers up a â€œmeetupâ€ option, with checkboxes next to each personâ€™s name. Chris selects 3 of the 5 and invites them by for coffee and a chat.

When you see demos like Loopt which was on stage at WWDC coming to iPhone soon, you realise how close to the real world this all is.

I need software that will allow me to manage my attention, retain my memory, enhance my judgement:

More than just minding my eBay (I don’t use eBay) but telling me when friends are nearby and when their status isn’t set to ‘Do Not Disturb’, reminding me at opportune times (like when I’m in town or at a mall) that I need to buy a birthday present for someone, allowing me to set thresholds which are contextual (like telling me that I’m “twenty minutes at 30 mph” away from the next meeting and I really should get my skates on.)

We have persistent network links, we have GPS, we have social networks, we have electronic funds transfer and we have location-based mashups of all of this. Everyone is throwing in their little bits and it absolutely gobsmacks me that G A M Y haven’t jumped on this. Especially Yahoo.

We do have to consider the security and privacy aspects:

Some people don’t want this. Yeah, well, don’t turn it on. It’s a bit like complaining about privacy breaches on FaceBook. If you’re worried at all about your privacy, don’t put your data in there because your friends are the liability here and will likely give out all sorts of personal information.

I’m not worried about services which show my location to friends because, if they’re on my friends list then I don’t mind them knowing and as long as I’m where I’m meant to be, what’s the problem?

As for security, again – don’t use the service if you’re nervous about your security being compromised. Don’t put your birthday, the names of your kids and dog and other personal information on the net if you’re unsure about the safety, that’s just asking to have your identity compromised.

Now, we just need someone to build it.