July 2008 – Page 10

Belfast OpenCoffeeClub

The Belfast Open Coffee Club met tonight and managed to pull in more people than ever – twenty or so – and I was both pleased and disappointed that there are just too many smart, interesting people in the room and not enough time to talk to them all. If I didn’t say hello to … Continue reading “Belfast OpenCoffeeClub”

16:30 – Co-Working Belfast
A 20 minute walkaround the site puts some reality on the bones of what we’ve been thinking about. I’m liking what I saw in our review of the site (and I’ll post the recording video of our walkaround if people want to see it to get a feel for the site – it’s a 5 minute 58 MB .mp4 file and I’ve added a Youtube embed below which will give you a BlairWitch-esque view of the building). I’m pleased that we’ve got enough people to actually make this a going concern but the serious questions about what kind of support we will get from Belfast City Council and InvestNI are still unanswered.

5 minute YouTube video

The site itself needs a lot of work but it’s big enough for the purposes. There’s work that needs done ‘structurally’ in terms of the removal of a stud wall and the creation of some partition and there’s going to need to be significant investment in terms of equipment – desks, chairs, locks – never mind computing infrastructure. But, in the end, I like it.

That said – it’s not a site like some of the others we’ve seen – which have artistic ceilings and look more like art studios than workplaces. It’s going to be grassroots, it’s basic but it’s sustainable and provides what I’d consider to be a basis for future movement.

19:00 – OpenCoffee Club
There were too may clusters of people talking to allow me to cover them all here but the ones which I witnessed were:

Will King, Darryl Collins and David Braziel – talking about the integration of location-significant data. I saw some demos showing heatmaps of Flickr pics over Northern Ireland, crime statistics, wifi points and some neat ‘cluster’ widgets which allowed information to be collected in easily understood ways.
I spoke perhaps at length (and with a bit of spittle) about the purpose of the Belfast OpenCoffeeClub in the formation of Northern Ireland’s future progress in technology. I was, of course, preaching to the converted so I have to apologise to Russell and Lee who had to listen to me rant about what the future might hold and how it was vitally important for the grassroots organisations to present themselves sensibly and with direction to government in order to achieve change. The people in that room were , in effect, the Digital Circle. We had application designers for desktop, mobile and web, GIS specialists, creatives, movie makers, animators, musicians, wireless enthusiasts and, last and least, me.
Andy and I spoke for a few minutes about Co-Working Belfast and I do feel a little guilty about stealing the spotlight at times and speaking too much. It’s an area I’m incredibly passionate about and sometimes that enthusiasm is a little hard to contain. We received some encouraging remarks but I think there’s some more marketing and work required before we can say that CoWorking Belfast will be filled to capacity.
The subject of the OpenCoffeeClub BBQ was also discussed. Philip will be driving a 7 seater people carrier down and we have half a dozen people to go in it. Some people need to be back earlier than others but we shall work through that – the plan at the moment is to drive down on the Tuesday afternoon, stay over, attend the BBQ, then stay over again and leave first thing in the morning in order to get back for a decent hour (lunchtime). I’ll be organising accommodation tomorrow. Confirmed names for the car are: Philip, Matt, Andy, Damien, Stuart and Mairin. Will is also going down separately.
There were other discussions of potential TechLudd, CreativeCamp and other copies of events happening around the world. I think it’s great but it would also be nice to do something original. More on those as we get more information.

As 21:00 came, I had to leave due to family commitments but it was extremely encouraging to see so many people there and I’m sure that if circumstances has been different, we’d have seen half a dozen more.

Roll on next time!

QFT’s Short Shorts

From NIScreen: QFT will launch the first in a monthly showcase of the best new and local short films – Short Shots â€“ on Monday 7th July. â€œShort film is often the first step on the road to a professional film-making career. The small scale and lower budget allows film-makers to experiment and learn the … Continue reading “QFT’s Short Shorts”

From NIScreen:
QFT will launch the first in a monthly showcase of the best new and local short films – Short Shots â€“ on Monday 7th July.

â€œShort film is often the first step on the road to a professional film-making career. The small scale and lower budget allows film-makers to experiment and learn the craft of film-making, but although the format may be small, the ideas are not!â€

For further information and booking for all Queenâ€™s Film Theatre film events, please visit www.queensfilmtheatre.com, telephone the box office on 02890971097 or drop in to the QFT at 20 University Square, Belfast.

Using your mobile abroad.

SMSTextNews comes in with some timely tips considering the weather is so bad here in Nor’n Ireland and this might motivate some of us to run for the hills…or maybe the Playa del Arseholio. The tips are all about how to save money when using your mobile abroad. Of course you’re going to use your … Continue reading “Using your mobile abroad.”

They also point to an Ofcom brochure.

For my part I’m hoping to make as much use of Skype and FON as I can. That means:

activating my SkypeIn number again
making sure I bring my N800 and my charger for same. Unless Skype surprise us with an app on the App Store
making sure I can log into FON and find somewhere for my second FON router.
making sure I know where every other Free WiFi spot in 6 cities in 6 countries lies
adding O2’s 50 MB roaming bundle making data Â£1 a MB rather than Â£3-6

I travel infrequently enough at the moment that this should suffice. July-August is just going to be a bit busy in terms of travel for me.

Orange pimping HTC Touch Diamond

Orange rang me trying to entice me back to the fold. I’d just canned my contract after reducing it from more than Â£80 a month to less than Â£10 due to getting an iPhone. Even paying Â£45 for the iPhone meant an overall saving and having a second emergency phone has been useful as well. … Continue reading “Orange pimping HTC Touch Diamond”

Orange rang me trying to entice me back to the fold. I’d just canned my contract after reducing it from more than Â£80 a month to less than Â£10 due to getting an iPhone. Even paying Â£45 for the iPhone meant an overall saving and having a second emergency phone has been useful as well. But as the contract was up, I called them on Tuesday and gave them the bad news: I was ditching them for an iPhone.

Anyway, the pitch was that Orange were launching the HTC Diamond and this was the rival for the iPhone. Here’s the less than stellar ShinyShiny review. The Diamond runs Windows mobile and has all sorts of interesting statistics (like these from Androidguys) but I can’t get myself motivated about it.

The speed difference between iPhone and Diamond is astounding. And reminds me of the Samsung Instinct videos. As long as you wait for the applications to launch, it’s great but as I said before – we spend a lot of time switching between apps in a mobile device.

ShinyShiny? Yes, the girl’s guide to gadgets. And yes, I’m a bloke (a large rugby player sized bloke by all accounts). But ShinyShiny offers pretty good reviews and decent video coverage and, frankly, their reviews are better than Engadget and Gizmodo in my opinion.

All you need is to be in touch with your feminine side.

I think I broke my finger.

It’s just my pinky but it’s sore, it’s swollen (the thickness of the finger is about 150% of the opposite pinky) and, well, it looks wrong. [UPDATE: Finger is indeed broken but partially healed. Problem is due to tendon coming loose. Felt a bit sick. Finger splinted and will take 6 weeks to heal] Related … Continue reading “I think I broke my finger.”

It’s just my pinky but it’s sore, it’s swollen (the thickness of the finger is about 150% of the opposite pinky) and, well, it looks wrong.

[UPDATE: Finger is indeed broken but partially healed. Problem is due to tendon coming loose. Felt a bit sick. Finger splinted and will take 6 weeks to heal]

Can you feel it?

Click ‘Register your interest’ and … I know. I’m such a fanboi I can’t contain my excitement! Related posts: The State of the Union Computer Programming for Everybody On The Box This echoes how I feel about programming

Click ‘Register your interest’ and …

I know. I’m such a fanboi I can’t contain my excitement!

Co-Working Office Design considerations.

Following on from my post aimed at making you think about what your co-working site would look like, here’s more on the design. What assumptions are you making with your co-working design? Are you making it open plan or cubicles? Are there going to be areas for privacy? LaunchPad, a co-working site due to open … Continue reading “Co-Working Office Design considerations.”

LaunchPad, a co-working site due to open in Austin, TX this September are happily showing off their floorplans interestingly enough with some evolution of the design. You have to wonder at the ‘ceiling’ they have planned (in the 3D renders) and ask – if this enterprise was cost-dependent then why would they bother with something so artistic? The answer is to shield their eyes from the drab cubicles upstairs and yet still let natural light in from the skylights. It has a function! I think too often we ignore the ‘possible’ in favour of the ‘assumption’ because the ‘possible’ seems beyond our grasp. I think I might have favoured a white translucent canvas ‘dome’ if only for the home-made IMAX opportunities it may offer.

Via James’ blog, I was led to the Altrupreneur Centre Project where they debate the virtues of cubicle versus open office design based on the results of a study performed a few years back. The study concluded that open office design negatively impacted workers satisfaction and they find it ironic that Co-Working espouses the open office design.

The study itself sampled 21 employees who were in a large private organisation and were surveyed before the shift, 4 weeks after the move and again 6 months after. Employee satisfaction went down and, frankly I’m not surprised. The survey doesn’t prove anything about co-working, positively or negatively, it proves something about making changes in large entrenched organisations.

Moving desks is something that not a lot of people like doing. Moving your comfortable work environment and yet having to keep the detritus of your previous desk is difficult especially when you’ve just lost your cubicle walls.
Personal preference in seating matters to some people. I don’t care where I sit but I prefer having my back to a wall as opposed to a doorway. That’s a personal thing.
The view can matter. There’s always a debate here with desk moves because where we were sitting previously, there was a nice view over the Dock on one side and the long stretch of road towards Belfast on the other. Now, I can see warehouse roofs on one side and on the other, an office.
Breaking the status quo with a team can be damaging to morale. If everyone knows that Dave sits by the window because, frankly, he was first there then that’s fine. If there’s a move and someone new gets the window seat it’s unlikely to please anyone. Least of all Dave.
Privacy is important to some people especially depending on their work ethic and their ability to get into ‘the zone’ for being productive. If you’re easily distracted or like checking out web sites during your breaks, you might not like this new potential for people to interrupt you.
We have no data about whether this move was done voluntarily, whether the individuals were consulted beforehand, whether they volunteered or whether there were accommodations made to attempt to make their experience more palatable.

Co-Working does not equal Open Office Design but the sort of person likely to be attracted to co-working is not going to be someone who would naturally need privacy and peace to work. It’s going to attract more social people, people who have flexible management who trust them to get the work done, people who work for themselves and can discipline themselves.

In The Business Plan for the Co-Working space I planned to open, we considered the different needs of different individuals which is why there was seating planned for the ground floor which was a public coffee shop, the next floor would be an open plan co-work space (The Commons) and the floor above that would include offices for people to work together in relative privacy (The Cloisters). There should be a mix!

I mention this because Andy mentioned that it would be possible to come along and view the potential co-working space in Belfast at 4:30 pm today. Co-Working is certainly the buzzword for the moment.

Travesty

This is what happens when you let someone bling up an iPhone. Related posts: iPhone. 4. Developing for iPhone? iPhone 3GS Entitlementards Ten Apps I Want…

This is what happens when you let someone bling up an iPhone.

CIO

CIO Magazine writes: “My CIO is clueless.” These are words you don’t want to hear if you want to earn the respect of your application development professionals. So how do you avoid being a clueless CIO? Steer clear of these behaviors: The CIO is a control nut. The CIO is aloof. The CIO gulps vendor … Continue reading “CIO”

CIO Magazine writes:

“My CIO is clueless.” These are words you don’t want to hear if you want to earn the respect of your application development professionals. So how do you avoid being a clueless CIO? Steer clear of these behaviors:

The CIO is a control nut.

The CIO is aloof.

The CIO gulps vendor Kool-Aid.

The CIO is a technical dinosaur.

The CIO is ubergeeky.

The CIO thinks changes can happen overnight.

The CIO doesn’t know the difference between resources and talent.

The CIO collaborates to death.

The CIO spends all of his time trying to get promoted to CEO.

A couple of years ago I had a debate during an awards ceremony (I was there to pick up, he was there to hand over) with a CIO regarding the utility and support of phones, handheld computers, PDAs and the like. He was adamant that everyone in the organisation should have the same hardware and software and there was no room for flexibility. I tried, over the lunch, to explain that if I can’t get my Outlook appointments synced to my phone, then I’ll miss meetings because I don’t sit at my desk all day waiting for appointment reminders to appear. He believed that the support burden of handhelds would far outweigh the advantages and it helped me realise that there are two kinds of IT folk in the world:

Those who think their job is to help their clients
Those who think their clients existence is to provide them with a job

I’ve met far too many of the latter. Doing support back in the late 90s for a very large population without the benefit of remote control tools or backoffice administration tools helped me realise what the support burden was of ‘helping people’.

It’s not a burden. It may be a job and you may get paid for it, but it’s not a burden. A burden is, in my opinion, an unnecessary weight on your workload. This may be due to poor procedure, a lack of automation or poor technology choices. My justification for this opinion is that I get asked for a lot of support when I’m sitting at home and just happen to be on email or instant messenger. I’ve always done my best to help people, whether this is over IM, email, Skype, Twitter.

CIOs need to remember what their function is. In a large enough company they are the manager or managers and not sitting in a lofty position preparing to rain crap down on their peons (been there). It’s not the job of the CIO to use the IT team as their personal and home IT resource and drag them away from their productive work to sort out a problem with a printer in their home (done that). Especially during working hours. The CIO should be working to find ways to make the Information Technology of the company work better and smoother. This means making sure your talented underlings attend the briefings and go on the fact-finding tours, they’re not an excuse for you to get out of the country (got the T-shirt) You then should take the opinions of the team and not just the opinion of the attractive saleswoman from Dell. The CIO needs to straddle the divide between the business and the IT department at the executive level. This means, for the most part, being knowledgeable about the reasons for things, defending the actions of the team who might know better about the IT environment and pushing for real change that will benefit everyone.

[EDITED due to stupidity]

IT investigators?

PCMag reports: A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate. In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to … Continue reading “IT investigators?”

PCMag reports:

A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate.

In order to obtain said license, technicians must receive a criminal justice degree or participate in a three-year apprenticeship. Those shops that refuse to participate will be forced to shut down. Violators of the new law can be hit with a $4,000 dollar fine and up to a year in jail, penalties that apply to customers who seek out their services.

Here’s the law text.

That seems excessive. But I’m saying that as the owner of a computer-repair company. You have to wonder what ends it serves. Is it to protect the consumer so that the service technician knows that they can’t trawl through customers emails? Is it to help the prosecutors where a trained technician could better spot the warning signs and alert them to a potential perpetrator.

This becomes significant with the stories about computer repair companies in the US being sued for illegally accessing customer data. Technicians have to be told this – customer data is sacrosanct. You don’t look at it. It’s illegal.

But where can you draw the line? Can you look but not see? Can you examine the problems in someone’s computer without some sort of awareness of the kinds of data there? How do you fix an email problem on a computer without seeing the names of senders and the titles of emails?